Gothic Literature: A Gale Critical Companion

GOTHIC LITERATURE A Gale Critical Companion

GALE CRITICAL COMPANION ADVISORY BOARD

Barbara M. Bibel Librarian Oakland Public Library Oakland, California

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

48 68 76 94

107 109 110 127 180 210 228

112 119 143 172 199

213

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

CONTENTS

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

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

231 233 236 249 264 301 342 385

241 260 275 291

480 486 506 525

478 487 491 497 510 522

308 333

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

362

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

377

389 391 394 401 415 452 461 473

399 411 416 425

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

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

436 451 464

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

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

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

25 27 27 31 46

37

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49 50 51 54 61 76

55 68

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

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

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

103 105 105 107 114 129

116 121

131 133 133 135

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

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

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

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

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153 155 155 156 162 177

163 171

179 181 181 182 200

191

201 202 203 205 211 228

207 215

223

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

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

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

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

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

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229 231 231 234 242 255

237

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

321 323 324 327 338

328 330

252

257 259 259 261 278

270

279 280 281 282 291

285

293 295 296 297 306 319

304

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

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

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

341 342 343 344 349 362

350

363 365 366 368 382 385

369 380

387 388 389 391 401 419

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

421 423 424 425 428 438

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

482 483 485 494 504

492

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

430

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

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

441 443 444 446 456 459

450

461 464 465 466 470 478

471

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

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

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

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31 33 34 36 46 70

42

62

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

CONTENTS

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

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

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

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

x

107 109 110 111 118 132

111 125

135 136 137 138 142 160

151

163 165 167 168 178

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

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

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

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

187 190 190 193 205 228

203 219

231 233 233 238 245 260

238 246 253

263 265 266 277 286

267 278

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

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

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

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

292 293 297 317

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

298

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

306

319 321 321 327 335 356

328

338

349

359 361 362 364 382

365 373

385 387 387 393 427

429 432 432 434 454

434

435 443

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

457 460 460 462 485

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

487 489 490 493 502 517

467

503

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

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

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

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FOREWORD

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

FOREWORD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Gale Critical Companion Collection

PREFACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• A Portrait of the Author is included when available.

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

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

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

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

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

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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

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

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

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

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

1220

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

■ Construction of the Cathedral of Amiens in France.

1127

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

■ William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is staged.

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

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

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

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1081

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1727

1762

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

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

1729

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

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

1764

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

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

1742

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1775

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

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

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

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

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

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

1760

1777

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

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

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1791

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

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

1779

1792

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

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

1780

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

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

1793 1781 ■ Henry Fuseli completes the painting The Nightmare.

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

1794 1783

■ James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest is produced.

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

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

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

1786

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

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

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

1787

1795

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

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

■ William Beckford’s Vathek is published.

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

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

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

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

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

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1778

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1798

1806

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

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

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

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

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

1808

1799

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

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

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

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

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

1802

1811

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

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

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

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

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

1813

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

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

1805

1814

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

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

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

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

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1821

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

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

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

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

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

1822

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

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

1817

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1826

1820

1827

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

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

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

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

■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Glenallan is published.

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1816

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1830

1842

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

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

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

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

1844

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

● William Beckford dies on 2 May in England.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1839 ● James Boaden dies on 16 February in England.

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

1848

1840

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

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

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

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1857

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

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

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

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

1850

1859

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

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

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

1860

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

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

1861

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

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

1852

1862

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

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

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

1864

■ Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is published.

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

C. 1854

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

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

1870

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

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

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

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

1873

■ Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales is published.

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

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

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1849

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1882

1894

● William Harrison Ainsworth dies on 3 January.

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

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

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

1885

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

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

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

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

1897

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

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

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

1888

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

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

1899

1889

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1892

1907

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

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

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

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

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1922

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

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

1909

1924

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

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

1910

1925

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

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

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

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

1911

1927

■ Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome is published.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1919

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

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

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

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

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

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

■ William Faulkner’s Sanctuary is published.

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

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1908

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1933

1940

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

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

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

■ Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is released.

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

1941

1934

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

■ Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales is published.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

■ Edith Wharton’s Ghosts is published.

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

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

■ Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is published.

1955

1939

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

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

1956

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

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

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

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

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1968

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

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

1959

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

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

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

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

1969

■ The Twilight Zone is first televised.

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

1960

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

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

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

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

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

1963

■ Black Sabbath’s Paranoid is released.

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

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

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

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

■ The Munsters is first televised.

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

1965

1974

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

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

1966

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

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

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

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1957

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1975

1983

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

■ Stephen King’s Pet Sematary is published.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1987 1978

■ Toni Morrison’s Beloved is published.

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

■ The Smiths’s Louder than Bombs is released.

1979

1988

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

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

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

1989

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

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

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

1990 ■ Twin Peaks is first televised.

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

1992

1981

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

■ Stephen King’s Danse Macabre is published.

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

■ Siouxsie and the Banshees’s Juju is released.

1982

1993

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

■ Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride is published.

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2000

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

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

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

■ Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is published.

1996 ■ Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace is published.

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1994

GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW

T

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

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

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

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

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

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

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E. T. A. Hoffmann

Wieland; or, The Transformation (novel) 1798

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

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

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

John Keats

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

Poems (poetry) 1817

Zanoni. 3 vols. (novel) 1842

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

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

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

George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron

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

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

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

Charles Robert Maturin

Manfred, A Dramatic Poem (play) 1817

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

Anton Chekhov

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

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

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Melmoth the Wanderer. 4 vols. (novel) 1820

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

Mrs. Eliza Parsons

James Fenimore Cooper

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

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

Edgar Allan Poe

Daniel Defoe

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

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

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

William Godwin

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

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

The Raven, and Other Poems (poetry) 1845

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Ann Radcliffe

Faust: Ein Fragment (poetry) 1790

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

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

Tales by Edgar A. Poe (short stories) 1845

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

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Charles Brockden Brown

GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bram Stoker Dracula (novel) 1897

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1803-1873.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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God himself Scarce seemèd there to be,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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JOHN PAUL RIQUELME (ESSAY DATE FALL 2000)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flannery O’Connor, 1925-1964.

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

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

Truman Capote, 1924-1984.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EUROPEAN GOTHIC RONALD PAULSON (ESSAY DATE AUTUMN 1981)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caricature of William Harrison Ainsworth, c. 1855.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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T

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shirley Jackson

REPRESENTATIVE WORKS

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

Louisa May Alcott

The Haunting of Hill House (novel) 1959

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

Harriet Jacobs

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

William Beckford

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

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

*Vathek (novel) 1787

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

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

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

SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC

Arthur Machen

Bram Stoker

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

Dracula (novel) 1897

Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Three Impostors (short stories) 1895

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

†The Hill of Dreams (novel) 1907

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

Carson McCullers The Member of the Wedding (novel) 1946

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

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

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

Toni Morrison

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

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

Mary Wollstonecraft

Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

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

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

*

Sylvia Plath

†

The Bell Jar (novel) 1963

‡

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

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

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

#

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

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

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Part II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ CLARA REEVE (1729-1807)

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

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

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

Clara Reeve, 1729-1807.

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

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

Or, you are pleased with the wonderful adventures of modern travellers, such as Gaudentio di Lucca, or Robinson Crusoe.

In the following excerpt from an introduction to her novel, which was published in 1778 as The Old English Baron, Reeve urges her readers to appreciate her novel as part of a Gothic literary tradition, and declares that every reader will find something in her work to enjoy.

Or, if you are unacquainted with any of the books already mentioned, I would venture a good wager that you have read the Pilgrim’s Progress.

Address to the Reader. Reader, before you enter upon the history before you, permit the Author to hold a short

You smile! but I mean nothing ludicrous, the Pilgrim’s Progress is a work of genius, and as such I respect it.—is it possible that a book merely fanatical, should have run through fifty-four editions? you may safely conclude it has merit of a higher

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kind, that enables it to blunt the shafts of ridicule, and to stand its ground, notwithstanding the variations of times and tastes, and the refinements of literature and language. But what (say you) is all this to the purpose? patience a moment, and I will come directly to the point.—if you have read any fictitious or fabulous story, it will answer my intention, which is to assert, that all readers, of all times and countries have delighted in stories of these kinds; and that those who affect to despise them under one form, will receive and embrace them in another. History represents human nature as it is.— alas! too often a melancholy retrospect.—romance displays only the amiable side of the picture; it shows the pleasing features, and throws a veil over the blemishes: mankind are naturally pleased with what gratifies their vanity, and vanity like all other passions of the human heart, may be rendered subservient to good and useful purposes. I confess that it may be abused, and become an instrument to corrupt the manners and morals of mankind; so may poetry, so may plays, so may every kind of composition; but that will prove nothing more than the old saying lately revived’— “that every earthly thing has two handles.” The business of romance is first to excite the attention, and secondly to direct it to some useful, or at least innocent end. Happy the writer who attains both these points, like Richardson! and not unfortunate, or undeserving of praise, he who gains only the latter, and furnishes out of it an entertainment for the reader! Having, in some degree, opened my design, I beg leave to conduct my reader back again, till he comes within view of the castle of Otranto; a work which has already been observed, is an attempt to unite the various merits and graces of the ancient romance and modern Novel.—to attain this end, there is required a sufficient degree of the marvellous to excite the attention.—enough of the manners of real life, to give an air of probability to the work;—and enough of the pathetic to engage the heart in its behalf. The book before us is excellent in the two last points, but has a redundancy in the first; the opening excites the attention very strongly; the conduct of the story is artful and judicious; the characters are admirably drawn and supported; the diction polished and elegant; yet with all these brilliant advantages, it palls upon the mind, though it does not upon the ear, and the reason is

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obvious; the machinery is so violent, that it destroys the effect it is intended to excite. Had the story been kept within the utmost verge of probability, the effect had been preserved, without losing the least circumstance that excites or detains the attention. For instance, we can conceive and allow of the appearance of a ghost, we can even dispense with an enchanted sword and helmet, but then they must keep within certain limits of credibility, a sword so large as to require an hundred men to lift it, a helmet that by its own weight forces a passage through a court-yard into an arched vault, big enough for a man to go through; a picture that walks out of its frame; a skeleton ghost in a hermit’s cowl: when your expectation is wound up to the highest pitch, these circumstances take it down with a witness, destroy the work of imagination, and instead of attention, excite laughter. I was both surprised and vexed to find the enchantment dissolved, that I wished might continue to the end of the book, and several others of its readers have confessed the same disappointment to me; the beauties are so numerous, that we cannot bear the defects, but want it to be perfect in all respects. In the course of my observations upon this singular book, it seemed to me that it was possible to compose a work upon the same plan, wherein these defects might be avoided, and the keeping as in painting might be preserved. But then, said I, it might happen to the writer as it has to the imitators of Shakespeare, the unities may be preserved, but the spirit may evaporate; in short it will be safest to let it alone. During these reflections, it occured to my remembrance, that a certain friend of mine was in possession of a manuscript in the old English language, containing a story that answered in almost every point to the plan above-mentioned; and if it were modernised, might afford entertainment to those who delight in stories of this kind. Accordingly (with my friend’s permission) I transcribed, or rather translated a few sheets of it.—I read it to a circle of friends of approved judgment, they gave me the warmest encouragement to proceed, and even made me promise to finish it. Here it is, therefore, at your service; if you are pleased, I am satisfied; I will venture to assure you that it shall not leave you worse than it finds you in any respect. If you despise the work it will go to

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Illustration from The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story, 1778.

sleep quietly with many of its contemporaries, and the ghost of it will not disturb your repose. I am, with profound Respect, Reader, your most obedient Servant, The EDITOR.

SOPHIA LEE (NOVEL DATE 1786) SOURCE: Lee, Sophia. An excerpt from The Recess; Or, A Tale of Other Times. By the Author of the Chapter of Accidents. Vol. 1, pp. 1-10. Dublin, 1786. The following excerpt is from the beginning of Lee’s highly popular novel.

After a long and painful journey through life, with a heart exhausted by afflictions, and eyes which can no longer supply tears to lament them, I turn my every thought toward that grave on the verge of which I hover. Oh! why then, too generous friend, require me to live over my misfortunes? Such has been the peculiarity of my fate, that though tortured with the possession and the loss of every tye and hope that exalts or endears humanity, let but this feeble frame be covered with the dust from which it sprung, and no trace of my ever having existed would remain, except in the wounded consciences of those who marked me out a solitary victim to the crimes of my progenitors: For surely I could never merit by my own misery of living as I have done—of dying as I must do.

My life commenced with an incident so extraordinary as the following facts alone could incline any one to credit. As soon as capable of reflection, I found myself and a sister of my own age, in an apartment with a lady, and a maid older than herself.—Every day furnished us with whatever was necessary for subsistence or improvement, supplied as it seemed by some invisible hand; for I rarely missed either of the few who commonly surrounded me. This Recess could not be called a cave, because it was composed of various rooms; and the stones were obviously united by labor; yet every room was distinct, and divided from the rest by a vaulted passage with many stairs, while our light proceeded from small casements of painted glass, so infinitely above our reach that we could never seek a world beyond; and so dim, that the beams of the sun were almost a new object to us when we quitted this retirement. These remarks occurred as our minds unfolded; for at first we were content, through habit and ignorance, nor once bestowed a thought on surrounding objects. The lady I have mentioned called us her children, and caressed us both with parental fondness.—Blest with every gentle charm, it is not wonderful she fully possessed the affections of those who had no one else to idolize. Every moment we met in a larger room than the rest, where a very venerable man performed mass, and concluded with a discourse calculated to endear retirement. From him we learnt there was a terrible large place called the world, where a few haughty individuals commanded miserable millions, whom a few artful ones made so; that Providence had graciously rescued us from both, nor could we ever be sufficiently grateful. Young hearts teem with unformed ideas, and are but too susceptible of elevated and enthusiastic impressions. Time gave this man insensibly an influence over us, as a superior being, to which his appearance greatly contributed. Imagine a tall and robust figure habited in black, and marked by a commanding austerity of manners.—His features bore the traces of many sorrows, and a kind of early old age, which interested every observer. The fire

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Alas! your partial affection demands a memorial which calls back to being all the sad images buried in my bosom, and opens anew every vein of my heart. Yet consummate misery has a moral use, and if ever these sheets reach the publick, let the repiner at little evils learn to be juster to his God and himself, by unavoidable comparison. But am I not assuming an insolent consequence in thus admonishing? Alas, it is the dear-bought privilege of the unfortunate to be tedious!

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and nobility of his eye, the gracefulness of his decay, and the heart-affecting solemnity of his voice, While on his reverend temples grew The blossoms of the grave,

gave an authority almost irresistible to Father Anthony, as we called him from hearing our mamma, to whom we understood he was brother. He usually partook our dinner, and from that time ’till the next morning vanished, for we knew not how or where he went. The interval we passed in little useful works, or in conversation with our mamma, whose only employment was that of forming our minds, for the world we were taught to dread.—She was our world, and all the tender affections, of which I have since proved my heart so full, centered in her, and my sister. Time and sorrow had given a wan delicacy to features exquisitely regular, while the soft symmetry of her person united every common idea of beauty and elegance to a feminine helplessness, which is, when unaffected, the most interesting of all charms. Her temper was equal, and her understanding enriched by a most extensive knowledge, to which she was every day adding by perpetual study. Inclined strongly by nature to serious reflection, and all her favourite employments, I used to pass those hours at her side Ellinor devoted to her play-things, or to Alice, whose memory was overcharged with those marvellous tales children always delight in. As our ideas every day expanded, we thought more and more concerning our origin, and our imprisonment. We knew Father Anthony constantly disappeared, but how or where was a secret beyond our comprehension; for in all our researches we never found a door except those common to the family, and which shut us from the world. Ellinor, whose lively imagination readily imbibed the romantic and extravagant, conjectured we were in the power of some giant; nay, such was her disgust to Father Anthony, that she sometimes apprehended he was a magician, and would one day or other devour us. I had a very different idea; and fancied our retreat a hollowed circle to seclude us from the wicked, while Father Anthony was our guardian genius. Frequently we by agreement interrogated Alice, who though fond to the common degree of an old nurse of both, but more especially Ellen, resisted those little arts nature herself inspires. Our mamma we now and then ventured to sound, but her gravity always disconcerted us, and we retreated from a vain attempt. She once absented herself fourteen days, and left us to our own conjectures, in a spot truly

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chearless. Part of the time we spent in searching once more for a door, and the rest in childish lamentations for her loss; which Alice still assured us would be but a temporary one. Inflexible in the discharge of her duty, she still persisted in locking our apartment every day after dinner, at which time all who had occasion, doubtless, passed in and out of the Recess. Being deprived of my customary resource, books, to amuse a part of our melancholy leisure, we mutually agreed to invent tales from the many whole-length pictures, which ornamented the best room, and to take them as they came alternately. Ellinor readily invented a ludicrous story upon the portrait of an old man, which made us both laugh heartily. I turned my eyes to consider what I should say about the next; they rested on the figure of a man of noble mien, his dress I then knew no name for, but have since found to be armour; a page held his helmet, and his hair, of a pale brown, fell over his shoulders. He was surrounded with many emblems of martial merit, and his eyes, which seemed bent on me, were full of a tender sweetness. A sentiment of veneration, mingled with a surprising softness, pierced my soul at once; my tongue faltered with a nameless idea, and I rested my head against the shoulder of my sister. That dear girl turned to me with quickness, and the beam of her eye was like that of the picture. I surveyed her over and over, and found in every feature the strongest resemblance; when she frowned, she had all his dignity; when she smiled, all his sweetness. An awe, I could not conquer, made me unable to form any tale on that subject, and I directed my attention toward the next. It represented a lady in the flower of youth, dressed in mourning, and seeming in every feature to be marked by sorrow; a black veil half shaded a coronet she wept over. If the last picture awakened veneration, this seemed to call forth a thousand melting sensations; the tears rushed involuntary into our eyes, and, clasping, we wept upon the bosoms of each other. “Ah! who can these be? cried we both together. Why do our hearts thus throb before inanimate canvas? surely every thing we behold is but part of one great mystery; when, will the day come, destined to clear it up?” We walked arm in arm round, and moralized on every portrait, but none interested us like these; we were never weary of surveying or talking about them; a young heart is frequently engrossed by a favorite idea, amid all the glare of the great world; nor is it then wonderful ours were thus possessed when entombed alive in such a narrow boundary. I knew not why, but we lived in the presence of

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The moment our mamma returned, we flew into her arms, and interrupted her tender carasses with importunate enquiries concerning these favorite pictures. She regarded us with astonishment—her eyes filled with tears, and she bade us leave her to recover herself alone. Shortly after she summoned Alice, and held with her a conversation which restored her tranquillity; but she carefully avoided our enquiries, endeavouring to diversify our hours by music, drawing, poetry, geography, and every ornamental branch of education. Whenever we verged toward an hint about the retreat—“wait, my dear girls, she would say, the appointed hour—alas, one may follow it, when you will wish yourselves still uninformed.”—Impressed with an undesinable melancholy, our years passed on ’till womanhood approached. Pardon me if I linger over these scenes; I have but few such to relate, and they are all of my life upon which my heart dares to pause. How are we born to invent our own miseries! We start forward from the goal of youth, fearless and impatient, nor know the heights and depths through which we must labour; oppressed in turn by every element, and often overwhelmed with that most insupportable of all burthens, our own dissatisfied souls. How have I wept the moment I quitted the Recess—a moment I then lived but in hope of! To be always erring, is the weakness of humanity, and to be always repenting, its punishment.— Alas! could we learn wisdom without experience, mankind would perhaps be too happy. Father Anthony in time ingratiated himself with us, by his continual remonstrances against our being shut up in a place which bounded our ideas so much that he despaired of making us comprehend half of what he taught us. We seconded his advice with endless entreaties. Our mamma, who was persuasion itself in her own person, was not proof against it in that of another. “Alas, my children, would she often say, by what fatality do you so passionately desire to leave a home you will hereafter remember with a pleasure full of regret? In vain you would return to it—you will lose a taste for the tranquil enjoyments this solitude offers, without perhaps finding any to supply them. Yet far be the selfish weakness from my heart of punishing you, even for your welfare. You shall see this admired world. May it ever please you as it will at first sight!”

We embraced her with youthful transport, and then each other—“We shall go at last, exclaimed both together, we shall see many more like ourselves!” “What say you, children? cried she; ah! you will see few indeed like yourselves.” The next day was appointed for our enfranchisement. We packed and unpacked our little luggage fifty times over for mere employment ’till the appointed hour came; when we were summoned to the chamber of our only friend, who was walking about apparently agitated with a secret. “Are you grieved, mamma, cried I, that we are going to be happy?” “Ah, no Matilda! I am grieved, because I think you are just ceasing to be so. In this peaceful solitude I could supply to you every lost relation— the adopted children of my heart, I stood between you and a fate at once distinguished, obscure and affecting.—Alas, why do you wrest yourselves and your secret from me? Why do you oblige me to tell you, you must never more call me any thing but Mrs. Marlow?” “Never more call you mamma! sighed I, incoherently, who then are our parents?” “You have no father, he who gave you a being sleeps in the bosom of God. “Our mother———” “Lives—but not for you—enquire no farther; let this specimen of knowledge teach you to fear it.—When the time requires it, I shall disclose your whole story;—weep no more, my lovely, my affecting girls; I have lost but a name: for my nature is unalterable. All who will see us know I never was married, which absolutely compelled me to this discovery. But I dare believe they will rely on my rectitude, and welcome you by whatever name I shall give you. Reasons you will hereafter know, induce me always to conceal a retreat, where alone I could have hid you, and both must, ere we leave it, solemnly promise never to disclose the secret.” Chilled with this solemn preparation, our desire of liberty vanished; we felt like links struck from the chain of creation; and still with restless imaginations explored the remainder of a mystery which we wept by anticipation. “She lives, but not for you!” were words whose sound vibrated to my heart, while pleasure danced around me, and the doubt attending the future, often robbed the present of enjoyment. After we had made at her knees the strict promise required, she muffled our faces, and tak-

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these pictures as if they understood us, and blushed when we were guilty of the slightest folly.

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ing my hand, as Alice did my sister’s, led us through many cold passages for some minutes; when unbinding our eyes, we found ourselves in a noble cloister. We flew into the garden it bordered, and how strong was the impression of the scene before us! from the mansion, which stood on a hill, spread a rich and fertile valley, mingled with thickets, half seen or clustered hamlets, while through the living landscape flowed a clear river, ———and to the main The liquid serpent drew his silver train.

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SOPHIA LEE (1750-1824)

[Lee]’s most significant work, The Recess [(1783),] appeared in one volume three years after the publication of [her play] The Chapter of Accidents [(1780)]. Its reception was so encouraging that Sophia produced two additional volumes in 1785. . . . The tale traces the vicissitudes of Matilda and Ellinor, daughters of Mary Queen of Scots by the Duke of Norfolk, who, under threat of persecution by Elizabeth, are reared in the subterranean vaults of an abandoned abbey so that, in their father’s words, they may “never . . . know the Court of Elizabeth, but innocently and happily . . . die in the desart where they bloomed.” The central importance of the recess, or refuge, in the tale reflects the most complex exploration of a theme that was to interest Lee throughout her writing career: that of retreat. . . . Throughout the novel, Lee’s passionate attention to the “exquisite distress” of the tormented sisters announces her conviction of the relationship (explored in detail by later Gothicists like Radcliffe) of mental suffering and refinement, of anguish and the sublime. The critical response to The Recess was immediate and vigorous. Readers were arrested by the new combination of history and romance. . . . The Recess, in effect, reintroduced the genre of the English historical romance, which had lain dormant since Thomas Leland’s Longsword of 1762, and in so doing not only stimulated the composition of a host of novels along similar lines but helped to form public taste for the more popular and radical genre that was to captivate English readers in the last decade of the eighteenth century: the Gothic.

SOURCE: Napier, Elizabeth R. “Sophia Lee.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 39: British Novelists, 1660-1800, edited by Martin C. Battestin, pp. 301-06. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group, 1985.

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ

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SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC Title page of The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times, 1786.

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KATHLEEN L. SPENCER (ESSAY DATE SPRING 1992) SOURCE: Spencer, Kathleen L. “Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis.” ELH 59, no. 1 (spring 1992): 197225. In the following essay, Spencer investigates Dracula within the social contexts of late Victorianism, discussing the novel in terms of British imperialism, contemporaneous theories of cultural degeneracy, and the New Woman movement of the time. I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created. —Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger1 The construction of categories defining what is appropriate sexual behavior (“normal”/ “abnormal”), or what constitutes the essential gender being (“male”/“female”); or where we are placed along a continuum of sexual possibilities (“heterosexual,” “homosexual,” “paedophile,” “transvestite” or whatever); this endeavor is no neutral, scientific discovery of what was already there. Social institutions which embody these definitions (religion, the law, medicine, the educational system, psychiatry, social welfare, even architecture) are constitutive of the sexual lives of individuals. Struggles around sexuality are, therefore, struggles over meanings—over what is appropriate or not appropriate—meanings which call on the resources of the body and the flux of desire, but are not dictated by them. —Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents (emphasis added)2

Interpreting Dracula’s sexual substrata has become something of a cottage industry of late, so much so that one more reading of the text’s unconscious may seem a bit pointless. Yet there is something curious going on here: despite certain disagreements as to what kind of sexuality is present in the novel, almost all readings presume a given sexuality that is repressed and displaced throughout the text, which it is the critical task to uncover and articulate. In other words, despite local disagreements, all of these readings approach the text from a fairly orthodox version of depth psychology.3 While this focus has certainly been productive, there are other questions about the text that cannot be answered by focusing on the unconscious sexuality of the author, or a character, or even, as in Freudian/Marxist readings, on the class system. What I propose is a different kind of historical reading of Dracula to supplement the previous apG O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1

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OVERVIEWS

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proaches; my concern is less with Stoker’s position as a representative late-Victorian man than with the novel as a representative late-Victorian text. For Dracula is not an isolated phenomenon, but is part of a literary/cultural discourse comprised not only of other tales about vampires, but of other fantastic novels and stories that also focus on sexual dynamics, whether covertly or overtly.4 Whatever it is that Dracula is saying about sex, then, it is saying not in isolation but as part of a dialogue. The first step in this broader historical explication of Stoker’s novel is to identify its literary context: the “romance revival” of the 1880s and 1890s—more explicitly, that species of romance called “the fantastic.” Having located the text generically, we can then clarify its cultural context—the late-Victorian world of imperialism and degeneracy theories, purity crusades and the New Woman, materialist medicine and its opponents (continental psychology on the one hand, Spiritualism and assorted occultisms on the other). To illuminate this social context I will read the novel against models of cultures in crisis drawn from René Girard and anthropologist Mary Douglas. Finally I will consider the relationship between Dracula’s genre, its historical context, and its popularity, to see what light this analysis can shed on a larger question—why the fantastic as a genre should have flourished so dramatically in this period of cultural transformation.

I: The Fantastic Like “romance” itself, “the fantastic” is a much-disputed term. While some theorists use “fantasy” and “the fantastic” interchangeably, others see them as referring to two quite different kinds of stories, and still others see the fantastic not as a genre at all but as an element that can appear in many kinds of tales (as the term “gothic” can be applied either to a specific fictional configuration common at the end of the eighteenth century, or to a literary mode which can appear in works of any period). The most famous definition of the term “fantastic” is Tzvetan Todorov’s, but what seems to me the most functional, precise explanation of the fantastic is that proposed by the Polish semiotician Andrzej Zgorzelski. For Zgorzelski, the fantastic as a genre is signaled by “the breaching of the internal laws which are initially assumed in the text to govern the fictional world.” The opening of the text indicates that the fictive world is based on a “mimetic world model,” a model that is violently breached by the entrance of the

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fantastic element and changed into a different world, one in which the fantastic element does not violate the laws of reality. A fantastic text, then, builds its fictional world as “a textual confrontation of two models of reality.”5 Two elements are essential for the characteristic frisson of the fantastic: first, the impossible event must genuinely be happening (not a dream, a hallucination, a mistake, or a deliberate trick); and second, the tone of the narrative emphasizes initial disbelief, and (usually) horror. The characters react with fear and revulsion at encountering what is not only unexpected, but unnatural according to the laws of the world they inhabit, and readers usually respond with the same feelings, not only because we identify with the characters, but because the world the characters initially inhabit is our own world. Further, the narrative voice insistently emphasizes violation and transgression, the logical contradiction between the impossibility of the occurrence and its actuality. For example, when Dracula appears in Picadilly at high noon, the characters react initially with disbelief and a kind of horrified vertigo at discovering that the monstrous is real and walking the streets of their ordinary modern city. Defined in this way, the fantastic as a genre is relatively modern. The low mimetic (to use Northrop Frye’s familiar term) must be a wellestablished fictional convention before we can conventionalize its violation, a condition that does not obtain till the mid-eighteenth century. Before the convention of realism became the norm—in the medieval quest narrative or Renaissance romance, for example—the intrusion of the supernatural or monstrous did not create an experience of the fantastic for either the characters or the readers. A questing knight may be seriously dismayed to discover a dragon or a magician in his path, but the mere existence of the supernatural does not force him to rethink reality, because it does not violate the laws of nature. For Prince Hamlet, seeing his father’s ghost is certainly alarming; but it is the ghost’s message, not its presence, which so distresses him. The serious question for Hamlet is not whether the ghost is real but whether it is “honest”—genuinely his father’s spirit or a demon sent to tempt him to regicide. Modern readers of these texts need not believe in the actual existence of dragons or ghosts to recognize that the text treats these occurrences as natural. The conventions of fictional realism do not apply, any more than they apply to modern fantasy or science fiction, whose readers learn to respond without astonishment to the presence of

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In light of this requirement, I would argue that the Gothic tales of the late eighteenth century are the first fantastic fictions, Horace Walpole and Anne Radcliffe among the first writers to experiment with the emotional possibilities (for both characters and readers) of violating the laws of nature. Since such violations are radically new, the earliest writers tend to soften the effects a bit. In the first place, Gothic fictions are traditionally distanced somewhat from the world of their audience, set back in time and “away” in space— preferably in Spain or Italy during the Inquisition—making the stories more plausible (to an English audience) by the superstitiousness of their settings, and at the same time lessening the intensity of the fear, for the readers if not the characters. As another softening device, some of the early Gothic writers, notably Radcliffe, tidy away the fantastic by giving us rational explanations for the apparent supernatural events— though not till the end of the novel, so we have plenty of time to experience the fantastic frisson first. However, this tidying strategy was soon abandoned. While second-generation Gothic writers like Monk Lewis and Charles Maturin still set their novels in Inquisition Europe, they apparently felt less need to reassure their readers at the end that the ordinary rational laws of reality governed the world inside the text as well as outside. But the fantastic that develops at the end of the nineteenth century (exclusive of the ghost story, a popular but traditional form) is identifiably different from the Gothic of one hundred years before. First and most important, the new authors insist on the modernity of the setting— not on the distance between the world of the text and the world of the reader, but on their identity. A modern setting means, most profoundly, an urban setting, as by the end of the nineteenth century well over half the population of the British Isles lived in cities. To be modern also means that science is the metaphor that rules human interactions with the universe, so the new fantastic adopts the discourse of empiricism even to describe and manipulate supernatural phenomena. These characteristics of the modern fantastic, as distinct from the earlier variety, suggest we need a new term to refer to it; and I would argue that

“Urban Gothic” is particularly appropriate for the new type, acknowledging the eighteenth-century ancestry while identifying the major modifications that have been made to adapt the fantastic to the needs of a new era. The change from Gothic to Urban Gothic allows writers to call on the powers of what Henry James, in a review of the sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, called “those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.” As James observed, the innovation of bringing the terror next door gave an entirely new direction to horror literature. The new strategy was fatal to the authority of Mrs. Radcliffe and her everlasting castle in the Apennines. What are the Apennines to us, or we to the Apennines? Instead of the terrors of “Udolpho”, we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country house and the busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely more terrible.

In 1865, James was moderately scornful of the supernatural as a fictional device, remarking in this same review that “a good ghost-story, to be half as terrible as a good murder-story, must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life.”6 But twenty-five years later he himself found uses for the supernatural by following his own advice and connecting it “at a hundred points to the common objects of life”—and so did his “fellow” (if we can so call them) romancers. In short, James, along with many of his contemporaries, explored the Urban Gothic.

II: The Romance Revival But the Urban Gothic was only part, if a crucial part, of a larger literary movement of the last two decades of the century: the romance revival. “Romance” is another of those protean literary terms whose meaning varies with the frame of reference, but in the context of the 1880s, the term has a fairly stable meaning. The “romance revival” began as a reaction against the “high realism” of the 1870s, which was, in its turn, a reaction against the “sensation novels” of the 1860s. The theorists of high realism rejected the sensation novel’s emphasis on plot, arguing that it demanded less of readers than novels that required them to interpret the subtleties of human motives. In addition, it was believed, too strong an emphasis on plot would interfere with the “naturalness” of characters. By the 1880s, these novels of “character analysis” themselves came under attack. First, being limited to and by “gross” reality, the novels (their critics argued) were dull and trivial. Second,

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wizards or of faster-than-light space vessels. But a wizard or faster-than-light ship introduced into a text whose opening pages signal a contemporary realistic setting would produce reactions from the characters, the narrator, and the readers that would signal the presence of the fantastic.

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these novelists had chosen to adopt the “heartless” methods of science (“vivisection” is a common metaphor), treating their characters with no sympathy or decorum, dissecting them in public. Then, when “high realism” transposes into naturalism, new grounds for rejection appear. For one thing, naturalist novels persistently tried to introduce moral, middle-class readers to the kinds of persons—prostitutes, criminals, beggars, and other “undeserving” or unappealing poor people—whom they had no desire to meet. For another, realism, especially when pushed to the extremes of naturalist determinism, allowed no room for the higher workings of Providence, no room for the reward of the virtuous and the punishment of the guilty. Finally, since naturalism was identified in the minds of English readers with Zola, James, and Howells, it became for some readers and critics a patriotic duty to resist “foreign influences,” and to call for a healthy English fiction.7 The result was a resurgence of interest in bold, high-stakes adventure, larger-(and simpler-) thanlife characters, exotic locales and incidents, idealistic quests, world-class criminals, disguises and escapes, rescues and disasters. Anthony Hope Hawkins, author (as Anthony Hope) of one of the best-known romances of the period, The Prisoner of Zenda (1893), exclaimed that in romance, Emotion must be taken at high pitch. It must be strong, simple, confident; otherwise it lacks the quality needed for romance. . . . romance becomes an expression of some of the deepest instincts of humanity. It has no monopoly of this expression, but it is its privilege to render it in a singularly clear, distinct, and pure form; it can give to love an ideal object, to ambition a boundless field, to courage a high occasion; and these great emotions, revelling in their freedom, exhibit themselves in their glory. Thus in its most worthy forms, in the hands of its masters, it can not only delight men, but can touch them to the very heart. It shows them what they would be if they could, if time and fate and circumstances did not bind, what in a sense they all are, and what their acts would show them to be if an opportunity offered. So they dream and are happier, and at least none the worse for their dreams.8

Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, and (in his early works) H. G. Wells are the best-known figures of this new movement, along with Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Andrew Lang, several of whom also wrote manifestos for the critical journals in favor of romance.9 In addition to these relatively familiar names, a whole army

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of romancers, once popular but now practically unread and in many cases entirely forgotten, produced large quantities of this fiction to supply the new markets.1 0 But if the revived romance of the 1880s takes its declared form from an ancient tradition, the new romancers (like the authors of the Urban Gothic) draw on contemporary interests for their characters, settings, and themes: the exotic reaches of the empire—Africa, Egypt, India, Australia—as well as such regions as China, the South Pacific, and South and Central America; dead civilizations of the ancient past (Egyptian, Peruvian, Celtic, Neanderthal), their tales enlivened by information culled from the newest archaeological reports; lost races inside volcanoes, at the bottom of the sea, in the polar regions, on other planets, in the future; the thrilling possibilities of modern technology (electrically-induced immortality or eternal youth; brain transplants; memory recordings; time travel); or the beliefs and rituals of that other revival of the 1880s, the occult revival (Spiritualism, Theosophy, the Society for Psychical Research, and the magicians of the Order of the Golden Dawn).1 1

III: Purity and Danger Thus not only the Urban Gothic but the romance revival as a whole transforms a traditional literary genre by an infusion of modern perspectives. But the Urban Gothic and the romance share another crucial characteristic beyond their common reliance on contemporary adventure and exoticism: a concern for purity, for the reduction of ambiguity and the preservation of boundaries. Both attempt to reduce anxiety by stabilizing certain key distinctions, which seemed, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, to be eroding: between male and female, natural and unnatural, civilized and degenerate, human and nonhuman. At issue, finally, underneath all these distinctions, is the ground of individual identity, the ultimate distinction between self and other. Where once a complex web of traditional roles and relationships grounded individual identity, in the new capitalist world of the cash-nexus, Anthony Giddens observes, the bulwarks of identity were reduced essentially to two: the arena of intimate relationships (that is, the family, personal and highly sexualized), and the arena of “mass ritual,” of sporting events and political ceremonies, especially the fervent impersonal group identity we call nationalism. “In such conditions of social life,” writes Giddens, “the ontological security of the individual in day-to-day life is more

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Instead of being broadly supported by a web of interlocking kinship links, work groups, ceremonial societies, traditions, routines, and even the continuities of place and seasonal cycle, identity for the ordinary middle-class Briton now hung delicately on two slender threads at the extreme margins of scale, the intimate and the national. So it is hardly surprising that many people grew anxious to preserve the clarity and purity of the distinctions that supported this system. However, even at this time of their heightened significance, these very distinctions came under attack. Darwinian evolutionary theory blurred the boundaries between human and animal in not one but two ways: by the famous argument that humans and apes had a common ancester, but also by the implied hierarchy at the end of The Descent of Man which leads from the ape-like ancestor through primitive peoples to civilized Europeans. The imputed inferiority of the lower races, as George Stocking points out, “although still in the first instance cultural, was now in most cases at least implicitly organic as well.”1 3 Thus the boundary between human and ape became a matter of scientific doctrine, but (as Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau pointed out) an ambiguous one: what was actually a philosophic and political debate was concealed under the language of science. Yet since “scientific” language could not hope to stabilize a fundamentally unscientific boundary, the issue continued unresolved. Nor was this boundary a matter of abstract speculation for civilized Europeans; for if humans could evolve, it was thought they could also devolve or degenerate, both as nations and as individuals. At what point in a downward slide did a human being cross over the line into animality? Lombroso addressed this question with his new “science” of criminal anthropology, which purported to demonstrate through elaborate measurements and charts of facial angles that habitual criminals were throwbacks to primitive ancestors, with more of the ape than the human about them. Fear of such national “degeneracy” was further highlighted for Britons by the Boer War of 1899-1902, first by the series of unprecedented defeats handed the greatest army in the world by a handful of Dutch farmers, and second by the recruiting campaign that discovered the physical inadequacies of the men from London’s East-End slums, who were alarmingly undersized,

frail, and sickly.1 4 Such concerns underlay the tremendous public anxiety at the end of the century about the condition of the British Empire and the warnings that, like its Roman predecessor, it could fall, and for what were popularly perceived as the same reasons—moral decadence leading to racial degeneration. Another crucial distinction under attack was that between male and female. By all the superficial criteria of appearance, behavior, and legal status, Victorian men and women must have seemed almost like two different, though symbiotically related, species. It has been argued that never in western society have gender roles been more rigid or more distinct (at least in the middle classes) than in the late nineteenth century. Victorian science, especially Victorian medicine, lent the weight of its prestige to the position that the physical distinctions between women and men were absolute, and absolutely determinate. In their very nature and essence, said the doctors, women were unlike men; and this difference explained their limitations—physical, moral, and intellectual—and justified their legal and social disabilities.1 5 It was woman’s special nature that fitted her for the task she had been assigned by Victorian society. In her guises of maiden, wife, and above all mother, Woman (with a capital) had been appointed the guardian of moral virtue; the home, Woman’s realm, became both a refuge from the hard necessities of the utilitarian business world and the temple of a new religion that served to supplement or substitute for the weakening Christian orthodoxy—the religion of romantic love as the source of salvation, and of the family as a haven for all the human warmth, grace and affection that had been banished from the father’s daily life in the world. Woman, as the Angel in the House, was to save Man from his own baser instincts and lead him toward heaven. Jenni Calder’s study of the Victorian home further clarifies the significance of this domestic religion. While Victorians genuinely desired to make the world a better place, Calder argues, the social problems facing them were so massive and so intractable that they usually had to settle for making the home, as the only part of the world responsive to their actions, a better place instead. Thus “the angel in the house was at the root of multitudes of Victorian assumptions and ideas, and Victorian rationalizations and ideals.”1 6 But this position did not go unchallenged. Throughout the century, women argued for re-

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fragile than in societies dominated by tradition and the meshings of kinship across space and time.”1 2

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forms of marriage and divorce laws, and in particular for the right of married women to own property in their own names. The kind of resistance they faced is revealed most potently in the comments of Lord St. Leonards, who argued against the passage of the Married Women’s Property Bill of 1857 on the grounds that it would “place the whole marriage law . . . on a different footing and give a wife all the distinct rights of citizenship,” an argument that indicates that for this distinguished jurist and former Lord Chancellor the categories of “wife” and “citizen” were mutually exclusive.1 7 A few men joined the fray on the distaff side, most notably John Stuart Mill, who argued against such logic in The Subjection of Women in 1869 and even tried to get women the vote, on the grounds that only if they could vote for their representatives would Parliament take their needs seriously; but considerable discussion produced little substantive action. The debate grew even more heated in the last few decades of the century when the New Woman arrived on the scene, wanting higher education, striving to enter the learned professions, and ever more frequently working outside the home for money (that is, middle-class women began to do so, for of course lower-class women had long been so employed). And some of the most radical New Women even argued that they were entitled to the same freedom of sexual expression as men. In short, more and more women insisted on leaving the house of which they had been appointed angel, the house that, if a refuge for men, became for many middle-class wives and daughters a more or less pleasant prison. But in the eyes of most Victorian men, for women to deny their traditional role was to deny their womanhood, to challenge the distinctions between women and men upon which the family—and therefore society— depended. Nor was the New Woman the only source of threat to gender categories. Homosexuality was brought into the consciousness of a horrified public, first by the Cleveland Street scandal in 1889, which revealed a homosexual brothel catering to the upper classes (including the Prince of Wales’s closest friend and, by rumor, the Prince’s eldest son as well).1 8 More dramatic still was the infamous Wilde trial in 1895, which made “homosexuality” both as an ontological state and as a chosen lifestyle available to ordinary middle-class imaginations for the first time.1 9 To late Victorians, if the New Woman’s desire to achieve higher status by “becoming” a man was at least understandable, though outrageous, what could be said

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about men who deliberately refused to be men? Such depravity challenged not just the distinction between male and female but that between natural and unnatural as well.2 0 The debates about sex and sex roles in the nineteenth century, argues Ludmilla Jordanova, “hinged precisely on the ways in which sexual boundaries might become blurred. It is as if the social order depended on clarity with respect to certain distinctions whose symbolic meanings spread far beyond their explicit context.”2 1 In this perception she is quite right: anthropologists tell us that social order depends precisely on the clarity of such distinctions. But anthropologists can tell us more: they can help us see the dynamics at work in late Victorian England in a larger social context—the context of a culture in crisis. Mary Douglas’s work on pollution fears and witchcraft societies is surprisingly appropriate here.2 2 All cultures that explain evil as a product of witchcraft—from certain African tribes to Salem Village in the seventeenth century—share certain characteristics, she notes. Most importantly, there is strong pressure on group members to conform, but the classification system of the society is somehow ineffective in structuring reality: it is too narrow and rigid to deal with the variety of actual experience, or it is inconsistent, or has gaps, or is in competition with another system of classification that weakens the effectiveness of both. In such a society, the universe is dualistic: what is inside is good, what is outside is bad. The group boundary is therefore both a source of magical danger and the main definer of rights: you are either a member or a stranger. Evil is a foreign danger introduced by foreign agents in disguise, but abetted by deviant members of the group who must be identified and expelled for allowing the outside evil to infiltrate. Since not only the society itself but the entire cosmos is endangered by the vile, irrational behavior of these human agents of evil, a witchcraft society is preoccupied with rituals of cleansing, the expulsion of spies or witches, and the redrawing of boundaries to mark the pure (inside) and the evil (outside). Though the late Victorians did not explicitly attribute evil to witches, they manifested the same fears of pollution from outsiders, the same suspicion of deviants as traitors, and the same exaggerated estimation of what was at stake—in short, the same social dynamics as more traditional witchcraft societies. The pressures on middle-class Victorians to conform were intense (and too well known to need documentation), while the model

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Douglas mentions one other key factor in a witchcraft society that the Victorians also shared: the leadership of the group is precarious or under dispute, and the roles within the group ambiguous or undefined. Because no one person or faction has sufficient authority to stabilize the situation, the struggle for leadership prompts what we might call “purity competitions”: who is most vigilant at ferreting out enemies, especially those disguised enemies lurking within the society itself? In other words, the struggle for power and stability under these social conditions leads inevitably to scapegoat rituals.2 3 The struggle for leadership of a divided and confused people also characterized late Victorian society. For the Victorians, neither traditionalist nor “rebel” forces could take complete command: the traditionalists had the numbers and most of the worldly power, but the rebels tended to be educated and articulate, many were influential, and all had ready access to a public forum in the wide-open periodical market of the 1880s and ’90s. As a result, they could make their voices heard in disproportion to their numbers and official positions. The battle produced numerous cries of “seize the witch!”—directed both at groups (Jews, Germans, Slavs, Orientals, birth control advocates, promiscuous women, decadent French authors [especially Zola], homosexuals) and at individuals—most spectacularly, though by no means solely, Oscar Wilde. And here is where we reconnect the social and the literary. The romance, I would argue, and in particular the Urban Gothic, not only in its characteristic subject matter but more importantly in its very form, is the perfect literary reflection of the cultural crisis Britain experienced between 1880 and 1914. In such an atmosphere, the

modern fantastic became a potent vehicle for social drama—potent because the images of the fantastic are always drawn from our dreams and nightmares. The fantastic as a genre is based on violations of reality, which means it is fundamentally concerned with defining reality; and the nature of reality is exactly the question at issue in late-nineteenth-century England. Finally, since at the end of a fantastic tale the violating element is characteristically expelled and the mimetic world, the status quo, is reestablished, the fantastic proved ideal for symbolically reaffirming the traditional model of reality. As Northrop Frye told us long ago, the romance is traditionally a psychomachia, a struggle between the forces of good and evil in which evil is defeated, and the modern romance (as Hope’s quotation suggests, with its emphasis on clarity and purity and “great emotions in their glory”) retains this pattern. The Urban Gothic extends the tradition in a peculiarly modern way by defining the enemy as not only evil but unnatural: she/ he/it has no right to exist at all. In the very form of both the romance and the Urban Gothic, then, we find repeated the contemporary drive to purify the inside and expel the foreign pollution: at the heart of both lies the scapegoat ritual. And this finally brings us to Dracula, a classic example of the conservative fantastic: in the end Dracula is killed, the alien element expelled and the ordinary world restored. But what exactly is being expelled? In particular, how would Stoker’s original audience have read this novel? In the cultural context of 1897, what threat did Dracula represent that needed so desperately and at such cost to be driven out? How was the culture being instructed to protect itself, and from what? Another way to put the question is this: who is the scapegoat in Dracula, and to what end is that scapegoat sacrificed?

IV: Ritual Victims in Dracula As René Girard tells us in Violence and the Sacred, what all sacrificial victims have in common is that they must recognizably belong to the community, but must at the same time be somehow marginal, incapable of fully participating in the social bond—slaves, criminals, the mad, the deformed. They are enough of the community to substitute for it, but between them and the community “a crucial social link is missing, so they can be exposed to violence without fear of reprisal. Their death does not automatically entail an act

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to which they were required to conform was losing its clarity. The old consensus on the central distinctions of their society—on which distinctions were indeed central, and on how those distinctions were to be defined and maintained— was breaking down. In the last twenty years of the century, an intense debate developed between those who sought to shore up the old crumbling distinctions and those demanding change— nontraditional women, homosexuals, socialists, some artists and intellectuals, a few scientists, working-class men who had acquired some education. One side strove to widen or redefine cultural boundaries, to let some of the “outside” in, while the other fought desperately to maintain the “purity” of the inside by expelling as traitors those who breached the boundaries.

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of vengeance.” As a result, sacrificing them will end communal violence rather than prolonging it.2 4 In Dracula, I argue, Lucy Westenra fills the category and the social function of the surrogate victim who is sacrificed to restore a lost order. On the surface, it would seem that Lucy belongs to the class Victorians would find least sacrificeable rather than most—a young, beautiful, virtuous girl—and that, in any case, she is a victim not of her own community but of a monstrous outsider. However, we are given numerous indications that Lucy, for all her sweetness, purity, and beauty, is a marginal figure. In the first place, her social connections are alarmingly tenuous: her father is dead, and she has no brothers or other family to protect her except her mother, who is herself very weak both psychologically and physically (and in fact predeceases her daughter). There is no one to protect Lucy from attack, or to revenge her death at the hands of her own community. More crucially, Lucy’s character is “flawed” in a way that makes her fatally vulnerable to the vampire. She is a woman whose sexuality is under very imperfect control. She is loved devotedly by three different young men, which in itself is not a fault, but her reaction to this situation reveals a problem. When she writes to Mina about her suitors, she can’t help gloating about “THREE proposals in one day.”2 5 Worse, although she says she is greatly in love with Arthur, she also feels very badly about turning down those two splendid fellows, John Seward and Quincey Morris, and bursts out, “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” Immediately afterward she admits that “this is heresy, and I must not say it” (59); but even so, we sense that she means what she says: she really would like to marry all of them. And, according to the novel’s own semiotics, she gets her wish. At her funeral Arthur declares that, because he has given Lucy his blood, he feels that she is his true wife in the sight of God. Under the circumstances, his friends naturally refrain from telling him about the transfusions Lucy had received from her other two lovers and Dr. Van Helsing; but later, alone with Seward, Van Helsing bursts out in uncontrollable laughter thinking of it. True, as Seward observes, the thought is very comforting for Arthur. But if Arthur is right in his belief, Van Helsing points out, what about the other three donors? “Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist” (176).

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Nor is this desire to marry all three of her suitors the only sign of Lucy’s suspect character. She is a sleepwalker, a habit traditionally associated with sexual looseness. She is therefore doubly vulnerable to Dracula’s approach; in the symbolsystem of the novel, she has signaled her sexual receptivity. It cannot be an accident that on the night of the storm, when Dracula’s ship lands, Lucy indulges again in sleepwalking, leaving the house dressed only in her nightgown. Considering the armor-like characteristics of the ordinary Victorian woman’s daytime clothing—the heavilyboned corsets, the immense weight of petticoats, the endless layers of cloth—Lucy in her nightdress might as well be naked. Worse yet, she goes to the old cemetery, alone, and to the grave of a suicide (the only spot of unsanctified ground in the churchyard). The traditional equation of sexuality and death could hardly be clearer, nor her invitation of Dracula more explicit. What makes Lucy’s sexuality threatening to the community—sufficiently threatening that she becomes an appropriate surrogate victim—is that she will not limit herself to one man. While she does officially choose one of her three suitors, her choice is insufficiently absolute to control the competition among the three for her possession. Stoker downplays the competition by making the men such good friends and such decent, selfcontrolled characters that the threat of disorder is concealed, but nonetheless that competition remains as a source of potential violence. But in order to function as a surrogate victim who can purge the community of its universal violence, something further is required: Lucy has to take on the aspect of the monstrous. In one light, Lucy functions as the monstrous double of Mina, the virtuous wife; seen another way, she functions as her own monstrous double, for there are two aspects to her personality whose separation becomes increasingly marked throughout her transformation into a vampire. She is both the image of purity, sweetness, and beauty—the traditional blond angel in the house—and the creature of sexual appetites, the sleep-walker who accedes to violent penetration by the vampire. Her saving grace, according to Van Helsing, is that she yielded to Dracula only during a trance—that is, when her conscious personality was not in command—so her unconscious personality alone has become vampiric.2 6 During her last hours, she manifests both sides of her personality in alternation, sometimes the sweet pure Lucy they all love, and sometimes the wanton, voluptuous creature with cruel mouth and hard eyes. When she is

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the work of her destruction was yielded as a privilege to the one best entitled to it, but Lucy as we had seen her in life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity. (216)2 7

As a vampire she is even more beautiful than in life, but no longer the Lucy they had known. “The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness. . . . Lucy’s eyes [have become] unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew”; they blaze with “unholy light” and she is as “callous as a devil” (211). Again and again, Seward uses the words “wanton” and “voluptuous” to describe Un-Dead Lucy’s smile, her tones “diabolically sweet”—until she is thwarted, at which point she becomes overtly monstrous, her eyes throwing out “sparks of hell-fire,” the brows “wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh were the coils of Medusa’s snakes” (212). These same images are repeated when the four men, Dr. Van Helsing and Lucy’s three suitors, return the next day to free Lucy’s soul, to save her by killing her. “She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth—which it made one shudder to see—the whole carnal and unspirited appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity” (214).

In death Lucy becomes again the angel she had been in life; she also becomes a bond between her three rivals, where in life she could only have been a source of division. Despite their personal grief, it is for them an ideal solution to the problem she represented. In sacrificing Lucy, the four men purge not only their fear of female sexuality generally, of which she is the monstrous expression, but also—and more importantly— their fear of their own sexuality and their capacity for sexually-prompted violence against each other.

But the rite of sacrifice, an act of terrible violence, restores both Lucy and the community she had threatened. As Stoker describes it, the final killing of Lucy is quite clearly both a religious act and a communal one. The setting is a solitary tomb lit only by candles. Arthur drives the stake through Lucy’s heart, as the one with the best right to so violate her offending body and release the innocent soul, and he is supported in his work by the priestly figure of Dr. Van Helsing and by his two closest friends, Lucy’s other lovers, who read the prayer for the dead as he strikes home. The thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, bloodcurdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it; the sight of it gave us courage so that our voices seemed to ring through the little vault. . . . There, in the coffin lay no longer the foul Thing that we had so dreaded and grown to hate that

The scene in the tomb exemplifies a key element of the sacrificial rite, “the atmosphere of terror and hallucination that accompanies the primordial religious experience.”2 8 The violent hysteria, the decisive act of violence perceived as religious experience, the succeeding calm and the atmosphere of holy mystery covering the participants, all function to fuse the men into a closed and harmonious community. Although Lucy is no longer available to any of the men as a bulwark of his personal identity, her death serves to reinforce their common bond, their dedication to each other and to a sense of shared interest, thus bolstering that other pole of Victorian identity that Giddens defines as nationalism. But Lucy is not the only scapegoat in the novel. Count Dracula himself is also sacrificed for the common good. Like all sacrificial victims, he must be both connected and marginal. His links to the community are literally blood ties—the blood of Jonathan, Lucy, and Mina. Further, he resembles his enemies in several important ways: he is (or was once) human, he is European, he is extremely intelligent and has a most powerful will. But his roots are in Eastern Europe—Slavic, Catholic, peasant, and superstitious where England is Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, industrial, and rationalist. Further, unlike Arthur, the bourgeois aristocrat, Dracula belongs to a much older, more feudal sort of aristocracy, one that was was going out of favor in England. 2 9 In fact, the most unmistakable sign of his allegiance to that older pattern may be his sexuality, which partakes of the ancient droit du seigneur. “Your girls that you all love are mine already,” he gloats (306), taunting his opponents; and throughout the novel he lets his appetites run rampant, voracious and (as Freud says of the child’s sexuality) polymorphously perverse—a most appropriate phrase,

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awake and thus “herself,” she clutches the garlic flowers to her; but in her sleep, she thrusts away that protection, embracing her monstrous fate. Since she dies in her sleep, her future as one of the Un-Dead is inescapable.

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since the narrative repeatedly emphasizes Dracula’s “child brain” (335), as opposed to the adult brains of his enemies. Even Mina has, we are told, a man’s brain to go with her woman’s heart (234). But we know that civilized adult men control their appetites; his failure to do so marks the crucial distinction between Dracula and his opponents: he is degenerate, “a criminal and of criminal type” according to the theories of Lombroso and Nordau, which means he has an “imperfectly formed mind” (342).3 0 Consequently he can only work on one project at a time, and in emergencies must fall back on habit—which is why, closely pursued, he can do nothing but flee to his castle, while his opponents are able to innovate strategies for his defeat. As criminal and degenerate, Dracula is by definition selfish, evil, solitary; despite his pride in his descent from Attila and in his people’s valiant struggles against the Turk, as a vampire he has no true “national” identity, no “community” to belong to. Even the three vampire women at the castle who could conceivably function as a family for him, if not a nation, do not appear to do so. By contrast the “band of brothers” is selfless, good, and unified into a community both by their shared sacrifice of Lucy and their shared devotion to Mina. It is, as Van Helsing tells them, one of their great advantages over Dracula—the “power of combination,” along with the “sources of science” and “devotion in a cause” (238). However, despite all these differences, the truth gradually emerges: the Count represents precisely those dark secret drives that the men most fear in themselves, which are most destructive to both poles of identity—the intimate self of the family man, threatened by unrestrained sexual appetites, and the communal self of the nation, undermined by violent internal competition more than by external invasion. Representing a real aspect of his enemies, but one that they consciously wish to reject, Dracula has both the necessary connections to the community and the necessary separation from it to fulfill the scapegoat’s purgative function. And like Lucy’s sacrifice, the scene of Dracula’s death contains all the elements of the primordial religious experience. The atmosphere is terrifying and hallucinatory: the two parties desperately racing the sun, each fighting for life— Dracula to reach his castle, the band of heroes to catch the vampire before sunset restores his deadly power; the Count’s glaring eyes and “horrible vindictive look” as he lies helpless in his coffin, and his triumphant expression as he sees the sun

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setting and anticipates his revenge. Like the earlier sacrifice, this act is communal: two of the young men together pry off the lid of the coffin with their knives and strike simultaneously, one slashing the Count’s throat, the other plunging a knife into his heart—all described in words that intensify the terror of the moment (“sweep,” “flash,” “shriek,” “shear,” “plunge” [377]). “It was like a miracle,” cries Mina in relief; but, as the Count’s body crumbles into dust before their eyes, she adds, “Even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there” (377). As at the moment of Lucy’s death, the sacrificial victim is pictured as at peace, almost grateful to die for the greater good of the community. And indeed, there may be a reason for both Lucy’s and Dracula’s curious passivity at the moment of death. Mary Douglas remarks in Purity and Danger that “if a person has no place in the social system and is therefore a marginal being, all precaution against danger must come from others. He cannot help his abnormal situation.” But to say that he cannot help his situation is to suggest that he would like to help it, that he does not want to be a danger to others. However we read this reaction, the atmosphere of the scene changes dramatically at the moment of the vampire’s death: Castle Dracula is suddenly seen standing out against the sunset sky as we have never seen it before, every stone blazing in the light. The violence and horror is succeeded by holy awe and peace, which is capped when Quincey Morris sees Mina’s forehead now clear of its shameful scar, and vows with his last breath that this outcome is worth dying for. It is the ultimate confirmation that the community has been saved.

V: What is Lost: What is Saved But it has been a near thing, and the cost high: Lucy is lost to them (though her soul was saved), Quincey is dead, and both Jonathan and Mina suffer severely before Dracula is defeated. Stoker’s novel, then, reveals two complementary perspectives on its subject. If Lucy and Dracula demonstrate the terrifying powers of degeneracy, so threatening that they must at all costs be expelled from the community and from life itself, Jonathan’s and Mina’s experiences exemplify the difficulties and the rewards of resistance. According to Victorian sexology, in Dracula’s castle Jonathan is a man at risk: he is engaged to Mina, but they are not yet married, so that his

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The girl went on her knees and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and seemed to fasten on my throat. . . . I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart. (38)

The erotic charge of the scene is quite remarkable, as is Jonathan’s fascinated passivity in surrendering to his sexual fantasies, even while admitting the wickedness of what he desires. What we see and he does not, at this moment, is that he is risking not the “little death” of orgasm, but the real thing. Ironically, Jonathan is saved from the women not by his own virtue, but by Count Dracula’s opportune arrival. However, he is rescued from the evils of feminine sexuality only to be plunged into the horrors of homosexual passions. “How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it?” Dracula furiously asks his handmaids. “This man belongs to me!” The women answer, with a laugh of “ribald coquetry,” “You yourself never loved; you never love!” The Count looks at Jonathan’s face “attentively,” and says in a soft whisper, “Yes, I too can love” (39). As Dracula approaches him, Jonathan conveniently sinks into unconsciousness—into the same state in which Lucy had yielded to the vampire’s blandishments. If we had had any doubts about the equation of violence and sex in the novel, this scene would dispel them: Dracula’s own language conflates erotic desire and feeding; the mouth

both kisses and consumes, the same organ gratifying two distinct hungers. The encounter seems to “cure” Jonathan of his sexual desires (desires he will later pay for in the brain fever which sends him to his wedding an invalid). The text attributes his reaction to the fact that he now understands who, or rather, what the fatally beautiful creatures are, and thus sees them with horror rather than his earlier guilty fascination. “I am alone in the castle with those awful women. Faugh! Mina is a woman, and there is nought in common. They are devils of the Pit!” (53). His beloved, he insists, though a woman, has nothing in common with these creatures. He means, of course, that she does not have their evil capabilities—but neither, we notice, does she have their voluptuousness. He never records any erotic reaction to Mina at all, let alone one of this feverish intensity. In fact, since their marriage begins with her nursing him through his illness, Mina’s relationship to her husband always seems more maternal than wifely. But in late-Victorian theory, that is as it should be. Marriage is designed to tame the sexual impulses of husbands; and as for wives, as Krafft-Ebing remarks, “Woman, if physically and mentally normal, and properly educated, has but little sensual desire. If it were otherwise, marriage and family life would be empty words.”3 2 Victorian sexual theory also helps us to understand the difference between Lucy and Mina, to explain why Mina takes longer to succumb to the vampire count, and why she is able to resist more effectively than her friend. In the first place, while Lucy satisfies her own unconscious desires in yielding to Dracula, Mina’s vulnerability results as much from the failures of others as her own weakness. It is no action of Mina’s that allows the count access to her bedroom, but Renfield’s betrayal in giving his master the necessary permission to enter the house. Further, her husband and her friends, who should be protecting her, instead become so obsessed with the fight against Dracula—a fight from which they deliberately, and with the best motives, exclude her—that they leave her too much alone. Solitude is a danger to her as it was to Jonathan; and while Mina has presumably had little personal experience of sexual desire, she has, we must remember, read Jonathan’s journal in the process of transcribing it. That means she has read his description of his adventure with the three female vampires. Her own husband, then, in another sort of betrayal, has exposed Mina to his sexual fantasies. Thus isolated and exposed, Mina’s experience of marital sex, such as it has been, gives her no

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sexual fantasies are inflamed but not yet lawfully satisfied. Further, he is far from home and isolated from other living human beings. For the Victorians, solitude greatly increased sexual danger: the solitude of privacy allowed one to indulge in masturbation, while the different solitude of anonymity left one free to indulge in the kinds of sexual experiences one would, as member of a family, have been ashamed to admit desiring.3 1 Jonathan is both alone and anonymous. Confronted with the three mysterious and beautiful women in the moonlit room, he admits, “I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips” (37). The scene that follows, when he very nearly (and disastrously) gets his wish, is recorded with incandescent detail:

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protection against the count’s powers of sexual fascination. When she recognizes him in her bedroom, she is appalled but paralyzed, unable to respond or cry out as he bares her throat to refresh himself. Such paralysis is bad enough, but worse, to her bewilderment she discovers that, “strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him. I suppose it is a part of the horrible curse that such is [sic], when his touch is on his victim” (287). Dracula has drained not only her blood, but also her will to resist. He is, in sexual terms, more seducer than rapist. For a modern reader, this might lessen the crime, but for Victorians seduction would have been infinitely worse. In Victorian theory, it is sexual desire rather than sexual activity that is the true source of danger; and as Mina herself makes clear, she experiences desire under Dracula’s attentions. This explains why Mina’s forehead is scarred by the Host, why she herself suffers such (to us disproportionate) agonies of guilt and selfrevulsion. But once she is no longer isolated, once she is included in the community of her husband and their friends, she is able to resist desire, to exert her will against Dracula to help defeat him. Thus when he dies, the shameful scar disappears from her forehead. With help, Mina has conquered temptation and the dangers of degeneracy. It is this effort of will, the effort to conquer her own sexual imagination, that makes her worthy of the sacrifices of the others—that makes her worthy, in the end, of salvation. What, then, has been achieved? By the end of the novel Lucy is dead, Quincey Morris is dead, Mina and Jonathan have both come close to death—or worse, to the death-in-life of the degeneracy which vampirism represents; but they have, after all, repented and are now stronger than ever. Dracula has been killed, and England and the world preserved. The fantastic element has been expelled, and we return to the safe, ordinary reality of the opening. In fact, the novel ends quite abruptly, barely a full page after Dracula’s death. In a brief note we are told that Mina and Jonathan have a son, that Seward and Gadalming are happily married (Lucy’s role filled by other women), and that Van Helsing is now incorporated into the extended family. We also learn that the story we have just been told is, despite its elaborate detail and fundamentally documentary nature, unsupported by any original documents—nothing exists but Mina’s typescript, which is hardly proof of the remarkable narrative we have just read. Thus we, the fictive audience, are left to accept or reject

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based purely on the internal evidence, and—since the danger is safely past—need not react at all if we choose.3 3

VI: Dracula and the Urban Gothic But if comparatively little has happened in the world of the fictive audience, in the world of the actual audience Stoker’s novel has accomplished a good deal. With Dracula’s death, the “natural” superiority of Englishmen over the “lesser” races has been once again convincingly portrayed. More importantly, a number of profoundly disruptive elements have been symbolically expelled from society and the crumbling boundaries between certain key categories reaffirmed: between life and death, civilization and degeneracy, human and non-human, desire and loathing—all of which boundaries Dracula had blurred or violated. The even more fundamental boundary between self and other, which Dracula’s ability to override his victims’ willpower so terrifyingly challenges, is seen once again triumphant in Mina’s recovered purity and self-control. In Sexuality and Its Discontents, Jeffrey Weeks connects the development of sociology with the simultaneous development of sexology. As these two new disciplines struggled to define the “laws” of behavior in their respective realms, he argues, a powerful interdependency sprang up between them. At the same time as sexuality was being constituted as a key area of social relations, where it helped to define personal identity, sex as what Freud would soon call a “drive” came to be perceived as “a force outside, and set against society,” as “part of the eternal battle of individual and society.”3 4 Thus sex is paradoxically seen as both social and anti-social; it helps to define individual identity while at the same time threatening the collective. No wonder, then, that sex is such an explosive issue for the late Victorians, for whom these two poles of identity had become so crucial and so fragile. (It may also help to explain why sex is still an explosive issue for us, their grandchildren, a hundred years later—apparently so different from them, but living in a society which, like theirs, balances precariously on the same two poles.) The sex/society formulation, Weeks continues, “evokes and replays all the other great distinctions which attempt to explain the boundaries of animality and humanity”—like nature/culture, freedom/regulation—the “two rival absolutes.”3 5 As we have already seen, these are some of the central categories at play in Dracula. The outcome of the novel suggests Stoker was arguing that the

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And it is the generic conventions of the fantastic that have made this resolution possible, by creating an imaginative way simultaneously to affirm and deny the reality of chosen cultural elements. The fantastic allows writers and readers to take those aspects of their own culture that are most emotionally charged, most disruptive, and identify them as monstrous—that is, as violations not just of human law but of the very nature of reality—so that society can be symbolically purged of its pollution. However, Dracula is not merely fantastic; it is an example of the Urban Gothic, that modern version of the fantastic marked by its dependence on empiricism and the discourse of science. The difference can be seen most clearly by comparing Dracula to its immediate predecessor and reputed inspiration, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871). Le Fanu’s story of a female (and lesbian) vampire is, in fact, quite powerful and subtle, but the tale is set in a remote country house in eighteenthcentury Transylvania, whereas Stoker goes out of his way repeatedly to emphasize the modernity of his setting. For example (more or less at random): Van Helsing observes, “A year ago which of us would have received [i.e., believed] such a possibility, in the midst of our scientific, sceptical, matter-of-fact nineteenth century?” (266); or again, in “this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be [Dracula’s] greatest strength” (321). In addition to such references, which could easily be multiplied, the band of heroes relies readily and matter-of-factly on modern technology like blood transfusions, typewriters, telegraphs, and Dr. Seward’s “phonograph diary” (219). But these are mere decorations on the surface of the text. More important, the approach of the characters to their tasks in each tale shows the same contrast. Carmilla is tracked to her lair and killed by reference to the past—her own history, and the traditional religious knowledge of the community, while Dracula is identified and defeated by painstaking investigation of his present actions. Dr. Van Helsing’s knowledge of vampire lore eventually becomes essential, but it is of no

use until Dracula can be conclusively identified as a vampire. Thus the most crucial event in Dracula occurs when Mina types up all the documents of the case (Jonathan’s diary, Seward’s records, her own correspondence with Lucy, newspaper clippings, even telegrams) and assembles them in chronological order—the order in which we read them. Only with chronology does narrative emerge; only then does a collection of data turn into a hypothesis. And, as in science, hypothesis is a necessary prelude to action. In other words, while Carmilla resembles a traditional ghost story, Dracula is constructed like that other form which comes into its own in the 1890s, the detective story.3 6 The implications of this difference are crucial. The ghost story, like the eighteenth-century Gothic to which it is closely related, usually finds its methods in the shared knowledge of the community, whether this means traditional religious approaches to the supernatural or the ancient remedies of the folk. In either case, the necessary knowledge is both implicit and communal. In the modern world, and therefore in the Urban Gothic, there is no implicit knowledge: everything must be tested and proved. A method for dealing with the supernatural must be created, drawing on the most powerful and prestigious tools at their disposal: the methods of science, shaped by a secular world view—paradoxically, the very world view that was initially overthrown by the fantastic intrusion.3 7 How are we to read this paradox, so central to the Urban Gothic? Is the primary effect to invalidate the supernatural, seeing it as an alien intruder in the modern world? Is it, on the contrary, to affirm the reality of the supernatural in the very act of expelling it? Or is it to demonstrate the efficacy of the scientific method in addressing any kind of crisis? I would argue instead that the central appeal of fantastic literature is that, like the violent scapegoat rituals it mimics, it allows its writers and readers simultaneously to acknowledge and deny those aspects of themselves and their world that they find most troubling—to see them both as part of the community and as available for sacrifice. Douglas observes that one of the sources of ritual pollution is “the interplay of form and formlessness. Pollution dangers strike when form has been attacked.”3 8 Dracula is a perfect example of the “formless” attacking form (he is, after all, a shape-changer); but at the same time, our cultural experience of the novel suggests that, in creating

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solution to the late Victorian crisis lay in privileging society over sex, that in order to preserve the nation it was necessary to sacrifice some degree of personal freedom. That would explain the novel’s insistent pattern of the many against the one, the community against the scapegoat; it might also help explain the novel’s popularity at a time of imperialist fervor concealing deep anxieties about the future of the empire.

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his vampire count, Stoker has given to formlessness itself a form of continuing potency.

Notes Some of the research for this essay was done during an NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers on “British Literature and Culture 18401900” given at Brown University in 1989. I am grateful to the NEH, to the seminar’s directors, Profs. Roger Henkle (English) and L. Perry Curtis (History), and to my colleagues in the seminar for their advice and support. 1. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 4. 2. Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 178. 3. The most common positions are that Dracula is either about male sexuality threatening passive female innocence, or about the need to control rampant female sexuality. But it has also been argued that the novel is about covert homoerotic desire displaced onto women, and even that all the sex in the book is sadomasochistic. For a convenient collection of the best recent criticism of Dracula, see Margaret L. Carter, The Vampire and the Critics (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988). For some non-psychological readings of the novel, see Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), and Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990). 4. For example: Rosa Campbell Praed, Affinities: A Romance of Today (1885); Rider Haggard, She (1887); Arthur Conan Doyle, The Parasite (1894); Richard Marsh, The Beetle (1897); Somerset Maugham, The Magician (1907); Algernon Blackwood, “The Camp of the Dog” in John Silence, Physician Extraordinaire (1908); Sax Rohmer, The Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918); Jessie Kerruish, The Undying Monster (1922). 5. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975); Andrzej Zgorzelski, “Is Science Fiction a Genre of Fantastic Literature?” Science-Fiction Studies 6 (1979): 289 (emphasis in original). Todorov defines the fantastic in relation to two other genres, the “uncanny” and the “marvellous.” In a realistic world—that is, a textual world modeled on the world we inhabit—an event occurs that appears to violate the laws of this world. The character who experiences this seemingly abnormal event (and, more importantly, the reader of the text) must choose between two explanations: either the event is a product of illusion, or imagination, or deliberate deception—in which case the familiar laws remain intact (and the text is an example of the uncanny); or else the event has genuinely occurred, is a part of reality, in which case the laws must be modified to allow for the existence of, say, ghosts or the Devil. In that case, the text belongs to the category of the marvellous. If, on the other hand, it is impossible for character or reader to decide whether or not the event is genuine, the text is, by Todorov’s definition, fantastic. “The fantastic is

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that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (25; emphasis added). The problem with Todorov’s definition is that most texts do actually commit themselves about the event; thus very few texts that we normally think of as fantastic end up qualifying as such by Todorov’s definition. For a more extended discussion of Zgorzelski’s definition and its implications, see Kathleen L. Spencer, “Naturalizing the Fantastic: Narrative Technique in the Novels of Charles Williams,” Extrapolation 28 (1987): 62-74. 6. Henry James, “Miss Braddon,” The Nation, 9 Nov. 1865, 593-94; reprinted in Notes and Reviews (Cambridge: Dunster House, 1921), 110. Jane Austen makes a similar point in Northanger Abbey, contrasting the imaginary horrors in the Gothic novels her heroine is so fond of reading with the more mundane but very real cruelties she finds practiced in her own modern, ordinary England. 7. For a fuller discussion of this material, see George Kenneth Graham, English Criticism of the Novel 1865-1900 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 51-109. For a more traditional (that is, judgmental) treatment of the romancerealism debate see Lionel Stevenson, The English Novel: A Panorama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960) and John Halperin, “The Theory of the Novel: A Critical Introduction” in The Theory of the Novel: New Essays, ed. John Halperin (London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), 3-22. For the patriotic argument for rejecting naturalism, see William C. Frierson, “The English Controversy Over Realism in Fiction 18851895,” PMLA 43 (1928): 533-50. 8. Cited in Sir Charles Mallett, Anthony Hope and His Books (London: Hutchinson, 1935), 114. 9. See, for example: R. L. Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance,” Longman’s Magazine 1 (November 1882): 69-79; Stevenson, “A Humble Remonstrance,” Longman’s Magazine 5 (December 1884): 139-47; H. Rider Haggard, “About Fiction,” Contemporary Review 51 (February 1887): 172-80; Andrew Lang, “Realism and Romance,” Contemporary Review 52 (1887): 683-93; George Saintsbury, “The Present State of the Novel.I,” Fornightly Review, n.s., 48 (September 1887): 410-17; “The Present State of the Novel.II,” Fortnightly Review, n.s., 49 (January 1888): 112-23; and Hall Caine, “The New Watchwords of Fiction,” Contemporary Review 57 (April 1890): 479-88. 10. For example, Marie Corelli, George Griffith, Guy Boothby, William Le Queux, Sax Rohmer. 11. For a fuller discussion of the late Victorian fascination with the far reaches of empire, see Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 18391914 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988). Though the futuristic plot settings of some of these novels may make them sound very much like science fiction, they do not as a rule qualify as such by any reasonably rigorous criteria, not even the novels set on other planets. Their generic affiliations are rather with the imaginary voyage and the utopia, which are quite different traditions. For a survey of these texts and an alternate view of their genre, see Darko Suvin, Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and Power (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983). For a brief description of the occult revival, see Kathleen L. Spencer, “The Urban Gothic In British Fantastic Fiction 1880-1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1987), 34-98. For more detail, see John J.

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12. Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Vol. I: Power, Property, and the State (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), 194. 13. George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (London: CollierMacmillan, 1968), 121. 14. For a discussion of the East End and degeneracy, see Gareth Steadman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationships Between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 149. 15. For discussions of this point, see (for example) Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), and Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture 18301980, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1987). While the female role as constituted in theory was quite rigid, in practice both working-class and aristocratic women experienced some relaxation of its rigors, especially in economic and (therefore?) in sexual activities: aristocrats, because of the traditional privileges of their class and the sense that their lives are not bound by the same rules as everyone else; and working-class women, because they were needed in the paid work force by both their families and their employers. 16. Jenni Calder, The Victorian and Edwardian Home (London: Batsford, 1977), 132. 17. 3 Hansard, CXLV, 800. Quoted by Lee Holcombe, “Victorian Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law, 1857-1882” in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977), 12. Holcombe’s article as a whole (3-28) is an illuminating and scholarly discussion of the struggle of Victorian wives to reform property laws. 18. For detailed discussions of the Cleveland Street brothel, see H. Montgomery Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghagan, 1976), and Colin Simpson et al., The Cleveland Street Affair (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976). 19. For a discussion of the way the Wilde trial helped turn “homosexual” from an adjective describing certain kinds of behaviors into a noun indicating a kind of person and the significance of this change for the subsequent history of homosexuality, see Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981). To give one small example of the trial’s effect on the general cultural atmosphere (beyond the terror it struck in the hearts of homosexuals): in the late 1880s and early ’90s, there had been an explosion of novels treating sympathetically such previously untouchable subjects as female sexuality, free love, and fallen women. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), for example, was received not without controversy, certainly, but with a good bit of support for Hardy’s

sympathetic treatment of Tess. But Jude the Obscure, published in 1896 after Wilde’s public disgrace, was greeted with such a firestorm of disapproval that Hardy swore off writing fiction forever (for this argument, see Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalenes: The Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual Attitudes, [London: Heinemann, 1976]). Dracula, published in 1897, reached the public at the height of this antisexual hysteria; it should not surprise us to find reflections of this mood in such a popular text—meaning both one that was addressed to a less sophisticated audience and one that was very widely read at the time. 20. In this same decade, the “unnaturalness” of homosexuality was also being challenged by Havelock Ellis, along with several prominent apologists like Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds who in the 1890s published books arguing that homosexuals were not “failed” or “unnatural” men or women but were instead members of a third or “intermediate” sex (Ellis, who was married to a lesbian, was the first to write sympathetically about lesbianism). In the early editions of Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing argued that all homosexual behavior was degenerate, but after the turn of the century he softens this judgment, concluding that some homosexuals indeed seemed to be “born” not “made,”—in his words, “congenital.” See, for example, the lengthy discussion of “Homosexual Feeling as an Abnormal Congenital Manifestation” (356-90). He explores the available explanations of “sexual inversion” from the traditional “vice” to the more “scientific” cause, excessive and/or early masturbation, and finally concludes that in some cases an explanation based on physiological factors— something in the structure of the brain, something therefore not subject to the will of the “invert”—rather than the old medico-moral explanation of “willful indulgence in depravity,” is the only logical conclusion. He does not altogether abandon degeneracy as an explanation even in these cases, arguing that “In fact, in all cases of sexual inversion, a taint of a hereditary character may be established”; but he admits that “What causes produce this factor of taint and its activity is a question which cannot be well answered by science in its present stage” (370; emphasis added). By allowing for the possibility of inherited tendencies to degeneracy, Krafft-Ebing simultaneously takes back and lets stand his uneasy conclusion that some homosexuals do not seem to be morally responsible for their sexual orientation. (Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Forensic Study, Latin trans. Harry E. Wedeck [New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965]. This edition, with an introduction by Ernest Van Den Haag, is described as “The first unexpurgated edition, with the Latin texts translated into English for the first time” by Dr. Wedeck, but does not specify who translated the German parts of the text. I suspect this edition is based on the translation of the 12th German edition by F. J. Rebman published in 1934 by the Physicians and Surgeons Book Company, but cannot verify my suspicion at this time.) 21. Ludmilla Jordanova, “Natural Facts: An Historical Perspective on Science and Reality” in Nature, Culture, and Gender, ed. Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 44.

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Cerullo, The Secularization of the Soul: Psychical Research in Modern Britain (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982); Frank Miller Turner, Between Science and Religion (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974); Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research (New York: Schocken Books, 1968); and Ellic Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887-1923 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).

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22. The following discussion is drawn primarily from Mary Douglas’s Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Random House, 1972). 23. For other examples of modern “witchcraft” societies, consider Nazi Germany and McCarthy-era America. Indeed, the current struggle between social liberals and religious fundamentalists over issues like abortion and pornography manifests many of the same dynamics. 24. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), 13. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that in many cultures women are not afforded full status, they are seldom chosen as surrogate victims. Girard speculates that because a married woman retains ties with her parents’ social group as well as her husband’s, to sacrifice her would be to run the risk of one group or the other interpreting the sacrifice as “an act of murder committing it to a reciprocal act of revenge,” and so not ending the communal violence, but increasing it (13). 25. Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), 59. All further citations will be to this text. Showalter in Sexual Anarchy (note 3), which I did not see until after this essay was submitted, makes the same essential point about Lucy. 26. Simon Williams, analyzing Charles Nodier’s play, Vampire (1820), part of the response to Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), finds a very similar pattern. “Sexual desire is exhibited as supernatural possession that causes the heroine to wander deliriously in caverns and shady places in search of her demon lover. But once she returns to consciousness, she is totally unaware of the dark forces that have briefly taken over her body” (“Theatre and Degeneration: Subversion and Sexuality,” in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, ed. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985], 246). The terms “conscious” and “unconscious” may seem anachronistic, but the English had casually accepted the idea of an unconscious mind by the latter part of the nineteenth century; the idea is expounded in a number of different places in the last two decades. It was not the concept of the unconscious that made Freud so shocking, but his notion of what kinds of material the unconscious contained. As Nina Auerbach (note 3) points out, Stoker might well have known of Freud by the time he wrote Dracula, since F. W. Myers had presented a lecture to the Society for Psychical Research on Freud and Breuer’s work with hysterics in 1893; and in the novel itself Dr. Seward mentions Charcot, Freud’s teacher (22-23). 27. Most critics discuss this scene as symbolic of sexual intercourse and orgasm, even going so far in one case as to liken it to the “painful deflowering of a virgin, which Lucy still is” (C. F. Bentley, “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Literature and Psychology 22 [1972]: 31). While I recognize the elements of the scene that make it possible to draw the parallel, what most strikes me in the description (and, I suspect, most women readers) is the violence—which is, because of the religious overtones of the scene, weirdly impersonal. Indeed, it is rather alarming to me to think that this scene can

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be read so easily, and apparently without qualms or qualifiers, as an image of sexual intercourse. What does such a reading suggest about our culture’s confusion of sex and violence? 28. Girard (note 24), 161. 29. This popular disapproval of the aristocracy became particularly apparent after the publication of Sir Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius in 1869, which attacked both inherited wealth and the titled nobility. 30. For a detailed discussion of Dracula as Lombroso’s “criminal man,” see Ernest Fontana, “Lombroso’s Criminal Man and Stoker’s Dracula,” in Carter (note 3), 159-66. For a more thorough examination of the place of degeneracy theory in late Victorian thinking, see Chamberlin and Gilman (note 26). 31. Douglas (note 1), 97. Richard Sennett and Michael Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” in Humanities in Review 1, ed. Sennett et al. (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 4. 32. Krafft-Ebing (note 20), 42. Not all Victorian doctors agreed with this, but it does seem to have been a majority opinion, expressed categorically, publically, and often. Poovey in Uneven Developments (note 15) offers the clearest explanation of the thinking behind what now seems a ludicrous position. Victorian doctors knew so little about female physiology, she observes, that the only model they had for sexual response was the familiar male tumescence/ejaculation sequence. Failing to find this sequence in women, they concluded that women normally did not experience orgasm. Of course, this does not explain KrafftEbing’s value judgment about the incompatibility of female sexual desire with marriage and family life; that, after all, is a matter of culture, not science. Nonetheless, Poovey’s observation does give us a welcome alternative to the reductive explanation of “sexism” as to how otherwise intelligent men could arrive at such absurd conclusions. 33. This detail is characteristic of fantastic texts, that finally we are left with just the testament itself, and no “external” proofs. 34. Weeks (note 2), 81. 35. Weeks, 97. 36. Rather than pointing to Carmilla, I think that Stoker’s most important literary source is Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), or more likely (since Stoker was a theatrical man) one of its many dramatic redactions. Polidori’s text creates a modern fantastic effect, deriving its potency from the device of bringing his nobleman/vampire into the city of London—seventyfive years before Stoker does the same thing. 37. One way to distinguish between the traditional ghost story and the Urban Gothic is that the ghost story, although genuinely fantastic, is much closer in tone to the original Gothic. In addition, ghosts generally have quite a limited repertory of objects, motives, and behaviors: to get revenge, to make restitution, to finish an important task left incomplete at death, to warn the living (generally family members or descendants),

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38. Douglas (note 1), 104.

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (1830-1894)

Poet Rossetti was the niece of John Polidori, author of The Vampyre (1819), a tale that is believed to have influenced Rossetti’s wellknown Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). Rossetti had plans to write a biography of Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe, whom she greatly admired, but was forced to abandon the project due to a lack of available information. “Goblin Market” relates the adventures of two sisters, Laura and Lizzie. The two are taunted by goblin merchants to buy luscious and tantalizing fruits. Though Lizzie is able to resist their coaxing, Laura succumbs. The narrator details Laura’s increasing apathy and Lizzie’s efforts to save her sister. The poem has been variously interpreted as a moral fable for children, an erotic lesbian fantasy, an experiment in meter and rhyme, and a feminist reinterpretation of Christian mythology. Two other well-known poems in the same volume, “After Death” and “Remember,” meditations on death and the afterlife, have also been interpreted by some feminists as subversive texts despite their seemingly complaisant surfaces. Much contemporary criticism has focused on “Goblin Market,” especially its eroticism and the exploration of the relationship between the two sisters in the story. Critics have noted the supernatural and macabre elements and presence of such creatures as goblins, serpents, and lizards in Rossetti’s poetry, and have asserted that the imagery and language of economics and commerce in “Goblin Market” comments on the role of women and their literature within the Victorian economy.

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or to reenact endlessly the crucial event of their lives (as in Yeats’ “Purgatory”). In the Urban Gothic, the supernatural powers have a much broader scope for action.

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Edmund Burke, 1749-1797.

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DAVID PUNTER (ESSAY DATE 1996) SOURCE: Punter, David. “Gothic and Decadence: Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen.” In The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, Vol. 2, pp. 1-26. Essex, England: Longman, 1996. In the following essay, Punter illustrates how works of Gothic literature by Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Machen exemplify Decadence, and asserts that each of these works question the extent to which a civilization can change, or “decline,” and still retain its national and cultural identity.

What is remarkable about the ‘decadent Gothic’ of the 1890s is that out of a cross-genre with only doubtfully auspicious antecedents should have proceeded, in the space of eleven years, four of the most potent of modern literary myths, those articulated in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau (1896) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Here again we have a burst of symbolic energy as powerful as that of the original Gothic: alongside Frankenstein’s monster, the Wandering Jew and the Byronic vampire we can set the Doppelganger, the mask of innocence, the maker of human beings and the new, improved vampire of Dracula. As we look at these books, we shall see certain interconnections—at any rate in terms of theme, even where authorial stances may be quite different—but one thing can be said at the outset which underlines the meaning of decadence in connection with these texts, and that is that they are all concerned in one way or another with the problem of degeneration, and thus of the essence of the human. They each pose, from very different angles, the same question, which can readily be seen as a question appropriate to an age of imperial decline: how much, they ask, can one lose—individually, socially, nationally—and still remain a ‘man’? One could put the question much more brutally: to what extent can one be ‘infected’ and still remain British? The text in which these questions are least on the surface is also the earliest of them, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which needs no introduction as the best-known Doppelganger story of them all. It follows on from an easily identifiable Gothic tradition, including James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ (1839), both of which influenced Stevenson, yet it has captured the popular imagination more strongly than any of the others, feasibly partly because of its ‘contemporary’, metropolitan setting and detective-story trappings, but feasibly

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also because of a stranger phenomenon, its obvious connection with actual late Victorian fears about similarly untraceable murders, centred on the archetype of Jack the Ripper. It is interesting in passing to note that, while Jekyll and Hyde itself is not in any overt way concerned with the Gothic problem of the aristocracy, popular imagination nevertheless has had its way by tying the text in with this body of semi-legendary history which unmistakably is aristocracy-oriented: the one thing nobody ever seems to have thought about Jack the Ripper was that, when unmasked, he might be someone working class or unknown. Jekyll and Hyde is, from one aspect, the record of a split personality, and the nature of the split is in its general outline one now familiar to a postFreudian age, although one which Stevenson outlines with particular sensitivity: ‘the worst of my faults’, says Jekyll, describing his youth, was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me, and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations, than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature.1

This is a very rich passage. One must, of course, be careful not to interpret it as the narrative voice, since it is part of Jekyll’s own statement, and Jekyll is certainly remarkably pompous and possibly a self-deceiver. However, Jekyll’s view seems to be that the split in his being has derived much less from the presence within his psyche of an uncontrollable, passionate self than from the force with which that self has been repressed according to the dictates of social convention. The original tendency of Jekyll’s alter ego, so he claims, was by no means towards the vicious, but rather towards the ‘loose’, a neutral desire for certain kinds of personal freedom which has been repressed by the ‘imperious’ need not only to conform to, but also to stand as a public example of, strict virtue. Jekyll’s problem, surely, is largely put as a social one, and one can interpret it in two connected ways: literally, as the problem of a

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But Jekyll’s aspirations are of two kinds: they are moral and social aspirations, but they are also scientific aspirations, as in the case of Frankenstein. The great strength of Jekyll and Hyde lies in its attempt to connect the two more clearly even than Mary Shelley had done, and to show that Jekyll’s familiar desire to ‘make another man’ stems from problems in the organisation of his own personality. Like Frankenstein (1818) and The Island of Dr Moreau, Jekyll and Hyde relies upon and even exploits public anxieties about scientific progress and about the direction of this progress if undertaken in the absence of moral guidance, but this aspect seems to be largely metaphorical. The scientific emphasis is very perfunctory; Jekyll himself slides over it, suggesting that details would only bore. What he does not slide over is his series of attempts to comprehend the precise nature of the relation between himself and Hyde, which Stevenson carefully avoids describing merely as a

relation of opposites. Hyde is not Jekyll’s opposite, but something within him: the fact that he is smaller than the doctor, a ‘dwarf’, demonstrates that he is only a part whereas Jekyll is a complex whole, and this is underlined in one of Stevenson’s more startling insights: ‘Jekyll had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference’ (Works, IV, 75). This, of course, was precisely the aspect of relationship which Mary Shelley suppressed in connection with Frankenstein and his monster, probably because such ‘unnatural’ creativity seemed too close to a parody of the divine. Stevenson admits to Hyde’s status as a parodic ‘son of God’, but only at the expense of certain other authorial repressions, principally sexual. Not only does the relation between Jekyll and Hyde exclude women, the whole tale moves—like Dorian Gray and Dr Moreau—in a world substantially composed of leisured bachelors, and even when Stevenson ostensibly tries to portray Hyde’s tendency towards sexual excess and deviance, which could hardly not be at the root of Jekyll’s fastidious disgust, he can get almost nothing on paper. Most of Hyde’s nastiness is withheld: Stevenson deals with it merely in generalities, and whether this is because of Jekyll’s revulsion or of a poverty in Stevenson’s ability to imagine the sexually criminal remains obscure: ‘into the details of the infamy at which I thus connived (for even now I can scarce grant that I committed it)’, Jekyll says, ‘I have no design of entering; I mean but to point out the warnings and the successive steps with which my chastisement approached’ (Works, IV, 72). He does then proceed, however, to allude to one incident, which we have already been told about, when Hyde has been seen to meet a child at a street corner, and to have ‘trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground’. ‘It sounds nothing to hear’, says Enfield, who is telling Utterson the story, ‘but it was hellish to see’ (Works, IV, 6). He is right: it does sound nothing to hear, and it is not even very easy to imagine. It lingers in the memory, but only because of its strangeness, which may have been Stevenson’s purpose. It is, of course, symbolic: it is designed to show the inhumanity of Hyde where a more purposive crime would not. Hyde is described here as a kind of Juggernaut, and it is his ‘thing-ness’ which finally appals Jekyll: ‘this was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life’ (Works, IV, 83).

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member of a ‘respectable’, professional upper middle class, who is supposed to ‘body forth’ social virtue in his person and to eschew any behaviour, however harmless, which might tend to degrade that stance, and also metaphorically as the problem of a member of a ‘master-race’. Jekyll’s difficulties are those of the benevolent imperialist: they are not at all to do with the political problem of sanctioning brute force, but with the maintenance of dignity under adverse circumstances. It is strongly suggested that Hyde’s behaviour is an urban version of ‘going native’. The particular difficulties encountered by English imperialism in its decline were conditioned by the nature of the supremacy which had been asserted: not a simple racial supremacy, but one constantly seen as founded on moral superiority. If an empire based on a morality declines, what are the implications for the particular morality concerned? It is precisely Jekyll’s ‘high views’ which produce morbidity in his relations with his own desires. Thus, of course, the name of his alter ego: it is the degree to which the doctor takes seriously his public responsibilities which determines the ‘hidden-ness’ of his desire for pleasure. Since the public man must be seen to be blameless, he must ‘hide’ his private nature, even to the extent of denying it be any part of himself. And although this is in one sense a problem locatable within a particular historical development, we can also sense in it echoes of older Gothic problems: it is, Jekyll claims, his ‘aspirations’ which render him particularly liable to psychic fragmentation, just as the younger Wringhim’s aspirations towards total purity caused his breakdown.

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Again, there is a problem here, a further reticulation of the Doppelganger structure, about the relation between Stevenson and Jekyll. It is reasonable that Jekyll should not want, or be able, to acknowledge Hyde as in any way human, and indeed that onlookers like Enfield should hold whatever opinion they please, but Stevenson himself appears to stop short of certain realisations. If it is indeed repression which has produced the Hyde personality, further denial of Hyde’s claims can only result in an ascending scale of violence. And this, of course, is exactly what happens, but Stevenson shows no clear signs of knowing why. Jekyll’s later attempts at repression compound Hyde’s fury: ‘my devil had been long caged, he came out roaring’ (Works, IV, 76). There is an underlying pessimism in the book which results from Stevenson’s difficulty in seeing any alternative structure for the psyche: once the beast is loose, it can resolve itself only in death. Jekyll rather feebly suggests at one point that, if he had been in a different frame of mind when he first took the drug, the second self thus released might have been very different: the prospect of an alternative Hyde, constructed of sweetness and light, is attractive but perhaps somewhat unrealistic. Julia Briggs’s work suggests that the issue of the relations between the human and the bestial which occurs in Stevenson, Wells, Stoker and later in such writers as Forster and Lawrence springs largely from the attempt to deal with Darwinian revelations about the nature of evolution.2 Thus Jekyll’s transformation is a change of state of the most extreme kind: when he takes the drug, ‘the most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death’ (Works, IV, 68). This is the reversion of the species, the ever-present threat that, if evolution is a ladder, it may be possible to start moving down it. Not surprisingly, this threat cannot be named in the text: Jekyll says that he has brought on himself ‘a punishment and a danger that I cannot name’ (Works, IV, 37), and Hyde is constantly spoken of as possessing unexpressed deformities. As in much Gothic, there is a dialectical interplay here between the unspeakable and the methods of verification evidenced in the complexity of narrative structure, but post-Darwinian fears have given a new twist to the concept of degeneration. Early in the story, Utterson suggests that something unspoken from the past may be coming to claim Jekyll:

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He was wild when he was young; a long while ago, to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ah, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace; punishment coming, pede claudo, years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault. (Works, IV, 19)

But in the context of the tale, Utterson is, despite the encouraging pun in his name, an oldfashioned moralist, and his attempt to impose a conventional ‘sins of the fathers’ explanation fails. If Hyde represents a ‘ghost’ and a ‘cancer’, it is a general one: the absence of just limitations goes farther than Utterson cares to think. The human being may be the product of a primal miscegenation, a fundamentally unstable blending, which scientific or psychological accident may be able to part. And this problem of the double self is, of course, also central to The Picture of Dorian Gray, the record, as Wilde puts it in Radcliffean terms, of the ‘terrible pleasure’ of ‘a double life’. The gilded Dorian used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.3

A casual wish on Dorian’s part severs the links, and he becomes free to live a life of vice and selfindulgence without losing his looks or his youth, while his portrait records his depravity in terms of physical decay. The problem of distinguishing narrator from character is very great in Wilde, particularly because of his aphoristic habits: it is not easy to know what to make of the multiple resonances of Dorian’s opinion that It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannised most strongly over us. Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious. It often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves. (Dorian, p. 59)

Here, as elsewhere, Dorian Gray incorporates the problems of the 1890s in a jewelled nutshell. We have a burgeoning awareness of the existence of the unconscious, of that fountain from which spring desires and needs a thousand times stronger than those to which we can admit; a sense of the dire situations which result from the liberation of

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Artifice is perhaps the key term: how much, if at all, do scientific and psychological discoveries help us to mould ourselves, and are the possible shapes into which they can project human life necessarily at all desirable. It is characteristic of Wilde’s late romanticism that the means of moulding should be not science but the art of painting, but the tenor of the metaphor is the same: is there anything we can do with this knowledge, on the one hand of our myriad-mindedness and on the other of our proximity to the beasts, which will be other than harmful? The answer of the 1890s was unanimous: No. This is more surprising in Wilde than in the other writers, because it places limits of a severe kind on his apparent decadence: Dorian Gray encourages no faith in artifice, either artifice on others or the self-artifice which is supposed to be the crux of decadence. Wilde’s fear of decay is even more vividly expressed than those of Stevenson or Wells: Dorian throws a pall over his picture, to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself— something that would breed horrors and yet would never die. What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. They would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian, p. 119)

Wilde has no doubt that Dorian’s repressed desires are as horrible as Jekyll’s, not only morally horrible but also inelegant; the much-vaunted divorce between moral and aesthetic categories is simply not there in Dorian Gray, which is structurally a simple morality tale, more so even than Jekyll and Hyde, and certainly more so than Dracula. Like Stevenson, Wilde is locked in the realisation that repression gets you both ways: Sir Henry advocates liberation, claiming that if we repress our desires ‘we degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to’ (Dorian, p. 23). Dorian does his slightly insipid best to avoid this

fate, but ends up in exactly the same state. Sir Henry’s anthropological speculations have a lot to be said for them: The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. . . . The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. (Dorian, p. 18)

So far so good: ‘sooner’, perhaps, ‘murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’.4 But Dorian cannot escape doom that way, and possibly Wilde’s reasoning is similar to Stevenson’s: both Dorian and Hyde ‘go native’, they both renounce the repressive morality of the dominant culture, but all they achieve is an assimilation to the apparently even worse ‘morality’ of the lower classes. Wilde’s version of the London environment is again Stevenson’s, and again lifted out of Dickens but shorn of even the severely truncated sympathy we find in Oliver Twist (1838): Dorian remembers wandering through dimly-lit streets, past gaunt black-shadowed archways and evil-looking houses. Women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after him. Drunkards had reeled by cursing, and chattering to themselves like monstrous apes. He had seen grotesque children huddled upon doorsteps, and heard shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts. (Dorian, p. 88)

There are two possible but contradictory conclusions one might draw from this nexus of urban visions: on the one hand, that Dickens, Stevenson, Wilde were themselves too deeply imbued with middle-class morality to grant any validity to alternative kinds of life, on the other that they had seen too clearly the depredations which that morality had wrought upon its underdogs to grant any credence to the survival of lower-class integrity. It has been said that decadence is fundamentally a middle-class attitude, and this is borne out by Dorian Gray. There is, says Basil Hallward, the artist, ‘a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings’ (Dorian, p. 3). But, elegant though this thought may be, it does not support the conclusions of the story: Schedoni, in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), could indeed claim kudos from such a fatality, as could any Byronic hero, but Dorian is not of the same stature at all. His crimes and his feelings are alike petty and

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those passions; and the complicated metaphor of experimentation, which runs through all four of these texts. In Dorian Gray, it is perfectly clear that one cannot restrict the concept of experimentation to science: Dr Jekyll and Dr Moreau experiment on malleable flesh, Sir Henry Wotton and Dorian—in different ways, but there are Doppelganger complexities here too—artificially mould the mind.

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dilettante, and his doom evokes neither compassion nor the more elevated sympathies of tragedy. Again, Wilde tries to fuse psychological speculation with characteristics taken from the older Gothic, but does not convince us of the grandeur of necessity:

pole that ‘he liked Gothic architecture, not because he thought it beautiful, but because he found it queer’,5 the sensibility sounds very much like Wilde’s, and the embarrassment one feels at Castle of Otranto (1764) is similar to that in Dorian Gray. Who is being made fun of in a passage like this:

There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. (Dorian, p. 190)

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. (Dorian, p. 1)

This reminds us less of the fate of the tragic hero than of the indulgent self-assessment of Count Fosco in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), but Fosco has a saving irony absent from Dorian Gray: he is also considerably more effective, in almost any terms, than any of Wilde’s characters. As the core Gothic theme of Jekyll and Hyde is the Doppelganger, the core theme of Dorian Gray is the quest for immortality, accompanied with appropriate speculations on the relations between art and life and between beauty and vice. A significant twist in Wilde’s dealings with these themes, however, is that his protagonist is hardly a hero but rather a hero-worshipper, whose own hero, Sir Henry, is really rather unconnected with the doom which afflicts Dorian. The vitality, the fire, the primitive barbaric energy of the Gothic hero are absent. Wilde himself talks about the continuing power of Gothic images to affect the psyche: There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. (Dorian, p. 131)

But his attempts to reinvoke this condition are tired, perhaps with the natural fatigue of accomplished paradox, perhaps because of the lack of bite in the social fears on which he plays. Dorian chooses to ape an aristocratic life-style, but he is not an aristocrat, at least not in any of the more worrying senses. It is, finally, unclear how much seriousness Wilde invests in this matter of style. When Lytton Strachey says of Horace Wal-

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Most probably the target is the reader: in any case, the primary effect of Dorian Gray is surely, unlike that of Jekyll and Hyde, cathartic. Where Jekyll and Hyde raises issues and does not resolve them, thus remaining to haunt the mind, Dorian Gray wraps up issues in a way that purges them of real importance. Dorian is not at root a figure whose fate affects the rest of us. In terms of this schema, Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau is definitely more closely related to Jekyll and Hyde, and of course even more so to Frankenstein, another text which owes a large part of its continuing popularity precisely to its failure to establish a coherent pattern out of its intellectual elements. Since it is perhaps rather less well known than Jekyll and Hyde or Dorian Gray, it may be as well to give a brief account of the plot. It is the first-person narrative of Edward Prendick, introduced by his nephew, who confirms the minimal points that his uncle has been shipwrecked and rescued, with an interval of almost a year between, but states that his uncle’s version of the intervening time has never been accepted. Prendick’s own account, thus introduced, tells how he was rescued from a ship’s boat by a strange craft equipped with a drunken captain, a collection of animals, and a man named Montgomery, an outcast ex-medical student who appears to be in charge. Due to an altercation with the captain, Prendick is put off with the others at their island destination, and there encounters Moreau himself. He is surprised by many features of the island, which, he is assured, is a kind of biological research station, but particularly by its other inhabitants, some of whom appear to be men,

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Poster advertising the 1977 film adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau.

although of no race he has ever encountered, others to be somehow between men and animals. He is also disturbed by screams of pain heard during the nights, and eventually forms the conclusion that Moreau, whose name he has now remembered as that of an exiled vivisectionist, is reducing men to an animal state by surgery, for dire purposes of his own. An explanation follows, in which Prendick is humiliated to find that Moreau is doing exactly the reverse and trying to form a man from the beasts, with varying success. The mixed crop of failures which inevitably accures lives in a village of hovels on the island, restrained from violence by laws which Moreau has implanted in them, but these start to become ineffective and the beast-men return to the beast, killing Moreau and Montgomery on the way. Prendick manages to survive amid the wreckage of the island society, and is eventually rescued. On the surface, this is another fable about the dangers of scientific progress unrestrained by moral compunction: we are clearly meant to be

appalled both by the pain caused to the animals and by the condition to which many of them are reduced. Had Moreau had any intelligible object I could have sympathised at least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I could have forgiven him a little even had his motive been hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless.6

But Prendick’s attitude is by no means consistent, which renders many of the scientific points ambiguous. Writing, we must remember, after his return to civilisation, he comments on the moment when he remembers where he had previously heard Moreau’s name, and adds that when his experiments became known the doctor was simply howled out of the country. It may be he deserved to be, but I still [sic] think the tepid support of his fellow investigators, and his desertion by the great body of scientific workers, was a shameful thing. (Moreau, p. 38)

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The principal problem, however, concerns the status of pain in the story. At one level, Moreau appears to be practising an extreme form of surgery with variable results, but at another he seems to be performing a less clearly scientific kind of operation, in which the important feature of the ‘humanising’ process is the actual experience of pain for its own sake. ‘Each time I dip a living creature into a bath of burning pain’, says Moreau, ‘I say, This time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own’ (Moreau, p. 84). Human rationality, for Moreau, seems to be largely dependent on transcending pain: ‘the store men and women set on pleasure and pain . . . is the mark of the beast upon them, the mark of the beast from which they came. Pain! Pain and pleasure—they are for us, only so long as we wriggle in the dust . . .’ (Moreau, p. 81). Yet it is by the threat of further pain that Moreau keeps control over the beastmen: presumably this is supposed to be a mark of their inadequacy, yet Moreau implants fear of pain in them as a substitute for a moral law.

spite and fear on the puritanical Prendick: ‘You logic-chopping, chalky-faced saint of an atheist, drink’, he shouts, ‘you’re the beast. He takes his liquor like a Christian’ (Moreau, p. 116). Certainly we are left feeling that there is a genuine vision at the root of Moreau’s behaviour, even if through rejection it has turned obsessional, and it is also very difficult to answer the questions which the text raises about the happiness of the beast-men in the way Wells appears to want them answered: how does one determine whether a half-man is more or less happy or pained than the beast from which he came? But Moreau is not only a Faustian seeker: he is also a more contemporary symbol. At one point Moreau, Montgomery and Prendick go forth to reassert their control over the beast-men, who come out of the jungle towards them: As soon as they had approached within a distance of perhaps thirty yards they halted, and bowing on knees and elbows, began flinging the white dust upon their heads. Imagine the scene if you can. We three blue-clad men, with our misshapen black-faced attendant, standing in a wide expanse of sunlit yellow dust under the blazing blue sky, and surrounded by this circle of crouching and gesticulating monstrosities, some almost human, save in their subtle expression and gestures, some like cripples, some so strangely distorted as to resemble nothing but the denizens of our wildest dreams. (Moreau, p. 98)

The purely scientific point is thus confused with a set of moral arguments about the difference between man and beast, as it is in Frankenstein; and similarly Prendick’s objections to Moreau’s procedures are considerably vitiated by his admiration for Moreau himself, grudging as it is. In the discussion where Moreau reveals his true aims, Prendick says that he found himself ‘hot with shame at our mutual positions’ (Moreau, p. 76). Like previous hero/villains, Moreau exercises an enormous power over his fellow men. When Prendick first ventures on a journey to discover the island’s secrets, Moreau catches him: ‘he lifted me as though I was a little child’ (Moreau, p. 56), says Prendick, and when Moreau dies, Montgomery collapses completely and returns to drink: ‘he had been strangely under the influence of Moreau’s personality. I do not think it had ever occurred to him that Moreau could die’ (Moreau, p. 115). Moreau is described, oddly, as having an exceptional, perhaps god-like, serenity, evidenced precisely in the absence of motive by which Prendick is fascinated: ‘you cannot imagine’, says Moreau to Prendick, rightly, ‘the strange colourless delight of these intellectual desires’ (Moreau, p. 81).

This is the Gothic vision of empire on which the book is founded. The ‘black-faced’ attendant is, of course, literally black-faced because he is himself a beast-man, but the play on black and white is nonetheless sustained throughout. Moreau himself is both white-haired and whitefaced; Prendick, as we have seen, is ‘chalky’; it is ‘white dust’ with which the dark-skinned beastmen cover themselves as a sign of submission. Moreau, whose island is, significantly, marked on maps as ‘Noble’s Isle’, is the white ‘aristocrat’ who presides over a colonial society in which the fears of reversion which we have already seen in Jekyll and Hyde and in Dorian Gray are ever-present, both in the beast-men and in the ‘white trash’ Montgomery. His attempts to prevent this reversion are unsuccessful but ultimately heroic, for he dies, surely, in the attempt to purify the race.

Thus far, the ambiguity of the text is a common Gothic ambiguity, in which the seeker after forbidden knowledge is condemned while being simultaneously surrounded by a halo of admiration. With very pleasing irony Wells portrays Montgomery after Moreau’s death venting his

None of this, of course, is to think of Wells as a racist: far from it. The point is that The Island of Dr Moreau represents a confluence of, first, old Gothic themes of aspiration and dominance; second, the fears about human status and dignity generated by Darwin; and third, as a natural

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they had certain Fixed Ideas implanted by Moreau in their minds, which absolutely bounded their imaginations. They were really hypnotised, had been told certain things were impossible, and certain things were not to be done, and these prohibitions were woven into the texture of their minds beyond any possibility of disobedience or dispute. (Moreau, pp. 87-8)

As Frankensteinian creator, Moreau wants to form a free being, free from the natural constraints of pain and pleasure; as imperialist, he wants to form a slave, and the best kind of slave, of course, does not know that he or she is one. The arguments are partly difficult to sort out because Moreau is not himself particularly concerned with the little society of rejects which he is producing; as far as he is concerned they are merely signs of failure. It is Montgomery who takes an interest in them. The society which thus accidentally emerges is one which repeats many features of ordinary human societies: an interesting and resonant one is that ‘the females were less numerous than the males, and liable to much furtive persecution in spite of the monogamy which the Law enjoined’ (Moreau, p. 89). More important, their ‘human-ness’ does not stick: they retain ‘the unmistakable mark of the beast’; ‘the stubborn beast flesh grows, day by day, back again’ (Moreau, pp. 46, 83). At a very basic level, the message is a simple and conservative one: do not interfere in the natural order. What is left doubtful, however, is whether such interference is wrong on moral grounds, or merely impossible to

achieve fully, and also to what extent the experience of pain is an essential part of Moreau’s process. Answers to the two hypothetical questions which one would like to ask—what Prendick or Wells would think if Moreau were successful, and what the situation would be given the benefits of anaesthesia—cannot be extrapolated from the text. If this makes for a somewhat confused work, it also makes for a rich one. The story has strong elements in it of Defoe and more particularly Swift. The language used by and to the beast-men is oddly biblical, which reinforces the image of a perverted island paradise, and the ending, with Prendick returning to civilisation only to find that he keeps regarding his fellow men as themselves bearing the mark of the beast, is identical to the ending of Gulliver’s Travels. The Island of Dr Moreau brings the reader face to face with a problem which had accompanied Gothic visions since the time of William Godwin and Mary Shelley, but which had been given an extra twist by Darwin: where do we locate the blame for terrors which are the effect of social conditioning? It could simply be said that Moreau’s ends do not justify his means, but Prendick at least seems to feel rather doubtful about this, and there are strong hints that the kinds of pressure under which the beast-men live are not really all that different from ordinary social pressures. Moreau’s island is partly a microcosm, partly a polemical distortion: its terrifying effect derives partly from Wells’s handling of conventional adventure-story techniques, but more from the sense of vertigo with which we apprehend the relation between the beast-men and ourselves. Fundamentally, all three of these works are concerned with the problem of the liberation of repressed desires. The discoveries of Darwin combined with psychological developments to produce, first, a revelation that the personality contains depths which do not appear on the surface of everyday intercourse, and second, a fear that the Other thus postulated may relate to the bestial level which evidences human continuity with the animal world. In the light of this double supposition, experiments of the kind made deliberately by Jekyll and Moreau and accidentally by Dorian Gray become fraught with more terror than a similar experiment implied in Frankenstein, because experimentation is coming to be seen as tinkering with the self. Thus the ‘double self’ which had been hypothesised by Hogg and others received a basis in scientific speculation, and the whole question of man’s relations to the beasts

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metaphorical accompaniment, images of white imperialism in its decline. But just as in Dorian Gray, the strands do not hold together: like Sir Henry Wotton, Moreau has considerable insight into the operations of repressive ideology, but his advocacy of alternatives is condemned by the text. ‘Very much’, says Moreau, ‘of what we call moral education is . . . an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion’ (Moreau, p. 79). But Wells fails to keep this suggestion, with its Freudian and Darwinian connotations, firmly in mind, and describes Moreau’s process of humanisation in two rather different ways. The first beast-man Moreau makes is said to have begun his new life ‘with a clean sheet, mentally; had no memories left in his mind of what he had been’ (Moreau, p. 82). Yet Moreau is also said not to be experimenting with freedom from conditioning, but rather to be forming beast-men who will be obedient to his own moral and social ideas:

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came to be examined—and mythologised—anew. But a myth supposes two moments in time: the moment of origin, creation, differentiation which needs explanation, and the contemporary moment in terms of which communicable myth must be cast. Thus Stevenson, Wilde and Wells found themselves necessarily assimilating the intellectual problems of their age to the actual social structures within and about which they wrote. In the case of Stevenson, the problem of the beast within becomes cast in terms of the difficulties of professional, public, respectable life: the doctor, of course, is the symbol of the union between scientific exploration and respectability. In the case of Wilde, the whole issue is cast archaically in the old Gothic categories of aristocratic life-style and its relation to primal cruelty. In The Island of Dr Moreau, as befits the work of a writer more politically concerned than Stevenson or Wilde, the question of reversion is linked to a series of agonising speculations on the inner significance of empire, with its attendant insistence on the preservation of both class and racial integrity. The whole complex of problems received by far its most significant treatment, however, in Bram Stoker’s greatly underrated Dracula, which is not only a well-written and formally inventive sensation novel but also one of the most important expressions of the social and psychological dilemmas of the late nineteenth century. For obvious reasons, the intellectual content of Dracula has not been taken seriously; yet it deserves to be, less because of any distinction in Stoker’s own attitudes and perceptions than as a powerful record of social pressures and anxieties. It has always been a difficult book to place, largely because if one accepts the conventional view of the expiry of Gothic before the middle of the nineteenth century Dracula becomes a kind of sport; but in fact it belongs securely with Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian Gray and The Island of Dr Moreau, while transcending all of them in its development of a symbolic structure in which to carry and deal with contradictions. The use of the term ‘myth’ to describe a work of written literature is open to abuse, but if there is any modern work which fits the term adequately, it is Dracula, if on the grounds of reception alone. At the heart of Dracula (if the pun may be forgiven) is blood. The vampire thrives on the blood of others, and the whole effort of Van Helsing and his colleagues is to fight this one-way flow of blood, by transfusion and any other possible means. ‘The vampire live on’, says Van Helsing in

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his broken English, ‘and cannot die by mere passing of the time; he can flourish when that he can fatten on the blood of the living. Even more, we have seen amongst us that he can even grow younger; that his vital faculties grow strenuous, and seem as though they refresh themselves when his special pabulum is plenty. But he cannot flourish without this diet; he eat not as others.’7 Here, as elsewhere in Dracula, is a religious inversion, brought out the more strongly by the biblical tone of Van Helsing’s discourse: the blood is the life. Stoker is well aware of the rich possibilities for ambiguity and bitter humour in this central motif. When Van Helsing recounts the ship’s captain’s response to his vampire passenger, there is a vertiginous interplay of conventional swear-words and deeper ironic significance: Dracula give much talk to captain as to how and where his box is to be place; but the captain like it not and swear at him in many tongues, and tell him that if he like he can come and see where it shall be. But he say ‘no’; that he come not yet, for that he have much to do. Whereupon the captain tell him that he had better be quick [sic]—with blood—for that his ship will leave the place—of blood—before the turn of the tide—with blood. (Dracula, pp. 322-3)

But the blood which gives Dracula his life is, as usual in vampire legendry, not merely literal. Dracula the individual needs blood, but Dracula is not merely an individual; he is, as he tells Harker, a dynasty, a ‘house’, the proud descendant and bearer of a long aristocratic tradition. He recites to Harker a catalogue of the gallant feats of his ancestors, ending thus: when, after the battle of Mohács, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were amongst their leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the Szekelys—and the Dracula as their heart’s blood, their brains, and their swords—can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. The warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told. (Dracula, pp. 38-9)

The long historical progression of the bourgeoisie’s attempts to understand the significance of noble ‘blood’ reaches a point of apotheosis in Dracula, for Dracula is the final aristocrat; he has rarefied his needs, and the needs of his house and line, to the point where he has no longer any need of any exchange-system or life-support except blood. All other material connections with the ‘dishonourable’ bourgeois world have been severed: the aristocrat has paid the tragic price of

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In his speaking of things and people, and especially of battles, he spoke as if he had been present at them all. This he afterwards explained by saying that to a ‘boyar’ the pride of his house and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of his house he always said, ‘we’, and spoke almost in the plural, like a king speaking. (Dracula, p. 37)

It is impossible to tell whether what is at stake is Dracula’s personal longevity or his total identification with his line. And if one looks again at the old legends themselves, what emerges as very obvious is that they were partly invented to explain the problem of the connection between aristocracy and immortality. To the peasantry of central Europe, it may well have seemed that the feudal lord was immortal: the actual inhabitant of the castle upon the mountain might change, but that might not even be known. What would have been known was that there was always a lord; that by some possibly miraculous means life and title persisted, at the expense, of course, of peasant blood, in the literal sense of blood shed in battle and in cruelty. Dracula can no longer survive on blood of this kind; he needs alternative sources of nourishment to suit his socially attenuated existence. The dominion of the sword is replaced by the more naked yet more subtle dominion of the tooth; as the nobleman’s real powers disappear, he becomes invested with semi-supernatural abilities, exercised by night rather than in the broad day of legendary feudal conflict. But thus far Dracula is merely another variant on the vampire legendry which we have already seen in John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ (1819), another modification of pre-bourgeois fears of tyrannical violence imaged in terms of the primal fear of blood-sucking. What makes Dracula distinctive is Stoker’s location of this set of symbols within late Victorian society. Over against the ‘house’ which Dracula represents Stoker places the bourgeois family, seen around the moment of maximum bonding, on the eve of marriage. Dracula is a dramatised conflict of social forces and attitudes: opposite the strength of the vampire

we are shown the strength of bourgeois marital relations and sentimental love, as in Mina’s letter to Lucy after her marriage to Harker. Well, my dear, what could I say? I could only tell him that I was the happiest woman in all the wide world, and that I had nothing to give him except myself, my life, and my trust, and that with these went my love and duty for all the days of my life. And, my dear, when he kissed me, and drew me to him with his poor weak hands, it was like a very solemn pledge between us . . . Lucy dear, do you know why I tell you all this? It is not only because it is all sweet to me, but because you have been, and are, very dear to me. It was my privilege to be your friend and guide when you came from the schoolroom to prepare for the world of life. I want you to see now, and with the eyes of a very happy wife, whither duty has led me; so that in your own married life you too may be all happy as I am. (Dracula, p. 115)

The list of structural oppositions is long. Dracula stands for lineage, the principal group of characters for family; Dracula for the wildness of night, they for the security of day; Dracula for unintelligible and bitter passion, they for the sweet and reasonable emotions; Dracula for the physical and erotic, they for repressed and etherealised love. And at the kernel of this structure is embedded the further opposition between Dracula and his arch-enemy Van Helsing, who is imported to put a stiffening of science and reason into the ‘team’: He is seemingly arbitrary man, but this because he knows what he is talking about better than any one else. He is a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day; and he has, I believe, an absolutely open mind. This, with an iron nerve, a temper of the ice-brook, an indomitable resolution, selfcommand, and toleration exalted from virtues to blessings, and the kindliest and truest heart that beats—these form his equipment for the noble work that he is doing for mankind—work both in theory and practice, for his views are as wide as his all-embracing sympathy. (Dracula, p. 121)

Van Helsing is a superman, and therefore combines in himself a number of contradictory qualities, but the emphasis in his character is on order, neatness, reserve, in Freudian terms on those aspects of the ego which serve the purpose of quashing the tendency towards chaos and libidinal fulfilment which would otherwise disrupt social and psychological organisation. Dracula’s is the passion which never dies, the endless desire of the unconscious for gratification, which has to be repressed—particularly on the eve of marriage, of

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social supersession, yet his doom perforce involves others. Cheated of his right of actual dominion, his power is exerted in mere survival: his relationship to the world is the culmination of tyranny, yet it is justified in that it is not his own survival that he seeks but the survival of the house, and thus, of course, the survival of the dead. Stoker brings out the ambiguity in the legends very well when Dracula tells Harker his history:

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course—in order to maintain stable ideology. He is ‘undead’ because desire never dies; gratification merely moves desire on to further objects. There is, for Dracula as for the unconscious, no final satisfaction, for his very nature is desire. Towards these structures the text manifests a socially revealing ambivalence. One of the aspects of decadence was the supremacy of the moment of attraction in the continual dialectic of attraction and repulsion which characterised the relation between the dominant middle class and its ‘un-dead’ predecessor. From the bourgeois point of view, Dracula is, like Schedoni, Frankenstein and Dorian Gray, a manic individualist; from his own point of view, which is not absent in the text, he is the bearer of the promise of true union, union which transcends death. From the bourgeois point of view, Dracula stands for sexual perversion and sadism; but we also know that what his victims experience at the moment of consummation is joy, unhealthy perhaps but of a power unknown in conventional relationships. Dracula exists and exerts power through right immemorial; Van Helsing and his associates defeat him in the appropriate fashion, through hard work and diligent application, the weapons of a class which derives its existence from labour. Lest some of this seem fanciful, we can cite some of Stoker’s dream symbolism: I didn’t quite dream; but it all seemed to be real. I only wanted to be here in this spot—I don’t know why, for I was afraid of something—I don’t know what. I remember, though I suppose I was asleep, passing through the streets and over the bridge. A fish leaped as I went by, and I leaned over to look at it, and I heard a lot of dogs howling—the whole town seemed as if it must be full of dogs all howling at once—as I went up the steps. Then I had a vague memory of something long and dark with red eyes, just as we saw in the sunset, and something very sweet and very bitter all around me at once; and then I seemed sinking into deep green water, and there was a singing in my ears, as I have heard there is to drowning men; and then everything seemed passing away from me; my soul seemed to go out from my body and float about the air. I seem to remember that once the West Lighthouse was right under me, and then there was a sort of agonising feeling, as if I were in an earthquake, and I came back and found you shaking my body. I saw you do it before I felt you. (Dracula, p. 108)

This reads almost like a case study in emotional ambivalence. Beginning by establishing that there is a difficulty in assessing Dracula’s reality vis-à-vis the world’s, Lucy then goes on to demonstrate that Dracula represents the ‘un-

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known’, that which is not available to consciousness, and to illustrate this with a succession of images of the unconscious: the leaping fish, emerging from psychic depths like Coleridge’s fountain, the howling dogs, symbol of yearning and wordless need, and the ‘something long and dark with red eyes’, which is Dracula but also prefigures the phallic connotations of the lighthouse. She sinks into the primal fluid of the unconscious, assailed by sensations which she can only describe as contradictory, ‘sweet’ and ‘bitter’, and her soul and body separate as she abandons responsibility for her situation. Dracula, the unconscious, takes the sins of the world on his shoulders because his existence, and the acquiescence of his victims, demonstrate the limitations of the moral will. Lucy, of course, can only experience the consummation of the lighthouse and the earthquake while in this trance-like state, and then translates her experience back into ‘safe’ terms, ‘you shaking my body’. She sees Mina before she feels her because she is sinking into the liberation which her conventional self denies: every time Dracula strikes it becomes harder for his victim to return to normality. The myth in Dracula, more clearly even than in other versions of the vampire legends, is an inversion of Christianity, and particularly of Pauline Christianity, in that Dracula promises— and gives—the real resurrection of the body, but disunited from soul. Stoker’s attitude to this is of course shocked, but then Stoker appears from the text to be almost traumatised by a specific sexual fear, a fear of the so-called ‘New Woman’ and the reversal of sexual roles which her emergence implies. Mina is afraid that ‘some of the “New Women” writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too! There’s some consolation in that’ (Dracula, p. 100). Behind the smugness lies disturbance; it is ironic, but with an irony familiar in the Gothic from Radcliffe on, that precisely the authorial conservatism of Dracula makes its rendition of the threats to comfortable Victorian sexual and familial life pointed and perceptive. A crucial scene occurs when Arthur visits Lucy, who is failing fast. When he first sees her, she ‘looked her best, with all the soft lines matching the angelic beauty of her eyes’. But as she sinks into sleep, this model of femininity and passivity begins to change:

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‘Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! Kiss me!’ (Dracula pp. 167-8)

Upon which Van Helsing, whose role is to protect against this kind of overt passion and reversal of roles, comes between them. And this scene is prefigured by the ‘key-note’ scene where Harker is menaced in Dracula’s castle by the three female vampires: All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down; lest some day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth. (Dracula, p. 46)

It is hard to summarise Dracula, for it is such a wide-ranging book, but in general it is fair to say that its power derives from its dealings with taboo. Where taboo sets up certain bounding lines and divisions which enable society to function without disruption, Dracula blurs those lines. He blurs the line between man and beast, thus echoing the fears of degeneracy in Stevenson, Wilde and Wells; he blurs the line between man and God by daring to partake of immortal life and by practising a corrupt but superhuman form of love; and he blurs the line between man and woman by demonstrating the existence of female passion. In his figure are delineated so many primitive fears: he is a shape-changer, a merger of species, the harbinger of ethnic collapse. His ‘disciple’ Renfield regards him as a god; and his satanic aspects are all the more interesting if we remember that his real-life ancestor gained his reputation for cruelty because of his assiduity in defending the Christian faith against the marauding Turk. Where Moreau constitutes an ambiguous and accidental threat to empire from without, destroying genetic and racial barriers which are essential to smooth government, Dracula threatens it from within, attacking the whole concept of morality by preying upon and liberating aspects of the personality which are not under moral control, and colonising on his own behalf by infection in a savage and quite unintentional parody of impe-

rialism. The ironic refrain of Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), the perception that you always kill the thing you love, that only love allows the proximity which can lead to real damage, is given a savage new twist by Stoker, in whose text one can see the traces of the illimitable desire which turns love into possession and demands incorporation of the love-object. Dracula is the logical culmination of the Victorian and Gothic hero, the hero in whom power and attraction are bent to the service of Thanatos, and for whom the price of immortality is the death of the soul. Before turning from the problematic of decadence to other forms of Gothic which continued to exist in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century fiction, there is one other writer whose work, beginning in the 1890s and continuing through to the 1920s, merits some comment: Arthur Machen. Machen’s books have never received much attention, a fact about which he grew increasingly bitter, yet they are the best in the rather sickly field of genre work which took up Darwinian anxieties as a basis for terror. In 1894, Machen published a novella called The Great God Pan, in which yet another doctor performs on a young girl an operation which is designed to open her ‘inner eye’ to the continuing diabolical existence of the Great God; the operation drives her mad, after which her child, born of her union with Pan, proceeds to confront a series of other people with visions of the horror which underlies the quiet surface of life. It is, as Machen says, ‘an old story, an old mystery played in our day, and in dim London streets instead of amidst the vineyards and the olive gardens’.8 The old story is the story of Moreau and Dracula, the story of the breaking of taboo boundaries and the dreadful consequences which result: Pan is a ‘presence, that was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all form’ (Pan, p. 20), and when the hell-child finally dies she goes through the stages of the reversion of the species to the ‘primal slime’: I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down to the depths, even to the abyss of all being. (Pan, p. 109)

The paradox of The Great God Pan is that the visitation which liberates the human being from the repression of false assumptions also destroys the barriers which retain human individuation:

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Her breathing grew stertorous, the mouth opened, and the pale gums, drawn back, made the teeth look longer and sharper than ever. In a sort of sleep-waking, vague, unconscious way she opened her eyes, which were now dull and hard at once, and said in a soft, voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her lips:

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the liberation of desire returns man to a primal association with the beast and destroys the soul: I knew I had looked into the eyes of a lost soul . . . the man’s outward form remained, but all hell was within it. Furious lust, and hate that was like fire, and the loss of all hope, and horror that seemed to shriek aloud in the night, though his teeth were shut; and the utter blackness of despair. (Pan, p. 91)

This is a lurid version of the process which converted Jekyll into Hyde; and it happens, as one might expect, almost exclusively to aristocrats. The Three Impostors (1895) is a rather more complex book and an interesting example of a text composed of a series of interlocking stories, all of which are lies. It is indebted to Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights (1882), and moves through a range of settings which bear comparison with Conan Doyle’s. The stories vary in terms of the order of interpretation which they advance, but the most significant of them are committed, like The Great God Pan, to asseting a pseudo-‘natural’ explanation for apparently supernatural events. Professor Gregg, another unfortunate seeker after forbidden knowledge, is convinced that the horror stories of folk legendry mask facts which are amenable to scientific discovery: he rejects ‘the supernatural hypothesis of the Middle Ages’, saying that ‘invention, no doubt, and the Gothic fancy of old days, had done much in the way of exaggeration and distortion’, and advances a different hypothesis: ‘what if the obscure and horrible race of the hills still survived, still remained haunting wild places and barren hills, and now and then repeating the evil of Gothic legend, unchanged and unchangeable as the Turanian Shelta, or the Basques of Spain?’9 Here Machen’s Celtic sensibility verges on a theory of history according to racial conspiracy; it is perhaps not surprising that he felt attracted towards Fascism.1 0 In one sense at least, The Three Impostors might be described as a truly decadent book, in that its content turns back upon itself and is used as the excuse for a series of ironic arguments about the nature of fiction. Its protagonists are involved in pondering the strangeness of the real, while continually being subjected to unsolicited stories which do nothing whatever to help the problem, since their tellers cannot be trusted. Machen’s continual theme is ‘the awful transmutation of the hills’ (Impostors, p. 119): the possibility that the merest sideslip of vision might offer us a world which is wholly other, and show us the real and awful faces of the demons who manipulate evolution to serve their own ends.

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This transmutation is also the theme of Machen’s most impressive work, The Hill of Dreams (1907), which has been described as the most decadent book in the English language. Its decadence is not formal but thematic, the closest connection being to Swinburne. The hero, Lucian Taylor, finds the world resistant both to his desires and to his attempts to write a novel, and enters into a dark bath of pain and sacrifice in which he revolves an endless obsession with the single moment of dubious love which he has experienced; but what is distinctive is that Machen manages to describe algolagnic indulgence without losing his sense of the irony which results from Lucian’s conflict with the real world: Never did he fail to wake at the appointed hour, a strong effort of will broke through all the heaviness of sleep, and he would rise up, joyful though weeping, and reverently set his thorny bed upon the floor, offering his pain with his praise. When he had whispered the last word, and had risen from the ground, his body would be all freckled with drops of blood; he used to view the marks with pride. Here and there a spine would be left deep in the flesh, and he would pull these out roughly, tearing through the skin, On some nights when he had pressed with more fervour on the thorns his thighs would stream with blood, red beads standing out on the flesh, and trickling down to his feet. He had some difficulty in washing away the bloodstains so as not to leave any traces to attract the attention of the servant; and after a time he returned no more to his bed when his duty had been accomplished. For a coverlet he had a dark rug, a good deal worn, and in this he would wrap his naked bleeding body, and lie down on the hard floor, well content to add an aching rest to the account of his pleasures. He was covered with scars, and those that healed during the day were torn open afresh at night; the pale olive skin was red with the angry marks of blood, and the graceful form of the young man appeared like the body of a tortured martyr. He grew thinner and thinner every day, for he ate but little; the skin was stretched on the bones of his face, and the black eyes burnt in dark purple hollows. His relations noticed that he was not looking well.1 1

The Hill of Dreams is an over-lush book, and the baroque quality of Machen’s prose sometimes becomes absurd, yet it has a power which is partly derived from his refusal to sever Lucian completely from reality: where a Keatsian hero might be able to retreat to a world of beauty, or a Swinburnian one to a permanent semi-mystical indulgence in pain, Lucian remains in contact with his environment, albeit transmuted by his special vision. His apocalyptic view of London is comparable with Baudelaire’s urban nightmares in intensity if not in execution:

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Machen takes to an extreme point tendencies already existing within decadent Gothic: like Dracula’s, Lucian’s is the desire which tends towards death, but unlike Dracula Lucian does not have the supernatural privilege of attaining gratification, except in his final dream: And presently the woman fled away from him, and he pursued her. She fled away before him through midnight country, and he followed after her, chasing her from thicket to thicket, from valley to valley. And at last he captured her and won her with horrible caresses, and they went up to celebrate and make the marriage of the Sabbath. They were within the matted thicket, and they writhed in flames, insatiable, forever. They were tortured, and tortured one another, in the sight of thousands who gathered thick about them; and their desire rose up like a black smoke. (Hill of Dreams, p. 266)

Machen provides an epilogue to English decadence, in which beauty and death are represented as inextricably fused at the root of the moment of passion.

Notes 1. Robert Louis Stevenson, Works, ed. L. Osbourne and Mrs R. L. Stevenson (30 vols, London, 1924-6), IV, 65. 2. See Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London, 1977), pp. 20-1, 79-81. 3. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray (London, 1974), p. 143. 4. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (17903), in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York, 1965), p. 37. 5. Lytton Strachey, Characters and Commentaries (London, 1933), p. 40.

6. H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (London, 1973), p. 104. 7. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York, 1965), p. 245. 8. Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (London, 1913), p. 101. 9. Machen, The Three Impostors, introd. Julian Symons (London, 1964), pp. 110-12. 10. This is, of course, only one of many examples in the Gothic—as in literature in general—of an oblique relation between a writer’s political tendency and the political content of his writings; a simple point, but one so far largely ignored in criticism of the genre. 11. Machen, The Hill of Dreams (New York, 1923), pp. 101-2.

RAPHAEL INGELBIEN (ESSAY DATE WINTER 2003) SOURCE: Ingelbien, Raphael. “Gothic Genealogies: Dracula, Bowen’s Court, and Anglo-Irish Psychology.” ELH 70, no. 4 (winter 2003): 1089-105. In the following essay, Ingelbien offers a psychological approach to a comparison of gothicism and Anglo-Irish identity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the works of Elizabeth Bowen.

Like all enduring literary myths, Dracula has been amenable to many interpretations. Although the aesthetic merits of Bram Stoker’s novel are still contested, its popularity with critics of all persuasions has been rising steadily, as is confirmed by the publication of two case studies editions in recent years.1 But the reception of Dracula is certainly not an object lesson in critical pluralism. Not only can a variety of approaches lead to conflicting readings; controversy also rages within some of the critical paradigms that have been applied to Stoker’s text. Nowhere has this been as obvious as in the attempts at locating Dracula in its historical and national contexts. The novel has long been a favorite of other kinds of criticism (mostly psychoanalytic); interest in Stoker’s relation to Irish cultural politics is comparatively recent. But any hopes that firm insights may be gained from the long overdue historicist placing of Dracula in its Irish context were soon dispelled, as the ideological controversies inherent in Irish studies were quickly imported into the novel’s interpretation. Who was Dracula? Besides being a Freudian projection of sexual anxieties, a perverted archetype, or a fin-de-siècle fantasy, where might the monster fit in what is also taken to be an allegory of Ireland’s social, political, and cultural upheavals at the end of the nineteenth century? The answers proposed so far look clearly incompatible. For some, Count Dracula represents the Protestant

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Voices, raucous, clamant, abominable, were belched out of the blazing public-houses as the doors swung to and fro, and above these doors were hideous brassy lamps, very slowly swinging in a violent blast of air, so that they might have been infernal thuribles, censing the people. Some man was calling his wares in one long continuous shriek that never stopped or paused, and, as a respond, a deeper, louder voice roared to him from across the road. An Italian whirled the handle of his piano-organ in a fury, and a ring of imps danced mad figures around him, danced and flung up their legs till the rags dropped from some of them, and they still danced on. A flare of naphtha, burning with a rushing noise, threw a light on one point of the circle, and Lucian watched a lank girl of fifteen as she came round and round to the flash. She was quite drunk, and had kicked her petticoats away, and the crowd howled laughter and applause at her. Her black hair poured down and leapt on her scarlet bodice; she sprang and leapt round the ring, laughing in Bacchic frenzy, and led the orgy to triumph. (Hill of Dreams, pp. 203-4)

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ RAY BRADBURY (1920-)

Known primarily for his science fiction novels and short stories, Bradbury often uses a sense of enchantment to weave traditional Gothic horrors into the fabric of ordinary life and to invest the most mundane situations with eerie potential. Supernatural occurrences in his stories are often matched by the experiences of characters whose emotional responses lead them into the realm of the uncanny. “The Lake” and “Reunion,” for example, are both centered on the endurance of love after death. In the former, a dead playmate reawakens the affections of the man who once loved her by leaving a sand castle for him on the beach where she drowned decades before. In the latter, an orphaned boy achieves a similar rapport with his dead family by recreating them in his imagination from the smell and feel of their clothing and other personal articles they used in life. In his stories “The Jar” and “The Next in Line” Bradbury depicts deteriorating marriages escalating toward disaster, conveying an eerie menace as events culminate around symbols—a jar containing a freak-show attraction in the former story and a catacomb filled with mummies in the latter—that crystallize the sense of dread. “Homecoming,” “Uncle Einar,” “The Traveller,” and “The April Witch” are all tales in which Bradbury features an extended family of vampires, werewolves and other supernatural beings who live unobtrusively among humans and who express emotional needs not unlike those of their mortal neighbors. The children in Bradbury’s stories are often genuine naïfs who access the supernatural unself-consciously using their as-yet unspoiled imaginations. In “The Emissary” their wishes resurrect the dead and games of make-believe defeat death altogether in “Bang! You’re Dead” and “The Ducker.” The lost innocence of Bradbury’s adult characters, however, renders them vulnerable to evil, death, and destruction. In “The Screaming Woman” the loss of youthful romance leads to death, and in Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) jaded, sinful men and women are lured into bargains with Satan by the promise of everlasting youth.

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Ascendancy in terminal decline; he is a bloodthirsty caricature of the aristocratic landlord, clinging to feudal power in the face of reform and about to be engulfed by the forces of modernity and nationalist agitation. Stoker’s novel must then be read as the indictment of a class incapable of adapting to new realities. This interpretation has chiefly been favored by critics whose sympathies are recognizably (though not crudely) nationalist, like Terry Eagleton and Seamus Deane. Their reading tactics have been impugned by Bruce Stewart, who considers alternative and supposedly closer analyses of Dracula that put the monster in the nationalist and/or Catholic middle-class camp: Dracula and his faithful Szgany are cast as radical Land Leaguers intent on political violence, or exploitative Catholic entrepreneurs known as gombeen men. Those revisionist views of the novel are complemented by Michael Valdez Moses’s interpretation, which draws attention to similarities between Dracula and the ill-fated leader of the Home Rule movement Charles Stewart Parnell.2 Stewart himself backs away from those neat inversions of nationalist readings and ecumenically warns against “privileging one side against the other,” apparently setting the interests of cultural peace above those of critical accuracy.3 Stoker’s own political sympathies, divided as they were between his own Protestant background and his alienation from its more conservative elements, do not allow biography to settle the dispute. Even his background is somehow disputed: although Stoker’s Protestant education took him to the Anglo-Irish stronghold of Trinity College, Dublin, some have speculated that his mother’s Gaelic ancestry rather made him “AngloCeltic,” and thus fundamentally ambivalent.4 Politically, Stoker seems to have developed from early imperialist sympathies to the position of a “philosophical Home Ruler,” while his journalism reveals a political thinking dominated by a “complex and fraught dialectic . . . between a frantic endorsement of progress as a natural law of social development, and its dark alternative, atavism, barbarism, chaos.”5 The role of that dialectic in his most famous novel is still open to conjecture. Meanwhile, readings proliferate, the battle lines are sharply drawn, and Dracula’s political identity remains at stake. This situation owes much to conflicts within Irish studies, but it also results from an almost exclusive—and, I suggest, deficient—focus on the figure of Dracula as a monstrous, protean body. Critical awareness of Dracula’s Irish contexts developed simultancously with the growing influ-

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Yet Stoker’s vampire is not simply a monstrous body. Given the current emphasis on the body in literature, one may easily forget that Dracula is also a psychological subject, and that, although he does not belong to the cast of primary narrators, he also speaks at length. Jonathan Harker devotes several pages of his journal to careful and revealing descriptions of his host’s dwelling and habits; he also gives the reader long, verbatim accounts of Dracula’s garrulous conversation. Could the Count’s personal effects, gestures, and words, so often neglected in favour of his spectacular monstrosity, contain clues about his identity?

More specifically, could the psychology they betray also help us locate Dracula in recognizable Irish cultural formations? An answer to those questions first suggested itself to me by a reading of Elizabeth Bowen’s family memoir Bowen’s Court, entitled after the Bowens’ Big House in County Cork, and first published in 1942.9 A classic example of Ascendancy (auto)biography, written by a key figure of modern Anglo-Irish literature, Bowen’s Court will here be used as a text against which Harker’s portrayal of Dracula in his journal can be read in illuminating ways. My aim is not to suggest a firm intertextual link between Dracula and Bowen’s Court. Bowen was certainly attuned to the finer nuances of Anglo-Irish Gothic, as her perceptive introduction to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas demonstrates. She would most probably have been familiar with Stoker’s fiction, although it apparently failed to captivate her as did Le Fanu’s work. This can be explained by her preferences among the different strains that compete within the Anglo-Irish Gothic tradition: Bowen’s own sense of the Gothic was always closer to the psychological terror and the neuroses that Le Fanu exploited than to the more sensational paraphernalia on display in Dracula.1 0 This is partly because Bowen’s Gothic was only one of the strategies that she used when exploring Ascendancy anxieties from the inside of her own society: in her writing, Gothic undertones often coexist quite naturally with a quasi-Jamesian observation of Anglo-Irish manners. This muted, subtle form of the Gothic not only informs supernatural elements in some of Bowen’s Irish fictions but also pervades many a page of Bowen’s Court. A comparison between Dracula and Bowen’s Court will, therefore, bring out those elements of psychological Gothic in Stoker’s novel that most definitely call for an interpretation within an Anglo-Irish cultural context—so far, those elements have received scant attention. This comparison should also be seen as a step towards refining our understanding of what can be meant by Anglo-Irish Gothic. Reading Dracula (1897) in the light of Bowen’s Court (1942) may seem anachronistic. But Bowen’s text is not only a mid-twentieth-century record of Anglo-Irish tradition; it stands as one of the most consummate expressions of that tradition. The themes and strategies she uses in her chronicle belong to that tradition as well. Bowen also makes extensive use of documents produced throughout her family’s history and manages to integrate them smoothly into her own narrative. Furthermore, Bowen’s Court can be used as a gateway into

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ence of New Historicism and its Foucauldian interest in the body as a site of meaning. This means that in many readings, Dracula is essentially a bundle of somatic properties.6 He is largely defined by his abnormal features, his bloodsucking, and the various guises he assumes through his supernatural transformations. To a certain extent, Stoker’s Gothic sensationalism invites precisely such a reading. Dracula can easily be made to stand for the return of a repressed, forbidden sensuality that threatens the bourgeois subjectivities of his victims. This is reinforced by the novel’s narrative organization. Dracula is famously made up of texts spoken or written by the vampire’s victims and/or pursuers; its eponymous central figure is denied an equal measure of narratorial authority, which apparently relegates him beyond the bounds of articulate subjectivity. An elusive, fascinating cipher, Dracula then becomes a mere body onto which various anxieties can be projected—whether it be by Freudian, New Historicist, or other readers. Recent contextualizations draw extensively on contemporary pictorial sources, reminding us that Dracula appeared in a fin-desiècle context where caricatures reflected dominant views on racial differences. Interesting though they undeniably are, those visual documents clearly offer no way out of critical controversy. John Paul Riquelme’s edition of Dracula includes caricatures from nineteenth-century periodicals, in which vampiric bats and other monsters were made to represent the Land League, British rule, or Parnell.7 Finally, the critical rhetoric that is applied to the novel often underscores the centrality of Dracula’s body and the wealth of interpretations it encourages: in the words of a recent commentator, Dracula is “an overdetermined figure onto whom are cathected many of the most formidable political and social issues of nineteenth-century Ireland.”8 Our Dracula is a walking infusion set; Stoker criticism is largely a form of surgery on Gothic bodies.

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a certain kind of Ascendancy biographical writing: in what follows, references to Bowen’s memoir will be accompanied by considerations of other representative texts written by key Anglo-Irish figures, like Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats, in the decades that separate Dracula from Bowen’s Court. The continuities between Harker’s journal and those different texts are often striking, and they suggest that Stoker was tapping into the same psychological vein that Bowen later exploited in her turn. The heuristic value of my comparison is also based on a recognition of this fact: Bowen speaks not only of her family and class; she speaks also as a family and class. Moreover, as we will see, she does so by using accents that uncannily echo the rhetoric of Stoker’s Count. It is clear that this comparison will lend support to analyses that identify Dracula as an Ascendancy figure, and that it can, therefore, be seen as a way of taking sides in the critical debate sketched out above. Bringing Bowen into the equation, however, will show that such a reading need not be motivated by a contemporary nationalist agenda, or by a desire to play up Ascendancy guilt through simplistic allegories (the fallacious strategies of which Stewart accuses Eagleton and Deane). If the characterization of Dracula can be fruitfully compared to a family chronicle by one of the Ascendancy’s most distinguished writers, it would seem that both Stoker and Bowen were indeed describing the same subject. Their attitudes towards that subject obviously differed: as I will argue, Stoker’s and Bowen’s portrayals were, respectively, intended as a critique and an apology. But their political differences do not detract from the troubling resemblance between their texts. Another possible objection should be considered before we proceed with the comparison proper. Can a reading that mainly focuses on Harker’s early account of Dracula offer representative evidence about the Irish dimension of Dracula? I would here counter that there is no reason to assume that the novel as a whole possesses a single, comprehensive allegorical intent. Allegories, whether political or psychological, certainly seem to abound in the novel, but it is far from certain that Dracula can function as one extended, coherent allegory (whatever the nature of that allegory is). In that sense, conflicting readings may also result from a failure to recognize that Stoker was ultimately after things other than allegorical consistency—a desire for commercial success played at least as large a part in the making of the novel. Some parts of Dracula can thus

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resist historicist readings in terms of Irish politics.1 1 But the early parts of Harker’s journal are definitely a goldmine for critics who adopt that approach. For one thing, Harker’s accounts of Transylvania draw on a source which provides an explicit link with Ireland: Stoker found inspiration in Major E. C. Johnson’s On the Track of the Crescent, where Transylvanian peasants were repeatedly likened to Irish ones. Harker’s insistence on the peasants’ superstition and devotional fervor clearly reminds one of a Protestant’s attitude towards Irish Catholics—this is a link on which most critics agree.1 2 Other elements of the setting can also point to Ireland, although one should be wary of reading Irish references into every detail that lends itself to this strategy. Admittedly, Dracula’s current status has much to do with “critical plurality, a discursive pattern of multiple signification and resignification that presents in itself a marked parallel to the psychoanalytical trope of overdetermination.”1 3 But overdetermination remains a cop-out if it allows different interpretations to be juxtaposed without any examination of the conflicts they generate. What can be an Irish reference in Dracula can also be part and parcel of the conventions of vampire literature: to what extent can such an element then be used in a historicist reading? To take but one example: how justified is a critic in speculating that Dracula’s powers of seduction may be a reference to Parnell, given that Dracula was hardly the first womanizing vampire in literature?1 4 Harker’s journal can confront the critic with similar problems. On the other hand, Stoker may have chosen to stress or adapt specific conventions of vampiric writing, because they could then function within an Irish allegory. Stoker’s own additions to those conventions (sometimes based on his research into Transylvanian folklore) are even more likely to constitute references to Irish politics, although generalizations are clearly unwise. It is mostly with such emphases, adaptations, or additions that my comparison with Bowen’s Court and other Ascendancy texts will be concerned. On one level, Stoker’s view of Transylvania as a land of superstition reflects what he found in his reading of local sources, but those sources were important to him partly because they facilitated a parallel with Ireland. Among the superstitions to which Stoker alludes are legends concerning hidden treasures. After his ceric coach journey to the castle, Harker asks the Count “why the coachman went to the places where we had seen the blue flames. Was it indeed true that they showed where gold was hidden?” (46). Stoker was here drawing

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I often heard that long ago in the garden at Coole, at the cross, a man that was digging found a pot of gold. But just as he had the cover took off, he saw old Richard Gregory coming, and he covered it up, and was never able again to find the spot where it was.1 6

In Dracula, the Count grants that some peasant might be bold enough to go treasure hunting after the blue flames, but he then tells his guest: “[E]ven if he did he would not know what to do. . . . You would not, I dare be sworn, be able to find these places again?” (47). Stoker’s adaptation of Transylvanian folklore, here, seems meant to bring out Dracula’s resemblance to an Ascendancy landlord. The association of Dracula with Ascendancy habits, obsessions, and values is also invited by descriptions of his castle. His deserted and draughty dwelling calls to mind the condition of an aristocracy which had already fallen on hard

times by the 1890s, when Ascendancy land ownership and the income landlords could derive from rents were being reduced by legal reforms.1 7 A closer look at Dracula’s behavior in and towards his house will only reinforce this parallel. “Welcome to my house!”: Dracula’s twice repeated words of greeting to Harker are remarkable for their insistence on hospitality (41). Although impoverished, this aristocrat still cultivates a hospitality on which many Ascendancy families (including the Bowens) continued to pride themselves. Harker is immediately asked to make himself at home. This is a tall order in such gaunt surroundings, but his task is made somewhat casier by the Count’s library, filled as it is with English books. Dracula himself is observed reading “of all things, an English Bradshaw’s Guide” (47), while his atlas lies “opened naturally at England, as if that map had been used much” (48-49). According to Eagleton, this exposes Dracula as an Anglophile Ascendancy aristocrat, “given to poring over maps of the metropolis,” and about to become a long-term absentce through his move to London.1 8 But Dracula’s library is also worth exploring in more detail. Indeed, family libraries often occupy a prominent place in Ascendancy memoirs. Lady Gregory devotes the first twenty pages of her short book Coole to “The Library.” Books were almost human presences to her: “I shall feel sorry to leave all these volumes among which I have lived. They have felt the pressure of my fingers. They have been my friends.”1 9 Dracula uses similar terms when he refers to his library: “‘These friends’—and he laid his hands on some of the books—‘have been good friends to me’” (45). Given the isolation of the Anglo-Irish Big Houses, such intimacy is hardly surprising. The contents of Dracula’s shelves are also telling, as is the very fact that Harker devotes a whole paragraph to an enumeration of his host’s books. These include a vast number of English books, whole shelves full of them, and bound volumes of magazines and newspapers. A table in the centre was littered with English magazines and newspapers, though none of them of very recent date. The books were of the most varied kind—history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law—all relating to England and English life and customs and manners. There were even such books of reference as the London directory, the “Red” and “Blue” books, Whitaker’s Almanack, the Army and Navy Lists, and—it somehow gladdened my heart to see it—the Law List. (44)

Dracula’s interest in England is understandable enough, given his plan for a prolonged stay

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on an account of Transylvanian superstitions, according to which “in the night preceding Easter Sunday . . . hidden treasures are said to betray their site by a glowing flame.”1 5 Dracula’s confirmation is almost a quotation from Stoker’s source; the Count goes on to explain that the treasures were buried during the numerous invasions to which the region was subjected. Stoker was probably struck by the similarity between his source and Irish tales of riches hurriedly hidden underground in time of trouble. Bowen’s Court includes such an episode: one of Bowen’s ancestors was made privy to the whereabouts of gold and silver buried near Kilbolane during the 1689 rebellion, but failed to disclose the location before his death (96-97). Buried treasures were part of Irish as well as Transylvanian folklore; what makes Stoker’s version interesting here is that only the Count (disguised as a coachman) ventured near the blue flames, in order to mark the place with a few stones (38). Dracula here asserts his ownership, secure in the knowledge that the peasants will never dare to come near the place: “[Y]our average peasant is at heart a coward and a fool”; “[O]n that night no man of this land will, if he can help it, stir without his doors” (46, 47). On the whole, Stoker sticks closely to his source (according to which the night in question was eminently dangerous), but his one transformation explicitly sets Dracula apart from the local peasantry by giving him the knowledge possessed by dead Ascendancy patriarchs. In Lady Gregory’s memoir Coole (1931), a local legend also makes it clear that the ghosts of the Ascendancy protect their buried treasures:

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in London. But the diversity of the books is quite remarkable in itself, and it clearly strikes Harker as much as the fact that all the items are about England. The celectic bric-à-brac on the Count’s shelves appears more familiar when compared with the somewhat frantic universalism of some Big House libraries. These reflected their owners’ aspiration to a Classical ideal of humanist knowledge as well as an attachment to English culture. The library at Bowen’s Court was less exclusively English and more literary than Dracula’s, but it was equally varied. Bowen’s list of its contents is a tribute to a certain cultural ideal, although one suspects some tongue in check irony at the range of interests represented: The (now) more or less complete works of Pope, Gay, Dryden, an eight-volume set of The Spectator, The Guardian, Addison’s Poems, Young’s Works (the Young of the Night Thoughts) dedicated to Mr. Voltaire, The Faerie Queene, written by Edmund Spenser, with a Glossary explaining Old and Obscure Words, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son, translations of Madame de Sévigné’s Letters and of Sully’s Memoirs, Johnson’s Dictionary, A Description of England (in eight volumes with plates of religious ruins and notable country seats), A Tour Through France (Anon.), Goldsmith’s Animated Nature, a Nouveau Traité de Vénerie, Smollett’s History of England, Robertson’s History of Scotland, six volumes of Dodsley’s Collections (Poems by Several Hands), Manners in Portugal, Vertot’s Revolution in Sweden, Crevier’s Roman Emperors, Memoirs of the Portuguese Inquisition, with Reflections on Ancient and Modern Popery, Essex’s Letters (from Ireland), Observations on the Turks, Tissot on Health, a Life of Gustavus Adolphus, Arthur Young’s Tour Through the North of England, Collins’s Peerage (eight volumes, 1779), and a Peerage of Ireland (1768). (BC, 192)

What is also typical of the Ascendancy is the place of this humanist taste, within a cultural ideal that included soldierly virtues as well as intellectual ones. Over time, Bowen’s Court became a repository of both. The library was an addition to a family history that had started out with more Philistine figures: the first Irish Bowens were “temperamental fighters, malcontents, firebrands, actuated by love of movement,” but with little time for other pursuits (BC, 39); the synthesis was achieved by later Bowens and, ultimately, through Bowen’s all-embracing chronicle. That synthesis is probably best known through Yeats’s poetic eulogies of an Ascendancy of soldiers, scholars, and horsemen—a retrospectively idealized mixture of elements that may have coexisted in only a few individuals. This appetite for fighting was, of course, all the more remarkable in that it seemed to transcend specific political interests or allegiances. Yeats’s ancestors, though not aristo-

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cratic, were “soldiers that gave, whatever die was cast”: Yeats himself was not always too sure about whose side his forefathers fought on, but that uncertainty was no obstacle to a celebration of their military virtue. In Yeats’s version, the Ascendancy, “Bound neither to Cause nor to State,” was admirable in and for itself.2 0 Bowen’s ancestors also belonged to the kind of “men of whom it is hard to say whether their ideas breed their passions or their passions breed their ideas.” Henry Bowen I thus switched sides during the Civil War as a matter of course: “I doubt whether Henry Bowen ever cared much for either King or Parliament: he may have hardly distinguished between the two” (BC, 39). Both Yeats’s and Bowen’s writings give concrete shape to this Anglo-Irish ideal of humanist culture, military prowess, and political versatility by collapsing several individuals into a collective, transgenerational subject. To Stoker’s readers, there is little new here. The strategy was already evident in the long, trance-like monologues where Dracula entertained Harker with a confused but passionate account of his family’s history: “for in our veins flows the blood of many races who fought as the lion fights: for lordship” (52). It is worth noting here that, by drawing on the bellicose figure of Vlad the Impaler, Stoker was adding a new feature to the make-up of the vampire of literary tradition.2 1 One reason for Stoker’s interest in Vlad is that his qualities as a military leader made him an appropriate source for the portrayal of a certain type of Anglo-Irish aristocrat. The crash course in Transylvanian history that Harker receives from Dracula gives pride of place to his ancestors’ heroism on the battlefield, but it also leaves one with an extremely confused picture of political changes. What is more, the Count’s lengthy tale, filled though it is with the distant sound of old battles, does not really make riveting reading; nor does it prepare for subsequent developments in the plot of Dracula. If it actually detracts from the narrative economy of this novel of sensation, one may surmise that Stoker included it because of the allegorical clues it gave about Dracula’s identity. Dracula presents his tribe (the Szekelys) as an independent minded race of natural warriors, whose allegiances were as shifting as those of Bowen’s or Yeats’s ancestors. The Szekelys were eminently adaptable to circumstance: “When the Hungarian flood swept eastward, the Szekelys were claimed as kindred by the victorious Magyars” (53); later though, “when after the battle of Mohacs, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were

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The Count’s tales about his family’s past are also remarkable for their narrative quirks. Harker’s comments on the strange quality of those tales deserve our attention here: In his speaking of things and people, and especially of battles, he spoke as if he had been present at them all. This he afterwards explained by saying that to a boyar the pride of his house and name are his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of his house he always said “we,” like a king speaking. (52)

Dracula is not being overly rhetorical here, of course: as an almost timeless creature, he actually is a collective, transhistorical subject, the living (or undead) embodiment of several generations. His systematic use of “we” eerily prefigures Bowen’s own lapses into plural pronouns in Bowen’s Court. Bowen’s family chronicle shows such a degree of empathy that her identity as a narrator repeatedly blends with that of her subjects. Like Dracula, she can speak of “we” as if she and her family were one timeless subject. This can happen even when Bowen herself was clearly not involved in the episodes that she is recounting. Bowen’s use of the plural “we” becomes even more striking when one remembers that Bowen’s Court was written in the early 1940s, when Bowen was already the last, childless representative of her line. Here are some examples (all emphases are mine): We north-east County Cork gentry began rather roughly, as settlers. (BC, 17) The story [runs that] King William III . . . paid a visit to the Bowens at Kilbolane . . . and presented them with a communion set. The only com-

munion plate now in our possession is, however, Victorian style. But King William’s portrait, framed to match Oliver Cromwell’s, hangs beside Cromwell’s at the top of Bowen’s Court stairs. If he never did stay with us, he no doubt wished that he could. (BC, 104-5) I think the loss of the law suit—for we did lose it in the end—determined and hardened [Henry III’s] nature in many ways. (BC, 152) He did, it is true, lose our part of a mountain (Quitrent) at cards . . . but it was his father, dear Henry III, who bequeathed us our lasting embarrassments. (BC, 205)

At other times, Bowen’s “we” seems to encompass both her family and the class to which it belonged. Her identification with the Ascendancy is perhaps at its strongest and most eloquent in passages that record periods of trouble or decay. Her portrayal of George Bowen in the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion is a case in point: [Big George] epitomizes that rule by force of sheer fantasy that had, in great or small ways, become for his class the only possible one. From the big lord to the small country gentleman we were, about this time, being edged back upon a tract of clouds and obsessions that could each, from its nature, be only solitary. (BC, 258, my emphasis)

In the following example, Bowen’s parenthetical remark suggests that a sense of decline could sometimes be almost too close for comfort: Such a society had its roughnesses, but it had not that vulgarity of assertion only necessary when there is decline (that is why to detect a vulgarity, in ourselves, in a friend or associate, worries us: it is the morbid symptom we recognize). (BC, 131, my emphasis)

In both Dracula and Bowen’s Court, the plural “we” is used by a consciously aristocratic voice that traces and identifies with a lineage which is now under threat. If that “we” sounds assertive or royal to Harker, as he listens to his host, it is perhaps also—and ironically enough, for Bowen—an elegiac symptom of decline. By letting us hear Count Dracula’s tales of past glory, Stoker well may have caught the essential tone of the declining society of the Big House. The very word “house” is used repeatedly (and sometimes almost ambiguously) in the conversations between Dracula and Harker; its meaning oscillates between “dwelling” and “family.” Dracula insistently welcomes the young lawyer to his “house” (twice on 41) and tells him that “to a

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among their leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free” (54). Like the early Bowens, the Szekelys were essentially lone operators, who laid themselves open to charges of pure egoism and opportunism.2 2 Dracula’s rebuttal justifies their attitude by stressing its strategic value in Transylvanian society. Of an earlier Dracula, he observes: “They said that he thought only of himself. Bah! what good are peasants without a leader?” (54). While the idea that peasants need a leader may provide a connection with the Land League in the eyes of some, the fact that these words are spoken by a nostalgic aristocrat means rather that Dracula is trying to justify aristocratic leadership in a society that was both rural and unstable. This justification, however, is coupled with an admission that the old aristocratic power and the virtues that sustained it have passed: “[T]he warlike days are over . . . the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told” (54).

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boyar the pride of his house and name is his own pride” (52, my emphasis); the “we” that intrigues Harker is used when Dracula speaks “of his house” (52). After hearing Harker’s description of the house that the young clerk has bought for him in London, Dracula expresses his satisfaction thus: I am glad that it is old and big. I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in one day; and after all, how few days go to make up a century . . . the walls of my castle are broken; the shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may. (48)

Although Bowen’s Court was not as dilapidated or melancholy, Bowen would certainly have recognized this state of mind where individual, family, and house merge into a composite, atemporal being. Bowen’s Court itself, in her memoir, becomes precisely such an entity; her writing is pervaded by an almost mystical sense of dwelling, increased by the awareness that she is the last Bowen to inherit the house. The personal and cultural mystique that surrounded Big Houses only intensified with the decline of the society that owned them. W. J. McCormack has argued that, although the Big House as a reality is as old as the Ascendancy itself, the concept and name of “Big House” emerged in Anglo-Irish literature only when its referent was already in decline.2 3 The date of that semantic shift remains to be investigated, but one suspects that Dracula’s delight at the prospect of staying in a “house” which is “old and big” is a revealing choice of words. In that respect, as in many others, Harker’s diary can be read as a portrait of Big House society.2 4 If Stoker managed to convey the tone and moods of an Anglo-Irish aristocracy in decline, his association of that class with vampirism is, of course, eminently critical; it is the gesture of a modern, forward-looking Dublin Protestant, who had little patience with the more conservative sections of Anglo-Ireland. By comparison, Bowen’s family chronicle definitely reads like an apology, although she does, at times, infuse her record with admissions of failure and of historical injustice.2 5 Bowen can also pass a benign form of criticism on the foibles and obsessions of her ancestors; when this occurs, her portrayals tend to assume more obviously Gothic features that would not have been out of place in Dracula. Towards the end of his life, John Bowen I thus withdrew into the kind of isolation and behavior that befits the undead:

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He took up his quarters in the small semi-ruinous castle just across the Fahary stream. . . . Into this dark doorway he turned at the close of the long dusks. In these chambers he muttered and walked at nights. (BC, 75)

The daughter of a Catholic landlord who was expropriated in favor of the Bowens is also described in terms that could be applied to some of Dracula’s victims, although Bowen’s descriptions perhaps recall the ghost of Catherine Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights more than the undead Lucy Westenra roaming her Whitby churchyard: Was Elizabeth Cushin, child of the dispossessed Garrett, as lovely as she was unfortunate? Did she walk like a living ghost the lands her father had owned, and was John—in the wood, up the stream, on the side of the mountain—constantly meeting her? (BC, 77)

These hints of a more sensational Gothic of walking ghosts and crumbling castles remain few and far between in Bowen’s Court. Stoker, on the other hand, liberally uses such ingredients alongside the more psychological Gothic that pervades the characterization of Dracula in Harker’s journal. The proliferation of Gothic horrors in Dracula partly answers Stoker’s wish to debunk a class that he could also portray with subtlety. Some of the Gothic atrocities that Dracula’s castle conceals are not just stage properties borrowed from European horror fiction. Closed doors and lascivious female vampires belong to that tradition, but one element also points back to a famous, earlier critique of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy written by a Dublin Protestant. After his narrow escape from the bites of Dracula’s women, Harker realizes with horror that Dracula has stolen a child and fed him to his aggressors. Later on, he observes a peasant woman walking round the castle in her distress, looking for her child. Childbiting vampires may not have been a novelty in literature, but Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” surely looms large behind this savage Gothic caricature of an aristocracy literally feeding on the infants of a helpless peasantry. Stoker gave Count Dracula enough of a psychology to paint him as an Anglo-Irish aristocrat pining for the heyday of the Ascendancy and expressing its values, moods, and isolation with the subtle touches that one finds in Ascendancy memoirs like Bowen’s. But his use of vampirism constitutes a damning assessment that remains closer to Swift’s sarcasm than to Bowen’s painstaking and defensive introspection. In that sense, the Gothic excess of Dracula both continues and sup-

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Notes 1. See the Norton Critical Edition of Dracula, ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (New York: Norton, 1997), and Dracula, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2002). Riquelme’s edition hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 2. For analyses of Dracula as an Ascendancy landlord, see Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 89-90, and Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (London: Verso, 1995), 215-16. Bruce Stewart takes issue with them in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Possessed by the Spirit of the Nation?,” Irish University Review 29.2 (1999): 238-55. Stewart regrets that “in Irish critical commentary on Dracula there are current signs of more than an element of political animus against the erstwhile ascendancy class in Ireland” (255). The alternative, revisionist readings he considers present Dracula as a Fenian leader, while the Szganys are “patently his Land League henchmen” (242-43). Like Stewart, Cannon Schmitt also aligns Dracula with nationalist elements in “Mother Dracula: Orientalism, Degeneration, and Anglo-Irish National Subjectivity at the Fin de Siècle,” in Irishness and (Post)modernism, ed. John S. Rickard (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1994), 25-43, esp. 34. Michael Valdez Moses’s essay “Dracula, Parnell and the Troubled Dreams of Nationhood,” appeared in Journal X: A Journal in Culture and Criticism 2 (1997): 66-112. 3. Stewart, 243. 4. See Joseph Valente, “‘Double Born’: Bram Stoker and the Metrocolonial Gothic,” Modern Fiction Studies 46 (2000): 632. 5. See Chris Morash, “‘Even Under Some Unnatural Condition’: Bram Stoker and the Colonial Fantastic,” in Literature and the Supernatural, ed. Brian Cosgrove (Dublin: The Columba Press, 1995), 112, 100. 6. This is perhaps more true of American readings than of Irish ones. The difference may reflect the closer links between Irish literary criticism and traditional history, or the fact that postcolonial theory has had a bigger impact in Ireland than has New Historicism. The latter has been more dominant among American critics. Nevertheless, the tendency to rash allegorizing that Stewart detects in Irish commentary on Stoker can also derive from a narrow focus on Dracula’s physical features. 7. See Dracula, ed. Riquelme, 370-71, 376-79. 8. Moses, “Dracula,” 69, my emphasis.

9. Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court, ed. Hermione Lee (London: Vintage, 1999). Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number and abbreviated BC. 10. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas is ostensibly set in Derbyshire, but Bowen observed that its focus on physical isolation, inheritance, and supernatural oppression was very much the product of Le Fanu’s Anglo-Irish concerns. See “Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu,” in The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Lee (London: Vintage, 1999), 100-13. The concept of an Anglo-Irish Gothic tradition that includes both Le Fanu and Stoker is still disputed. Alison Millbank likens Stoker to Le Fanu and other Irish Protestant writers in “‘Powers Old and New’: Stoker’s Alliances with Anglo-Irish Gothic,” in Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic, ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith (London: Macmillan, 1998), 12-28. W. J. McCormack has tried to wrest Le Fanu from what he regards as a “doubtful tradition” (Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen [Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1993], 3). If Charles Maturin, Le Fanu, and Stoker are regularly “invoked in the name of a more substantial Irish gothic tradition,” McCormack argues that “the description ‘gothic’ can be applied to [Le Fanu’s] work only in a general and unsatisfactory way.” McCormack’s championing of Le Fanu goes together with an overt irritation at the Stoker’s “unrelenting narration of supernatural and horrific agencies” and Dracula’s tendency to “overkill.” See his introductory essay, “Irish Gothic and After,” in vol. 2 of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Deane (Derry, Ireland: Field Day Publications, 1992), 832 (“the description”), 842 (“unrelenting”; “overkill”). 11. Joseph Valente’s recent Dracula’s Crypt. Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2002), is an often brilliant and thoughtprovoking attempt at reading the whole novel in the light of Stoker’s complex position as an “Anglo-Celtic” writer. To engage with all of Valente’s points would be beyond the scope of the present essay. Valente sees Dracula as both landlord and nationalist agitator (5559)—in fact, he argues that Dracula’s fundamental ambivalence stems from the fact that he is nothing but a hallucinatory projection of the other characters’ racial anxieties. Tantalizing though it is, Valente’s emphasis on Dracula’s ambivalence is not always justified (see note 22, below). 12. A relevant section from Major Johnson’s book is reprinted in Riquelme’s edition, 383-85. See also Christopher Frayling’s Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber, 1991). Frayling notes Johnson’s “many comparisons between Wallachian peasants and ‘our friend Paddy’” (335). For a summing up of the current critical view of Stoker’s use of Johnson, see Gregory Castle’s essay “Ambivalence and Ascendancy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in Riquelme’s edition, 527. 13. See Hughes’s and Smith’s introduction to Bram Stoker, 4. 14. Morash, 110. 15. See Frayling, 321. 16. Lady Gregory, Coole (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1931), 41. 17. “His decrepit castle, the lack of servants, the mingling of fear and respect accorded to him by Catholic peasants who seem to stand to him in a relation of

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plants the muted, psychological Gothic that Stoker’s characterization shares with Bowen’s chronicle of Ascendancy life. However, political differences between both authors should not obscure their common use of tropes and rhetorical strategies that belong to this second, recognizable Anglo-Irish form of Gothic. I hope to have shown that a proper understanding of that Gothic vein, and of its links to Ascendancy psychology, as well as an awareness of its presence in Stoker’s novel, are essential to the placing of Dracula in the mined context of Irish history.

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subservience—all of this suggests the social milieu of the Ascendancy Big House.” See Castle, 529. The decline of the Ascendancy’s political and economic power accelerated during the second half of the nineteenth century; its landmarks were the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (1869) and the Land Acts passed in the 1880s. See R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London: Penguin, 1989), 396, 412-15. 18. Eagleton, 215. 19. Lady Gregory, 21. 20. W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1990), 148, 244. The lines from “Responsibilities,” about the ancestors who “withstood . . . James and Irish when the Dutchman crossed” (148), are the eventual result of a long revision: “[T]his passage had to be rewritten, for Yeats once thought mistakenly that his Butler ancestors had fought on the side of the Englishman James II, not the Dutchman William of Orange” (519). 21. “Dracula differs from the previous vampire Counts of literature [in that] he is a military figure as well, who periodically reminisces about his military successes in the distant past, in campaigns to drive the Turks out of his territory” (Frayling, 76). 22. Valente reads those shifting alliances as yet another sign of Dracula’s fundamental ambivalence: “Just as the Draculas seem to have allied themselves with all manner of opposing parties in the Balkan wars, so Dracula’s own subject position aligns him with various constituencies in the debate and struggle over Ireland” (59). However, the Szekelys’s political mutability can also bring to mind the confused allegiances of Ascendancy families, and the tone of Dracula’s tale is definitely closer to Ascendancy nostalgia than to nationalist rhetoric. 23. “The establishment of the Big House as a central trope in modern Irish writing is closely linked to its elegiac and compensatory qualities.” See McCormack, “Setting and Ideology: with Reference to the Fiction of Maria Edgeworth,” in Ancestral Voices: The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature, ed. Otto Rauchbauer (Hildesheim, Germany: Olms, 1992), 51. 24. Big House society was not exclusively Protestant; some old Catholic families also owned Big Houses. Although they were long technically excluded from the Ascendancy on religious grounds, the distinction between those families and their Protestant counterparts became increasingly blurred after Catholic emancipation and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. By the time Dracula was written, Big House Catholics were in many ways closer to the Protestant aristocracy than to urban middle-class Protestants like Stoker. This means that Dracula’s long-debated religious identity does not affect his status as a Big House aristocrat. In the controversies surrounding the novel, Dracula has been variously painted as a Catholic (see, for instance, Schmitt, 34), and as an Irish Protestant dabbling in the occult and drawn to the sacramental side of Catholicism (see Castle, 533-34). The classic account of the Protestant Ascendancy’s fascination with the occult is Foster’s “Protestant Magic: W. B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History,” in Yeats’s Political Identities, ed. Jonathan Allison (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996), 83-105. Foster makes suggestive remarks on Stoker but does not discuss Dracula at length.

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25. Bowen wrote in her afterword: “[M]y family . . . drew their power from a situation that shows an inherent wrong (BC, 453).

RACE AND THE GOTHIC TERESA A. GODDU (ESSAY DATE 1997) SOURCE: Goddu, Teresa A. “Haunting Back: Harriet Jacobs, African-American Narrative, and the Gothic.” In Gothic America: Narrative, History, and the Nation, pp. 131-52. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. In the following essay, Goddu explores how the Gothic is used in literature by African Americans—and by white writers who write about the African American experience—to express the horrors of slavery and racism. Early American writers, Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne, complained bitterly about the bleakness and flatness of the American scene. But I think that if they were alive, they’d feel at home in modern America. True, we have no great church in America; our national traditions are still of such a sort that we are not wont to brag of them . . . we have no rich symbols, no colorful rituals. But we do have in the Negro the embodiment of a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of even a James; and we do have in the oppression of the Negro a shadow athwart our national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy even the gloomy broodings of a Hawthorne. And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him. —Richard Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ was Born,” Native Son

In this ending to the introduction to Native Son, Richard Wright makes a powerful connection between the African-American experience and the gothic.1 The horror that Poe or Hawthorne had to invent, Wright argues, is already embodied in African-American history—in the haunting legacy of slavery and in the heavy shadow of oppression. For Wright, African-American history is not only material for the gothic writer, but is also itself coded in gothic terms.2 As Wright’s novel, Native Son, shows, the African-American experience, written as a realist text, resembles a gothic narrative. Arguing that the gothic, as exemplified by an author like Poe, does not invent horror but is invented by it, Wright unveils the gothic as a complex historical mode: history invents the gothic, and in turn the gothic reinvents history. By exploring Wright’s connection between historical horror and the gothic, this chapter uses the African-American gothic to revise readings of the American gothic that have positioned the genre—and, more broadly, the American literary

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With this final chapter, then, Gothic America comes full circle, returning to its founding image: the caged slave in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer. Instead of focusing on Farmer James, who is struck mute by this encounter, or on the stylistic evasions Crèvecoeur’s text performs to contain and silence this horror, this chapter focuses on the voices that emanate from within stereotypes of the gothic and on how to begin articulating the horror. No longer simply the metaphor for dread, the “conveniently bound and violently silenced” black bodies of the gothic return in this chapter to reclaim and revise the gothic mode (Morrison 1992:38). By locating the strategies involved in unveiling slavery’s horrors, this chapter listens to how the unspeakable is spoken.

Spectacles of Horror: The Scene of Slavery Negro writing has instinctively adopted the Gothic tradition of American literature and given its more supernatural and surrealistic characteristics a realistic basis, founded on actual lives often

lived in the Gothic manner, that is indeed terrifying: the nightmare world of Poe or Hawthorne has become the Monday morning of the Negro author. . . . —Theodore Gross, The Heroic Ideal in American Literature

The scene of slavery was often represented as gothic during the antebellum period in America. From newspaper accounts of Nat Turner’s insurrection and antislavery writings to slave narratives and literary works such as Lydia Maria Child’s “Stand from Under!” (1829) and Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), the horrible reality of slavery was depicted through gothic images and a romantic rhetoric. Theodore Weld exemplifies how slavery was easily read as a sensationalized spectacle during the antebellum period when he states, “facts and testimony as to the actual condition of the Slaves” would “thrill the land with Horror” (Barnes and Dumond 2:717). The gothic’s focus on the terror of possession, the iconography of imprisonment, the fear of retribution, and the weight of sin provided a useful vocabulary and register of images by which to represent the scene of America’s greatest guilt: slavery. According to Kari Winter, the gothic’s structural alliance with slavery is not coincidental.4 Many of the eighteenthcentury British male gothicists—such as Monk Lewis and William Beckford—were either slaveowners or proslavery; moreover, the rise of the gothic novel in England at the end of the eighteenth century occurred during the heightened debate about abolition, a debate in which William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, both authors of gothic novels, actively participated (Winter 3). Like revolution—as Ronald Paulson has shown in his study of the gothic and the French Revolution—and the new capitalistic structures that emerged in the eighteenth century—as Andrea Henderson argues—slavery was a significant part of the historical context that produced the gothic and against which it responded.5 For instance, slave uprisings in St. Domingue at the end of the eighteenth century and in America during the antebellum period, as epitomized by the figure of Nat Turner, were turned into tales of gothic terror.6 Nat Turner and his band were demonized by The Richmond Enquirer (August 30, 1831) as “banditti” and “horrible . . . monsters” (Tragle 43).7 Turning the event into an ominous warning, The Liberator (September 3, 1831) states, “for ourselves, we are horror-struck at the late tidings” and argues that “what was poetry—imagination—in January, is now a bloody reality” (Tragle 64, 63). Turner’s insurrection

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canon—as exempt from the forces of history. A focus on slavery, America’s most glaring cultural contradiction, shows how it produced gothic narratives during the antebellum period and how these narratives reproduced the scene of slavery.3 The chapter examines two strategies by which the gothic represents the unspeakable event of slavery. First, by signifying the event of slavery through narrative effects, the gothic both registers actual events and turns them into fiction. Its conventions can both rematerialize and dematerialize history: some gothic narratives insist upon the actuality of slavery by refusing to collapse the referent of the narrative with its effects; others displace the event of slavery into fictional form in order to contain its horrors. However, as this book has shown, even in the act of displacement, traces of the material remain to be read by those invested in remembering the horrors of history. AfricanAmerican writers—particularly Harriet Jacobs, who works within and against an antebellum discourse that gothicizes slavery—recognize the uses and dangers of the gothic as a mode that can remember and combat, but can also erase, the horrors of a racial history. In looking at how particular gothic fictions are produced in relation to the historical institution of slavery and how the gothic mode represents slavery’s unspeakable history, this chapter explores the extent to which the gothic is able to rematerialize the ghosts of America’s racial history and enable African-American writers to haunt back.

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actualized the imagined terror of slave rebellion: its bloody reality both fulfilled and generated a gothic narrative of dread and retribution. Recounting Turner’s reign of terror, The Constitutional Whig (September 26, 1831) demonstrates how the historical event of Turner’s uprising was represented through gothic conventions: In retracing on Tuesday morning the route pursued by the banditti, consisting of a distance of 20 miles, my imagination was struck with more horror, than the most dreadful carnage in a field of battle could have produced. The massacre before me, being principally of helpless women and children. . . . In future years, the bloody road, will give rise to many a sorrowful legend; and the trampling of hoofs, in fancy, visit many an excited imagination. (Tragle 96-97)

Sarah Grimké’s account of her departure from the South and slavery underscores the way white abolitionists used the gothic’s narrative power to subordinate the slave’s horror to the white viewer’s response:

The bloody scene produces a gothic effect when it strikes the viewer’s imagination; the event “gives rise to” a narrative of terror and horror. However, the event is also reinterpreted by that gothic narrative. As symbolized by the bloody road, it will be turned into a legend: Nat Turner will haunt the imagination of future travelers much like the Headless Horseman of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Translating the event into a gothic symbol, turning it into a legend, the passage reveals how the gothic can dematerialize and displace the source of its effect even while representing it. The present event is constructed as both more “real” and “unreal” as it is imaginatively experienced: the narrator’s imagination is struck by the full horror of the scene even as the scene is displaced into the future and translated into a legend to excite the future viewer’s fancy. The gothic’s conventions, then, gave whites responding to Turner’s rebellion a discourse to symbolize and contain their terror. Once subsumed into symbols, imagined instead of experienced, the event could be read as an effect rather than as a reality. This displacement of event by effect also tends to relocate the horror of slavery from the slave’s experience to the white viewer’s response. Antislavery and proslavery sympathizers alike deployed the gothicized scene of slavery, the event, as the conduit for a particular effect. In American Slavery as It Is (1839), Theodore Weld uses the gothic conventions of clanking chains and swooning maidens to emphasize the horror of slavery. “We repeat it, every man knows that slavery is a curse,” he writes. “Whoever denies this, his lips libel his heart. Try him; clank the chains in his ears, and tell him they are for him. . . . then look at his pale lips and trembling knees, and you have na-

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ture’s testimony against slavery” (7). Asking the viewer to imagine himself enslaved, responding to this imagined scene, Weld turns slavery into an effect. The clanking chains sound the warning of retribution more than they symbolize actual imprisonment. Nature’s testimony against slavery is not the scene itself but the white viewer’s response to it: pale lips and trembling knees. Paradoxically, the gothic effect subsumes the gothic event even as it testifies to its horrors.

As I left my native state on account of slavery, and deserted the home of my fathers to escape the sound of the lash and the shrieks of tortured victims, I would gladly bury in oblivion the recollection of those scenes with which I have been familiar; but this may not, cannot be; they come over my memory like gory spectres, and implore me with resistless power, in the name of a God of mercy, in the name of a crucified Savior, in the name of humanity; for the sake of the slaveholder, as well as the slave, to bear witness to the horrors of the southern prison house. (Weld 22)

Grimké depicts herself as the innocent maiden fleeing the scene of horror. She, not the slave, is the tortured victim of the slavery system, a displaced wanderer, haunted by bloody specters. In identifying herself as the victim, Grimké abstracts and co-opts the slave’s horror.8 By equating witnessing these scenes with experiencing them, Grimké makes the effect coextensive with the event, thereby establishing her authority. The gory scenes implore her to speak; the shrieks of the tortured victims are articulated through her. Bearing witness to the horrors of the southern prison house in the name of all its victims, slaveholders as well as slaves, Grimké generalizes the horror to everyone involved. In the hands of antebellum white writers, then, the gothic often enabled the representation of slavery only to departicularize it. As Eric Sundquist argues, “the antislavery imagination, no less than the proslavery, tended to collapse history into timeless images of terror and damnation” (1993:147). The gothic might offer useful metaphors for depicting the historical event of slavery, but its narrative construction could also empty slavery of history by turning it into a gothic trope. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s preface to Dred (1856) articulates how easily literary discourse could fictionalize the historical reality of slavery.

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in a merely artistic point of view, there is no ground, ancient or modern, whose vivid lights, gloomy shadows and grotesque groupings, afford to the novelist so wide a scope for the exercise of his powers. In the near vicinity of modern civilization of the most matter-of-fact kind, exist institutions which carry us back to the twilight of the feudal ages, with all their exciting possibilities of incident. (29)

Stowe locates slavery as a feudal institution, displaced in time and space and hence offering the romance writer wider scope for her fictional powers. For Stowe, who can see it from a merely artistic point of view, slavery is already a fictionalized scene, full of “exciting possibilities of incident.” Its actuality is once again imaginatively subsumed by gothic conventions. The problem of how literary narrative could displace historical reality was especially troubling for the author of the slave narrative. While slave narratives use many fictional forms to structure their events, the difficulty of negotiating the line between fact and fiction is especially apparent in their use of the gothic.9 The slave narrative’s generic conventions seem to be in direct opposition to the gothic’s: its documentary form and adherence to veracity announce a refusal of any imaginative rendering. Although the slave narrative might not incorporate the gothic’s typical supernatural elements, it does, however, contain— even in its factual form—many gothic characteristics. With descriptions of slavery as a feudal institution, horrifying scenes of torture and entrapment, lascivious masters and innocent slave girls, and curses on many generations, the slave narrative reads like a gothic romance with a single, crucial difference: the scenery is not staged but real. The slave narrative’s representations have historical referents that embody horror; however, though recording a horror beyond the pale of most gothic romances, the slave narrative could be read within the gothic’s fictional conventions. As Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner stated of slave narratives, “Romance has no stories of more thrilling interest than theirs” (qtd. in The Liberator [October 22, 1852], 169). Or, as Angelina Grimké wrote in a letter to Theodore Weld in 1838, “Many and many a tale of romantic horror can the slaves tell” (Barnes and Dumond 2:523). The realization that their factual narratives could read like fiction caused many authors to insist on the veracity of their tales. In My Bondage and My

Freedom (1855), Frederick Douglass writes, “The reader is, therefore, assured, with all due promptitude, that his attention is not invited to a work of ART, but to a work of FACTS—Facts, terrible and almost incredible, it may be—yet FACTS, nevertheless” (3).1 0 In her “authentic narrative describing the Horrors of slavery,” Harriet Jacobs, for example, feels compelled to assure her readers that her narrative is not fiction: “I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible,” she writes, “but they are, nevertheless, strictly true” (1). 1 1 Jacobs’s opening disclaimer marks the complex relationship between the romance and the real in her text. Paradoxically, the horrifying facts seem, as Lydia Maria Child states, “more romantic than fiction” (3); overflowing the boundaries of the real, Jacobs’s factual narrative can read like a gothic fiction. It is important to note the slave narrative’s double bind: the difficulty of representing a gothic history through gothic conventions without collapsing the distinctions between fact and fiction, event and effect. The slave narrative must rewrite the conventions of gothic fiction for its own factual ends. Frederick Douglass’s gothic scene of slavery in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Aunt Hester’s whipping, is one example of this rewriting. Placed at the end of the Narrative’s first chapter, the gothic scene serves as both the reader’s and Douglass’s entrance through the “blood-stained gate” of slavery (51). Douglass gives northern antebellum readers a familiar scene: the southern gothic spectacle of slavery.1 2 With its gothic villain, the slavemaster, and its innocent maiden, his Aunt Hester, who “stood fair for his infernal purpose,” the scene plays up but also resists its gothic effects (52). It offers the reader the villain and the maiden but transposes their conventional associations: the black villain is white and the virginal, innocent maiden is a black slave. As the viewer of, rather than a participant in, this infernal scene, Douglass signifies against white narratives of gothic spectatorship. Framing the scene with his response to it, Douglass both plays to northern readers’ sympathy and critiques their voyeurism. Situated in Douglass’s position as witness to this scene of brutality, the reader is asked to identify with Douglass’s horror and against the iron-hearted slavemaster. Douglass hopes that the scene will strike the reader with the same “awful force” as it struck him (51). By drawing a parallel between the way the scene “strikes” the viewer and the blows Aunt Hester experiences from the slavemaster, the narrative suggests the power of the gothic scene to relay the

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Explaining why she has chosen as a subject “the scenes and incidents of the slaveholding states,” Stowe writes:

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experience of horror. However, in identifying the viewer with the victim and in depicting the viewer as a passive and safely distant observer (the young Douglass hiding in the closet), the scene also reveals how the gothic spectacle can enable identification without initiating a corresponding action. The scene exposes not only the victimization inherent in the white reader’s relationship to slavery but also the voyeurism. Like the young boy peeping out of the closet to witness the sexualized spectacle of slavery, the white reader is both repulsed and fascinated with its horrors. In this way, Douglass also identifies the viewer with the slavemaster and his “great pleasure” (51). The scene, then, offers a typical gothic scenario only to critique the white reader’s role in viewing it. The scene further exposes the slave narrative’s use and revision of the gothic by employing the gothic to rematerialize history while resisting its possible dematerializing effects. Following a general description of his Aunt Hester’s whippings, Douglass pauses to reflect upon the scene before he describes the first time he witnessed this event: “I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember any thing. . . . It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it” (51). Here, Douglass captures the difficulty of speaking the unspeakable: slavery is at once unforgettable and indescribable. The performative quality of Douglass’s simultaneous insistence that he cannot capture his response to the scene and attempts to do so shows that the gothic provides tropes by which the unspoken can be represented, if not fully spoken. In its pseudodocumentary and excessively mediated form (a manuscript that has been translated and passed to the narrator through a number of sources), the gothic claims historical veracity even as it points to the limits of historical representation. Similarly, Douglass recounts the scene of Aunt Hester’s whipping while insisting that the scene of slavery is ultimately unrepresentable. Douglass repeats it two times, first as a general occurrence and then as a particular event, the first time he witnessed it. His twice-told tale, however, like his performative gesture, signals the unrepresentability of the scene: its excessiveness implies that it cannot be fully captured. By insisting on the gothic’s resistance to representation, Douglass negotiates the uneasy relationship between his gothic tale and his gothic history: he both represents his history and insists that it defies narrative reconstruction.

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Douglass’s resistance to turning the event of slavery into a narrative effect is also evident in the way he represents Aunt Hester’s whipping. The focus in the scene is as much on the “it,” the spectacle of the whipping, as on the “I,” the narrator who responds to it. Douglass’s insistence that he cannot commit his feelings to paper is as much an articulation of slavery’s unrepresentability as a refusal to focus more on the response to the event than on the event itself. Douglass uses the gothic to translate Aunt Hester’s whippings into a symbol of slavery—“a terrible spectacle”—but he also refuses to abstract the horror by turning it into a timeless trope of terror. Not only does he generalize his account of the whipping between two versions, but he also goes to great lengths in the second recounting to particularize the scene, giving the context of the whipping and describing it in a matter-of-fact tone. The frame, more than the narrative, sensationalizes the scene. This tension between the depiction of the actual event and the gothicized effect of its narrative frame is also evident in Douglass’s first description: “I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he [the slavemaster] used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood” (51). In this statement, Douglass deploys the gothic with a twist: instead of waking from the nightmare, he wakes to it. Unveiling reality as the nightmare and emphasizing that Aunt Hester is “literally” covered with blood, Douglass rewrites the gothic as actual horror instead of stage effect. Moreover, by describing the event as occurring in the continuous present—“I have often been awakened”—he reexperiences the scene in the act of reimagining it, making the event hauntingly present. When he ends, “I had therefore been, until now, out of the way of the bloody scenes that often occurred on the plantation,” he suggests that the reader, like himself, is awake to the nightmare of slavery: the gothic effect does not dematerialize the event but makes it ever-present (52, emphasis added). By redeploying the gothic, Douglass is able to materialize the scene and resist its representation as mere effect. Douglass’s use of the gothic, then, acknowledges that the scene of slavery is conventionally constructed but rewrites those conventions to his own ends. By making the reader enter his narrative of slavery through the conventions of the gothic, Douglass discloses how the spectacle of slavery is mediated and structured generically. The event is accessible only as a narrated scene,

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Douglass’s redeployment of the gothic exposes it as a mode intimately connected to history.1 4 The gothic’s typical association with the “unreal” and the sensational, however, has created a resistance to examining African-American narratives in relation to the gothic. Alice Walker, for instance, dislikes the categorization of her work as gothic since it “conjures up the supernatural” and since she “feels what she writes has ‘something to do with real life’” (263). Similarly, Toni Morrison is reluctant to have her writing described as gothic. She dislikes the term black magic used in conjunction with her work since the “implication [is] that there [is] no intelligence there” (C. Davis 145).1 5 The gothic’s apparent lack of connection to reality and intellectual purpose has made it troubling to use in conjunction with AfricanAmerican writers.1 6 However, instead of accepting traditional readings of the gothic as unrealistic and frivolous, thereby excluding African-American narratives from this genre, we should use the African-American gothic to revise our understanding of the gothic as an historical mode. Re-viewing the gothic through the lens of African-American transpositions and recognizing that the gothic itself is a dynamic and contradictory mode whose tropes and conventions can be used for a variety of ends makes visible the American gothic’s relationship to history. In order to examine how the African-American gothic revises standard notions of the American gothic tradition, I now examine the dialogue that occurs between two texts: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). The relationship of influence and resistance between these texts reveals how the African-American gothic is working within and against a broader American gothic tradition. My aim is not to subsume African-American narratives under some reified concept of the American tradition, but rather to

show how the African-American gothic highlights the historicity of the American gothic.1 7

Loopholes of Influence: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Jacobs Signifyin(g) functions as a metaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the AfroAmerican literary tradition. —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl exemplifies the slave narrative’s connection to the gothic romance through its use of fictional conventions. As late as the 1970s, Incidents’s authenticity remained in doubt because of its perceived similarity to the novel of seduction. In The Slave Community, for instance, John Blassingame discusses Incidents as a fictional story, arguing that Jacobs’s tale was too melodramatic to be considered an authentic slave narrative. The debate over whether Incidents was fact or fiction was not fully resolved until Jean Fagan Yellin verified the narrative’s authenticity in 1981.1 8 However, it is precisely Jacobs’s use of fictional tropes to represent authentic fact that fueled this confusion. On the one hand she claims, “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction”; on the other hand, in the act of claiming her narrative’s authenticity she uses a trope from the novel (1). While Incidents’s relationship to the conventions of the sentimental novel has been extensively explored, it has rarely been discussed in terms of the gothic.1 9 Whether this is because the gothic continues to be viewed as opposed to the realist conventions of the slave narrative or because the sentimental has become canonized as the nineteenth-century woman’s genre is hard to say; however, Jacobs’s refashioning of the gothic mode calls for further examination. The history of Jacobs’s relationship to Harriet Beecher Stowe foregrounds Incidents’s connection to the conventions of the gothic. Instead of writing her own story, Jacobs initially planned to dictate her narrative to Stowe, who wanted to use it for her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853). Outraged by Stowe’s subsequent treatment of her and her daughter, Jacobs decided to write her story herself, claiming that “it needed no romance” (Yellin 1985:266).2 0 Despite Jacobs’s claim, her story was the perfect factual source for Stowe’s gothic romance. Jacobs’s factual account of her sevenyear imprisonment in her grandmother’s garret, written almost a decade after Key, echoes Stowe’s fictional tale about Cassy haunting Legree’s attic. This uncanny connection—fact mirroring fiction—exemplifies the complex intersection between the romance and the real in both texts. If

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1constructed for the viewer.1 3 However, in using gothic conventions, Douglass marks the differences as well as the similarities between gothic narrative and gothic history. Gothic conventions might usefully reproduce the scene of slavery, but they also might dematerialize it. By allying the gothic with reality and yet insisting that its effects cannot fully capture the event, Douglass utilizes the gothic’s narrative power to represent slavery and to create a strong effect while insisting on the difference between event and effect. Like other African-American authors who employ the gothic mode, Douglass must negotiate between its power and its danger.

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Stowe desired Jacobs’s factual history to authenticate her fictional tale, Jacobs also revised Stowe’s fictional story in her own factual account. Since Jacobs refers in her penultimate chapter to Stowe’s treatment of the Fugitive Slave Law in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is evident that Jacobs was familiar with Stowe’s novel (194). Moreover, Jacobs’s borrowing of Cassy’s “loophole in the garret” to name her own “loophole of retreat” suggests connections between the two stories that have yet to be fully explored (Stowe 597; Jacobs 114). 2 1 In both instances, the gothic is the fictional mode by which the factual horrors of slavery can be represented. However, understanding how Jacobs revises Stowe’s loophole along with other gothic conventions makes apparent the power and the limitations of the gothic mode for AfricanAmerican authors.

is would be a work which could not be read; and all works which ever mean to give pleasure must draw a veil somewhere, or they cannot succeed. (Key, I)

The scene of slavery exceeds the representation of art. By passing over what is too dreadful, fiction makes the unreadable readable, paradoxically unveiling slavery yet concealing its worst aspects. It is precisely this paradox—the need for narrative to represent historical reality yet the danger that fiction will be equated with fact—that troubles Jacobs’s narrative. Stowe, who has different goals, negotiates this paradox more easily. For her, narrative effects can both be grounded in reality and evade it.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a fiction that claims the status of fact. Her subtitle to The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin argues that her fictional effects are grounded in actual events: “Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story is Founded. Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work.” Moreover, Stowe claims that the novel “more, perhaps, than any other work of fiction that ever was written, has been a collection and arrangement of real incidents, of actions really performed, of words and expressions really uttered, grouped together with reference to a general result” (1). However, in defending Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a true story, Stowe reveals a complicated relationship between fictional effect and factual event. Events may authenticate her effects, but they remain subordinate. Uncle Tom’s Cabin achieves its realist status primarily through its impression on the reader and only secondarily through its factual authentication. Stowe writes, “the book had a purpose entirely transcending the artistic one, and accordingly encounters at the hands of the public demands not usually made on fictitious works. It is treated as a reality—sifted, tried and tested, as a reality; and therefore as a reality it may be proper that it should be defended” (1). Once treated as reality, the novel can then be defended as such. The narrative effect not only claims the status of event but supersedes it. However, even as Stowe subsumes fact into fiction, she recognizes the difference between the two:

Stowe’s use of the gothic in Uncle Tom’s Cabin exemplifies this complicated relationship between the event of slavery and its narrative effects. Stowe employs the gothic to represent the southern spectacle of slavery.2 2 In the last third of the novel, as Tom travels down the blood-red river to Legree’s decaying mansion in a chapter titled “The Middle Passage,” the gothic intrudes into the sentimental in order to register the full horror of slavery: Legree’s ruined plantation unveils what lies just behind the seemingly enlightened edifice of St. Clare’s home. On another level, Stowe’s description shows just how easily slavery is transcribed into gothic terms. Hell and the Inquisition serve as apt metaphors for the horror chamber of slavery where one can be “burned alive . . . scalded, cut into inch-pieces, set up for the dogs to tear, or hung up and whipped to death” (512). Indeed, as Cassy tells Tom, slavery’s everyday occurrences make a fine gothic tale: “I could make any one’s hair rise, and their teeth chatter, if I should only tell what I’ve seen and been knowing to, here” (512). This section of the novel shows how the event of slavery is structured in gothic terms, and also demonstrates how gothic stories are produced by history. The scene of actual terror—a female slave imprisoned in the garret and beaten to death—is turned into a ghost story that then terrifies Legree: “it was said that oaths and cursings, and the sound of violent blows, used to ring through that old garret, and mingle with wailings and groans of despair” (565). As the transformation of event into legend makes clear, gothic devices terrify because of their relation to actuality. Legree’s superstition is not illusory; his fright is grounded in reality.

The writer acknowledges that the book is a very inadequate representation of slavery; and it is so, necessarily, for this reason—that slavery, in some of its workings, is too dreadful for the purposes of art. A work which should represent it strictly as it

The inclusion of Cassy’s gothic tale within the novel’s already gothicized plot shows the gothic operating on yet another level: it allows the objects of torture and terror to haunt back. In

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However, although Cassy’s ghost story shows that gothic effects are grounded in historical events, Stowe’s narrative tends to dematerialize those effects. Not only does her gothic tale demonize Cassy, turning her into a stock character, partly insane, with a supernatural laugh, but it also reminds the reader that the horror is not true, only a play. “At the time when all was matured for action,” the narrator interrupts, “our readers may, perhaps, like to look behind the scenes, and see the final coup d’etat” (571). By introducing Cassy’s machinations with this address to the reader, the narrative unveils itself as a fiction. We are not asked to identify with Legree and read Cassy’s effects as true; rather, we are shown behind the scenes to see the effect as merely that—an effect. Instead of being frightened by the ghost, we are made privy to Cassy’s plan to “play ghost for them” (574). Whereas Legree is terrified by Cassy’s effects, the reader is amused. By parodying the gothic, Stowe’s narrative undercuts its relation to actual incidents: “Authorities were somewhat divided,” Stowe writes at the beginning of chapter XLII, “as to the outward form of the spirit, owing to a custom quite prevalent among negroes,—and, for aught we know, among whites, too,—of invariably shutting the eyes, and covering up heads under blankets, petticoats, or whatever else might come in use for a shelter, on these occasions” (594). Here, Stowe spoofs the gothic to play the scene for laughs rather than fear. Blacks, and perhaps whites, are made to appear stupidly superstitious, a position the reader is implicitly instructed to avoid. Asked not to take the white

sheet too seriously, the reader is exempted from the horrors of history. Cassy’s effects have power over Legree, who sees them as true, but not over the reader, who is reminded that they are a fiction. Stowe’s deployment of the gothic in Uncle Tom’s Cabin demonstrates how the gothic can resurrect or dematerialize history by turning it into a fiction; the gothic might allow the objects of terror to haunt back, but it also offers its viewer an avenue of escape. This double-edged nature of the gothic is precisely what Jacobs negotiates in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. At the outset of her narrative, Jacobs articulates the problem of writing her life story: it is at once incredible and indescribable. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true. I have not exaggerated the wrongs inflicted by Slavery; on the contrary, my descriptions fall far short of the facts. I have concealed the names of places, and given persons fictitious names. I had no motive for secrecy on my own account, but I deemed it kind and considerate towards others to pursue this course. (1)

This opening address to the reader signals the intricate connections between fact and fiction in Jacobs’s narrative. The facts of Jacobs’s history are unspeakable, but once represented, even partially, they resemble fiction. Paradoxically, her narrative of slavery appears to be an effect even as it falls short of capturing slavery’s grim reality. Caught between exaggerated effect and unspeakable fact, Jacobs’s narrative must negotiate the two poles without collapsing them; her history must not be subsumed by the fictional conventions she uses to represent it. The canny revelation that she concealed the true names of places and people in her narrative suggests the narrative’s dual function: like the author’s pseudonym, Linda Brent, her narrative veils her history while appearing to unveil it. By highlighting her narrative’s fictionality and inadequacy as well as its truth, Jacobs signals the way it both reveals and conceals her unspeakable history.2 3 Lydia Maria Child seemingly disregards the difficulty of Jacobs’s narrative position when she writes: “This peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn. I do this for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul, that our ears are too delicate to listen to them” (4). Child assumes not only that

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order to escape the horrors of Legree’s house, Cassy directs her own ghost story, reviving the legend of the garret to enable her escape. Adding some special effects—she inserts the neck of an old bottle into the garret window to ensure the proper shrieks, leaves ghost stories around for Legree to read, and finally turns herself into a ghost with the requisite white sheet—Cassy uses the gothic’s terror effects to free herself from the imprisoning plot of slavery. The author of her own “Authentic Ghost Story,” as Stowe’s chapter heading informs us, Cassy appropriates the place of terror and imprisonment, the “weird and ghostly” garret—and turns it into a safe haven and the site of her liberation (564). As the haunter, Cassy may first roam the house freely and then escape it altogether. The gothic serves as a means of resistance in Cassy’s hands: by turning the horror of her own history into the source of her power, Cassy finds liberation in the very terror that has imprisoned her.

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withdrawing the veil is her responsibility but also that it is simple, however indelicate. Yet her metaphor of slavery as a monster reveals the veil to be multilayered. Beneath it is another veil: a metaphor of slavery rather than slavery itself. Even uncovered, the event is transcribed as another effect. In arguing that slavery’s wrongs are too foul for listeners’ delicate ears, Child echoes Stowe’s sentiments that slavery in all its dreadfulness is unreadable, or in this case unhearable. Child’s paradoxical point—that slavery’s horrors must be unveiled, yet once unveiled they might be too foul to be heard—suggests the difficult space within which Jacobs had to negotiate her narrative. Incidents, then, has to perform a play of veils. Jacobs’s manipulation of the gothic’s conventions is central to this performance. Like Stowe and Douglass, Jacobs understands and exploits the gothic’s conventionalized relationship to the scene of slavery in the antebellum period; she gothicizes slavery from the outset of her narrative by describing it as a “deep, and dark, and foul . . . pit of abominations” peopled by “fiends who bear the shape of men” (2, 27). However, like Douglass, she also resists the gothic’s romantic effects. In chapter 9, “Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders,” Jacobs recounts a series of horrifying punishments to reveal the “abominations of slavery”: slaves are bludgeoned, flogged, and burned to death (52). Like Stowe, she suggests how these actual events produce gothic narratives. The slavemaster’s fear of retribution prompts his belief in ghosts: “Murder was so common on his plantation that he feared to be alone after nightfall,” she says of Mr. Litch. “He might have believed in ghosts” (47). However, Jacobs insists, unlike Stowe, that the gothic’s effects are real: the bloodhounds “literally tore the flesh from his bones,” she states of one slave (47). The compilation of narratives in this chapter, which resembles the narrative techniques of antislavery tracts like Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is, produces a factual basis for these incredible horrors. Piling narrative upon narrative, Jacobs marshals a multitude of cases as evidence of slavery’s real terrors, proving the punishments to be a “general rule” rather than an exaggerated exception (50). Repetition rather than progression marks her narrative mode in this chapter, and indeed, her entire narrative. For instance, in comparing her easy fate in slavery to that of others, she writes: I was never cruelly over-worked; I was never lacerated with the whip from head to foot; I was never so beaten and bruised that I could not turn from one side to the other; I never had my heel-strings

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cut to prevent my running away; I was never chained to a log and forced to drag it about, while I toiled in the fields from morning till night; I was never branded with hot iron, or torn by bloodhounds. (115)

The parallel construction of her sentences as well as the proliferation of examples marks the way repetition functions to substantiate a single fact: slavery’s torture. However, Jacobs’s use of repetition also points to the inadequacy of narrative in reconstructing reality. No matter how many examples she recounts, she says, “I could tell of more slaveholders as cruel as those I have described” (49). Moreover, at the end of her list of examples Jacobs writes, “No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery” (51). Claiming the factual nature of slavery’s gothic horror even as she argues that an excess of examples still falls short of the fact, Jacobs at once narratively constructs the gothic event as actual and insists that it exceeds such representation. The narrative excess that the gothic event produces (in this case, the repetition) allows it to remain uncontained. While Child edits the chapter in order to contain its horrors and shield its reader—“I put the savage cruelties into one chapter, entitled ‘Neighboring Planters,’ in order that those who shrink from ‘supping upon horrors’ might omit them, without interrupting the thread of the story” (qtd. in Yellin 1987:xxii)—Jacobs refuses to quarantine the gothic to this chapter or to the South. Her use of repetition not only weaves this thread of her story throughout her narrative but also refuses her reader any escape from history’s horrors. Stowe allows readers to separate themselves from the frightening effects of the gothic by showing them behind the scenes, but Jacobs blocks the avenues of escape for her northern reader. From the title-page epigraph indicting the North for lack of effort in overthrowing slavery and her imaginative projection of the northern reader as a negro trader at the end of chapter 9, to her conditional freedom at the end of the narrative, Jacobs implicates the North in the horrors that she presents and curtails her readers’ ability to read her history as a romantic tale. Although Jacobs licenses her reader to view her narrative within certain gothic conventions— she recounts a typical female gothic plot when she portrays herself as an innocent maiden pursued by a lascivious villain, the “vile monster” Doctor Flint (27)—she also rewrites them, especially the gothic’s demonization and victimiza-

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While Jacobs exploits her position as the victim of a gothic plot, she also insists on her ability to haunt back. She portrays herself as both the victim of Dr. Flint’s deceptions and his competitor in cunning: “Being surrounded by mysteries, deceptions, and dangers,” Jacobs writes, slaves “early learn to be suspicious and watchful, and prematurely cautious and cunning” (155). Jacobs might represent herself as the unsuspecting maiden who, when Dr. Flint begins to people her “young mind with unclean images,” lets his signs “pass, as if [she] did not understand what he meant,” but she is actually out-manipulating him (27, 31). Refusing to react to his words, she evades the actual terror in which those verbal deceptions are meant to result—rape. By cloaking her strong reading of events as a seeming nonreading, Jacobs plays both helpless heroine and active combatant.2 5 By emphasizing her role as the victim of slavery’s imprisoning gothic plot even as she manipulates that plot, Jacobs appeals to and resists her readers’ conventional view of the slave as victim of monstrous evils. For instance, when she describes Dr. Flint’s plan to give her a home of her own and “make a lady” of her, she rewrites his sentimental story as a gothic plot: she “shudders” as she listens to his plan, realizing that the “secluded place” would imprison her in a “dreaded fate,” a “living death” (53). By revealing the gothic terror behind Dr. Flint’s sentimental smoke screen, Jacobs justifies her sexual fall. Her gothic scene not only underscores her role as helpless victim

but also sets the stage for her resistance: “I was determined that the master . . . should not . . . succeed at last in trampling his victim under his feet. I would do any thing, every thing, for the sake of defeating him,” she writes (53). As the innocent maiden unwillingly initiated into evil, the victim “struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery,” Jacobs mounts her defense (54). If the gothic monster has her in his grasp, then her manipulations of slavery’s evil plots are justified. Asking the reader to pity her and pardon her for taking Mr. Sands as a lover, she argues that she saw no other “way of escaping the doom [she] so much dreaded” (55). Jacobs’s ultimate escape plan highlights her revision of and resistance to the gothic’s conventions. Over the “living death” that awaits her in Dr. Flint’s secluded cottage, she chooses her own place of live burial when she imprisons herself in her grandmother’s garret (53). She describes her garret in gothic terms: it is a “dungeon,” a torture chamber, a prison, a grave (127). Indeed, her “dismal hole” resembles the “deep, and dark, and foul” pit of slavery (113, 2). Jacobs’s description symbolizes slavery’s extreme entrapment: “The garret was only nine feet long and seven wide. The highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was no admission for either light or air” (114). Jacobs’s refusal to sensationalize her garret—she describes it in a factual tone—reflects her general resistance to the gothic’s dematerializing effects. She might exploit gothic metaphors (for instance, she describes herself as a “poor captive in her dungeon” [133]), but she insists that they be taken as truth. Her address to the reader about her seven years of imprisonment in the garret emphasizes the truthfulness of her tale: I hardly expect that the reader will credit me, when I affirm that I lived in that little dismal hole, almost deprived of light and air, and with no space to move my limbs, for nearly seven years. But it is a fact; and to me a sad one, even now; for my body still suffers from the effects of that long imprisonment, to say nothing of my soul. Members of my family, now living in New York and Boston, can testify to the truth of what I say. (148)

The incredibleness of her revelation makes her assume her reader’s disbelief, so Jacobs authenticates her description of the extreme physical and psychological conditions of her imprisonment with the continued effects on her body and soul, to which her family can bear witness. By presenting herself and her family as factual evidence, Jacobs asserts her own materiality: she asks the

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tion of blacks.2 4 She might use Dr. Flint’s persecutions to emphasize her extreme vulnerability, but she also refuses to be imprisoned in the role of victim: “My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there” (28). By locating the gothic’s evil blackness in Dr. Flint’s dark shadow, Jacobs both emphasizes her persecution and reverses the gothic’s usual demonization: the master, not the black slave, is the source of horror and dread. Unlike Stowe’s Cassy, who embodies the demons of slavery—she tells Legree, “I’ve got the devil in me” (525)—Jacobs refuses to become a projection of the slavemaster’s villainy. By presenting herself as the innocent maiden attempting to flee the corruptions of slavery, Jacobs both gains the sympathy of her reader and resists being demonized.

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reader to credit her story by crediting her as a person rather than as a character. Moreover, in insisting that her staged death is not a performance from which she can walk away unscathed, Jacobs points to the costs of her conjuring. Cassy says to Tom, “I know no way but through the grave,” but Jacobs signifies against Stowe by actualizing that escape (562). Thus, Jacobs refuses to dematerialize the gothic event of slavery. Unlike Cassy, who can walk away from slavery dressed in a white sheet, Jacobs reminds the reader of the physical costs of her disappearing act. After her first live burial under the floorboards, she remarks, “the fright I had undergone, the constrained posture, and the dampness of the ground, made me ill for several days” (110); later, in her garret, she describes being tortured by dripping turpentine, excessive temperatures, and insects until her body becomes so crippled that it makes escape impossible. Jacobs also argues that the gothic’s ghostly effects are the result of actual events. When she reappears in the realm of the living, her friend Fanny declares, “Linda, can this be you? or is it your ghost?” (156). Figured as a specter returned from the dead, she resembles a gothic effect. However, as Jacobs’s earlier discussion of her brother’s figure suggests, a ghostly appearance is one of the physical effects of slavery: “long confinement had made his face too pale, his form too thin”; he looks “like a ghost” (23, 24). In Fanny and Brent’s exchange of their tales of terror and suffering, Jacobs underscores the events behind all gothic effects. When her son imagines her as the victim in a gothic story, “O mother! you ain’t dead, are you? They didn’t cut off your head at the plantation, did they,” Jacobs demonstrates how the supernatural is based in institutionalized threats of power (88). Benny has not made up this terrifying story but has learned it from his master’s threats: Dr. Flint says to him, “Get out of the way, you little damned rascal! If you don’t, I’ll cut off your head” (116). Jacobs refuses to spoof the gothic or undermine the reality behind its effects, and thus she mounts an implicit critique of Stowe’s gothic episode. Her garret stands in marked contrast to Cassy’s “great, desolate space” (564). Cassy’s attic serves as a new home, not a prison (she can roam the house at night and walk around the attic during the day, and she also reclaims the role of “true womanhood” there, becoming mother to Emmeline and making a home for them), but Jacobs’s garret is both a safe haven and a grave. Cassy is in “no danger” and can make any noise that she

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pleases since “it will only add to the effect,” but Jacobs states that she had to remain still and quiet for fear of being caught (576). Jacobs might depict herself as using her gothic location to combat slavery’s terrors—with “spying eyes and ventriloquist voice” she is able to out-manipulate Dr. Flint by disappearing and by projecting herself, through her letter-writing, up North—but she constantly reminds the reader what this costs her (Andrews 1986:259). She remains the object of terror and torture even as she haunts back. Jacobs’s refusal to exploit Stowe’s story overtly in this scene emphasizes her resistance to the gothic’s fictionalizing conventions. Jacobs authenticates her own incredible imprisonment with a narrative of horrifying fact rather than a fictional tale. Her description of her garret directly echoes her previous tale of a runaway slave who is punished by being whipped and then screwed into a cotton gin: “He was then put into the cotton gin, which was screwed down, only allowing him room to turn on his side when he could not lie on his back. . . . When the press was unscrewed, the dead body was found partly eaten by rats and vermin” (49). The cotton gin is like Jacobs’s dark hole, where she can only sleep on one side and has to endure rats and mice running over her bed; both the gin and Jacobs’s grave represent the torture chamber of slavery.2 6 Indeed, Jacobs’s use of repetition places her garret in a long line of imprisoning places—the cotton gin, the attic storeroom in her friend’s house, the shallow grave under the floorboards in her friend’s kitchen, the Snaky Swamp—enabling her to verify and generalize her scene of suffering. The garret is not an exceptional example of slavery’s horror but its typical representative. As Deborah Garfield argues, instead of letting Stowe narrow Jacobs’s experience to a single romantic event in Key, Jacobs insists on a broader context for the gothic horrors of slavery (284). Just as Jacobs refuses to restrict the gothic horrors of slavery to a single event or a single chapter (as Child would do), so too does she argue that they exceed the borders of the South. Through repetition, Jacobs demonstrates that her life in the North replicates her imprisonment and persecution in the gothic South.2 7 Instead of being a place of freedom, the North “aped the customs of slavery” (163).2 8 She describes it as a place of reimprisonment and persecution: not only is she pursued by her “Old Enemy Again” but she portrays herself as entrapped in another “reign of terror,” this time in the form of the Fugitive Slave Law (191). Upon arriving in the North, she claims

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Portraying herself as a victim of the terrors of the North, Jacobs exposes the North’s complicity in the South’s gothic plots. The North obeys southern laws when it buys people their freedom and returns runaways: “when victims make their escape from this wild beast of Slavery, northerners consent to act the part of bloodhounds, and hunt the poor fugitive back into his den” (35-36). Moreover, she specifically indicts northern readers for their voyeuristic pleasure in and appropriation of the slave’s suffering. Jacobs might end the book by presenting a portrait of the sympathetic northern reader in the form of Mrs. Bruce, but she begins the book by critiquing the voyeuristic reader in the person of Mrs. Flint, whose “nerves were so strong, that she could sit in her easy chair and see a woman whipped, till the blood trickled from every stroke of the lash” (12). Her opening also insists that reading about gothic horror is different from experiencing it: “Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations,” she states (2). When at the end of her narrative Jacobs argues that she is only as free from “the power of slaveholders as are the white people of the north,” which is “not saying a great deal,” she places the northern reader in the position of southern terrorist or imprisoned victim and allows no loophole out of the horrors of the nation’s history (201). Returning to New York from England, she writes that “from the distance spectres seemed to rise up on the shores of the United States. It is a sad feeling to be afraid

of one’s native country” (186). For Jacobs, the gothic shadows of slavery encompass the entire nation. Although Jacobs continues to be haunted by her “mournful past” in the North, she is able to haunt back by writing her narrative and by speaking the unspeakable about slavery (161). Jacobs describes it as the gothic horror that must be unveiled: “the secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition” (35). Throughout her narrative, Jacobs makes evident how a veil of silence supports slavery: it serves as the slavemaster’s single most important weapon in the battle of appearances. Jacobs emphasizes this point in chapter 9, “Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders.” The litany of terror and torture she recites here depends on the fact that “Nothing was said” (47); the cruelties pass “without comment” (46). Silence fuels and secures slavery’s reign of terror. Against the master’s powerful prohibition, Jacobs insists on speaking the unspeakable. From early on, she realizes the power of exposure.2 9 Even as a young girl, she understands that Dr. Flint’s hesitancy in whipping her stems from a fear that “the application of the lash might have led to remarks that would have exposed him” (35). Instead of exposing the marks on her flesh, as many ex-slaves did, Jacobs reveals the horrors of slavery through her pen: “Rise up, ye women that are at ease!” the title page announces, “Hear my voice, ye careless daughters! Give ear unto my speech.” In doing this, she reverses the position of terror. She is recording a litany of real-life horrors—from scalding drops of fat falling on bare skin and bloodhounds tearing the flesh from runaways, to whipping posts surrounded by pools of blood and slaves going insane—but in writing these horrors, she reclaims them for her own purpose: to haunt back by exposing the difference between slavery’s appearance and its reality. This rending of the veil, however, is not easy. Like most gothic texts, Jacobs’s narrative encodes the difficulty inherent in speaking the unspeakable. Her invocation to speech on her title page is balanced in both the preface and the appendix of her text with a desire for silence. Her text begins with her stating that “it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history” and ends with Post’s description of Jacobs’ reluctance to tell her story (1). The narrative frame both exhibits her resistance to exposing her painful history as a sentimental stance and registers the very real difficulty of representing such excessive horror and the pain involved in remembering it.

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that she barely has time to find a home before Dr. Flint comes looking for her: “Again I was to be torn from a comfortable home, and all my plans for the welfare of my children were to be frustrated by that demon Slavery!” she exclaims (180). Describing herself as constantly moving (she flees her home four times to evade her persecutors) and ever fearful (she never goes out “without trepidation” since Mr. Dodge, Dr. Flint’s surrogate, “might at that moment be waiting to pounce upon [her] if [she] ventured out of doors” [195, 196]), Jacobs depicts herself in a reactive position. No matter how many “double veils” and assumed names she takes on, she can never disappear or find a safe space (181). Dr. Flint’s renewed power over her is marked as so omnipotent that it not only extends upward from the South but also from beyond the grave. Even after he dies, Jacobs is not free from his curse, for his family, now destitute, is even more eager to regain its “property.” Jacobs, then, argues that the daylight world of the North resembles the nightmare world of the South.

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While the conclusion of Jacobs’s narrative appears to veil the horrors she has spent her narrative revealing in the cloak of sentiment, it remains haunted by her history: “it has been painful to me, in many ways, to recall the dreary years I passed in bondage. I would gladly forget them if I could. Yet the retrospection is not altogether without solace; for with those gloomy recollections come tender memories of my good old grandmother, like light, fleecy clouds floating over a dark and troubled sea” (201).3 0 The passage registers Jacobs’s desire to alleviate the pain of her horrific history with the healing salve of forgetfulness, but it also insists on the futility of this desire. Haunted by the shadows of her past and the continued oppression of her present, Jacobs cannot completely exorcise the demons of slavery; yet in bearing witness to them she haunts back.

Notes 1. Despite his historicizing of the African-American gothic, Wright continues to reinforce an ahistorical reading of Poe. My discussion of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which places race at the center of Poe’s gothicism, shows how Poe dealt with the racial hauntings of his own culture. Contrary to Wright’s statement, Poe need not be resurrected to be imagined in terms of race, for its horrors had already invented him. 2. Historical studies such as Trudier Harris’s Exorcising Blackness, with its accounts of ritualized violence against African Americans, or Neil McMillen’s Dark Journey, with its description of “Negro Barbeques,” reveal the horrors of African-American history. McMillen recounts a public burning where a crowd of a thousand watched while whites tortured their black victims, “chopp[ing] off their fingers and ears, one by one, goug[ing] their eyes until they ‘hung by a shred from the socket,’ and pulled ‘big pieces of raw, quivering flesh’ from their bodies with corkscrews” (234); Trudier Harris gives similar accounts of lynching and mob violence. In his introduction to American Slavery as It Is, Theodore Weld also records a litany of real-life horrors: “We will prove that the slaves in the United States are treated with barbarous inhumanity . . . that they are frequently flogged with terrible severity, have red pepper rubbed into their lacerated flesh, and hot brine, spirits of turpentine, & c, poured over the gashes to increase the torture; that they are often stripped naked, their backs and limbs cut with knives, bruised and mangled by scores and hundreds of blows with the paddle, and terribly torn by the claws of cats, drawn over them by their tormentors. . . . All these things and more, and worse, we shall prove” (9). See Stephen Browne’s “‘Like Gory Spectres’: Representing Evil in Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is” for an analysis of the modes of representation Weld uses to prove these horrors. 3. Indeed, as Edmund Morgan has shown in American Slavery, American Freedom, the marriage of slavery and freedom is America’s central paradox: the rise of the American republic and its requisite myths depended on the terrifying realities of slavery (4).

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4. Other critics have also noted connections between slavery and the gothic. Robert Hemenway argues that slavery is “an extreme form of Gothic entrapment” (“Gothic Sociology,” 113) and Joseph Bodziock claims that the slave narrative incorporates “the fundamental forms and values of the European gothic” (“Richard Wright and Afro-American Gothic,” 29). In Haiti, History, and the Gods, Joan Dayan insists on the integral connection between the gothic and slavery. Reading the Black Codes as a gothic text, Dayan argues that the supernatural fictions of the Americas are rooted in the natural histories of slavery (193). 5. See Paulson’s “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution” and Henderson’s “An Embarrassing Subject: Problems of Value and Identity in the Early Gothic Novel.” 6. See Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations (145-47) for a discussion of the gothic discourse used in response to the revolution in St. Domingue. 7. The rhetoric of monstrosity that permeates descriptions of Turner’s insurrection exemplifies Joan Dayan’s theory that whites externalized images of their own power—the “bodily tortures and incarnate terrors necessary to sustain the institution of slavery”—by projecting them onto their victims (Haiti, History, and the Gods, 247). 8. The abolitionist’s identification with/as the victim of slavery’s horrors is a common trope. See Nudelman for a discussion of the abolitionist’s sympathetic identification with the slave and their “tales of suffering witnessed rather than suffering endured” (“Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering,” 948). In American Slavery as It Is, C. C. Robin gives the following testimony after recounting a whipping scene: The reader is moved; so am I: my agitated hand refuses to trace the bloody picture, to recount how many times the piercing cry of pain has interrupted my silent occupations; how many times I have shuddered at the faces of those barbarous masters, where I saw inscribed the number of victims sacrificed to their ferocity. (59) The reader’s and writer’s pain and horror here subsume the slave’s terror, which is further displaced since it is visible only in the face of the master. By rendering the slave as victim, this passage raises a corresponding problem: abolitionist discourse not only appropriated the victim’s position but also tended to picture the slave as the victim of the gothic prison of slavery, thereby denying the slave agency or resistance. 9. The slave narrative’s fictional characteristics have been examined by a number of critics, most notably William Andrews. No longer seen merely as transparent transcriptions of history, slave narratives have come to be read as sophisticated autobiographical acts. Andrews argues that the genre is a “scene of a complex discursive encounter” (To Tell a Free Story, 2); his “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative” examines the genre’s relation to fiction. Carla Peterson also discusses the gradual shift from autobiography to novel in nineteenth-century AfricanAmerican writing, arguing that the “autobiographical narrative already contained within it subversive fictional techniques” (“Capitalism, Black (Under)-

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10. In “Letters to His old Master” in the appendix to My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass further emphasizes that the gothic horrors of slavery are not imaginative renderings but actual events: The grim horrors of slavery rise in all their ghastly terror before me; the wails of millions pierce my heart and chill my blood. I remember the chain, the gag, the bloody whip; the death-like gloom overshadowing the broken spirit of the fettered bondman; the appalling liability of his being torn away from wife and children, and sold like a beast in the market. Say not that this is a picture of fancy. You well know that I wear stripes on my back, inflicted by your direction. . . . All this, and more, you remember, and know to be perfectly true, not only of yourself, but of nearly all the slaveholders around you. (269) I will discuss Douglass’s use of gothic conventions while resisting their dematerializing effects at greater length in the body of this chapter, but it is crucial to note here how he refuses to reduce the gothic horrors of slavery to fancy. 11. This need to argue that the incredible facts of slavery are true also occurs in Weld’s American Slavery as It Is. Weld presents his documentary evidence in order to disprove the objection that “such cruelties are INCREDIBLE” (121). Arguing that the evidence is not the “exaggerations of fiction,” the text constantly reiterates that its statements, “incredible as [they] may seem” fall “short, very short of the truth” (61). 12. As many critics have noted, Douglass presents the reader with another common trope of slavery in this opening episode: the sexualized scene of whipping. Ronald Walters’s “The Erotic South” and The Antislavery Appeal argue that the antebellum discourse that gothicized slavery also eroticized it. Abolitionist discourse, he claims, pictured the evils of slavery in terms of corrupted femininity and the corrosive effects of unrestrained sexuality (The Antislavery Appeal, 111). Karen Halttunen takes this argument a step further by showing how the whipping scene eroticizes pain by turning the dreadful into the obscene, the sympathetic spectator into a sadistic voyeur (“Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture”). The sexual sensationalism of this scene has been criticized by several feminist critics including Franchot, “The Punishment of Esther”; McDowell, “In the First Place”; and Foster, “‘In Respect to Females.’” 13. Hortense Spillers argues that slavery is marked by its narrativity: slavery “remains one of the most textualized and discursive fields of practice that we could posit as a structure for attention” (“Changing the Letter,” 29). 14. As Gladys-Marie Fry shows in her study Night Riders in Black Folk History, the gothic has long been allied with reality in African-American history. During slavery and Reconstruction, the supernatural was used by

whites as a form of psychological control of African Americans. Whether it was a master designating haunted places or the Ku Klux Klan riding as ghosts through the night, the supernatural kept African Americans literally and figuratively in their place. African-American fear of the supernatural was based less on a belief in the master’s stage effects than on the institutionalized power that lay behind them (McWhiney and Simkins, “The Ghostly Legend of the Ku-Klux Klan”). As James Cameron points out in the compelling account of his own near-lynching in his memoir, A Time of Terror, African Americans grew up knowing that the hair-raising accounts of terror they heard were not figments of the imagination but daily realities. 15. Many of the reviewers of Beloved also seem uneasy affiliating Toni Morrison with the gothic: “To outline this story is to invite the very resistance I felt on first reading it,” writes one reviewer. “A specter returned to bedevil the living? A Gothic historical romance from Toni Morrison?” (Clemons, “The Ghosts of Sixty Million and More,” 74). Other reviewers use this seeming disjunction between serious writer and melodramatic form to attack Morrison. In his notorious review of the novel, Stanley Crouch uses a gothic metaphor to begin his assault: “the book’s beginning clanks out its themes” (“Aunt Medea,” 42). Carol Iannone claims Morrison’s use of the gothic marks her lack of seriousness: “The graphic descriptions of physical humiliation begin to grow sensationalistic, and the gradual unfolding of secret horror has an unmistakably Gothic dimension which soon comes to seem merely lurid, designed to arouse and entertain” (“Toni Morrison’s Career,” 63). All of these examples reveal how gothic has become a negative, demeaning term. Associated with the sensational, the formulaic, and the popular, the gothic is seen to lack seriousness of purpose and connection to actual experience. 16. This is perhaps the reason for the scant attention given to the African-American gothic within critical discourse. The work that has been done tends to focus on individual authors. For discussions of the AfricanAmerican gothic, see Joseph Bodziock, “Richard Wright and Afro-American Gothic”; Erik Curren, “Turning the Tables on the White Savage” and “Should Their Eyes Have Been Watching God?”; Louis Gross, Redefining the American Gothic; Theodore Gross, The Heroic Ideal in American Literature; Michel Fabré, “Black Cat and White Cat”; Robert Hemenway, “Gothic Sociology”; Keith Sandiford, “Gothic Intertextual Constructions in Linden Hills”; Mary Sisney, “The Power and Horror of Whiteness”; and Geraldine Smith-Wright, “In Spite of the Klan.” 17. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy warns of the dangers inherent in any project that attempts to reconstruct the interplay of black and white literary traditions. Counseling against any “easy resolution” or “short-term rapprochement” between the traditions that glosses over the “substantial drama of conflict in intercultural literary engagements,” Rushdy argues that “we need to seek out the deeper meanings of conflicts in literary history and not forget that it is the social order of our nation, with its fundamental material inequities, that defines and determines the sites of contestation where those conflicts occur in our national literature” (“Reading Black, White, and Gray in 1968,” 63).

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Development, and the Production of the AfricanAmerican Novel in the 1850s,” 563). Also see Barbara Foley (“History, Fiction, and the Ground Between” and Telling the Truth) for an examination of the representational strategies nineteenth-century AfricanAmerican authors used to authenticate their writing.

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18. See Jean Fagan Yellin, “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs’s Slave Narrative.” Yellin explains the confusion over Incidents’s literary status as follows: “It is no accident that many critics mistook Jacobs’s narrative for fiction. Its confessional account of sexual error and guilt, like the passages in which Linda Brent presents herself to be judged by her reader, link Incidents to a popular genre, the seduction novel” (Introduction to Incidents, xxix-xxx). The text’s relationship to fiction continues to be clarified. Jacqueline Goldsby and P. Gabrielle Foreman have both argued against reading Jacobs’s text in a purely factual way. Goldsby states that Incidents should be examined in terms of how “it engages and resists the closure implied by historical documentation” (“‘I Disguised My Hand’,” 15). Concerned with how the “implicit demands for referentiality” force critics to “interpret the principal script as if [Jacobs] had not loaded it with narrative explosions, with subversive scriptmines, so to speak,” Foreman critiques the “politics of transparency” that often informs readings of black women’s sentimental writing (“Manifest in Signs,” 77). 19. Because of its “novelization of her autobiographical voice,” as Claudia Tate describes it, Incidents is perhaps the slave narrative most often examined in terms of other literary traditions (Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, 26). P. Gabrielle Foreman, for instance, argues that Incidents “defies easy generic categorization” and that it “blurs the parameters of fiction and slave narrative” (“The Spoken and the Silenced,” 315). Incidents, however, is usually discussed only in terms of the sentimental tradition. Views on Incidents’s connection to sentimentalism range from early studies like Annette Niemtzow’s, which argues that the “domestic novel swallows Linda Brent’s voice” (“The Problematic of Self in Autobiography,” 105), and Raymond Hedin’s, which claims that Jacobs does not act “against the grain of sentimental fiction” (“Strategies of Form in the American Slave Narrative,” 28), to more recent perspectives—Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood; Doherty, “Harriet Jacobs’ Narrative Strategies”; Doriani, “Black Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century America”; Nelson, The Word in Black and White; Nudelman, “Harriet Jacobs”; Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty; Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority; Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire; Walter, “Surviving in the Garret”; Yellin, Introduction to Incidents; and others—that argue that Jacobs appropriates, revises, and elaborates the sentimental tradition. For an extended discussion of the parallels between Incidents and the gothic, see Kari Winter’s Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change. 20. See Yellin (Introduction to Incidents, xviii-xix) and Hedrick (Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, 248-49) for a fuller account of Jacobs’s relationship to Stowe. 21. Jacobs’s use of the term “loophole of retreat” has most often been traced to William Cowper’s poem “The Task” (see Yellin’s note to Jacobs’s chapter title in Incidents, 277). I suggest that Jacobs is also referencing Stowe in her title. In “Carnival Laughter,” Anne Bradford Warner also points to the connections between Stowe’s and Jacobs’s texts. She argues that Brent’s crippling discomfort in her garret “cannot help but comment on the gothic romance and trickery of Cassy’s escape episode in Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (224). Warner develops this connection further in her conference paper “No Key to Cassy: Jacobs Revises Stowe.” While our arguments intersect in illuminating ways, Warner is concerned more with Jacobs’s discomfort with the

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gothic mode and her resistance to the gothic’s eroticization. Also see Phyllis Cole, “Stowe, Jacobs, Wilson,” for a more general discussion of how Jacobs rewrites Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 22. See Karen Halttunen’s “Gothic Imagination and Social Reform: The Haunted Houses of Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe” for a study of the Stowe family’s use of the gothic in their various social critiques; and Diane Roberts’s The Myth of Aunt Jemima for a reading of Stowe’s use of the gothic in the novel. 23. The dual movement of Jacobs’s narrative, what Carla Peterson calls her “double discourse,” has been discussed in a variety of ways (“Capitalism, Black (Under)Development,” 565). See Braxton, “Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents”; Burnham, “Loopholes of Resistance”; and Foreman, “The Spoken and the Silenced” for readings of how the text uses concealment and revelation. 24. The narrative follows a typical female gothic plot. Jacobs, like so many earlier gothic and sentimental heroines, traces her initiation into a world of evil to the death of her mother. Only after the loss of this “shield” does she become self-conscious of her position as a slave: “When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave” (6). Jacobs is left even more vulnerable when at age twelve her mistress, who was “almost like a mother to [her],” also dies, leaving her without any protection from the sexual evils that accompany slavery (7). Jacobs’s dual initiation into the trials of slavery and maidenhood is made explicit in her relationship to her new master, Doctor Flint. Imprisoned in a plantation (read castle) that is cut off from the laws of the outside world, she finds herself at the mercy of a lascivious villain, her “persecutor,” Doctor Flint (35). She is saved in part, as she later remarks, by the proximity of the plantation to town and a surrogate protector, her grandmother: “If I had been on a remote plantation . . . I should not be a living woman at this day” (35). 25. See Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in African-American Narrative, for an extended discussion of the power of passivity in Incidents. 26. Mary Titus has a wonderful reading of the cotton gin: “The image encapsulates Jacobs’s argument, uniting in a single horrific image the slave, the verminous slaveholder who consumes him, and the central machine of the cotton economy” (“‘This Poisonous System’,” 203). 27. The clearest case of repetition is Jacobs’s description of her daughter Ellen. Not only does Ellen relive Brent’s plight when she has “vile language” poured into her ears by Mr. Thorne, but also, unlike her mother, she is defenseless against these words since she “scarcely knew her letters” (179, 166). Ellen’s position emphasizes Brent’s own powerlessness in the North. Unlike Stowe’s novel, which provides a happy ending for Cassy when she is magically reunited with both of her children, Jacobs’s text offers no such conclusion: Brent does not recognize her daughter when they are first reunited precisely because Ellen has deteriorated from neglect. It is through her daughter-double—who is more of a slave in the North, where her mother’s protection is ineffectual, than she ever was in the South, under her mother’s hidden protection—that Jacobs marks the North as the South’s double (165).

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29. This is not to say that silence is not an equally powerful weapon. Turning the tables and adapting the slave master’s tool, Jacobs, like many former slaves, used silence to protect those who helped her and to keep the master “in the dark.” See Valerie Smith, SelfDiscovery and Authority, and Braxton, “Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents” for further discussions of the gaps and silences in Jacobs’s text. 30. It is important to note that Child sentimentalized Jacob’s ending. As Bruce Mills points out in “Lydia Maria Child and the Endings to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Jacobs originally planned to end her narrative with a discussion of John Brown, which would have emphasized a gothic narrative of violent retribution. However, Child counseled her to end by focusing on her grandmother instead.

Works Cited Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de. Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie et dans l’état de New-York. 3 vols. Paris: Maradan, 1801. ———. Sketches of Eighteenth Century America: More “Letters from an American Farmer”. Edited by Henri L. Bourdin, Ralph H. Gabriel, and Stanley T. Williams. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925. ———. Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America. Edited by Albert E. Stone. New York: Penguin, 1986. ———. More Letters from the American Farmer. Edited by Dennis D. Moore. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Crouch, Stanley. “Aunt Medea.” The New Republic 197 (Oct. 19, 1987): 38-43. Cunliffe, Marcus. “Crèvecoeur Revisited.” Journal of American Studies 9 (1975): 129-44. Curren, Erik. “Turning the Tables on the White Savage: The African American Appropriation of Gothic Horror.” Paper presented at a conference on the American gothic, University of Montreal, Montreal, Canada, October 1994.

———. “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative.” PMLA 105 (1990): 23-34.

———. “Should Their Eyes Have Been Watching God?: Hurston’s Use of Religious Experience and Gothic Horror.” African-American Review 29 (1995): 17-25.

Barnes, Gilbert H. and Dwight L. Dumond, eds. Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké. Vol. 1, 1822-1844. New York: AppletonCentury, 1934.

Davis, Christina. “Interview with Toni Morrison.” Presence Africaine: Revue Culturelle du Monde Noir 145 (1988): 141-50.

Blassingame, John. “Critical Essays on Sources.” In The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. 1972; revised and enlarged edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Bodziock, Joseph. “Richard Wright and Afro-American Gothic.” In Richard Wright: Myths and Realities. Edited by C. James Trotman. New York: Garland, 1988.

Dayan, Joan. “Romance and Race.” In The Columbia History of the American Novel. Edited by Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. ———. “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies and Slaves.” American Literature 66 (1994): 239-73. ———. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Braxton, Joanne M. “Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: The Redefinition of the Slave Narrative Genre.” Massachusetts Review 27 (1986): 379-87.

Doherty, Thomas. “Harriet Jacobs’ Narrative Strategies: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Southern Literary Journal 19 (1986): 79-91.

Browne, Stephen. “‘Like Gory Spectres’: Representing Evil in Theodore Weld’s American Slavery As It Is.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 277-92.

Doriani, Beth Maclay. “Black Womanhood in NineteenthCentury America: Subversion and Self-Construction in Two Women’s Autobiographies.” American Quarterly 43 (1991): 199-222.

Burnham, Michelle. “Loopholes of Resistance: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative and the Critique of Agency in Foucault.” Arizona Quarterly 49 (1993): 53-73. Cameron, James. A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story. Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 1994. Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———. “The Canon: Civil War and Reconstruction.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989): 35-43. Child, Lydia Maria. “Stand from Under!” Massachusetts Daily Journal 24 Aug. 1829; reprint, The Liberator 28 Jan. 1832: 16. Clemons, Walter. “The Ghosts of Sixty Million and More.” Newsweek 110 (Sept. 28, 1987): 74-75. Cole, Phyllis. “Stowe, Jacobs, Wilson: White Plots and Black Counterplots.” In New Perspectives on Gender, Race, and Class in Society. Edited by Audrey T. McCluskey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Edited by Houston Baker. New York: Penguin, 1982. ———. My Bondage and My Freedom. Edited by William L. Andrews. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Fabré, Michel. “Black Cat and White Cat: Richard Wright’s Debt to Edgar Allan Poe.” Poe Studies 4 (1971): 17-19. Foley, Barbara. “History, Fiction, and the Ground Between: The Uses of the Documentary Mode in Black Literature.” PMLA 95 (1980): 389-403. ———. Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Foreman, P. Gabrielle. “The Spoken and the Silenced in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Our Nig.” Callaloo 13 (1990): 313-24. ———. “Manifest in Signs: The Politics of Sex and Representation in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” In Harriet

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28. Jacobs was keenly aware of the North’s complicity with slavery since her employer, Mr. Willis, was proslavery. See Yellin (Introduction to Incidents, xviii) for a discussion of Jacobs’s relationship to the Willises.

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Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Deborah M. Garfied and Rafia Zafar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Foster, Frances. “‘In Respect to Females’: Differences in the Portrayals of Women by Male and Female Narrators.” Black American Literature Forum 15 (1981): 66-70. Franchot, Jenny. “The Punishment of Esther: Frederick Douglass and the Construction of the Feminine.” In Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Edited by Eric J. Sundquist. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Fry, Gladys-Marie. Night Riders in Black Folk History. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975. Garfield, Deborah M. “Earwitness: Female Abolitionism, Sexuality, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” In Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

McDowell, Deborah E. “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American Narrative Tradition.” In Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass. Edited by William L. Andrews. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. McWhiney, H. Grady and Francis B. Simkins. “The Ghostly Legend of the Ku-Klux Klan.” In Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of AfroAmerican Folklore. Edited by Alan Dundes. New York: Garland Publishing, 1981. Mills, Bruce. “Lydia Maria Child and the Endings to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” American Literature 64 (1992): 255-72. Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. ———. “Five Years of Terror.” U.S. News and World Report 103 (Oct. 19, 1987): 75.

Goldsby, Jacqueline. “‘I Disguised My Hand’: Writing Versions of the Truth in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and John Jacobs’s ‘A True Tale of Slavery.’” In Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

———. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989):1-34.

Gross, Louis. Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland to The Day of the Dead. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989.

Nelson, Dana. The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature 1638-1867. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Gross, Theodore L. The Heroic Ideal in American Literature. New York: The Free Press, 1971.

Niemtzow, Annette. “The Problematic of Self in Autobiography: The Example of the Slave Narrative.” In The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory. Edited by John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner. Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1982.

Haltunnen, Karen. “Gothic Imagination and Social Reform: The Haunted House of Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.” In New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Edited by Eric Sundquist. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ———. “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture.” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 303-34.

———. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Nudelman, Franny. “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering.” English Literary History 59 (1992): 939-64. Paulson, Ronald. “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution.” ELH 48 (1981): 532-54.

Harris, Trudier. Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Peterson, Carla. “Capitalism, Black (Under)Development, and the Production of the African-American Novel in the 1850s.” American Literary History 4 (1992): 559-83.

Hedin, Raymond. “Strategies of Form in the American Slave Narrative.” In The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory. Edited by John Sekora and Darwin. T. Turner. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1982.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. In The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Volume 1, The Imaginary Voyages. Edited by Burton R. Pollin. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

Hemenway, Robert. “Gothic Sociology: Charles Chesnutt and the Gothic Mode.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 7 (1974): 101-19. Henderson, Andrea. “‘An Embarrassing Subject’: Problems of Value and Identity in the Early Gothic Novel.” In At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism. Edited by Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Waston. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Iannone, Carol. “Toni Morrison’s Career.” Commentary 84 (Dec. 1987): 59-63. Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

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Roberts, Diane. The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region. New York: Routledge, 1994. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “Reading Black, White, and Gray in 1968: The Origins of the Contemporary Narrativity of Slavery.” In Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies. Edited by Henry B. Wonham. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Sandiford, Keith. “Gothic Intertextual Constructions in Linden Hills.” In Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah. New York: Amistad Press, 1993.

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Sisney, Mary F. “The Power and Horror of Whiteness: Wright and Ellison Respond to Poe.” College Language Association 29 (1985): 82-90. Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in AfricanAmerican Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Smith-Wright, Geraldine. “In Spite of the Klan: Ghosts in the Fiction of Black Women Writers.” In Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women. Edited by Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Spillers, Hortense J. “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed.” In Slavery and the Literary Imagination. Edited by Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly. Edited by Ann Douglas. New York: Penguin, 1986. ———. The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1987. ———. Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Edited by Judie Newman. Halifax, England: Ryburn, 1992. Sundquist, Eric. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993. Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Titus, Mary. “‘This Poisonous System’: Social Ills, Bodily Ills, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” In Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Tragle, Henry Irving. The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Walter, Krista. “Surviving in the Garret: Harriet Jacobs and the Critique of Sentiment.” American Transcendental Quarterly 8 (1994): 189-210. Walters, Ronald G. “The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism.” American Quarterly 25 (1973): 176-201. ———. The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Warner, Anne Bradford. “Carnival Laughter: Resistance in Incidents.” In Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. “No Key to Cassy: Jacobs Rewrites Stowe.” Paper presented at the Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers in the Twenty-First Century Conference, Hartford, Connecticut, May 30-June 2, 1996. Weld, Theodore. American Slavery as It Is; Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. 1839. New York: Arno Press, 1968.

Winter, Kari J. Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 17901865. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper and Row, 1940. Yellin, Jean Fagan. “Written By Herself: Harriet Jacobs’s Slave Narrative.” American Literature 53 (1981): 479-86. ———. “Text and Context of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself.” The Slave’s Narrative. Edited by Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. ———. Introduction to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Young, Samuel. Tom Hanson, the Avenger. Pittsburgh: J. W. Cook, 1847. Ziff, Larzer, Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

TERESA DERRICKSON (ESSAY DATE MARCH 2001) SOURCE: Derrickson, Teresa. “Race and the Gothic Monster: The Xenophobic Impulse of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Taming a Tartar.’” American Transcendental Quarterly 15, no. 1 (March 2001): 43-58. In the following essay, Derrickson examines Alcott’s sensationalist short story “Taming a Tartar,” and asserts that “[b]y tracing the careful way in which the ‘monstrous’ nemesis of the narrative’s triumphant protagonist embodies nineteenth-century fears of racial degradation, this essay opens up new meaning in Alcott’s work and underscores the infiltrating power of the Gothic impetus.”

In her study entitled Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Judith Halberstam concludes her rereading of the Gothic monster by implicating more than just the horror genre in the veiled construction of social prejudice. Warning against the hegemonic impulse that runs deep in areas we fail to consider, she writes, “the violence of representation does not always lie in bloody scenes of carnage or in images of monstrosity. [It] more often works through well-meaning and sincere humanist texts that feel compelled to make the human into some earnest composite of white, bourgeois, Christian heterosexuality” (188). Halberstam’s subtle injunction against a complacent reading of seemingly “innocent” texts offers a useful point of entry into a range of literary works, including the quasi-Gothic tales of one nineteenth-century writer whose social rhetoric appears morally unassailable: Louisa May Alcott. Hailed as the purveyor of “moral pap for the young” (qtd. in Falcon v), this unassuming author of Little Women seems a most unlikely dissemina-

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Sands, R. C. “Domestic Literature.” The Atlantic Magazine 1 (1824): 130-39.

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strains of “social violence” in one of Alcott’s newly recovered tales, “Taming a Tartar.” Far from attempting to rewrite the reputation of a wellrespected writer, my objective in this paper is to offer a reading of this story that confirms the cultural function of the Gothic as stipulated in the work of Halberstam.1 By tracing the careful way in which the “monstrous” nemesis of the narrative’s triumphant protagonist embodies nineteenth-century fears of racial degradation, this essay opens up new meaning in Alcott’s work and underscores the infiltrating power of the Gothic impetus.

Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914.

tor of harmful ideology. It is not just her renown as a children’s writer that positions her as such, but her personal politics as well. As Sarah Elbert indicates in her introduction to a compilation of Alcott’s stories, Alcott was not only a feminist at a time when female passivity was the hallmark of womanly virtue, but she was also a staunch abolitionist and a vocal proponent of racial integration. Her ethical resume and its prominent inscription in her narrative fiction have thus understandably discouraged critics from engaging in a more rigorous analysis of her creative work. The recent discovery of a collection of sensational stories published anonymously and pseudonymously in two nineteenth-century periodicals has done little to change that. Indeed, many of the preliminary readings of these “lost” Gothic thrillers have focused primarily on the stories’ subversive potential, praising their explicit privileging of female power and racial heterogeneity (Stern, Double Life; Stern, Feminist Alcott; Keyser; Klimasmith). The overall assessment of these stories as “politically groundbreaking” is hardly disputable. And yet as Halberstam suggests in the passage quoted above, even the most unlikely narratives participate in discursive strategies of social violence—including, above all, the Gothic genre. Such an assertion begs a rereading of Alcott’s sensational fiction, and thus it is with some justification that I undertake to illuminate the

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Judith Halberstam’s historical trajectory of the Gothic influence in nineteenth and twentiethcentury narrative leads her to theorize counter claims about the political underpinnings of this trivial and “popular” genre. Not only does she locate the Gothic as the nexus of all nineteenthcentury literature—thereby reversing historical hierarchies that privilege the primacy of realism (2)—but she does so by positing a fundamentally different interpretation of the Gothic monster. For Halberstam, monstrous beings serve to symbolize cultural configurations, not psychic configurations (116-17). Instead of mapping the latent psychology of its presumed human antagonist, the Gothic monster, according to Halberstam, embodies a discourse of power and domination that undergirds nineteenth-century attitudes towards variations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This discourse manifests itself in the presentation of stigmatized flesh—the presentation of skin that bears the odious markings of “aberrant” social subjects. Vilified because of the skin they wear— and given the skin they wear because they are to be vilified—, these monsters thus constitute a complex system of cultural coding, one in which their bodies ultimately signify a fear of identities whose “difference” proves imminently threatening: Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century specifically used the body of the monster to produce race, class, gender, and sexuality within narratives about the relation between subjectivities and certain bodies. . . . The monster functions as monster . . . when it is able to condense as many [of these] fear-producing traits as possible into one body. (6, 20)

While Halberstam illustrates this reading by analyzing representations of “conventional” Gothic monsters, she also allows for a more dynamic concept of the monstrous by defining monstrosity as something that disrupts conventions of normalcy: “In its typical form, the Gothic

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Monsters and the Gothic fiction that creates them are . . . narrative technologies that produce the perfect figure for negative identity. Monsters have to be everything the human is not and, in producing the negative of human, these novels make way for the invention of human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual. (27)

Halberstam’s broadened definition of the Gothic monster as “impure” and “non-human” allows us to situate the domestic tyrant of Alcott’s “Taming a Tartar” within its meaningful parameters. Made terrible and menacing by the foreign blood (read “non-European” and non“EuroAmerican”) that colors his veins, Alcott’s antagonist assumes the skin of the nineteenthcentury Gothic monster, and in doing so both stabilizes and disrupts the ideologies of race and gender that undergird the text. “Taming a Tartar” is the first person narrative of a young British woman who quits her duties as a teacher to serve as a companion to an ailing Russian princess. Despite the pleasantries of her new employment, the protagonist, Sybil Varna, finds herself confronting challenges of an unrelated nature as she tries to determine how best to manage the notoriously explosive and tyrannical disposition of the princess’s halfbrother, Alexis. Through a series of violent domestic episodes, the two characters become locked in a virtual battle of the sexes, the strong-willed and virtuous Sybil vying for mastery over the family’s ruthless patriarch, and vice versa. Determined to “tame” Alexis into a gentle and civilized man, Sybil treats him with brutal indifference, even when—and especially when—events precipitate romantic feelings between the two. The story ends with the couple’s happy nuptials, but not before Sybil claims victory in conquering her “brave barbarian.” The most frequently cited reading of this thriller seizes upon the unconventionally explicit gender struggle between the two principal characters and concludes that the narrative’s political rhetoric speaks predominantly of female self-

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914)

Bierce’s literary reputation is based primarily on his short stories about the Civil War and the supernatural—a body of work that makes up a relatively small part of his total output. Often compared to the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, these stories share an attraction to death in its more bizarre forms, featuring depictions of mental deterioration, uncanny, otherworldly manifestations, and expressions of the horror of existence in a meaningless universe. Like Poe, Bierce professed to be mainly concerned with the artistry of his work, yet critics find him more intent on conveying his misanthropy and pessimism. In his lifetime Bierce was famous as a California journalist dedicated to exposing the truth as he understood it, irrespective of whose reputations were harmed by his attacks. Bierce’s major fiction was collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and Can Such Things Be? (1893). Many of these stories are realistic depictions of the author’s experiences in the Civil War, but critics and Bierce himself noted that despite their realism his stories often fail to supply sufficient verisimilitude. Bierce’s most striking fictional effects depend on an adept manipulation of the reader viewpoint: a bloody battlefield seen through the eyes of a deaf child in “Chickamauga,” the deceptive escape dreamed by a man about to be hanged in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” and the shifting perspectives of “The Death of Halpin Frayser.” Bierce’s narratives are characterized by a marked use of black humor, particularly in the ironic and hideous deaths his protagonists often suffer. The brutal satire Bierce employed in his journalism appears as plain brutality in his fiction, and critics have both condemned and praised his imagination, along with Poe’s, as among the most vicious and morbid in American literature. Bierce’s bare, economical style of supernatural horror is usually distinguished from the verbally lavish tales of Poe, and few critics rank Bierce as the equal of his predecessor.

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topos is the monstrous body a la Frankenstein, Dracula, Dorian Gray, Jekyll/Hyde; in its generic form, Gothic is the disruption of realism and of all generic purity” (11, emphasis added). Halberstam’s emphasis on “generic purity” as the antithesis of the monstrous—that is, as the primary quality against which all monsters take meaning— leads her to rearticulate the nineteenth-century Gothic monster as the objectified “other,” as the opposite of that which is pure, privileged, and in subject position:

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empowerment (Stern, Double Life; Stern, Feminist Alcott). While this interpretation is certainly valid, it in no way encompasses the full discursive import of the story. The title of the work makes this clear by subsuming issues of gender within issues of race—it is notably a “Tartar” to be tamed, not a man. We are thus made aware from the onset that there is much more to this tale than the exclusively feminist message critics have been quick to trumpet. Halberstam’s theory of the Gothic fills in much of what is unaccounted for in these interpretive gaps by allowing us to trace the racist discourse in this story and read such discourse as a “technology” that fixes Alexis as the monstrous Other. Before examining how this occurs, it is worth noting that Alcott indeed was writing during a time when the word “race” had already come to be constructed in its modern-day sense. As Colette Guillaumin has explained, “race” was originally a word used by the European aristocracy to refer to members of a privileged family line, a meaning that served an explicitly legal function and therefore was altogether devoid of genetic implications (33-57). By the early nineteenth century, however, the semantic field surrounding the word had changed considerably, and race” came to take on the biological assumptions that inform its meaning today (Guillaumin 55). The United States was not exempt from this new denotation. As Thomas Gossett observes in his book entitled Race: The History of an Idea in America, racist ideologies took hold in nineteenthcentury America as anthropologists and other social scientists heightened their search for measurable ways to classify peoples of different colors and origins (54-83). Their “definitive” conclusions made it appropriate and “natural” to associate behavioral characteristics with subsets of the population who were either visibly different from the white mainstream (e.g., “Negros” and “Indians”) or who hailed from different socio-political regions of the world (e.g., the Italians were thought to constitute their own race, as were the Germans and the French, etc.) (201). In short, as Gossett observes, “nineteenth[-]century [America] was obsessed with the idea that it was race which explained the character of peoples” (244). Despite her strong personal convictions against slavery and her “bold” fictional representations of interracial couples, Alcott herself certainly would have been influenced by nineteenthcentury racial theories. Her own father, for example, was a strong believer in the idea that temperament and character were a function of

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biology (Elbert xv-xvi). Alcott internalized this notion at least in part, interpreting her own dark complexion and dark features to signify that she herself was naturally inferior to her fair-skinned, younger sister, May (Elbert xvi). As Elbert concludes from this behavior, Alcott was indeed a product of her times in terms of how she conceptualized race: “Alcott’s notions of race were shaped by daily family interactions as surely as they were by the larger cultural discourses” (xvi). These discourses surface immediately in Alcott’s “Taming a Tartar.” Within the first few pages of the story, for example, we learn from Sybil’s confidant that Russians “are but savages,” an uncivilized people whose status as “barbarians” cannot be changed by “all their money, splendor, and the polish [of] Paris” (198). This characterization applies even more so to Alexis, whose fullblooded Russian make-up earns him a more infamous description: Paris is wild for him, as for some magnificent savage beast. Madame la Comtesse Millefleur declared that she never knew whether he would fall at her feet, or annihilate her, so impetuous were his moods. At one moment showing all the complaisance and elegance of a born Parisian, the next terrifying the beholders by some outburst of savage wrath, some betrayal of the Tartar blood that is in him. Ah! it is incredible how such things amaze one. (199)

Several aspects of this passage are significant in revealing the precise characterization of Alexis’ “monstrosity.” His depiction as a “savage beast,” a “terrifying” creature given to “outbursts of savage wrath” situates him well within the realm of both the hostile and the “nonhuman,” which are equated here as one. The reactions of the Parisian onlookers confirm his status as such, betraying a patronizing fascination for the marked strangeness of one so ostensibly unlike themselves. The most significant aspect of this description, however, comes in the final claim of the narrative in which the speaker instinctively pronounces Alexis’ behavior to be “some betrayal of the Tartar blood that is in him.” In making such an assertion, Sybil’s confidant parrots the racial prejudice of her day, conflating the distinction between the prince’s debased behavior and his race, and thereby contributing to a more global discourse that connects blood, depravity, and ethnic essentialism with western racial domination. Foucault’s theory of sexuality supports this reading by indicating that blood defined the battleground in which Victorian England carried out and rendered justifiable its eugenic and

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. . . [A]s the nation expanded to become an empire, as Englishmen left the country to go to the colonies, and as a flood of immigrants entered England from Eastern Europe and Russia, national identity came increasingly to depend upon race rather than place. . . . As racethinking gave way to full-fledged racism towards the turn of the century, the body became the setting for a drama of blood. (80, 78)

This “drama of blood” plays itself out, Halberstam continues to argue, not only in historical accounts, but in the narrative fiction of Victorian literature as well, where the symbolics of blood and the political rhetoric informing it become fully inscribed in the Gothic text: “The reemergence of Gothic monstrosity at the end of the century coincides suggestively with the Gothic interdisciplinary interest in the racial body; indeed, by the turn of the century, the Gothic horror novel . . . became a privileged site in the representations of potential dangers of racial decline” (79). By linking Gothic monstrosity with “racial bodies” and the “dangers of racial decline,” Halberstam throws new light on the political rhetoric of Alcott’s work and renders all the more meaningful those passages that serve to underscore Alexis’ monstrous difference. That such difference is in fact inextricably connected to race is made explicit not only in the opening passages previously quoted, but in numerous other places in the story as well. Indeed, racial blood imbues this text, coloring its characters in ways that paint clear demarcations between those of moral rectitude and those of moral depravity, those intrinsically civil and those hopelessly rapacious. Such is the case with respect to the two main characters in particular, whose physical descriptions turn on a telling of blood that instructs us not only in the respective natures of their persons but also in how we are to respond to them. Sybil’s self-description reads, in part, “The long mirror showed me a slender, wellmolded figure, and a pale face—not beautiful, but expressive, for the sharply cut, somewhat haughty

features betrayed good blood, spirit and strength” (200). In contrast, the prince bears a different though somewhat parallel description: The costume suited the face; swarthy, black-eyed, scarlet-lipped, heavy-browed and beardless, except a thick mustache. . . . A strange face, for even in repose the indescribable difference of race was visible; the contour of the head, molding of features, hue of hair and skin, even the attitude, all betrayed a trace of the savage strength and spirit of one in whose veins flowed the blood of men reared in tents, and born to lead wild lives in a wild land. (201)

Of particular note in these two portraits is the collapsed distinction between inside and outside: that which is beneath the surface of the skin appears visible on/in the skin itself so that blood and skin become both signifiers and signifieds of each other and racial identity is made manifest— literally embodied—in each person. Sybil’s “good blood,” for example, betrays her “pale face”—and vice versa—in the same way that Alexis’ “swarthy” face and “[dark] hue of hair and skin” betray his own foreign heritage. That his race, however, is inferior to hers is expressed in the phrase “good blood,” a rhetorical strategy that connects Sybil’s western-European descent with “goodness” and racial superiority, and therefore, by contrast, Alexis’ eastern-European descent with the undesirable inverse. Although not explicitly expressed in this passage, Alexis’ blood does indeed account for an aspect that renders him monstrous. Alcott’s use of the word “indescribable” in detailing his portrait connects him to a legacy of Gothic antagonists (e.g., Frankenstein, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde) whose monstrosity lies in their inscrutable physicality and in their “terrible” race. Alexis is constructed as essentially threatening in other ways as well, perhaps most succinctly through the description of his sister, a woman whose gentle and refined behavior contrasts so drastically with the violent disposition of her brother that Madame Bayard is forced to explain, “[the princess] is not of the same blood. She is a half-sister; her mother was a Frenchwoman” (199). In this instance, not only is blood again connected to outward behavior (i.e., the princess’s controlled countenance is accounted for by her French heritage), but pure foreign blood is implicitly connected to human degeneracy. No other motif in the story constructs Alexis as so monstrously “other” than this very suggestion that he is inhuman. A series of figures in the text defines him as such, including, perhaps most powerfully, Sybil’s careful painting of his likeness,

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imperialist projects: “Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth-century, the thematics of blood was sometimes called on to lend its entire historical weight toward revitalizing the type of political power that was exercised through the devices of sexuality” (Foucault 149). Just as Foucault argues in this passage that a “thematics of blood” was invoked to justify technologies of sexuality and the regimes of power they served, so too does Halberstam argue that blood functioned as a rhetorical device for reaffirming British “superiority”:

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a painting that features his dress in painstaking detail but exhibits a “blank spot where his . . . face should have been” (220). Though we are told that she will complete the picture in time, the temporary omission of his head is nevertheless visually symbolic of the human element that he is so explicitly denied. Other places in the text underscore this point. Madame Bayard’s initial description of the prince, for example, details him as a “magnificent savage beast” (199), a phrase that places an emphasis on his distinctly animallike character. Her term is not only repeated verbatim elsewhere in the story (212), but it is also one that is widely expressed metaphorically as well, such as in Sybil’s observation that Alexis is a “handsome savage [that] chafe[s] and fret[s] behind the bars of civilized society” (222) not unlike a caged animal, and in the episode in which the prince manhandles a pair of wild horses with an ease that betrays his own bestial impulse (225). Alexis’ explicit construction as animal-like thus dominates the racial discourse that subtends his monstrosity. Not unlike the fearful doubling of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, Alcott’s Russian prince plays host to a negative, animalistic identity that erupts intermittently, exposing the feral blood of his ancestry and thus giving reason for his own truculence. The explosive scene in which Sybil tries to prevent the prince from whipping his dog illustrates this darker aspect: The prince followed, whip in hand, evidently in one of the fits of passion which terrified the household. I had seen many demonstrations of wrath, but never anything like that, for he seemed literally beside himself. Pale as death, with eyes full of savage fire, teeth set, and hair bristling like that of an enraged animal, he stood fiercely glaring at me. . . . I saw he was on the point of losing all control of himself. . . . (209)

In this passage, Alexis’ skin, eyes, teeth, and hair betray his transformation into the Gothic monster of so much Victorian fiction. Of particular note here is the physical aspect of his altered state, the fact that his madness marks itself upon the body in a way that once again reinforces the connection between “aberrant” race and spiritual malevolence. Alcott later writes, for example, that as Sybil tries to reason with him, “[the prince’s] black brow lowered, and the thunderbolt veins on his forehead darkened again with the angry blood, not yet restored to quietude” (211). In this instance, the reference to “angry blood” makes explicit the cause of Alexis’ transformation and therefore condemns him with the suggestion that this “evil side” constitutes his natural essence, an

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essence that can be temporarily controlled by civilizing forces on the outside, but never fully contained. The conclusion of the episode makes this clear by indicating that the becalmed Alexis has no memory of what has occurred. According to the text, he “shiver[s] as if recovering from a swoon” and then demands of Sybil, “Did I strike you?” (210). His monstrous state is thus characterized by a complete loss of control, a complete usurpation of his rational, human-like qualities. The princess informs us of this fact of his nature in a later passage in which she explains to Sybil, “When in these mad fits he knows not what he does; he killed a man once, a servant, who angered him, struck him dead with a blow. He suffered much remorse, and for a long time was an angel; but the wild blood cannot be controlled, and he is the victim of his passion” (213). The assertion in this excerpt that “the wild blood cannot be controlled” and that “he knows not what he does” renders Alexis, much like his British Gothic corollaries, a sympathetic but ultimately unredeemable character. Such is the paradox that governs his own construction as a monster, for unlike his more infamous colleagues, his foreign blood neither destroys him nor casts him out of society. Instead, he is allowed to live, but only after a series of choreographed incidents in which he is wounded with a bullet and made to spill his Tartar blood. Race thus never ceases to be an issue in this monster’s fate, for at the same time that Alexis is praised for a new moral fortitude emboldened by love, his body is figuratively transformed through more brutal means, bleeding him of the mark of race, the mark of biological degeneracy that situated him as morally corrupt to begin with. It is this corporeal reconfiguration that qualifies as the most formidable prerequisite in ultimately fashioning him as a “new being” (245). Only in this “refined” condition is he able to engage in a union with his English nemesis, Sybil. The text thus ends on a decidedly dubious note. Alexis is saved, but only under conditions that ultimately re-inscribe his Russian depravity. A reading of this tale through Halberstam’s reconceptualization of Gothic monstrosity thus complicates the political meaning of the work. Just as the text is ambiguous as to how race is finally treated (is Alexis’ recuperation ultimately xenophobic or not?), the text is equally indeterminate as to its statement on women. A strictly feminist interpretation of the story—particularly those of the brand suggested in preliminary discussions of Alcott’s sensational thrillers—becomes problem-

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In order to examine how this reading might occur, it is necessary to reconsider the ways in which this story operates as a tale of female empowerment. One argument can be stated quite succinctly by situating this text within Kate Ellis’s subgenre of the female Gothic. According to Ellis, women’s Gothic comprises a set of conventions in which “the heroine exposes the villain’s usurpation [of the home] and thus reclaims an enclosed space that should have been a refuge from evil but has become the very opposite, a prison” (xiii). That Alcott’s text dramatizes this very theme is patently evident. Alexis’ despotic rule over the home turns the domestic sphere into a place of terror, a place that threatens the safety of women not from without, but from within. Sybil’s ultimate triumph over his tyranny not only disrupts ideological conceptions of nineteenth-century womanhood—indeed the last line of the story has the protagonist asserting that she will “Not obey” her new husband (252)—but it also situates this text, as Ellis would argue, as a “site of female resistance,” a site that subverts male power by implicitly attacking the Victorian arrangement whereby men seek to confine women to the supposedly “safe haven” of the home (xvi). Although this interpretation is certainly valid, Alcott’s text can also be read from a different perspective, one in which the narrative is viewed not as a groundbreaking work at all, but as a story that upholds the status quo, reinforcing nineteenth-century power paradigms and the ideologies on which they are based. Treating this work as a discursive strategy that concentrates western racism in the monstrous “other” allows us to see this alternative meaning. In short, Sybil’s attempts to subdue, control, and “tame” the wild aspect of Alexis’ racial blood betray her collusion in regimes of power that work to “subdue” her own area of influence as well. Ellis’s Contested Castle offers a point of entry for this reading. In her study, Ellis argues that the increased productivity of the industrial revolution and the increased corruption of middle-class morality it invariably gave rise to called for a new definition of womanhood. This definition enacted a type of “unsupervised control” over women by restricting “the weaker sex” to spaces within the

home and charging them with the responsibility of serving as the moral and spiritual guardians of a society on the edge of ruin (3-19). By fixing women’s role as the nation’s spiritual redeemer, nineteenth-century England solved one important problem. As Ellis writes, “If women focus[ed] all their attention on ameliorating the lot of those with whom they are in contact, . . . then the dangerous consequences of their freedom from physical or gainful labor w[ould] not appear” (1213). Sybil Varna performs this role precisely as it has been scripted for her, concentrating her efforts throughout the text on “ameliorating the lot” of Alexis’ debased nature. No passage makes this more explicit than Alexis’ own supplication for moral guidance. Reacting to Sybil’s critique of him as a “tyrant” and a “madman,” the prince meekly pleads, “One dares to tell me [of my faults], and I thank her. Will she then add to the obligation by teaching me to cure them? . . . Sybil, you can help me; you possess a courage and power to tame my wild temper, my headstrong will. In heaven’s name I ask you to do it, that I may be worthy of a good woman’s love” (242). This passage constructs Sybil as a paragon of Victorian femininity. Not only does it infuse her with the “power and courage” associated with women’s moralizing function, but its explicit invocation of “heaven” imbues such function with divine sanction and makes Alexis’ “conversion”—and thus Sybil’s own role as a moralizing influence—all the more imperative. That Sybil does in fact assume such a role is reflected in two later incidents in which her intervention in one of Alexis’ outbursts earns her the following praise from the servant who was spared: “[I]t is you I thank, good angel of the house” (246). Alexis makes a similar comment only pages later, addressing Sybil with the parting words, “Always our good angel. Adieu, Sybil. I submit” (250). Both references to Sybil as the Victorian “angel of the house” make explicit her interpolation in ideologies that construct her according to the will of white patriarchy. Nina Auerbach’s discussion of the iconoclastic power of “woman as angel” in Victorian society suggests some of the strictures that her construction as such imposes: [T]he Victorian angel in the house seems a bizarre object of worship, both in her virtuous femininity and its inherent limitations—she can exist only within families, when masculine angels can exist elsewhere—and in the immobilization the phrase suggests. In contrast to her swooping ancestors, the angel in the house is a violent paradox with

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atic not only because it fails to account for the racial discourse that pervades the narrative, but because it also fails to account for the possibility that the same racial discourse might minimize the subversive potential of the story’s otherwise blatant critique of women’s role in Victorian society.

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overtones of benediction and captivity. Angelic motion had once known no boundaries; the Victorian angel is defined by her boundaries. (71-72)

Auerbach’s emphasis on the Victorian angel’s sphere as one characterized by “limitation,” “immobilization,” and “captivity” speaks powerfully against a reading of this text that would attempt to stabilize meaning in the seemingly subversive potential of the story’s emboldened heroine. Halberstam’s conception of Gothic monstrosity makes this more explicit by recasting Alcott’s Russian prince not as a mere man of tyrannical impulse, but as a racial body that concentrates fears of foreign infiltration in the “wild blood” of his “deviant” ancestry. By reading Alexis as the embodiment of nineteenth-century xenophobic discourse, we can in turn see Sybil’s role as the conquering “angel of the house” in a completely different light. Her efforts, for example, to see the prince “thoroughly subdued” (244) cause us to focus not on the power that this woman so ostensibly commands, but on the machinery of white male control that lurks visibly beneath her moralizing influence. For if the impulse to civilize is so inextricably connected to a symbolics of blood, then the execution of that civilizing gesture becomes an act of patriarchy, an act that reinstates both the cage in which Alexis “chafes and frets” as well as the “cage” in which the angel of the house does the same. It is thus not without considerable significance that the final scene of the narrative has Sybil boasting to Alexis, “Come with me to England, that I may show my countrymen the brave barbarian I have tamed” (252). Sybil’s expressed desire to showcase her handiwork to an audience that all but requisitioned it to begin with could hardly be made more distinct, nor could the corresponding suggestion that her actions play right into the hands of the same men who keep her appropriately “subdued” as well. Sybil’s civilizing influence over Alexis thus renders her an instrument of white male power—a co-conspirator, if you will, of institutional forces that subjugate women. Lora Romero confirms this reading in her study on the politics of antebellum domesticity, observing that “Although thinking of women as the living gospel for men gives women a certain authority, it also defines them in terms of men’s needs . . . threaten[ing] to reduce women to little more than vessels for male salvation” (22). Sybil dutifully functions as this “vessel for male salvation,” and yet her behavior as such only complicates critical readings of Alcott’s story as a feminist text; it does not dismiss them. Indeed

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as Romero points out, nineteenth-century domestic fiction rarely lends itself to a single statement about the proper role of women in the home. On the contrary, such works routinely express both a genuine resistance to domestic ideologies at the same time that they reinstate those ideologies through other dynamics in the text (19-24). Such is the case in Alcott’s story, for it is more than evident that while Sybil may indeed reinforce structures of power that ultimately fashion her as a mere “vessel for male salvation,” she is also, undeniably, an extremely strong female character, one whose independence and whose considerable command in controlling her own affairs pose a challenge to patriarchal conceptions of womanhood. This fact is made evident through the striking juxtaposition that occurs between Sybil and the only other principal female character in the text: Alexis’ sister, the princess. The princess is defined not only by her fragile constitution, but also by her persistent dependence on others. Her confinement within the home speaks convincingly of the impotence that characterizes her pathetic existence. As Sybil herself comments about the girl upon first meeting her, “[she] was one of the clinging, confiding women who must lean on some one[;] I soon felt that protective fondness which one cannot help feeling for the weak, the sick, and the unhappy” (206). Sybil is the virtual antithesis of this portrait of female passivity. Far from being “clingy” and “weak,” Alcott’s protagonist is described to us as “fond of experiences and adventures, self-reliant and self-possessed” (199-200). Most notably, however, Sybil commands a strength of character that allows her to confront the abusive Alexis at times when all others cower and capitulate. Such a quality is by far the outstanding feature of her person and one readily highlighted in several places throughout the text. The much weaker princess, for example, often enlists Sybil to fight her battles with her brother for her, the younger woman understanding that “[Sybil] can plead for me as I cannot plead for myself” (208). Other characters also depend on Sybil’s advocacy to shield them from Alexis’ wrath. In a previously noted incident, even the family dog, suffering the blows of his master’s boot for disobeying a command, is rescued by Sybil’s assertive and timely interference. In this specific case, however, Sybil is not satisfied simply to interrupt the injustice she sees, but instead, in an unusual act of female selfassertion, she demands that Alexis not only cease his brutal behavior but also yield his will to hers by admitting his wrongdoing. As Sybil reveals to

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As this passage suggests, Sybil is indeed unwilling to assume the role of the “weaker” sex. On the contrary, she admittedly seeks to usurp the power of the master of the house and to “conquer his will” for her own gain. This same motive is apparent in a much later exchange between two rivals, one in which Sybil demands to be allowed to leave Alexis’ country estate and return to St. Petersburg without him. As she so emphatically demands, “I wish to be free. You have promised to obey; yield your will to mine and let me go” (247). Like the previous passage, the assertion in this excerpt is a direct assault on the traditional patriarchal arrangement of domestic power. Sybil not only calls for a new kind of domesticity, one in which she will be allowed to come and go as she pleases (i.e., “to be free,” as she says), but she also insists on a radically new relationship between herself and her male “superior,” demanding that the latter obediently subordinate his own interests to hers—his own interests, that is, to those of a woman. Both of these scenes thus express a new vision for female selfhood. It is this vision and its ultimate realization by the end of the story that scholars have seized upon to characterize Alcott’s work as progressively feminist. Halberstam’s theory of the Gothic does not unsettle this reading; however, it does complicate it in important ways. Specifically, her argument that the Gothic tradition is rooted in a discourse that asserts the seeming primacy of white, European peoples makes visible the politics of racism that underwrite the kind of feminist power explicit in Alcott’s text. The anti-patriarchal impulse of this story is inextricably connected to—and in fact supported by—its much more subtle yet equally significant racist impulse. Again Romero offers support for this reading, this time by observing that dynamics of gender and dynamics of race can cross in ways that produce unexpected results in terms of their collective effect on dominant ways of thinking (i.e., whether they subvert or reinforce that thinking). Gender and race are, she maintains, “competing and intersecting determinates of ideological subscription/transcendence” (19). The implications of this fact for Alcott’s work is that the story’s feminist inclinations do not preclude the possibility that the story might also support less-than-progressive views on other is-

sues—views, for example, that reinstate racial stereotypes and racial bigotry. My argument here is that this possibility approximates the microdynamics at play in Alcott’s work: that is, the feminist discourse of Alcott’s “Taming a Tartar” is deeply implicated in the racist discourse that constructs Alexis as the depraved Other. This complex intersection of competing interests is easily traced in scenes where Sybil asserts her will over Alexis’. In all such incidents, the struggle for power that occurs is explicitly written as one that involves not only a woman pitted against a man, but also a person of “good blood” pitted against a person of “bad blood.” This latter fact is significant, for Sybil’s triumph in these scenes is one that necessarily reaffirms the notion that Alexis is by nature—by virtue of his biology— morally inferior. Such a result would not be the outcome if the story did not make an issue of Alexis’ race in the way that it so carefully does. That is, the form of racism associated with these scenes does not precipitate from the mere fact that Sybil is European while Alexis is not. Instead, it precipitates from the text’s own rhetoric, which repeatedly reminds the reader that Alexis’ tyrannical behavior is grounded in his racial makeup and that Alexis’ reluctant but eventual submission is an appropriate affirmation of Sybil’s inherently superior “bloodline.” The gains Sybil realizes as a woman are therefore achieved at the expense of Alexis’ dignity as a human being: each gesture of selfhood on her part serves to underscore or remind us of the “inhuman” nature of his fiendish character. The eventual union of the two rivals does little to change this dynamic, for even their courtship is encoded with subtleties that reaffirm the racial politics so apparent in the first part of the text. Of particular note is the way in which Sybil repeatedly “apologizes” for her new affections for Alexis. Rather than openly confessing that her feelings for him are wellfounded and justifiable, Alcott’s protagonist makes veiled excuses to the reader for this unexpected preference, insinuating that her partiality is either the product of a fluke, irrational impulse that is undeniably negative in nature, or that such partiality is not genuine at all and is simply part of an act of charity that must be dutifully carried out. Sybil is “forced” to confess, for example, that she misses the prince when he is away (223, emphasis added). We are also informed that her heart is “rebellious” for harboring presumably unwelcome and impermissible feelings for him (233). And finally, we learn that her eventual marriage to him is not at all an act of deliberate

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us, “I was bent on having my own way and making him submit as a penance for his . . . menace. Once conquer his will, in no matter how slight a degree, and I had gained a power possessed by no other person” (211).

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choice, but a forced concession made to a dying man: “While life and death still fought for [Alexis], I yielded to his prayer to become his wife. . . . In my remorse I would have granted anything . . .” (251). What is significant about these instances is that they effectively reinforce the social stigma associated with Alexis’ foreign heritage by suggesting that no proper woman in her right mind would marry a man of such dubious racial ancestry without being coerced. And so while the final pages of the story appear to deliver a surprising reversal in terms of how we are to respond to Alexis as a character, the micropolitics of the text would suggest something quite different. Halberstam’s theory of the Gothic ultimately allows us to see this disparity. By reading the Gothic monster as a social construct that voices anxiety over racial infiltration and racial “decline,” we are able to unveil the racist ideologies that undergird the systems of power operating in the work—systems of power that vilify and dehumanize signs of genetic and national difference, and systems of power that work to assert a more meaningful role for women within the home. The irony implicit in this final reading is that Alcott does indeed go out of her way to make a very specific statement against racism in her work. The last page of her story focuses not on the marriage of the two major characters but on Sybil’s insistence that her new husband free the serfs who labor “through force [and] fear” on his property (252). This seemingly trivial exchange says far more than it appears to on the surface, for it functions as a clear indictment of slavery, an indictment of an institution that justifies itself on the false belief that peoples of different colors and different geographic regions are not only inferior to those of English descent, but essentially subhuman as well. It is a troubling testament to the power of nineteenth-century racist ideology that Alcott fails to see how carefully she reinstates racist thinking on the one hand while ostensibly repudiating it on the other. Part of the function of the Gothic monster is that it makes visible this incongruity and in doing so belies interpretations of Alcott’s story that would rest on the easy assumption that the work is a simple tale of romance with little or no political import.

Note 1. Certainly one might question why I have chosen to read Alcott’s work through the lens of a theoretical perspective associated with a British Gothic model as opposed to an American Gothic model. First of all, my reason for doing so is not to elide important dif-

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ferences between British and American Gothic traditions, but rather to insist that there exists a racial dimension to the American Gothic that has been largely overlooked and merits closer attention. Halberstam’s theory—whether formulated for a British literary tradition or not—is particularly useful in awakening us to that notion. Second of all, it bears pointing out that other theorists do indeed define the American Gothic in terms of the same racial underpinnings Halberstam’s theory seizes upon. Teresa Goddu makes the assertion, for example, that the fundamental “darkness” of the American Gothic genre is located in its “racial roots”: “the American Gothic is haunted by race,” she maintains (7). Eric Savoy repeats this argument in his own claim that the American Gothic makes visible the vilified being that American dominant culture cannot accept: “the entire tradition of American Gothic can be conceptualized as the attempt to invoke . . . the specter of Otherness that haunts the house of national narrative” (14). Both Goddu and Savoy make clear the fact that my use of Halberstam in reading an American text does not foist upon that text an incommensurate theory, reading, or model. On the contrary, it would appear as if Halberstam simply allows us to further explore that which other scholars have already confirmed to be an integral part of this American subgenre.

Works Cited Alcott, Louisa May. “Taming a Tartar.” A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Little, 1988. 198-252. Auerbach, Nina. Women and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. Elbert, Sarah. Introduction. Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery. By Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Sarah Elbert. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1997. ix-lx. Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989. Falcon, Jo. Introduction. A Modern Mephistopheles. By Louisa May Alcott. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995. v-viii. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978. Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1963. Guillaumin, Colette. Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology. New York: Routledge, 1995. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox. Introduction. Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Elizabeth Lennox Keyser. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1993. xixix. Klimasmith, Betsy. “Slave, Master, Mistress, Slave: Genre and Interracial Desire in Louisa May Alcott’s Fiction.” ATQ (American Transcendental Quarterly) 11 (1997): 11535.

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Savoy, Eric. Introduction. American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1998. 3-19. Stern, Madeleine B. Introduction. A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. By Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Little, 1988.128. ———. Introduction. The Feminist Alcott: Stories of a Woman’s Power. By Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1996. vii-xxiii.

ANNE K. MELLOR (ESSAY DATE JUNE 2002) SOURCE: Mellor, Anne K. “Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya.” European Romantic Review 13, no. 2 (June 2002): 169-73. In the following essay, Mellor demonstrates how Charlotte Dacre’s use of Gothic conventions enabled her to illuminate the traditionally taboo sexual relationship between a white woman and a black man in her novel Zofloya.

The genre of the Gothic has long enabled both its practitioners and its readers to explore subjective desires and identities that are otherwise repressed, denied or forbidden by the culture at large. As David Punter trenchantly characterized the Gothic genre in The Literature of Terror, it is centrally concerned with paranoia, the taboo, and the barbaric, a barbaric that nonetheless returns as the unheimlich, the uncanny, what is most familiar yet most disturbing. The array of culturally repressed subjectivities at the end of the eighteenth century in England, at a time of lip-service to Enlightenment rationality, of a political paranoia fuelled by the Terror in France, and of the increasing dominance of a bourgeois domesticity, is of course enormous. Here I wish to think about the way in which one Gothic novel enables us to explore what was perhaps the most taboo of all human sexual desires in Romantic-era England, the passionate, even uncontrollable, sexual desire of a beautiful white woman for the black male body. The widespread dissemination of abolitionist poems, stories, tracts and autobiographies which insisted not only upon universal human rights, but upon the sympathetic brotherhood and sisterhood of white and black peoples, raised the possibility of interracial sexual alliances and even marriages. Most of the texts which overtly represented such interracial alliances confined themselves to legitimating a white male desire for the black female body. They depended on the already widespread cultural practice in the British West

Indies of sexual liaisons between white male slaveowners and their black female slaves. Several plays performed on the London stage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century rewrote this cultural practice in the genre of romance, presenting positive portrayals of the love of a white man for a black woman. In George Colman the Younger’s version of Inkle and Yarico performed in 1787, for instance, the white English gentleman Inkle finally forswears his inheritance in order to marry the black African princess Yarico, while his white man-servant Trudge also marries Yarico’s black female attendant, Wowski. A few plays and novels reversed this pattern to legitimate the sexual desire of a black man for a white woman. In James Powell’s comic pantomime, Furibond; or, Harlequin Negro, performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1807, the black Harlequin finally manages to marry his beloved Columbine, the white daughter of a Jamaican planter. More radical was J. Ferriar’s revision of Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko, titled The Prince of Angola, performed in Manchester in 1788. Here Oroonoko has already married the white daughter of the European “stranger” who visited his father’s court in Angola, taught him warfare, and died in battle in his arms. As Oroonoko recalls his courtship of the white Imoinda, echoing Shakespeare’s Othello, . . . I presented her With all the spoils of battle to atone Her father’s ghost. But when I saw her face, And heard her speak, I offer’d up myself To be the sacrifice. She bow’d and blush’d; I wonder’d and ador’d. The sacred power That had subdued me, then inspir’d my tongue, Inclin’d her heart, and all our talk was love. I married her: And tho’ my country’s custom Indulg’d the privilege of many wives, I swore myself never to know but her. She grew with child and I grew happier still. (Ferriar 13-14)

In Maria Edgeworth’s novel Belinda, published in 1801, the black freed slave Juba, a servant of Belinda’s suitor, Mr. Vincent, marries the white farmer’s daughter Lucy—although the public dismay at this interracial marriage forced Edgeworth in the third, 1810, edition of Belinda to marry Lucy instead to her second love, the white James Jackson (1801:243; 1810:234). And Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography reminds us that a black man could legitimately marry a white woman in England—in April 1792, Gustavus Vassa married the Englishwoman Susanah Cullen (Equiano 235, 305n674). But all these texts focus on the sexual desires of males, either of a white male for a black female

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Romero, Lora. Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.

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or a black male for a white female. None tell the story from the position of a female subjectivity. More to the point, the very possibility that a white female might sexually prefer the black male body to the white male body was one that British culture in the late eighteenth century either denied or abhorred. Significantly, Edgeworth’s Lucy has to overcome an initial fear of Juba’s black face (1801: 244) before she can learn to love him. And Ferriar’s white Imoinda has been raised since infancy among the black peoples of Angola; she had never seen a white man other than her father when she married Oroonoko (Ferriar 13). Far more characteristic of the public discourse on interracial mating in the Romantic era was a horrified disgust. Typical of this racial phobia is Matthew Lewis’ poem “Isle of the Devils”, published in his Journal of a West India Proprietor in 1834, in which he can imagine the desire of a black man for a white woman only as a brutal rape, a rape which twice impregnates the chaste Irza and finally leads her to abandon her children, however reluctantly in the case of her fair-skinned (as opposed to her dark-skinned) son. More vitriolic, and perhaps most indicative of the culture’s racial paranoia concerning miscegenation, or what they called assimilation, is Edward Long’s outburst in his Candid Reflections . . . on what is commonly called the Negroe-Cause, by a Planter, published in 1772. Long first laments that escaped male slaves in England frequently intermarry with white servant-women, “but when the prospect of an easy subsistence fails, they make no scruple to abandon their new wife and mulatto progeny to the care of the parish, and betake themselves to the colony, where they are sure, at least, of not starving” (Long 48). But far worse, in Long’s view, are the sexual desires of these working-class white women. As he writes, The lower class of women in England, are remarkably fond of the blacks, for reasons too brutal to mention; they would connect themselves with horses and asses, if the laws permitted them. By these ladies they generally have a numerous brood. Thus, in the course of a few generations more, the English blood will become so contaminated with this mixture, and from the chances, the ups and downs of life, this alloy may spread so extensively, as even to reach the middle, and then the higher orders of the people, till the whole nation resembles the Portuguese and Moriscos in complexion of skin and baseness of mind. This is a venomous and dangerous ulcer, that threatens to disperse its malignancy far and wide, until every family catches infection from it. (Long 48-9)

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Long’s widely shared horror at the potentially interracial desires of the English working classes was powerfully evoked in Thomas Rowlandson’s print in 1810, titled “Kitchen Stuff”. Here the loving embrace of the white servant-girl with a black man is crudely paralleled by the white kitten that playfully embraces a spotted, black-and-white dog, thus suggesting that such an interracial embrace is both brutally animalistic and a form of crossspecies mating. Moreover, this embrace is fuelled by alcohol, by the “Black Jack” rum on the mantelpiece and the “Cherry Bounce” liqueur in the cup of the drunken cook. In the context of this cultural paranoia concerning interracial sexuality, it should not surprise us that when a female writer wished to explore the passionate desire of a white woman for a black man, she felt constrained to frame her novel—as many Gothic novels are framed—within a pat Christian moral. In reading Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or The Moor, published in 1806, however, we should not take this moral over-seriously. Yes, Victoria’s beloved Moor is—we finally learn—the devil in disguise; yes, Victoria has been corrupted from early adolescence by the bad example of her mother’s adulterous elopement with a treacherous suitor; yes, Dacre suggests, human nature is innately evil and strong social restraints must be placed on all human desires. At the level of this framing moral narrative, Diane Hoeveler has correctly concluded in her Gothic Feminism that Zofloya is “racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic” (Hoeveler 145), that Dacre condemns the excesses of female sexual desire and overtly affirms instead the ideals of bourgeois rationality and a maternal ideology. I would like to look at Zofloya somewhat differently, focusing not on the framing moral of the novel but rather on the textual representation of Victoria’s desires as they develop during the novel. First, let me give just the briefest of plot synopses for those of you who have not yet read this fascinating novel. Victoria de Loredani’s mother elopes with her lover Count Ardolph when Victoria is 15; her father is subsequently killed in a duel with Ardolph. The beautiful, dark-haired Victoria’s dawning sexuality is then aroused by the older libertine, Count Berenza; her mother tries to prevent this liaison by imprisoning Victoria with her aunt; Victoria escapes to Berenza, initiates their sexual affair, seduces him into marrying her, only to discover that Berenza cannot sexually satisfy her. She then becomes enamored of Berenza’s younger, more virile brother Henriquez, who rejects her advances because he is engaged to the

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What I wish to focus on in this lurid tale is Victoria’s sexuality.1 Aroused by the white male, white female sexual desire in this novel is repeatedly frustrated by that white male, who proves increasingly impotent as the novel unfolds. Count de Loredani cannot satisfy his wife, who elopes. Count Berenza, the vitiated libertine, cannot arouse or gratify his wife, and visibly wastes away before our eyes, poisoned by the lemonade he so adoringly drinks from his wife’s cup. Henriquez is besotted by the pale Lilla, but is unable to consummate his sexual desire for her, impaling himself instead on his own dagger. In the figural discourse of this text, white male bodies literally become smaller, weaker, less potent. In contrast, the bodies of both Victoria and Zofloya increase in size. Victoria, “above the middle height”, “tall and graceful” as the antelope (Dacre 96), looms over the wasted Berenza and drugged, pale Henriquez. Zofloya, a man of exceptional intelligence, musical skill and education, immediately attracts the erotic gaze of Victoria: It occurred to her that the figure of the Moor possessed a grace and majesty which she had never before remarked; his face too seemed animated with charms till now unnoticed, and his very dress to have acquired a more splendid, tasteful, and elegant appearance.—True it was, that great was the beauty of Zofloya, to a form the most attractive and symmetrical, though of superior height, deriving every advantage too from the graceful costume of his dress, was added a countenance, spite of its colour, endowed with the finest possible expression. His eyes, brilliant and large, sparkled with inexpressible fire; his nose and mouth were elegantly formed, and when he smiled, the assemblage of his features displayed a beauty that delighted and surprised. (153)

Tall, “majestic” and “solemnly beautiful” (158) when he first appears, Zofloya becomes a “towering figure” (190), “so gigantic” that he seems

“increased to a height scarcely human” (191). As Zofloya’s size increases, so does Victoria’s sexual desire for him. Initially Victoria sees Zofloya only as her servant, the one who will carry out her wish to eliminate her husband and to seduce the rejecting Henriquez. But as the novel progresses, Victoria becomes more and more dependent on Zofloya, who repeatedly professes his own desire for her, kneeling before her, kissing her hand, preserving her bloodied handkerchief next to his heart, gently pressing her to his bosom, and insisting that she belongs to him. But it is Victoria’s growing sexual desire for Zofloya that I wish to emphasize. At first the “vain” Victoria is attracted only by Zofloya’s desire—“she took pleasure in knowing that he gazed upon her” (153). As the novel progresses, she increasingly desires what he can do for her. As he promises to help her consummate her desire for Henriquez, she, “seizing his hand . . . pressed it to her bosom” (159); in Zofloya’s presence, she recognizes that “I remain unsatisfied” (172); when she hears his flute-playing, she momentarily forgets Henriquez—“sooner, yes sooner, would I hear the footstep of Zofloya, or his sweet voice, sweeter than all this music” and confesses to him that “I desired your presence!” (181). After Henriquez’ suicide, Victoria’s erotic attraction to Zofloya becomes ever more intense—“On him the eyes of Victoria involuntarily fixed; dignity and ineffable grace, were diffused over his whole figure;—for the first time she felt towards him an emotion of tenderness” (226). When he embraces her, “Victoria felt reassured . . . such powerful fascination dwelt around him that she felt incapable of withdrawing from his arms; . . . no sooner . . . did she behold that beautiful and majestic visage, that towering and graceful form, than all thought of his inferiority vanished, and the ravished sense, spurning at the caluminous idea, confessed him a being of a higher order” (227). Having fled with Zofloya to the bandits’ cave, Victoria is overcome with passion for the Moor: Victoria’s proud, but now almost subjugated heart, touched with the respectful attentions of the only companion her vices and her crimes had left her, extended to him, with softened looks her hand.—He took it with tenderness, yet delicate reserve, and raised it to his lips—his manner but encreased to ardour the feelings of Victoria. (231)

This love scene ends with Victoria’s passionate declaration—“Zofloya!—I am thine ever” (231). Even then her overwhelming sexual desire remains unconsummated, hence all-consuming.

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delicate, pale-skinned Lilla. At this point Henriquez’ servant, Zofloya, a Moor, appears, first in Victoria’s dream, then in fact, and offers her his services in gaining Henriquez’ love. Victoria, overcome with frustrated sexual passion, first poisons her husband and then, when Henriquez still rejects her, chains Lilla in a cave and drugs Henriquez with a love-potion. but her longed-for sexual consummation with Henriquez proves disappointing. Henriquez commits suicide, Victoria kills Lilla, and escapes with Zofloya to a cave of bandits. When these bandits are surrounded by the army, Victoria flees with the Moor’s help, only to learn at last that he is the Devil; he hurls her to her death from a cliff.

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Her death at the Moor’s hands thus becomes, in the figuration of sexual desire that I have been tracking in this novel, a Liebestod. Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya thus constructs a unique Gothic subjectivity as it powerfully represents a hitherto culturally outlawed sexual desire, that of an empowered white woman for a black man. It initiates a complicated dialogue with the racist discourse of Edward Long, with those who can conceptualize female interracial desire only as degenerate, immoral or threatening. And it enabled Dacre’s female readers to explore a far wider range of sexual options, a more aggressive libidinal subjectivity, than did the other writing of her day.

Note 1. Victoria’s sexuality has previously been analyzed by Adriana Craciun as a representation of nymphomania (Dacre, Introduction 21-23) and by James Dunn as a feminine appropriation of masculine sexual desire and violence (Dunn, 313-14). Kim Ian Michasiw, who perceptively locates the novel within the conventions of a “transracial chivalric aristocracy of an earlier Orientalism” (xxiii), also explores the role of sexuality within the class and racial configurations of Zofloya.

Works Cited Colman, George, the Younger. Inkle and Yarico. London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1787. Dacre, Charlotte. Zofloya or, The Moor: a Romance of the Fifteenth Century. Ed. with an Introduction by Adriana Craciun. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview, 1997. All citations in the text are from this edition. Dunn, James. A. “Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence.” Nineteenth Century Literature. 35, 1998. 307327. Edgeworth, Maria. Belinda, 1st ed. 1801. Ed. with an introduction by Eilean Ni Chilleanain. London: Everyman, J. M. Dent, 1993. ———. Belinda, 3rd ed. 1810. Ed. Eva Figes. London: Pandora, 1986. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Ed. with an introduction by Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin, 1995. Ferriar, J. The Prince of Angola, a Tragedy. Altered from the Play of Oroonoko, and adapted to the Circumstances of the Present Times. Manchester, 1788. Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism—The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State UP, 1998. Lewis, Matthew. “The Isle of Devils, A Metrical Tale,” in Journal of a West India Proprietor Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (1834). Ed. with an introduction by Judith Terry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999, 160-83. Long, Edward. Candid Reflections upon the Judgment lately awarded by the Court of the King’s Bench in WestminsterHall, On what is commonly called the Negroe-Cause, By a Planter. London: T. Lowndes, 1772.

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Michasiw, Kim Ian, Ed. with an introduction. Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya, or The Moor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Powell, James (with G. Male). Furibond; or, Harlequin Negro—A Grand Comic Pantomime. London: C. Lowndes, 1807. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror. London: Longman, 1980; 2nd ed., 1996.

WOMEN AND THE GOTHIC ELAINE SHOWALTER (ESSAY DATE 1991) SOURCE: Showalter, Elaine. “American Female Gothic.” In Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing, pp. 127-44. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. In the following essay, Showalter examines Gothic literature by women within the context of American history and culture.

One of the earliest critical manifestations of the change in consciousness that came out of the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s was the theorization of the Female Gothic as a genre that expressed women’s dark protests, fantasies, and fear. The first great feminist theorist of the genre was Ellen Moers, a brilliant and pioneering critic who died of breast cancer in 1971 at the age of fifty. Her book, Literary Women: The Great Writers (1975), was a highly personal, loosely organized study of women writers across national lines. The chapters on the Female Gothic were particularly striking. Moers distinguished between two types of female Gothic novel: Ann Radcliffe’s origination in The Mysteries of Udolpho of a mode in which ‘the central figure is a young woman who is simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine,’ and Mary Shelley’s turn of the genre in Frankenstein, a story with a heroine but very powerfully a ‘birth myth,’ a tale of hideous progeny both literary and physiological. As Moers maintained, Frankenstein is ‘A woman’s mythmaking on the subject of . . . what follows birth: the trauma of the after-birth,’ fear and guilt, anxiety and depression.1 No woman who has ever read the book will forget Moers’s description of the newborn infant, taken directly from Dr Spock: A baby at birth is usually disappointing-looking to a parent who hasn’t seen one before. His skin is coated with wax . . . his face tends to be puffy and lumpy, and there may be black and blue marks . . . the head is misshapen . . . The baby’s body is covered all over with fuzzy hair . . . and some babies have black hair on the scalp which may come far down on the forehead.

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In the late 1970s Moers’s work was rethought and revised by a number of psychoanalytically oriented feminist critics influenced by objectrelations theory and especially the work of Nancy Chodorow. They viewed the Female Gothic as a confrontation not just with maternity, but with the reproduction of mothering, and ‘the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront.’2 In the Female Gothic, Claire Kahane asserts, ‘the heroine is imprisoned not in a house but in the female body, which is itself the maternal legacy. The problematics of femininity is thus reduced to the problematics of the female body, perceived as antagonistic to the sense of self, as therefore freakish.’3 The Gothic castle is, above all, the house of the dead mother. The heroine thinks that she is trapped in the haunted castle by a sinister and seductive older man; but she is really on a quest to find the mother, who holds the secrets of feminine existence: Within an imprisoning structure, a protagonist, typically a young woman whose mother has died, is compelled to seek out the center of a mystery, while vague and usually sexual threats to her person from some powerful male figure hover on the periphery of her consciousness. Following clues that pull her onward and inward—bloodstains, mysterious sounds—she penetrates the obscure recesses of a vast labyrinthean space and discovers a secret room sealed off by its association with death. In this dark, secret center of the Gothic structure, the boundaries of life and death seem confused. Who died? Has there been a murder? Or merely a disappearance?4

In the mid-1980s another group of feminist critics influenced by poststructuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis saw the Female Gothic as a mode of writing corresponding to the feminine, the romantic, the transgressive, and the revolutionary. For them, its key texts were novels like Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, in which the Gothic erupted despite Brontë’s stated desire to express herself in the bourgeois and patriarchal language of reason. Reading the Female Gothic through Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, ‘Dora,’ and ‘Das Unheimliche,’ as well as through Lacan and

Kristeva, critics equated the Gothic with the feminine unconscious, and with the effort to bring the body, the semiotic, the imaginary, or the pre-Oedipal [M]Other Tongue into language. Several of these critics systematized their readings of Female Gothic under the rubric of hysteria. In the preface to her book The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Eve Sedgwick calls ‘the heroine of the Gothic a classic hysteric, its hero a classic paranoid.’ The hysterical heroine graphically expresses through her body what cannot be spoken about the self or come into existence as narrative. Similarly, when Mary Jacobus asks, ‘what is the literary status of that version of the uncanny known to feminist critics as “female Gothic,”’ she replies that the heroine is a hysteric and the Female Gothic text is a hysterical narrative.5 But ‘hysterical readings’ that dehistoricize the Female Gothic make it a timeless universal mode, one that threatens to reinstate the familiar duality linking women with irrationality, the body, and marginality, while men retain reason, the mind, and authority. As Terry Eagleton remarks, ‘if women speak the discourse of the body, the unconscious, the dark underside of formal speech—in a word, the Gothic—they merely confirm their aberrant status.’6 And if ‘Gothic’ becomes the word that totalizes and encapsulates these positions, it loses its capacity to mediate between the uncanny and the unjust. Like other genres, the Female Gothic takes on different shapes and meanings within different historical and national contexts. Borrowing many of its conventions from the English and European traditions, it has become one of the most versatile and powerful genres of American women’s writing, with elements that have changed in relation to changes in women’s roles and American culture. We could trace a long history of American Female Gothic. The popularity of the Gothic genre in American fiction began within a decade of Ann Radcliffe and Monk Lewis, and flourished in the first years of the Republic, despite the difficulty of finding appropriate equivalents of the ‘haunted castle, the ruined abbey, the dungeons of the Inquisition’ in rural Connecticut and Long Island.7 In the introduction to her book Woman’s Record (1852), Sarah J. Hale explained the influences which had led her to become ‘the Chronicler of my own sex.’ ‘The first regular novel I read,’ she recalled, was ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho,’ when I was quite a child. I name it on account of the influence it exercised over my mind. I had remarked that of

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Moers extended her theory of Female Gothic to self-hatred and self-disgust directed towards the female body, sexuality, and reproduction. The Gothic, in her view, had to do with women’s anxieties about birth and creativity, including the anxiety of giving birth to stories in a process that society could deem unnatural. Her ideas were crucial to the work of such feminist critics as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and to others who looked at Mary Shelley as the paradigm of the Gothic woman writer.

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Spofford, or Flannery O’Connor, but rather of Poe, Brockden Brown, Melville, Twain, Hemingway, and Faulkner. The essence of American literature, Fiedler asserted, was ‘non-realistic, even antirealistic; long before symbolisme had been invented in France and exported to America, there was a full-fledged native tradition of symbolism.’ But American women’s writing did not share this symbolist essence. In fact, American Gothic could not be written by women because it was a protest against women, a flight from the domestic and the feminine. Women stood for the dreary or repellent ‘physical data of the actual world’ or ‘the maternal blackness, imagined by the gothic writer as a prison’ below the ‘crumbling shell of paternal authority.’ In order to ‘avoid the facts of wooing, marriage, and childbearing,’ then, American writers created a ‘nonrealistic and negative, sadistic and melodramatic’ Gothic fiction, a literature of ‘darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation.’9 Women could only be totemic figures along the masculine Gothic trail, seductive Dark Ladies or lachrymose Little Evas. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1860-1935.

all the books I saw, few were written by Americans and none by women. Here was a work, the most fascinating I had ever read, always excepting ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ written by a woman! How happy it made me! The wish to promote the reputation of my own sex, and do something for my own country, were among the earliest mental emotions I can recollect.

For many nineteenth-century American women readers and writers, the Gothic suggested independence, adventure, narrative boldness, and self-reliance. It allowed writers otherwise subject to the narrative restrictions of gentility and patriotism to find covert outlets for their sexuality and to imagine exotic or European settings for transgressive plots. Yet for much of this century, when American critics theorized about the American Gothic, lurid women writers were not on their list. Most interpretations of the Gothic saw it as a myth of male power, arousing terror through incestuous or Oedipal plots, whether ‘a helpless daughter confronting the erotic power of a father or brother’; or ‘the son’s rebellious confrontation with paternal authority.’8 When Leslie Fiedler, for instance, argued in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) that the Gothic was the ‘form that has been most fruitful in the hands of our best writers,’ he was not thinking of Louisa May Alcott, Harriet

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A story that challenged this narrative of American Gothic was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. First published in the New England Magazine in 1892, the story had dropped out of the American literary canon. It was rediscovered and reprinted in 1972 by the Feminist Press, with an introduction by Elaine Hedges which used the language of Kate Millett’s recently published feminist best-seller to call it a narrative of ‘sexual politics’ in which a woman rebels against patriarchal power. Throughout the decade, as Jean Kennard has explained, feminist critics produced numerous readings of the story which depended on new conventions and interpretations of such terms as patriarchy, madness, and quest.1 0 Now considered ‘one of the most famous feminist literary works,’1 1 it is also an American classic. (The author is certainly not well known in England, where a recent review called her ‘Charlotte Perkins Gilmore’).1 2 Yet paradoxically, when ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ was adapted for Masterpiece Theater, a program that specializes in bringing television versions of the English classics to American audiences, it was set in Victorian England. The story may have been too Gothic to seem American. Told in a series of brief paragraphs of one or two sentences, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is a firstperson narrative of a woman who has been taken by her physician husband to a secluded house in the country—‘a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate’—in order to cure a nervous illness, ‘a slight

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The narrator wants to write, and indeed confides her story in secrecy to the ‘dead paper’ of a journal which becomes the text. Her husband and his sister think it is the writing that has made her sick. But gradually the enforced passivity and confinement breaks down her mind; she begins to have crying spells, fatigue, and hallucinations in which the ‘florid arabesque’ of the wallpaper becomes a living paper, ‘budding and sprouting in endless convolutions.’ Ultimately she sees a woman creeping behind the pattern of the paper, who becomes many women trapped and trying to climb through. At the story’s end, the narrator is completely mad. When her husband breaks into the room where she has locked herself, she has ripped off all the paper and is creeping around the floor. ‘I’ve got out at last in spite of you,’ she tells him, and when he faints in shock, she creeps over his body. Gilman gives the account of the breakdown and treatment that motivated her to write the story in her autobiography and also in an essay called ‘Why I Wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.”’ In 1887, after the birth of her daughter, Gilman became severely depressed. Her husband at first tried to cheer her up by hiring a maid and by reading her Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century; when neither remedy worked, he sent her to Philadelphia for six weeks to take Dr Weir Mitchell’s rest cure. A prominent and successful nerve specialist, Mitchell had developed a therapy for intellectual women, Edith Wharton among them, that involved complete bed rest, no visitors, no intellectual activity of any sort, including reading, and a rich diet intended to produce a weight gain of fifty to seventy pounds, a kind of pseudo-pregnancy in which the symbolism of biological creativity displaced artistic and intellectual creativity. The body imagery of the rest cure also implied the inverse relation of female body and female mind; women who wished to produce a large body of work had to starve them-

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860-1935) AND “THE YELLOW WALLPAPER”

Gilman wrote only one work of horror fiction, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), but it is one of the lasting classics of the genre, and has become part of the canon of feminist literature. The novella is based upon Gilman’s own experience with the “rest cure” developed by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell to treat the mental illness known at the time as “neurasthenia”; Gilman was prescribed the treatment for the postpartum depression she suffered following the birth of her daughter. Mitchell’s rest cure, prescribed primarily to women, consisted of committing the patient to bed for a period of months, during which time the patient was fed only mild foods and deprived of all mental, physical, and social activity—reading, writing, and painting were explicitly prohibited. Gilman once stated that the rest cure nearly drove her insane; she recovered after embarking upon a trip alone, and decided to leave both her husband and her daughter permanently. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is structured as a series of secret diary entries by an unnamed woman, a young wife and new mother whose debilitating mental condition has prevented her from caring for her infant. She and her husband John, who is a doctor, have rented a house in the country, in which she is to take a rest cure. The narrator is confined to an upstairs room with barred windows and no furnishings except for a bed that is nailed to the floor. The narrator describes the color and pattern of the room’s garish yellow wallpaper in an assortment of distasteful ways, eventually becoming obsessed with the wallpaper and imagining that a woman is trapped behind it. The story ends with the narrator creeping around the edges of the room and tearing the wallpaper in ragged sheets from the walls in an attempt to free the woman she believes to be trapped behind it. Her husband unlocks the door and witnesses this activity. “I’ve got out at last,” she explains to him, “And I’ve pulled off most of the paper so you can’t put me back!” He faints, and she continues to creep around the room, crawling over her unconscious husband.

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hysterical tendency,’ she has developed after the birth of a son. The house is ‘quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village.’ On the extensive grounds, there are ‘hedges and walls and gates that lock,’ and at the top of the house, a large room with barred windows, rings on the walls, an iron bed nailed down to the floor with a canvas mattress, and a gate barring the stairs. The floor is ‘gouged and splintered,’ the bedstead ‘gnawed,’ and the yellow wallpaper ripped.

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selves physically, and women who nurtured or indulged their appetites would pay with artistic sterility.1 3 Ordered never to ‘touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live,’ Gilman came close to insanity. She recovered only when she left her husband and child for a short trip, an experience that made her decide on a therapeutic divorce; ‘it seemed plain that if I went crazy it would do my husband no good and be a deadly injury to my child.’1 4 Casting Weir Mitchell’s advice to the winds, she began to write again. Later she remarried, and had a remarkable career as a feminist journalist and activist. Like Fuller’s work, Gilman’s Gothic had its roots in the father’s library. Gilman’s father, a distinguished librarian, had abandoned the family when she was a year old. In her memory, the father’s library stood not only for patriarchal knowledge and language, but also the absence of love and support. As she wrote in her autobiography, ‘The word Father, in the sense of love, care, one to go to in trouble, means nothing to me, save indeed in advice about books and the care of them—which seems more the librarian than the father.’1 5 After her breakdown, tellingly, she found herself unable to tolerate the paraphernalia and spaces associated with her father; she could not ‘read a heavy book,’ or ‘look down an index,’ and ‘a library, which was once to me as a confectioner’s shop to a child, became an appalling weariness just to look at.’1 6 The father’s library could indeed become the locus for both hysteria and rage. Gilman’s contemporary Alice James described her fantasies of violence as she ‘used to sit immovable reading in the library with waves of violent inclination suddenly invading my muscles, taking some one of their myriad forms such as throwing myself out of the window, or knocking off the head of the benignant pater as he sat with his silver locks, writing at his table.’1 7 Gilman’s heroine too has violent fantasies against men, but expresses her rage against herself and against her child in the form of selfdestructive illness, suicidal feelings, and infanticidal impulses. The realistic subtext of the story is that the heroine’s husband and sister-in-law are afraid that she may injure her baby or herself during a postpartum psychosis. For this reason, they are indeed keeping her under tacit surveillance. The heroine wonders why the house has gone so long unrented, and why they got it so cheaply; but it seems clear that it is an abandoned private mental hospital. The barred windows are not to protect children, but to prevent inmates from

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jumping out. The walls and the bed have been gouged and gnawed by other prisoners. The women she sees creeping in the hedges are perhaps the ghosts of former patients. Some of these ghosts are literary; ‘as readers versed in female gothic,’ Mary Jacobus points out, ‘we know that Bertha Mason haunts this text.’1 8 But more than women’s reading haunts The Yellow Wallpaper. Psychosis, involving hallucinations and delusions, can develop from postpartum depressions marked by crying spells, confusion, sleeplessness, and anxiety. Victorian doctors already knew what recent studies have documented: that ‘it’s during a psychotic depression that mothers are at a great risk of killing their babies.’1 9 We learn about the heroine’s violent feelings through the fantasies she projects on the patterned yellow wallpaper in the room. Although she claims to love her child and simply be tired of caring for him, (‘Such a dear baby! And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous’) her perceptions of the wallpaper reveal images of strangling: ‘There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.’ Berman suggests that ‘the new mother’s description of the wallpaper evokes an image of an insatiable child who seems to be crawling everywhere, even into the nursery which remains her only sanctuary.’2 0 The guilt engendered by these involuntary images, while never conscious, forms her system of defenses. She congratulates herself on the baby’s ‘fortunate escape’ from having to ‘occupy this nursery with the horrid wallpaper’; and puts herself in the child’s place: ‘I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.’ Because the specter of infanticide is too appalling to be faced, the heroine transforms her violent wishes against the child to self-destructive ones. Soon there is a woman crawling behind the wallpaper, and she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white! If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.

Childbirth becomes at once the tortuous emergence of the self, and a fantasy of engulfment by many-headed offspring, hungry and crying. By the end of the story—the heroine’s last, logically impossible journal entry, when she is completely mad—her self-punishing suicidal urges have come to the surface. She thinks about burn-

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Such a ‘thematic’ feminist reading of The Yellow Wallpaper cannot, as Mary Jacobus would argue, ‘account for the . . . uncanny elements present in the text.’2 1 But the scenario of confinement and madness in Gilman’s Gothic corresponds to the scripts of repression and incarceration typical of late nineteenth-century psychiatric practice, and of late nineteenth-century American Female Gothic plots. In Literary Women, Ellen Moers suggested that the keynote of the modern, post-war American Female Gothic was its obsession with freaks. She pointed to Southern Gothic writers such as Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Carson McCullers, whose adolescent heroines see the discomforting changes in their bodies mirrored in grotesques and freaks. In O’Connor’s story ‘A Temple of the Holy Ghost,’ a hermaphrodite in a blue dress tells the twelve-year-old heroine, ‘God made me this way and if you laugh he may strike you the same way.’ In McCullers’s Member of the Wedding, the adolescent Frankie visits a circus where she stands horrified before the booth of the Half-Man, Half-Woman: ‘She was afraid of all the Freaks, for it seemed to her that they had looked at her in a secret way and tried to connect their eyes with hers, as though to say: we know you.’ Katherine Anne Porter’s Miranda also goes to the circus where a dwarf with ‘not-human golden eyes’ grimaces at her ‘imitating her own face.’ Looking at freaks in the 1940s and 1950s signified a woman artist’s determination to confront the forbidden without flinching, to activate a powerful female gaze. Freaks and feminists were weirdly bonded. Moers was particularly struck by Diane Arbus’s photographs of urban outcasts— drag queens, circus people, lunatics, nudists, and giants. Starting out in 1950 as a fashion photographer for Glamour magazine, the well-bred Arbus initially seemed like the ideal American girl. ‘Diane fitted perfectly into the white-glove syndrome,’ a colleague remembered. ‘I was astonished when she surfaced with all those freak pictures.’2 2 From the photographers Lisette Model and Weegee, and the filmmaker Emile de Antonio,

Arbus learned to photograph the forbidden: ‘the androgynous, the crippled, the deformed, the dead, the dying.’ As Model recalled, ‘she never looked away, which took courage and independence.’2 3 With her cameras as a shield, Arbus entered an underworld, an urban space usually off-limits to women. 2 4 Her gothic quest included following her subjects home; as she told a reporter for Newsweek, ‘I love to go to people’s houses—exploring—doing daring things I’ve not done before—things I’d fantasized about as a child. I love going into people’s houses—that’s part of the thrill of seduction for woman—to see how he lives.’2 5 In her celebrated photograph of triplets, Arbus represented her own three faces in the American culture of the 1950s: ‘Triplets remind me of myself when I was an adolescent,’ she said. ‘Lined up in three images: daughter, sister, bad girl, with secret lusting fantasies, each one with a tiny difference.’2 6 These images were central to the plots of American Female Gothic of the 1950s, in which such writers as Jean Stafford and Shirley Jackson were obsessed by the good girl/bad girl split. Arbus, Plath, and Marilyn Monroe, who appeared to Plath in a dream to give her ‘an expert manicure’ (perhaps to cure her of a man), and to promise her ‘a new, flowering life,’ were all Gothic heroines of a decade in which female artistic ambition as well as sexuality were deviant.2 7 ‘Write laundry lists,’ not poems, Adlai Stevenson had exhorted Sylvia Plath’s graduation class of Smith in 1953, as if in reference to the Gothic debunking of Northanger Abbey.2 8 Women artists of the period attempted to resolve their sense of freakishness by rejecting and exorcising the Mother. In her journals in the late 1950s, Plath also jotted down numerous descriptions of plots for Female Gothic stories, ‘an analysis of the Dark Mother, the Mummy, Mother of Shadows. An analysis of the Electra complex.’ The Bell Jar (1962) is set in several of the Women’s Houses of the 1950s, suffocating equivalents of the Gothic castle. Far from being idyllic female communities of sisterly support, these are cloying sickly spaces where women betray each other, as the female body betrays: the Amazon Hotel, for ‘girls . . . with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldn’t get at them and deceive them’; Ladies Day magazine where Esther Greenwood gets food poisoning; the suburban houses where she shares a bedroom with her mother and thinks about strangling her; the women’s dormitory at the mental hospital that reminds her of college.

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ing down the house, ‘to reach the smell’ of the yellow wallpaper that torments her. She has found a rope, useful only for hanging herself, and she admits ‘I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try.’ Instead she turns herself into the infant, creeping around the room, even over the body of her husband who has fainted at the sight of what she has become.

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Pregnant women especially seem like freaks to Esther, whether the Catholic Dodo Conway with her six babies, and ‘grotesque protruding stomach,’ or the anaesthetized woman whose delivery her boyfriend takes her to watch, with ‘an enormous spider-fat stomach and two little ugly spindly legs.’ Plath ‘equated maternal love with self-denial, self-sacrifice, and ultimately selfdestruction; and it is no coincidence that [her] writings are filled with matricidal and infanticidal imagery.’2 9 Fear of childbirth and its restrictions is a powerful weapon against female sexuality. ‘A man doesn’t have a worry in the world,’ Esther tells her psychiatrist, ‘while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick to keep me in line.’ Part of the fear is the appropriation of childbirth by a dehumanizing male medicine. The woman in the delivery room is ‘on a drug that would make her forget she’s had any pain . . . she was in a kind of twilight sleep.’ Esther thinks ‘it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent.’ The drug is in fact nembutal, used by obstetricians in twilight sleep anaesthesia. While the movement made the concept of painless childbirth more acceptable, ‘by encouraging women to go to sleep during their deliveries, the twilight sleep movement helped to distance women from their bodies.’3 0 As Adrienne Rich notes, ‘no more devastating image could be invented for the bondage of woman: sheeted, supine, drugged, her wrists strapped down and her legs in stirrups, at the very moment when she is bringing new life into the world.’ 3 1 Plath equates twilight sleep with electroshock treatment, also a kind of birth process engineered by men. The Bell Jar offers us several possible endings to Esther Greenwood’s gothic quest. One is sexual freedom through birth control. When Esther gets her first diaphragm, it is like a ticket on the Underground Railroad: ‘I climbed up on the examination table, thinking “I am climbing to freedom.”’ Another is killing off the lesbian self Plath associated with the ‘career woman’ in the suicide of Esther’s double Joan Gilling. It’s at Joan’s funeral that Esther wonders ‘what I thought I was burying’ and hears the ‘old brag’ of her heart: ‘I am I am I am.’ A third is the rhetorical murder of the Mother. ‘I hate her,’ she tells the psychiatrist, who smiles ‘as if something had pleased her very, very much.’ And guided ‘as by a magical thread’ she steps into the hospital boardroom to pass her final examination in sanity. Hating one’s mother was the enlightenment of the pre-feminist 1950s and 1960s. But matro-

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phobia is really only a metaphor for self-hatred. Since the daughter shares the maternal body, the dead mother continues to haunt her. In Adrienne Rich’s important book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), matrophobia is interpreted as ‘a womanly splitting of the self, in the desire to become individuated and free. The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr.’ Rich insisted that the split be healed in a genuine reunion not only with the maternal principle, but with the real mother. No feminist, she argued, can be truly at peace with herself until she has made her peace with her own mother and sisters. Rich’s volumes of poems and essays called upon the feminist ‘will to change,’ upon women’s decisions to use their anger, sexuality, and energy to confront confining institutions and to assert control of their lives. But these feminist fantasies of the liberated will characteristic of the late 1960s came up against an external limit, as did the utopian fantasies of other revolutionary movements in politics and civil rights. Despite the expansion of vocational and political opportunities during the 1970s, women also became more imprisoned and paralyzed by the fear of male violence. Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975) was a pivotal book of the decade, one which made a strong case for the politicization of rape as a feminist issue. As Brownmiller observed. ‘The ultimate effect of rape upon the woman’s mental and emotional health has been accomplished even without the act. For to accept a special burden of self-protection is to reinforce the concept that women must live and move about in fear and can never expect to achieve the personal freedom, independence, and self-assurance of men.’ While contemporary American Female Gothic has increasingly dealt with rape, assault, and murder, it has received far less attention from feminist critics than the narratives of maternity, madness, or the grotesque. An early and influential example of this genre was Joyce Carol Oates’s short story ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been’ (1966). Dedicated to Bob Dylan, the story begins realistically. Fifteen-year-old Connie has a mind ‘all filled with trashy daydreams.’ She lies to her parents and spends her evenings flirting with boys and being picked up at the mall or the drive-in restaurant. The title thus suggests the parent’s questions to the rebellious teenager. But Connie is threatened and finally abducted by a mysterious man posing as a teenager in a gold convertible who calls himself Arnold Friend. He

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I’m your lover, honey. You don’t know what that is yet but you will . . . But look: it’s real nice and you couldn’t ask for nobody better than me or more polite. I’m always nice at first, the first time. I’ll hold you so tight you won’t think you have to try to get away or pretend anything because you’ll know you can’t.

When he takes her away from her house in his gold car, it is clear that she is going to her death. By the story’s chilling end, they have become mythic figures in a Female Gothic landscape of the True West: My sweet little blue-eyed girl, he said in a halfsung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes, but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know she was going to it.

Some have attributed such plots to the overheated and morbid imaginings of the author. In an essay called ‘Why Is Your Writing So Violent?’ Joyce Carol Oates muses on the reason she is so often asked why she doesn’t leave ‘war, rape, murder and the more colorful minor crimes’ to men, and focus her writing on ‘“domestic” and “subjective” material, in the manner . . . of Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf. The implication is that if Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf had lived in Detroit they might have been successful at “transcending” their environment and writing novels in which not a hint of “violence” could be detected.’3 2 Oates has explained however that the story came to her ‘more or less in a piece’ after hearing Bob Dylan’s song ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,’ and then reading about a killer in the Southwest and thinking about ‘the old legends and folk songs of Death and the Maiden.’3 3 According to Oates, Arnold Friend is ‘a fantastic figure: he is Death, he is the elf-knight of the ballads, he is the Imagination, he is a Dream, he is a Lover, a Demon, and all that.’3 4 The plot is based on a real incident. In 1966 twenty-three-year-old Charles Howard Schmid of Tucson, Arizona was charged with the murder of three teenage girls and became the subject of a feature story in Life called ‘The Pied Piper of Tucson.’3 5 The article told how Schmid, or Smitty, as he was called, had sought to ‘create an exalted,

heroic image of himself.’ To the bored teenagers in his crowd, he was a ‘folk hero . . . more dramatic, more theatrical, more interesting than anyone else in their lives.’ With a face that was his own aesthetic creation, the hair dyed black, heavy make-up, and a beauty mark on one cheek, Smitty cruised Tucson in a gold convertible, looking in all the teen hangouts for pretty girls. Bragging about his sexual exploits, claiming to have made vast amounts of money selling drugs, Charles Schmid had assembled himself so consciously from movies and popular culture that its hard to say that he, rather than Arnold Friend, is not the fictional character. Oates does not see the Gothic as a revelation of female hysteria, but rather as the indictment of an American social disorder, the romanticization of the violent psychopath and serial killer. Yet there is also a muted maternal subtext in the story. Connie lives restlessly inside ‘her daddy’s house,’ the house of domesticity, of the housewife married to her four walls. Connie’s mother haunts the little house, always picking on her pretty daughter, who wishes they both were dead. What Connie’s mother calls her ‘trashy daydreams’ are inarticulate longings for something different, something more than having to be ‘sweet and pretty and give in.’ At the mall and the roadhouse, she becomes another person, someone who experiences sexual pleasures that are tender, ‘the way it was in movies and promised in songs.’ To experience sexual desire, for the American maiden of 1966, is to risk pregnancy, maternity, the destruction of one’s identity. It means becoming the mother and therefore dead. But twenty years later, in the film version of the story, Smooth Talk (1986), Connie goes off with her demon lover and comes home again, gentler, cured of her restlessness and rage. For the American maiden of the 1980s, sexual initiation is not fatal, but the beginning of understanding and maternal kinship. The Shadow Knows (1974) by Diane Johnson is both an artful and terrifying study of female vulnerability, and a novel about race, sexuality, and fear in 1970s America. Johnson has been called a member of the ‘California Gothic’ School of fiction;3 6 her fiction is an extended exploration of American irrationality, danger, and the bizarre. The Shadow Knows is narrated by ‘N. Hexam,’ a thirty-four-year-old divorced mother of four, who lives in a housing project in Sacramento, California. With her lives Ev, a black woman who cares for the children while N. goes to graduate school in structural linguistics. Pregnant by her married

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looks like James Dean or Marlon Brando, with ‘shaggy black hair that looked crazy as a wig,’ sunglasses that are ‘metallic and mirrored everything in miniature,’ and ‘tight faded blue jeans stuffed into black scuffed boots.’ A. Friend speaks to Connie with shocking directness:

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lover, N. has had an IUD put in to produce an abortion. As she receives obscene phone calls, has her door vandalized, and her tires slashed, N. believes that someone is trying to kill her, and she may be right. Anyone could do it: her ex-husband, her best friend, her lover, his wife, the crazy former maid Osella. While meditating on her enemies, N. reflects on male hatred of women: ‘husbands killing wives—that’s an especially recurrent sort of murder . . . I don’t understand the sources of male vanity and rage that turn them into killers. Who suckles them on these bitter poisons of expectation? Women, I know.’ Carrying the burden of guilt for her sexuality, her infidelity, her intelligence, her love and resentment for her children, N. feels that perhaps she deserves to be punished. ‘If someone is trying to kill you, do you perhaps deserve it?’ Her efforts at abortion also torment her: ‘I have reason to believe myself a murderess.’ She sees the mess smeared on her front door by unknown vandals as ‘fetal membranes and blood from inside me,’ the ‘murdered new life.’ The urban context of crime and racial tension adds to the atmosphere of the novel. According to Johnson, The Shadow Knows was ‘about race relations, the evil in human nature, and social fear.’3 7 Furthermore, ‘it was meant to be about persons on the fringe; they happen to be women, and what happens to them is meant to be particular to America in the seventies.’3 8 The maid, Ev, who lacks N.’s white-skin privilege, is a daily wrenching reminder to her of the desperation of women’s lives at the edges of the American dream. Ev’s lovers ‘slash and beat . . . and steal from her.’ She values herself so little that she often burns and cuts herself, and is deeply scarred, like Queequeg or ‘the vandalized statue of a great Nubian queen.’ Ev’s death—of acute pancreatitis? of murder?— surprises no one, not even her grieving parents. She has long been a victim. At the gothic center of the book is the relationship between N. and Osella, the enormously fat, crazy, black ex-nursemaid. Osella makes threatening phone calls to N., accusing her of witchcraft and promiscuity. Is she the mysterious vandal? Suspecting Osella of the crime, N. goes to see her perform at the Club Zanzibar, where she works as a stripper: She seemed to have been oiled, for she shone so; one saw nothing but the gleaming immense breasts lying across her huge belly, breasts astoundingly full and firm like zeppelins overhead. She wore little trunks of purple satin and nothing else but a gold armlet around the expanse of her up-

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per arm—a brilliant stroke, a rather Egyptian, goddess-like adornment calling to mind one of those frightening and horrifying fertility goddesses with swollen bodies and timeless eyes and the same engulfing infinitely absorbing quality Osella radiated now.

Osella is N.’s double and shadow; Kali, the dark jungle queen, the mother-man-eater. While N. is a thin little woman, Osella is immense, ‘a sort of super-female.’ Her huge body exudes heat; like other fat ladies and freaks in American Female Gothic, she represents the terrifying essence of female appetite and desire.3 9 Is N. a reliable narrator? Is anyone trying to kill her or is she simply paranoid, racist, neurotic? The threats may only be the projections of her own violence and rage. N. describes the ‘ordinary misery of mothers of small children’; the loneliness and desperation; ‘you must carry them. Their little arms are tightly around your throat, their sticky little fingers are on your glasses.’ She has fantasized killing her husband on a fishing trip: ‘It simply occurred to her to push him in the river.’ Johnson’s title alludes to the popular American radio show of the 1940s called The Shadow Knows, about the detective Lamont Cranston, whose eerie laugh accompanied the famous opening question; ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?’ Read with the conventions of the detective story it parodies, the novel suggests the Agatha Christie device of the first-person killer. Yet Johnson has told an interviewer that she meant N. to be a ‘reliable narrator and the events more or less real, and the fear certainly real.’4 0 While N. is not murdered, Ev apparently is; and at the end of the novel N. is raped by a mysterious assailant, an event Johnson presents as a fate better than death, almost a relief. The rape is N.’s punishment for breaking the rules, for protesting and making trouble, for going to graduate school instead of working for the telephone company. Johnson has commented that ‘the rape scene was meant to be a final symbol of ambiguity and everybody’s complicity in evil. I wrote that last scene lightly, before my consciousness was raised about the political implications of rape.’4 1 Reviewing Brownmiller’s book for the New York Review of Books, Johnson realized that ‘from a woman’s earliest days she is attended by injunctions about strangers, and warnings about dark streets, locks, escorts and provocative behavior. She internalizes the lessons contained therein, that to break certain rules is to invite or deserve rape.’4 2 In an interview shortly afterwards, she admitted that a woman who was raped would feel ‘angry, resentful, venge-

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Some of this raised consciousness about women’s internalization of the responsibility for male violence came out in 1980 when Johnson wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s film version of The Shining, an American Male Gothic novel by Stephen King, which portrays a woman who fears that her husband may be trying to kill her from the point of view of the husband. Jack Torrance, the blocked writer who is the protagonist of The Shining, has been beaten by his father as a child, and remembers seeing his mother beaten as well. In a pattern psychologists have established as valid, he projects his rage onto his wife and child: ‘You have to kill her, Jacky, and him too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves. Because they’ll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back and drag you down.’ The collaboration of Johnson and Kubrick on the script for The Shining is a fascinating instance of the re-gendering of Gothic plots. Johnson and Kubrick wrote together during an eleven-week period in London. What initially struck Johnson about King’s book was ‘the horror, of course—the whole atmosphere of growing fear within the domestic circle was the core.’ In the adaptation, Kubrick wrote Jack’s lines, while Johnson wrote those of the wife Wendy. But most of Wendy’s lines ended up on the cutting-room floor. Johnson comments, ‘I was interested to see that finally the Wendy that came out on the screen was much quieter than the Wendy I had written, who was more like a female character in my novels, I suppose, in that she had a lot to say.’4 4 Nevertheless, aficionados of the slasher film were disappointed in The Shining. They thought it had too much psychological nuance and feminist perspective, and too little blood. Stephen King himself did not like the film. ‘Neither Stanley Kubrick nor his screenwriter Diane Johnson had any knowledge of the genre,’ he complained. ‘It was like they had never seen a horror movie before.’4 5 Changing expectations of what horror means in the horror movie will not happen overnight, and the gender gap in American Gothic remains enormous. Yet ironically, if the contemporary Female Gothic has come increasingly to be perceived as an American mode it is because its concerns are now consistent with a larger change in American fiction towards ‘violence-centered plots’ and a Gothic revival representing ‘alterna-

tive strategies for depicting an ever more terrifying reality.’4 6 If American Psycho is the masculine Gothic of the 1990s, Female Gothic looks more and more like a realist mode.

Notes 1. Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 91-2, 93. 2. Claire Kahane, ‘The Gothic Mirror,’ in Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (eds.), The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 335. 3. Ibid. 343. 4. Ibid. 334. 5. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1986), vi; Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 201. 6. Eagleton, Nationalism: Irony and Commitment (Belfast: Field Day Theatre Company Limited, 1988), 13-14. 7. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. edn. (New York: Stein and Day, 1975), 144. 8. Kahane, ‘The Gothic Mirror,’ 335-6. 9. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 132. 10. See Jean E. Kennard, ‘Convention Coverage or How to Read Your Own Life,’ New Literary History, 13 (Autumn 1981), 69-88. 11. Diane Price Herndl, ‘The Writing Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna O., and “Hysterical” Writing,’ NWSA Journal, 1 (1988), 68. 12. See Kate Ford, ‘Loss and Compensation,’ Times Literary Supplement, 12-18 Jan. 1990, 46. 13. Thanks to Catherine Gallagher for this perception. 14. Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 152. 15. Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1935), 5-6. 16. Ibid. 98, 100. 17. The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1934), 149. 18. Reading Woman, 240. 19. Dr Paula Clayton, quoted in Daniel Goleman, ‘Wide Beliefs on Depression in Women Contradicted,’ New York Times, 9 Jan. 1990. 20. Jeffrey Berman, The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 54. 21. Jacobus, Reading Woman, 233. 22. Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 101. 23. Ibid. 132.

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ful, guilty—a whole bunch of things which N. in The Shadow Knows doesn’t feel. And maybe now that I’ve read Susan Brownmiller, I would not have had the book end that way.’4 3

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24. Arbus’s use of the camera had precedent in the early photography of Eudora Welty, and recent parallels in the work of women film directors like Susan Seidelman. In the documentary Calling the Shots, shown on British television in Spring 1990, Seidelman and other women film-makers discussed the way that the camera allowed them access to forbidden turf. 25. Bosworth, Diane Arbus, 158. 26. Ibid. 217. 27. The Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough (New York: Dial Press, 1982), 319. An unpublished paper by Jodi Hauptman, ‘Mirrors and Pictures: A Comparison of The Bell Jar to the Photographs of Diane Arbus,’ written for my course on ‘American Women Writers’ in May 1985, explores similar images of mirrors, shadows, and doubling in Arbus and Plath. 28. Linda Huf, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), 128. 29. Berman, Talking Cure, 127. 30. Judith Walzer Leavitt, ‘Birthing and Anesthesia: The Debate over Twilight Sleep,’ in Women and Health in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 181. 31. Of Woman Born (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 170-1. 32. ‘Why Is Your Writing So Violent?’ New York Times Book Review, 25 Mar. 1981, 10. 33. ‘Interview with Joyce Carol Oates,’ in John R. Knott, Jr., and Christopher R. Keaske (eds.), Mirrors: An Introduction to Literature, 2nd edn. (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1975), 18-19. 34. Ibid. 19. 35. See Dan Moser, ‘The Pied Piper of Tucson,’ Life, 4 Mar. 1966, 18-24. This source was identified by Tom Quirk, ‘A Source for “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”’ Studies in Short Fiction, 18 (Fall 1981), 413-19. 36. Larry McCaffery, Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 205. 37. Interview with Diane Johnson, in McCaffery, Anything Can Happen, 202. 38. Janet Todd, ‘Diane Johnson,’ in Janet Todd (ed.), Women Writers Talking (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), 125. 39. See e.g. Jean Stafford’s story, ‘The Echo and the Nemesis,’ in Children are Bored on Sunday (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953). 40. Todd, ‘Diane Johnson,’ 125. 41. McCaffery, Anything Can Happen, 213. 42. Diane Johnson, ‘The War between Men and Women,’ New York Review of Books, 11 Dec. 1975. 43. Constance Carey, interview with Diane Johnson, San Francisco Review of Books, 1 (Jan. 1976), 17. 44. McCaffery, Anything Can Happen, 215. 45. Aljean Harmetz, ‘“Pet” Film Rights Sold,’ New York Times, 8 June 1984.

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46. Michiko Kakatuni, ‘Kill! Burn! Eviscerate! Bludgeon! It’s Literary Again to Be Horrible,’ New York Times, 21 Nov. 1989.

E. J. CLERY (ESSAY DATE 1992) SOURCE: Clery, E. J. “The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s.” In Reviewing Romanticism, edited by Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis, pp. 69-85. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. In the following essay, Clery outlines the utility of Gothic fiction for readers in the 1790s, particularly in terms of advancing a progressive, feminist perspective.

L’Histoire d’une femme est toujours un Roman. ‘You must confess that novels are more true than histories, because historians often contradict each other, but novelists never do.’ The would-be heroine of E. S. Barrett’s satire of romance fiction, The Heroine, here goes on the attack against the conventional depreciation of the ‘feminine’ novel in favour of ‘masculine’ history (1814, 78). Gender is at the heart of the matter when it is raised again in Northanger Abbey, for history, Catherine Morland observes, ‘tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all, it is very dull. . . .’ (Austen, 1933, 108) Both of these satires set out to show, in comic terms, what happens when an avid consumer of ‘horrid novels’ fulfils James Beattie’s gloomy prognosis: Romances are a dangerous recreation . . . and tend to corrupt the heart, and stimulate the passions. A habit of reading them breeds a dislike to history, and all the substantial parts of knowledge; withdraws the attention from nature and truth; and fills the mind with extravagant thoughts, and too often with criminal propensities. (573-4)

and comes to read her own ‘history’ as if it were a sensational narrative. Yet on the way to the satire’s final rationalist confirmation of the divide between fact and fiction a curious alchemy takes place. Common sense, in temporarily assuming a fantastic disguise, finds it cannot so easily shake it off again. Thus Margaret Kirkham’s feminist reading of Northanger Abbey discovers in it ‘a major criticism of the assumptions associated with the schema of the burlesque novel in which a heroine learns that her romantic notions are all mistaken, and that the world of the everyday is better ordered than that of imagination.’ (Kirkham 89) Catherine’s

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The following essay will trace the disruptive effect of satire’s ‘other’ to its source. In it I will try to assess, in the light of historical experience, the value of Gothic fiction for its readers in the 1790s—a period when novels with a Gothic theme accounted for up to two-thirds of those published in a year. To begin with, I want to propose the paradox that it is in the narratives of this for the most part ideologically conservative form of popular fiction, in conjunction with contemporary evidence for the response to them, that we must look for signs of the development of a feminist critical self-consciousness. In Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft expresses an ambivalent opinion of the novel form’s progressive potential. While restating the rationalist valorisation of history over fiction, she nevertheless insists that novel-reading is preferable to leaving ‘a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers.’ (1985, 386) Six years later the Prologue of her novel The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798) requests the reader to consider the narrative as a ‘history . . . of woman’. A conventional historical account of ‘the partial laws and customs of society’ has been rejected as inadequate.1 In spite of her disclaimer regarding the use of ‘stage-effect’, she has recourse in her fiction to the most melodramatic devices of the Gothic mode involving imprisonment, sexual tyranny and madness. In Gothic she finds the appropriate discursive form for her social critique of the rape of women’s humanity. The change in sentiment that takes place between the writing of these two works coincides with the rise of the Gothic heroine. During the same space of time Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), apogee of Gothic fiction, had appeared, and its success had resulted in a flood

of imitations. On the basis of her enormous success Radcliffe—identified by Michel Foucault as ‘initiator of a discursive practice’—put into circulation the elements of a narrative-type structured around the subjectivity of the heroine, and thus distinct from the early romances of Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve and the more sensational strain of ‘Schauerroman’ available in translations from the German and later popularised by ‘Monk’ Lewis. Instances of the heroine-centred narrative will be read here as contributions to a ‘history of woman’. Beginning with the making of the heroine/female subject through her equivocal relations with the realm of property ownership and economic agency, my narrative follows her to the Gothic castle, a structure briefly lit up as a metaphor for woman’s ‘dematerialisation’ before the law, and then on to her arrival at the ‘happy ending’ and ultimate absorption into marriage.

1. The Heroine Emily calmly said: ‘I am not so ignorant, signor, of the laws on this subject, as to be misled by the assertion of any person. The law, in the present instance, gives me the estates in question, and my own hand shall never betray my right.’ ‘I have been mistaken in my opinion of you, it appears,’ re-joined Montoni sternly. ‘You speak boldly, and presumptuously, upon a subject which you do not understand. For once, I am willing to pardon the conceit of ignorance; the weakness of your sex, too, from which, it seems, you are not exempt, claims some allowance; but if you persist in this strain—you have everything to fear from my justice.’ ‘From your justice, signor,’ rejoined Emily, ‘I have nothing to fear—I have only to hope.’ Montoni looked at her with vexation, and seemed considering what to say . . . ‘Your credulity can punish only yourself; and I must pity the weakness of mind which leads you to so much suffering as you are compelling me to prepare for you.’ ‘You may find, perhaps, signor,’ said Emily with mild dignity, ‘that the strength of my mind is equal to the justice of my cause; and that I can endure with fortitude, when it is in resistance to oppression.’ ‘You speak like a heroine,’ said Montoni contemptuously; ‘we shall see whether you can suffer like one.’ Emily was silent, and he left the room. Recollecting that it was for Valancourt’s sake she had thus resisted, she now smiled complacently upon the threatened sufferings, and retired to the spot which her aunt had pointed out as the repository of the papers relative to the estates . . . (Radcliffe 1970, 380-1)

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Gothic imaginings about General Tilney and his late wife are partially borne out; for it emerges that Mrs Tilney had been imprisoned by her marriage, that unhappiness had contributed to her death, and that the General, in accordance with the laws of England and the customs of the time, does wield near absolute power ‘as an irrational tyrant’ in the family. We find the romance perspective, pace The Heroine’s Cherubina, may be ‘more true’ than Henry Tilney’s reassuring, Whig vision of historical progress (‘Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them?’). In attempting to cure it, by a dangerous mingling, satire itself catches the infection of fiction which Beattie feared.

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The story so far: After a blissful childhood Emily St Aubert loses her mother and father in quick succession. She is penniless and forced to go and live with her vain and foolish aunt, a rich widow. There she falls in love with and agrees to marry Valancourt, whom she had first met on a tour of the Pyrenees she made with her father. The aunt after some opposition permits the marriage and then vetoes it when she herself impulsively marries the mysterious and compelling Signor Montoni. The household moves to Venice. Emily is pressured to marry a man she dislikes but before the ceremony there is an abrupt removal to Montoni’s castle, Udolpho, in the Appenines. The castle is full of long dark passages, nameless fears and hints of ancestral wrongdoings. It emerges that Montoni is the chief of a band of condottieri. He has large gambling debts to pay off and threatens his wife in order to make her sign over some entailed estates to him. She refuses and he has her imprisoned. She dies of unhappiness and neglect and bequeaths the estates to her niece. The confrontation between heroine and villain in The Mysteries takes place at the intersection of economic structure and cultural norms. Emily’s self-assertion in defence of her property rights is countered by Montoni’s rehearsal of strictures on feminine propriety. The excessive, romantic nature of her resistance to authority is registered in her naming as ‘heroine’;2 the predestined failure of such a gesture is signified by her silence. Emily’s brushes with the supernatural at Udolpho are later explained away (the ‘explained supernatural’ is frequently used as a description of the Radcliffean narrative-type) as the products of an overstimulated imagination but they are nevertheless the proper metaphor for her own condition. Her determined relation to the economic order—in this instance the system of property relations organised by kinship—defines the nature of the heroine’s social existence.3 She is to serve as an instrument for the passage of property, whether by cession to the superior claim of a male relation or as the merchandise of a profiteering marriage agreed between men; therefore her tormented consciousness, her sensibility, her humanity, are alike excessive—ghostly emanations. She experiences, as the effect of this socioeconomic positioning, the curious ambiguity of existing simultaneously as both a thing and a person, in a twilight zone of individuation. At the same time her alienation from her own will is imposed by the shadow of propriety, making her response to economic oppression double: libertarian in so far as she is a sensible individual;

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calculating—on behalf of reputation—insofar as she is a woman, constrained by gender. In the event she is forced to sign away her property to her wicked uncle not because of any inability to suffer with fortitude, but because in a castle overrun with drunken mercenaries and Venetian courtesans she can no longer safeguard her privacy or virtue without his protection. Sex intervenes, marking the duplicity of women’s experience. ‘A man . . . secure in his own good conduct, depends only on himself, and may brave the public opinion; but a woman, in behaving well, performs but half her duty; as what is thought of her, is as important to her as what she really is. . . . Opinion is the grave of virtue in a man; but its throne among women.’ Wollstonecraft quotes Rousseau (1985, 242). Romance fiction revolves around this double standard, alternately condoning and deprecating, pointing on the one hand to the throne on which the heroine will be installed at the end of her trials, and on the other hand to the grave where one false step might, however undeservedly, lead her. Romance recognises that the gentlewoman is bound by the metaphysics of appearance, that her mind is of necessity given over to superstition. In every work that reflects on the condition of women the rule of propriety exists as a ubiquitous invisible presence, an imperative and a threat. A notable example is Regina Maria Roche’s sentimental-Gothic The Children of the Abbey (1796) in which a libertine conspires to destroy the reputation of the heroine, the cancelling of her good name being, not as in Clarissa a mere by-product of seduction, but the preliminary to it. These machinations prepare for the nightmarish sequence in which Amanda suffers a lightning fall through the levels of the English class system until she lands half-dead in the gutter.4 Emily, unprotected merchandise on the marriage market, turns the tables by learning to treat herself as a commodity. Pursuing the principle of synecdoche, part for a whole, Emily’s humanity and the sum total of her actions are absorbed by her ‘virtue’, the need to preserve it and, what is more difficult still, the need to maintain its ‘appearance’ while preserving it, in the cause of her own economic viability: her ‘property’ in her self. (Here ‘virtue’ assumes its alternative meaning as the efficacy of things—as use-value, that gives a basis for exchange-value.) This is the pragmatic import of her father’s warning against overindulgent sensibility. By self-appraisal, the recognition of her exchange-value on the marriage market, she must learn to subordinate her will to

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The Mysteries displays in the form of romance the real contradictions and dangers which every gentlewoman of the period potentially faced.5 Above all it actualises the fears of the woman of the middle class, whose social standing was most unstable, liable to upward and downward variation, and therefore particularly susceptible to the taboos surrounding femininity. Mary Wollstonecraft recognised the critical potential in the Radcliffean romance when she adopted its ‘system of terror’ for her political fiction The Wrongs of Woman, where she made explicit what was already immanent in the form. It was not coincidental that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had been addressed to middle-class women, later to become the best readers of Gothic romance.6 What Wollstonecraft calls the natural state of middle-class women, their ability to experience in a conscious way the various demands made on the sex as contradictory, that which in addition allowed them to empathise with the sufferings of the Gothic heroine, might also make them the bearers of critique. To realise contradiction as critique would be for the reader to become the heroine of her own life and apply to her own circumstances the lesson of how to ‘suffer like a heroine’. Such, certainly, was the fear implicit in the satires and condemnations of novel-reading women who confused fact and fiction. The space for critique opened within the new economic order was linked to increased restrictions on women’s social praxis.7 The heroine of romance follows the private lady into a negative, occulted relation to the sphere of economic agency. Forcibly absented from the scene of production, the private lady continues to haunt it, whether as casualty, or clandestine participant. One legitimate role was that of consumer, whose connection with the workshop, though causal, could be veiled. But here the embattled, unprotected Gothic heroine parts company with the

lady; not for her the petty sovereignty of the purse-strings. True to her vocation for suffering she comes to illustrate the harshest effects of unequal access to remunerative work. By the 1790s, although still caught up in the traditional web of kinship, some heroines begin to react to pressures from another quarter; those conditions described by Mary Ann Radcliffe in The Female Advocate (1799) when she deplores the erosion of the ‘Rights of Women’ to an independent livelihood.8 Monimia in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House does piecework for ‘a very considerable linen warehouse in the neighborhood.’ (1989, 494) Ellena in The Italian passes ‘whole days in embroidering silks, which were disposed of to the nuns of a neighboring convent, who sold them to the Neapolitan ladies . . . at a very high advantage’. (Radcliffe 1981, 9) The gentlewoman/heroine as worker transgresses the code of propriety, yet so long as she labours in secrecy, remaining within the genteel space defined by the magical walls of the home, her character is preserved from the judgement of the world. The appearance of gentility is precariously upheld by the returns of honest labour, in the knowledge that the fact of labour may destroy what it was meant to save. The revelation of transgression into the economic sphere would dissolve the layer which separates the world from the home, making private woman irrevocably, disreputably, public. When Ellena’s social status is thrown in doubt, she, like the products of her labour, is disposed of to a convent. The convent of romance fiction, the insolvent heroine’s last resort, approximates the symbolic extreme of the brothel in a Protestant society, the ‘nunnery’ of Anglo-Saxon slang. Novel-writing was another means of support for needy gentlewomen, though to my knowledge no heroine makes use of it. Again a kind of piecework permitting both physical seclusion within the household and an anonymous, mediated relationship to the marketplace, it offered correspondingly meagre rewards. The late eighteenth century was the great age of the nameless ‘Lady’, signatory of innumerable popular publications. It was not unusual for an author’s preface to indicate financial hardship as the motive of writing, making the purchase of novels a form of charity, while the public recognition of financial need sometimes excused the public advertisement of a woman’s name—to an extent. Charlotte Smith’s was one such case. She wrote for the support of herself and her children after leaving her profligate husband, and subsequently won the

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the maintenance of herself as object. Of what use is her inheritance if her body is devalued? Although she needs a dowry to afford the husband, the loss of respectability would debar her forever from the happiness of secure social status. If Emily emerges unscathed and triumphant, her exertions have by the end of the narrative left her paler and more pensive, as though, by her strict adherence to it, the ideology of femininity had drained her of lifeblood, vampire-like. She has finished her task as entrepreneur of herself. She is in direct line of succession to Pamela, another literary paragon who turns propriety to profit, in effect managing her virginity as if it were a business.

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sympathy and even friendship of some wellconnected readers. The novels, for which she received £50 per volume, appeared with the regularity of a production line. Her friend William Cowper wrote of her ‘Chained to her desk like a slave to his oar’; she herself valued them ‘no more than a Grocer does figs’. (cit., Smith 1989, xii, x) Moreover the price of her industry was the exposure of her private life as spectacle. The reviewers discussed her fiction as autobiography, identified unflattering portraits of her husband and reproved her for her disloyalty to the marriage vows. As we will see, Ann Radcliffe, perhaps the most highlypaid English novelist of the century (£500 for The Mysteries, £800 for The Italian), was also punished in the public imagination for her manifest success. From the literary sweatshop to the magical legacies of the fictional happy ending: by the close of The Mysteries Emily St Aubert has received not one but two inheritances in sublime recognition of her virtue, yet she receives them in the name of another, ‘for Valancourt’s sake.’ In defending her ‘property in her own person’, there too her care has amounted to a caretaker government, for it was property safeguarded for another. On her wedding day all property rights, including those to her own person, will be given over to her husband; English common law presides over the transaction. The fate of the Gothic heroine, civil disembodiment, was prefigured by the unhappy end of Madame Montoni, conveyed in the premonitory message of the Gothic castle.

2. The Castle ‘We inherit an old Gothic castle,’ wrote Sir William Blackstone in Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), ‘erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant. The moated ramparts, the embattled towers, and the trophied halls, are magnificent and venerable, but useless. The inferior apartments, now converted into rooms of convenience, are chearful and commodius, though their approaches are winding and difficult.’ (III, 268) The great legal authority of the eighteenth century drew on a trope current in both the aesthetic and political discourses of his time in order to picture the historical range of his field of enquiry. But there is nothing here of Burke’s passionate evocation of feudalism as a rebuke to the present in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1792). In these pre-revolutionary days, it appeared that modernisation by a ‘series of minute contrivances’, as opposed to full-scale ‘new-modelling’, could do no damage to the social

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fabric. The old system of property laws—for this was the immediate object of Blackstone’s remarks—could be comfortably fitted up to suit the requirements of the now predominant ‘commercial mode of property . . . to facilitate exchange and alienation’. (III, 268) The object of the Commentaries as a whole was a complete review, codification and vindication of the law as it upheld the right of the newly-dominant capitalist system of property relations in the interest of the revised status quo. It was also intended to establish the law’s disinterested and fully autonomous functioning, and this was implemented at a discursive level through the representation of the law, in four volumes of print, as a unified and functional whole, where, as in the renovated Gothic castle, reason is superimposed on natural evolution. Blackstone’s Commentaries operate two distinct strategies of rationalisation, each on the basis of a different sense of the word ‘rationalise’. The first is an attempt to codify the law as a rational system governed by fixed and immutable principles, extracting logic from its haphazard underwriting of sectional interest, and enabling it to take its place as a branch of the human sciences. The second works to justify or legitimate the law by identifying it with natural order, beyond the reach of human criticism. The two ends appear at first sight to be contradictory; another case posing the eighteenth century riddle: can enlightenment and theodicy be reconciled? Yet at an institutional level their functions were complementary. Both constituted the law as a closed system, selfsufficient, impartial, abstracted from social relations. In such a way the law confirmed its participation in the general phenomenon of reification, social manifestation of the economic order to which it now devoted its services, the ‘essence of commodity-structure’, as Lukács describes it. He continues, ‘Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a “phantom-objectivity”, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.’ (Lukács 83). Meanwhile, the contrivances of the law involve a number of ‘fictions and circuities’, which, as Blackstone admits, might ‘shock the student’. One fiction that shocked the 1794 editor of the Commentaries, as he confessed in a footnote, was Blackstone’s boast that the legal provisions for marriage showed how ‘great a favourite is the female sex of the laws of England’. (I, 445) Elsewhere, in a digression concerning laws dependent

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Among the real consequences of this principle were the following: the husband took control of the whole of his wife’s property, past, present and future; he had sole rights over their children; a married woman could not enter into any legal agreement or lawsuit on her own behalf; she could not bring proceedings against her husband in common law; and, since her ‘very being’ was suspended, she no longer held property in her own person, Locke’s minimum condition for civil rights. ‘My wife and I are one and I am he.’ The husband was held to represent his wife’s interests at every level. Marriage meant what has been called ‘a kind of civil death’ for women (Davidoff and Hall 200). The debate about marriage as an institution in this period raised the same issues of representation as elision—the legalised absorption of one body by another—as contemporary debates over the extension of male suffrage, the colonial system and slavery. At precisely the time that coverture was found to be irreconcilable with the liberal humanist ideals of reason and autonomy of the individual it arrived at its moment of maximum utility. The intensified ‘privatising’ of middle- and upper-class women which took place throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century was underwritten by law. But the legal fictions required to support legal objectivity on this point were becoming increasingly transparent. The doctrine of coverture formalised and brought to completion the ongoing education in supernatural non-being which we have already noted in the history of the Gothic heroine. In the legislation relating to married women it is no

surprise to find the elements of a Gothic fiction. In the first place, its foundation in doubt expressed in the dictum ‘Maternity is a fact, paternity is a matter of speculation.’ This single absence of proof of paternity, jeopardising the legitimate transmission of property from generation to generation, was the ultimate justification for all restraints placed on women of the property-owning classes. As Burke recognised, sublimity and violence are native to obscurity. Thus, secondly, and in two stages, we have: the civil death of the woman by order of the law; and the haunting of the law by the spectre of the woman as potential occlusion of its working principle. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, a period in which patrilineal property laws were enforced with increasing strictness, literary fictions by and about women bore witness to the haunting of a coercive legal system. They took as their subject matter the persistent threats to the clarity of patrilineity—abduction, rape, elopement, adultery, illegitimacy, incest— aberrations generated by the very attempt to enforce security of property through the male line. ‘Marriage has bastilled me for life.’ With these words the heroine of The Wrongs of Woman radicalises a commonplace condition (154-5). The conjunction marriage/Bastille defamiliarises the private zone to which women are consigned by law in a way more obliquely realised in Gothic fiction. Like the castle of Udolpho, the private lunatic asylum to which Wollstonecraft’s Maria is consigned by her vicious husband is in ruins, intended as optimistic evidence, maybe, of the decadence of the institution they represent. Less optimistic in tendency is the device of serial autobiographies punctuating the main narrative, a kaleidoscope of women’s lives which seem to demonstrate only a universal misery—the technique again borrowed by Wollstonecraft from romance fiction. In the works of Radcliffe and her followers as in Wollstonecraft the heroine seems to move through a bleak landscape littered with the remains of destructive marriages; every casualty she encounters is a ruin and a prophecy. Yet the repetition implies a sort of collectivity, or the potential for one. Out of Gothic dystopia Wollstonecraft attempted to formulate the utopian telos of her politics. Radcliffean romance, the so-called ‘supernatural explained’, briefly unmasks the interested nature of man-made laws. Their narratives perform a break-up of the reification of the law by permitting a reflection on the illusory nature of its ‘phantom-objectivity’—and this through a literalminded representation of the law as haunted

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on the ‘wisdom and will of the legislators’, Blackstone had been more explicit about their function: ‘Thus our own common law has declared, that the goods of the wife do instantly upon marriage become the property and right of the husband; and our statute law has declared all monopolies a public offence: yet that right, and this offence, have no foundation in nature; but are merely created by the law, for the purposes of civil society.’ (I, 55) Workers’ monopolies remaining from the medieval guild system were to be discarded. But the doctrine of coverture was one of those ancient feudal relics which were readily integrated within the new structure of capitalism.9 Blackstone defined it like this: ‘By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing . . .’. (I, 441)

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house. The metaphysical paraphernalia of an ‘objectivist’ system of justice is portrayed with objectivity in the terrifying phantasmagoria of Gothic fiction. For in this vision ‘justice’ is estranged from itself, retranslated into an asymmetric, repressive relation between people. In each novel there is a confrontation, however brief, with the unthinkable: a world of inescapable injustice; a brush with the Sadeian universe where the pleas of the victims are forever unheard and wrongdoing forever unpunished, before the narrative reverts to a properly providential dénouement. How appropriate that the author who most vividly communicated this transient terror should be sent to end her life in a madhouse by the daydreams of the British reading public.1 0 The castle of Udolpho would appear to serve the function of an illumination, its darkness representing for the heroine the truth of her condition, a truth she can withstand only momentarily, in the instant before she faints. But in the overall scheme the castle provides only a theatrical, metaphorical horror, structurally isolated from the main body of narrative. The castle offers itself as an approximate expression, a proxy, for those quotidian horrors situated elsewhere, outside, in the realm of the ‘real.’ Horror is detained in quarantine, to guard against infection of the daylight world to which the story, in accordance with the therapeutics of romance, must return for the happy ending.

3. The Happy Ending What is the status of Gothic fiction’s revelations? I have made a claim for the grounding of horror in historical truth. That the condition of women at this time was oppressive, and was frequently experienced as such, is undeniable. Romances both helped to produce and offered a reflection upon this experience. They actively implement the division of public and private spheres by constituting their female readers as a fragmented body, accomplishing a pleasurable sequestration of the novel-reader in the realm of private aesthetic consumption. The public voice the novel form offered women writers was necessarily inflected by the fact of trespass. I have suggested that at the same time the romances allowed a reflection on this very exclusion from civil society and the violence it entailed. Critique appears at a phantasmagoric level, at the level of consciousness or imagination. But within the illogic of the novel it must replace illusion with illusion. Divorced from practical transformation, cut off from the rationale of causality,

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in the final analysis Gothic enlightenment endorses the ideological patterns it has briefly exposed. The irrational, feminine popular novel can show the violence and irrationality of reason, prising apart its contradictions; but the truth of a novel is by definition fictional and its force contained by the correlative ‘laws’ of narration. The achievement of these novels was not to represent the real condition of women in supernatural trappings, but to intimate, through the reader’s identification with the heroine, the supernatural condition of women in the real world. Implicitly, they tell of the fiction of reality rather than reflecting reality in fiction. The implications of this inversion become evident when we reconsider the main charge brought against romances, namely, that female readers, by identification with the romantic heroine, would be led to confuse fact with fiction, recreating themselves after her image, and learning to read their own lives like a sensational narrative. Romances were charged with cultivating in the reader a sense of the supernaturalism of everyday life by the dissemination of impermissible thoughts, untenable values, irrational models of behaviour.1 1 Read episodically, the fictions of Radcliffe and her followers yield the suggestion that patriarchal right is founded on force, not nature; that the ‘right’ of patriarchy is itself a fiction. But such a reading is against the linear flow of the narrative towards resolution and closure. For the significance of the whole is subsumed in the final tableau of idealised wedlock: a partnership freely entered into by both parties and made equal by the strength of mutual affection; a sacred union of reason and sensibility.1 2 The threatening indeterminacy of past terrors is resolved in the light of this final manifestation of providential order. The previous melt-down of reification by fear is superseded by moral hypostasis: a concluding freezeframe.

Notes 1. Gary Kelly, editor of The Wrongs of Woman (1976), suggests that the novel was the second volume promised in the Vindication; the work which would look closely at “the laws relative to women.”; 156 n1. 2. The ‘naming of the heroine’ occurs as a reflexive trope in heroine-centred novels from Richardson onwards: with ritual malice, an enemy jeeringly associates the main female character with romance-reading, accusing her of entertaining paranoid fantasies, of selfdramatisation, in order to undermine her opposition to (corrupt) authority. When the heroine is vindicated, so too is the exemplary ‘truth’ of fiction. 3. Several recent interpretations of The Mysteries of Udolpho have alerted us to the importance of economic

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4. The same radical dualism—throne or grave—appeared with exemplary force in Wollstonecraft’s own lifestory after the publication of William Godwin’s incautious Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ (1798). A champion of feminine propriety like the Rev. R. Polewhele was able to write, ‘I cannot but think, that the Hand of Providence is visible, in her life, her death, and in the Memoirs themselves. As she was given up to her “heart’s lusts,” and let “to follow her own imagination,” that the fallacy of her doctrines and the effects of an irreligious conduct might be manifested to the world; and as she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to which they are liable; so her husband was permitted, in writing her Memoirs, to labour under a temporary infatuation, that every incident might be seen without a gloss—every fact exposed without an apology.’ (2930) 5. It is necessary to emphasise, in what might otherwise appear a rather static outline of the condition of women, that the boundaries between public and private, visible and invisible, the proper and the inadmissible, were undergoing major transition in this period. The critical reflections under discussion here were to some extent made possible by this process of change, and the explicit negotiations it involved. For more about the transformations in gender ideology, and the effect on women of the property-owning classes in particular, see Poovey (1984) Chapter 1 and Davidoff and Hall (1987). 6. In The Discourse of the Sublime: History, Aesthetics and the Subject Peter de Bolla provides a well-documented account of the ‘feminization’ of reading practices in the late of eighteenth century, with the rider that the majority of novel-readers may have been men (237). Statistics are difficult to come by in this area; they would not in any case alter an interpretation based on the novels’ own inscription of their readership, and the prevalent stereotype of the female reader circulated by journals and conduct books—added to the oblique image found in the satires. 7. See note 5. 8. Mary Ann Radcliffe’s polemic centres on the peculiar horrors of the plight of genteel women without financial means or male protectors, subjected to ‘the absolute necessity of bartering their virtue for bread.’ She criticises among other things the lack of useful

education for women, their exclusion from professions and replacement in traditionally female trades by ‘effeminate tradesmen’, and the abuses of ‘mercenary marriages’. 9. See Pateman (1988) on the survival of patriarchy in what has traditionally been seen by historians as the post-patriarchal ‘civil world of contract’ of the eighteenth century and after. 10. The rumour that Ann Radcliffe had gone mad by ‘the excessive use of her imagination in representing extravagant and violent scenes’ was widely credited (McIntyre, 1920, 19-20). It seemed to offer an explanation for her prolonged silence after the publication of The Italian. The Monthly Review circulated the story in their issue of July 1826, but printed an apology and correction after the posthumous appearance of Gaston de Blondville (1826) complete with a doctor’s report confirming her sanity at the time of death. 11. ‘We would admonish our young female readers not to expect, as the reward of their virtues, those critical and extraordinary coincidences which, against all the laws of probability and calculations of chances, invariably remove every obstacle that opposes the wishes of their favourite heroines . . .’; a representative example from a review of The Castle of Ollada in Critical Review. S.2, 14 (July 1795), 113-14. 12. The truth-value of Emily’s disturbing adventures as both subject and object resides precisely in that split identity—an unhappy consciousness manacled to an object of avaricious desire and economic exchange. This truth-value is apparently cancelled by the novel’s closure, when narrative and heroine disappear together in marriage. Yet it is worth noting that the wedding as a form of closure would itself express a partial, figurative truth for a society in which marriage was the vanishing-point of women’s individual existence, ‘a kind of civil death’.

Works Cited Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (London: Oxford University Press, 1933). Vol. 5 of The Novels of Jane Austen. Barrett, Eaton Stannard, The Heroine, or Adventures of Cherubina (Dublin: 1814). Beattie, James, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London: W. Strahan, T. Cadell; Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1783). Blackstone, Sir William, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Notes and additions by Edward Christian, 15th ed., 4 vols (London: Cadell & Davies, 1809). Boorstin, Daniel J., The Mysterious Science of the Law. An Essay on Blackstone’s COMMENTARIES, etc. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958). Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and women of the English middle class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchison, 1987). de Bolla, Peter, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Kirkham, Margaret, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (New York, Methuen, 1986). Lukács, Georg, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971).

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factors in the unravelling of its plot, pulling into focus for the first time passages like that quoted above. ‘Money’, Mary Poovey states in ‘Ideology and the Mysteries of Udolpho’, ‘lurks behind every turn of The Mysteries plot.’ (1979, 323) In Literary Women, Ellen Moers pioneered the view that property takes precedence over ‘true love’ among the themes of what she called the ‘Female Gothic’. (1978, 136) Janet Todd has found in all of Radcliffe’s works an unstated equation of sexual and financial threat ‘but it is not really an equal association; perhaps it might better be said that the economic is sexualised.’ (262) Each suggests that fiction provided an apt if heightened representation of the real condition of women: ‘Fear is an appropriate response in a world where women have property or at least the opportunity of transmitting it, but where they have little power to control it.’ (Todd 262)

SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC

McIntyre, Clara Francis, Ann Radcliffe in Relation to Her Time, Yale Studies in English, Vol. 62 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920).

Book-length study that examines works by Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Dacre, and Mary Shelley.

Moers, Ellen, Literary Women (London: Women’s Press, 1978).

D’Haen, Theo. “Postmodern Gothic.” In Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, pp. 283-94. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995.

Pateman, Carol, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). Polewhele, Rev. R., The Unsex’d Females (London: Cadell and Davis, 1798). Poovey, Mary, ‘Ideology and The Mysteries of Udolpho’, Criticism 21 (Fall, 1979): 307-30. ———, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology and Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Radcliffe, Ann, The Italian, Or The Confessional of the Black Penitents, ed. Frederick Garber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). ———, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Radcliffe, Mary Ann, The Female Advocate, Or An Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation (London: Verner and Hood, 1799). Roche, Regina Maria, The Children of the Abbey (London: Minerva Press, 1797). Smith, Charlotte, The Old Manor House, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Todd, Janet, The Sign of Angelica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800 (London: Virago Press, 1989). Wollstonecraft, Mary, Mary and The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). ———, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).

FURTHER READING

Argues that “the Gothic, as part of the fantastic, in postmodernism fulfils a particular function, and the recognition of the role it plays has rather far reaching implications for the entire discussion on postmodernism.” DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: a Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1990, 368 p. Applies feminist theory to the analysis of nineteenthcentury Gothic literature. Edmundson, Mark. “American Gothic.” In Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic, pp. 1-68. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Surveys the connections between the Gothic and sadomasochism in modern American society, horror films, and literature. Goldner, Ellen J. “Other(ed) Ghosts: Gothicism and the Bonds of Reason in Melville, Chesnutt, and Morrison.” MELUS 24, no. 1 (1999): 59-83. Evaluates works by Herman Melville, Charles Chesnutt, and Toni Morrison that treat the subject of race, racism, and slavery. Haggerty, George E. “‘The End of History’: Identity and Dissolution in Apocalyptic Gothic.” Eighteenth Century 41, no. 3 (fall 2000): 225-46. Outlines millennialism in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Heller, Tamar. “Reigns of Terror: The Politics of the Female Gothic.” In Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, pp. 13-37. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. Notes the various connections between Gothic literature and opinions regarding the traditional roles of women in the domestic sphere and in society.

Criticism Andriano, Joseph. Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993, 182 p.

Hendershot, Cyndy. The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998, 281 p.

Comprehensive analysis of the role of female demons in works of Gothic fiction by male authors.

Studies the treatment of masculinity in Gothic fiction and film.

Brantlinger, Patrick. “Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880-1914.” In Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 18301914, pp. 227-53. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the fin de siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 203 p. Full-length analysis of the influence of science on the treatment of the human body and subjectivity in latenineteenth-century Gothic fiction.

Studies the significance of what Brantlinger classifies as the “imperial Gothic,” which, he asserts, “combines the seemingly scientific, progressive, often Darwinian ideology of imperialism with an antithetical interest in the occult.”

Kollin, Susan. “Race, Labor, and the Gothic Western: Dispelling Frontier Myths in Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind.” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 3 (fall 2000): 67594.

Clery, E. J. Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley. Plymouth, England: Northcote House in Association with the British Council, 2000, 168 p.

Discusses the treatment of race and sex roles, as well as elements of both American Western fiction and Gothic conventions in Scarborough’s novel, The Wind.

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Interprets depictions of such stock Gothic characters as monsters, half-breeds, cannibals, and vampires as revealing British attitudes toward people of other races and cultures. Michasiw, Kim Ian. “Charlotte Dacre’s Postcolonial Moor.” In Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, pp. 35-55. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Postcolonialist reading of Zofloya, emphasizing Dacre’s subversion of the traditional racial power structure. Navarette, Susan J. The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998, 314 p. Delineates the connection between horror literature of the late nineteenth century and the intellectual school of thought and works comprising the “Decadent style.” Person, Leland S. “Poe’s Philosophy of Amalgamation: Reading Racism in the Tales.” In Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, pp. 205-24. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Highlights racism present in works by Edgar Allan Poe. Reddy, Maureen T. “Female Sexuality in ‘The Poor Clare’: The Demon in the House.” Studies in Short Fiction 21, no. 3 (summer 1984): 259-65. Discusses Elizabeth Gaskell’s treatment of sexuality, women, and the double in her Gothic short story, “The Poor Clare.” Royster, Francesca T. “White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 4 (winter 2000): 432-55. Surveys the Gothic elements and Shakespeare’s treatment of race in Titus Andronicus. Schafer, Martin. “The Rise and Fall of Antiutopia: Utopia, Gothic Romance, Dystopia.” Science-Fiction Studies, no. 6 (1979): 287-95.

Studies Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk, asserting that “an analysis of the thematic attention to surfaces changes the traditional view of the Gothic contribution to characterization and figuration in fiction.” ———. “Toward the Gothic: Terrorism and Homosexual Panic.” In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, pp. 83-96. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Explores the significance of homosexuality to the Gothic tradition. Smith, Allan Lloyd. “Postmodernism/Gothicism.” In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited and with an introduction by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, pp. 6-19. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Suggests “some rather more significant parallels” between postmodernist and Gothic discourse, asserting that “[i]n this dual focus some new perspectives can be offered on both.” Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, eds. Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 248 p. A collection of essays that study Gothic literature through the lens of postcolonial literary theory. Spencer, Kathleen. “Victorian Urban Gothic: The First Modern Fantastic Literature.” In Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, pp. 87-96. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Examines the treatment of the city in Victorian fantasy novels and its connection to gothicism. Winter, Kari J. Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 17901865. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992, 172 p. Full-length study of the treatment of the oppression of women in Gothic fiction and slave narratives.

Surveys the evolution of the Gothic romance from utopia to dystopia.

Wolstenholme, Susan. Gothic (Re)Visions: Writing Women as Readers. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, 201 p.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 96, no. 2 (March 1981): 255-70.

Illustrates how Gothic fiction, perceived as a women’s literary genre, provided women writers with an unprecedented opportunity to explore an expansive array of narrative conventions, subjects, and perspectives.

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Malchow, H. L. Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996, 335 p.

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G

othic literature has influenced and inspired several subgenres of literature, including the supernatural tale, the ghost story, horror fiction, and vampire literature. Many critics have analyzed the connections between these subgenres and the Gothic tradition, as well as some of the most widely-discussed themes, figures, and settings found in Gothic literature and works in these various subgenres. While belief in the supernatural served as the basis for the mythologies of early civilizations, and afterward remained an enduring aspect of world folklore, it was not until the nineteenth century that a substantial body of works evolved that focused upon the otherworldly as a source of horror. Although Gothic novelists often included supernatural incidents in their works, they also pursued other concerns, particularly those related to eighteenth-century morals and manners. Such concerns precluded the single-minded focus and inventiveness of their successors in portraying weird and ghostly phenomena. The Gothic novel was characterized by intricate but often loosely constructed plots and subplots, stock characters such as the naive young woman and the lascivious male villain, and a medieval setting, such as a haunted, ruined castle. In contrast, nineteenthcentury supernatural fiction often takes the form of the short story, which critics agree is better suited to achieving the effect of horror, and

features more thoroughly developed characters and contemporary settings. The growth of popular magazines increased the proliferation of supernatural tales, and “penny dreadfuls” provided the working class with serialized tales of the macabre, such as Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (1847), written by either Thomas Peckett Prest or James Malcolm Rymer. Alternatively, some critics assert that, rather than serving as an escapist diversion from rigid social norms, the ghost story, advancing the idea that wrongdoers and eccentrics incur the wrath of ghosts, defended the status quo by discouraging rebellion against one’s position in society. Nineteenth-century supernatural fiction has also been viewed as a reaction against the materialism and rationalist philosophy that accompanied the rapid social changes brought about by the industrial revolution, during which an older, more stable way of life, with its traditional ways of thinking, was eclipsed by technological progress and the routines of urban life. The struggle between religion and science became an important issue as new theories that challenged traditional beliefs were advanced, most prominently Charles Darwin’s speculations on human evolution. Although a few commentators have maintained that a literalistic belief in the supernatural has always been, and will always be, a prerequisite

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for the creation and enjoyment of horror tales, most critics propose special reasons to explain the relatively recent phenomenon of supernatural fiction as a literary form. Among these reasons, one is most often given: the nineteenth century was an age of scientific and technological advancement that had distanced itself from many of the superstitions of the past; as a consequence, it was precisely these superstitions, exiled from the progressive consciousness of the day, that emerged in the works of literature. A corollary to this theory states that because earlier societies assumed the supernatural as part of the cosmic order, its manifestations could not inflict that dread peculiar to modern humanity. This explanation has been most prominently articulated by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay “Das Unheimlich” (“The Uncanny”), and is based on the assumption that beneath the surface of civilized skepticism survive all the irrational beliefs of humanity’s past. Thus, a common storyline in Gothic and horror fiction involves an unbelieving protagonist to whom it is proven—with unpleasant consequences—that some aspect of the supernatural is true. While supernatural fiction emerged as a distinct literary form in the Victorian era, it was also during this period that the focus of the genre began to shift away from confrontations with ghostly phenomena toward character psychology. Supernatural fiction had often addressed, albeit unwittingly, the concerns of the inchoate field of psychology by rendering unresolved inner conflict in a symbolic manner that is exemplified in the standard plot of a murderer haunted by the ghost of his victim, which then represents the murderer’s guilty conscience. Critics commonly read such works as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and those in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light (1894) as allegories of humankind’s struggle with instinctual needs and drives, laying bare the dark side of the human soul. Many observers maintain that supernatural fiction underwent a significant change when Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu introduced, with his “Green Tea” (1869), the apparition that may in fact be a product of the mind. This type of story was later developed with great success by Henry James in his novella The Turn of the Screw (1898). Thus, the legacy of supernatural fiction, somewhat paradoxically, has been a tendency among modern fiction writers to favor psychological horrors over those that have their roots in the archaic and essentially pastoral lore based on the existence of the supernatural.

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Despite all contentions that supernatural fiction suffered a decline in the early decades of the twentieth century, this literary genre has continued to flourish and grow in popularity, assisted by television and movie adaptations and imitations. Although some might contend that it has radically changed in quality and substance, becoming merely a source of income for hack writers who exploit the more sensationalistic aspects of the form, horror fiction has always been allied to the lower types of commercial literature, from the “shilling shockers” of the Gothic period to the mass-market “pageturners” of the present day. Even those authors who are recognized as the most profound and artistic practitioners of literary supernaturalism, such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, are often criticized as hopelessly vulgar and categorized far below the level of serious artists. At the same time, the highest examples of the supernatural genre have endured for the same reason as the more accepted classics of literature—their power to express through the medium of language some significant aspect of human experience. In the perception of many readers and critics, the works of such authors as Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Walter de la Mare do not “transcend” the essential traits of supernatural fiction but rather bring them to perfection. As Lovecraft stated in his 1945 study Supernatural Horror in Literature: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form.” The theme of the doppelgänger (the double, or “second self”) is prominent in nineteenth-century literature, from stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann in Germany to works of Robert Louis Stevenson in Great Britain, Edgar Allan Poe in the United States, and countless others. Although stories as ancient as the Greek myth of Narcissus feature characters’ fascination with their mirror images, and numerous folk tales center on the mysterious relation between a person and his or her shadow, the double as a dominant element in an artistic work was the creation of the German Romantics. Critics commonly note the appearance of the double in such earlier works as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s drama Faust (1808), presenting in Siebenkäs and his friend Leibgeber two intimately connected figures who are clearly meant to be taken as aspects of a single personality. Subsequently the German fantasist and musician Hoff-

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While the vampire can be traced throughout literary history and world folklore to antiquity, vampirism as the focus of narrative and theme in works of literature first became prominent in the early nineteenth century. John William Polidori’s novella The Vampyre, published in 1819, is generally considered to be the first work of vampire fiction and introduced several traits of the literary vampire, including a deathlike countenance and hypnotic powers. This work sparked popular interest, and a deluge of vampire stories followed, most prominently Varney the Vampyre. Another influential work of vampire literature was Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1871-72), which depicted a lesbian relationship between vampire and victim, further expanding the conventions of vampirism to include an ambiguous sexual attraction between predator and prey, the vampire’s aversion to religious symbols, and aspects of sadism. With the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897, the popular conception of vampires and their portrayal in literature became codified, resulting in the familiar stereotype of an aristocratic bloodsucker who preys upon beautiful young women. Stoker’s novel has been the focus of diverse social, psychological, and historical

interpretations. Many critics, for example, have asserted that the work is an admonition against deviant sexual behavior, emphasizing the association between vampires and the subversion of Christian and Victorian morality. Although much twentieth- and twenty-first-century vampire fiction incorporates characteristics of the nineteenthcentury vampire, commentators have noted a trend toward depictions of vampires as sympathetic and morally ambiguous characters, such as Louis in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), which contrasts with the traditional image of the vampire as threatening and thoroughly evil. Both as character and as symbol, critics find that the vampire in literature serves to reflect society’s views on sexuality, death, religion, and the role of women, and functions as a psychological metaphor for humanity’s most profound fears and desires.

REPRESENTATIVE WORKS Jane Austen Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. 4 vols. (novels) 1818

Joanna Baillie Orra: a Tragedy, in Five Acts (play) 1812

Clive Barker The Damnation Game (novel) 1985 The Hellbound Heart (novella) 1986; published in the collection Night Visions 3, edited by George R. R. Martin; published separately, 1988

William Beckford *Vathek (novel) 1787

Algernon Blackwood The Empty House, and Other Ghosts (short stories) 1906 Ancient Sorceries, and Other Tales (short stories) 1927 The Dance of Death, and Other Tales (short stories) 1927 The Tales of Algernon Blackwood (short stories) 1938

Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights [as Ellis Bell] (novel) 1847

Charles Brockden Brown Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. 3 vols. (novel) 1799

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mann imaginatively and forcefully exploited the artistic potential of doubling in numerous short stories, including “Der Sandmann” (1817; “The Sandman”), and in the novel Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815-16; The Devil’s Elixir), which explores the power of demonic forces over a person’s existence. Hoffmann conjured up the doppelgänger, or double: a tangible and wholly independent embodiment of sinister powers. Hoffmann’s doubles draw from both human psychology and belief in the supernatural, reflecting nineteenth-century interest in scientific psychology but also retaining a link to occult traditions. As writers strove to explain duality according to the laws of reason and common sense, the double became an important metaphor of humankind’s struggle to reconcile opposing inner forces, such as destructiveness and creativity. Moreover, as the consequences of the industrial revolution became apparent, writers increasingly began to express in their works the idea of the divided self as a reaction to unnatural pressures exerted on the individual by an alienating society. Many works, such as Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla” (1886), Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Dvoinik: Prikliucheniia gospodina Goliadkina (1846; The Double: A Poem of St. Petersburg), Poe’s “William Wilson” (1840), and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), feature doubles.

GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

William Godwin

Zanoni. 3 vols. (novel) 1842

Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. 3 vols. (novel) 1794

Lucretia; or, The Children of Night. 3 vols. (novel) 1846 A Strange Story. 2 vols. (novel) 1862

St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. 4 vols. (novel) 1799

George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale (poetry) 1813

Faust: Ein Fragment (play) 1790

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto the Third (poetry) 1816

Faust—Der Tragödie erster Teil [Faust. Part I.; published in Faust: A Drama by Goethe and Schiller’s “Song of the Bell”] (play) 1808

Manfred, A Dramatic Poem (verse drama) 1817 Don Juan, Cantos I-XVI. 6 vols. (poetry) 1819-24

Suzy McKee Charnas

Marquis von Grosse Genius [Horrid Mysteries] (short stories) 1796

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Vampire Tapestry (novel) 1980

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“The Birthmark” (short story) 1843; published in the journal Pioneer

Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep (poetry) 1816

The House of the Seven Gables, A Romance (novel) 1851

Charlotte Dacre Zofloya; or, The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century. 3 vols. (novel) 1806

Ellen Datlow Blood is Not Enough: Seventeen Stories of Vampirism (short stories) 1989

E. T. A. Hoffmann Die Elixiere des Teufels. 2 vols. [published anonymously; The Devil’s Elixir] (novel) 1815-16 †“Der Sandmann” [“The Sandman”] (short story) 1817

A Whisper of Blood (short stories) 1991

James Hogg

Walter de la Mare Ghost Stories (short stories) 1936

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (novel) 1824; republished as The Suicide’s Grave, 1828

Thomas De Quincey

Washington Irving

Confessions of an English Opium Eater (novel) 1821; published in two parts in London Magazine; published in book form, 1822

‡“Adventure of the German Student” [as Geoffrey Crayon] (short story) 1824

Shirley Jackson

Charles Dickens Bleak House (novel) 1853

The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris (short stories) 1949

“The Signal-Man” (short story) 1866; published in Mugby Junction

The Haunting of Hill House (novel) 1959

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Henry James

Dvoinik: Prikliucheniia gospodina Goliadkina [The Double: A Poem of St. Petersburg] (novel) 1846

The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End (novellas) 1898

Brat’ia Karamazovy [The Brothers Karamazov] (novel) 1880

Stephen King

Arthur Conan Doyle

Carrie: A Novel of a Girl with a Frightening Power (novel) 1974

The Parasite (novel) 1894

’Salem’s Lot (novel) 1975

Sigmund Freud

The Mist (novella) 1980; published in the collection Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley

“Das Unheimlich” [“The Uncanny”] 1919; published in the journal Imago

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The Tommyknockers (novel) 1987

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The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times. 3 vols. (novel) 1783

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh. 3 vols. (novel) 1864 “Green Tea” (short story) 1869; published in the journal All the Year Round “Carmilla” (short story) 1871-72; published serially in the journal Dark Blue

Matthew Gregory Lewis The Monk: A Romance. 3 vols. (novel) 1796 The Captive: A Scene in a Private Mad-House (play) 1803

H. P. Lovecraft

“The Gold Bug” (short story) 1843; published in two installments in the journal Dollar Newspaper “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (short story) 1844; published in the journal Godey’s Lady’s Book The Raven, and Other Poems (poetry) 1845 Tales by Edgar A. Poe (short stories) 1845

John William Polidori The Vampyre; a Tale (novella) 1819; published in the journal New Monthly Magazine

Thomas Peckett Prest or James Malcolm Rymer **Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (novel) 1847

#“At the Mountains of Madness” (short story) 1936; published in the journal Astounding Stories

Ann Radcliffe

Supernatural Horror in Literature (criticism) 1945

The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents. A Romance. 3 vols. (novel) 1797

Arthur Machen The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (short stories) 1894

Richard Matheson Hell House (novel) 1971

The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance; Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry. 4 vols. (novel) 1794

Clara Reeve The Champion of Virtue. A Gothic Story (novel) 1777; republished as The Old English Baron, 1778

G. W. M. Reynolds

Charles Robert Maturin

Faust: A Romance of the Second Empire (novel) 1847

Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale. 4 vols. (novel) 1820

Wagner the Wehr-wolf (novel) 1857

Guy de Maupassant

Anne Rice

㛳“Le Horla” [“The Horla”] (short story) 1886; published in the journal Le Gil Blas; revised version published in 1887

Interview with the Vampire (novel) 1976

Thomas Moore

The Witching Hour (novel) 1990

The Epicurean. A Tale (novel) 1827

The Vampire Armand (novel) 1998

Edgar Allan Poe

Blood Canticle (novel) 2003

Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian (poetry) 1827

Regina Maria Roche

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, North America: Comprising the Details of a Mutiny, Famine, and Shipwreck, During a Voyage to the South Seas; Resulting in Various Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries in the Eightyfourth Parallel of Southern Latitude [published anonymously] (novel) 1838 §“William Wilson” (short story) 1840 “The Oval Portrait” (short story) 1842; published in the journal Graham’s Magazine

The Vampire Lestat (novel) 1985 The Queen of the Damned (novel) 1988

Children of the Abbey (novel) 1798

Dante Gabriel Rossetti “Hand and Soul” (short story) 1850; published in the journal the Germ ††“St. Agnes of Intercession” (unfinished short story) c. 1850 ‡‡“The Portrait” (poem) 1869

Sir Walter Scott Rokeby: A Poem (poetry) 1813

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Sophia Lee

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Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. 3 vols. (novel) 1814 ##The Keepsake for 1829 (short stories) 1828 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (nonfiction) 1830

William Shakespeare Hamlet (play) c. 1600-01

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 3 vols. (novel) 1818; revised edition, 1831

Percy Bysshe Shelley Zastrozzi, A Romance (novel) 1810 St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance [as “A Gentleman of the University of Oxford”] (novel) 1811

Dan Simmons Carrion Comfort (novel) 1989

Robert Louis Stevenson

The Palace: A Historical Horror Novel (novel) 1979 Blood Games: A Novel of Historical Horror (novel) 1980 *

The unauthorized translation of Vathek was published as An Arabian Tale, 1786. † This story was included in the collection, Nachtstücke, herausgegeben von dem Verfasser der Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, Vol. 1, published anonymously, 1817. ‡ This story was first published in the collection Tales of a Traveller. 2 vols., in 1824. # This story was written in 1931, and was collected in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels in 1985. 㛳 This story was first published in an earlier version as “Lettre d’un fou” (“Letter from a Madman”) in 1885. § This story was published in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840. ** Authorship of this novel has been alternately attributed to Thomas Peckett Prest and James Malcolm Rymer. †† This unfinished story was begun in 1850 and was not published during Rossetti’s lifetime. It was included in the collection The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1911. ‡‡ This sonnet was published in the collection Poems, 1869. ## This collection includes the short stories “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror,” “The Tapestried Chamber; or, The Lady in the Sacque,” and “The Laird’s Jock.”

Treasure Island (novel) 1883 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (novella) 1886

Bram Stoker Dracula (novel) 1897 Dracula’s Guest, and Other Weird Stories (short stories) 1914

Whitley Strieber The Hunger (novel) 1981

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (POEM DATE 1809) SOURCE: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Three Graves: A Fragment of a Sexton’s Tale.” In Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poems, edited with an introduction and notes by Richard Holmes, pp. 69-80. New York: Penguin Group, 1994. The following poem was composed by Coleridge in 1797, and first published in the journal The Friend in 1809. Coleridge explains in his preface that his own fragment of this ballad is based upon a poem (which Coleridge summarizes) written by William Wordsworth.

Communion: A True Story (nonfiction) 1987 The Wild (novel) 1991

George Sylvester Viereck The House of the Vampire (novel) 1907

Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto, A Story (novel) 1764 The Mysterious Mother. A Tragedy (play) 1768

Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (novel) 1890; first published in the journal Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine; revised edition, 1891

C. Q. Yarbro Hotel Transylvania: A Novel of Forbidden Love (novel) 1978

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“The Author has published the following humble fragment, encouraged by the decisive recommendation of more than one of our most celebrated living Poets. The language was intended to be dramatic; that is, suited to the narrator; and the metre corresponds to the homeliness of the diction. It is therefore presented as the fragment, not of a Poem, but of a common Ballad-tale. Whether this is sufficient to justify the adoption of such a style, in any metrical composition not professedly ludicrous, the Author is himself in some doubt. At all events, it is not presented as poetry, and it is in no way connected with the Author’s judgment concerning poetic diction. Its merits, if any, are exclusively psychological. The

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“Edward, a young farmer, meets at the house of Ellen her bosom-friend Mary, and commences an acquaintance, which ends in a mutual attachment. With her consent, and by the advice of their common friend Ellen, he announces his hopes and intentions to Mary’s mother, a widow-woman bordering on her fortieth year, and from constant health, the possession of a competent property, and from having had no other children but Mary and another daughter (the father died in their infancy), retaining for the greater part her personal attractions and comeliness of appearance; but a woman of low education and violent temper. The answer which she at once returned to Edward’s application was remarkable—‘Well, Edward! you are a handsome young fellow, and you shall have my daughter.’ From this time all their wooing passed under the mother’s eye; and, in fine, she became herself enamoured of her future son-inlaw, and practised every art, both of endearment and of calumny, to transfer his affections from her daughter to herself. (The outlines of the Tale are positive facts, and of no very distant date, though the author has purposely altered the names and the scene of action, as well as invented the characters of the parties and the detail of the incidents.) Edward, however, though perplexed by her strange detractions from her daughter’s good qualities, yet in the innocence of his own heart still mistook her increasing fondness for motherly affection; she at length, overcome by her miserable passion, after much abuse of Mary’s temper and moral tendencies, exclaimed with violent emotion—‘O Edward! indeed, indeed, she is not fit for you—she has not a heart to love you as you deserve. It is I that love you! Marry me, Edward! and I will this very day settle all my property on you.’ The Lover’s eyes were now opened; and thus taken by surprise, whether from the effect of the horror which he felt, acting as it were hysterically on his nervous system, or that at the first moment he lost the sense of the guilt of the proposal in the feeling of its strangeness and absurdity, he flung her from him and burst into a fit of laughter. Irritated by this almost to frenzy, the woman fell on her knees, and in a loud voice that approached to a scream, she prayed for a curse both on him and on her own child. Mary happened to be in the room directly above them, heard Edward’s laugh, and her mother’s blasphemous prayer, and fainted away. He, hearing the fall, ran upstairs, and taking her in his arms, carried her off to Ellen’s home; and after some fruitless attempts on

her part toward a reconciliation with her mother, she was married to him.—And here the third part of the Tale begins. “I was not led to choose this story from any partiality to tragic, much less to monstrous events (though at the time that I composed the verses, somewhat more than twelve years ago, I was less averse to such subjects than at present), but from finding in it a striking proof of the possible effect on the imagination, from an idea violently and suddenly impressed on it. I had been reading Bryan Edwards’s account of the effects of the Oby witchcraft on the Negroes in the West Indies, and Hearne’s deeply interesting anecdotes of similar workings on the imagination of the Copper Indians (those of my readers who have it in their power will be well repaid for the trouble of referring to those works for the passages alluded to); and I conceived the design of shewing that instances of this kind are not peculiar to savage or barbarous tribes, and of illustrating the mode in which the mind is affected in these cases, and the progress and symptoms of the morbid action on the fancy from the beginning. “The Tale is supposed to be narrated by an old Sexton, in a country church-yard, to a traveller whose curiosity had been awakened by the appearance of three graves, close by each other, to two only of which there were grave-stones. On the first of these was the name, and dates, as usual: on the second, no name, but only a date, and the words, ‘The Mercy of God is infinite.’”

Part III The grapes upon the Vicar’s wall Were ripe as ripe could be; And yellow leaves in sun and wind Were falling from the tree. On the hedge-elms in the narrow lane Still swung the spikes of corn: Dear Lord! it seems but yesterday— Young Edward’s marriage-morn. Up through that wood behind the church, There leads from Edward’s door A mossy track, all over boughed, For half a mile or more. And from their house-door by that track The bride and bridegroom went; Sweet Mary, though she was not gay, Seemed cheerful and content. But when they to the church-yard came, I’ve heard poor Mary say, As soon as she stepped into the sun, Her heart it died away.

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story which must be supposed to have been narrated in the first and second parts is as follows:—

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And when the Vicar join’d their hands, Her limbs did creep and freeze: But when they prayed, she thought she saw Her mother on her knees.

The mother walked into the church— To Ellen’s seat she went: Though Ellen always kept her church All church-days during Lent.

And o’er the church-path they returned— I saw poor Mary’s back, Just as she stepped beneath the boughs Into the mossy track.

And gentle Ellen welcomed her With courteous looks and mild: Thought she, “What if her heart should melt, And all be reconciled!”

Her feet upon the mossy track The married maiden set: That moment—I have heard her say— She wished she could forget.

The day was scarcely like a day— The clouds were black outright: And many a night, with half a moon, I’ve seen the church more light.

The shade o’er-flushed her limbs with heat— Then came a chill like death: And when the merry bells rang out, They seemed to stop her breath.

The wind was wild; against the glass The rain did beat and bicker; The church-tower swinging over head, You scarce could hear the Vicar!

Beneath the foulest mother’s curse No child could ever thrive: A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.

And then and there the mother knelt, And audibly she cried— “Oh! may a clinging curse consume This woman by my side!

So five months passed: the mother still Would never heal the strife; But Edward was a loving man And Mary a fond wife.

“O hear me, hear me, Lord in Heaven, Although you take my life— O curse this woman, at whose house Young Edward woo’d his wife.

“My sister may not visit us, My mother says her nay: O Edward! you are all to me, I wish for your sake I could be More lifesome and more gay.

“By night and day, in bed and bower, O let her curséd be!!!” So having prayed, steady and slow, She rose up from her knee! And left the church, nor e’er again The church-door entered she.

“I’m dull and sad! indeed, indeed I know I have no reason! Perhaps I am not well in health, And ’tis a gloomy season.” ’Twas a drizzly time—no ice, no snow! And on the few fine days She stirred not out, lest she might meet Her mother in the ways. But Ellen, spite of miry ways And weather dark and dreary, Trudged every day to Edward’s house, And made them all more cheery.

I saw poor Ellen kneeling still, So pale! I guessed not why: When she stood up, there plainly was A trouble in her eye. And when the prayers were done, we all Came round and asked her why: Giddy she seemed, and sure, there was A trouble in her eye. But ere she from the church-door stepped She smiled and told us why: “It was a wicked woman’s curse,” Quoth she, “and what care I?”

Oh! Ellen was a faithful friend, More dear than any sister! As cheerful too as singing lark; And she ne’er left them till ’twas dark, And then they always missed her.

She smiled, and smiled, and passed it off Ere from the door she stept— But all agree it would have been Much better had she wept.

And now Ash-Wednesday came—that day But few to church repair: For on that day you know we read The Commination prayer.

And if her heart was not at ease, This was her constant cry— “It was a wicked woman’s curse— God’s good, and what care I?”

Our late old Vicar, a kind man, Once, Sir, he said to me, He wished that service was clean out Of our good Liturgy.

There was a hurry in her looks, Her struggles she redoubled: “It was a wicked woman’s curse, And why should I be troubled?”

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But Mary heard the tale: her arms Round Ellen’s neck she threw; “O Ellen, Ellen, she cursed me, And now she hath cursed you!” I saw young Edward by himself Stalk fast adown the lee, He snatched a stick from every fence, A twig from every tree. He snapped them still with hand or knee, And then away they flew! As if with his uneasy limbs He knew not what to do! You see, good sir! that single hill? His farm lies underneath: He heard it there, he heard it all, And only gnashed his teeth. Now Ellen was a darling love In all his joys and cares: And Ellen’s name and Mary’s name Fast-linked they both together came, Whene’er he said his prayers. And in the moment of his prayers He loved them both alike: Yea, both sweet names with one sweet joy Upon his heart did strike! He reach’d his home, and by his looks They saw his inward strife: And they clung round him with their arms, Both Ellen and his wife.

I’d rather dance upon ’em all Than tread upon these three! “Aye, Sexton! ’tis a touching tale.” You, Sir! are but a lad; This month I’m in my seventieth year, And still it makes me sad. And Mary’s sister told it me, For three good hours and more; Though I had heard it, in the main, From Edward’s self, before. Well! it passed off! the gentle Ellen Did well nigh dote on Mary; And she went oftener than before, And Mary loved her more and more: She managed all the dairy. To market she on market-days, To church on Sundays came; All seemed the same: all seemed so, Sir! But all was not the same! Had Ellen lost her mirth? Oh! no! But she was seldom cheerful; And Edward looked as if he thought That Ellen’s mirth was fearful. When by herself, she to herself Must sing some merry rhyme; She could not now be glad for hours, Yet silent all the time. And when she soothed her friend, through all Her soothing words ’twas plain She had a sore grief of her own, A haunting in her brain.

And Mary could not check her tears, So on his breast she bowed; Then frenzy melted into grief, And Edward wept aloud.

And oft she said, I’m not grown thin! And then her wrist she spanned; And once when Mary was down-cast, She took her by the hand, And gazed upon her, and at first She gently pressed her hand;

Dear Ellen did not weep at all, But closelier did she cling, And turned her face and looked as if She saw some frightful thing.

Then harder, till her grasp at length Did gripe like a convulsion! “Alas!” said she, “we ne’er can be Made happy by compulsion!”

Part IV To see a man tread over graves I hold it no good mark; ’Tis wicked in the sun and moon, And bad luck in the dark! You see that grave? The Lord he gives, The Lord, he takes away: O Sir! the child of my old age Lies there as cold as clay. Except that grave, you scarce see one That was not dug by me;

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These tears will come—I dandled her When ’twas the merest fairy— Good creature! and she hid it all: She told it not to Mary.

And once her both arms suddenly Round Mary’s neck she flung, And her heart panted, and she felt The words upon her tongue. She felt them coming, but no power Had she the words to smother; And with a kind of shriek she cried, “Oh Christ! you’re like your mother!” So gentle Ellen now no more Could make this sad house cheery; And Mary’s melancholy ways Drove Edward wild and weary.

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Lingering he raised his latch at eve, Though tired in heart and limb: He loved no other place, and yet Home was no home to him.

“The Sun peeps through the close thick leaves, See, dearest Ellen! see! ’Tis in the leaves, a little sun, No bigger than your ee;

One evening he took up a book, And nothing in it read; Then flung it down, and groaning cried, “O! Heaven! that I were dead.”

“A tiny sun, and it has got A perfect glory too; Ten thousand threads and hairs of light, Make up a glory gay and bright Round that small orb, so blue.”

Mary looked up into his face, And nothing to him said; She tried to smile, and on his arm Mournfully leaned her head. And he burst into tears, and fell Upon his knees in prayer: “Her heart is broke! O God! my grief, It is too great to bear!” ’Twas such a foggy time as makes Old sextons, Sir! like me, Rest on their spades to cough; the spring Was late uncommonly.

And then they argued of those rays, What colour they might be; Says this, “They’re mostly green”; says that, “They’re amber-like to me.” So they sat chatting, while bad thoughts Were troubling Edward’s rest; But soon they heard his hard quick pants, And the thumping in his breast. “A mother too!” these self-same words Did Edward mutter plain; His face was drawn back on itself, With horror and huge pain.

And then the hot days, all at once, They came, we knew not how: You looked about for shade, when scarce A leaf was on a bough.

Both groaned at once, for both knew well What thoughts were in his mind; When he waked up, and stared like one That hath been just struck blind.

It happened then (’twas in the bower, A furlong up the wood: Perhaps you know the place, and yet I scarce know how you should,)

He sat upright; and ere the dream Had had time to depart, “O God, forgive me!” (he exclaimed) “I have torn out her heart.”

No path leads thither, ’tis not nigh To any pasture-plot; But clustered near the chattering brook, Lone hollies marked the spot.

Then Ellen shrieked, and forthwith burst Into ungentle laughter; And Mary shivered, where she sat, And never she smiled after.

Those hollies of themselves a shape As of an arbour took, A close, round arbour; and it stands Not three strides from a brook. Within this arbour, which was still With scarlet berries hung, Were these three friends, one Sunday morn, Just as the first bell rung. ’Tis sweet to hear a brook, ’tis sweet To hear the Sabbath-bell, ’Tis sweet to hear them both at once, Deep in a woody dell. His limbs along the moss, his head Upon a mossy heap, With shut-up senses, Edward lay: That brook e’en on a working day Might chatter one to sleep. And he had passed a restless night, And was not well in health; The women sat down by his side, And talked as ’twere by stealth.

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GEORGE GORDON NOEL, LORD BYRON (NOVEL FRAGMENT DATE 1819) SOURCE: Byron, George Gordon Noel, Lord. “Fragment of a Novel.” In Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, The Vampyre, edited by E. F. Bleiler, pp. 287-91. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966. The following novel fragment, written in 1816 but first published as an appendix to Byron’s Mazeppa in 1819, served as John Polidori’s inspiration and model for his novella, The Vampyre. Byron composed the fragment during the competition between Polidori, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and himself, during which Mary Shelley produced her 1818 novel, Frankenstein. June 17, 1816

“In the year 17—, having for some time determined on a journey through countries not hitherto much frequented by travellers, I set out, accompanied by a friend, whom I shall designate by the name of Augustus Darvell. He was a few years my elder, and a man of considerable fortune G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1

“I was yet young in life, which I had begun early; but my intimacy with him was of a recent date: we had been educated at the same schools and university; but his progress through these had preceded mine, and he had been deeply initiated into what is called the world, while I was yet in my novitiate. While thus engaged, I heard much both of his past and present life; and, although in these accounts there were many and irreconcilable contradictions, I could still gather from the whole that he was a being of no common order, and one who, whatever pains he might take to avoid remark, would still be remarkable. I had cultivated his acquaintance subsequently, and endeavoured to obtain his friendship, but this last appeared to be unattainable; whatever affections he might have possessed seemed now, some to have been extinguished, and others to be concentred: that his feelings were acute, I had sufficient opportunities of observing; for, although he could control, he could not altogether disguise them: still he had a power of giving to one passion the appearance of another, in such a manner that it was difficult to define the nature of what was working within him; and the expressions of his features would vary so rapidly, though slightly, that it was useless to trace them to their sources. It was evident that he was a prey to some cureless disquiet; but whether it arose from ambition, love, remorse, grief, from one or all of these, or merely from a morbid temperament akin to disease, I could not discover: there were circumstances alleged which might have justified the application to each of these causes; but, as I have before said, these were so contradictory and contradicted, that none could be fixed upon with accuracy. Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed that there must also be evil: I know not how this may be, but in him there certainly was the one, though I could not ascertain the extent of the other—and felt loth, as far as regarded himself, to believe in its existence. My advances were received with sufficient coldness: but I was young, and not easily discouraged, and at length succeeded in obtaining, to a certain degree, that common-place intercourse and moderate confidence of common

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ GEORGE GORDON NOEL, LORD BYRON (1788-1824)

Despite Lord Byron’s enormous influence in Europe—both Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Aleksander Pushkin considered him a master poet—his work was not favorably received in his native England until almost a century after his death. Continued interest in Byron’s work is as rooted in the examination of his controversial personality and exploits as in the literary merits of his work. Byron’s most notable contribution to Romanticism is the Byronic hero, a character type that was influenced by the Gothic hero-villains in novels by such authors as Horace Walpole, Matthew Gregory Lewis, William Beckford, and Mary Shelley. The Byronic hero has been likened to Byron himself, and is a melancholy man, often with a dark past, who eschews societal and religious strictures and seeks truth and happiness in an apparently meaningless universe. The title character of Byron’s first verse drama, Manfred (1817), is a quintessential Byronic hero: consumed by his own sense of guilt for an incestuous relationship with his sister, Astarte, he finally seeks peace through his own death. The drama is set in the Alps where Manfred lives in a Gothic castle. Tortured by his guilt, Manfred invokes six spirits associated with earth and the elements, and a seventh who determines Manfred’s personal destiny. Byron composed a novel fragment during the famous “ghoststory sessions” in 1816 when Mary Shelley is purported to have composed Frankenstein; this novel fragment served as the inspiration and impetus for John Polidori’s The Vampyre. This novel fragment and the other works Byron composed between 1812 and 1818 (prior to the 1819 publication of Don Juan, his most highly respected work) contain many elements of the Gothic tradition, including ruined settings, tortured characters, and encounters with the supernatural. These works include the three “Turkish tales”—The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), and The Corsair—, Lara (1814), and the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812).

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and ancient family: advantages which an extensive capacity prevented him alike from undervaluing or overrating. Some peculiar circumstances in his private history had rendered him to me an object of attention, of interest, and even of regard, which neither the reserve of his manners, nor occasional indications of an inquietude at times nearly approaching to alienation of mind, could extinguish.

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and every-day concerns, created and cemented by similarity of pursuit and frequency of meeting, which is called intimacy, or friendship, according to the ideas of him who uses those words to express them. “Darvell had already travelled extensively; and to him I had applied for information with regard to the conduct of my intended journey. It was my secret wish that he might be prevailed on to accompany me; it was also a probable hope, founded upon the shadowy restlessness which I observed in him, and to which the animation which he appeared to feel on such subjects, and his apparent indifference to all by which he was more immediately surrounded, gave fresh strength. This wish I first hinted, and then expressed: his answer, though I had partly expected it, gave me all the pleasure of surprise—he consented; and, after the requisite arrangement, we commenced our voyages. After journeying through various countries of the south of Europe, our attention was turned towards the East, according to our original destination; and it was in my progress through these regions that the incident occurred upon which will turn what I may have to relate. “The constitution of Darvell, which must from his appearance have been in early life more than usually robust, had been for some time gradually giving away, without the intervention of any apparent disease: he had neither cough nor hectic, yet he became daily more enfeebled; his habits were temperate, and he neither declined nor complained of fatigue; yet he was evidently wasting away: he became more and more silent and sleepless, and at length so seriously altered, that my alarm grew proportionate to what I conceived to be his danger. “We had determined, on our arrival at Smyrna, on an excursion to the ruins of Ephesus and Sardis, from which I endeavoured to dissuade him in his present state of indisposition—but in vain: there appeared to be an oppression on his mind, and a solemnity in his manner, which ill corresponded with his eagerness to proceed on what I regarded as a mere party of pleasure little suited to a valetudinarian; but I opposed him no longer— and in a few days we set off together, accompanied only by a serrugee and a single janizary. “We had passed halfway towards the remains of Ephesus, leaving behind us the more fertile environs of Smyrna, and were entering upon that wild and tenantless tract through the marshes and defiles which lead to the few huts yet lingering over the broken columns of Diana—the roofless

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walls of expelled Christianity, and the still more recent but complete desolation of abandoned mosques—when the sudden and rapid illness of my companion obliged us to halt at a Turkish cemetery, the turbaned tombstones of which were the sole indication that human life had ever been a sojourner in this wilderness. The only caravansera we had seen was left some hours behind us, not a vestige of a town or even cottage was within sight or hope, and this ‘city of the dead’ appeared to be the sole refuge of my unfortunate friend, who seemed on the verge of becoming the last of its inhabitants. “In this situation, I looked round for a place where he might most conveniently repose:— contrary to the usual aspect of Mahometan burialgrounds, the cypresses were in this few in number, and these thinly scattered over its extent; the tombstones were mostly fallen, and worn with age:—upon one of the most considerable of these, and beneath one of the most spreading trees, Darvell supported himself, in a half-reclining posture, with great difficulty. He asked for water. I had some doubts of our being able to find any, and prepared to go in search of it with hesitating despondency: but he desired me to remain; and turning to Suleiman, our janizary, who stood by us smoking with great tranquillity, he said, ‘Suleiman, verbana su,’ (i.e. ‘bring some water,’) and went on describing the spot where it was to be found with great minuteness, at a small well for camels, a few hundred yards to the right: the janizary obeyed. I said to Darvell, ‘How did you know this?’—He replied, ‘From our situation; you must perceive that this place was once inhabited, and could not have been so without springs: I have also been here before.’ “‘You have been here before!—How came you never to mention this to me? and what could you be doing in a place where no one would remain a moment longer than they could help it?’ “To this question I received no answer. In the mean time Suleiman returned with the water, leaving the serrugee and the horses at the fountain. The quenching of his thirst had the appearance of reviving him for a moment; and I conceived hopes of his being able to proceed, or at least to return, and I urged the attempt. He was silent—and appeared to be collecting his spirits for an effort to speak. He began— “‘This is the end of my journey, and of my life;—I came here to die; but I have a request to make, a command—for such my last words must be.—You will observe it?’

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“‘I have no hopes, nor wishes, but this— conceal my death from every human being.’ “‘I hope there will be no occasion; that you will recover, and———’ “‘Peace!—it must be so: promise this.’ “‘I do.’ “‘Swear it, by all that———’ He here dictated an oath of great solemnity. “‘There is no occasion for this. I will observe your request; and to doubt me is———’ “‘It cannot be helped,—you must swear.’ “I took the oath, it appeared to relieve him. He removed a seal ring from his finger, on which were some Arabic characters, and presented it to me. He proceeded— “‘On the ninth day of the month, at noon precisely (what month you please, but this must be the day), you must fling this ring into the salt springs which run into the Bay of Eleusis; the day after, at the same hour, you must repair to the ruins of the temple of Ceres, and wait one hour.’ “‘Why?’ “‘You will see.’ “‘The ninth day of the month, you say?’

“‘Doubtless: there is nothing uncommon in it; it is her natural prey. But it is odd that she does not devour it.’ “He smiled in a ghastly manner, and said faintly, ‘It is not yet time!’ As he spoke, the stork flew away. My eyes followed it for a moment—it could hardly be longer than ten might be counted. I felt Darvell’s weight, as it were, increase upon my shoulder, and, turning to look upon his face, perceived that he was dead! “I was shocked with the sudden certainty which could not be mistaken—his countenance in a few minutes became nearly black. I should have attributed so rapid a change to poison, had I not been aware that he had no opportunity of receiving it unperceived. The day was declining, the body was rapidly altering, and nothing remained but to fulfil his request. With the aid of Suleiman’s ataghan and my own sabre, we scooped a shallow grave upon the spot which Darvell had indicated: the earth easily gave way, having already received some Mahometan tenant. We dug as deeply as the time permitted us, and throwing the dry earth upon all that remained of the singular being so lately departed, we cut a few sods of greener turf from the less withered soil around us, and laid them upon his sepulchre. “Between astonishment and grief, I was tearless.”

“‘The ninth.’ “As I observed that the present was the ninth day of the month, his countenance changed, and he paused. As he sat, evidently becoming more feeble, a stork, with a snake in her beak, perched upon a tombstone near us; and, without devouring her prey, appeared to be steadfastly regarding us. I know not what impelled me to drive it away, but the attempt was useless; she made a few circles in the air, and returned exactly to the same spot. Darvell pointed to it, and smiled—he spoke—I know not whether to himself or to me—but the words were only, ‘’Tis well!’ “‘What is well? What do you mean?’ “‘No matter; you must bury me here this evening, and exactly where that bird is now perched. You know the rest of my injunctions.’ “He then proceeded to give me several directions as to the manner in which his death might be best concealed. After these were finished, he exclaimed, ‘You perceive that bird?’ “‘Certainly.’ “‘And the serpent writhing in her beak?’

JOHN WILLIAM POLIDORI (NOVELLA DATE 1819) SOURCE: Polidori, John William. The Vampyre: A Tale. 1819. Reprinted in The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre, edited with an introduction and notes by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick, pp. 265-83. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. The following excerpt is from Polidori’s novella, written in 1816 and first published in 1819 in New Monthly Magazine.

Next morning Aubrey set off upon his excursion unattended; he was surprised to observe the melancholy face of his host, and was concerned to find that his words, mocking the belief of those horrible fiends, had inspired them with such terror.—When he was about to depart, Ianthe came to the side of his horse and earnestly begged of him to return, ere night allowed the power of these beings to be put in action—he promised. He was, however, so occupied in his research that he did not perceive that day-light would soon end, and that in the horizon there was one of those specks which in the warmer climates so rapidly gather into a tremenduous mass and pour all their

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“‘Most certainly; but I have better hopes.’

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rage upon the devoted country.—He at last, however, mounted his horse, determined to make up by speed for his delay: but it was too late. Twilight in these southern climates is almost unknown; immediately the sun sets, night begins; and ere he had advanced far, the power of the storm was above—its echoing thunders had scarcely an interval of rest—its thick heavy rain forced its way through the canopying foliage, whilst the blue forked lightning seemed to fall and radiate at his very feet. Suddenly his horse took fright, and he was carried with dreadful rapidity through the entangled forest. The animal at last, through fatigue, stopped, and he found, by the glare of lightening, that he was in the neighbourhood of a hovel that hardly lifted itself up from the masses of dead leaves and brushwood which surrounded it. Dismounting, he approached, hoping to find some one to guide him to the town, or at least trusting to obtain shelter from the pelting of the storm. As he approached, the thunders, for a moment silent, allowed him to hear the dreadful shrieks of a woman mingling with the stifled exultant mockery of a laugh, continued in one almost unbroken sound; he was startled: but, roused by the thunder which again rolled over his head, he with a sudden effort forced open the door of the hut. He found himself in utter darkness; the sound, however, guided him. He was apparently unperceived; for though he called, still the sounds continued, and no notice was taken of him. He found himself in contact with some one, whom he immediately seized, when a voice cried ‘again baffled,’ to which a loud laugh succeeded, and he felt himself grappled by one whose strength seemed superhuman: determined to sell his life as dearly as he could, he struggled: but it was in vain: he was lifted from his feet and hurled with enormous force against the ground:—his enemy threw himself upon him, and kneeling upon his breast, had placed his hands upon his throat, when the glare of many torches penetrating through the hole that gave light in the day, disturbed him—he instantly rose and, leaving his prey, rushed through the door, and in a moment the crashing of the branches, as he broke through the wood, was no longer heard.—The storm was now still; and Aubrey, incapable of moving, was soon heard by those without.—They entered; the light of their torches fell upon the mud walls, and the thatch loaded on every individual straw with heavy flakes of soot. At the desire of Aubrey they searched for her who had attracted him by her cries; he was again left in darkness; but what was his horror,

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when the light of the torches once more burst upon him, to perceive the airy form of his fair conductress brought in a lifeless corse. He shut his eyes, hoping that it was but a vision arising from his disturbed imagination; but he again saw the same form, when he unclosed them, stretched by his side. There was no colour upon her cheek, not even upon her lip; yet there was a stillness about her face that seemed almost as attaching as the life that once dwelt there:—upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein:—to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, ‘a Vampyre, a Vampyre!’ A litter was quickly formed, and Aubrey was laid by the side of her who had lately been to him the object of so many bright and fairy visions, now fallen with the flower of life that had died within her. He knew not what his thoughts were—his mind was benumbed and seemed to shun reflection and take refuge in vacancy—he held almost unconsciously in his hand a naked dagger of a particular construction, which had been found in the hut.— They were soon met by different parties who had been engaged in the search of her whom a mother had soon missed.—Their lamentable cries, as they approached the city, forewarned the parents of some dreadful catastrophe.—To describe their grief would be impossible; but when they ascertained the cause of their child’s death they looked at Aubrey and pointed to the corpse.—They were inconsolable; both died broken-hearted. Aubrey being put to bed was seized with a most violent fever, and was often delirious; in these intervals he would call upon Lord Ruthven and upon Ianthe—by some unaccountable combination he seemed to beg of his former companion to spare the being he loved.—At other times he would imprecate maledictions upon his head, and curse him as her destroyer. Lord Ruthven chanced at this time to arrive at Athens, and, from whatever motive, upon hearing of the state of Aubrey, immediately placed himself in the same house and became his constant attendant. When the latter recovered from his delirium he was horrified and startled at the sight of him whose image he had now combined with that of a Vampyre; but Lord Ruthven by his kind words, implying almost repentance for the fault that had caused their separation, and still more by the attention, anxiety, and care which he showed, soon reconciled him to his presence. His Lordship seemed quite changed; he no longer appeared that apathetic being who had so astonished Aubrey; but as soon as his convalescence began to be rapid, he again

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Aubrey’s mind, by this shock, was much weakened, and that elasticity of spirit which had once so distinguished him now seemed to have fled for ever.—He was now as much a lover of solitude and silence as Lord Ruthven; but much as he wished for solitude, his mind could not find it in the neighbourhood of Athens; if he sought it amidst the ruins he had formerly frequented, Ianthe’s form stood by his side—if he sought it in the woods, her light step would appear wandering amidst the underwood, in quest of the modest violet; then suddenly turning round would show, to his wild imagination, her pale face and wounded throat with a meek smile upon her lips. He determined to fly scenes, every feature of which created such bitter associations in his mind. He proposed to Lord Ruthven, to whom he held himself bound by the tender care he had taken of him during his illness, that they should visit those parts of Greece neither had yet seen. They travelled in every direction, and sought every spot to which a recollection could be attached; but though they thus hastened from place to place yet they seemed not to heed what they gazed upon.—They heard much of robbers, but they gradually began to slight these reports, which they imagined were only the invention of individuals, whose interest it was to excite the generosity of those whom they defended from pretended dangers. In consequence of thus neglecting the advice of the inhabitants, on one occasion they travelled with only a few guards, more to serve as guides than as a defence.—Upon entering, however, a narrow defile, at the bottom of which was the bed of a torrent, with large masses of rock brought down from the neighbouring precipices, they had reason to repent their negligence—for, scarcely were the whole of the party engaged in the narrow pass, when they were startled by the whistling of bullets close to their heads, and by the echoed report of several guns. In an instant their guards had left them, and placing themselves behind rocks had begun to fire in the direction whence

the report came. Lord Ruthven and Aubrey, imitating their example, retired for a moment behind a sheltering turn of the defile; but ashamed of being thus detained by a foe, who with insulting shouts bade them advance, and being exposed to unresisting slaughter, if any of the robbers should climb above and take them in the rear, they determined at once to rush forward in search of the enemy.—Hardly had they lost the shelter of the rock, when Lord Ruthven received a shot in the shoulder that brought him to the ground.— Aubrey hastened to his assistance, and no longer heeding the contest or his own peril, was soon surprised by seeing the robbers’ faces around him; his guards having, upon Lord Ruthven’s being wounded, immediately thrown up their arms and surrendered. By promises of great reward, Aubrey soon induced them to convey his wounded friend to a neighbouring cabin, and having agreed upon a ransom he was no more disturbed by their presence, they being content to merely guard the entrance till their comrade should return with the promised sum for which he had an order.—Lord Ruthven’s strength rapidly decreased; in two days mortification ensued, and death seemed advancing with hasty steps.—His conduct and appearance had not changed; he seemed as unconscious of pain as he had been of the objects about him; but towards the close of the last evening his mind became apparently uneasy, and his eye often fixed upon Aubrey, who was induced to offer his assistance with more than usual earnestness—‘Assist me! you may save me—you may do more than that—I mean not my life, I heed the death of my existence as little as that of the passing day; but you may save my honour, your friend’s honour.’— ‘How, tell me how; I would do any thing,’ replied Aubrey. ‘I need but little—my life ebbs apace—I cannot explain the whole—but if you would conceal all you know of me, my honour were free from stain in the world’s mouth—and if my death were unknown for some time in England—I—I— but life.’—‘It shall not be known.’—‘Swear!’ cried the dying man, raising himself with exultant violence, ‘Swear by all your soul reveres, by all your nature fears, swear that for a year and a day you will not impart your knowledge of my crimes or death to any living being in any way, whatever may happen, or whatever you may see.’—His eyes seemed bursting from their sockets: ‘I swear!’ said Aubrey; he sunk laughing upon his pillow and breathed no more. Aubrey retired to rest, but did not sleep; the many circumstances attending his acquaintance

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gradually retired into the same state of mind, and Aubrey perceived no difference from the former man, except, that at times he was surprised to meet his gaze fixed intently upon him with a smile of malicious exultation playing upon his lips; he knew not why, but this smile haunted him. During the last stage of the invalid’s recovery, Lord Ruthven was apparently engaged in watching the tideless waves raised by the cooling breeze, or in marking the progress of those orbs, circling, like our world, the moveless sun;—indeed he appeared to wish to avoid the eyes of all.

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with this man rose upon his mind, and he knew not why; when he remembered his oath a cold shivering came over him, as if from the presentiment of something horrible awaiting him. Rising early in the morning he was about to enter the hovel in which he had left the corpse, when a robber met him, and informed him that it was no longer there, having been conveyed by himself and comrades, upon his retiring, to the pinnacle of a neighbouring mount, according to a promise they had given his lordship, that it should be exposed to the first cold ray of the moon that rose after his death. Aubrey was astonished, and taking several of the men, determined to go and bury it upon the spot where it lay. But, when he had mounted to the summit he found no trace of either the corpse or the clothes, though the robbers swore they pointed out the identical rock on which they had laid the body. For a time his mind was bewildered in conjectures, but he at last returned, convinced that they had buried the corpse for the sake of the clothes. Weary of a country in which he had met with such terrible misfortunes, and in which all apparently conspired to heighten that superstitious melancholy that had seized upon his mind, he resolved to leave it, and soon arrived at Smyrna. While waiting for a vessel to convey him to Otranto, or to Naples, he occupied himself in arranging those effects he had with him belonging to Lord Ruthven. Amongst other things there was a case containing several weapons of offence, more or less adapted to ensure the death of the victim. There were several daggers and ataghans. Whilst turning them over, and examining their curious forms, what was his surprise at finding a sheath apparently ornamented in the same style as the dagger discovered in the fatal hut; he shuddered; hastening to gain further proof, he found the weapon, and his horror may be imagined when he discovered that it fitted, though peculiarly shaped, the sheath he held in his hand. His eyes seemed to need no further certainty—they seemed gazing to be bound to the dagger; yet still he wished to disbelieve; but the particular form, the same varying tints upon the haft and sheath were alike in splendour on both, and left no room for doubt; there were also drops of blood on each. He left Smyrna, and on his way home, at Rome, his first inquiries were concerning the lady he had attempted to snatch from Lord Ruthven’s seductive arts. Her parents were in distress, their fortune ruined, and she had not been heard of since the departure of his lordship. Aubrey’s mind became almost broken under so many repeated

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horrors; he was afraid that this lady had fallen a victim to the destroyer of Ianthe. He became morose and silent, and his only occupation consisted in urging the speed of the postilions, as if he were going to save the life of some one he held dear. He arrived at Calais; a breeze, which seemed obedient to his will, soon wafted him to the English shores; and he hastened to the mansion of his fathers, and there, for a moment, appeared to lose, in the embraces and caresses of his sister, all memory of the past. If she before, by her infantine caresses, had gained his affection, now that the woman began to appear, she was still more attaching as a companion. Miss Aubrey had not that winning grace which gains the gaze and applause of the drawingroom assemblies. There was none of that light brilliancy which only exists in the heated atmosphere of a crowded apartment. Her blue eye was never lit up by the levity of the mind beneath. There was a melancholy charm about it which did not seem to arise from misfortune, but from some feeling within, that appeared to indicate a soul conscious of a brighter realm. Her step was not that light footing, which strays where’er a butterfly or a colour may attract—it was sedate and pensive. When alone, her face was never brightened by the smile of joy; but when her brother breathed to her his affection, and would in her presence forget those griefs she knew destroyed his rest, who would have exchanged her smile for that of the voluptuary? It seemed as if those eyes,—that face were then playing in the light of their own native sphere. She was yet only eighteen, and had not been presented to the world; it having been thought by her guardians more fit that her presentation should be delayed until her brother’s return from the continent, when he might be her protector. It was now, therefore, resolved that the next drawing room, which was fast approaching, should be the epoch of her entry into the ‘busy scene’. Aubrey would rather have remained in the mansion of his fathers, and fed upon the melancholy which overpowered him. He could not feel interest about the frivolities of fashionable strangers, when his mind had been so torn by the events he had witnessed; but he determined to sacrifice his own comfort to the protection of his sister. They soon arrived in town, and prepared for the next day, which had been announced as a drawing room. The crowd was excessive—a drawing room had not been held for a long time, and all who were anxious to bask in the smile of royalty, hastened thither. Aubrey was there with his sister.

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Aubrey became almost distracted. If before his mind had been absorbed by one subject, how much more completely was it engrossed, now that the certainty of the monster’s living again pressed upon his thoughts. His sister’s attentions were now unheeded, and it was in vain that she intreated him to explain to her what had caused his abrupt conduct. He only uttered a few words, and

those terrified her. The more he thought, the more he was bewildered. His oath startled him;—was he then to allow this monster to roam, bearing ruin upon his breath, amidst all he held dear, and not avert its progress? His very sister might have been touched by him. But even if he were to break his oath, and disclose his suspicions, who would believe him? He thought of employing his own hand to free the world from such a wretch; but death, he remembered, had been already mocked. For days he remained in this state; shut up in his room, he saw no one, and ate only when his sister came, who, with eyes streaming with tears, besought him, for her sake, to support nature. At last, no longer capable of bearing stillness and solitude, he left his house, roamed from street to street, anxious to fly that image which haunted him. His dress became neglected, and he wandered, as often exposed to the noon-day sun as to the midnight damps. He was no longer to be recognized; at first he returned with the evening to the house; but at last he laid him down to rest wherever fatigue overtook him. His sister, anxious for his safety, employed people to follow him; but they were soon distanced by him who fled from a pursuer swifter than any—from thought. His conduct, however, suddenly changed. Struck with the idea that he left by his absence the whole of his friends, with a fiend amongst them, of whose presence they were unconscious, he determined to enter again into society, and watch him closely, anxious to forewarn, in spite of his oath, all whom Lord Ruthven approached with intimacy. But when he entered into a room, his haggard and suspicious looks were so striking, his inward shudderings so visible, that his sister was at last obliged to beg of him to abstain from seeking, for her sake, a society which affected him so strongly. When, however, remonstrance proved unavailing, the guardians thought proper to interpose, and, fearing that his mind was becoming alienated, they thought it high time to resume again that trust which had been before imposed upon them by Aubrey’s parents. Desirous of saving him from the injuries and sufferings he had daily encountered in his wanderings, and of preventing him from exposing to the general eye those marks of what they considered folly, they engaged a physician to reside in the house, and take constant care of him. He hardly appeared to notice it, so completely was his mind absorbed by one terrible subject. His incoherence became at last so great, that he was confined to his chamber. There he would often lie for days, incapable of being roused. He had become emaci-

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While he was standing in a corner by himself, heedless of all around him, engaged in the remembrance that the first time he had seen Lord Ruthven was in that very place—he felt himself suddenly seized by the arm, and a voice he recognized too well, sounded in his ear—‘Remember your oath.’ He had hardly courage to turn, fearful of seeing a spectre that would blast him, when he perceived, at a little distance, the same figure which had attracted his notice on this spot upon his first entry into society. He gazed till his limbs almost refusing to bear their weight, he was obliged to take the arm of a friend, and forcing a passage through the crowd, he threw himself into his carriage, and was driven home. He paced the room with hurried steps, and fixed his hands upon his head, as if he were afraid his thoughts were bursting from his brain. Lord Ruthven again before him—circumstances started up in dreadful array—the dagger—his oath.—He roused himself, he could not believe it possible—the dead rise again!—He thought his imagination had conjured up the image his mind was resting upon. It was impossible that it could be real—he determined, therefore, to go again into society; for though he attempted to ask concerning Lord Ruthven, the name hung upon his lips, and he could not succeed in gaining information. He went a few nights after with his sister to the assembly of a near relation. Leaving her under the protection of a matron, he retired into a recess, and there gave himself up to his own devouring thoughts. Perceiving, at last, that many were leaving, he roused himself, and entering another room, found his sister surrounded by several, apparently in earnest conversation; he attempted to pass and get near her, when one, whom he requested to move, turned round, and revealed to him those features he most abhorred. He sprung forward, seized his sister’s arm, and, with hurried step, forced her towards the street: at the door he found himself impeded by the crowds of servants who were waiting for their lords; and while he was engaged in passing them, he again heard that voice whisper close to him—‘Remember your oath!’—He did not dare to turn, but, hurrying his sister, soon reached home.

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ated, his eyes had attained a glassy lustre;—the only sign of affection and recollection remaining displayed itself upon the entry of his sister: then he would sometimes start, and, seizing her hands, with looks that severely afflicted her, he would desire her not to touch him. ‘Oh, do not touch him—if your love for me is aught, do not go near him!’ When, however, she inquired to whom he referred, his only answer was—‘True! true!’ and again he sank into a state, whence not even she could rouse him. This lasted many months: gradually, however, as the year was passing, his incoherences became less frequent, and his mind threw off a portion of its gloom, whilst his guardians observed, that several times in the day he would count upon his fingers a definite number, and then smile. The time had nearly elapsed, when, upon the last day of the year, one of his guardians entering his room, began to converse with his physician upon the melancholy circumstance of Aubrey’s being in so awful a situation when his sister was going next day to be married. Instantly Aubrey’s attention was attracted; he asked anxiously to whom. Glad of this mark of returning intellect, of which they feared he had been deprived, they mentioned the name of the Earl of Marsden. Thinking this was a young earl whom he had met with in society, Aubrey seemed pleased, and astonished them still more by his expressing his intention to be present at the nuptials, and desiring to see his sister. They answered not, but in a few minutes his sister was with him. He was apparently again capable of being affected by the influence of her lovely smile; for he pressed her to his breast, and kissed her cheek, wet with tears, flowing at the thought of her brother’s being once more alive to the feelings of affection. He began to speak with all his wonted warmth, and to congratulate her upon her marriage with a person so distinguished for rank and every accomplishment; when he suddenly perceived a locket upon her breast; opening it, what was his surprise at beholding the features of the monster who had so long influenced his life. He seized the portrait in a paroxysm of rage, and trampled it under foot. Upon her asking him why he thus destroyed the resemblance of her future husband, he looked as if he did not understand her—then seizing her hands, and gazing on her with a frantic expression of countenance, he bade her swear that she would never wed this monster, for he———But he could not advance—it seemed as if that voice again bade him remember his oath—he turned suddenly round, thinking Lord Ruthven was near

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him, but saw no one. In the meantime the guardians and physician, who had heard the whole, and thought this was but a return of his disorder, entered, and forcing him from Miss Aubrey, desired her to leave him. He fell upon his knees to them, he implored, he begged of them to delay but for one day. They, attributing this to the insanity they imagined had taken possession of his mind, endeavoured to pacify him, and retired. Lord Ruthven had called the morning after the drawing room, and had been refused with every one else. When he heard of Aubrey’s ill health, he readily understood himself to be the cause of it: but when he learned that he was deemed insane, his exultation and pleasure could hardly be concealed from those among whom he had gained this information. He hastened to the house of his former companion, and, by constant attendance, and the pretence of great affection for the brother and interest in his fate, he gradually won the ear of Miss Aubrey. Who could resist his power? His tongue had dangers and toils to recount—could speak of himself as of an individual having no sympathy with any being on the crowded earth, save with her to whom he addressed himself;—could tell how, since he knew her, his existence had begun to seem worthy of preservation, if it were merely that he might listen to her soothing accents;—in fine, he knew so well how to use the serpent’s art, or such was the will of fate, that he gained her affections. The title of the elder branch falling at length to him, he obtained an important embassy, which served as an excuse for hastening the marriage, (in spite of her brother’s deranged state,) which was to take place the very day before his departure for the continent. Aubrey, when he was left by the physician and his guardian, attempted to bribe the servants, but in vain. He asked for pen and paper; it was given him; he wrote a letter to his sister, conjuring her, as she valued her own happiness, her own honour, and the honour of those now in the grave, who once held her in their arms as their hope and the hope of their house, to delay but for a few hours, that marriage, on which he denounced the most heavy curses. The servants promised they would deliver it; but giving it to the physician, he thought it better not to harass any more the mind of Miss Aubrey by, what he considered, the ravings of a maniac. Night passed on without rest to the busy inmates of the house; and Aubrey heard, with a horror that may more easily be conceived than described, the notes of busy preparation. Morning came, and the sound of carriages broke

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upon his ear. Aubrey grew almost frantic. The curiosity of the servants at last overcame their vigilance, they gradually stole away, leaving him in the custody of an helpless old woman. He seized the opportunity, with one bound was out of the room, and in a moment found himself in the apartment where all were nearly assembled. Lord Ruthven was the first to perceive him: he immediately approached, and, taking his arm by force, hurried him from the room, speechless with rage. When on the staircase, Lord Ruthven whispered in his ear—‘Remember your oath, and know, if not my bride to day, your sister is dishonoured. Women are frail!’ So saying, he pushed him towards his attendants, who, roused by the old woman, had come in search of him. Aubrey could no longer support himself; his rage, not finding vent, had broken a blood-vessel, and he was conveyed to bed. This was not mentioned to his sister, who was not present when he entered, as the physician was afraid of agitating her. The marriage was solemnized, and the bride and bridegroom left London. Aubrey’s weakness increased; the effusion of blood produced symptoms of the near approach of death. He desired his sister’s guardians might be called, and when the midnight hour had struck, he related composedly what the reader has perused—he died immediately after. The guardians hastened to protect Miss Aubrey; but when they arrived, it was too late. Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ H. P. LOVECRAFT (1890-1937)

H. P. LOVECRAFT (ESSAY DATE 1945) SOURCE: Lovecraft, H. P. “The Aftermath of Gothic Fiction.” In Supernatural Horror in Literature. 1945. Reprint edition, edited by E. F. Bleiler, pp. 36-44. New York: Dover, 1973. In the following essay, first published in 1945, renowned horror and science fiction writer Lovecraft surveys the development of the Gothic in major and minor literary works written during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Meanwhile other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary plethora of trash like Marquis von Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries (1796), Mrs. Roche’s Children of the Abbey (1798), Mrs. Dacre’s Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806), and the poet Shelley’s schoolboy effusions Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvine (1811) (both imitations of Zofloya) there arose many memorable weird works both in English and German. Classic in merit, and markedly different from its fellows because of its foundation in the Oriental tale rather than the Walpolesque Gothic novel, is the celebrated History of the Caliph Vathek by the wealthy dilettante William Beckford, first written in the French language but published in an English translation before the appearance of the original. Eastern tales, introduced to European literature early in the eighteenth century through Galland’s French translation of the inexhaustibly opulent Arabian Nights, had become a reigning fashion; being used both for allegory and for amusement. The sly humour which

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H. P. Lovecraft is widely considered the most important literary supernaturalist of the twentieth century and one of the greatest in a tradition that originated with the Gothic novelists of the eighteenth century and was perpetuated throughout the nineteenth century by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Arthur Machen. Like these literary forebears, Lovecraft practiced an essentially popular form of writing, the evolution of which he traced in the critical history Supernatural Horror in Literature (1945). Combining elements of the lowest pulp melodrama with the highest imaginative artistry, Lovecraft’s “weird tales” have become classics of an enduring branch of literature, and among authorities in this province he is regarded as a peer of his Gothic predecessors. Lovecraft’s stories are commonly divided into three types: those influenced by the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany, a diverse group of horror narratives set in New England, and tales sharing a background of cosmic legendry usually referred to as the “Cthulhu Mythos.” One of the most important and controversial issues in Lovecraft criticism is that regarding nomenclature for his Mythos stories. Various labels have been employed, from the broad designations of “horror” and “Gothic” to more discriminating terms such as “supernormal” and “mechanistic supernatural.” At the source of this diverse terminology is the fact that, while these works clearly belong to the tradition of Gothic literature, Lovecraft did not make them dependent on the common mythic conceits associated with this tradition—ghosts, vampires, witches, werewolves, and other figures of folklore—and even when they do appear in his work, these entities are often modified to function against a new mythical background, one whose symbolism emphasizes the philosophical over the psychological. The question of how to describe tales whose effect derives from the violation of the laws of nature rather than those of personal or public morality was somewhat resolved by Lovecraft himself when he applied the term “weird” to such works.

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But Beckford remained alone in his devotion to the Orient. Other writers, closer to the Gothic tradition and to European life in general, were content to follow more faithfully in the lead of Walpole. Among the countless producers of terrorliterature in these times may be mentioned the Utopian economic theorist William Godwin, who

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only the Eastern mind knows how to mix with weirdness had captivated a sophisticated generation, till Bagdad and Damascus names became as freely strewn through popular literature as dashing Italian and Spanish ones were soon to be. Beckford, well read in Eastern romance, caught the atmosphere with unusual receptivity; and in his fantastic volume reflected very potently the haughty luxury, sly disillusion, bland cruelty, urbane treachery, and shadowy spectral horror of the Saracen spirit. His seasoning of the ridiculous seldom mars the force of his sinister theme, and the tale marches onward with a phantasmagoric pomp in which the laughter is that of skeletons feasting under arabesque domes. Vathek is a tale of the grandson of the Caliph Haroun, who, tormented by that ambition for super-terrestrial power, pleasure and learning which animates the average Gothic villain or Byronic hero (essentially cognate types), is lured by an evil genius to seek the subterranean throne of the mighty and fabulous pre-Adamite sultans in the fiery halls of Eblis, the Mahometan Devil. The descriptions of Vathek’s palaces and diversions, of his scheming sorceress-mother Carathis and her witch-tower with the fifty one-eyed negresses, of his pilgrimage to the haunted ruins of Istakhar (Persepolis) and of the impish bride Nouronihar whom he treacherously acquired on the way, of Istakhar’s primordial towers and terraces in the burning moonlight of the waste, and of the terrible Cyclopean halls of Eblis, where, lured by glittering promises, each victim is compelled to wander in anguish for ever, his right hand upon his blazingly ignited and eternally burning heart, are triumphs of weird colouring which raise the book to a permanent place in English letters. No less notable are the three Episodes of Vathek, intended for insertion in the tale as narratives of Vathek’s fellow-victims in Eblis’ infernal halls, which remained unpublished throughout the author’s lifetime and were discovered as recently as 1909 by the scholar Lewis Melville whilst collecting material for his Life and Letters of William Beckford. Beckford, however, lacks the essential mysticism which marks the acutest form of the weird; so that his tales have a certain knowing Latin hardness and clearness preclusive of sheer panic fright.

H. P. Lovecraft, 1890-1937.

followed his famous but non-supernatural Caleb Williams (1794) with the intendedly weird St. Leon (1799), in which the theme of the elixir of life, as developed by the imaginary secret order of “Rosicrucians,” is handled with ingeniousness if not with atmospheric convincingness. This element of Rosicrucianism, fostered by a wave of popular magical interest exemplified in the vogue of the charlatan Cagliostro and the publication of Francis Barrett’s The Magus (1801), a curious and compendious treatise on occult principles and ceremonies, of which a reprint was made as lately as 1896, figures in Bulwer-Lytton and in many late Gothic novels, especially that remote and enfeebled posterity which straggled far down into the nineteenth century and was represented by George W. M. Reynold’s Faust and Wagner the Wehr-Wolf. Caleb Williams, though nonsupernatural, has many authentic touches of terror. It is the tale of a servant persecuted by a master whom he has found guilty of murder, and displays an invention and skill which have kept it alive in a fashion to this day. It was dramatized as The Iron Chest, and in that form was almost equally celebrated. Godwin, however, was too much the conscious teacher and prosaic man of thought to create a genuine weird masterpiece. His daughter, the wife of Shelley, was much more successful; and her inimitable Frankenstein;

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or, the Modern Prometheus (1817) is one of the horror-classics of all time. Composed in competition with her husband, Lord Byron, and Dr. John William Polidori in an effort to prove supremacy in horror-making, Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein was the only one of the rival narratives to be brought to an elaborate completion; and criticism has failed to prove that the best parts are due to Shelley rather than to her. The novel, somewhat tinged but scarcely marred by moral didacticism, tells of the artificial human being molded from charnel fragments by Victor Frankenstein, a young Swiss medical student. Created by its designer “in the mad pride of intellectuality,” the monster possesses full intelligence but owns a hideously loathsome form. It is rejected by mankind, becomes embittered, and at length begins the successive murder of all whom Frankenstein loves best, friends and family. It demands that Frankenstein create a wife for it; and when the student finally refuses in horror lest the world be populated with such monsters, it departs with a hideous threat “to be with him on his wedding night.” Upon that night the bride is strangled, and from that time on Frankenstein hunts down the monster, even into the wastes of the Arctic. In the end, whilst seeking shelter on the ship of the man who tells the story, Frankenstein himself is killed by the shocking object of his search and creation of his presumptuous pride. Some of the scenes in Frankenstein are unforgettable, as when the newly animated monster enters its creator’s room, parts the curtains of his bed, and gazes at him in the yellow moonlight with watery eyes—“if eyes they may be called.” Mrs. Shelley wrote other novels, including the fairly notable Last Man; but never duplicated the success of her first effort. It has the true touch of cosmic fear, no matter how much the movement may lag in places. Dr. Polidori developed his competing idea as a long short story, The Vampyre; in which we behold a suave villain of the true Gothic or Byronic type, and encounter some excellent passages of stark fright, including a terrible nocturnal experience in a shunned Grecian wood. In this same period Sir Walter Scott frequently concerned himself with the weird, weaving it into many of his novels and poems, and sometimes producing such independent bits of narration as The Tapestried Chamber or Wandering Willie’s Tale in Redgauntlet, in the latter of which the force of the spectral and the diabolic is enhanced by a grotesque homeliness of speech and atmosphere. In 1830 Scott published his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which still forms one of our best

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compendia of European witch-lore. Washington Irving is another famous figure not unconnected with the weird; for though most of his ghosts are too whimsical and humorous to form genuinely spectral literature, a distinct inclination in this direction is to be noted in many of his productions. The German Student in Tales of a Traveller (1824) is a slyly concise and effective presentation of the old legend of the dead bride, whilst woven into the comic tissue of The Money Diggers in the same volume is more than one hint of piratical apparitions in the realms which Captain Kidd once roamed. Thomas Moore also joined the ranks of the macabre artists in the poem Alciphron, which he later elaborated into the prose novel of The Epicurean (1827). Though merely relating the adventures of a young Athenian duped by the artifice of cunning Egyptian priests, Moore manages to infuse much genuine horror into his account of subterranean frights and wonders beneath the primordial temples of Memphis. De Quincey more than once revels in grotesque and arabesque terrors, though with a desultoriness and learned pomp which deny him the rank of specialist. This era likewise saw the rise of William Harrison Ainsworth, whose romantic novels teem with the eerie and the gruesome. Capt. Marryat, besides writing such short tales as The Werewolf, made a memorable contribution in The Phantom Ship (1839), founded on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, whose spectral and accursed vessel sails for ever near the Cape of Good Hope. Dickens now rises with occasional weird bits like The Signalman, a tale of ghastly warning conforming to a very common pattern and touched with a verisimilitude which allied it as much with the coming psychological school as with the dying Gothic school. At this time a wave of interest in spiritualistic charlatanry, mediumism, Hindoo theosophy, and such matters, much like that of the present day, was flourishing; so that the number of weird tales with a “psychic” or pseudoscientific basis became very considerable. For a number of these the prolific and popular Edward Bulwer-Lytton was responsible; and despite the large doses of turgid rhetoric and empty romanticism in his products, his success in the weaving of a certain kind of bizarre charm cannot be denied. The House and the Brain, which hints of Rosicrucianism and at a malign and deathless figure perhaps suggested by Louis XV’s mysterious courtier St. Germain, yet survives as one of the best short haunted-house tales ever written. The novel Zanoni (1842) contains similar elements

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In A Strange Story (1862) Bulwer-Lytton shows a marked improvement in the creation of weird images and moods. The novel, despite enormous length, a highly artificial plot bolstered up by opportune coincidences, and an atmosphere of homiletic pseudo-science designed to please the matter-of-fact and purposeful Victorian reader, is exceedingly effective as a narrative; evoking instantaneous and unflagging interest, and furnishing many potent—if somewhat melodramatic—tableaux and climaxes. Again we have the mysterious user of life’s elixir in the person of the soulless magician Margrave, whose dark exploits stand out with dramatic vividness against the modern background of a quiet English town and of the Australian bush; and again we have shadowy intimations of a vast spectral world of the unknown in the very air about us—this time handled with much greater power and vitality than in Zanoni. One of the two great incantation passages, where the hero is driven by a luminous evil spirit to rise at night in his sleep, take a strange Egyptian wand, and evoke nameless presences in the haunted and mausoleum-facing pavilion of a famous Renaissance alchemist, truly stands among the major terror scenes of literature. Just enough is suggested, and just little enough is told. Unknown words are twice dictated to the sleep-walker, and as he repeats them the ground trembles, and all the dogs of the countryside begin to bay at half-seen amorphous shadows that stalk athwart the moonlight. When a third set of unknown words is prompted, the sleep-walker’s spirit suddenly rebels at uttering them, as if the

soul could recognize ultimate abysmal horrors concealed from the mind; and at last an apparition of an absent sweetheart and good angel breaks the malign spell. This fragment well illustrates how far Lord Lytton was capable of progressing beyond his usual pomp and stock romance toward that crystalline essence of artistic fear which belongs to the domain of poetry. In describing certain details of incantations, Lytton was greatly indebted to his amusingly serious occult studies, in the course of which he came in touch with that odd French scholar and cabbalist Alphonse Louis Constant (“Eliphas Levy”), who claimed to possess the secrets of ancient magic, and to have evoked the spectre of the old Grecian wizard Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in Nero’s times. The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard (whose She is really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson—the latter of whom, despite an atrocious tendency toward jaunty mannerisms, created permanent classics in Markheim, The Body Snatcher, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indeed, we may say that this school still survives; for to it clearly belong such of our contemporary horrortales as specialise in events rather than atmospheric details, address the intellect rather than the impressionistic imagination, cultivate a luminous glamour rather than a malign tensity or psychological verisimilitude, and take a definite stand in sympathy with mankind and its welfare. It has its undeniable strength, and because of its “human element” commands a wider audience than does the sheer artistic nightmare. If not quite so potent as the latter, it is because a diluted product can never achieve the intensity of a concentrated essence. Quite alone both as a novel and as a piece of terror-literature stands the famous Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, with its mad vista of bleak, windswept Yorkshire moors and the violent, distorted lives they foster. Though primarily a tale of life, and of human passions in agony and conflict, its epically cosmic setting affords room for horror of the most spiritual sort. Heathcliff, the modified Byronic villain-hero, is a strange dark waif found in the streets as a small child and speaking only a strange gibberish till adopted by the family he ultimately ruins. That he is in truth a diabolic spirit rather than a human being is more than once suggested, and the unreal is

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more elaborately handled, and introduces a vast unknown sphere of being pressing on our own world and guarded by a horrible “Dweller of the Threshold” who haunts those who try to enter and fail. Here we have a benign brotherhood kept alive from age to age till finally reduced to a single member, and as a hero an ancient Chaldaean sorcerer surviving in the pristine bloom of youth to perish on the guillotine of the French Revolution. Though full of the conventional spirit of romance, marred by a ponderous network of symbolic and didactic meanings, and left unconvincing through lack of perfect atmospheric realization of the situations hinging on the spectral world, Zanoni is really an excellent performance as a romantic novel; and can be read with genuine interest by the not too sophisticated reader. It is amusing to note that in describing an attempted initiation into the ancient brotherhood the author cannot escape using the stock Gothic castle of Walpolian lineage.

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further approached in the experience of the visitor who encounters a plaintive child-ghost at a bough-brushed upper window. Between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a tie deeper and more terrible than human love. After her death he twice disturbs her grave, and is haunted by an impalpable presence which can be nothing less than her spirit. The spirit enters his life more and more, and at last he becomes confident of some imminent mystical reunion. He says he feels a strange change approaching, and ceases to take nourishment. At night he either walks abroad or opens the casement by his bed. When he dies the casement is still swinging open to the pouring rain, and a queer smile pervades the stiffened face. They bury him in a grave beside the mound he has haunted for eighteen years, and small shepherd boys say that he yet walks with his Catherine in the churchyard and on the moor when it rains. Their faces, too, are sometimes seen on rainy nights behind that upper casement at Wuthering Heights. Miss Brontë’s eerie terror is no mere Gothic echo, but a tense expression of man’s shuddering reaction to the unknown. In this respect, Wuthering Heights becomes the symbol of a literary transition, and marks the growth of a new and sounder school.

HAUNTED DWELLINGS AND THE SUPERNATURAL S. T. JOSHI (ESSAY DATE WINTER 1994) SOURCE: Joshi, S. T. “Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror.” Studies in Weird Fiction 14 (winter 1994): 9-28. In the following essay, Joshi surveys Jackson’s works, noting the difficulties inherent in attempting to classify them by genre, and discussing Jackson’s horrific inversion of societal ideals of human relationships and homelife in her works, particularly in The Haunting of Hill House.

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965)1 and Ramsey Campbell are the two leading writers of weird fiction since Lovecraft. In making this assertion I am not merely bypassing other writers who, at least in their own minds, aspire to that title—in particular the best-selling quartet of Stephen King, Peter Straub, Anne Rice, and Clive Barker—but am making the problematical assertion that Jackson is a weird writer at all. It is true that only one of her novels is avowedly supernatural—the masterful Haunting of Hill House (1959)—while others are weird only slightly or not at all; it is also true that perhaps at most fifteen or twenty of her hundred-

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odd short stories can be said to belong either to the weird tale or to the mystery story or to science fiction.2 Certainly there is nothing supernatural about “The Lottery” (1948), whose impact rests on the very possibility of its occurrence. But I wish to place Jackson within the realm of weird fiction not only for the nebulous reason that the whole of her work has a pervasive atmosphere of the odd about it, but, more importantly, because her entire work is unified to such a degree that distinctions about genre and classification become arbitrary and meaningless. Like Arthur Machen, Shirley Jackson developed a view of the world that informed all her writing, whether supernatural or not; but that world view is more akin to the cheerless and nihilistic misanthropy of Bierce than to Machen’s harried anti-materialism. It is because Shirley Jackson so keenly detected horror in the everyday world, and wrote of it with rapier-sharp prose, that she ranks as a twentieth-century Bierce. Jackson’s world view does not extend into the realm of metaphysics: it is not possible to deduce from her work any coherent conception of the nature of the universe. She is wholly and avowedly concerned with human relationships, and it is from their complexities that both horror and the supernatural emerge in her work. Both early and late in her career Jackson was affirming that, at least for her, the supernatural is a metaphor for human beings’ relation to the world. Consider a remark in 1948: I have had for many years a consuming interest in magic and the supernatural. I think this is because I find there so convenient a shorthand statement of the possibilities of human adjustment to what seems to be at best an inhuman world. . . . everything I write [involves] the sense which I feel, of a human and not very rational order struggling inadequately to keep in check forces of great destruction, which may be the devil and may be intellectual enlightenment. (O 125)

In 1962 she wrote in a lecture: Just remember that primarily, in the story and out of it, you are living in a world of people. A story must have characters in it; work with concrete rather than abstract nouns, and always dress your ideas immediately. Suppose you want to write a story about what you might vaguely think of as “magic.” You will be hopelessly lost, wandering around formlessly in notions of magic and incantations; you will never make any forward progress at all until you turn your ideas, “magic,” into a person, someone who wants to do or make or change or act in some way. Once you have your first character you will of course need another to put into opposition, a person in some sense “antimagic”; when both are working at their separate

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It is entirely possible, then, that a proper startingpoint for the study of Jackson’s fiction from a weird perspective may not be her actual weird work but those tales for which she gained an entirely different following: her family chronicles collected in Life among the Savages and Raising Demons.

Domestic Fiction The strain of autobiography that is so dominant throughout Jackson’s work can be traced to her very earliest writing. Her first professionally published story, “My Life with R. H. Macy” (L), appears to be a lightly fictionalised account of a job she had as a saleswoman at Macy’s department store. The stories she wrote about her family date no earlier than 1948, several years after she began her literary career; but they continued at a fairly constant pace to the end of her life. Jackson admitted to her parents that many of these stories were potboilers: They are written simply for money and the reason they sound so bad is that those magazines won’t buy good ones, but deliberately seek out bad stuff because they say their audiences want it. I simply figure that at a thousand bucks a story, I can’t afford to try to change the state of popular fiction today. . . . I won’t write love stories and junk about gay young married couples, and they won’t take ordinary children stories, and this sort of thing is a compromise between their notions and mine . . . and is unusual enough so that I am the only person I know of who is doing it. (O 145)

This dismissal of her domestic fiction may be somewhat disingenuous: to be sure, they brought in needed income ($1000 per story came in very handy in supporting four children, as Hyman, a university professor, never made much money of his own from his literary criticism), but the zest, vigour, and wit with which they are written testify to their importance to Jackson. Even if many of these tales are written with the sort of coy, innocuous, and resolutely cheerful tone expected in fiction for women’s magazines in the 1950s, they nevertheless contain certain disturbing undercurrents that may subvert their surface hilarity. James Egan, in a thoughtful essay that attempts to reconcile Jackson’s domestic fiction and her weird work, sees a twofold division of her work, as “either the expression of an idyllic domestic vision or the inversion of that vision into the fantastic and Gothic” (Egan 15). I am

fundamentally in agreement with this assessment, but it may require a little more shading. Especially when we examine the chronology of Jackson’s short fiction, we will find that the domestic stories themselves undergo a gradual modification— brought on, perhaps, by her marital problems or simply by the fact that her children grew up and no longer exhibited that affinity to “magic” (O 209) which Jackson thought the very young reveal—so that the later domestic fiction now and then displays a brooding irony and even misanthropy that brings it surprisingly close in tone to her other work. Although Jackson appears to pay lip service to the conventions of middleclass life in the 1950s, the vibrancy of her writing, the flawlessly exact capturing of her children’s idiosyncrasies, and above all Jackson’s complete lack of sentimentalism make these stories pungent and vivid even today. I am not sufficiently interested in their sociological implications, but I imagine that much interesting work could be done on gauging how exactly these tales do or do not reflect the stereotypes of their class and time. What I am interested in is the degree of their veracity; that is, the extent to which they are unvarnished or faithful transcriptions of actual events in Jackson’s life and in the life of her family. It is, of course, naive to imagine that any autobiographical writing simply relates events as they occurred; and Jackson’s remark that these stories allowed her to see her children “through a flattering veil of fiction” (O 119) may be all we need to infer that her domestic fiction, no less than her other work, is in some sense a creation of the imagination. Egan’s reference to this work as “idyllic” is correct insofar as Jackson systematically attempts to present what may in reality have been highly traumatic events as the source of harmless jest—her son being struck by a car, for instance, in which he suffered a concussion and some broken bones. The importance of this domestic fiction—as regards her other work, at any rate—rests in its manipulation of very basic familial or personal scenarios that would be utilised in her weird work in perverted and twisted ways: things like riding a bus, employing a maid, taking children shopping, going on vacation, putting up guests, and, in general, adhering—or seeming to adhere—to the “proper conduct” expected of her as a middle-class housewife. It is interesting that her function as a writer is almost never mentioned in these works, or if it is, it is to poke fun at it as an anomaly for a wife with four children. “The Third Baby’s the

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intentions, dragging in other characters as needed, you are well into your story. (“Notes for a Young Writer” [C 153-54])

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Easiest” captures the idea perfectly, as Jackson registers with a desk clerk at the hospital: “Age?” she asked. “Sex? Occupation?” “Writer,” I said. “Housewife,” she said. “Writer,” I said. “I’ll just put down housewife,” she said. (LS 426)

An earlier sketch, “Fame” (1948), amusingly tells of a gossip columnist who phones Jackson and is interested in everything about her except the fact that her first novel is soon to be issued by a major New York publisher. It is important to note, however, that this body of domestic fiction really does underggo some significant changes over the years; it is in no sense a monolithic block of determined cheer. Some cracks begin to appear as early as “Lucky to Get Away” (1953), in which Jackson emphatically betrays a weariness with the unending round of housework required of her as a mother, especially one whose husband contributes nothing to the household chores: I got to feeling that I could not bear the sight of the colored cereal bowls for one more morning, could not empty one more ashtray, could not brush one more head or bake one more potato or let out one more dog or pick up one more jacket. I snarled at the bright faces regarding me at the breakfast table and I was strongly tempted to kick the legs out from under the chair on which my older son was teetering backward. (LS 583)

Three other pieces show that Jackson’s relationship with her husband might not have been one of unending bliss. One of the many curious things about these stories is the infrequency with which her husband even appears: they are all about herself and her children, and when her husband does make an appearance it is almost always as a clumsy buffoon (“The Life Romantic”, “The Box”). In “Queen of the May” the tone becomes a little more sinister: the jealousy Jackson felt toward her husband (a known philanderer) is much in evidence:

There was a deep, enduring silence, until at last my husband’s eye fell on Jannie. “And what did you learn in school today?” he asked with wild enthusiasm. (RD 661-62)

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Some of the later, uncollected domestic fiction comes off sounding a little tired: Jackson must have realised that her material was running dry, especially as her children were growing up into the less superficially “cute” stage of young adulthood. Indeed, a late piece, “Karen’s Complaint” (1959), is quite poignant in depicting Jackson’s sense of loneliness and aimlessness as her youngest child begins to go to school and she faces the prospect of an empty house for the first time in nearly two decades. However haphazardly her household appeared to be run, she took evident pride in providing a loving home for her husband and children. It is exactly this sense of togetherness and warmth that is obtrusively lacking in her other fiction. Where the reality of her own family lay, no one but she herself could have answered: perhaps all the carefree and welladjusted children in her domestic fiction were themselves imaginary—her greatest fantasy.

Domestic into Weird

The humour in this passage is, surely, a little sardonic.

“Daddy is going to see a lot of girls,” Sally told Barry. She turned to me. “Daddy likes to look at girls, doesn’t he?”

Still odder and still more bitter is “One Last Chance”, in which a husband announces somewhat sheepishly that an old flame of his will be dropping by (in fact she cancels her plans and never arrives), tactlessly and unintentionally suggesting that this woman is much prettier and a better cook than his wife. Finally, “On Being a Faculty Wife” (1956) is astonishingly vicious in its portrayal of callow young girls worshipping the distinguished professor while his wife is brushed aside as a useless (and unattractive) ornament.

The transformation of some incidents found in the domestic fiction into something very different and much more disturbing can occasionally occur with scarcely an alteration save that of context. The textbook example of this is the story “Charles”. Here, of course, the transition has occurred in the reverse direction, as the story was first published in a magazine and gathered in The Lottery before being reprinted in Life among the Savages. In its earlier two contexts the story is subtly menacing and rather grim: her son Laurie (mentioned by name in all three versions), attending kindergarten, tells of a strange boy, Charles, who is by turns extremely unruly and even evil (”’Today Charles hit the teacher’ . . . ‘He kicked the teacher’s friend’” [L 71-72]) and excessively well-behaved. Later, when Jackson meets Laurie’s teacher, she finds out that there is no Charles in the class. I shall return to the implications of this story later, but here I wish to note what a remarkably different atmosphere this story has when it is buried in the genial confines of Life among the Sav-

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Another means for effecting the transition from domestic to weird, or vice versa, is omission. A very peculiar tale, “The House”, was reprinted in Life among the Savages—but not all of it. The latter portion was excised, no doubt because it is precisely here that the tale veers off into suggestions of the supernatural. At the outset it is difficult to ascertain whether, in its magazine appearance, this story is genuinely autobiographical, since Jackson never refers to her husband or children by name. In any case, the story concerns her family moving into an old, somewhat ramshackle, and faintly sinister house in New England (the precise location is never specified in the original appearance). The narrative of fixing up the house for habitation and moving in is told with mild humour—certainly not with the overt hilarity of pieces like “Look, Ma, We’re Moving!” (1952) or “Worldly Goods”—but with an undercurrent of the strange. The house seems almost animate: There was a door to an attic that preferred to stay latched, and would latch itself no matter who was inside; another door hung by custom slightly ajar, although it would close good-humoredly for a time when some special reason required it. We had five attics, we discovered, built into one another; one of them kept bats, and we shut that one up; another one, light and cheerful in spite of a small window, liked to be a place of traffic and became a place to store things temporarily.3

The house controls its inhabitants, not the inhabitants the house. It is on its sufferance that they are there at all. All this may be only mildly disturbing; but then an old lady comes to pay a visit: “It’s a lovely old house,” I said. “Do you think so?” She turned quickly to look at me. “Do you really think it’s a lovely old house?” “We’re very happy here.” “I’m glad.” She folded her hands and smiled again. “It’s always been such a good house,” she said. “The old doctor always used to say it was a good house.” “The old doctor?” “Doctor Ogilvie.” “Doctor Ogilvie?” “I see they kept the pillars, after all,” she said, nodding. “We always thought they gave the house character.”

“There was a hornets’ nest in one,” I said weakly. Doctor Ogilvie had built the house in 1816!4

The first passage I quoted above was included in Life among the Savages, but again context robs it of any undertones of the weird; and that reprint breaks off the tale shortly thereafter. If anything, this story could be a model of Jackson’s ability to transform the events of her own life into weird fiction. Jackson’s work returns time and again to certain fundamental domestic themes, sometimes in an autobiographical manner, sometimes in a mainstream manner, and sometimes in a weird manner. I again emphasise that these distinctions are arbitrary and nebulous; it takes only a small touch to push a story from one of these groups to another, and some stories remain resolutely averse to clear categorisation. Consider, for example, the number of stories by Jackson involving the hiring of a maid. There are at least four such tales, and they all play startling variations of tone and mood upon this one theme. Chronologically the first is “Tootie in Peonage” (1942; C), one of Jackson’s earliest stories. It tells of a young woman, Tootie Maple, whom the narrator hires to help with the housework. It is an amusing tale of how Tootie has too many other pressing things to do—painting her toenails, finishing the latest issue of True Confessions—to get down to her actual duties; but the real object of satire is the housewife who hired her, who lacks the strength of will either to order Tootie to do her work or to fire her. The next maid story, “Family Magician” (1949), is a rather odd and benign weird tale about a maid, Mallie, who appears to fulfil her household responsibilities through magic. The tale is not of much note save in being Jackson’s first avowedly supernatural work. Then comes “Monday Morning”, incorporated in Life among the Savages and similar in tone to “Tootie in Peonage”. In this explicitly autobiographical and quite amusing story we read of the maid Phoebe, who shows up more than an hour late. Then we come to the extremely nasty “Strangers in Town” (1959). The tale does not focus upon the maid, named Mallie (as in “Family Magician”), but it is clear that this maid too has supernatural powers: she gathers an acorn, a mushroom, and a scrap of grass and makes a stew out of them. The simple act of riding a bus or train and travelling to a strange location—usually a big city—has generated a number of Jackson’s most powerful stories, whether weird or otherwise. We have seen the innocuous version of this in chapter

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ages: there the whole tale comes off as simply another prank by her cute but headstrong son, whereas in the former instances one has the strong sensation that her son may well have serious problems of adjustment.

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4 of Raising Demons, in which Jackson relates taking her children to New York; other tales are much more ominous. “The Tooth” (1949; L) is a queer and meandering story of a young woman who travels to New York to see a dentist; I confess to being at a loss what point this story is trying to make, but the atmosphere of shimmering, dreamlike fantasy that was to become a Jackson trademark finds its first genuine embodiment here. “Pillar of Salt” (1948; L) involves a nearly identical scenario, although here a couple from New Hampshire comes to New York for a vacation. The emphasis is, inevitably, on the wife, whose appreciation of the city oscillates between amazement and condescension (looking at a set of miniature milk bottles being sold as toys, she notes archly, “We get our milk from cows” [L 177]). Gradually the giganticism, pace, and impersonality of the city overwhelm her, and her plight is keenly encapsulated by her utter inability to cross a busy street even when the light is with her: The minute the light changes, she told herself firmly; there’s no sense. The light changed before she was ready and in the minute before she collected herself traffic turning the corner overwhelmed her and she shrank back against the curb. She looked longingly at the cigar store on the opposite corner, with her apartment house beyond; she wondered, How do people ever manage to get there, and knew that by wondering, by admitting a doubt, she was lost. (L 184)

“The Bus” (1965; C) finally takes this topos into the realm of the supernatural. An old woman is dropped off at the wrong stop late at night, eventually catches a ride on a truck to some dismal-looking roadhouse, and, as the atmosphere becomes at once more menacing and more unreal, the old woman imagines herself a child in her room, looks in a closet, and finds her old doll speaking to her: “‘Go away, old lady, go away, old lady, go away’” (C 200). At this point the old woman wakes up—it was all a dream and she is still on the bus! Not content with this trite device, Jackson gives it a further predictable twist by having the old woman get off at the same wrong stop as before. Several other stories speak of the peculiar vulnerability of people on vacation, away from their friends and their familiar environment. “The Summer People” (1949; C) is a mordant tale about an elderly couple who decide to stay on in their summer cottage past Labor Day, something they have never done before. The dour countryfolk of the region appear to resent this decision—

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”’Nobody ever stayed at the lake past Labor Day before’” (C 73)—and insidiously conspire against them: the couple cannot get kerosene or ice, the mail suddenly stops, the groceries can’t be delivered, and so on. This masterful story is worth considering in several other respects, but the gradual isolation of the couple, as one by one the locals turn against them through sheer inaction, is harrowing. There is, of course, nothing supernatural about this tale, but a work like this makes the strongest possible case for the inclusion of the non-supernatural horror story as a genuine subset of the weird tale. “The Lovely Night” (1952; retitled “A Visit” in C) introduces the supernatural in the subtlest way. A college girl, Margaret, goes with her friend Carla Rhodes to the latter’s palatial home, whose location is never specified. Initially it all seems idyllic: Carla stopped before the doorway and stood for a minute, looking first behind her, at the vast reaching gardens and the green lawn going down to the river, and the soft hills beyond, and then at the perfect grace of the house, showing so clearly the long-boned structure within, the curving staircases and the arched doorways and the tall thin lines of steadying beams, all of it resting back against the hills, and up, past rows of windows and the flying lines of the roof, on, to the tower . . . (C 98)

The tale develops a powerful atmosphere of weirdness through the deliberately artificial dialogue—it is as if all the characters know they are in a work of fiction. Carla’s brother Paul arrives; Margaret spends much time with him. She goes up to the tower and has an enigmatic talk with Carla’s grandmother. Throughout the story Mrs Rhodes is weaving a tapestry of the house. This is the end of the tale: “You will not leave us before my brother comes again?” Carla asked Margaret. “I have only to put the figures into the foreground,” Mrs. Rhodes said, hesitating on her way to the drawing room. “I shall have you exactly if you sit on the lawn near the river.” “We shall be models of stillness,” said Carla, laughing. “Margaret, will you come and sit beside me on the lawn?” (C 120)

What does this mean? What is the significance of Paul’s remark that “’without this house I could not exist’” (C 119)? Is this not a pun, meaning that neither he nor the entire family can live without (i.e. outside of) the house? And isn’t Margaret now being woven into the fabric of the house by way of the tapestry? This exquisite and

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Language, Truth, and Horror Many of Jackson’s stories turn on the statements uttered by her characters: is what they are saying true? What if, Jackson asks in a number of tales, there is some sort of insane conspiracy to deceive a single individual? Such stories are almost unclassifiable: we cannot know if the supernatural actually comes into play because ambiguity is maintained to the end as to the truth of the matter. Nevertheless, some of her most powerful tales revolve around simple utterances by individual characters, which, when taken together, potentially suggest some horrific and irrational victimisation of an individual who is frequently somewhat disturbed to begin with. The standard distinction between what might be called interior and exterior supernaturalism (i.e., that occurring within the confines of an individual’s mind and that occurring in the external world) seems to collapse here, or even to fuse together: it is as if Jackson is suggesting that the supernatural falls specifically upon those individuals whose hold on reality is itself shaky. Jackson’s very first story, “Janice” (1938; C) already starts the pattern. This mordant shortshort story is nothing more than a page of dialogue held by the title character, a college student, with some of her friends: she is telling each of them that she “nearly killed herself” (C 41) by carbon monoxide poisoning. Is this actually the case? Is it anything more than an attempt at selfdramatisation? When the first-person narrator suddenly obtrudes with the pointed query, “How did it feel to be dying, Jan?”, Janice can only reply with a meaningless and stereotypical remark: “Gee, funny. All black” (C 42). It is the first of many stories in which the veracity of characters’ utterances is subtly impugned without any concrete statement ever being made by the narrator one way or the other. “Charles” also fits this pattern, although at the end we are clearly led to believe that “Charles” is nothing more than a sort of fictitious dummy to whom Laurie is attributing his own unruliness in school: his teacher remarks, “We had a little trouble adjusting, the first week or so . . . but now

he’s a fine little helper. With occasional lapses, of course” (L 74), which corresponds exactly to the cycle of “Charles’s” good and bad moments in school. Doubt still remains, however, whether Laurie (or anyone) actually committed the acts he fastens upon Charles: some may still be exaggerated or, indeed, entirely imaginary. Several of Jackson’s best tales involve the harrowing question of a mad (because unmotivated, wholly malicious, and, conceivably, supernaturally inspired) conspiracy on the part of seemingly unrelated individuals—perhaps the entire world—to cause mental or emotional pain to some hapless individual. It is here that the suggestion of the veracity of the characters’ statements is of the greatest importance, but it is also the most hopelessly irresolvable. The effect is extremely unnerving. The celebrated tale “The Daemon Lover” (1949; L) is one of the best of this type. This story inaugurates a curious thread in the stories in The Lottery (and elsewhere) in which the figure of James Harris, the Daemon Lover, flits in and out of stories, seemingly at random. To my mind, however, not much can be made of this: the name Harris appears in several stories in the collection, and sometimes it is specified as James or Jim Harris; but I do not think that in the end it amounts to much save a sort of in-joke that has no particular point. Jackson herself admitted to being haunted by a daemon lover, from as early as her college years, and she describes it in a sketch as follows (she was in a noncapitalisation phase at this point): but all i remember is that i met him (somewhere where was it in the darkness in the light was it morning were there trees flowers had i been born) and now when I think about him i only remember that he was calling margaret, as in loneliness margaret margaret, and then (did i speak to him did he look at me did we smile had we known each other once) i went away and left him (calling to me after me) calling margaret margaret. (O 49)

This is poignant enough, and the several stories she wrote about a daemon lover all have this same quality of bittersweet unreality; but the interconnexions she attempts to forge by dropping the name Harris in the Lottery collection do not add up to a coherent whole. But “The Daemon Lover” is an exquisite piece. It introduces us to the most easily recognisable character-type in all Jackson’s work: the lonely, weak-willed, sensitive, overly imaginative, and possibly psychotic young woman who usually

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haunting tale—a fantastically transmogrified version of a visit Dylan Thomas paid to Jackson’s home in Westport, Connecticut (O 151-52)— exemplifies the “quiet weird tale” at its pinnacle. And, of course, it embodies a theme that we can already see is a dominant one in Jackson’s work and perhaps also her life: the manner in which a house can subsume its occupants.

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ends her pitiable and meaningless existence in madness or suicide. This figure recurs with such obsessive frequency in her stories that one is tempted to see in it Jackson’s imaginative view of herself, however much or little it may have coincided with the reality of her personality. In “The Daemon Lover” we encounter such a figure in Margaret, who awakes one morning in her shabby one-room apartment awaiting the arrival of James Harris, to whom she is to be married. We are already a little uneasy, since we learn that she has known Harris only for a month; and our fears seem confirmed when he fails to show up at her apartment at the appointed time. She begins to look for him, reaching the building where he had borrowed the apartment of a Mr and Mrs Royster for the last month. Finding the Roysters, who have just returned, she asks about James. Mrs Royster’s reaction is not reassuring: “’O Lord . . . What’d he do?’” (L 18). At least this appears to confirm Harris’ existence, however tenuously. But the Roysters do not really know him—he was a friend of a friend. Margaret begins to ask the neighbourhood shopowners whether they have seen a man answering Harris’ description. No one has. Finally she so pesters a news-agent that he confesses to have seen him: “Now I don’t know for sure, mind you, but there might have been someone like your gentleman friend coming by this morning.” “About ten?” “About ten,” the newsdealer agreed. “Tall fellow, blue suit. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.” “Which way did he go?” she said eagerly. “Uptown?” “Uptown,” the newsdealer said, nodding. “He went uptown. That’s just exactly it. What can I do for you, sir?” (L 21)

This is the critical point of the story: is the man admitting to having seen Harris only to get rid of the pestiferous Margaret? Why does he agree with such alacrity to having seen him at the time and place she insists he must have seen him? From this point the story devolves into either a paranoid fantasy or an evil conspiracy, or perhaps both: the florist admits that Harris bought flowers (wouldn’t a man going to his wedding buy flowers for his bride?); the shoe shine man admits he shined Harris’ shoes (a natural thing for a bridegroom to do), and he directs Margaret to a street (not hers) where he says he saw Harris go; a boy at the corner says he saw Harris go in a building

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across the street. Margaret goes in and hears voices behind a door. The tale ends inconclusively (as it must) and agonisingly: She knew there was someone inside the other apartment, because she was sure she could hear low voices and sometimes laughter. She came back many times, every day for the first week. She came on her way to work, in the mornings; in the evenings, on her way to dinner alone, but no matter how often or how firmly she knocked, no one ever came to the door. (L 26)

Have all these people lied to her? If so, why? Do they all hate her and wish to torture her emotionally? Or are they simply cheerful sadists? This is the most frightening prospect of the story, more frightening than the prospect that Margaret has imagined much of her relationship with Harris: how can people be so irresponsibly evil? “The Daemon Lover” has an atmosphere of wistful pathos that somehow works in tandem with the conte cruel horror of the tale; another story, “The Renegade” (1948; L), is pure conte cruel. A family from the city, the Walpoles, have moved to a placid-seeming country town and seem to be settling in nicely. Then Mrs Walpole receives a call from a neighbour: the Walpoles’ dog has been killing this person’s chickens; something must be done. Mrs Walpole cannot believe it of her gentle pet. Soon the story is all over the town (the phone is on a party line), and everyone has remedies for stopping a dog from killing chickens. These remedies become more and more hideous: you can chain the dog; you can tie a dead chicken around its neck until it rots, so that the dog hates chicken; you can place it in a pen with some chicks and a mother hen who is sure to scratch the dog’s eyes out; or you could put around the dog’s neck a collar that has spikes on the inside, and when the dog approaches a chicken you pull on a rope attached to the collar, and (as Mrs Walpole’s own son notes with glee), “The spikes cut her head off” (L 65). Which one is it to be? In this tale it is a little clearer that the townspeople have conspired to tease Mrs Walpole mercilessly, although other questions remain unclear: did the dog actually kill chickens (it is true that the dog comes into the house with blood on its legs—but what does this mean? was the dog somehow framed?), and why have the townspeople ganged up on Mrs Walpole like this? As to the latter, Mrs Walpole “wondered briefly if Mr. White had maliciously blamed Lady because they were city folk, and then thought, No, no man

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The odd story “The Intoxicated” (1949; L) might perhaps be studied in this context. Here a man who finds himself bored at a party wanders into the kitchen, meeting the hostess’ daughter Eileen, a girl of seventeen. She is writing a paper about the future of the world; but she doesn’t think the world has much of a future. Rather harrowingly, she chronicles the destruction of civilisation—or, at least, this phase of it: “Somehow I think of the churches as going first, before even the Empire State building. And then all the big apartment houses by the river, slipping down slowly into the water with the people inside. And the schools, in the middle of Latin class maybe, while we’re reading Caesar.” She brought her eyes to his face, looking at him in numb excitement. “Each time we begin a chapter in Caesar, I wonder if this won’t be the one we never finish. Maybe we in our Latin class will be the last people who ever read Caesar.” (L 11)

The worst thing about it is that she seems so certain of it; and this raises the query: What if she is right? This story somehow reminds me of Margaret St Clair’s famous tale, “The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes”, although in that tale the boy is undoubtedly clairvoyant and knows that the world will end, whereas in “The Intoxicated” we are left only with the unnerving thought that the girl is either right (in which case the world will end) or that she is wrong (in which case she is insane) or that she is having a little fun (in which case she is a sadist). None of these is very reassuring. Here again Jackson is simply trying to jolt us out of our conventional ways of thinking— and a tiresome party is the perfect backdrop for such an enterprise. I might as well study Jackson’s one genuine science fiction (or at least futuristic) story, “Bulletin” (1954), here, for it not only follows up on the theme of “The Intoxicated” (the future of civilisation) but indirectly exemplifies the same issues of language, truth, and horror as the other

stories I have been discussing. This very brief tale is surprisingly difficult to interpret. Let us bypass the very crude mechanics of the story: a clumsy editor’s note informing us that certain documents have come back in a time machine that was sent into the early twenty-second century, although the scientist who went in the machine did not return. The first document we find is a fragment of a newspaper dating from May 8, 2123; this indicates little save that the people of that time were given to pompous and empty circumlocution (hardly a unique trait!). A letter from a boy to his parents has the spellings “haveing”, “cokies” (for cookies), “loveing”, and the like, implying either that the boy was illiterate (and perhaps, by extension, the rest of the society?) or that these spellings had by then become standard. The most interesting and problematical document is a highschool or college history exam. Here we find that the twenty-second century has fallen into irremediable confusion about the past, citing such figures as “George Washingham”, “Sinclair (Joe) Lewis”, and “Sergeant Cuff” (as if he were a real individual). Then there are a series of statements that one is to mark either true or false, and this is where things get complicated. Take this statement: “The aboriginal Americans lived above-ground and drank water.” This is obviously true, but carries the suggestion that the people of the twentysecond century do not live above-ground or drink water: in a single sentence an entire mode of future existence is potently suggested. But consider this statement: “The hero Jackie Robinson is chiefly known for his voyage to obtain the golden fleece.” The point is not whether this is true or false; the point is: What if the people of the future think it to be true? Given their other errors, this is entirely conceivable. Even if the future society knows this to be false, the very manner in which the statement is framed suggests that Jackie Robinson is now regarded as some sort of hero, perhaps in some religious fashion. Other statements carry similarly disturbing implications. But the clincher is at the end. The final document is a card giving someone’s weight (presumably the scientist’s) and a meaningless machine-generated fortune. But the editor of these documents professes to find this silly thing “of great significance”. And it suddenly becomes clear that the time machine was not sent forward from our time into the future but backward from an infinitely farther future, in which people’s grasp of the events of our time and before must be even poorer than the

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around here would bear false witness against a dog” (L 61). What Jackson has done in this story, and in others of this type, is to make us doubt every single utterance made by every character in the tale; at the same time, we are inexorably made to think the worst of all the characters. In this instance, the townspeople are either liars of sadists or both; and the worst part of it is, of course, that her own children are infected with this blood-lust against a dog and happily imagine the many tortures one could inflict upon it to cure it of this reprehensible habit.

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twenty-second century’s if they cannot correctly identify an insignificant weight and fortune card.

Loneliness Shirley Jackson once wrote that she took to writing out of loneliness: when i first used to write stories and hide them away in my desk i used to think that no one had ever been so lonely as i was and i used to write about people all alone. once i started a novel . . . but i never finished because i found out about insanity about then and i used to write about lunatics after that. i thought i was insane and i would write about how the only sane people are the ones who are condemned as mad and how the whole world is cruel and foolish and afraid of people who are different. (O 40)

It is conceivable that this single utterance encompasses nearly the whole of her fiction, and loneliness may be the single most dominant theme in her work. But note again what a contrast the domestic fiction presents: in that body of work she herself is not lonely because she has her lively and energetic children (I have already noted how infrequently her husband appears in these works); and although she and her family may be isolated from the rest of the community (as in reality they were because of their intellectualism and, it must be admitted, Jackson’s snobbishness [O 183-84]), they still participate with gusto in such social rituals as shopping, moving, celebrating Christmas, and participating in sports. If the domestic fiction therefore benignly papers over the true loneliness of Jackson and her family, her other fiction scathingly lays it bare with such force that the tales become genuinely horrific. Loneliness appears to be manifested in these stories in two parallel ways, as in the domestic fiction: 1) the loneliness of an individual within a wider group (whether that be a family, a community, or the world); and 2) the loneliness of a family within a wider group. In both categories we find some of Jackson’s most memorable and terrifying work. We have already noted individual loneliness in a number of tales—the partygoer in “The Intoxicated”, Margaret in “The Daemon Lover”, the niece in “The Little House”. The opening paragraph of “The Intoxicated” encapsulates the idea perfectly: He was just tight enough and just familiar enough with the house to be able to go out into the kitchen alone, apparently to get ice, but actually to sober up a little; he was not quite enough of a friend of the family to pass out on the living-room

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couch. He left the party behind without reluctance, the group by the piano singing “Stardust,” his hostess talking earnestly to a young man with thin clean glasses and a sullen mouth; he walked guardedly through the dining-room, where a little group of four or five people sat on the stiff chairs reasoning something out carefully among themselves . . . (L 9)

By implication, the man’s loneliness is a product both of his own volition (he does not want to join the singers) and of rebuffs by others (the hostess clearly does not wish to be interrupted in her tête-à-tête with the young man; the people in the dining room are discussing something “among themselves”, leaving no room for anyone else), and we will find this sort of dichotomy frequently in Jackson. A surprising number of individuals or families will withdraw themselves from society, washing their hands of it entirely; this tendency reaches its apex in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). But can we truly be certain that this self-imposed hermitry is solely a result of misanthropy? Might it perhaps not conceal a longing for acceptance that has finally turned to what Lovecraft called the “bitterness of alienage”? I am not at all certain that “The Lottery” (1948; L) ought to be considered in this precise context, but I may as well do so here as anywhere. Whereas this tale seems generally to convey the notion of a community that wilfully isolates an individual within it, Jackson herself appears to have had different ideas. Judy Oppenheimer writes: “She always refused to answer the question put to her by thousands of readers, ‘What is “The Lottery” really about?’—but to a good friend she confided very matter-of-factly that it had, of course, been about the Jews” (O 72). Respectful as I generally am to authors’ statements about their own work, in this case I must frankly declare Jackson to be mistaken. “The Lottery” cannot be about anti-Semitism because of the fundamental randomness of the procedure by which an individual from the community is selected to die. In any case, the community depicted in the story appears racially and culturally homogeneous, and the individual chosen for death—Mrs Hutchinson—differs in no appreciable way from the other citizens. Indeed, it is exactly this randomness that is the source of horror in the story. Another comment by Jackson seems a little more on target: “I suppose I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity of their

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For ritual is at the heart of the story—a meaningless, stupid ritual whose original rationale, whatever it may have been, has now been entirely forgotten. This is made clear by an elderly person’s statement that the neighbouring town wants to give up the lottery (the implication, obviously, is that the lottery is a widespread if not universal phenomenon): Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly. (L 215)

The lottery has become so inveterate that it has given rise to an axiom. This axiom, “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon”, suggests that the original purpose of the lottery was as a fertility rite, something akin to what Thomas Tryon described at the conclusion of Harvest Home (1973); but the need for bountiful crops must have long passed, and yet the lottery continues, much as we might say “Bless you” when someone sneezes, even though we have entirely forgotten and perhaps would no longer even believe in what the expression really means (one must be blessed lest one expel one’s soul while sneezing). It is “ritual gone to seed”. And it is the young people of the neighbouring town who wish to give up the lottery: they are less under the sway of mindless convention than the old people. Indeed, when Old Man Warner remarks at the end, “It’s not the way it used to be . . . People ain’t the way they used to be” (L 218), he means that now some people are actually taking pity on the victim or, at least, are not taking pride in having the victim chosen from one’s own family (the remark previous to his is: “A girl whispered, ‘I hope it’s not Nancy’” [L 218]). The artistry of “The Lottery” is indeed remarkable, although there is some justice to some readers’ complaints of authorial deceit. One reader wrote to The New Yorker, “I resent being tricked into reading perverted stories like ‘The Lottery’” (C 231); however naive and conventional this response may be, it underscores the fact that Jackson goes out of her way to conceal the climax

by a narrative tone that at the outset is placid, benign, and innocuous almost to excess. Subtle little points throughout the narrative cause unease, however, in particular the matter of why the family that has apparently won the first part of the lottery (the family from whom the person is to be killed is chosen first, then the individual from that family) seems unhappy about being chosen. If they have won a lottery, shouldn’t they be pleased? And it is only one more of Jackson’s perversions of domestic bliss that the children of the town take the greatest glee in stoning the victim to death. I have stated that “The Lottery” is nonsupernatural, and of course the actual events are indeed so; but in a strange way this tale may be weird without being supernatural, by merely postulating the existence of the lottery in this town and in at least several others. There are, of course, no lotteries of this sort and never have been. In this sense the story embodies in the most literal way a trait I have described in the weird tale: the refashioning of reality. “The Lottery” is clearly set in the present day and in a world we are all seemingly familiar with; but the mere existence of the lottery, and the clear implication that it has been in practice for decades or centuries, depict Lovecraft’s “violation of natural law” in the simple sense of portraying the real world as other than we know it in this one regard. I think that the central theme of The Haunting of Hill House is also individual loneliness, although it could be studied from a number of other perspectives. The focus of this rich, complex, poignant, and atmospheric work—at once the greatest of Jackson’s novels and her greatest contribution to weird fiction—is Eleanor Vance, perhaps Jackson’s most delicately etched portrait of the weak-willed, love-starved woman. Eleanor has been chosen—along with Luke Sanderson and Theodora (she claims to have no last name)—by Dr John Montague, an avowed investigator of “supernatural phenomena” (HH 5), to explore Hill House because of her apparent sensitivity to the weird or occult: when younger she had evidently experienced some poltergeist phenomena. Her previous life (she is thirty-two) has been wretched: up to a few months before coming to Hill House she had to take care of her sick mother, and she now suffers guilt because she thinks she may have contributed to her death by being negligent; she does not get along with her married sister (indeed, it is stated at the outset that she “hated” [HH 7] her) and is forced covertly to take the car they

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own lives” (O 131). Even this I am not inclined to accept wholly, and in fact Jackson’s best commentary on her story may be a stray remark in Hangsaman: “Another instance . . . of ritual gone to seed” (H 62).

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Suddenly, without reason, laughter trembled inside Eleanor; she wanted to run to the head of the table and hug the doctor, she wanted to reel, chanting, across the stretches of the lawn, she wanted to sing and to shout and to fling her arms and move in great, emphatic, possessing circles around the rooms of Hill House; I am here, I am here, she thought. She shut her eyes quickly in delight and then said demurely to the doctor, “And what do we do today?” (HH 100-101)

What this passage also suggests is her growing identification with Hill House—she is possessing it or it is possessing her. Early on the doctor says: “‘Hill House has a reputation for insistent hospitality; it seemingly dislikes letting its guests get away’” (HH 48-49). Eleanor ominously echoes this idea when she says, “‘I don’t think we could leave now if we wanted to’” (HH 54).

Friedrich von Schiller, 1759-1805.

jointly own when the sister refuses to allow her to use it to drive to Hill House. I am at the moment not interested in many of the supernatural phenomena recounted in the novel; I here wish to clarify not merely Eleanor’s loneliness (she admits this herself: “‘I am always afraid of being alone’” [HH 113]) but her low estimation of herself: Eleanor found herself unexpectedly admiring her own feet. Theodora dreamed over the fire just beyond the tips of her toes, and Eleanor thought with deep satisfaction that her feet were handsome in their red sandals; what a complete and separate thing I am, she thought, going from my red toes to the top of my head, individually an I, possessed of attributes belonging only to me. I have red shoes, she thought—that goes with being Eleanor; I dislike lobster and sleep on my left side and crack my knuckles when I am nervous and save buttons. I am holding a brandy glass which is mine because I am here and I am using it and I will have a place in this room. I have red shoes and tomorrow I will wake up and I will still be here. (HH 59)

This is all a little harried: she is seizing upon anything she can find to validate her existence. Has Eleanor only really begun to live—to lead a full, emotionally satisfying life—since coming to Hill House? Such is surely the implication of the following:

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The Shakespearean tag “Journeys end in lovers meeting” glides through this novel like an elusive ritornello, but what is its true implication? If it is Eleanor’s journey that is at an end here (and this is clearly the case, as at the beginning we experience the long trip to Hill House through her eyes), who is her lover? Is it Theodora, with whom she becomes very close—to the point that Theodora must wear Eleanor’s clothes when her own are found covered with red paint like blood? Is it Luke, who seems to be dallying with both women? Or is it the house itself? Perhaps it is all three. Toward the end it becomes clear that Luke, finding Eleanor’s behaviour increasingly odd, prefers the company of Theodora. Is Eleanor jealous of Theodora? Why else is she suddenly filled with an “uncontrollable loathing” (HH 112) of her? It is here that some of the supernatural manifestations gain their importance. At one point the guests find some crude writing on the wall: “HELP ELEANOR COME HOME” (HH 103). The wording is significant: it is not “Help Eleanor go home” or “get home”; the implication is that Eleanor is already home or on the way home (at Hill House), and that some sort of spiritual transition must take place so that she feels at home here. Other weird events also seem to single out Eleanor, until finally she appears to begin cracking under the strain. One night she leaves her bedroom to meander through the house; her absence is noted by the others and they look for her, but she refuses to reveal her whereabouts: “Eleanor clung to the door and laughed until tears came into her eyes; what fools they are, she thought; we trick them so easily” (HH 163). Who is the “we” but she and Hill House? Journeys end in lovers meeting. When

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At this point it is worth studying the general supernaturalism of the novel. In a lecture written a year prior to the publication of the novel, “Experience and Fiction” (C), Jackson discusses the research and composition of the novel at length. I am not sure that this essay is of any genuine help in elucidating the work, although it contains some wry features, as when Jackson comes down to her study one morning and finds the words “DEAD DEAD” in her own handwriting (C 213), which she takes as a sign that she was destined to write a ghost story. In any case, we learn both from this essay and from the facts of her biography that Jackson had always had an interest in the supernatural, and indeed both she herself and her children made no secret of the fact that she actually believed in the supernatural (O 37, 125). She had an extensive collection of books on witchcraft, and in preparation for her novel she read much about hauntings, including papers by the Society for Psychic Research. And yet, I am forced to admit that the supernatural manifestations in The Haunting of Hill House in many cases seem random, unmotivated, and unexplained. What is the significance of the cold spot in the hallway? of the knocking heard intermittently at night on people’s doors? of “some animal like a dog” (HH 95) seen by Dr Montague? It is all very well for the doctor to say that “‘psychic phenomena are subject to laws of a very particular sort’” (HH 48), but those laws are never specified nor are the psychic events actually experienced at Hill House ever plausibly accounted for or harmonised within the overall scheme of the novel. It appears that they are meant merely to enhance the atmosphere of weirdness as a backdrop to the story of Eleanor Vance. I also think it was a mistake for Jackson to introduce Montague’s obnoxious and overbearing wife and her pompous and bumbling assistant toward the end; considerable cheap satire is had at their expense, but the atmosphere of the novel is close to being shattered by their obtrusive presence. Nevertheless, The Haunting of Hill House remains a masterwork in the field, if only for exhibiting some of the most meticulous character

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER (1759-1805)

One of the preeminent German authors of the nineteenth century, Schiller is esteemed as an adept lyricist and theoretician whose works are informed by his conviction that the writer should strive not only to entertain, but also to instruct and improve his audience. He was an immensely popular poet during his life, but is best remembered for his dramas. Of these, his early plays reflect his affinity with the Sturm und Drang movement, which championed the passionate expression of emotional and spiritual struggle, and emphasize both his idealism and his concern for human freedom; his later plays are characterized by more realistic, moral, and Classical subjects and forms. Schiller’s impact upon the Gothic and Romantic traditions was the immense popularity and influence of his drama Die Räuber (1781; The Robbers) and his novel fragment Der Geisterseher (1789; The Ghost-Seer; or, The Apparitionist) upon such writers as Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. Schiller completed The Robbers in 1781. The play is an imaginative and often violent glorification of a rebel who, along with a band of thieves, attempts to overthrow a corrupt political order. Unable to find a publisher, Schiller printed the play anonymously at his own expense, and it soon attracted the attention of Wolfgang von Dalberg, director of the Mannheim National Theater, who staged it that same year. The Robbers was both popular and controversial. Reviewers debated the morality of its characters, and Schiller, jailed for two weeks, was forbidden to publish further due to the revolutionary fervor the play allegedly inspired.

portrayal in weird fiction and for its overwhelming sense of inevitable doom. A final contribution to the individual loneliness theme is Jackson’s last published story, “The Possibility of Evil” (1965). This story of an aristo-

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the others persuade her to leave, she cries defiantly, “Hill House belongs to me” (HH 173), and as she leaves the driveway she turns abruptly and smashes her car into a tree, echoing the fate of the last occupant of Hill House eighteen years before, whose “horse bolted and crushed him against the big tree” (HH 49). What life would Eleanor have had if she had left? “‘It’s the only time anything’s ever happened to me’” (HH 171).

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cratic old woman who writes anonymous poison pen letters to other citizens so as to keep her town “clean and sweet” is a trifle obvious, but is redeemed by its unrelenting viciousness. In the end she is detected and someone repays her in kind by destroying her cherished rose garden and writing an anonymous note: “LOOK OUT AT WHAT USED TO BE YOUR ROSES.” Jackson’s biographer Judy Oppenheimer believes, incredibly, that Jackson identified with the old woman: “Shirley wanted to see herself . . . as a proper lady, sure of her place, who sent forth her terrible messages to the world yet remained anonymously secure” (O 272). But surely we are meant to loathe the old woman for her spitefulness and her injustice: “Miss Strangeworth never concerned herself with facts; her letters all dealt with the more negotiable stuff of suspicion.” And the irony is a little heavyhanded: She had been writing her letters . . . for the past year. She never got any answers, of course, because she never signed her name. If she had been asked, she would have said that her name, Adela Strangeworth, a name honored in the town for so many years, did not belong on such trash. The town where she lived had to be kept clean and sweet, but people everywhere were lustful and evil and degraded, and needed to be watched; the world was so large, and there was only one Miss Strangeworth left in it.

Jackson’s incomplete novel, Come Along with Me (1965; C), is the most forthright example of a character leaving the past behind. A middle-aged woman whose husband has died decides to unburden herself of all the impedimenta of her prior existence and start afresh:

The Bird’s Nest might be studied here, even though I fear it is the least successful of Jackson’s novels. This work might have been a powerful vehicle for the study of loneliness and the concomitant desire to refashion oneself—for who can be lonelier than a person with multiple personalities?—but the execution is severely flawed. This story of Elizabeth Richmond, who is diagnosed as having four separate personalities—Elizabeth (timid and colourless), Beth (sweet but fragile), Betsy (childishly petulant and potentially violent), and Bess (the most evil of all, a frightening megalomaniac)—is marred by structural clumsiness, poor writing, and a feeble conclusion. Jackson makes several mistakes of judgment. Each of the five long chapters is narrated from a different point of view: the first chapter is omniscient, the second and fourth from the perspective of the psychiatrist brought in to treat Elizabeth, the third (most interestingly) through Betsy’s eyes, and the fifth from the point of view of Elizabeth’s Aunt Morgen. The psychiatrist’s narrative tone—flippant, pretentious, cheaply ironic—seriously impedes the progress of the novel, which in any case (as with all Jackson’s novels save the last two) tends to meander and digress. In chapter 2 the

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reproduction of the psychiatrist’s transcript of a discussion with Elizabeth and her various personalities sounds excessively clinical, robbing the scene of the emotive power it might have had if it had been presented more novelistically. And the lame conclusion, in which Elizabeth is magically cured and her personalities integrated, is a woeful anticlimax. Indeed, toward the end the atmosphere changes almost in spite of Jackson’s wishes from grim intensity to farce as we watch Elizabeth’s four personalities successively assert themselves and take four baths consecutively (B 33537). Eventually we are led to understand the origin of the entire personality split: Elizabeth, jealous of her mother’s lover (who hates her [B 236]), has caused her mother’s death in an altercation and is now suppressing the memory. Jackson may have erred here also on the side of vagueness, as the background is sketched hazily and fragmentarily, so that the connexion between Elizabeth’s relationship with her mother and her split personality is never adequately clarified.

So that was how I started out. I’d thought about it for a long time of course—not that I positively expected I was going to have to bury Hughie, but he had a good life—and everything went the way I used to figure it would. I sold the house, I auctioned off the furniture, I put all the paintings and boxes in the barn, I erased my old name and took my initials off everything, and I got on the train and left. (C 12)

She takes up a new name, Angela Motorman, almost at random, and, in response to her landlady’s query as to her occupation, she remarks: “‘I dabble in the supernatural’” (C 18). What this means, apparently, is that from the age of twelve she has heard voices from the dead (C 24-26). The fragment ends after Angela gives a rather inconclusive and unsatisfying séance. I have no idea where this novel was going to go—even what we have seems a little disjointed and unfocused—or whether the supernatural would actually have come into play; but this novel might for once have portrayed a strong, self-controlled figure rather than the birdlike victims so characteristic of Jackson’s other work. The tales that focus on the loneliness or isolation of a family within a community do not differ appreciably in tone from those involving indi-

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Consider “The Renegade”. The horror of this story lies not merely in the implication that an entire community has, with gleeful vindictiveness, turned against a household because of its supposed chicken-killing dog, but that the family is now being destroyed from within as the children embrace the prospect of killing the dog: Mrs. Walpole looked at them, at her two children with their hard hands and their sunburned faces laughing together, their dog with blood still on her legs laughing with them. She went to the kitchen doorway to look outside at the cool green hills, the motion of the apple tree in the soft afternoon breeze. “Cut your head right off,” Jack was saying. (L 65)

“Strangers in Town” (1959) is Jackson’s vendetta against the townsfolk who ostracised her when she accused a favourite grade-school teacher of beating her children (see O 213-15). This crude and obvious story is fueled by nothing but hatred, to the point that Jackson’s artistry completely forsakes her. Told from the point of view of smallminded neighbours who cannot tolerate a strange family’s unconventional ways (they don’t seem to do any cooking; they dance the night away), this story is simply void of subtlety: “Foreign ways!” I said. “You’re heathen, wicked people, with your dancing and your maid, and the sooner you leave this town, the better it’s going to be for you. Because I might as well tell you”—and I shook my finger right at her—“that certain people in this town aren’t going to put up with your fancy ways much longer, and you would be well advised—very well advised, I say—to pack up your furniture and your curtains and your maid and cat and get out of our town before we put you out.”

“‘All She Said Was “Yes”’” (1962) is much superior, speaking poignantly of a curious young

girl whose parents have been killed in an auto accident. It bears relationships to “The Intoxicated” in that it suggests that the girl is clairvoyant; and like that story, it is told from the point of view of an individual who fails to perceive the girl’s powers. This tale is also a little obvious (there is no ambiguity, as in “The Intoxicated”, whether the girl really can see into the future or not), and a predictable ending does not help matters: the girl tells her neighbour repeatedly not to go on a boat, but the neighbour pays no attention and the story concludes: “we’re all going to go on a cruise.” But the delicate portrayal of the central figure—an unattractive, tight-lipped, morose girl who knew that her parents would die and is accordingly not shocked but merely saddened and stupefied, and now totally alone in the world—makes this one of Jackson’s later triumphs. The Sundial may be mentioned here, although I wish to study it more extensively elsewhere. This mad and disturbing tale of a large and wealthy family convinced that the external world will shortly come to an end, with only its house preserved, displays at once the Halloran family’s isolation from the world and the internal dissensions that cause it to be a microcosm of the unruly outside world they are purportedly leaving behind. The Hallorans’ withdrawal from the world, even before they take up their insane view of the world’s imminent destruction, is entirely selfgenerated: The character of the house is perhaps of interest. It stood upon a small rise in ground, and all the land it surveyed belonged to the Halloran family. The Halloran land was distinguished from the rest of the world by a stone wall, which went completely around the estate, so that all inside the wall was Halloran, all outside was not. The first Mr. Halloran . . . was a man who, in the astonishment of finding himself suddenly extremely wealthy, could think of nothing better to do with his money than set up his own world. His belief about the house . . . was that it should contain everything. The other world, the one the Hallorans were leaving behind, was to be plundered ruthlessly for objects of beauty to go in and around Mr. Halloran’s house; infinite were the delights to be prepared for its inhabitants. (S 11)

But this isolation fails to weed out the disharmonies of the world, as we shall see elsewhere. Much of the effectiveness of this book lies in how Jackson totally ignores the outside world, as if it has already ceased to exist. Everything is focused on the house and its occupants; even when some of those occupants have come from that outside world, it is completely forgotten once they enter

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vidual loneliness. It might be thought that these tales would be tempered somewhat with hope, in the sense that the family members at least have themselves even if the rest of the world rejects them, whereas the lonely individuals have no one to turn to in their isolation; but in fact these tales can be even grimmer than the others, and several of them represent Jackson’s most pungent excursions into satire and misanthropy. This is either because the family unit cannot provide any significant comfort to its members in the face of the overwhelming hostility of the outside world, or because the family itself is torn by tragedy and in-fighting, so that individuals may feel an added layer of loneliness—both within the family and without.

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the house. Background information on the characters is deliberately lacking, as if they had no prior existence before coming to the house. And in the one instance where a character—Maryjane, the daughter-in-law of the domineering Mrs Halloran—attempts to escape the house, the scene is depicted in so bizarre a manner that we are uncertain of its reality—and Maryjane, bootlessly trying to flee to the nearby town on foot, finds that she has unwittingly returned to the very house she sought to leave. It is needless to remark that Jackson wisely ends the novel without resolving the issue of whether the world will in fact end. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is, of course, Jackson’s grimmest and nastiest portrayal of family isolation. The Blackwood family has been shattered by tragedy: all but three members of the household died by poisoning six years prior to the novel’s opening, and one of the survivors, Constance Blackwood, is blamed by the townspeople for the murders even though she was tried and found innocent. She now lives in her spectral house with her younger cousin Mary Katherine (called Merricat) and her uncle Julian, himself crippled from the effects of the poison. Next to the Hallorans in The Sundial, this is Jackson’s weirdest family. Merricat is the focus of the tale: she alone ventures to the town for groceries and other household needs, enduring the taunts of the townsfolk but in turn hating and despising them. It is clear that we are meant to sympathise wholeheartedly with the Blackwoods and to hate the townspeople as they hate them, and as they are hated in turn by them. But what are we to make of the family’s snobbishness? Anyone who came to see us, properly invited, came up the main drive which led straight from the gateposts on the highway up to our front door. When I was small I used to lie in my bedroom at the back of the house and imagine the driveway and the path as a crossroad meeting before our front door, and up and down the driveway went the good people, the clean and rich ones dressed in satin and lace, who came rightfully to visit, and back and forth along the path, sneaking and weaving and sidestepping servilely, went the people from the village. (W 27-28)

The novel does not end here, however. In what is both a horrific and a heart-rending twist of Jackson’s domestic fiction, the two cousins (Julian has now died) continue in their quiet defiance of the townsfolk by trying to resume their lives even when most of their property—furniture, clothes, utensils, food, even much of the house itself—is devastated. When Constance, successfully locating two teacups with their handles intact, remarks, “We will take our meals like ladies . . . using cups with handles” (W 144), we are evidently to regard this as a reaffirmation of the “good breeding” the women have received, a wholly admirable attempt to preserve one’s dignity in the face of disaster. There is, of course, nothing supernatural about We Have Always Lived in the Castle; if anything, it is a mystery story, although the mystery is not very cleverly executed and is by no means the focus of the novel. By any normal criteria it cannot be considered a weird tale, even though it manipulates after a fashion the topos of the haunted house, doing so from the unique perspective of the inhabitants of the house rather than of outsiders seeking to penetrate its mysteries. There is, however, a rather odd way in which perhaps the weird does enter into this novel, and it is this which I now wish to consider.

Misanthropy

One might be inclined to say that Jackson is introducing a significant ambiguity to suggest that the Blackwoods and the townspeople are both blameworthy for the ostracism they inflict upon each other; but I do not believe this to be the case. We have already seen that Jackson herself looked down upon the townsfolk of Bennington, and her views are identical to Merricat’s; she is clearly portraying the attitude here as entirely admirable

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(it in fact connects with what happens later in the novel), and it is simply unfortunate that Jackson could not predict the disapproval that later generations would have of this sort of snobbishness. In any case, the rest of the novel compels us to find the townspeople wholly responsible for the events that follow, in particular when the townspeople, in a fit of irrational anger, destroy much of the house while putting out a fire that has started inside it. It is at this point that we learn a truth that scarcely any reader could have failed to guess, although Jackson evidently intends it as a stunning surprise: Merricat was the poisoner of her family.

“Nothing has the power to hurt which doesn’t have the power to frighten” (O 42): this single utterance by Shirley Jackson may be all the justification we need to consider some of her darkest and most vicious work, otherwise wholly nonsupernatural, as anomalous contributions to the weird tale. Maurice Lévy remarked of Ambrose Bierce that “One is almost tempted to believe that one day he decided to instill fear into his contemporaries by hatred, to gain revenge on them”,5 and Jackson seems very frequently inspired by the

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It is interesting that The Sundial seems to have been singled out by reviewers for its misanthropy. Harvey Swados snorted: “While Miss Jackson is an intelligent and clever writer, there rises from her pages the cold fishy gleam of a calculated and carefully expressed contempt for the human race” (O 218). There are two problems with this utterance: one, the whole of Jackson’s work is refreshingly misanthropic; two, the assumption here (as I have noted in connexion with Bierce) is that there is something necessarily wrong with misanthropy. I do not know that Jackson anywhere offers an explicit philosophical defence of misanthropy, but perhaps she need not have done so: her work makes it obvious that she had little patience for the stupid, the arrogant, the pompous, the complacently bourgeois, the narrowminded, and the spiteful—in other words, she hates all those people whom there is every good reason to hate. Since, therefore, I do not acknowledge any prejudice against misanthropy, I can only relish the exquisite nastiness with which Jackson ordinarily displays it. Such a tale as “Strangers in Town” is to be criticised not because it is misanthropic but because in this instance Jackson’s blind hatred has resulted in a failure of that artistry and subtlety uniformly evident in the rest of her work. The celebrated (but uncollected) “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts” is worth discussing in this context. This spectacularly nasty story has, in its quiet way, some stupendous implications. A man leaves home in the morning and seems intent on accomplishing nothing but good: he keeps an eye on a boy while his mother runs an errand; he advises a man looking for an apartment as to the availability of one he has just seen; he actually gives a cab driver money and advice for betting on horses. Most remarkably of all, he intentionally stops a young man and a young woman on the street, introduces them to each other, and gives them money to take the day off and have a good time. He is benevolence itself. He comes home, meets his wife, and tells her how his day went. She tells him about hers:

“I had a little nap this afternoon, took it easy most of the day. Went into a department store this morning and accused the woman next to me of shoplifting, and had the store detective pick her up. Sent three dogs to the pound—you know, the usual thing.”

They plan the next day: “Fine,” said Mr. Johnson. “But you do look tired. Want to change over tomorrow?” “I would like to,” she said. “I could do with a change.” “Right,” said Mr. Johnson.

With such ease can people be sadistically mean and superhumanly philanthropic in turn! The one seems as good a way of passing the time as the other. But the true message of the story, beyond the implication that misanthropy and benevolence can be sloughed off and put on like a cloak, is the idea of manipulation: both misanthropy and benevolence involve a fascistic manipulation of human beings as if they were puppets; and perhaps Jackson’s real misanthropy is directed here not at the couple but at the spineless and stupid people who allow the couple to do their dirty or good work with such insouciance. Manipulation of this sort is what Mrs Orianna Halloran attempts in The Sundial. There may perhaps be some justification in singling out this novel for its misanthropy, since here there are no admirable or likeable characters at all, and each of them is portrayed in the most vitriolic manner: Mrs Halloran, domineering, arrogant, and possibly the murderer of her own son so that no one can stand in the way of her control of the household; Mr Halloran, her husband, broken, feebleminded, lost in dreams of the past; Aunt Fanny, flighty and confused but startlingly bucking Orianna’s authority at unexpected moments; Maryjane, an airhead who only wants control of the house and property for herself; Miss Ogilvie, an utterly ineffectual longtime family retainer; Essex, a sycophant who seeks only to forward his own cause; Augusta Willow, a blowsy matron who wants nothing more than to marry off her two sullen daughters, Julia and Arabella; Gloria, a possibly disturbed young woman with apparently precognitive powers; even little Fancy, Maryjane’s young daughter, whose sweet exterior hides a lust for power and control scarcely less intense than that of Mrs Halloran. This is the eccentric crowd Jackson gathers for her pseudo-apocalyptic tale; and it can scarcely be doubted that, if nothing else, it represents the most extreme contrast possible with the love,

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same motivation. Indeed, from this perspective it is possible to consider a very wide array of works— from Juvenal (notably the fifteenth satire, on cannibalism in Egypt) to Swift6 to Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934)7 —as quasi-weird, because they are all driven by such daemonic misanthropy that they not only hurt but frighten. Perhaps it is this feature that will allow us to sneak in We Have Always Lived in the Castle through the back door of the weird.

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warmth, and unity of Jackson’s own family as recorded (with perhaps no little exaggeration) in her domestic fiction. The ease with which everyone is convinced—or claims to be convinced—of Aunt Fanny’s notion that the world will end (she claims to have heard it from the spirit of her dead father) is certainly meant is a testament to human stupidity. It is conceivable, however, that Mrs Halloran only goes along with the idea as a means of maintaining control of the household, since she immediately begins laying down orders on preparing for the disaster and makes it abundantly clear that she will be the queen of the new civilisation that the family will have to found once all the other people in the world are eliminated. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Jackson’s most unrestrainedly misanthropic work. Here hatred is everywhere: “The people of the village have always hated us” (W 11); “I wished they were dead” (W 15); “our father said they [the villagers] were trash” (W 17). Let us hear what Merricat feels for the townsfolk: I wish you were all dead, I thought, and longed to say it out loud. Constance said, “Never let them see that you care,” and “If you pay any attention they’ll only get worse,” and probably it was true, but I wished they were dead. I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true. “It’s wrong to hate them,” Constance said, “it only weakens you,” but I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place. (W 15-16)

That last sentence rather reminds me of Lucretius’ celebrated utterance against the argument from design: Quidve mali fuerat nobis non esse creatis? (“What harm would it have been had we never been created?”) (De Rerum Natura 5.174). In any case, I actually believe we are meant to agree with Merricat’s sentiments here, outrageous as they seem: note that when Constance chides her for hating the townsfolk, it is not because such a hatred is abstractly immoral but that “it only weakens you”. Constance is recommending a sort of bland indifference as an even purer form of misanthropy than active hatred. The whole novel, in any event, asks us to sympathise with the Blackwoods and not the townsfolk.

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Houses Anyone who has written works with such titles as “The Lovely House”, “The House”, “Louisa, Please Come Home”, “The Little House”, “Home”, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle must find great inspiration from dwellings. These tales by no means exhaust the catalogue of “house” stories in Jackson’s work, and we must add at least The Sundial and, indeed, both volumes of domestic fiction to the list. Those domestic volumes are again the logical starting-point for the analysis of the house theme in Jackson. It is not simply that the house functions benignly in these books whereas it is sinister, evil, confining, and inhibiting in her other work; the relation is again more complex than that. Recall our discussion of “The House” (1952), the quasi-supernatural tale whose first section alone was included at the very beginning of Life among the Savages. It is no surprise that the supernatural component of the story would be excised in its new setting; but the mere context has robbed the house in the story of its subtly evil character. The narrative of moving into this imposing but ramshackle house takes on a seriocomic quality, as in the book Jackson’s children play a greater role, dispersing the potentially chilling atmosphere with their boisterous high spirits. The message is clear: in the domestic fiction a house is not in itself a cheering and heartwarming environment, but becomes so through the love and closeness of the family occupying it. It is exactly these emotions that are lacking in Jackson’s other work, whether it be in such a non-supernatural satire as The Road through the Wall or in a quasisupernatural one as The Sundial. In both these instances the house becomes cold and unwelcoming only because the inhabitants themselves exhibit these same feelings toward each other. Even in those stories in which the house itself remains relatively passive, the hostility of its occupants or of the outside community render the house something akin to a prison. Neither “The Summer People” nor “The Little House” focuses upon the house as such; but in both tales it takes on foreboding qualities. In the former the elderly couple’s summer house becomes a virtual tomb when the couple decides to extend its stay beyond Labor Day. In the latter, the spitefulness of eldery neighbours causes a perfectly innocuous house to appear a death-trap to its new owner, who flees in terror. And yet, to Jackson’s mind—at once conditioned to the domestic pieties of the 1950s and

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Movie still from The Haunting, the 1963 film adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

rebelling against them—the house is an unavoidable fixture regardless of what dire qualities it takes on. Even at the beginning of We Have Always Lived in the Castle Constance is afraid of leaving the house (W 29), although it has become, for all practical purposes, a grave for her. Her life after the poisoning of her family has been reduced to its walls—with, perhaps, fleeting moments on the grounds—but she regards it at least as a haven against the scorn of the townspeople. And even after much of the house is burned and rendered uninhabitable, Constance and Merricat choose to remain there, calmly and even whimsically reshaping their lives to within an even smaller compass. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Jackson’s most searing parody of domesticity: all the things that made the domestic stories so wholesome and touching—love between the family members; the antics of children; the comical excess of furniture, toys, and food; the sense of belonging to a community—have here been perverted. And yet, Constance and Merricat seem strangely content with their impoverished circumstances; and indeed, is it really so bad? They at least have each other.

In The Sundial even this comfort is lacking. Each member of this lunatic household clings, like Constance and Merricat, to the belief that the house alone will represent safety and sanctuary even when the rest of the world is destroyed; but amongst the occupants themselves there is no harmony, only struggles for supremacy, covert affairs, and bungled attempts to escape. Because the outside world so rarely figures in this novel, the house itself becomes the world—it is as if there really is nothing beyond it. Is Jackson saying that the rest of the world functions as the Halloran household does? Is there no harmony or love to be found anywhere? The Haunting of Hill House is, of course, Jackson’s most profound and searching treatment of the house theme; its opening paragraph sets the tone, and I cannot resist quoting it in spite of its celebrity: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream: Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.

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Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. (HH 5)

I confess, however, to an uncertainty as to what this is exactly supposed to mean. It is interesting that here insanity is linked to the perception of “absolute reality”: I am not so much concerned with quoting T. S. Eliot (“Human kind cannot bear very much reality”) as with ascertaining the precise applicability of the remark. Hill House is a place where the superficial masks and deceptions of life are stripped off: it is where Eleanor comes to terms with the wretchedness of her prior life, sees through the sham of Luke’s and Theodora’s arch lightheartedness, and realises that she belongs here—because, in fact, she belongs nowhere. A later passage might shed further light on this enigmatic opening: This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed. (HH 26)

Curiously, the remark that the house “was not a fit place for . . . love” is perhaps contradicted by the denouement, for in its twisted way Hill House does love Eleanor—it wants her, it won’t let her leave, it perhaps kills her when she tries to go away. But if whatever walks in Hill House walks alone, are we not to see in this Jackson’s ultimate metaphor for loneliness? A house should represent safety, comfort, welcome; but in this house, as Dr Montague notes, “‘the intention is, somehow, to separate us’” (HH 96)—to render each person alone and lonely. If Jackson sees togetherness as the natural and desirable state for human beings, then Hill House, which causes loneliness, is an abomination and even a paradox; if it makes no “concession to humanity”, then it has defied the very beings who have created it and inverts the purposes for which it was built.

Notes 1. Jackson’s year of birth is usually given as 1919, a date she herself gave in later years; but her biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, has determined that Jackson was actually born on December 14, 1916, and that 1919 was given as the year of her birth so that she could seem to be younger than her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman (see O 11, 88). 2. An excellent and comprehensive bibliography of Jackson’s short work can be found in Joan Wylie Hall’s recent volume, Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction (1993). In my bibliography I include only important uncollected items. For books, asterisks indicate the edition cited in the text. 3. “The House”, Woman’s Day 15, No. 8 (May 1952): 116.

Conclusion What do we make of Shirley Jackson? Is she a weird writer even in part? That second question I am still unable to answer in any definitive way,

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save to note the obvious supernaturalism in a fairly representative core of her work. If The Haunting of Hill House is one of the greatest haunted house novels ever written, if “The Lottery” is among the cruellest non-supernatural horror stories ever written, what do we do with something so nebulous as The Sundial or “The Lovely House”? I hope, at any rate, to have suggested the tightly knit unity of Jackson’s work, its constant reworking of the interlocking themes of domesticity and loneliness, love and hate, madness and sanity, society and the individual; and I hope we can now see how each of these threads is pursued successively in tales that, from the point of view of genre, might be termed supernatural, nonsupernatural, mainstream, or autobiographical. It is true that Jackson, even in her avowedly supernatural work, presents no coherent metaphysics: her supernatural manifestations fail to suggest any putative reordering of the cosmos. But if she lacks the cosmic perspective of a Lovecraft, a Blackwood, or a Dunsany (or, indeed, of a Ramsey Campbell or T. E. D. Klein), if her focus is solely on human characters and human relationships, with even the supernatural phenomena subservient to or symbols for these relationships, then she at least distinguishes herself by the intensity, accuracy, and subtlety of her portrayal of human concerns; as with Bierce, her pitiless and sardonic exposing of human weakness makes her a horrific satirist who does not require the supernatural to arouse fear and horror. Her icy prose, clinical detachment, and utterly refreshing glee at the exhibition of human greed, misery, and evil ought to give her a high rank in general literature; that she chose to devote even a part of her talents to the weird is something for which we ought all to be grateful.

4. Ibid., p. 118. 5. Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, tr. S. T. Joshi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), p. 14.

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7. A chapter from this novel, “Du côté de chez Todd”, has frequently been included in horror anthologies under the title “The Man Who Liked Dickens”. It is one of the nastiest contes cruels ever written.

“Home.” Ladies’ Home Journal 82, No. 8 (August 1965): 6465, 116, 118. “Journey with a Lady.” Harper’s 205, No. 1 (July 1952): 7681. Rpt. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine 31, No. 6 (June 1958) (as “This Is the Life”). “Karen’s Complaint.” Good Housekeeping 149, No. 5 (November 1959): 38, 40, 42, 46.

Bibliography

“The Lost Kingdom of Oz.” Reporter 21, No. 10 (10 December 1959): 42-43.

A. Primary

“The Lovely Night.” Collier’s 125, No. 14 (8 April 1950): 15, 66-68.

I. BOOKS

“The Missing Girl.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 13, No. 6 (December 1957): 42-52.

The Bird’s Nest. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1954. Rpt. The Magic of Shirley Jackson. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966, pp. 147-380. [B]

“The Omen.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 14, No. 3 (March 1958): 118-30.

Come Along with Me. Ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman. New York: Viking, 1968. Rpt. New York: Popular Library, n.d. [C]

“On Being a Faculty Wife.” Mademoiselle 44, No. 2 (December 1956): 116-17, 135-36. In RD (in part).

Hangsaman. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1951. Rpt. New York: Popular Library, 1976. [H]

“One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 8, No. 1 (January 1955): 53-61. Rpt. The Best American Short Stories 1956, ed. Martha Foley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956, pp. 195-204.

The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Viking, 1959. Rpt. New York: Popular Library, 1977. [HH] Life among the Savages. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1953. Rpt. The Magic of Shirley Jackson. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966, pp. 383-530. [LS] The Lottery. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1949. Rpt. New York: Popular Library, n.d. [L] Raising Demons. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1957. Rpt. The Magic of Shirley Jackson. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966, pp. 531-753. [RD] The Road through the Wall. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948. The Sundial. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1958. Rpt. New York: Ace, n.d. [S] We Have Always Lived in the Castle. New York: Viking, 1962. Rpt. New York: Popular Library, n.d. [W]

II. UNCOLLECTED SHORT STORIES AND ARTICLES “‘All She Said Was “Yes.”’” Vogue 140, No. 8 (1 November 1962): 142-43, 169, 171, 174-75.

“The Possibility of Evil.” Saturday Evening Post 238, No. 25 (18 December 1965): 61-64, 68-69. “Root of Evil.” Fantastic 2, No. 2 (March-April 1953): 12429, 162. Rpt. Fantastic 18, No. 5 (June 1969): 123-27, 140. “The Strangers.” Collier’s 129, No. 19 (10 May 1952): 24, 6871. “Strangers in Town.” Saturday Evening Post 231, No. 48 (30 May 1959): 18, 76-77, 79. “The Wishing Dime.” Good Housekeeping 129, No. 3 (September 1949): 35, 223-28.

B. Secondary Egan, James. “Sanctuary: Shirley Jackson’s Domestic and Fantastic Parables.” Studies in Weird Fiction No. 6 (Fall 1989): 15-24. Friedman, Lenemaja. Shirley Jackson. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Hall, Joan Wylie. Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993.

“Behold the Child among His Newborn Blisses.” In CrossSection: A Collection of New American Writing, ed. Edwin Seaver. New York: L. B. Fisher, 1944, pp. 292-98.

Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam’s, 1988. [O]

“The Birthday Party.” Vogue 141, No. 1 (1 January 1963): 118, 145-46, 149, 154. (Rev. version of “Pajama Party”.)

Parks, John G. “Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson’s Use of the Gothic.” Twentieth Century Literature 30 (1984): 15-29.

“Bulletin.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 6, No. 3 (March 1953): 46-48. Rpt. The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fourth Series, ed. Anthony Boucher. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955, pp. 182-85. “Daughter, Come Home.” Charm 60, No. 3 (May 1944): 75, 94-95. “Fame.” The Writer 61, No. 8 (August 1948): 265-66. “Family Magician.” Woman’s Home Companion, September 1949, pp. 23, 92-93, 98, 100. “A Great Voice Stilled.” Playboy 7, No. 3 (March 1960): 5758, 91.

DAVID A. OAKES (ESSAY DATE WINTER 1999) SOURCE: Oakes, David A. “Ghosts in the Machines: The Haunted Castle in the Works of Stephen King and Clive Barker.” Studies in Weird Fiction 24 (winter 1999): 25-33. In the following essay, Oakes highlights the modernization and transformation of the traditional Gothic setting of the haunted castle in works by Stephen King and Clive Barker.

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6. See Dale J. Nelson, “Arthur Jermyn Was a Yahoo: Swift and Modern Horror Fiction”, Studies in Weird Fiction No. 7 (Spring 1990): 3-7.

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Imagine, for a moment, that you are sitting down to read Stephen King’s disturbing short novel, The Mist. However, instead of being a frightening tale of a group of people trapped in a grocery store by a sinister mist that hides fantastic creatures, you find the novel to be a mildly amusing diversion because it tells how the mist engulfs and traps David Drayton and his friends in a castle. Envision how strange King’s “Trucks” would be if the truck stop being besieged by the vehicles was a large castle. What if Clive Barker’s “The Hellbound Heart” did not require the use of a puzzle box to summon the Cenobites, but, rather, demanded that the characters travel to the ruins of an ancient fortress to summon these strange entities? Or suppose that Arnie Cunningham, in King’s Christine, purchased and decided to repair a castle possessed by a ghost rather than the cursed red-and-white Plymouth Fury? Although the haunted castle was a crucial, even indispensable, element of early works of Gothic literature, the use of it in an unchanged form in contemporary settings can considerably lessen the impact of the tale or the fear generated by the events of the story. Thus, in order for Gothic fiction to remain an effective genre, the haunted castle needs to evolve and change to continue to be relevant to readers in different times and societies. The genre of Gothic fiction is a literature of destabilization in that it inspires its readers to ask questions about themselves, their society, and the cosmos surrounding them. Further, it serves as a cultural artifact, reflecting the concerns and fears not only of the time in which it is written, but also of the time in which it is read. Gothic literature is defined not only by what effects it has on readers, but also by a series of elements that appear time and again in works of this genre. The most prominent and common element of Gothic literature is the haunted castle and its later derivations. The haunted castle often serves as the center of supernatural activity, acts as a symbol of the past, and functions as the main source of danger and suspense within a work of Gothic fiction. In his 1927 study, The Haunted Castle, Eino Railo notes that the castle serves as a “scene of innumerable horrors, capable of touching the imagination each time we see it” (7). He believes that the haunted castle plays an exceedingly important part in [Gothic fiction]; so important, indeed, that were it eliminated the whole fabric of romance would be bereft of its foundation and would lose its predominant atmosphere. (7)

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The importance of this element comes, in part, from the connection of the term “Gothic” with architecture in the eighteenth century. Many of the earliest works of Gothic literature, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, are set in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, and therefore utilize a castle as the setting for the events of the story. As cultural artifacts, many works of Gothic fiction change the way in which the haunted castle is presented in order to remain relevant to their time and setting. Even in the earliest works of Gothic literature, the haunted castle undergoes changes and appears in different manifestations. For example, Eino Railo notes that Clara Reeve in The Old English Baron is the writer who, “for the first time,” makes “deliberate use of an empty suite of rooms [that is] supposed to be haunted” (8). Another manifestation of the haunted castle appears in the form of “the old abbey and monastery” as can be seen in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk. Similarly, Charles Brockden Brown, the first American Gothic writer, transforms the haunted castle into a wilderness, a realm of spirits and fantastic events, as he adapts the Gothic form to an American setting. Other writers of the nineteenth century, such as J. Sheridan LeFanu and Ambrose Bierce, change the haunted castle into a haunted house, in part, so their tales could be placed in contemporary settings. Furthermore, as Railo notes, as time passes the haunted room becomes the laboratory of workers of magic, of alchemists, the secret research room of a modern scientist—becomes, in general, the mysterious hidden chamber where the terrifying element is housed. Each age fashions this centre of suspense to conform with its own new experiences and inventions, but for the reader aware of its history it is an easy task to strip off the modern equipment, when it stands confessed as merely a new rendering of the old picture of the haunted castle. (171)

Thus, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the haunted castle becomes the laboratory of an ambitious scientist. This particular manifestation again appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”. Further, the process continues in the twentieth century with the haunted house of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 tale, The Haunting of Hill House, and the merging of the haunted house and laboratory in Richard Matheson’s 1971 novel, Hell House. It manifests itself as a lost city in H. P. Lovecraft’s 1931 novel, At the Mountains of Madness. Although its forms appear vastly different from those in the eighteenth century, the haunted castle continues

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Although the haunted castle has proven to be a very adaptable element in the works of various Gothic writers, it has often been limited in one way—it remains at a fixed location, necessitating the bringing of the characters to that particular site. However, Stephen King removes this limitation in Christine by presenting the haunted castle in the form of a car. Indeed, the use of the Plymouth Fury is particularly effective because it invokes a cultural artifact by calling upon the fascination many teenagers, especially males, feel for cars: Engines. That’s something else about being a teenager. There are all these engines, and somehow you end up with the ignition keys to some of them and you start them up but you don’t know what . . . they are or what they’re supposed to do. There are clues, but that’s all. . . . They give you the keys and some clues and they say, Start it up, see what it will do, and sometimes what it does is pull you along into a life that’s really good and fulfilling, and sometimes what it does is pull you right down the highway to hell and leave you mangled and bleeding by the roadside. (62)

Tony Magistrale observes in Landscape of Fear that the car acts as “a great mirror of America itself”, representing “prosperity” and “an infatuation with . . . speed” (46). There are, however, disturbing aspects to this fascination because this haunted car also illustrates how this captivation with an object can lead to disaster if it comes to dominate a person’s life as it does the young Arnie Cunningham. Further, Christine functions as a symbol of the past because the vehicle was first made in the 1950s, a time within American mythology that is

often viewed as a golden age of prosperity when things were simpler and less complicated. Indeed, the car plays upon desires to return to a simpler time, and demonstrates their dangers. It can transport the people within its confines back to the 1950s. Dennis Guilder experiences such a trip on a ride with Arnie: Arnie stopped at intersections where we should have had the right-of-way; at others, where traffic lights glowed red, he cruised Christine mildly through without even slowing. On Main Street I saw Shipstad’s Jewelry Store and the Strand Theater, both of them torn down in 1972 to make way for the new Pennsylvania Merchants Bank. The cars parked along the street—gathered here and there in clumps where New Year’s Eve parties were going on—all seemed to be pre-60s . . . or pre-1958. Long portholed Buicks. A DeSoto Firelite station wagon with a body-long blue inset that looked like a check-mark. . . . Ramblers, Packards, a few bullet-nosed Studebakers, and once, fantastical and new, an Edsel. (417)

Roland D. LeBay views the 1950s as a golden age, a time when he finds happiness in a new car that fulfills his dreams. Passengers see visions of the era LeBay loves, but it is one that has vanished forever. The visions within Christine are illusions, real only for Christine and LeBay. The haunted car is a trap for Arnie, drawing him back to a time that no longer exists, and removing him from the present to live in an illusory world, one that will not allow him to grow as a person and one that essentially dooms him to destruction. One of the most important aspects of Christine is its mobility. The Plymouth Fury becomes the home of the ghost of its first owner, Roland D. LeBay, after his death. It serves as the central locus of the supernatural activity within the novel, and this car also opens some unusual possibilities in using the fantastic. An automobile is not limited to one location, magnifying Christine’s threat because it can attack people in remote locations instead of waiting for individuals to enter its domain like the ghost of Emeric Belasco in Matheson’s Hell House. The car’s mobility proves to be particularly disturbing, for it means that there are no safe havens into which people can retreat to escape the influence of the fantastic. In the case where the haunted castle’s manifestation is at a fixed location, the vast majority of the people usually enjoy a degree of safety if they do not venture to that place. Yet, in Christine’s case, the car may seek people out in their homes or in locations that would ordinarily be considered secure. Moreover, the vehicle’s ability to regenerate itself means that it can take a tremendous amount of damage and

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to serve as crucial tool in the process of destabilization. Indeed, this element of Gothic fiction can continue to be found in the works of such late twentieth-century Gothic writers as Stephen King and Clive Barker. The haunted castle appears in a vast array of forms in King’s fiction: a red-andwhite 1958 Plymouth Fury in Christine, a grocery store in The Mist, and a flying saucer in The Tommyknockers. Clive Barker presents the haunted castle as a man’s private hell in “Down, Satan!”, a puzzle box in “The Hellbound Heart”, and as an ancient wizard in The Damnation Game. These manifestations play a vital role in laying the foundation for creating fear in each tale. Moreover, they not only demonstrate the genius of King and Barker in adapting this element for a twentiethcentury setting, but also illustrate why Gothic literature continues to exist as a unique and identifiable genre.

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still continue to run, allowing it to penetrate areas, such as a brick house, that may seem inaccessible. Another destabilizing aspect of Christine’s mobility and regenerative abilities comes at the end of the novel. King concludes with hints that Christine appears to restore herself again after being smashed to pieces by a truck. Dennis Guilder speculates that the haunted car has returned: Of course it’s impossible, but it was all impossible to start with. I keep thinking of George LeBay in Ohio. His sister in Colorado. Leigh in New Mexico. What if it’s started again? What if it’s working its way east, finishing the job? Saving me for last? [LeBay’s] single-minded purpose. His unending fury. (503)

In these lines, King not only suggests that the supernatural power of this haunted car cannot be dispelled, but also, unlike a haunted castle or house, this force can seek out and hunt down new victims, meaning that there may be no escape from Christine. Stephen King’s The Mist presents another variation on the haunted castle in that he presents two different candidates for the manifestation of this element within the tale. The creation of the mist itself and its subsequent engulfing of towns and cities transforms civilized areas into wilderness. Any area within the confines of the mist basically becomes a haunted wilderness, filled with the unknown and danger. King demonstrates this fact through the dire fates of those, such as Brent Norton and The Flat-Earth Society, who refuse to accept the reality of the mist and the creature within it and foolishly choose to venture forth into its confines: And from out of the mist there came a high, wavering scream. It was impossible to tell the sex of the screamer. . . . The howl was abruptly cut off. There was no sound at all for what seemed to be forever. Then the old lady cried out—this time there could be no doubt about who it was. “Git it offa me!” she screamed. “Oh my Lord my Lord get it—“Then her voice was cut off, too. (101)

The dangerous creatures lurking within the mist’s confines make venturing forth into its confines an extremely dangerous proposition,

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especially given the fact that humans are deprived of their primary source of protection from danger—their vision. Yet, although King surrounds the survivors who are trapped in the grocery store with what amounts to a haunted wilderness, he also makes the supermarket into a haunted castle. When confronted by the dangers within the mist, a large number of people decide to wait within the confines of the store because it provides the food and drink they need to survive. This method of survival, waiting for the danger to pass, while not as foolhardy as the one chosen by Brent Norton, is still presented as a hazardous choice. The people trapped in the mist do not simply deal with small creatures; they also face gargantuan beasts such as the one David Drayton and his companions see as they attempt to escape the confines of the mist: It was six-legged, I know that . . . and clinging to it were scores, hundreds, of those pinkish “bugs” with the stalk-eyes. I don’t how big it actually was, but it passed directly over us. One of its gray, wrinkled legs smashed down right beside my window, and Mrs. Reppler said later she could not see the underside ofits body, although she craned her neck up to look. She saw only two Cyclopean legs going up and up into the mist like living towers until they were lost to sight. (151)

Given the size of this creature and others like it in the mist, the supermarket is only a temporary safe haven. The novel rejects inaction; the people who stay in the grocery store accept a new reality, but still hide from the world rather than trying to escape it. A refusal to struggle against the unknown is a capitulation to fear. The people who stay leave themselves at the mercy of the unknown instead of taking control of their destiny, and also almost turn themselves into living ghosts, figments of a vanished society who will simply wait to die. Indeed, as David Drayton and his friends depart in his “Scout”, he drives past the supermarket and sees “at each loophole there were two or three pales face, staring out at us” (147). There is good reason these faces are “pale” for, in all probability, it will only be a matter of time before they actually die, ending the living death to which they have consigned themselves. Within The Mist, the best option for surviving the haunted castle and wilderness is to simply escape them. The people in the grocery store live in a haunted castle, becoming living ghosts who desperately yearn to return to their familiar, lost world. The mist transforms civilized areas into a wilderness full of threatening predators. The only hope for restoration is for individuals to confront

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Like H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House” and Richard Matheson’s Hell House, King’s The Tommyknockers is a variation on the haunted house tale. King also follows their lead by linking science, technology, and the supernatural in presenting his haunted house as a flying saucer. However, whereas Lovecraft and Matheson use science to explain the supernatural, King does not; he simply uses a scientific and technological environment as a setting for the supernatural. The flying saucer has been buried near Haven for millions of years, and the aliens are dead: They’re dead, Gard! Your Tommyknockers were real enough, but they were mortal, and this ship has been here for at least fifty million years. The glacier broke around it! It covered it but it couldn’t move it. Not even all those tons of ice could move it. . . . They’re dead, Gard. (191)

However, the ghosts of the aliens linger in their vessel, waiting to possess new bodies. Jim Gardener actually calls the ship “a haunted house whose demons might still walk between the walls and in the hollow places” (500). This flying saucer represents the past because it is millions of years old; but King reinforces the idea by establishing a series of similarities between the aliens and humanity. The parallels between the races make the aliens a mirror of the worst aspects of human civilization. One parallel emerges from the capacity of both species for violence. Many people, like Jim and Bobbi Anderson, assume an intelligent race of aliens will be benevolent, but this idea soon falls apart: Remember how we always assumed a technologically advanced race of beings would be, if one made contact with us? We thought they’d be smart like Mr. Wizard and wise like Robert Young on Father Knows Best. Well, here’s the truth, Bobbi. The ship crashed because they were having a fight. . . . Look, Bobbi. See how dark the claws are. That’s blood, or whatever they had inside them. It’s on the claws because they did most of the damage. The place sure as shit didn’t look like the bridge of the starship Enterprise before it crashed. Just before it hit, it probably looked more like a free-for-all cock-fight out behind some redneck’s barn. This is progress, Bobbi? (616-17)

The discovery of these corpses reveals a race as capable of extreme violence as humanity. King presents a disillusioning vision that intelligent races may not leave behind dark traits as they become more advanced. Indeed, this alien society shares one of humanity’s most abhorrent and despicable institutions—slavery. One room in the flying saucer is “full of hammocks suspended in metal frames” which contain the dead bodies of aliens “CHAINED” inside them (619). The aliens keep members of their own race as “galley slaves” to be the “ship’s drive” (619). The novel reinforces the bond between the aliens and humans by showing how the people of Haven do not hesitate to use slaves as well: He [Jim] was unable to take his eyes from the leftrear corner of the shed, where Ev Hillman, Anne Anderson, and Bobbi’s good old beagle Peter had somehow been hung up on posts in two old galvanized steel shower cabinets with their doors removed. They hung there like slabs of beef on meathooks. But they were alive . . . A thick black cord which looked like a highvoltage line or a very big coaxial cable ran out of the center of Anne Anderson’s forehead. A similar cable ran out of the old man’s right eye. And the entire top of the dog’s skull had been peeled away; dozens of smaller cords ran out of Peter’s exposed and pulsing brain. (569)

Ev, Anne, and Peter are “living batteries” (575). The use of slaves by the aliens and humanity is disturbing because supposedly civilized and advanced societies use this barbaric institution, raising one of the most troubling and tragic periods of the past. Furthermore, the flying saucer also poses a threat to the future because if the aliens succeed in completing their takeover of Haven, the excavation of their ship, and, perhaps, the conquest of the Earth, human society will change into a civilization that is a reflection of the darkest aspects of its past and present. The haunted castle takes on many different forms, such as a car or flying saucer, in Stephen King’s works of Gothic fiction, but it takes on some of its strangest and most imaginative manifestations in the works of Clive Barker. Barker presents one unusual variation in his short story, “Down, Satan!”, where he depicts a man who constructs his own private hell. An important aspect of Gregorius’ New Hell is the fact that it does not appear to have a long history because it is a new creation. Yet this building does come to be endowed with a far longer history than many of the haunted castles that appear in other works

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their fears and journey into that wilderness in the hope that they may somehow escape it. David Drayton and his friends are the only ones who are brave enough to make an effort to find the limits of the mist. Indeed, even if they do not ultimately escape the confines of the mist, a possibility which each reader must determine since King makes the ending ambiguous, they are still the only ones who have a chance to survive.

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of Gothic fiction. The New Hell is based on one of the oldest legends created by humanity. Many ancient cultures, including the Greek and Roman civilizations, have their own versions of Hell where those who commit evil deeds are punished for their sins. Indeed, in constructing his Hell, Gregorius consults “the great libraries of the world . . . for descriptions of hells both secular and metaphysical” along with “museum vaults . . . for forbidden images of martyrdom” (186). Moreover, “no stone was left unturned if it was suspected something perverse was concealed beneath” (186-87). Gregorius’ New Hell, although a product of human technology and twisted ingenuity, embodies a long tradition of infernal images and tortures. Furthermore, Gregorius specifically desires to build a “modern inferno” that is “so monstrous that the Tempter would be tempted, and come to roost there like a cuckoo in a usurped nest” (186). The New Hell also comes to be embodied with a sense of antiquity because it has been designed to attract the oldest source of evil within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. However, a far more disturbing possibility emerges from the story than the New Hell serving as the haunted castle, and attracting Satan to establish a new, terrifying dominion on Earth. Barker suggests that the true haunted castle may be the twisted mind of Gregorius who envisions this New Hell, and becomes its overlord after its completion. After he has been left alone in New Hell, Gregorius believes that he detects the presence of Satan in “noises” he hears “from the lower depths” (188). Although he believes he hears these sounds, he never discovers Satan, and Barker presents the references to these noises in the context of their being heard by Gregorius, raising the possibility that he may be imagining it. Indeed, when he is arrested, Gregorius himself, along with a “few disciples whom he’d mustered over the years”, is the actual master of New Hell, seeing to it that “there was not a torture device in the building they had not made thorough and merciless use of” (190). Barker raises the disturbing notion, as other writers of Gothic fiction such as Edgar Allan Poe have done before, that the ultimate haunted castle lies within the human mind. The possibility exists that all the suffering and evil that takes place in New Hell do not come from Satan, but from the twisted mind of one wealthy individual who possesses the wherewithal to make his dark visions into a reality. Indeed, perhaps the most frightening idea to emerge from “Down, Satan!” is that humans no longer need

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the Devil because we have become as efficient and as creative in the production of evil and suffering as Lucifer himself. One important aspect of the haunted car in King’s Christine comes from mobility. Clive Barker also presents two variations of the haunted castle that can move from place to place in “The Hellbound Heart” and The Damnation Game. A small puzzle box known as the Lemarchand Configuration serves as the locus of supernatural activity within “The Hellbound Heart”. One important aspect of the Lemarchand Configuration is its mobility, as it can be easily transported from one user to another as well as to different locations, enabling the Cenobites and the Order of the Gash to claim new voyagers into the greater realms of pleasure and pain. Indeed, just as Gregorius creates his own haunted castle, those who choose to use the puzzle box often do so of their own free will. For example, Frank undergoes extensive preparation in summoning the Cenobites, including having “a jug of his urine—the product of seven days’ collection” on hand “should they require some spontaneous gesture of selfdefilement” (187). Such preparations indicate that Frank chooses to follow this path, leading to his own destruction and eternal suffering for his spirit. Thus, the Lemarchand Configuration not only gives Barker the opportunity to present strange entities from another realm, but also allows him to comment again on the darkness that lurks within human beings. The Lemarchand Configuration, by virtue of its mobility and its ability to summon the Cenobites, also transforms the location where it is opened into a manifestation of the haunted castle. It changes the room and the house where Frank summons them into the world into a haunted realm filled with the horrors created by a group of ancient entities who dwell in another dimension. In fact, even after the Cenobites depart Frank’s room, the taint of the ritual remains to bring renewed suffering to others in the right circumstances. Barker describes such an occurrence after Frank restores himself to a semblance of life when his brother, Rory, bleeds in the room where the summoner had been dragged to damnation: He [Frank] had been lucky. Some prisoners had departed from the world without leaving sufficient sign of themselves from which, given an adequate collision of circumstances, their bodies might be remade. He had. Almost his last act, bar the shouting, had been to empty his testicles onto the floor. Dead sperm was a meager keepsake of his essential self, but enough. When dear brother Rory (sweet butter-fingered Rory) had let his chisel slip, there

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Summoners of the Cenobites, such as Frank, condemn themselves to eternal suffering, but if they manage to break free of this other dimension, they can bring pain and misery to innocent people. After Frank returns, his lover, Julia, seeks out victims for him to feast on in order to restore his body. Rory becomes a unwitting victim, and Frank’s niece, Kirsty, also almost becomes consumed by her uncle’s efforts at restoration. Thus, although summoners of the Cenobites may deserve their fate because they freely chose their destiny, the potential is there for the taint of this darkness to expand and claim innocent victims, suggesting that seekers of new experiences must be careful lest they bring harm to those who do not deserve it. The embodiment of the haunted castle in Barker’s The Damnation Game, a centuries-old wizard known as Mamoulian, shares many similarities with the Lemarchand Configuration in terms of those who seek him out. Those individuals who seek out Mamoulian, like those who summon the Cenobites, often do so of their own free will, whether that emerge from a desire to explore new areas of life or to engage in the ultimate game of chance. Joseph Whitehead, the man who serves as the focus of Mamoulian’s wrath within the novel, seeks the wizard out for the ultimate game of chance after the thief hears rumors about an individual who “never lost a game, and who came and went in this deceitful city like a creature who was not, perhaps, even real” (6). And since Mamoulian is a living entity, it is easier for him to bring harm to innocents who happen to get in his way in his quest for vengeance on Whitehead than those who accidently stumble upon the Cenobites. Mamoulian, like the Lemarchand Configuration, can also taint and transform the areas where he dwells or travels, making them into centers of supernatural power. Barker makes an important observation when he notes that “most of” the “miracles” caused by the immense powers of the Last European “were slipped with such cunning behind the facade of ordinary life that only the sharpest-sighted, or those in search of the unlikely, caught a glimpse of the Apocalypse showing its splendors to a sun-bleached city” (277). He illustrates the changes Mamoulian can make in an environment when he describes Whitehead’s

estate. Barker makes the house seem like a throwback to the Middle Ages because the menace of Mamoulian drives Whitehead to adopt a siege mentality and to protect himself with guard dogs, video monitors, and electric fences “topped by sharpened steel struts” and “crowned with spirals of barbed wire” (65-66). In effect, even though Mamoulian may not be physically present at Whitehead’s estate, his threat haunts Whitehead to such a degree that he changes what should be a comfortable, palatial estate into a fortress where he cowers behind multiple defenses, hiding from the specter of his past. Barker puts another interesting twist into the character of Mamoulian: not only can the Last European warp areas by virtue of his presence, but he also serves as a location unto himself, as he can bring individuals into a realm located within him: Finally, the thief understood. This place, which he’d glimpsed in the sauna at the Sanctuary, existed within the European. These ghosts were creatures he’d devoured. Evangeline! Even she. They waited, the tattered remains of them, in this no-man’s-land between flesh and death, until Mamoulian sickened of existence and lay down and perished. Then they too, presumably, would have their liberty. Until then their faces would make that soundless O at him, a melancholy appeal. (406)

Mamoulian possesses the power to create a world within himself where he can trap human souls, reinforcing his role as the manifestation of the haunted castle within the novel and the center of the supernatural power and suspense in the tale. Stephen King and Clive Barker have both made use of manifestations of the haunted castle within their fiction. Their use of this element of Gothic demonstrates the genre’s ability to adapt itself to contemporary settings. Instead of an ancient mouldering fortress, the haunted castle appears as a car, a flying saucer, a puzzle box, and even a human wizard. However, the importance of the haunted castle does not simply emerge from its versatility. It also comes from the important role it can play in developing the overall themes of a particular work of Gothic fiction. Stephen King and Clive Barker make the haunted castle far more than the locus of supernatural events or a symbol of the past. King, for example, uses Christine, the haunted car, to comment on the obsession people can develop for cars and the dangers of becoming fixated with the past. In The Tommyknockers, the flying saucer serves as a reflection of

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was something of Frank to profit from the pain. He had found a fingerhold for himself, and a glimpse of strength with which he might haul himself to safety. (220-21)

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the dark side of human society, and of the dangers human society may face in the future if it should follow this same path. Clive Barker’s New Hell in “Down, Satan!” makes the disturbing suggestion that the evil that lurks within humans may be greater than the darkness of Satan. Similarly, the Lemarchand Configuration of “The Hellbound Heart” exposes the dangers to innocents that may arise from those who recklessly seek to explore the limits of human knowledge and endurance. The appearance of the haunted castle within the fiction of Stephen King and Clive Barker in a multiplicity of different forms is a reflection of the ability of writers of the Gothic genre to mould and shape its elements to suit a constantly changing world. Indeed, this mutability demonstrates that Gothic literature will continue to be a vibrant and effective genre in the future.

Bibliography Barker, Clive. The Damnation Game. New York: Charter, 1988. ———. “Down, Satan!” In The Inhuman Condition. New York: Pocket, 1987. 183-91. ———. “The Hellbound Heart.” In Night Visions: The Hellbound Heart. New York: Berkley, 1988. Birkhead, Edith. The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance. London: Constable & Company, Ltd, 1921. Botting, Fred. Gothic. New York: Routledge, 1996. Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. New York: Methuen, 1984. King, Stephen. Christine. New York: Signet, 1983. ———. The Mist. In Skeleton Crew. New York: Signet, 1986. ———. The Tommyknockers. New York: Signet, 1988. MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Magistrale, Tony. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. Railo, Eino. The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1927. Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame. London: Arthur Barker, 1957.

ROBERT MIGHALL (ESSAY DATE 1999) SOURCE: Mighall, Robert. “Haunted Houses I and II.” In A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares, pp. 78-129. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. In the following excerpt, Mighall studies how the “theme of the ancestral curse was adapted by the Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century” to explore the manifestation of hereditary disease—a new topic in scientific literature of the time—using the device of the haunted house.

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Those who have quitted the world, and those who are not arrived at it, are as remote from each other as the utmost stretch of mortal imagination can conceive: What possible obligation, then, can exist between them; what rule or principle can be laid down, that of two non-entities, the one out of existence, and the other not in, and who can never meet in this world, the one should control the other to the end of time? (Thomas Paine, Rights of Man) ‘Oh, Bertram-Haugh! how came you by those lofty walls? Which of my ancestors had begirt me with an impassable barrier in this horrible straight?’ (J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas, 1864)

The previous chapter examined the emergence of an Urban Gothic in the first half of the nineteenth century, showing how many of the properties, effects, and rhetorical positions identified in the eighteenth-century tradition were transported and adapted to the representation of modern urban spaces. This suggests continuity as well as divergence, demonstrating the mobility of the Gothic fictional mode. The present chapter will continue with this emphasis on mobility, development, and ‘transportation’, by exploring how something that was largely excluded from both the Radcliffian and the Reynoldsian traditions, a Gothic located in the world inhabited by the reader, was realized in works from the midVictorian period. What these works have in common is their use of the idea of a family curse, an explicit or implicit adherence to the moral employed by Horace Walpole in the first Gothic novel, that the sins of the father will be visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation. According to David Punter, this became ‘perhaps the most prevalent theme of Gothic fiction’.1 How the theme of the ancestral curse was adapted by the Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century is the subject of this chapter, which explores the various media—supernatural, pathological, and legalistic—that are used to convey unwelcome legacies in Victorian Gothic fiction. . . . The [excerpted portion of this chapter from A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction] will identify the key features of curse narratives and legatory fictions, and show how these are adapted by writers around the mid-century to explore new domains for malevolent legacy—principally in the diseased bodies of descendants. It will show how in works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Jane Hooper, and Wilkie Collins, the supernatural mechanisms and devices of earlier tales of family curses are refigured through a materialist emphasis on pathological function. In Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hooper’s The

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Haunted Houses I: Legends and Legacies A cursed family inherits an unwelcome legacy. History moves on, progress is made, enlightenment replaces barbarism and superstition, but still the curse—initiated by sacrilege, usurpation, or some unspecified dark deed—inexorably visits its punishment on successive generations. Curse narratives show how crimes belonging to the ancestral past can blight both the present and the future. They often adapt the theme of generational conflict which is central to early Gothic romances such as Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Both novels, which have a common source in Diderot’s La Religieuse (1770, English translation 1797), feature aristocratic parents attempting to expiate their own sins by dedicating their innocent offspring to religious houses. The experiences of Lewis’s Agnes and Maturin’s Monçada extend the parental persecution plot of the Gothic, by using a legalistic mechanism to bind the lives of the present generation to the misguided customs of the past. Once this mechanism is established, the parents need not actively torment their children further (sadistic Superiors are more than happy to act in loco parentis in this respect), and need not even live beyond this binding contract to blight their children’s happiness. Curse narratives develop this legatory plot by locating the source of disorder in the more distant past. Here it is often the great-grandfather or a more distant ancestor still who torments his innocent descendants, ‘haunting’ the present with the consequences of his crimes. The individual’s immediate parents may be as enlightened and affectionate as the reader would wish, but are as much victims of the ancestral past as their own children. ‘Family Portraits’ (1812) by Jean Baptiste Benoit Eyries is a typical curse narrative, and which helps to identify the key properties that are developed and adapted in the hands of Victorian writers. Its plot is extremely tangled, involving complex wills and curses which determine the fortunes of two ancient families, the Meltheims and the Wartbourgs. Whilst its immediate setting is the end of the eighteenth century, the fortunes

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ URSULA K. LE GUIN (1929-)

Acclaimed for her contributions to fantasy, science fiction, and children’s literature, Le Guin is a highly respected author often credited with expanding the scope of the fantasy genre by combining conventional elements of science fiction with more traditional literary techniques. She is known for creating fictional worlds in works that express her conviction that humans must live in balance and harmony both with one another and with their environment. Central to all of Le Guin’s writing is the importance of individual moral responsibility, played out by her characters as they face difficult choices and navigate conflicting demands that directly impact the state of balance—or imbalance—in their world. Le Guin’s works are noted for their mythic creativity, elegant prose style, complex characterization, vibrant imagery, and for their feminist themes and concerns. Recipient of numerous literary awards, including multiple Nebula and Hugo awards, Le Guin is best known for her novels, including The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974), and her Earthsea cycle—A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972), and Tehanu (1990). LeGuin’s short stories, including those collected in The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (2002) have been noted by critics as evocative of the Gothic tradition because of their use of the supernatural and fantastic, their preoccupation with death, and their revolutionary spirit.

of the present generation are rigidly determined by the legacies of tenth-century progenitors. The tale opens with a familiar situation. ‘Ferdinand . . . the last branch of the ancient family of Meltheim’ is encouraged by his mother to marry Clothilde de Hainthal.2 However, Ferdinand, who ‘never thought of this union but with regret’, has fallen in love with Emily, daughter of Count Wartbourg and the sister of a schoolfriend; but inevitably,

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House of Raby (1855), and Collins’s ‘Mad Monkton’ (1855), hereditary disease is the ghost that haunts the present descendants of a House, an emphasis that indicates the contemporaneity of these works, appearing at a time when medical science was just beginning to look to hereditary etiologies to explain moral dysfunction. . . .

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revealed in Ditmar’s will), but he also inherits the Wartbourg estate on the death of the male heir.

His mother refused to consent to his marriage with Emily: her husband having, she said, on his death-bed, insisted on his wedding the baron of Hainthal’s daughter, and that she should refuse her consent to any other marriage. He had discovered a family secret, which forced him peremptorily to press this point, on which depended his son’s welfare, and the happiness of his family; she had given her promise, and was obliged to maintain it, although much afflicted at being compelled to act contrary to her son’s inclinations. (40-1)

Thus despite the tale being set in the near present, a tenth-century ‘family secret’ effects a dramatic crux similar to those narratives situated on the Gothic ‘cusp’—the ‘family’ threatens to drag youth back into the past, into an arranged marriage founded on the perpetuation of lineal interests and decrees. A curse can bring the tenth to the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The family secret which imperils Ferdinand’s romantic hopes turns out to be an elaborate curse associated with portraits that have hung in the ancestral gallery for generations. One dates from the tenth century and has supernatural powers, causing the death of Ferdinand’s sister by falling on her. Behind the portrait is discovered a parchment which identifies the subject as Bertha de Hainthal, the distant ancestor of the young woman Ferdinand’s parents wish him to marry. Juliana’s death (like Walpole’s Conrad’s who expired by similar means) is in fulfilment of part of Bertha’s curse in expiation for her sins. These involved her betrayal of her lover Ditmar de Wartbourg (an ancestor of Emily), by marrying Bruno de Hainthal. To complicate matters further, Ditmar has hatched a few curses of his own and has a similarly troublesome portrait which is instrumental in causing the death of all male members bar one of his own family in each generation. Ditmar’s curse is in expiation for his murder of Bertha’s husband and their male child. He walled the former up in a tower on his estate. Ditmar’s malevolent legacy involves not only the lineal pruning of the ‘branches of his house, without being able to annihilate the trunk’ (38-9), but stipulates that should the tower in which he walled Bruno be pulled down then the male trunk will also perish. This occurs when Emily’s brother, who has learned of the curse, ‘sacrif[iced] himself to release his house from the malediction that hung over it’ (39). This event brings about the opening of an old trunk containing the deeds of the Wartbourg family. A number of old parchments are read, and the outcome is that Ferdinand is not only entitled to marry Emily (according to the circumstances relating to his ancestry as

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Despite its baffling complexities and contrivances, ‘Family Portraits’ is worth considering as it assembles a number of conventions central to curse narratives. Because they are aided by supernatural means, the edicts of an ancestral curse are generally inflexible and rigidly deterministic.3 Departing from the Radcliffian plot, the thought of disobeying the family over the choice of spouse is not considered. Happiness is secured only because the children’s desires happen to comply with the conditions of the will/curse. These curses, in expiation for sins, involve generations of casualties, and are only curtailed by the noble sacrifice of the male heir who pulls down the ancestral edifice symbolizing centuries of misery. The curse formula involving ancestral iniquity generally absolves the living protagonists from agency or blame. One further important convention of curse narratives found in ‘Family Portraits’ is the ancestral portrait. The portrait of Ditmar enables Ferdinand to identify the ghost which he witnesses carrying out the conditions of the curse, bestowing a fatal kiss on the Count de Wartbourg’s youngest sons. Thus when the source of disorder is from the distant past a means of recognition is necessary. The portrait of Bertha also serves to identify the malevolent agent of the Meltheim’s ancestral legacy, and the absurdly literal-minded fulfilment of her prophecy—the portrait doing the deed itself—implies the importance of this means to identification. The portrait ‘represents’ Bertha both in the mimetic and the legal sense. When it is no longer the immediate parents who wield the dead hand of the past, such devices serve to remind by whose agency the past haunts the present.4 A particularly striking and effective use of this motif is found in what is perhaps the most famous story of an ancestral curse, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Hawthorne’s novel plays a key role in bringing the curse narrative up to date and into the middle of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, its North American setting helps draw attention to the mobility of the Gothic mode, and the significant adaptations this key Gothic theme of the ancestral curse underwent in the nineteenth century (the significance of the North American context will be discussed shortly). The House of the Seven Gables is haunted by the past, by the dark deed upon which it was

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If the Seven-Gabled mansion is not actually a haunted house, it is a building haunted by its ‘House’, by its lineage. The House of the Seven Gables is also the Pyncheon ‘House’—the lineage which extends from the Old Colonel to the Pyncheon of Today and his son, who reputedly gather to haunt the house at midnight. According to Lawrence Stone, ‘it was the relation of the individual to his lineage which provided a man of the upper classes in a traditional society with his identity’. Stone defines lineage as ‘relations by blood or marriage, dead, living, and yet to be born, which collectively form a “house”’.8 A ‘House’ was therefore both the ancestral seat, and the family associated with it who took and preserved its identity from its ancestors. An ancestral portrait gallery makes this conflation between architectural fabric and ‘blood’ visible. Its portraits function rather like genealogical ‘growth rings’ for

the mansion itself, testimony to the antiquity of the house (building) and of the House (family). Hawthorne’s tale of the ‘aristocratic’ Pyncheons is partly a demystification of this relationship, which it explores from a number of angles. The Pyncheon mansion is often personified. The narrator compares its front to ‘a human countenance, bearing the traces of . . . the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes, that have passed within’ (5), and suggests that the house itself was ‘like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and sombre reminiscences’ (27). Both similes are encouraged by an awareness of the building’s antiquity, that generations have been born, lived, and died there: ‘the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart’ (27). In Clifford’s view, this architectural absorption is far from beneficial; as he exclaims: ‘There is no such unwholesome atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one’s defunct forefathers and relatives!’ (261). As these remarks suggest, the ‘unwholesome’ exchange between house and lineage is reciprocal. Thus the narrator remarks how Hepzibah ‘had dwelt too much alone—too long in the Pyncheon-house— until her very brain was impregnated with the dryrot of its timbers’ (59). If buildings can ‘ooze’ with human memories it is only fair that long-dwelling inhabitants should acquire architectural maladies. The metaphorical conflation between building and lineage is explored further in an extended conceit which compares Judge Jaffrey’s character with ‘a tall and stately edifice’: Behold, therefore, a palace! Its splendid halls and suites of spacious apartments are floored with a mosaic-work of costly marbles [etc] . . . With what fairer and nobler emblem could any man desire to shadow forth his character? Ah; but in some low and obscure nook—some narrow closet on the ground floor, shut, locked, and bolted, and the key flung away—or beneath the marble pavement, in a stagnant water-puddle, with the richest pattern of mosaic-work above—may lie a corpse, half-decayed, and still decaying, and diffusing its death-scent all through the palace! (229-30)

This is the corollary to the anthropomorphic depiction of the Pyncheon house ‘oozing’ with its inhabitants’ lineage. As this image indicates, the Pyncheon House is founded on a crime; as Jaffrey inherits his character from his ancestor so he inherits the ‘death-scent’ of the Colonel’s original crime. In other words, if Judge Jaffrey is a house, he is a haunted one, haunted by the curse which he perpetuates by his actions. As ‘the Pyncheon of Today’ his body provides the site for the past to

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founded. Legend records how in the seventeenth century Colonel Pyncheon’s acquisition of Matthew Maule’s land, upon which he built his dynastic edifice, was not unconnected with the latter’s execution for witchcraft. At his death Maule uttered a curse that God, in retribution for his crimes, ‘will give [Pyncheon] blood to drink!’5 This is one of the few incidents in the legend which is supported by ‘history, as well as fireside tradition’ (8), and appears to have been fulfilled when the old Colonel dies with a bloody mouth on the very day the mansion is open to view. Subsequent events appear to confirm that this retribution has become hereditary—at least two descendants die in identical circumstances. These ancestral repetitions appear to endorse the ‘fireside’ traditions which keep the legend of Maule’s curse alive.6 They also correspond with the moral of the tale which is established in the author’s ‘preface’ (which recalls Walpole’s own from the Castle of Otranto): ‘the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones . . . [and] becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief’ (2).7 However, the supernatural phenomena associated with this legend are handled with extreme cautiousness. Almost all references to the curse or to events which appear to confirm its agency are qualified by being designated ‘tradition’, ‘gossip’, ‘the popular imagination’, ‘wild, chimney-corner legend[s]’, or ‘ancient superstitions’ (7, 20, 21, 197, 124). Even these traditions and rumours are pronounced ‘doubtful’, ‘absurdities’, or ‘ridiculous’ (238, 189, 279). And yet despite this narratorial ‘distancing’ these legends are apparently confirmed by events.

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haunt the present. Once more, an ancestral portrait serves an important function in this respect. The portrait of the old Puritan Pyncheon, which has hung in the room in which he died for two centuries, is literally the focal point of the tale. It conceals the lost deeds which encourage the ‘Pyncheon of today’ in every generation to reenact his ancestor’s course of greed, treachery, and single-minded ambition. The portrait of the old Puritan allows successive generations to identify the Pyncheon of Today. This physical recognition enables the perpetuation of the legend of the ‘moral’ resemblance and the repetition of ancestral crime. When Hepzibah is confronted by Judge Jaffrey who seeks to wrest from Clifford the secret of ‘untold wealth’, the narrator remarks: ‘Never did a man show stronger proof of the lineage attributed to him, than Judge Pyncheon, at this crisis, by his unmistakable resemblance to the picture in the inner room’ (232). Without the portrait to allow for physical recognition such ‘genealogical’ memories would probably die out. Moral patterns are suggested by the recurrence of physical traits. The body and its reproduction in descent thus enables the perpetuation of the legend of the curse. Judge Pyncheon’s body provides the site for the crimes and consequences of the ancestral past to visit the present. Hawthorne thus focuses on the relationship between House and house to suggest a new site for ancestral haunting. A haunted body is a diseased body, a house haunted by its lineage is similarly diseased. 9 This is confirmed in the conclusion when Holgrave diagnoses the ‘curse’ as hereditary apoplexy, observing how ‘This mode of death has been an idiosyncrasy with his family, for generations past . . . Old Maule’s prophecy was probably founded on a knowledge of this physical predisposition in the Pyncheon race’ (304). What looked like ‘witchcraft’ was really a shrewd insight into an hereditary predisposition to a pathological trait. This focus provides a materialist alternative to the ‘wild, chimneycorner legends’ which attribute the ancestral repetitions to supernatural agents. Although the present study is largely concerned with British fiction, Hawthorne’s tale is included here to demonstrate the mobility of the Gothic, its ability to be transported from one geopolitical environment to another. It can serve as a test case for the historical and political determinants informing the shift from an exotic to a domestic Gothic fictional mode. Hawthorne himself was acutely aware of the importance of setting for Gothic fiction, or at least Gothic occurrences. As he asserts in the Preface to his later

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novel The Marble Faun (1861), which is set in the traditional Gothic locality of Italy, ‘Romance and poetry, like ivy, lichens and wall-flowers, need Ruin to make them grow.’ And, as his readers knew, there were no castle ruins, ‘no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong’, in the ‘broad and simple daylight’ of America.1 0 And yet Hawthorne’s own works belie this (self-consciously ironic) statement. For shadows, (relative) antiquity, and picturesque and gloomy wrongs do cloud the broad daylight of the New England location of the seven-gabled mansion. The Pyncheon ‘House’ (lineage) carries this heavy Gothic burden through the medium of reproduction and pathology. When the body serves as the locus for ancestral guilt, and when the supernatural curse is adapted to more material circumstances, then geopolitical and historical context are potentially immaterial. The historical and ideological determinants of this transportation, that which enabled a middle class ‘domestic’ Gothic, will now be considered. One of the ways Hawthorne achieves this transportation of the Gothic, from gloomy Europe to sunny America, is his representation of the Pyncheons’ ‘aristocratic’ pretensions, and the way this is associated with the morbidity which really distinguishes their lineage. For example, Hepzibah’s pride in her family’s ‘aristocratic’ impracticability, which she considers an ‘hereditary trait’, is described by the narrator as ‘a morbid one, such as is often generated in families that remain long above the surface of society’ (77-8). Even the ‘aristocratic’ chickens which resemble their owners so much, are a race in decline: ‘All of them were pure specimens of a breed which had been transmitted down as an heirloom in the Pyncheon family . . . the hens . . . had a queer, rusty, withered aspect, and a gouty kind of movement . . . It was evident that the race had degenerated, like many a noble race besides, in consequence of too strict a watchfulness to keep it pure’ (88-9). This passage underlines the theme of inheritance which is central to the narrative, but it does this by reducing it to a biological function. The hens are anthropomorphized by the references to their ‘aristocratic lineage’ (90); but this also serves as a reminder that aristocrats are animals and their claims to distinction are as much biological as ideological. ‘Blue Blood’ is a fiction which is nonetheless premissed upon a function of reproduction (reproducing ancestral honour).1 1 The example of the hens is extended to ‘many a noble race besides’, further endorsing the association between aristocratic ‘heirlooms’, nobility and

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Hawthorne’s representations concur with contemporary comment on the problems of heredity. For example, George Man Burrows’s Commentaries on Insanity (1828) remarks how ‘Among the highest ranks, hereditary insanity is more common than among the lower; for the former most frequently contract marriage with their own rank, or even with their own family’.1 2 An exclusive concern with caste inevitably involves degrees of endogamy, and therefore, for many observers, degeneration. The pride which characterizes the villains of Gothic romance, and which impels them to pursue their disastrous dynastic campaigns, here points to a physiological, or, what would later be termed, a ‘eugenic’ lesson. As Henry Belinaye observed in 1832: ‘The marriages arranged among the higher classes, from motives of convenience or family interest, are seldom so prolific as those founded on mutual choice.’1 3 The reason for this circumstance? For Belinaye, successful reproduction requires mutual affection. To demonstrate this he observes how ‘In vain the hated tyrants of Florence, the latter Medici, had recourse to every method to perpetuate their line; they have bequeathed to the world nothing but a warning, and the remembrance of a name’ (67). Like the Gothic novelist, the physiologist turns to the historical past for a dramatic incident of domestic disorder. He equates the lack of affection in marriage (a consequence of politic alliances) with tyrannies worthy of Walpole’s Manfred, and draws a ‘biological’ lesson from this stock theme of the fall of a House. In this case it is reproductive rather than poetic or divine retribution which effects this decline. Whilst Gothic novelists stigmatize arranged marriages based on aristocratic pride as unfeeling and unnatural, and dramatize their effects on sensitive protagonists, physicians are more concerned with the disastrous biological consequences of such unions. When medicine rediscovered heredity towards the middle of the nineteenth century, it found in the practices of the nobility conspicuous examples of familial practices which institutionalized a regard for lineage, transmission, and entailment. Add to this the understanding that the mysteries of

hereditary transmission are easier to detect in their dysfunctional and pathological forms (pathology serving a similar function to the ancestral portrait in this respect), and the parallels between Gothic and physiological discourse occurring here are easier to account for.1 4 A family curse or ancestral taint is the dark underside of the principle of inheritance, both depict versions of what Michel Foucault terms ‘alliance gone bad’. Foucault’s work can help explain this historical concurrence. Foucault’s La Volonté de savoir (1976) famously charts what he calls the deployment of sexuality, an historical circumstance which he attributes to a bourgeois project to define its own ‘class body’, in contradistinction to the practices of the nobility.1 5 This, as Robert Miles has suggested, can illuminate aspects of Gothic fiction, principally its focus on family dynamics and generational conflicts. According to Miles, ‘there is a neat fit between The History of Sexuality’s clash between the deployments of “alliance” and “sexuality” and Gothic writing’s typical conflict between the father’s dynastic ambitions and the children’s romantic love’.1 6 As seen in earlier examples, Gothic fiction often dramatizes this conflict by depicting what could be termed inverted ‘family romances’, where children born to aristocratic parents struggle to establish their domestic arrangements on more democratic models, based on ‘affection’ and natural relations. In Foucauldian terms, this figures a conflict between the older claims of ‘alliance’ and the interests of an emergent concept which he identifies as ‘sexuality’. The fundamental difference between the older, aristocratic model of ‘alliance’ (characterized by primogeniture, arranged marriages, and the entailment of property) and the model of sexuality (with its emphasis on romantic love, choice, and familial affection), is that the former looked to the past for validation, while the latter staked its hopes on the future. The foundation of the aristocratic model of alliance was the family. Through the practice of primogeniture, the ancestry, status, and name of the family or ‘House’ was perpetuated. According to Foucault, it was also in and around the family that ‘sexuality’ first became problematic. For him, ‘the family, the keystone of alliance, was the germ of all the misfortunes of sex’ (Foucault, III). Through the problematics of familial relations, and by means of what Foucault characterizes as a ‘reflux movement’ (39), ‘normal’ sexuality was defined. By recognizing the dangers inherent within sexuality (the dangers of consanguinity, of debilitating practices, and misdirected passions) a

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disease, which the text uses to shift the scene of haunting from the supernatural to the somatic sphere. However, whilst its principal function is to comment on the decline of the Pyncheons, it implies that their condition is not unusual, but is actually a consequence of their caste mentality. Through such emphases, Hawthorne makes a political point, using physiology and pathology to stigmatize the caste politics of the ‘nobility’.

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stable and well-regulated and productive sexuality was imagined. As S. G. Howe remarked when he surveyed the products of ancestral guilt in the asylums of Massachusetts in 1848: The moral to be drawn from the prevalent existence of idiocy in society, is, that a very large class of persons ignore the conditions upon which alone health and reason are given to men, and consequently they sin in various ways . . . they overlook the hereditary transmission of certain morbid tendencies, or they pervert the natural appetites of the body into lusts of divers kinds,—the natural emotions of the mind into fearful passions, and thus bring down the awful consequences of their own ignorance and sin upon the heads of their unoffending children.1 7

Howe’s concern is with the correct deployment of sexuality, with the appropriate regulation of the body’s ‘natural’ impulses. In the violation of these laws is witnessed the ‘perverted’ and degenerate form of the idiot, the outcome of dysfunctional inheritance. Bourgeois sexuality challenges aristocratic ‘alliance’, by appropriating the themes and obsessions of the latter to identify the morbid and dysfunctional operations of its own concerns. In the individual failures of the bourgeoisie’s (expansive) project are found its opposites: bodies tied to the past and doomed to extinction. The perverse or diseased bourgeois was figured as an example of ‘alliance gone bad’ (Foucault, 109). These dynamics can be identified in Gothic curse narratives, which show the ‘House’ of the aristocracy in ruins. What was implicit, metaphorical, or merely suggested in Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables—that hereditary illness can be used as a modern version of the supernatural curse—is made explicit in Jane Margaret Hooper’s The House of Raby; Or, Our Lady of Darkness, published in 1854. The narrative of Hooper’s novel is dynastic and ‘generational’, following the fortunes of two families across four generations. The title refers to the Raby family, rather than its ancestral seat which is called Carleton Castle. This intense familial focus is reinforced in the titles given to each book: Introductory; Marriage and Birth; Parents and Children; The Last Generation of a Noble House. As these titles suggest, the narrative follows the decline of the House of Raby, while the theme of heredity provides its structure, dramatic, and moral conflict, and its suspense. The tale is narrated in the present by Frank Hastings, but incorporates epistolary material and anecdotes from the late eighteenth century. The lives of members of the noble Rabys and the solidly middle-class Hastings are bound together through at least three generations. Henry Hast-

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ings, Frank’s grandfather was a schoolfriend of Frederick, sixth earl of Carleton and later became Rector on his friend’s estate. The earl falls in love with Henry’s sister Margaret, but a parental interdiction prevents the marriage. A familiar situation. However, in this case it is Margaret’s father, the Reverend Hastings who opposes the match: Against the young man himself they had nothing to say; they believed him to be noble, amiable, truthful, every way worthy to be Henry’s friend; but against his marriage with one of their daughters they had two reasons to urge. First, they knew a great deal of the viscount’s father, and firmly believed him to be insane. His disease, they expected, would show itself sooner or later in his son; or, passing over him, would reappear in his children.—Secondly, they believed that a marriage in her own rank of life would be a happier one for their daughter.1 8

Here we find a novel twist to the familiar theme of domestic happiness thwarted by parental prohibition. It is now the middleclass parent who raises objections which implicitly equate class identity with pathology. This reverses the earlier pattern, implying that social ascent would mean biological decline. Ancestry and family pride are no longer the issue, it is the health of future progeny which dictates bourgeois domestic policy. This situation also adapts the situation of the curse plot to new and overtly physiological uses. Frederick’s father, like many a Gothic ancestor, has left a malevolent legacy for his descendants. His ‘madness’, like Maule’s curse, is almost exclusively the preserve of rumour, gossip, or folk memory. It is largely a consequence of his behaviour, which followed a suitably Gothic pattern: Francis, fifth Earl of Carleton, was what all the world called a very strange man—an oddity. Some few who knew a little of his private life, said he was the victim of an uncontrolled temper, a domestic tyrant, a misanthrope, a miser . . . and a few of the plain-speaking kind had been heard to say, that the Earl of Carleton was madder than many a man in Bedlam. He had had a gentle wife whom he killed with terror; and he had often frightened his child into fits . . . It would be a useless and revolting task to give any further particulars of the earl’s domestic conduct . . . [At the death of his wife, he] shut up Carleton Castle and went abroad, where he was occasionally heard of by English travellers, as the hero of stories that made their hair stand on end. (i. 142-3)

The earl is cast in the Gothic mould of a Manfred or Mazzini, ‘killing’ his wife, tyrannizing and terrifying his household, and indulging in unspecified dark or immoral deeds: in short, exemplifying a ‘Gothic’ antithesis of a well-regulated

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Margaret regretfully abides by her father’s decision, and the text endorses her act of renunciation. It is applauded as a noble and necessary sacrifice for the greater good. Like curse narratives which depict supernatural agents, The House of Raby is somewhat pessimistic in its outlook. Ancestral crimes demand expiation, and this means innocent victims—those who inherit the taint, and those who renounce domestic happiness from a sense of duty. In a generational narrative this pattern can repeat itself with relentless determination.1 9 Margaret remains unmarried, while Frederick eventually seeks solace in a marriage of convenience with his cousin. This is effected by his aunt Lady Morton, who deliberately ignores the rumours of insanity to secure for her daughter ‘an earldom and forty thousand a year’ (i. 221). Aristocrats are less scrupulous than their bourgeois counterparts about what would later be termed ‘eugenic’ considerations. Practices associated with the nobility, what Foucault terms ‘alliance’, are thus implicitly associated with the pathological mechanism which serves the function of a curse in this tale. The rumours of his father’s insanity (combining Gothic cruelty with the stereotypical aristocratic rakishness) compelled the sensible bourgeois to prohibit a union with the son. An aristocrat faced with the same situation pursues the traditional policies of her class and thus perpetuates the curse of the past. By transforming the Gothic curse into a pathological function, The House of Raby, like the medical discourse contemporary with it, depicts ‘alliance gone bad’. Male twins are born of this union and towards the end of his first year Arundel, the second son, exhibits symptoms of the mental illness with which he is ‘cursed’ for the rest of his life. Margaret Hastings, having renounced domestic happiness, devotes her time to the study of insanity, and spends her life looking after the brilliant but unstable Arundel, the son of her former lover. She reads up in Pinel and the German alienists, and helps out at a local asylum. Her responsible and useful work stands in marked contrast to the selfish motives of the noble family which her

own family supports through each generation. The years pass and another Margaret Hastings is born. She grows up in her aunt’s company, and imbibes her namesake’s sense of duty, industry and skill in caring for the afflicted. And like her aunt she falls in love with a Raby, developing an ill-fated passion for Arundel, who, notwithstanding his taint, is a noble and progressive landowner who devotes his energy and money to improving the lot of the people on his estates. Like her namesake, young Margaret suppresses her love and devotes her life to a similar course of dutiful renunciation. The love turns out to be reciprocal, but both renounce its physical consummation, and spend their days in a Platonic union. As Arundel declares: I shall be the last of the Rabys. The old name had better die. It stands for something that has passed out of existence . . . If nobility obliges a man to do anything—it obliges me to sacrifice my individual feelings and affections for the good of the community—and to accept the sacrifice . . . We will have no child to ask us, ‘Why was I born to this accursed inheritance? . . . Father! mother! I do not thank you for a life like this! . . . I know not what dreadful deeds I may commit when the demon takes possession of me! Life like this is a disgrace to earth! (iii. 320-1)

With a pathological ‘curse’ the sacrifice demanded no longer involves the pulling down of an ancestral tower and the release of a soul in torment (‘Family Portraits’), the ‘House’ which is pulled down is the tainted lineage of the Raby family itself. Like the tenth-century tower associated with the supernatural curse of the Wartbourgs, the ‘House’ of Raby ‘stands for something that has passed out of existence’—the customs and domestic policies of the aristocracy. As Arundel tells young Margaret: ‘In reality, my nature is inferior to yours. I am precocious, irregular, incomplete,—diseased. You are neither before nor behind your age—regular, complete—normal.—This is the will of God!’ (iii. 22, original emphasis). Arundel inherits the curse of ancestral crime, but is free from the ideological principles from which such a curse originates. His democratic and progressive inclinations instil in him a sense of responsibility, and thus he ends the curse. It is the body which carries the curse, and therefore ‘exorcism’ is achieved through reproductive renunciation. The occasion for the above speech is Arundel’s resolution to adopt Frank Hastings, the narrator, as the heir to the Raby estate. His decision to let the name die is a self-consciously political one, found-

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domestic ideal. Whatever the truth of the situation, the wicked earl’s behaviour has left a legacy of rumour and scandal which blights the happiness of his son. However, what earlier took the form of a supernatural curse is refigured in wholly material terms: in this scientific and rational age, the legacies of ancestral crime are carried in the bodies of descendants. The curse haunting the House of Raby is hereditary insanity.

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ing a progressive dynasty free from the legacy of the past. As Arundel declares, with the lapse of the earldom: The wealth of the Rabys will enrich other houses, and there will be no more of our race . . . God’s will be done . . . I look to you, my boy to found a new race—better fitted to these later times than our old one. . . . May the house of Hastings excel in all honourable things the house of Raby;—then will its last son have succeeded in converting the evil of his own lot into a blessing for the rest of the world. (iii. 323-4)

The (biological) fall of one House means the rise of ‘a new race—better fitted to these later times’. The responsible, industrious, and healthy Hastings are thus rewarded for their self-sacrificing sense of duty. Twice the Hastings are tested and twice they renounce immediate gratification of desire for the greater good. If this is read in Foucauldian terms, it displays a recognition of ‘the menaces of heredity’, and the conversion of the evil of a racism ‘organized for basically conservative ends’, to a ‘dynamic racism, a racism of expansion’ (Foucault, 124, 125). In the fourth generation a Hastings joins the Raby family, but does so by overcoming ‘birth’, the problematic of the narrative. The House of Raby presents a familiar Gothic scenario of ancestral crime, expiation, and renunciation. However, it uses this to focus upon a (predominantly realist) drama of domestic conflict which centres around issues of sexuality (the basis of the two Margarets’ and Arundel’s sacrifices), and shows how the legacies of the past (‘alliance’ and ancestral pride), can survive to blight the happiness of the present generation. ‘Sexuality’ is thus menaced by the spectre of its antithesis, which survives in corrupted form as a pathological pedigree. As in The House of the Seven Gables, the ‘Gothic’ and supernatural aspects of the narrative are lightly handled and largely figurative. They operate on the level of metaphor or analogy. For example, Carleton Castle is twice compared to Udolpho (i. 19; iii. 71), while Arundel’s taint is invariably referred to as his ‘curse’. There is also talk of a haunted east wing. Its ‘ghost’ is reputedly Arundel’s grandmother, the wife of the wicked earl who was imprisoned there for attempting to escape his domestic tyranny. Her ghost haunts the window from which she attempted to make her escape. The events of this legend (which resembles that of the ‘Ghost’s Walk’ in Dickens’s Bleak House), are recounted by a suitably Gothic housekeeper, Old Cuthbert who was in the old earl’s service. The narration occurs when this wing is

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opened up for the first time since the poor woman’s death. Arundel’s mother and the younger Margaret Hastings aged 10, explore the apartments just as twilight descends. Unbeknown to them at the outset, it is the anniversary of the countess’s ill-fated attempt to escape. As Cuthbert narrates the legend in the gathering gloom, Gothic expectations are established. They are fulfilled when a ghostly face appears at that very window. It turns out to be Arundel who manifests his first major outbreak of insanity in this incident. His pale vacant face, which resembles his grandmother’s, staring in at that window on that night understandably encourages the witnesses to imagine it is the apparition. Until they discover their mistake the narrative momentarily admits the possibility of the supernatural. This conflation of the supernatural with the pathological is significant. It shows that the ‘curse’ which follows the wicked deeds of the Gothic grandfather and which give rise to the ghostly legend, now resides in the body of his descendant which is ‘haunted’ by its legacy in a pathological form. In this way, the pathological appropriates the supernatural mechanism of cursed inheritance, while paying a tribute to its earlier discursive provenance in its allusions to Gothic conventions. The situation of the pathological being inserted into the space established by a supernatural mechanism is a common feature of curse narratives from the mid-nineteenth century. It is central to Wilkie Collins’s tale ‘Mad Monkton’, first published in 1855 as ‘The Monktons of Wincot Abbey’. ‘Monkton’ involves both an ancient legend about an old family, and a modern rational discourse on the strain of madness which also haunts the Monkton race. These two interpretations or authorities compete for hermeneutic supremacy in the narrative. But whilst the modern rational explanation appears to be triumphant, the reader is perhaps left with some doubts. It is commonly believed that Alfred Monkton, the last of a great Catholic family, has inherited the taint of insanity which had been in his family for generations; the consequence of some ‘crime committed in past times by two of the Monktons, near relatives’.2 0 Monkton wishes to marry Miss Elmslie, but her guardian refuses his consent on the grounds of the Monkton family taint. When the guardian dies, the lovers prepare for their nuptials. Arrangements for the wedding are suspended, however, by what appears to be an outbreak of the Monkton madness. This takes a most peculiar form, and is reported by the narrator, Monkton’s only friend who is also the son of

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Therefore, whilst it is no longer his ‘madness’ which acts as a bar to matrimony, the prophecy which invokes another form of ancestral curse works to the same effect. If its warnings are ignored it will mean the end of the Monkton race. A by now familiar situation: the present and (reproductive) future is menaced by ancestral legacies which imperil its domestic happiness. However in this case there is an alternative cause or agent of this legacy. The supernatural and psychiatric are conjoined; it is the narrator’s task to separate them. He is responsible for transforming the supernatural into the pathological, Gothic into Realism, and a legend into a ‘case’. As he reasons It was plain that the real hallucination in the case now before me, lay in Monkton’s conviction of the truth of the old prophecy, and in his idea that the fancied apparition was a supernatural warning to him to evade its denunciations. And it was equally clear that both delusions had been produced, in the first instance, by the lonely life he had led, acting on a naturally excitable temperament, which was rendered further liable to moral disease by an hereditary taint of insanity. (71, my emphasis)

In this way a pathological discourse on hereditary insanity helps to explain why a ‘case’ believes in an ancestral prophecy. It is this belief which informs the narrator’s ‘diagnosis’ of Monkton. Monkton’s belief in the legend which threatens the end of his race, and thus his domestic happiness, is used as evidence for, or a ‘symptom’ of, hereditary insanity. Thus a supernatural curse enables, but is at the same time conquered or invalidated by, a clinical discourse which shares its emphasis on ancestry, entailment, and the effects on future generations. But only one version can be allowed authority in the text, as both cannot be true. The two versions of the curse mechanism face each other in epistemological combat.

The outcome depends entirely on discursive or generic criteria. Or, in other words, whether the narrative is to function as a legend or a ‘case’. A further complication is the narrator’s rash promise to help Monkton find his uncle’s corpse. This troubles the narrator, who is very much his father’s son, sharing his sense of (eugenic) responsibility: ‘Supposing that with my help he found Mr Monkton’s body, and took it back with him to England, was it right in me thus to lend myself to promoting the marriage which would most likely follow these events—a marriage which it might be the duty of everyone to prevent at all hazards?’ (71). By going along with one form of ancestral curse—the supernatural one—he is compelled to ignore the claims of another—the belief that Monkton’s acts are the consequence of his inherited insanity. Thus whilst he supports the interests of the latter—the now familiar duty of preventing a union which would perpetuate this taint—he finds himself furthering the cause of its antagonist—the project which validates the supernatural, but which serves to confirm for the narrator the tradition that the Monkton race is mad. At first, the supernatural appears to be in the ascendant. They discover the unburied corpse of Stephen Monkton, and the prophecy appears to be authenticated. Clearly troubled by these occurrences, the narrator refers to these ‘striking coincidences which [appear] to attest’ the truth of the prophecy (100). But fate is against the Monktons, and the ship taking the uncle’s remains to his ancestral vault goes down in a storm. Monkton immediately contracts what is diagnosed as ‘brain fever’, and settles into a decline. A physician who attends him states that ‘He may get the better of the fever, but he has a fixed idea, which never leaves him night or day, which has unsettled his reason, and which will end in killing him . . .’ (101). The supernatural prophecy thus becomes an idée fixe, a concept so popular with nineteenthcentury alienists. Monkton’s fever proves fatal, appearing to confirm the prophecy. But the narrative is reluctant to accept this interpretation, and strives to allow the pathological explanation precedence. Therefore, in the last stage of his illness Monkton loses all memory of the prophecy and of the events in Italy. Pathology thus makes a final bid for dominance over superstition, as Monkton dies of a ‘fever’ rather than a ‘curse’. As Monkton is the only person who believed in the prophecy, his loss of memory enables this suppression. This textual forgetting of the Gothic ‘ancestry’ of the medical model thus allows the

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Miss Elmslie’s guardian. Monkton confides to the narrator that he cannot marry until he has buried his rakish uncle who died in a duel, but whose body lies unburied somewhere near Rome. Monkton is haunted by the ‘phantom’ of this uncle, which reminds him of his duty and never leaves his side. This duty actually conforms to an ancient prophecy or curse associated with the Monktons, that if one of their line remains unburied, then the Monktons will die out with that generation. Monkton believes in the prophecy and its ghostly harbinger, and sets out to restore his uncle’s body to its place in the Monkton’s ancestral vault. He will not marry until he has accomplished this.

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latter to gain epistemological supremacy in the narrative. The rationalistic explanation can only function if the cultural memory of an ancestral curse is wiped from the protagonist’s consciousness and from the text. The tale ends with a visit to the ancestral vault and its ominous empty space: a troubling reminder of the ancient prophecy which the modern discourse on pathological taint has superseded only by appropriating its logic and its consequences. Both Hooper’s and Collins’s texts were mentioned in an article entitled ‘Hereditary Influence, Animal and Human’ appearing in the Westminster Review in 1856. The article, which was republished the following year in the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, was by George Henry Lewes, and took stock of the recent interest in the question of heredity, while reviewing important monographs on this subject. Lewes also observed how the theme of ‘hereditary taint’ had been recently handled in prose fiction. Among the books he mentions are The House of Raby, Constance Herbert, by Geraldine Jewsbury (1855)2 1 and Collins’s ‘Monkton’. But Lewes takes these writers to task, complaining that: ‘artists are not bound to be physiologists, and are assuredly bad law givers in such cases. As artists, they employ their permitted licence in simplifying the problem of insanity to suit their stories . . .’. By implying that ‘the transmission of the malady is inevitable [they] teach questionable doctrine, because they teach it by means of fallacious facts’.2 2 For Lewes finds many reasons to deny that an hereditary taint is ‘certain’ to be transmitted. This was the view of most commentators on the question up until the mid-century, who still stressed the ameliorative benefits of a sound regimen to combat an hereditary taint. Within a few years, however, the trend in mental pathology would move towards a more deterministic model, one which comes closer to the novelist’s more dramatic emphasis. Indeed, the same number of the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology (1857), in which Lewes’s article was reprinted includes Forbes Winslow’s abridgement of B. A. Morel’s Traite des Dégénérescences (1857), the most influential work in establishing a more pessimistic view of transmission and decline.2 3 The following year, S. G. Howe’s On the Causes of Idiocy appeared in a British imprint. And in 1860 Henry Maudsley published his first major article on hereditary insanity, appropriately enough on Edgar Allan Poe, where he expounds for the first time the (scientific) lesson that he would preach for the next forty years: that ‘the sins of the fathers [are]

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visited on the children unto the third and fourth generation’.2 4 These influential writers, to varying degrees, stress the accumulative effects of ancestral vice or disease, and the stern law of their entailment. If the Gothic fictions of Hooper, Jewsbury, and Collins ‘transcend[ed] the limits of art’ (Lewes, 400) they also anticipated the current of medical thought.

Notes 1. Punter, The Literature of Terror (London: Longman, 1980), 52. 2. Eyries, Tales of the Dead: The Ghost Stories of the Villa Diodati, trans. Terry Hale (Chislehurst: Gothic Society, 1992), 20. 3. I have encountered only two tales of family curses in which the conditions of the curse are not met to the letter, Stephen Cullen’s The Castle of Inchvally (1796) and Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), and in both the supposed portents turn out to be hoaxes. 4. For the reasons enumerated, ancestral portraits often appear in tales involving family curses. In The Castle of Otranto Manfred is haunted by the resemblance between Theodore and his ancestor Alfonso; in Dickens’s Bleak House (1853-4), which includes the curse of the ‘Ghost’s Walk’, Guppy detects the resemblance between Lady Dedlock and Esther Summerson when he encounters her portrait. Ancestral portraits also feature in late 19th-cent. works featuring family curses, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Ollala’ (1885), Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), chs. 34 and 35, and Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). How writers developed this theme in late-Victorian Gothic will be discussed in the next chapter. On the motif of the ‘haunted portrait’ see Theodore Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); see also Maria M. Tartat, ‘The Houses of Fiction: Toward a Definition of the Uncanny’, Comparative Literature, 33 (1981), 167-82. 5. Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, ed. Milton R. Stern (New York: Penguin, 1986), 8. 6. On Hawthorne’s Gothic ‘repetitions’ in this text see Eugenia C. Delamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 113-14. 7. On how Hawthorne’s text compares with, and departs from Otranto see Ronald T. Curran, ‘“Yankee Gothic”: Hawthorne’s “Castle of Pyncheon”’, Studies in the Novel, 8 (1976), 69-80; on Hawthorne and the Gothic tradition see Jane Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Tradition of Gothic Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946). 8. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 15001800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 29, 28-9. See also Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality, trans. Richard Southern (1976; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1-33. 9. On Hawthorne’s combination of the Gothic and the scientific in his depiction of the ‘atmosphere’ of the House of the Seven Gables see Jonathan Arac, Com-

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Ph.D. thesis (University of California at San Francisco, 1973); Ian Dowbiggin, ‘Degeneration and Hereditarianism in French Medicine 1840-90: Psychiatric Theory as Ideological Adaption’, in William F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds.), The Anatomy of Madness, vol. i (London: Routledge, 1988), 185-229; Otis, Organic Memory, 49-53. For the best survey of degenerationist thought see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For developments in Victorian psychiatry and the emergence of ‘positivist’ and hereditarian emphases, see Vieda Skultans, Madness and Morals: Ideas on Insanity in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1975); Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

10. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, ed. Richard H. Brodhead (New York: Penguin, 1990), 3. 11. On this and other aspects of ‘Aristocratic Ideology’, its tensions and erosion, and its relationship to the emergence of the novel, see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1988), 131-75. 12. Burrows, Commentaries on the Causes, Forms, Symptoms, and Treatment, Moral and Medical of Insanity (London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1828), 104. 13. Belinaye, The Sources of Health and Disease in Communities; or, Elementary Views of Hygiene (London: Treuttel & Würtz & Richter, 1832), 66. 14. On how ‘Degeneration makes heredity visible’ see Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 60. 15. Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley originally as The History of Sexuality: An Introduction as vol i of his proposed four part study (1979; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 124. 16. Miles, Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy (London: Routledge, 1993), 15. 17. Howe, ‘Supplement to Report on Idiocy’, Report Made to the Legislature of Massachusetts, Upon Idiocy (Boston: Collidge & Wiley, 1848), 56-7; republished as On the Causes of Idiocy (Edinburgh: Maclachlan & Stewart, 1858). 18. [Hooper], The House of Raby: Or, Our Lady of Darkness, 3 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1854), i. 145. The novel was published anonymously, and reissued in 1874 in a slightly revised form in one volume under Mrs Hooper’s name.

24. Maudsley, ‘Edgar Allan Poe’, Journal of Mental Science, 6 (1859-60), 328-69, 340. Maudsley’s article offers intriguing possibilities for exploring the relationship between fictional and medical discourses with regard to the theme of hereditary taint. It is self-consciously ‘literary’, and evokes the authority of Nathaniel Hawthorne on how ‘The weaknesses and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral diseases which lead to crime, are handed down from one generation to another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been able to establish’, ibid. 341. However, Hawthorne’s narrator from Seven Gables had only ‘implied’ this, whilst for Maudsley it had become a fact.

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19. Compare with Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1848), and Hardy’s The Well-Beloved (1892), other ‘generational’ narratives. On fiction as repetition in these and other texts see J. Hillis Miller’s Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982).

SOURCE: Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny, by Sigmund Freud, translated by David McLintock, pp. 123-62. New York: Penguin, 2003. In the following excerpt from an essay first published in Imago in 1919 as “Das Unheimlich” and considered the quintessential work on the subject of the uncanny, Freud defines the uncanny, provides examples of how it is exemplified in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman,” and explains how the uncanny functions within the context of human psychology.

20. Collins, ‘Mad Monkton’, in Mad Monkton and Other Tales, ed. Norman Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 39. On Collins and psychiatry see Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of the Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988). 21. Jewsbury’s novel shares similarities with both Hooper’s and Collins’s. Like Raby it is ‘generational’, showing how the ‘eugenic’ mistakes of one generation live on into the next; like ‘Monkton’, an hereditary taint of insanity is complicated by a pre-existing curse for sacrilege. Geraldine Jewsbury, Constance Herbert, 3 vols. (London: Hirst & Blackett, 1855). 22. Lewes, ‘Hereditary Influence, Animal and Human’, Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, 10 (1857), 384-402, 400. 23. On the importance of Morel’s work see Ruth Friedlander, ‘Benedict-Augustin Morel and the Development of the Theory of Dégénérescence (the Introduction of Anthropology into Psychology)’, unpublished

II If we now go on to review the persons and things, the impressions, processes and situations that can arouse an especially strong and distinct sense of the uncanny in us, we must clearly choose an appropriate example to start with. E. Jentsch singles out, as an excellent case, ‘doubt as to whether an apparently animate object really is alive and, conversely, whether a lifeless object might not perhaps be animate’. In this connection he refers to the impressions made on us by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls

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missioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville and Hawthorne (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 97-103.

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and automata. To these he adds the uncanny effect produced by epileptic fits and the manifestations of insanity, because these arouse in the onlooker vague notions of automatic—mechanical—processes that may lie hidden behind the familiar image of a living person. Now, while not wholly convinced by the author’s arguments, we will take them as a starting point for our own investigation, because he goes on to remind us of one writer who was more successful than any other at creating uncanny effects.

deny that any such person existed, except as a figure of speech, but a nursemaid was able to give him more tangible information: ‘He is a bad man who comes to children when they won’t go to bed and throws a handful of sand in their eyes, so that their eyes jump out of their heads, all bleeding. He then throws their eyes in his bag and takes them off to the half-moon as food for his children. These children sit up there in their nest; they have hooked beaks like owls, and use them to peck up the eyes of the naughty little boys and girls.’

‘One of the surest devices for producing slightly uncanny effects through story-telling,’ writes Jentsch, ‘is to leave the reader wondering whether a particular figure is a real person or an automaton, and to do so in such a way that his attention is not focused directly on the uncertainty, lest he should be prompted to examine and settle the matter at once, for in this way, as we have said, the special emotional effect can easily be dissipated. E. T. A. Hoffmann often employed this psychological manoeuvre with success in his imaginative writings.’

Although little Nathaniel was old and sensible enough to dismiss such grisly details about the Sand-Man, fear of this figure took root even in him. He resolved to find out what the Sand-Man looked like, and one evening, when another visitation was due, he hid in his father’s study. He recognized the visitor as a lawyer named Coppelius, a repulsive person of whom the children were afraid when he occasionally came to lunch. He now identified Coppelius with the dreaded SandMan. In the remainder of this scene the author leaves us in doubt as to whether we are dealing with the initial delirium of the panic-stricken boy or an account of events that must be taken as real within the world represented in the tale. The boy’s father and the visitor busy themselves at a brazier that emits glowing flames. Hearing Coppelius shout ‘Eyes here! eyes here!’ the little eavesdropper lets out a scream and reveals his presence. Coppelius seizes him and is about to drop red-hot grains of coal in his eyes and then throw these into the brazier. The father begs him to spare his son’s eyes. This experience ends with the boy falling into a deep swoon, followed by a long illness. Whoever favours a rationalistic interpretation of the Sand-Man is bound to ascribe the child’s fantasy to the continuing influence of the nursemaid’s account. Instead of grains of sand, red-hot grains of coal are to be thrown into the child’s eyes, but in either case the purpose is to make them jump out of his head. A year later, during another visit by the Sand-Man, the father is killed by an explosion in his study, and the lawyer Coppelius disappears from the town without trace.

This observation, which is undoubtedly correct, refers in particular to Hoffmann’s story ‘The Sand-Man’, one of the ‘Night Pieces’ (vol. 3 of Hoffmann’s Gesammelte Werke in Grisebach’s edition), from which the doll Olimpia found her way into the first act of Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann. I must say, however—and I hope that most readers of the story will agree with me—that the motif of the seemingly animate doll Olimpia is by no means the only one responsible for the incomparably uncanny effect of the story, or even the one to which it is principally due. Nor is this effect enhanced by the fact that the author himself gives the Olimpia episode a slightly satirical twist using it to make fun of the young man’s overvaluation of love. Rather, it is another motif that is central to the tale, the one that gives it its name and is repeatedly emphasized at crucial points—the motif of the Sand-Man, who tears out children’s eyes. A student named Nathaniel, with whose childhood memories this fantastic tale opens, is unable, for all his present happiness, to banish certain memories connected with the mysterious and terrifying death of his much-loved father. On certain evenings his mother would send the children to bed early with the warning ‘The SandMan is coming.’ And sure enough, on each such occasion the boy would hear the heavy tread of a visitor, with whom his father would then spend the whole evening. It is true that, when asked about the Sand-Man, the boy’s mother would

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Later, as a student, Nathaniel thinks he recognizes this fearful figure from his childhood in the person of Giuseppe Coppola, an itinerant Italian optician who hawks weather-glasses in the university town. When Nathaniel declines to buy one, Coppola says, ‘So, no weather-glass, no weatherglass! I’ve got lovely eyes too, lovely eyes.’ Nathaniel is at first terrified, but his terror is allayed when the eyes he is offered turn out to be harmless spectacles. He buys a pocket spyglass

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Having recovered from a long, serious illness, Nathaniel at last seems to be cured. He finds his fiancée again and plans to marry her. One day they are out walking in the town with her brother. The tall tower of the town hall casts a huge shadow over the market-place. Clara suggests that they go up the tower together while her brother remains below. At the top, her attention is drawn to the curious sight of something moving along the street. Nathaniel examines this through Coppola’s spyglass, which he finds in his pocket. Again he is seized by madness and, uttering the words ‘Wooden doll, spin round’, he tries to cast the girl down from the tower. Her brother, hearing her screams, comes to her rescue and quickly escorts her to the ground. Up above, the madman runs around shouting out ‘Ring of fire, spin round’—words whose origin is already familiar to us. Conspicuous among the people gathering below is the lawyer Coppelius, who has suddenly reappeared. We may assume that it was the sight of his approach that brought on Nathaniel’s fit of madness. Some of the crowd want to go up the tower and overpower the madman, but Coppelius says laughingly: ‘Just wait. He’ll come down by himself.’ Nathaniel suddenly stands still, catches sight of Coppelius and, with a cry of ‘Yes! Lovely eyes—lovely eyes’, throws himself over the parapet. Moments later he is lying on the pavement, his head shattered, and the Sand-Man has vanished in the milling crowd.

This brief summary will probably make it clear beyond doubt that in Hoffmann’s tale the sense of the uncanny attaches directly to the figure of the Sand-Man, and therefore to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes—and that intellectual uncertainty, as Jentsch understands it, has nothing to do with this effect. Uncertainty as to whether an object is animate or inanimate, which we were bound to acknowledge in the case of the doll Olimpia, is quite irrelevant in the case of this more potent example of the uncanny. It is true that the author initially creates a kind of uncertainty by preventing us—certainly not unintentionally— from guessing whether he is going to take us into the real world or into some fantastic world of his own choosing. He is of course entitled to do either, and if he chooses, for instance, to set the action in a world in which spirits, demons and ghosts play a part, as Shakespeare does in Hamlet, Macbeth and Julius Caesar and, rather differently, in The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we must yield to his choice and treat his posited world as if it were real for as long as we submit to his spell. But in the course of Hoffmann’s tale this uncertainty disappears; it becomes clear that the author wants us too to look through the spectacles or the spyglass of the demon optician, and even, perhaps, that he has looked through such an instrument himself. For, after all, the conclusion of the tale makes it clear that the optician Coppola really is the lawyer Coppelius1 and so also the Sand-Man. There is no longer any question of ‘intellectual uncertainty’: we know now that what we are presented with are not figments of a madman’s imagination, behind which we, with our superior rationality, can recognize the sober truth—yet this clear knowledge in no way diminishes the impression of the uncanny. The notion of intellectual uncertainty in no way helps us to understand this uncanny effect. On the other hand, psychoanalytic experience reminds us that some children have a terrible fear of damaging or losing their eyes. Many retain this anxiety into adult life and fear no physical injury so much as one to the eye. And there is a common saying that one will ‘guard something like the apple of one’s eye’. The study of dreams, fantasies and myths has taught us also that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is quite often a substitute for the fear of castration. When the mythical criminal Oedipus blinds himself, this is merely a mitigated form of the penalty of castration, the only one that befits him according to the lex talionis. Taking up a rationalis-

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from Coppola and uses it to look into the house of Professor Spalanzani, on the other side of the street, where he catches sight of Olimpia, the professor’s beautiful, but strangely silent and motionless daughter. He soon falls so madly in love with her that he forgets his wise and levelheaded fiancée, Clara. But Olimpia is an automaton, for which Spalanzini has made the clockwork and in which Coppola—the Sand-Man—has set the eyes. The student comes upon the two quarrelling over their handiwork. The optician has carried off the eyeless wooden doll; the mechanic, Spalanzani, picks up Olimpia’s bleeding eyes from the floor and throws them at Nathaniel, from whom he says Coppola has stolen them. Nathaniel is seized by a fresh access of madness. In his delirium the memory of his father’s death is compounded with this new impression: ‘Hurry— hurry—hurry!—ring of fire—ring of fire! Spin round, ring of fire—quick—quick! Wooden doll, hurry, lovely wooden doll, spin round—’. Whereupon he hurls himself at the professor, Olimpia’s supposed father, and tries to strangle him.

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tic stance, one may seek to reject the idea that the fear of damaging the eyes can be traced back to the fear of castration; one finds it understandable that so precious an organ as the eye should be guarded by a commensurate anxiety. Indeed, one can go further and claim that no deeper mystery and no other significance lie behind the fear of castration. Yet this does not account for the substitutive relation between the eye and the male member that is manifested in dreams, fantasies and myths; nor can it counter the impression that a particularly strong and obscure emotion is aroused by the threat of losing the sexual organ, and that it is this emotion that first gives such resonance to the idea of losing other organs. Any remaining doubt vanishes once one has learnt the details of the ‘castration complex’ from analyses of neurotic patients and realized what an immense part it plays in their mental life. Moreover, I would not advise any opponent of the psychoanalytic view to appeal to Hoffmann’s story of the Sand-Man in support of the contention that fear for the eyes is something independent of the castration complex. For why is this fear for the eyes so closely linked here with the death of the father? Why does the Sand-Man always appear as a disruptor of love? He estranges the unfortunate student from his fiancée, and from her brother, his best friend; he destroys the second object of his love, the beautiful doll Olimpia, and even drives him to suicide just when he has won back his fiancée and the two are about to be happily united. These and many other features of the tale appear arbitrary and meaningless if one rejects the relation between fear for the eyes and fear of castration, but they become meaningful as soon as the Sand-Man is replaced by the dreaded father, at whose hands castration is expected.2 We would therefore venture to trace back the uncanny element in the Sand-Man to the anxiety caused by the infantile castration complex. Yet as soon as we conceive the idea of ascribing the emergence of the sense of the uncanny to an infantile factor such as this, we cannot help trying to derive other examples of the uncanny from the same source. ‘The Sand-Man’ also contains the motif of the apparently animate doll, which was singled out by Jentsch. According to him we have particularly favourable conditions for generating feelings of the uncanny if intellectual uncertainty is aroused as to whether something is animate or inanimate, and whether the lifeless bears an excessive likeness to the living. With dolls, of course, we are not far from the world of childhood. We recall that children, in their early games, make no

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sharp distinction between the animate and the inanimate, and that they are especially fond of treating their dolls as if they were alive. Indeed, one occasionally hears a woman patient tell how, at the age of eight, she was still convinced that her dolls were bound to come to life if she looked at them in a certain way, as intently as possible. Here too, then, the infantile factor is easily demonstrated. But, oddly enough, ‘The Sand-Man’ involved the evocation of an old childhood fear, whereas there is no question of fear in the case of a living doll: children are not afraid of their dolls coming to life—they may even want them to. Here, then, the sense of the uncanny would derive not from an infantile fear, but from an infantile wish, or simply from an infantile belief. This sounds like a contradiction, but possibly it is just a complication, which may further our understanding later on. E. T. A. Hoffmann is the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature. His novel Die Elexiere des Teufels [The Elixirs of the Devil] presents a whole complex of motifs to which one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the story. The content is too rich and intricate for us to venture upon a summary. At the end of the book, when the reader finally learns of the presuppositions, hitherto withheld, which underlie the plot, this leads not to his enlightenment, but to his utter bewilderment. The author has piled up too much homogeneous material, and this is detrimental, not to the impression made by the whole, but to its intelligibility. One must content oneself with selecting the most prominent of those motifs that produce an uncanny effect, and see whether they too can reasonably be traced back to infantile sources. They involve the idea of the ‘double’ (the Doppelgänger), in all its nuances and manifestations—that is to say, the appearance of persons who have to be regarded as identical because they look alike. This relationship is intensified by the spontaneous transmission of mental processes from one of these persons to the other—what we would call telepathy—so that the one becomes co-owner of the other’s knowledge, emotions and experience. Moreover, a person may identify himself with another and so become unsure of his true self; or he may substitute the other’s self for his own. The self may thus be duplicated, divided and interchanged. Finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing, the repetition of the same facial features, the same characters, the same destinies, the same misdeeds, even the same names, through successive generations.

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The concept of the double need not disappear along with this primitive narcissism: it may acquire a new content from later stages in the evolution of the ego. By slow degrees a special authority takes shape within the ego; this authority, which is able to confront the rest of the ego, performs the function of self-observation and selfcriticism, exercises a kind of psychical censorship, and so becomes what we know as the ‘conscience’. In the pathological case of delusions of observation it becomes isolated, split off from the ego, and discernible to the clinician. The existence of such an authority, which can treat the rest of the ego as an object—the fact that, in other words, man is capable of self-observation—makes it possible to imbue the old idea of the double with a new content and attribute a number of features to it—above all, those which, in the light of selfcriticism, seem to belong to the old, superannuated narcissism of primitive times.4 Yet it is not only this content—which is objectionable to self-criticism—that can be embodied in the figure of the double: in addition there are all the possibilities which, had they been realized, might have shaped our destiny, and to which our imagination still clings, all the strivings of the ego that were frustrated by adverse circumstances, all the suppressed acts of volition that fostered the illusion of free will.5 However, after considering the manifest motivation behind the figure of the double, we have

to own that none of this helps us understand the extraordinary degree of uncanniness that attaches to it, and we may add, drawing upon our knowledge of pathological mental processes, that none of this content could explain the defensive urge that ejects it from the ego as something alien. Its uncanny quality can surely derive only from the fact that the double is a creation that belongs to a primitive phase in our mental development, a phase that we have surmounted, in which it admittedly had a more benign significance. The double has become an object of terror, just as the gods become demons after the collapse of their cult—a theme that Heine treats in ‘Die Götter im Exil’ [‘The Gods in Exile’]. The other disturbances of the ego that Hoffmann exploits in his writings are easy to judge in accordance with the pattern set by the motif of the double. They involve a harking back to single phases in the evolution of the sense of self, a regression to times when the ego had not yet clearly set itself off against the world outside and from others. I believe that these motifs are partly responsible for the impression of the uncanny, though it is not easy to isolate and specify the share they have in it. The factor of the repetition of the same thing will perhaps not be acknowledged by everyone as a source of the sense of the uncanny. According to my own observations it undoubtedly evokes such a feeling under particular conditions, and in combination with particular circumstances—a feeling, moreover, that recalls the helplessness we experience in certain dream-states. Strolling one hot summer afternoon through the empty and to me unfamiliar streets of a small Italian town, I found myself in a district about whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Only heavily made-up women were to be seen at the windows of the little houses, and I hastily left the narrow street at the next turning. However, after wandering about for some time without asking the way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence began to attract attention. Once more I hurried away, only to return there again by a different route. I was now seized by a feeling that I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad to find my way back to the piazza that I had recently left and refrain from any further voyages of discovery. Other situations that share this feature of the unintentional return with the one I have just described, but differ from it in other respects, may nevertheless produce the same feeling of helplessness, the same sense of the uncanny. One may, for instance, have lost one’s way in the

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The motif of the double has been treated in detail in a study by O. Rank.3 This work explores the connections that link the double with mirrorimages, shadows, guardian spirits, the doctrine of the soul and the fear of death. It also throws a good deal of light on the surprising evolution of the motif itself. The double was originally an insurance against the extinction of the self or, as Rank puts it, ‘an energetic denial of the power of death’, and it seems likely that the ‘immortal’ soul was the first double of the body. The invention of such doubling as a defence against annihilation has a counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of expressing the idea of castration by duplicating or multiplying the genital symbol. In the civilization of ancient Egypt, it became a spur to artists to form images of the dead in durable materials. But these ideas arose on the soil of boundless self-love, the primordial narcissism that dominates the mental life of both the child and primitive man, and when this phase is surmounted, the meaning of the ‘double’ changes: having once been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.

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woods, perhaps after being overtaken by fog, and, despite all one’s efforts to find a marked or familiar path, one comes back again and again to the same spot, which one recognizes by a particular physical feature. Or one may be groping around in the dark in an unfamiliar room, searching for the door or the light-switch and repeatedly colliding with the same piece of furniture—a situation that Mark Twain has transformed, admittedly by means of grotesque exaggeration, into something irresistibly comic.

compulsion probably depends on the essential nature of the drives themselves. It is strong enough to override the pleasure principle and lend a demonic character to certain aspects of mental life; it is still clearly manifest in the impulses of small children and dominates part of the course taken by the psychoanalysis of victims of neurosis. The foregoing discussions have all prepared us for the fact that anything that can remind us of this inner compulsion to repeat is perceived as uncanny.

In another set of experiences we have no difficulty in recognizing that it is only the factor of unintended repetition that transforms what would otherwise seem quite harmless into something uncanny and forces us to entertain the idea of the fateful and the inescapable, when we should normally speak of ‘chance’. There is certainly nothing remarkable, for instance, about depositing a garment in a cloakroom and being given a ticket with a certain number on it—say 62—or about finding that the cabin one has been allocated bears this number. But the impression changes if these two events, of no consequence in themselves, come close together, so that one encounters the number 62 several times in one day, and if one then observes that everything involving a number—addresses, hotel rooms, railway carriages, etc.—invariably has the same one, at least as part of the whole. We find this ‘uncanny’, and anyone who is not steeled against the lure of superstition will be inclined to accord a secret significance to the persistent recurrence of this one number—to see it, for instance, as a pointer to his allotted life-span. Or suppose one is occupied with the writings of E[wald] Hering,6 the great physiologist, and that within the space of a few days one receives letters from two people named Hering, posted in different countries, although one has had no previous dealings with anyone of that name. An ingenious scientist has recently sought to show that such occurrences are subject to certain laws—which would necessarily remove the impression of the uncanny. I will not venture to pronounce on whether he has succeeded.7

But now, I think, it is time to turn away from these relationships, which are in any case difficult to pass judgement on, and seek out unequivocal cases of the uncanny, which may be expected, once analysed, to determine the validity of our hypothesis once and for all.

How the uncanny element in the recurrence of the same thing can be derived from infantile psychology is a question that I can only touch upon here; I must therefore refer the reader to another study, now awaiting publication, which treats the subject in detail, but in a different context. In the unconscious mind we can recognize the dominance of a compulsion to repeat, which proceeds from instinctual impulses. This

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In Schiller’s poem Der Ring des Polykrates (‘The Ring of Polykrates’) the guest turns away in horror because he sees his friend’s every wish instantly fulfilled and his every care at once removed by fate. His host has become ‘uncanny’. The reason he himself gives—that whoever is excessively fortunate must fear the envy of the gods—still seems obscure to us, its meaning being veiled in mythology. So let us take an example from a much simpler setting. In the case history of a patient suffering from obsessional neurosis8 I recorded that he had once visited a hydropathic institution and found that his health improved greatly. However, he was sensible enough to attribute this improvement not to the healing properties of the water, but to the location of his room, which was next to the office of a very kind nurse. So, on returning for a second visit, he asked for the same room, only to be told that it was already occupied by an old gentleman. Whereupon he gave vent to his annoyance with the words, ‘Then he should be struck dead!’ A fortnight later the old gentleman did suffer a stroke. My patient found this an ‘uncanny’ experience. The impression of the uncanny would have been even stronger if a much shorter interval had elapsed between his uttering the words and the untoward event that followed, or if he had been able to report numerous similar experiences. In fact, he was never at a loss for such corroboration. Indeed, not only this patient, but every obsessional neurotic I have studied, could tell similar stories about themselves. They were not at all surprised when, perhaps after a long interval, they ran into someone about whom they had only just been thinking. They would regularly get a letter by the morning post from a friend of whom they had said, only the night before, ‘He’s not been heard of for ages.’ In

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One of the uncanniest and most widespread superstitions is fear of the ‘evil eye’, which has been thoroughly investigated by the Hamburg oculist S. Seligmann.9 It appears that the source of this fear has never been in doubt. Anyone who possesses something precious, but fragile, is afraid of the envy of others, to the extent that he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place. Such emotions are betrayed by looks,1 0 even if they are denied verbal expression, and when a person is prominent owing to certain striking characteristics, especially if these are of an undesirable kind, people are ready to believe that his envy will reach a particular intensity and then convert this intensity into effective action. What is feared is thus a covert intention to harm, and on the strength of certain indications it is assumed that this intention can command the necessary force. These last examples of the uncanny depend on the principle that I have called ‘the omnipotence of thoughts’, a term suggested to me by a patient. We can no longer be in any doubt about where we now stand. The analysis of cases of the uncanny has led us back to the old animistic view of the universe, a view characterized by the idea that the world was peopled with human spirits, by the narcissistic overrating of one’s own mental processes, by the omnipotence of thoughts and the technique of magic that relied on it, by the attribution of carefully graded magical powers (mana) to alien persons and things, and by all the inventions with which the unbounded narcissism of that period of development sought to defend itself against the unmistakable sanctions of reality. It appears that we have all, in the course of our individual development, been through a phase corresponding to the animistic phase in the development of primitive peoples, that this phase did not pass without leaving behind in us residual traces that can still make themselves felt, and that everything we now find ‘uncanny’ meets the criterion that it is linked with these remnants of animistic mental activity and prompts them to express themselves.1 1 This is now an appropriate point at which to introduce two observations in which I should like to set down the essential content of this short study. In the first place, if psychoanalytic theory is right in asserting that every affect arising from an

emotional impulse—of whatever kind—is converted into fear by being repressed, it follows that among those things that are felt to be frightening there must be one group in which it can be shown that the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns. This species of the frightening would then constitute the uncanny, and it would be immaterial whether it was itself originally frightening or arose from another affect. In the second place, if this really is the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why German usage allows the familiar (das Heimliche, the ‘homely’) to switch to its opposite, the uncanny (das Unheimliche, the ‘unhomely’) (p. 134), for this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed. The link with repression now illuminates Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as ‘something that should have remained hidden and has come into the open’. It now only remains for us to test the insight we have arrived at by trying to explain some other instances of the uncanny. To many people the acme of the uncanny is represented by anything to do with death, dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts. Indeed, we have heard that in some modern languages the German phrase ein unheimliches Haus [‘an uncanny house’] can be rendered only by the periphrasis ‘a haunted house’. We might in fact have begun our investigation with this example of the uncanny— perhaps the most potent—but we did not do so because here the uncanny is too much mixed up with the gruesome and partly overlaid by it. Yet in hardly any other sphere has our thinking and feeling changed so little since primitive times or the old been so well preserved, under a thin veneer, as in our relation to death. Two factors account for this lack of movement: the strength of our original emotional reactions and the uncertainty of our scientific knowledge. Biology has so far been unable to decide whether death is the necessary fate of every living creature or simply a regular, but perhaps avoidable, contingency within life itself. It is true that in textbooks on logic the statement that ‘all men must die’ passes for an exemplary general proposition, but it is obvious to no one; our unconscious is still as unreceptive as ever to the idea of our own mortality. Religions continue to dispute the significance of the undeniable fact of individual death and to posit an afterlife. The state authorities think they cannot sustain moral order among the living if they abandon the notion that life on earth will be ‘corrected’ by a bet-

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particular, accidents and deaths rarely happened without having flitted through their minds a short while before. They would describe this phenomenon in the most modest terms, claiming to have ‘presentiments’ that ‘usually’ came true.

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939) AND “THE UNCANNY”

Freud is considered one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century for his development of the theories and methodologies of psychoanalysis. Central to his theory is the concept of the unconscious, which he describes as a primitive region of the psyche containing emotions, memories, and drives that are hidden from and repressed by the conscious mind. Freud’s formulation of a method for retrieving and analyzing repressed psychic material established psychoanalysis as an indispensable form of therapy in treating neurotic disorders, many of which were first identified by Freud and his followers. Freud has also exerted a profound influence on the broader culture of the twentieth century, inspiring artists, writers, critics, and filmmakers. Many of the psychoanalytic terms that Freud coined, such as “narcissism,” “repression,” and “transference,” have entered the vernacular of several languages. Despite the widespread application of the principles of psychoanalysis in the field of psychology, Freud’s writings continue to ignite controversy in such diverse disciplines as feminist literary theory, linguistics, and hermeneutics. In his essay “The Uncanny” (1919)—first published in Imago as “Das Unheimliche”— Freud considers literature in a discussion of the effects of the fantastic. He analyzes E. T. A. Hoffman’s story “The Sandman” as a means of elucidating the idea of the uncanny, and particularly the theme of the doppelgänger, or double, as an aspect of the uncanny in literature. Freud posits animism, omnipotence of thought, regression, unintended repetition, and childhood castration anxieties as the psychological sources of the sense of the unreal, and concludes with a summary of the subjective experience of the uncanny as a revisiting of childhood experiences and associations, and the temporary resurgence of primitive explanatory beliefs in the face of the seemingly inexplicable.

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ter life hereafter. Placards in our big cities advertise lectures that are meant to instruct us in how to make contact with the souls of the departed, and there is no denying that some of the finest minds and sharpest thinkers among our men of science have concluded, especially towards the end of their own lives, that there is ample opportunity for such contact. Since nearly all of us still think no differently from savages on this subject, it is not surprising that the primitive fear of the dead is still so potent in us and ready to manifest itself if given any encouragement. Moreover, it is probably still informed by the old idea that whoever dies becomes the enemy of the survivor, intent upon carrying him off with him to share his new existence. Given this unchanging attitude to death, one might ask what has become of repression, which is necessary if the primitive is to return as something uncanny. But it is there too: so-called educated people have officially ceased to believe that the dead can become visible as spirits, such appearances being linked to remote conditions that are seldom realized, and their emotional attitude to the dead, once highly ambiguous and ambivalent, has been toned down, in the higher reaches of mental life, to an unambiguous feeling of piety.1 2 Only a few remarks need now be added to complete the picture, for, having considered animism, magic, sorcery, the omnipotence of thoughts, unintended repetition and the castration complex, we have covered virtually all the factors that turn the frightening into the uncanny. We can also call a living person uncanny, that is to say, when we credit him with evil intent. But this alone is not enough: it must be added that this intent to harm us is realized with the help of special powers. A good example of this is the gettatore,1 3 the uncanny figure of Romance superstition, whom Albrecht Schaeffer, in his novel Josef Montfort, has turned into an attractive figure by employing poetic intuition and profound psychoanalytic understanding. Yet with these secret powers we are back once more in the realm of animism. In Goethe’s Faust, the pious Gretchen’s intuition that Mephisto has such hidden powers is what makes him seem so uncanny: Sie fühlt, dass ich ganz sicher ein Genie, Vielleicht wohl gar der Teufel bin. [She feels that I am quite certainly a genius, perhaps indeed the very Devil.]

The uncanny effect of epilepsy or madness has the same origin. Here the layman sees a manifestation of forces that he did not suspect in a fellow

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Severed limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm (as in a fairy tale by Hauff), feet that dance by themselves (as in the novel by A. Schaeffer mentioned above)—all of these have something highly uncanny about them, especially when they are credited, as in the last instance, with independent activity. We already know that this species of the uncanny stems from its proximity to the castration complex. Some would award the crown of the uncanny to the idea of being buried alive, only apparently dead. However, psychoanalysis has taught us that this terrifying fantasy is merely a variant of another, which was originally not at all frightening, but relied on a certain lasciviousness; this was the fantasy of living in the womb. Let us add something of a general nature, which is, strictly speaking, already contained in what we have previously said about animism and the superannuated workings of our mental apparatus, but seems to call for special emphasis. This is the fact that an uncanny effect often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred, when we are faced with the reality of something that we have until now considered imaginary, when a symbol takes on the full function and significance of what it symbolizes, and so forth. This is at the root of much that is uncanny about magical practices. The infantile element about this, which also dominates the mental life of neurotics, is the excessive stress that is laid on psychical reality, as opposed to material reality—a feature that is close to the omnipotence of thoughts. During the isolation of the Great War, I came across a number of the English Strand Magazine. In it, among a number of fairly pointless contributions, I read a story about a young couple who move into a furnished flat in which there is a curiously shaped table with crocodiles carved in the wood. Towards evening the flat is regularly pervaded by an unbearable and highly characteristic smell, and in the dark the tenants

stumble over things and fancy they see something undefinable gliding over the stairs. In short, one is led to surmise that, owing to the presence of this table, the house is haunted by ghostly crocodiles or that the wooden monsters come to life in the dark, or something of the sort. It was a quite naïve story, but its effect was extraordinarily uncanny. To conclude this collection of examples, which is certainly not exhaustive, I will mention an experience culled from psychoanalytic work, which, unless it rests on pure coincidence, supplies the most pleasing confirmation of our conception of the uncanny. It often happens that neurotic men state that to them there is something uncanny about the female genitals. But what they find uncanny [‘unhomely’] is actually the entrance to man’s old ‘home’, the place where everyone once lived. A jocular saying has it that ‘love is a longing for home’, and if someone dreams of a certain place or a certain landscape and, while dreaming, thinks to himself, ‘I know this place, I’ve been here before’, this place can be interpreted as representing his mother’s genitals or her womb. Here too, then, the uncanny [the ‘unhomely’] is what was once familiar [‘homely’, ‘homey’]. The negative prefix un- is the indicator of repression.

Notes 1. On the derivation of the name, pointed out by Frau Dr Rank: coppella ⫽ ‘assay-crucible’ (the chemical operations during which the father meets his death); coppo ⫽ ‘eye-socket’. [In the first edition of 1919 this note occurs where it does now, but in subsequent German editions (except the students’ edition) it appears, no doubt erroneously, after the second mention of the name Coppelius in the previous paragraph.] 2. In fact, the writer’s imaginative handling of his material has not thrown the constituent elements into such wild confusion that their original arrangement cannot be reconstructed. In the story of Nathaniel’s childhood, his father and Coppelius represent the fatherimago, which, owing to its ambivalence, is split into two opposing parts; the one threatens him with blinding (castration), while the other, the good father, successfully intercedes for his sight. The piece of the complex that is most subject to repression, the deathwish directed against the bad father, finds expression in the death of the good father, for which Coppelius bears the blame. In Nathaniel’s later life as a student, this pair of fathers is represented by Professor Spalanzani and the optician Coppola. The professor himself belongs to the father-series, while Coppola is seen as identical with the lawyer Coppelius. They once worked together at the mysterious brazier; now they have collaborated in constructing the doll Olimpia; the professor is also called her father. This twofold collaboration reveals them as two parts of the fatherimago, which means that both the mechanic and the optician are the fathers not only of Olimpia, but of Nathaniel too. In the frightening childhood scene Coppelius, after refraining from blinding the boy, had

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human being, but whose stirrings he can dimly perceive in remote corners of his own personality. The Middle Ages attributed all these manifestations of sickness consistently, and psychologically almost correctly, to the influence of demons. Indeed, it would not surprise me to hear that psychoanalysis, which seeks to uncover these secret forces, had for this reason itself come to seem uncanny to many people. In one case, when I had succeeded—though not very quickly—in restoring a girl to health after many years of sickness, I heard this myself from the girl’s mother long after her recovery.

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proceeded, by way of experiment, to unscrew his arms and legs—to work on him, in other words, as a mechanic would work on a doll. This strange feature, which falls quite outside anything we know about the Sand-Man, brings a new equivalent of castration into play; it also points to the inner identity of Coppelius and his later counterpart, the mechanic Spalanzani, and prepares us for the interpretation of Olimpia. This automaton cannot be anything other than a materialization of Nathaniel’s feminine attitude to his father in his early childhood. Her fathers, Spalanzani and Coppola, are merely new versions—reincarnations—of Nathaniel’s two fathers. Spalanzani’s otherwise incomprehensible statement that the optician had stolen Nathaniel’s eyes (see above) in order to set them in the doll becomes significant as evidence of the identity of Olimpia and Nathaniel. Olimpia is, so to speak, a complex that has been detached from Nathaniel and now confronts him as a person; the control that this complex exercises over him finds expression in his senseless, compulsive love for Olimpia. We are justified in describing such love as narcissistic, and we understand that whoever succumbs to it alienates himself from his real love-object. Yet the psychological truth that a young man who is fixated on his father by the castration-complex becomes incapable of loving a woman is demonstrated by many analyses of patients, the content of which, while less fantastic than the story of the student Nathaniel, is scarcely less sad. E. T. A. Hoffmann was the child of an unhappy marriage. When he was three, his father left his small family and never lived with them again. The evidence that Grisebach assembles in his biographical introduction to the works shows that the writer’s relation to his father was always one of the sorest points in his emotional life. 3. O. Rank, ‘Der Doppelgänger’, Imago III, 1914. 4. I believe that when poets complain that two souls dwell in the human breast, and when popular psychologists talk of the splitting of the human ego, what they have in mind is the division under discussion, belonging to ego-psychology, between the critical authority and the rest of the ego, rather than the opposition, discovered by psychoanalysis, between the ego and whatever is unconscious and repressed. True, the difference is blurred because the derivatives of what has been repressed are foremost among the things that are condemned by self-criticism. 5. In H. H. Ewers’ story Der Student von Prag [‘The Student of Prague’], which supplies Rank with the starting point for his study of the double, the hero promises his beloved that he will not kill his opponent in a duel, but on his way to the duelling-ground he meets his double, who has already dispatched his rival. 6. [In the Gesammelte Werke this writer is wrongly given the initial ‘H’.] 7. P. Kammerer, Das Gesetz der Serie (Vienna 1919). 8. ‘Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose’ [‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’] [II.B] (Gesammelte Werke, vol. VII). 9. Der böse Blick und Verwandtes (2 vols, Berlin 1910/ 1911). 10. [In German ‘the evil eye’ is der böse Blick, literally ‘the evil look’.]

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11. On this topic see Freud’s study Totem und Tabu [‘Totem and Taboo’] (1913) section III of which deals with animism, magic and the omnipotence of thoughts. Here the author remarks, ‘It seems that we ascribe the character of the uncanny to those impressions that tend to confirm the omnipotence of thoughts and animistic thinking in general, though our judgement has already turned away from such thinking.’ 12. Cf. op. cit. on ‘taboo and ambivalence’. 13. [Literally the ‘thrower’ (of bad luck), or ‘the one who casts’ (the evil eye).]

OTTO RANK (ESSAY DATE 1941) SOURCE: Rank, Otto. “The Double as Immortal Self.” In Beyond Psychology, by Otto Rank, pp. 62-101. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958. In the following excerpt from an essay first published in 1941, Rank outlines the concept of the double as a symbol of the supernatural, or “immortal,” self.

Our view of human behaviour as extending beyond individual psychology to a broader conception of personality indicates that civilized man does not act only upon the rational guidance of his intellectual ego nor is he driven blindly by the mere elemental forces of his instinctual self. Mankind’s civilization, and with it the various types of personality representing and expressing it, has emerged from the perpetual operation of a third principle, which combines the rational and irrational elements in a world-view based on the conception of the supernatural. This not only holds good for primitive group-life carried forward on a magical world-view, but is still borne out in our highly mechanized civilization by the vital need for spiritual values. Man, no matter under how primitive conditions, never did live on a purely biological, that is, on a simple natural basis. The most primitive people known to us show strange and complicated modes of living which become intelligible only from their supernatural meaning. Although this has been recognized by modern anthropologists, most of them—not unlike the psychologists—look down on this supernatural world-view as an interesting relic of the primitive’s belief in magic which we discarded long ago as superstition. Sir James Frazer, in the last volume of his encyclopedic history of magic, The Golden Bough, considers it “a dark chronicle of human error and folly, of fruitless endeavor, wasted time and blighted hopes.”1 Freud, for his part, in comparing primitive superstition with neurotic behaviour merely brought to light the survival of irrational forces in modern man2 and thereby proved the inadequacy of rational psychology to explain primitive man’s world-view. It signifies

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Thus we distinguish in the development of culture and the simultaneous creation of the civilized self three layers: the supernatural, the social and the psychological. The biological self of natural procreation is denied from the beginning, since it implies the acceptance of death. In this sense, the earliest magical world-view was for primitive man not a consoling illusion in his difficult struggle for biological survival but an assurance of eternal survival for his self. This man-made supernatural world-view forms the basis of culture, since man had to support himself increasingly with more and more concrete symbols of his need for immortalization. The most powerful instrument for the creation of his own cultural world was religion as expressed in cult (“culture”), from which spring the fine arts, as well as architecture, drama and literature; in a word, the sum of what survives the short span of one personal life-time. Specialists in the fields of archeology, anthropology and sociology are re-constructing from relics

of bygone civilizations the characteristic patterns of various culture periods. . . . In order to show how culture develops, neither geographically nor anthropologically but from that inner spiritual need, we will confront in the following pages the dynamic personality of modern man with its remotest but still living ancestor, the spiritual self of primitive man. This primitive material we are introducing not in an historical or explanatory sense but merely as illustrative of survivals in modern man, who, having created civilization and with it an over-civilized ego, disintegrates by splitting up the latter into two opposing selves. Those two aspects of the self which in modern man are opposing and fighting each other provide, to be sure, the original raw material for his personality makeup. Yet it makes all the difference whether they are united in the expression of a total personality or driven by conflicting strivings between the two selves, manifested as the antimony of acting or “thinking and feeling.” Such dichotomy of conflict, interfering with full living and functioning, is not to be confused with the basic dualism between the natural and spiritual self which was dynamically balanced in the magic world-view. The primitive and modern material concerning the Double, which we are confronting in this chapter, will show how a positive evaluation of the Double as the immortal soul leads to the building-up of the prototype of personality from the self; whereas the negative interpretation of the Double as a symbol of death is symptomatic of the disintegration of the modern personality type. Such a complete reversal, as is borne out by our juxtaposition of folk-loristic and literary tradition, betrays a fundamental change in man’s attitude towards life from a naïve belief in supernatural forces which he was certain could be influenced by magic to a “neurotic” fear of them, which he had to rationalize psychologically. As early as 1914, before the emotional shock of the World War upset the foundations of an over-rationalized civilization, I published an essay on the literary motif of the Double,3 the structural analysis of which laid bare the irrational roots of human psychology in primitive magic. Such development of a respectable science from earlier superstitious beliefs cannot be surprising or embarrassing when we remind ourselves that from time immemorial man was forced to protect himself against the unknown forces of nature by pretending to be able to control them in one form or another. Centuries before our Western science of astronomy was established, the high priests of

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little when some advanced writers, in thrusting aside those scientific classifications, seem ready to admit that we ourselves are just as superstitious as the primitive; in fact, are still primitive beneath the surface. Such an admission smacks too much of reform, hence, seems to have a frightening rather than a liberating effect. The fear of this “primitiveness” within ourselves is obviously the result of an unsuccessful attempt to deny it. Be that as it may, this primitivity, which we are able to admit so readily, is to a large extent the product of our own imagination. That is to say, what we really have in common with our remote ancestors is a spiritual, not a primitive self, and this we cannot afford to admit because we pride ourselves on living on a purely rational plane. In consequence, we reject those irrational life forces as belonging to our primitive past instead of recognizing them in our present spiritual needs. In this sense is to be understood my earlier conception of the supernatural as the really human element, in contradistinction to the biological life which is natural (homo naturalis). My human interpretation conceives of the supernatural as basically identical with what we call “culture,” which is after all made up of things non-existent in nature. I mean by that not only all spiritual values of mankind, from the early soul belief to religion, philosophy and its latest offspring psychology, but also social institutions. These too were originally built up to maintain man’s supernatural plan of living, that is, were meant to guarantee his self-perpetuation as a social type.

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Oriental religion practised astrology in order to foresee and thus direct the destiny of their people; this very science, in fact, was made possible by an objective observation of planets, which, in the ancient civilizations of the East, emerged from such subjective interpretation of the firmament. Likewise, our science of chemistry was developed from the mysterious experiments of medieval alchemists, determined to outdo nature by producing gold, indeed, creating life itself in their cauldrons. Whether or not these scientific children of a later age are willing to acknowledge their uneducated parents, we should not hesitate to trace their ancestry and their heritage, especially with such a problem child as we have found psychology to be. As a student, having fallen under the spell of the new scientific psychology, I became aware in its early days of the inadequacy of rational psychology—even that of the unconscious—to explain the unchanging effect of an age-old theme throughout the centuries. More than twenty-five years ago, I happened to see a moving-picture which revived the theme of the Double—famous since the days of Greek mythology and drama—in a more phantastic realism than has ever been possible on the stage. The popularity of this eternal tragi-comedy of errors caused by man’s encounter with his double has, however, as is the case with many renowned literary motifs, been periodic. Just as the subject of antagonism between brothers was typical for the literary epoch at the end of the eighteenth century, and the motif of incestuous love between brother and sister characteristic for the Elizabethan age, so it was in the era of German Romanticism that the theme of the Double was in vogue. The renewed interest shown then in the old “Double” of stage-fame, whose humorous entanglements with himself had become subjected to a psychological scrutiny by introspective novelists, cannot be sufficiently accounted for by their eccentric personalities alone. Similar currents in German philosophy at that time suggest that a deeper reason is to be found in the mentality of a whole period once more questioning the identity of the Self. After Kant—“the Philosopher of the Revolution”—had systematized the mentality of the bourgeois type, the underlying principle of self-determination was carried to its individualistic extreme by the romantic philosophers. Disappointed at the actual results of the French Revolution, the romantics outdid Kant, who had taught that the laws of nature had been legislated by the mind. This idealistic conception they applied to the whole pattern of historical development

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which they conceived of as identical with the growth of self-consciousness. Hence, the true object of knowledge could only be self-knowledge. On that basis they justified personal, class and national aspirations as being evolved from the development of the Self, construed by Fichte as ethical, by Hegel, as logical and by Schelling as aesthetical. It is not surprising to find that this philosophic self-centredness of the Romantic epoch appears reflected in its contemporary literature. In fact we find these romantic authors interpreting the theme of the Double as a problem of the Self, that is to say, they first looked at it from a psychological point of view. Their choice of the subject of dual personality for the probing into the depth of the human Self, resulted undoubtedly from their own inner split personality, characteristic of the romantic type—hence the conflicting and frustrated emotions of the romantic, a paradoxical type shaped by the repercussions of the French Revolution and glorifying Napoleon, who emerged victorious after it, as the ideal super-man. Once more man had become aware of the irrational forces within himself, the artistic expression of which he had to justify intellectually by subscribing to a new philosophy of the Self. While this preoccupation with the Self accounts for the romantic’s obsession with the subject of the Double, the explanation for the typical form in which this motif persistently appears from Antiquity to the present day has to be derived— beyond the psychology of the individual—from ancient traditions and primitive folk beliefs. Since the plot of the above-mentioned film, “The Student of Prague,” drawn from the well-known “Story of the Lost Reflection” by the famous romanticist, E. T. A. Hoffman, combined practically all the old motifs inherent in the subject, I choose to perform what might be called an autopsy on this generalized literary motif. The hero, a reckless libertine, in one of his desperate moods sells his own reflection to a human impersonation of the Devil, only to realize too late the vital importance of his seemingly useless image in the mirror. This, to his bewilderment, takes on an independent life of its own; it follows its former owner, interfering with his social ambitions and his amorous affairs until it becomes a real persecutor driving its victim to suicide. The gruesome death of the hero is brought about through his final attempt to end this terrifying persecution by killing his alter-ego, thereby destroying his own self. Those phantastic happenings take on an uncanny feature with the appearance of the

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While some writers, like Robert Louis Stevenson in his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, dramatized this moral aspect of the subject in a hero possessed by an evil self, others, like Dostoievski, in his early story “The Double” (1846) elaborated its psychological intricacies to a point reaching the clinical exactness of a study in paranoic persecution and megalomania. In such psychological and moralistic presentations of the Double, their authors are dealing with illusions in a more or less split personality, whereas in other stories the double appears concretely personified by an identical protagonist, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s tale, “William Wilson,” where the hero’s namesake acts as his guardian angel. In German romanticism, however, this same motif, namely, two figures appearing in identical form like twins has been elaborated upon in a truly morbid fashion. Jean Paul, the father of romantic fiction, especially, dwells in his complicated plots on pathological types whose identify becomes confused with that of their doubles. In his most noted work, Titan, he is said to have derided Fichte’s philosophy of the Self by carrying his transcendental idealism ad absurdum. One of the most pathological figures in this novel cannot look at any part of his body without being seized by the dread of his double, a fact which drives him into such a rage that he breaks all the mirrors reflecting his despised self; no wonder he dies insane—with Fichte’s phrase of identity on his lips. Compared to such extravagancies in vogue during the Romantic period, other presentations in which the hero sells his reflection to the Devil or loses his shadow, as in the famous story of Peter Schlemihl (known to English readers from Howitt’s translation), appear, despite the hero’s tragic fate, naive, not to say, fairy-tale like. There seems inherent in the subject itself a dual aspect which permits its treatment in different forms, varying from the naive comedy of errors enacted between identical twins to the tragic, almost pathological loss of one’s real self through a superimposed one. Bearing in mind these duofold potentialities of

our subject, we turn to the constant symbolism which this theme—no matter how greatly elaborated upon—has preserved throughout the ages: namely, the presentation of the second self by one’s own shadow or reflection. This motif I have traced back, in my essay on the Double referred to, to ancient traditions and folk beliefs which may be considered man’s first conception of the soul. Numerous superstitions regarding one’s shadow or image still prevalent in all parts of our civilized world correspond to widespread tabus of primitives who see in this natural image of the self the human soul. . . . In confronting those ancient conceptions of the dual soul with its modern manifestation in the literature of the Double, we realize a decisive change of emphasis, amounting to a moralistic interpretation of the old soul belief. Originally conceived of as a guardian angel, assuring immortal survival to the self, the double eventually appears as precisely the opposite, a reminder of the individual’s mortality, indeed, the announcer of death itself. Thus, from a symbol of eternal life in the primitive, the double developed into an omen of death in the self-conscious individual of modern civilization. This revaluation, however, is not merely due to the fact that death no longer could be denied as the end of the individual existence but was prompted by the permeation of the whole subject of immortality with the idea of evil. For the double whom we meet after the completion of this developmental cycle appears as a “bad,” threatening self and no longer as a consoling one. This change was brought about by the Christian doctrine of immortality as interpreted by the church, which presumed the right to bestow its immortality on the good ones and exclude the bad ones. At a certain period during the Middle Ages this fear of being doomed on Judgment Day—that is, of not participating in the eternal life of the good—became epidemic in the cult of the Devil, who in essence is nothing but a personification of the moralized double. His origin in the old soul belief is still shown in numerous stories where the hero sells his shadow or reflection to an impersonation of the Devil in order to gain worldly pleasures. This common folk-belief of a soulless Devil eager to secure a good man’s immortal soul by seducing him to evil has been immortalized in Goethe’s “Faust.” The artist took the traditional folk-tale and lifted it from its superstitious entanglements into a human struggle for self-immortalization through work, that is, selfrealization.

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double—played in the film by the same actor as the youthful image of the hero, who himself is aging and has adopted moral standards contrary to those of his former self. The encounters of these conflicting selves at crucial moments in the hero’s life provide the necessary complications for a plot, the moral of which seems to imply: a man’s past— represented in the film by the hero’s own youthful image—is so intimately bound to his vital being that misfortune befalls him if he tries to detach himself too completely from it.

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Similar revaluations in the history of famous literary subjects4 point to a social function of the artist who humanizes traditional folk-beliefs by animating them with his own spiritual struggle for immortality. What enables the creative writer to express his inner dualism—Goethe through Faust speaks directly of the two souls in his bosom—without being too much thwarted by its conflicting struggle, is not, as modern psychology suggests, simply a matter of degree.5 Though both the artist and the neurotic are beset by similar conflicts, it does not mean much to explain the one type by the other. The irrational forces which are operating in both types are striving for some kind of rationalized, that is, accepted form of expression. The neurotic fails in that attempt inasmuch as his productions remain irrational, whereas the artist is able and permitted to present his creation in an acceptable form justifying the survival of the irrational in the midst of our overrationalized civilization. This cultural function, which I have always considered the main distinction of the artist,6 is borne out in the treatment of the Double-motif as it was developed in the works of prominent authors. There can be no doubt that it is the same exaggerated fear of death threatening the destruction of the Self which the artist has in common with the neurotic. Yet the creative type, in dealing with this fundamental problem of the Self, achieves his personal justification by performing his cultural function—to revive the spiritual values of irrational forces for his generation and thus promote their continuity. Hence, the astounding limitation of literary inventiveness and the seeming monotony of ever-recurring plots. We have to turn from the content of literature to its function in order to appreciate that the artist’s imaginative faculty is shown not so much in the invention of new motifs as in recapturing the true spirit of popular tradition to which his irrational self is sensitive. It is for this reason that we find the most popular stories of the Double based on current folk-belief. At the same time, it is not surprising to find pathological elements, such as the hero’s persecution by his double, introduced by modern authors whose creative sensibility responds likewise in morbid moods to the threat of irrational elements. It is almost as if the primitive curse of overstepping the tabus, which protected the double, has struck the artist daring to gain immortality by creating a profane image of his spiritual self. Some of these authors while writing their stories felt death, as it were, on their heels. Stevenson was severely ill from a hemorrhage

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when, in a dream, he conceived the essential scenes of his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This first draft, however, he burned as unsatisfactory and hastened to re-write the whole story, a feat which he accomplished in three days, presumably not to lose it again but actually for fear of his failing health. “I drive on with Jekyll,” he wrote in a letter, “bankruptcy at my heels.”7 Guy de Maupassant wrote his gruesome account of a spectre, “Le Horla,” seemingly at the beginning of his fatal illness. The common assumption that the author was already insane when he wrote this story has recently been refuted by his former valet Francois.8 Francois, who at the age of seventyeight still refers to his late master as “Monsieur,” said that Maupassant was perfectly lucid at the time he wrote the book, in August, 1887. When he sent the novel to the publisher, he told Francois that before a week had elapsed all Paris would be saying he was crazy. Actually, it was not until 1891, four years later, that Maupassant began to feel insanity coming on; when he realized he could no longer retain his right state of mind, he attempted suicide by cutting his throat. This typical outcome of persecution by the double, although precipitated by the author’s illness, was by no means caused by it. Throughout his life Maupassant had been struggling against the “Intimate Enemy,” which he had long recognized as a double personality in himself. Like Poe and Hoffman, he also suffered from hallucinations which he described in his work. There exists one account of an actual experience of this sort which Maupassant had in 1889 and which he related that same evening to a friend. He was sitting at his desk in his study, having given strict orders that no one was to be admitted. Suddenly he had the impression that someone had opened the door. He turned around and to his great astonishment saw his own self enter and sit down in front of him, resting his head on his hand. All that Maupassant wrote on this occasion was dictated to him by his double. Having finished, he rose and the phantom vanished. This account9 sounds like a scene from his Le Horla which, however, must be considered an intuition rather than a recording of another such actual experience. Of Poe, it is well known that he died at the early age of thirty-seven in a fit of delirium tremens. His story, “William Wilson,” is generally regarded as a confession, since it pictures the fate of a man ruined by gambling and drinking, who finally, despite the efforts of his better self to save him, kills himself. Many years before his end, Poe also suffered from various obsessions

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Of all the authors who introspectively recognized an early split in their personality, no one probably was more driven by the fear of death than was Dostoievski. While still a student at the Polytechnic, he suffered from slight fits, probably epileptic, and was afraid of being buried alive, as was Poe, likewise a victim of epilepsy. In many passages of his works, Dostoievski has described his later “grand mal” in masterly fashion. Before going into the aura, he was able to catch a glimpse of the “happiness that could not be experienced in ordinary life and of which no other man could have an idea. . . . This sensation is so powerful, so agreeable, that one would give ten years for a few seconds of such felicity, and perhaps even one’s life.” After each fit, however, he was terribly depressed and felt himself a criminal. During the last days of his life to Petrograd, he wrote: “I have had an attack lasting ten days and for five days since I have been prostrated. I am a lost man—my reason has really suffered and that is the truth—I know it. My nervous confusion has often brought me near to madness.” He not only experienced these states of unconsciousness frequently but having been condemned to death as a revolutionist and graced only at the last minute, he actually died, so to speak, a living death, described in The Idiot. His feeling of being constantly persecuted by death, which even seems to account for the expressionism of his hectic style,1 1 cannot be explained as the result of those abnormal experiences alone, but is the most fundamental feature of his personality make-up. According to Merejkovsky, the theme of the Double was for Dostoievski his main personal problem: “Thus all his tragic and struggling pairs of real people who appear to themselves as complete entities are presented as two halves of a third divided personality—halves which, like the doubles, seek themselves and pursue themselves.” This is carried out in the most grandiose manner in his last and greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, where Smerjakov is pictured as the double of his brother Ivan, the two not only usually appearing together and discussing the same subjects but being inseparably united by a favorite motif of Dostoievski’s,

the idea of the potential criminal. This double (says Ivan) “is only a personification of myself, in fact only a part of myself . . . of my lowest and stupidest thoughts and feelings.” In some of the omitted passages of The Possessed, Stavrogin, still trying to convince himself that his hallucination of the double is subjective and not the Devil, says: “I don’t believe in him, do not yet believe. I know that this is only myself in different manifestations, splitting myself and talking to myself. But he is determined to become an independent Devil, so that I have to believe in his existence.” In this last work of Dostoievski, the hero Ivan propounds the author’s moral philosophy in a poetic vision of the Devil, who is presented as a creation of man in his own image. Before Ivan becomes insane, the Devil appears to him and declares himself his double; Ivan, however, refuses to recognize the reality of the apparition. “You are an illusion, a malady, a deception, but I do not know how to destroy you. You are an hallucination, you are only a manifestation of myself, that is to say, of my thoughts and of my most abominable thoughts at that. All that has been long since dead, all the opinions that I uttered long ago, you bring up here as if they were new.” Here we find ourselves again confronted with the meaning of the double, as a representative of the individual’s past. Originally, the double was an identical self (shadow, reflection), promising personal survival in the future; later, the double retained together with the individual’s life his personal past; ultimately, he became an opposing self, appearing in the form of evil which represents the perishable and mortal part of the personality repudiated by the social self. Those three essential stages in the development of the ideas on the double we find epitomized in the successive treatment of this theme in three of Dostoievski’s masterpieces: his early story, “The Double,” his most fascinating study, The Possessed, and his last and maturest work, The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoievski himself has confessed that Goliadkin, the paranoiac hero of his early novel, was the mouthpiece of his own feelings. The author had planned to rewrite this too-revealing account but evidently felt compelled to treat the same subject in a more objective manner. In this, his second story of a double, called “The Youth,” the hero is definitely characterized as a case of split personality who describes himself in the following words: “You know, I seem to duplicate myself, to divide myself into two parts—actually double myself and I’m terrified of this doubling. I feel as if my double were standing next to me; one is oneself sober

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and nameless apprehensions; he was troubled by a persecution mania and had delusions of grandeur. In his recent book, Edgar Allan Poe; a Study in Genius, 1 0 Joseph Wood Krutch considers the famous stories and poems not as works of artifice but as more or less disguised expressions of queer realities in Poe’s life, particularly since it is known that many of his ideas came to him in visions and hallucinations.

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and sensible and the double absolutely wants to do something silly, sometimes something very funny; and then one suddenly realizes that one actually wants to do this oneself. God knows why, one wants it somehow involuntarily, one resists it and yet one wants it with all one’s will power.” Interestingly enough, Dostoievski closes his description of Versilov’s split by a self-conscious remark which indicates that the author has familiarized himself with the current literature on psychopathology: “What is the double really?” he asks. “He is—at least according to a medical book of an expert that I consulted lately on this subject—nothing but the first stage of insanity which may end in disaster, a dualism between feeling and willing.” Following the above-sketched development of the idea of the double in three successive characters of Dostoievski’s main works, Professor D. Tschizewskij, exiled in Prague after the revolution, concludes in his philosophical interpretation of The Double in Dostojevskij1 2 that they represent the artist’s protest against nineteenth-century rationalism, according to which man only exists in the material world and in a material sense. The double breaking through as he does in Dostoievski’s characters is evidence of the uncertainty an individual feels when confronted with a more real existence opened up in the face of unknown forces. The first witness, Goliadkin, appears as a more passive victim of this principle, in that the rational forces are crushing him from without, whereas Stavrogin and his fully developed successor, Ivan Karamazov, are consumed by their rationalism from within. This literary development of the Double-motif shows how its moralistic revaluation of folktradition is accompanied by an intellectual interpretation in literature aimed to counteract its threatening irrational power. In giving the main folk-belief a tragic form, the artist not only disposes of his irrational self in his work but at the same time enables the public to detach itself from both the writer and his creation. Such artistic transformation of a primitive motif differs, however, from the historical detachment of scientific classification in that it appears as a living expression of powerful personalities still under the spell of those irrational forces. In giving them form, that is, rational expression, the artist enables the public to feel sufficiently removed from the irrational elements to dare vicariously to participate in them. This dual rôle of the public explains the fascination great tragedies have for us, in that we not only take part in the hero’s human suffering but by the same token participate in the super-

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human greatness for which he suffers. Our form of tragedy as the offspring of early Greek cult and ritual still performs the same spiritual function as did those religious ceremonies: that of temporarily uniting the “commoner” with irrational life-forces from which the average man in his daily existence had to be protected by all sorts of strict tabus. On certain festive occasions, however, when those tabus were lifted, the priests and kings permanently endowed with the sacred duty of preserving that essential life-force communicated it to the people. It is from such seasonal renewal of the irrational self in the spiritual ceremonies of magic participation that culture developed. Culture is derived from “cult,” not only linguistically but also functionally, that is, as a continuous translation of supernatural conceptions into rational terms. Culture, then, is conceived of here as an expression of the irrational self seeking material immortalization in lasting achievements. In this sense, culture serves a dual function: it preserves the old spiritual life-values in a more permanent form, independent of the seasonal re-creation, and at the same time provides a more direct and permanent participation of the average group member in the creation and maintenance of its symbols.

Notes 1. Aftermath, The Macmillan Co., N. Y., 1937. 2. Totem and Tabu, Moffat Yard, N. Y., 1913. 3. “Der Doppelgaenger,” “Imago,” 1914. Reprinted, Internationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag, Vienna, 1925. French translation under the title, “Don Juan, Une étude sur le Double,” Paris, 1932. 4. See my book, Don Juan, Une Étude sur le Double, Paris, 1932. 5. My differing viewpoint is fully documented in Art and Artist, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., N. Y., 1932. 6. Der Kuenstler, Internationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag, Wien, 1907. 7. Balfour, Sir Graham. The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Scribner’s Sons, N. Y., 1901. 8. In an interview with “Paris Soir,” July 3, 1933. 9. Quoted from Sollier, Les phénomènes d’Autoscopie, Paris, 1913. 10. Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1926. 11. “In these rapidly sketched, mobile, fluctuating descriptions of Dostoievski’s, one feels the hurried impressionism and abnormal clarity of a consciousness already anticipating the approach of insensibility. In his descriptions we find a completely unique form of realism of an epileptic, and one who has suffered the death sentence.” (Grossman, L., in his recent edition of Dostoievski’s works in Russian.) 12. Reichenberg, 1933.

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SOURCE: Punter, David. “Narrative and Psychology in Gothic Fiction.” In Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/ Transgression, edited and with an afterword by Kenneth W. Graham, pp. 1-27. New York: AMS, 1989. In the following essay, Punter assesses Gothic fiction within the context of the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein.

In this essay, I want to try to bring together some of the crucial features of Gothic fiction with one or two of the insights to be derived from psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis of a particular kind: the school of psychoanalysis particularly associated with Melanie Klein, the so-called British School, which is also sometimes referred to under the heading of “object-relations psychology.” In trying for this connection I am not simply practising an arbitrary yoking together of the heterogeneous. I believe that Kleinian psychoanalysis is very important, for several reasons. Mainly, I take it to be capable of generating accounts of what it might mean to be human. What I mean by that is that the Kleinian approach is one which does not shirk the complexity of the connections between thought and feeling; it does not shrink from owning to the destructiveness which proves so frequently disastrous to the best-intended schemes of political and social progress; it attempts to describe the growth of the individual in ways which assume that, from the outset, the individual lives and moves and has his or her being in a recognisably constituted social world. It is, perhaps, highly polemical in these times to say this; but I believe that, in these respects, Kleinian analysis stands in stark contrast to the more popular neo-Freudianism associated with the name of Jacques Lacan. There are many things one could say about this contrast, and what it itself symbolises; but I believe it fair to say that Lacanian conceptualisations rarely seek very much purchase in experience.1 That is to say, Lacanian thought tends towards becoming a peculiarly cerebral and abstract affair; it deals, certainly with intelligence, in structure and form, and offers valuable insight into levels at which, indeed, the unconscious may operate like a language; but it appears to lack the more real sense of complexity which emerges from the very best psychoanalytical writing—a complexity, that is, which is very unlike the largely mechanical complexities of Lacanian post-structuralism, and bears more relation to the ever-changing oscillations of feeling and mood which actually comprise human experience.

This absence in Lacanian thought would, perhaps, not matter very much if it were not for the fact that, after all, Lacanianism purports to be a variant of psychoanalysis, and if there is one thing of which psychoanalysts should be aware, it is of the deep psychoses which frequently underlie the excessively high valuation of mind. Sandor Ferenczi, to name but one analyst who writes about this, referred most individual and cultural madness to an intense desire for rationality, which itself masked a disgust for the body and for the material world, a disgust which would need much patient unravelling.2 Lacan, I believe, is caught in precisely this trap. It is perhaps also worth underlining that this particular syndrome, the syndrome, we might call it, of the disembodied brain, is undoubtedly connected with masculinity; that is not to say that it is exclusively an illness of men, but masculinity, the rejection of the body, and the impulses of self-destruction and the destruction of others are very closely tied together, in this culture at least; and the directly phallic stance of Lacanian thought and writing is another vitiation of its value, and one which is particularly surprising when one considers that Lacan has been much taken up by feminist thinkers and writers, whereas Melanie Klein has not.3 I wish to explore four points. First, to address briefly the general question, “What are we doing when we psychoanalyse a text?” Secondly, to offer one or two thoughts on psychoanalysis in general in relation to Gothic fiction. Thirdly, to discuss Klein’s work in general relation to the notions of narrative and symbolism. And finally, to try to draw these threads together by investigating certain moments in Gothic fiction in the light of Kleinian concepts, and seeing whether we can make use of these concepts to elucidate some of the problems of a particular genre of fiction. So: what are we doing when we use psychoanalysis in relation to literary texts? We need, I think, to be clear that we are engaged in a very different enterprise from anything we might practise within a real relationship to other people. According to Freud there are only three ways of recovering and exploring unconscious material. One is through dream; the second is through parapraxes, slips of the tongue, behavioural eccentricities and so forth; and the third, which of course bases itself largely on work with the first two, is in the practice of analysis itself, through the use of the principal tools of free association. None of these methods for the recovery and exploration of unconscious material is available in the written text. The text may recount dreams,

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but it does not dream of itself. The nearest equivalents it may have to parapraxes are printing errors; these might indeed be interesting, but are hardly likely to yield a rich crop of meaning. And although we may put questions to the text, we can expect no answers. Indeed, in our interrogations of the text, the psychoanalytic situation is reversed; it is the text which remains mute, while we, the critics, conduct our more less impassioned monologues and dialogues across its inert form. So the text itself cannot be psychoanalysed; and neither can its author, or at least, such a process would have little relation to the central tasks of criticism. I believe that the best we can say is this: that we are making use of psychoanalytical concepts, and maybe also of a psychoanalytic stance, as tools with which to elucidate our experience of the text.4 That may sound very imprecise, but I suggest that it is not; that we need to have the category of our own experience within the definition for the sake of clarity, because whatever our approach to literature is, it will always be our own experience of the text which is at stake. And, of course, there is no reason to suppose that this experience need be pristine or uninformed; clearly, whenever we approach a text we bring with us all the baggage we have acquired through previous cultural contacts, our knowledge of the language, our various historical senses, our aesthetic formation and so forth. I say “to elucidate our experience of the text”; but I would want to add a further point. Psychoanalysis, essentially, is in the business of making interpretations.5 Of course, within the process of individual psychoanalysis, the status of those interpretations, whether withheld or offered by the analyst, is highly provisional; and, indeed, this may also be the case with literary interpretation. But I would want to hold to the category interpretation when trying to work with analytic concepts; it is an interpretation which is the endpoint of our endeavours, and it is inevitable that in putting forward an interpretation of a text we are simultaneously putting forward an interpretation of ourselves, and also, in most cases, an interpretation of a particular moment of contact between the culture we inhabit and a different one, a moment of contact within which whole realms of human experience may be contained. Turning now to the Gothic, it needs to be said that Gothic fiction has proved a godsend to psychoanalytically-minded critics; and it is not hard to see why this should be so. Gothic fiction deals intensely in symbolism, to the point of naivety; it does not take much analytic skill to probe

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the skeletons of Mysteries of Udolpho or the inner significance of the portrait in Lewis’ The Monk. One variant or another of described mental abnormality occurs in all the relevant texts; it would take a remarkable blindness to avoid noticing the diagnoses of insanity, consequent frequently upon the prohibitions of the law and the disorienting effects of transgression, which are offered on every page—although that is not at all the same, of course, as taking those diagnoses at their face value. For all that, there has not been a satisfactory general study of the Gothic from a psychoanalytic viewpoint; the kinds of point mentioned above tend to emerge piecemeal in the general run of Gothic criticism.6 It is not necessary to rehearse those obvious points here, but I would like to add a few observations on matters which I take to be generally relevant to a psychoanalytical interpretation of the Gothic. First, I think it needs to be pointed out that there is a type of historical continuity between the forms of Gothic fiction and the forms of psychoanalytical writing. To put it at its simplest, quite a number of Gothic novels are really structured like case histories. We might think particularly of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, with its doubled account of what we could crudely refer to as a phenomenon of massive defensive splitting of the psyche; but the structure is also clearly visible in many lesserknown works. In Sophia Lee’s The Recess, for instance, a very early Gothic novel, we are actually invited to adjudicate as readers between two different diagnostic accounts, which in several crucial respects flatly contradict each other.7 And this, of course, complicates the business of critical interpretation by appearing to offer us a further alternative. If it is technically impossible to analyse the text or the presumed author, perhaps after all it may be possible to analyse the character or characters whose reality we are offered for inspection. I think we have to be clear that if we do this we are in fact participating in a flow of fictions; which, in itself, may be a perfectly worthwhile activity, but should not be confused with the analysis of real people. In fact, it is odd how quite sophisticated critics, who in other respects are alert to the fictions of character, of the ways in which the very notion of character needs to be deconstructed so that one can see the bundle of codes and categories out of which fictional persons are built, nonetheless seem able to believe that, for the specific purpose of discerning an unconscious, we can take a “character” as in some sense real. It appears to me, for instance, that Eve

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Of course, there are other connections. Freud himself was a devotee of just that period and type of German writing, epitomised in Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, which proved inspirational to the English Gothic novelists. This is important because the great German romantics were themselves trying, for the most part, to diagnose a cultural condition, a condition in which they themselves participated. It could be said that this kind of writing reached its finest, if most opaque, flowering in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, where the passing sicknesses of civilisation and of the individual psyche are welded together in a single prose account of a historical condition. The basis of that condition, according to Hegel, can be summarised as “alienation”; and it is worth noting that among the many meanings of that tortured and tortuous word is its application to conditions of mental dislocation.9 In trying to draw psychoanalytic writing and the Gothic novel together in this way, there are several concepts we need to have in mind. The first one is the pleasure of the text. Why do we read Gothic novels? Why do we read Freud’s case histories? In the latter case we may have a genuine professional interest; but in the absence of that, I suggest that the pleasures to be derived may not be dissimilar. What we have in those writings are two sets of depictions of psychotic states of mind; the “dreadful pleasure” evoked by Gothic fiction, whether it be Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho or The Italian, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is not merely the terror of falling from high precipices or of encountering the fearsome sight of the monster playing Boris Karloff and hurling small children around; it is also the terror that we may be in danger of losing our minds, that the madness exemplified in the text may end up by removing some of our own usual life coordinates and leaving us adrift, the victims of a transgression which can no longer be healed. Certainly Coleridge felt that danger as he read through and reviewed some of the early Gothic texts;1 0 and yet of course he was aware, as we need to be, that with this terror there is also a considerable admixture of pleasure, of several kinds: the rather unpleasant pleasure which comes from viewing a character in worse psychological shape than oneself, but also the deeper pleasure of being able to peer backwards through our own personal his-

tory, because all psychotic states are simply perpetuations of landscapes which we have all inhabited at some stage in our early infancy. Madness is not something peculiar which grows on people; it can more helpfully be defined as the radically inappropriate persistence of visions of the world which are perfectly natural in their rightful place and time but which should have faded long ago from the inner eye. And obviously, in Freud too we can observe these states and their operations in the world, and measure our experience against these extreme accounts of cultural dislocation. It may be useful at this point to introduce Barthes’ term, the “enigmatic code”: by which he simply means to identify those parts of a text whose primary function is to keep us persisting in our reading by focusing our minds on unanswered questions.1 1 Obviously, the detective story and the thriller are forms where the preponderance of the enigmatic code as an organising textual principle is high; but it is high too in Gothic, although perhaps of a different order. We could take Frankenstein as an example. In the classic detective story, the enigmatic code hinges on the question of who committed the crime. Often, of course, it is more sophisticated than this: was a crime committed at all? or, will X, who, we know, did not commit the crime, manage to demonstrate his or her innocence? and so on. The enigmatic code in Frankenstein is a great deal more open-ended than that, and this may be one important reason why the constructed myth of Frankenstein has proved to have such extraordinary longevity and power of adaptation: the question itself is operative at two levels simultaneously, the level of character interaction and the level of world-historical consequence. We wonder, of course, and increasingly as the novel continues, what the outcome will be of the burgeoning conflict between Frankenstein and his creation; but we also are brought to wonder what the effects will be on the world in general of the existence and public performance of this non-human creature, and of the transgression which has been implicit in his creation. And this, I suspect, is central to the enigmatic code of the Gothic; because it deals in material which challenges the boundaries of the “natural,” it is always difficult to see what the implications might be of the outcome of particular action for the world at large. Whether or not Philip Marlow identifies the murderer, the world as a whole will go on in very much the same way as before; but if indeed it should prove to be the case that the ghosts Emily sees at Udolpho are real, then the impact of that

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Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire contains some very interesting thoughts on the Gothic, usually falls into this trap despite the intensity of her engagement with deconstructionist thinking.8

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tiny example of the supernatural would radically undermine a great number of metaphysical and political presumptions. This facet of the enigmatic code is important in terms of the Gothic’s purchase on our interest; and again I would want to connect this with the enigmatic code which operates in Freud’s case histories. If indeed it is the case that people—and, of course, at least in the emblematic case of Judge Schreber, very important and public people—are themselves the open recipients and bearers of a version of being human which is not in general accord with our conventional criteria, what does this do for the ordinary consensus on which social life and organisation are based? This leads to a further point. In my opinion psychoanalysis has been quite shy of moving into the field of cultural diagnosis. Freud’s only significant attempt in this direction, Civilisation and its Discontents, was a late work, and it lacks very much detail. However, the question needs to be put: is psychoanalysis capable of proffering an interpretation which transcends the individual? Of course, in one vital sense all psychoanalytical interpretation does precisely this; in that the unconscious is not within the individual and necessarily its contents have a strong relation to the world of flow by which the individual psyche is structured. However, the point of greater interest is whether interpretation can find any purchase on the societal world which lies between the individual and the universe—and which in fact structures the relations within which the individual finds him or herself. In other words, can psychoanalysis be of any help in diagnosing an age, and thus, for instance, a literary genre, considered as a historically bounded set of attempts to structure and explicate feeling? Theoretically, the answer should be yes; despite a number of years of neglect and indeed derision, the attempts of Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown and Wilhelm Reich to characterise capitalism through the use of psychoanalytic categories remain potent, even if they are by no means perfect models.1 2 It is historically obvious that the Gothic coincides with a specific stage of the reorganisation of English society and economy. We are accustomed to referring to this massive reorganisation as “industrialisation”, although that may not be the most useful descriptive term. At all events, the years between 1760 and 1820 saw an enormous set of changes—at the level, of course, of the social body, but also in terms of individual experience, and in particular

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in terms of how the individual might experience expectancy and change.1 3 I assume, with Freud, that the experience of change is fearful, and that we therefore make various attempts to prohibit that experience. We might then well expect to find that a fiction of fear arises at a time when conventional social norms and norms of legality are evaporating; and I think we can go further than this. After all, the emergence of Gothic is really quite an extraordinary phenomenon; a new, and very large, audience for fiction which had been happily reading Fielding and Smollett, with their emphasis on London taverns and country retreats, suddenly chose to start reading stories set in medieval Italian abbeys and mysterious Spanish courtyards. Why? The answer presumably lies in the concept of sublimation (a likelihood enhanced by the occurrence of the category of “sublimity” in the discourse of the period). We can put it like this: that when the prospect of uninvited change in the external world becomes pressing, there arises a need to safeguard the objects in one’s internal world; and to contemplate whether they are capable of survival within this soon-to-be-changed scenario. In Gothic fiction we see a prolonged contemplation of the objects in the internal world; and at the same time a repeated vindication of the individual’s ability to survive despite transgressive threat to boundaries. Emily survives; many of the crucial figures in Gothic mythology—like the Wandering Jew and the Ancient Mariner—are archetypal survivors; indeed often their narrative functions seem to be simply to evidence the possibility of survival, albeit at a level which approaches the transcendental. And, of course, it is not by accident that the notion of narrative suspense really begins with the Gothic authors; clearly the conditions of fear, threat and dependency are precisely in the area where suspense becomes a key datum of everyday experience. We are now already verging on Kleinian theory, with the mention of the “internal world”; because it was a cardinal point of Klein’s version of the psyche that individuals form internal worlds, and that one of the problems of life becomes the series of attempts to square the contents of one’s internal world with the outer world and the ways in which you might from time to time experience it. Some brief introductory remarks on Klein may be necessary. She was a Freudian analyst. Her own analysis was carried out by Ferenczi, briefly, and then by Karl Abraham. In 1926, she left Germany for England,

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We can summarise the distinctiveness of Klein’s position very briefly. Firstly, her work is distinguished by its attention to infancy and very early mental states. Although it is a simplification, I nonetheless think it fair to say that Klein rejected Freud’s theory of the instincts; she was much more interested in how very early experiences shape the internal world of the child, and in particular in how those experiences may have a bearing on patterns of emotion—hate, envy, guilt, reparation—which may continue to reverberate through adult life. In her attention to the infant, Klein’s emphasis was always on the crucial relation with the mother; in reality and in fantasy, as actual nurturer and also as the fictive precursor of the expected and hoped-for nurturing which conditions much adult response. She was absorbed, to an even greater degree than Freud, by the phenomena of the transference and the counter-transference in analysis, and it is not hard to see why. Her belief in the supreme importance of early stages of infancy and her reference of psychological problems to damage caused in early infancy entailed a strong interest in the patterns of early relationship which might be re-enacted in the analytic situation; and clearly the fact that she was a woman underlined the importance of working through feelings about motherhood and nurturing which Freud had to a large extent ignored, or at least relegated by his attention to penis-envy and other allegedly gender-specific formative experiences. Klein’s interest in early infancy and in the transference points to her main clinical work, which was in the sphere of psychotic states of mind; an unusual slant for a psychoanalyst of her time, since the principal means of identifying psychosis had been precisely as that order of mental disturbance which analysis could not reach. Finally, Klein did a great deal of work on the inescapability of envy and destructiveness as components of the infant experience which cannot be expunged by later developments and

which thus continue to operate within the conventional interchange of relationships and social existence. Her work is referred to as “object-relations psychology” because, in her analysis of infant states, she supposes that our earliest experiences are in relation to particular part-objects, and principally the breast; and that later children start to put those part-objects together as whole objects and thus to be able to conceive of the totality of the mother and then the father. It is the series of relations between the infant and the part-objects, and then the whole objects, which is crucial to healthy development. If any of those objects becomes damaged in the child’s internal world, then that will be the basis of disturbance in later life.1 5 It is in the relation between external and internal objects that Klein believes the origin of symbolism to lie. Freud considered that all interest in the “world” was a displacement from an interest in, or rather, curiosity about, one’s own and one’s parents’ bodies. Klein agreed with that; but she considered that the wish to possess or attack the mother’s body is the fundamental epistemophilic relation to the world, and is thus imbued with all the primary processes of guilt, transgression and reparation. All external objects are, according to Klein, symbols of the child’s and the parents’ bodies or parts of them; and the construction of a work of art is in part a symbolic externalisation of the inner world within which these objects exist, and in part an attempt at reparation for the past sins of which the still existing child in the artist conceives him- or herself to be guilty. Thus works of art frequently contain representations of damaged internal objects; and symbolism is based in a wish to effect some connection between the damage which exists within the inner world and the objects in the world outside which may in some way relate to our experience of that damage.1 6 Art is the recovery and restoration of “damaged and lost internal objects”. And this damage occurs at a very early age; for Klein claims that the origin of symbolism, being a displacement, is coterminous with the prevalance of sadism at a particular point of the child’s development. The child expects to find within the mother (a) the father’s penis, (b) excrement, and (c) children, and these things it equates with edible substances. According to the child’s earliest phantasies (or “sexual theories”) of parental coitus, the father’s penis (or his whole body) becomes incorporated in the mother during the act. Thus the child’s sadistic attacks have for their object both father

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where she lived for the rest of her life. While here, she entertained a good many ideas which were heterodox in terms of the psychoanalytic establishment, and it has since been said that she founded, with the aid of her mentor Ernest Jones, a British School of Psychoanalysis.1 4 The crucial question for us, however, is: what were the differences between her theory and practice and those of the psychoanalytical orthodoxy? And are these ideas of any use when we come to consider literary phenomena?

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helmet! Shocked with these lamentable sounds, and dreading he knew not what, he advanced hastily—But what a sight for a father’s eyes!—He beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers. (pp. 16-17)

and mother, who are in phantasy bitten, torn, cut or stamped to bits. The attacks give rise to anxiety lest the subject should be punished by the united parents, and this anxiety also becomes internalised in consequence of the oral-sadistic introjection of the objects and is thus already directed towards the early super-ego . . . it is the anxiety arising in the phase that I have described which sets going the mechanism of identification. Since the child desires to destroy the organs (penis, vagina, breasts) which stand for the objects, he conceives a dread of the latter. This anxiety contributes to make him equate the organs in question with other things; owing to this equation these in their turn become objects of anxiety, and so he is impelled constantly to make other and new equations, which form the basis of his interest in new objects and of symbolism. Thus, not only does symbolism come to be the foundation of all phantasy and sublimation but, more than that, it is the basis of the subject’s relation to the outside world and to reality in general.1 7

We can move directly from this assertion to Gothic fiction; and, in particular, to the work which has so often been taken as the originator of the genre: Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. Castle of Otranto is a book which abounds in partobjects; in separated fragments of the disunited body. For the second edition of the novel, Walpole added an epigraph: “vanae / fingentur species, tamen ut pes, et caput uni / reddantur formae.”1 8 This is a corruption of a text from Horace. The original meaning was: “Idle fancies shall be shaped [like a sick man’s dream] so that neither head nor foot can be assigned to a single shape.” Walpole’s version significantly, and, I believe, unconsciously, reverses the impact of that text to read that “nevertheless head and foot are assigned to a single shape.” The reversal is vital; Walpole is telling us that, in this new genre of supernatural or improbable fiction, the bits and pieces of the body which he is offering us have some grounding in dream and sickness; and also that they need to be taken as in some sense symptomatic of damage experienced in the relationships between real people. Thus in Castle of Otranto we encounter, for instance, the enormous casque, or helmet, which is offered to us as a part of the body of a deceased giant, who is, of course, the absent ancestor. When our hero, Manfred, first encounters this object, we have this description: The first thing that struck Manfred’s eyes was a group of his servants endeavouring to raise something that appeared to him a mountain of sable plumes. He gazed without believing his sight. What are ye doing? cried Manfred, wrathfully: Where is my son? A volley of voices replied, Oh, my lord! the prince! the prince! the helmet! the

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Such a passage as this, in one sense, merely exemplifies the melodramatic quality of Walpole’s book; and has also been seen as evidencing his incompetence in the sustained evocation of fear.1 9 But there are other things to be said about it. We might well suggest, according to Klein’s theories, that this incidence of an accommodable partobject, and especially in an incident which also recounts the death of the child, relates closely to that particularly problematic stage in which the child has to learn to make the transition from observing his parents as bundles of objects whose relevance to him- or herself is defined merely in terms of gratification, and to begin to take note of the ways in which these bundles of more or less gratifying physical objects appear, in disconcerting ways, to possess a level of independence which threatens the child’s own apprehension of the purposes of the universe—which, until this stage, have largely consisted of the gratification of the child. This scene from Walpole is expressionistically emblematic of the process which Lacan, of course, described as the “passing under the name of the father”:2 0 the dead prince is that child who has been called upon to take on the role of the father—and in this case, with certain associated feudal responsibilities and prohibitions—but has been, rather directly, crushed by them. In Klein’s terms, we would be able to add something to this interpretation: that here we clearly have an unhappy, or disastrous, accommodation with the head, or penis—a failure of patriarchal descent which is, in the end, what undermines Manfred himself; and this connects in with the prohibited theme of the story, which is incest. Castle of Otranto is not much read these days; but Frankenstein is, and there we can also discern some major themes by thinking about the partobjects. After all, what is the construction of the monster if not an attempt to bring together the parts of the inner world to form a whole which can somehow achieve cogency and validation in the outer realm? We need to remind ourselves of several crucial features of Frankenstein. First, Frankenstein’s own education is a peculiar one. He says:

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The category which is omitted in Frankenstein’s education is the category which embraces encounters with the real world in its social organisation. It is this category which seems to Frankenstein to hold no interest; to supplant it he turns to the two extremes, to the so-called “metaphysical” and to chronic introspection. In Kleinian terms, we could speak of problems of introjection. The young Frankenstein is given to us as a name for a syndrome which abandons reality-testing, for one reason or another, and which prefers to work on a direct link between the inner world and the untested fantasy. But this is a mask for destructiveness; that ignorance of the real world is also a need to wish it away, to place it under prohibition, to deal only in the inner world and in the gigantic shadows which that inner world throws on the screen of experience if we choose to ignore the checks and balances of external constraint. It is thus not surprising that we find Frankenstein describing his creation of the monster in these terms: “I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed.” (p. 49) This is in the context of a passage where Frankenstein is saying that he wished to suspend every tie of affection with real people, and principally with his family, while he was engaged in his version of creativity. I have no wish to pun on Mary Shelley’s use of the term “object”; nevertheless what is happening here is that we are being offered an account of what might happen when creativity is practised in an arena where the internal world has been fatally damaged. Clearly there is a sense in which Frankenstein’s work is reparative, in the sense in which Klein uses the word; a sense in which Frankenstein’s effort to construct an object for himself is itself connected with his own apprehension of the failure of loved objects in his own life. It is here that Klein’s description of the transition from a world based on part-objects to a world

where real relationships can be established, and where one’s experiences of the unconditional love of the mother can be continuously transformed into further experiences of loving and being loved that can at least appear to have independent and volitional validity, is useful. Because Frankenstein is stuck with the bits and pieces. It is clear—Mary Shelley tells us so—that the inner world of the story has become a charnel-house, a place where all that exists are the fragments of the body which cannot be connected together to comprise a meaningful and functioning whole. This is not only so if we fall into the fiction of considering the enterprise from Frankenstein’s point of view; the very structure of the novel itself, beginning as it does with the series of letters, reinforces our sense of being in a world where the fragments cannot be made to coalesce. And thus it is that Frankenstein embarks on his great transgressive activity. If the outer world is not experienced as real; if it is perceived as a shadow form in which consequences cannot be produced or expected, then the monstrous truly appears in that one might try to set the internal fragments themselves in some kind of order and expect real life to result. The actual physical fragments from which Frankenstein has assembled his monster are themselves beautiful; and human. Yet what is the outcome: How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and his straight black lips. (p. 51)

It has never been easy to get a picture of this monster; certainly little in it suggests the various cinematic representations of the twentieth century. Some parts, certainly, are good, others bad, as one might expect; but it is the disunity of the whole, the inability of these various parts to cohere which is the main source of Frankenstein’s dismay, and thus of the endless persecution to which the monster is subjected throughout the rest of the novel. What we then need to say about Frankenstein is that it confronts us with a scenario in which the damaged inner world of which Klein speaks is

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My temper was sometimes violent, and my passions vehement; but by some law in my temperature they were turned, not towards childish pursuits, but to an eager desire to learn, and not to learn all things indiscriminately. I confess that neither the structure of languages, nor the code of governments, nor the politics of various states, possessed attractions for me. It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things, or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or, in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.2 1

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incarnated; and the result of that incarnation is the imposition of an endless destructiveness, based in mutual envy.2 2 Crucially, the monster envies Frankenstein his freedom of action, which is intimately associated with his command of language; what Frankenstein envies in his creation is his apparent ability to give free vent to his destructive and envious impulses. The landscape here is one in which inner and outer worlds have become fatally fragmented, and we can connect this fragmentation with the phenomena of Gothic in general; with, for instance, the extraordinary paintings of the later, but undeniably Gothic, artist John Martin, where the dislocation between the puniness of the human figures and the grandeur of the destructive landscape is the very incarnation of the landscape scenes we encounter all the time in Radcliffe. Both Otranto and Frankenstein confront us with psychotic states. These are the landscapes of childhood, where enormous monsters rush around after us threatening to tear at our vitals, while all the time we suspect that they are of our own making. It is not enough to speak of instinct, rather we are referred back in both cases to difficulties of parenting, of succession, of the handing down of behavioural patterns within the family. For it is the collapse and ineffectiveness of the family which is at stake in these texts, and in almost all the other Gothic novels, with their insistent harping on the state of being an orphan. And it is now that we are in a position to begin to ask the sociopsychological questions; for it must not be forgotten that the main actual experience of the industrial revolution was of a massive and irremediable dislocation of family life.2 3 But before embarking on this “metapsychological” project, there are one or two other points worth mentioning. What happens in The Monk and in other Gothic texts is that there is a total absorption of an object; and this is a phenomenon which Klein describes. In fact, Freud describes it first, defining introjection as the sole condition on which an object may be given up.2 4 In other words it is only by tangling with and absorbing an object that one may be allowed to develop to a further stage in which the external occurrences of that object may appear unnecessary. Klein adds to this point: “If the object is introjected in a situation of emotional conflict it is more likely to be introjected into the superego”.2 5 In other words, the phenomenon of introjection happens all the time; but if it happens at a time when the psyche is peculiarly vulnerable then one of the possible consequences is that the introjected object may

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take over one’s life, and effectively prevent the possibility of reality-testing. It is these conditions which, according to Klein, produce the main defensive strategies; in other words, when the introjection of the object becomes too intense, phenomena occur within the psyche which may prove unamenable to the usual processes of social prohibition. Klein describes these processes under two main headings: projective identification and splitting.2 6 Splitting is only too obvious as the major motor principle of the narrative of Frankenstein; projective identification may well be the main process described by the other main Gothic fictions, the intense identification with the hero and heroine despite a lack of any obvious reason for their assumed supremacy. And it would be at that point that one might begin to consider what the fundamental principles are behind the ways in which narrative itself functions: through a process of identifying and destroying centres of consciousness, in other words, through a process of making and destroying projective identifications. The process of maturation as Klein describes it is the evolution from the paranoid/schizoid position to the manic-depressive position.2 7 In other words one moves in infancy, or so it is hoped, from a stance in which every phenomenon of the outer world appears as persecutory and thus threatens one with the splitting or disintegration of the self, to a stance in which one might achieve a reasonable oscillation between feelings of hope and despair. This is, one should add, the best that can be hoped for. I would suggest that Gothic fictions for the most part deal in interruptions of this maturing process: and that part of the evidence for this has been the repeated critical attempt to explore the categories of the “explained” and “unexplained” supernatural. Presumably the “explained” supernatural is that experience which proves amenable to the categories one might use in so-called adult life; while that which remains unexplained adheres to the paranoid position, as I have suggested in The Literature of Terror.2 8 Northanger Abbey and similar tales of recuperation would thus serve as attempts to regain for adulthood what might be essentially the property of childhood, as Austen more or less overtly says. To add one or two further points: it is apparent that the hero, so aptly named Wringhim, of Confessions of a Justified Sinner is precisely a representation of the mechanism of splitting which takes place, according to Klein, when there have been problems with the figuring in the internal landscape of the mother or the father.

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I have already said that psychoanalytic schools have been understandably wary of mounting cultural explanations; but I would like to make a suggestion. The infant, it is plain from Klein’s accounts of her own analyses of children, is at all times evolving symbolic systems in order to prevent him- or herself from having to experience loss. That resistance to loss may in some extreme cases become a resistance to development or change of any kinds, and some psychotic manifestations like autism arise from this syndrome. The issue is the prevention of whole objects, and the fear is that those whole objects, if they were allowed to appear, would reproduce the persecutory valency which the infant has experienced in relation to the breast.2 9 I would suggest that this resistance is at stake in Gothic fiction, and that this might condition the narrative forms with which we try to deal in the Gothic. The enigmatic codes permit of only two alternatives, explanation or non-explanation; in both cases there is a problem about how to do justice to the unresolved complexities of adult experience. And this, I would suggest, has to do with fear of change; with a genre which is peculiarly a set of narratives which emerge in a world either where the questions which narrative might pose are unanswerable, or where the answers might be too fearful for the individual mind to hold in the face of social change. It seems to me, then, that the Kleinian concepts are indeed capable of generating accounts of history, although clearly historical process cannot be mapped in a one-to-one way onto the development of the psyche. But more importantly, I suggest that Gothic fiction, because of its overt dealing in symbols, becomes a special case in two ways. On the one hand, we might say that this expressionism renders its meanings particularly available to analytic interpretation. But on the other, one also needs to say that psychoanalysis itself, and especially of the Kleinian kind, can provide us with some thoughts about why this type of fiction, with its emphases on familial prohibition and transgressive wish-fulfilment, arose when it did; about, in other words, the ways in which external fears are linked in particular ways with attempts to constitute and handle the

internal world to which fiction so often gives access, and about what those linkages might be for Gothic fiction, arising as it does at a time when traditional processes of maturation and shaping for the family were being visibly threatened by a set of feared changes the endpoint of which could be seen but dimly if at all.

Notes 1. I am thinking of essays like, for instance, “The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis,” in Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), pp. 30-113. 2. See, e.g., Sándor Ferenczi, Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-analysis, ed. M. Balint (London: Hogarth, 1955), p. 246. 3. One of the most suggestive attempts to relate Klein’s work to the study of culture is Michael Rustin, “A Socialist Consideration of Kleinian Psychoanalysis,” New Left Review, No. 131 (1982), pp. 71-96. 4. For a description of psychoanalytic stance, as I mean it here, see Edgar Levenson, The Fallacy of Understanding (New York: Basic Books, 1972), pp. 211 ff.; but also J. Krishnamurti, The Penguin Krishnamurti Reader (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1970), pp. 21 ff. 5. On interpretation, see particularly James Strachey, “The Nature of the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (1969). For these references and those in the previous note, I am indebted to Barry Palmer, and to his unpublished paper, “Interpretation and the Consultant Role.” 6. See, e.g., Elliott B. Gose, Imagination Indulged: The Irrational in the Nineteenth Century Novel (Montreal and London: McGill-Queens U.P., 1972), pp. 27 ff.; Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New York: Columbia U.P., 1979), pp. 241 ff.. 7. See my Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longmans, 1980), pp. 56-59. 8. See Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia U.P., 1985). 9. On alienation, it is particularly interesting to look at Mitchell Franklin, “On Hegel’s Theory of Alienation and its Historic Force,” Tulane Studies in Philosophy, IX (1960). 10. See Coleridge, Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (London: Constable, 1936), pp. 355-382. 11. Or hermeneutic code; see Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. R. Miller (London: Cape, 1975), p. 19. 12. See particularly Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, Mass.: Beacon, 1966); Brown, Life Against Death: the Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959); Reich, Sex-Pol: Essays 1929-1934, ed. L. Baxandall (New York: Vintage, 1972). 13. The most illuminating perspectives on expectancy are offered, I believe, by the group analysts. See, e.g., Wilfred Bion, Experiences in Groups, and Other Papers (London: Tavistock, 1961), pp. 150-152. 14. The most useful book about Klein is Hanna Segal, Klein (Brighton: Fontana, 1979).

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Equally, Klein talks about the damage which may ensue from the child’s unestablished fantasies about the presence of the father inside the mother; much of the material about Schedoni in The Italian fits in with this analysis. Why, however, and the question still remains with us, the Gothic? Why then, and why like that?

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15. See particularly Klein, “On the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt,” in Envy and Gratitude, and Other Works 19461963 (London: Hogarth, 1975), pp. 25-42; and “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of ManicDepressive States,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation, and Other Works 1921-1945 (London: Hogarth, 1975), pp. 262-289.

It is within the experience of many medical practitioners, that a patient, with strange and unusual symptoms, has been more distressed in mind, more wretched, from the fact of being unintelligible to himself and others, than from the pain or danger of the disease. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

16. See Klein, “Early Analysis,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation, pp. 77-105; “On Observing the Behaviour of Young Infants,” in Envy and Gratitude, pp. 94-121; and “The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation, pp. 219-232.

The high esteem in which dream-life is held by some schools of philosophy . . . is clearly an echo of the divine nature of dreams which was undisputed in antiquity. . . . For attempts at giving a psychological explanation have been inadequate to cover the material collected, however decidedly the sympathies of those of a scientific cast of mind may incline against accepting any such beliefs. —Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

17. “Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego,” pp. 219-221. 18. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. W. S. Lewis (London: Oxford U.P., 1969), pp. xii-xiii. 19. See, e.g., Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance (London: Russell and Russell, 1921), p. 19. 20. See Lacan, especially “On a question preliminary to any treatment of psychosis,” in Ecrits, pp. 179-225. 21. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. R. E. Dowse and D. J. Palmer (London: Dent, 1963), p. 28. 22. Cf. Klein, “Envy and Gratitude”, in Envy and Gratitude, pp. 176-235. 23. See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld, 1977); C. C. Harris, The Family and Industrial Society (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983). 24. See, e.g., Freud, “Psycho-analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey (24 vols., London: Hogarth, 195374), XVIII, 245-246. 25. This quotation actually refers to a paper in which one of Klein’s colleagues, Paula Heimann, is presenting Kleinian views. See Heimann, “Certain Functions of Introjection and Projection in Early Infancy,” in Developments in Psycho-Analysis, ed. J. Riviere (London: Hogarth, 1952) pp. 122-168. 26. These themes run throughout Klein’s work; but see, e.g., “Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant,” in Envy and Gratitude, pp. 61-93. 27. See Klein, “Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States” and “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” in Envy and Gratitude, pp. 1-24. 28. See Literature of Terror, pp. 130-159. 29. See, e.g., “On the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt,” p. 34.

RONALD R. THOMAS (ESSAY DATE 1990) SOURCE: Thomas, Ronald R. “Recovering Nightmares: Nineteenth-Century Gothic.” In Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious, pp. 71-81. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. In the following excerpt, Thomas focuses on the relationship between dreams and Gothic literature, in terms of psychology as well as narrative style.

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The author of the first gothic novel in English traced the origin of his story to the recovery and writing down of a haunting dream that disturbed his sleep: “I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate.”1 Here, at the beginning point of English gothic fiction, Horace Walpole joined the experience of dreaming with a question about authority. In recovering his dream, Walpole represented himself as being virtually compelled to write about something outside of his own knowledge and intention, as if he had been forced to write The Castle of Otranto (1764) in the strange, gigantic hand of his dream. Authors of many subsequent gothic tales attributed their origins to dreams, often to emphasize a failure on the part of even the writers to understand and control the forces that drove their narratives. The stories frequently contain dreams as well, most often nightmarish dreams of demonic possession.2 Matthew Lewis’s Monk (1796), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) all contain dreams of this kind, and the dreamer is invariably someone who suffers from a state of illness or divided personality that he or she can explain only as a form of supernatural possession. These characteristics of the gothic novel make it an appropriate place for Freud to put into practice his project of replacing a divine interpretation of dreams with a scientific one. In fact, in Delusion and Dream Freud gave an elaborate analysis of the dreams in an early twentieth-

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Several other nineteenth-century gothic novels also anticipated the claims of psychoanalysis, especially the concern with replacing supernatural explanations for delusional formations such as dreams with scientific—even medical—explanations. Although the dreamers of these novels may not always be “cured” by their explanations, they consistently call attention to the symptomatic aspects of the words they use to describe their dreams. Like Jensen’s Gradiva, these novels expose a gap in scientific knowledge which needed to be filled by a language that would enable the dreamer’s recovery, and they go some distance in helping to fill that gap as well. The importance that Freud placed upon attributing dreams to the psychic health of the dreamer rather than to some divine intervention is evident in the very beginning of The Interpretation of Dreams, where he lines up the forces engaged in the nineteenth-century debate over the significance of dream experience. In reviewing the current literature on the subject, Freud concluded that the two basic theories then prevailing were not new but already established in the ancient world. On one side were positivists who, like Aristotle, maintained that dreams “do not rise from supernatural manifestations but follow the laws of the human spirit.” On the other side were idealists of various kinds who, like Plato, thought of the dream “not as a product of the dreaming mind but as something introduced by a divine

agency; and already,” Freud goes on to say, “the two opposing currents, which we shall find influencing dream life at every point in history, were making themselves felt” (2-3). These same currents also made themselves felt in the gothic fiction of the nineteenth century. Frankenstein, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and Wuthering Heights, and the dreams in them present themselves through both story and discourse as neurotic symptoms, as attempts at “recovery” centered in the conflict between supernatural and psychological explanations for the uncanny experience of dreaming. At stake for the gothic hero or heroine in this conflict is the recognition of the powerful influence of irrational impulses on behavior and the need to take control over those impulses. The very rise of the gothic novel as a genre may be read as an attempt to recover or reconstruct an account of psychic life in the face of supernatural accounts whose inadequacy was becoming more and more apparent. Even more to the point, these texts expose how supernatural explanations of such events often mask a repressed pathological struggle rooted very firmly in the powers of this world. The extensive theoretical writing on dreams during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was generally directed against supernatural explanations for psychic disturbances. Characteristically, the scholarship took one of two courses: dream theory either deferred to an idealism that tried to rationalize the supernatural element of dreams by attributing them to something like a world soul or collective unconscious, or it sought to explain dreams as purely physiological phenomena that did not reveal anything profoundly important about the dreamer.3 As the most systematic and comprehensive theory of dreams in the period, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams offered a third course. For Freud, dreams were neither the manifestations of possession by some spiritual power nor the result of normal somatic processes during sleep. Rather, dreams were to be regarded as symptoms of a neurosis in the dreamer, evidence of a psychic wound or illness. But in regarding the dream as a symptom Freud did not think of it as a “pathological product”; on the contrary, he saw the dream, like any other delusion formation, as “an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction.”4 The common association of physical and psychic illnesses with the dreams and dreamers of gothic fiction suggests some continuity with Freud’s description of the dream as a symptom. The rise of gothic fiction during the latter part of

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century gothic novel, Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva. Even though Gradiva, like most gothic fiction, contains many reports of ghostly visitations, Freud did not regard it as a ghost story at all. He called the novel nothing less than “an entirely correct study in psychiatry, by which we may measure our understanding of psychic life, a story of illness and cure which seems designed for the inculcation of certain fundamental teachings of medical psychology” (Delusion and Dream, 64). Freud marveled that the author had somehow “acquired the same knowledge as the physician,” or at least “behave[d] as if he possessed it” (77). He particularly admired the remarkable ways in which Jensen seemed to anticipate the talking cure by treating the protagonist’s speech and his dreams as symptoms of a delusion, by tracing these symptoms back to their origins, and by effecting a “concurrence of explanation and cure” in the articulation of those origins (110-14). Freud could only conclude that “science leaves a gap which we find filled” by this “story of illness and cure”—the same gap Freud himself sought to fill with his theories of dream interpretation (75).

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the eighteenth century and its flowering during the nineteenth may in fact be read as a symptom on a cultural scale, an expression of a desire for a vocabulary by which to name and control psychic forces in terms of pathology rather than theology. Freud himself offers a direct point of contact between the two discourses not only in his commentary on Gradiva but also in his remarkable essay “A Neurosis of Demoniacal Possession in the Seventeenth Century.” There Freud analyzes a case of alleged demonic possession which had been recorded in a form strikingly like that of a gothic novel. As is true of such gothic tales as Frankenstein, Melmoth, Justified Sinner, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula, for example, the material for this case consists of several documents written in the first person. A series of captioned drawings by the “patient” (who in this instance is a painter) depict his signing of a pact with the devil and his redemption at the shrine of the Holy Mother. Those drawings are combined with a description of the case by a “reverend compiler” (who also includes some lines in verse which contain information about his own life), a deposition by an abbot testifying to the authenticity of the documents, and finally the diary of the patient, which chronicles his possession and exorcism. Freud takes particular interest in the complex textual issues of the case—the contradictions between the pictures and the painter’s verbal accounts of them, the inconsistencies within the diary itself, the variations in wording of the patient’s two written pacts with the devil, the compiler’s attempts at textual reconciliation, and so on. The function of Freud’s analysis is to add still another text of reconciliation or reconstruction, a “final” attempt to piece together the inconsistencies by substituting a story of neurosis for one of possession. Freud clearly took up the case in order to demonstrate how phenomena perceived in medieval times as demonic dreams, visions, and possessions could be explained in terms of repressed impulses and psychic forces. “We merely eliminate the projection of these mental entities into the external world,” he says; “instead, we regard them as having arisen in the patient’s internal life, where they have their abode.”5 But Freud’s analysis does much more. His translation of the incident from a theological into a medical vocabulary dramatizes exactly what is dramatized in the dreams of many gothic texts: fundamentally, dreams and visions are sites of interpretive power where dreamers are actually attempting to resist or surrender to the notion that an authority from the outside is governing their lives. Furthermore,

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these struggles for authority take place on the level of language—in the giving or witholding of a dream account. In both cases, dreams and visions must be seen as symptoms that serve as attempts at recovery, and thus are actions taken by the dreamer, not actions taking him or her over from the outside. Like the case Freud analyzes here, gothic fiction commonly evidences this assertion of authority in the production of the texts themselves—in the writing of pacts in blood, in the retraction of those pacts through confession and exorcism, in the revision of inconsistencies to preserve the authority of the church, and most important, in the patient’s composition of a diary that seeks to bring together the fragmented pieces of a life threatened by a divine or demonic usurpation. This particular case has a special fascination and significance for Freud since he is able to trace the patient’s morbid anxiety to the recent death of his father and the paralyzing melancholia that resulted from this loss of parental authority. Not only does this scenario follow the pattern of Freud’s own experience in writing The Interpretation of Dreams, but it corresponds to the set of forces commonly operating in the gothic novel as well—problems of inheritance, incest, parricide, entombment, ghostly hauntings from the past, and so on. In Freud’s view, this patient never fully recovered from his neurosis because he never recognized his visions as symptoms of this anxiety. Rather, he merely substituted one form of “possession” for another, replacing his father’s authority first with that of the devil, then with that of the church. “He wanted all along simply to make his life secure. He tried first to achieve this with the help of the devil at the cost of his salvation; and when this failed and had to be given up, he tried to achieve it with the help of the clergy at the cost of his freedom and most of the possibilities of enjoyment in life” (104). This failed selfrecognition in the desperate attempt to find the “security” of some transcendent authority is the fate of many gothic dreamers as well, and it reflects a larger crisis of authority in the nineteenth century—a crisis of which the rise of the gothic novel is itself a symptom. The acceptance of a secular interpretation of dreams as originating in the individual psyche demands that the dreamer be the source of the significance as well as the haunting images of the dream. Any authority the dream might have for the dreamer is based upon her or his own recognition of it as a self-portrayal, rather than a revelation from the divine world. If, as T. S. Eliot

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This conflict between the “two opposing currents” of dream interpretation divided Freud from Jung more subtly than from his other opponents. Though Jung shared Freud’s conviction that the dream was essentially a self-portrayal by the dreamer, he maintained that dreams had a higher, objective value as well. Jung’s interest in symbol and archetype led him to conceive of the dream as transcending the personal ego and participating in a historical pattern external and inexplicable to the self. For Jung, the symbolic content of the dream had its own value and meaning, which could not be imposed by the individual dreamer. Ultimately, that symbolic significance was inexpressible in words: “A symbol does not define or explain,” he said; “it points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined yet still beyond our grasp, and cannot be adequately expressed in the familiar words of our language.”8 Jung’s use of theological language is significant here, and this kind of statement fundamentally distinguishes him from Freud, who argued that dreams are nothing more than our symptomatically disguised desires, which we can understand and control only when we translate them into the “familiar words of our language.” Jung’s views represented a compromise between the traditional religious belief that dreams have their origins and significance in a realm “higher” than the dreamer and the more scientific and biological orientation of Freud, who related them to the personal life history of the dreamer. But as Freud indicated, what he regarded as an entirely “pre-scientific” viewpoint was not without its adherents in the nineteenth century, not only

the “pietistic and mystical writers” of the period but a number of “clear-headed men” as well: “It would be a mistake to suppose that the theory of the supernatural origin of dreams is without its supporters in our own day,” Freud cautioned in The Interpretation of Dreams. “One comes across clear-headed men, without any extravagant ideas, who seek to support their religious faith in the existence and activity of superhuman spiritual forces precisely by the inexplicable nature of the phenomena of dreaming” (4). In this latter category Freud placed P. Haffner, Friedrich Schelling, and Johann Fichte, who saw dreams either as representative of some “complementary” reality, as “divine in nature,” or simply as separate in important ways from waking life. Freud consistently made it a point to associate such views with the demands of religious faith and to oppose them to a truly “scientific” attitude of mind. While such claims may have overstated the case, these thinkers did consider dreams to be part of some complex of forces outside the spheres of rational and empirical inquiry, forces that we conventionally align with the gothic and romantic strain of nineteenth-century literature. But the role of the dream in gothic fiction is much more complicated than that. The gothic use of dreams may be more properly understood as expressing the uneasy tension in the period between scientific and religious explanations of dream experience. The dreamers in these stories tend to be wounded figures suffering from some physical and psychological disturbance and some visionary experience that they commonly explain in terms of the supernatural. Those explanations, however, usually contend in the text with a desire for a more “psychological” explanation that connects the dream to some undisclosed repressed material, some traumatic experience, or some crisis in authority experienced by the dreamer. The conflict between these two viewpoints becomes apparent when the dreamer chooses either to convert the dream event into the common words of our language or to submit it to the uncommon language of the divine. One of the more dramatic fictional examples of this situation occurs in Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla (1870). The narrative begins with a terrifying dream experience recounted by the young woman who narrates the story. In her dream she is visited by a female figure who first comforts and caresses her until the dreamer feels a terrible pain in her breasts. Then the dream figure disappears beneath the bed. The narrator, Laura, initially dreams this dream as a child, and it provokes a nervous

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claimed, one consequence of this assumption is that the “quality of our dreams suffers,” another consequence is that the quality of the dreamer’s account of the dreams becomes that much more important.6 In many gothic texts, acts of selfrepresentation are presented as acts of selfdiscovery and healing, and acts of secrecy or repression are part of a pattern of illness and psychic disturbance. When the narrator of Justified Sinner complains of having “such dreams that they will not bear repetition,” for example, he either fails to understand that his refusal to repeat his dreams keeps him “troubled” and “enchained” by them, or he admits that he wants to maintain his illusions about himself by censoring the thoughts that are behind the dreams.7 Stories like this narrator’s consistently dramatize how dreams take shape and reveal themselves as symptoms only when they are put into words and connected with the dreamer’s waking life.

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disorder from which she never entirely recovers. The dreams continue, and they develop into a series of voices that haunt the narrator in her dreams; one of these she recognizes as the voice of her mother mysteriously warning her to avoid her “assassin” (308). The warning seems not only to refer to the father in the tale but also to reinforce the sense that these dreams are efforts toward recovery and self-preservation on the part of the dreamer. She is told by various authorities that these dreams are either visitations of evil spirits, the product of a fever in the body, or finally, the haunting of a vampire. Eventually, her father destroys this monster and presumably solves the mystery, appropriately, in an old Gothic church. But since the destruction of the supposed vampire does not cure the narrator’s illness or alleviate her recurring dreams, this supernatural explanation is called into doubt. That the trauma of the childhood dream had obliterated Laura’s memory of everything that preceded it strongly suggests that the dream serves as an agency of repression for her and her father as well.9 Her dreams are also continually associated with the loss of her dead mother (whom Laura cannot remember), with the awakening of her own sexuality, and with the domination of her life by her father. Together with the father’s repeated attempts to dismiss the significance of the dreams and to obscure crucial events in Laura’s past, these details indicate that her dreams may screen the memory of a childhood seduction or primal scene. But these “symptoms” are never fully understood in Carmilla because they are never allowed to be expressed. Rather, they remain unrecovered, uninterpreted memories for the patient, who is still plagued by her dreams, her illness, and her overbearing father at the end of the story. Like William Godwin’s Adventures of Caleb Williams or like Melmoth, Justified Sinner, Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, and many other gothic tales, Carmilla represents a narrator’s attempt to recover from a disordered state—a condition that not only is often physically debilitating but proves to be psychologically crippling as well. This disability almost invariably takes the form of a loss of personal control, a usurpation, a denial, or a willing abandonment of personal authority over and responsibility for one’s actions. States of dream, trance, madness, and possession provide the appropriate psychological conditions to investigate (or explain away) this problem. Typically, this project takes place in complex, embedded narratives that serve both to suggest the buried psycho-

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logical origins of dreamlike materials and to designate the dynamics of the telling as essential to understanding the meaning of the condition. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), for example, represents a further development of the plot and structure of a typical gothic text such as Carmilla. Count Dracula’s victims can never clearly distinguish their own dreams from the vampire’s nocturnal visitations. The dreamers embed their dreams in a strange legend composed of their own diaries, journals, case histories, letters, medical reports, telegrams, newspaper stories, and the transcripts of phonograph recordings made by a doctor about his patients, all of which are employed to project the dreamers’ fears and desires onto an exotic, monstrous ghoul as an alternative to accepting them as symptoms of their own psychic disturbances. These gothic novels anticipate many of the features of Freud’s speaking cure and his emphasis on rendering an account of the images of our dreams in the familiar words of our language. But by also continuing to evoke the atmosphere and rationale of the supernatural in these tales—even if sometimes discrediting supernatural explanations as strategies of denial or repression—gothic fiction reenacted the debate that raged in England throughout the nineteenth century over the source and significance of dreams. Fashionable groups of secular and religious spiritualists argued that dreams were miraculous events that permitted communication with a divine realm, while positivist theorists maintained that dreams were explainable phenomena governed by natural law.1 0 The scientific community in England was most deeply influenced by the theories of the rationalists of the previous century, who based their description of dreams on the laws of association, the effects on the mind of recent sense impressions and ideas, and the state of the body during sleep. This positivistic tradition was carried forward into the nineteenth century by such theorists as Dugald Stewart (Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1814) and Robert Macnish (The Philosophy of Sleep, 1838), and later others in England, including F. W. H. Myers and James Sully, who began to look more seriously at the psychological significance of dreams and to suggest the importance of what Freud would later identify as the unconscious. Myers is a particularly interesting figure for the period, since he founded the Society for Psychical Research in order to oppose the tide of positivist thought in England and on the Continent. He maintained that positivist explanations

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guage of revelation, at once a symptom of psychic distress and a sign of psychic recovery. The dream accounts that permeate Frankenstein, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and Wuthering Heights anticipate this interpretive turn. They are all told by a narrator recovering from some illness or disabling event, and they all express a profound psychological conflict. Not only do these three texts offer a representative range of gothic conventions, they also foreground an essential characteristic of the genre: the narratives exist primarily as symptoms of an attempt to recover from a disordered state of mind which is most dramatically manifested in the narrator’s dreams. 1 3 Frankenstein began as the “waking dream” of Mary Shelley, which she proceeded to turn into a “ghost story” for her husband and friends during a holiday in Switzerland. But most of the text itself takes the form of a deathbed narrative told by an ailing scientist trying to explain away his own obsessive dream as a form of demonic possession. Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater recounts its narrator’s recovery from a paralyzing illness and addiction to opium, and it is written to “display the marvelous agency” of the dreams associated with that illness as well as to recover the dreamer’s health (114). The Confessions demands attention not only because of its importance for the medical literature on dreams in the period but also because of its thematic and formal affinities with the gothic and autobiographical novel.1 4 Finally, the uncanny, disturbing events of Wuthering Heights can be said to grow out of the bewildering nightmares of its narrator who is stricken ill at the beginning of the tale and is nursed back to health during the course of it. His dreams seem mysteriously and irresistibly to connect him to the other dreams and dreamers in the story and to compel him to question his own authority over his experience, just as they do. In each of these cases, the giving of the dream account is not only a part of the recovery from an illness but also a literal act of authorship—the production of a text. Beneath the manifest plots of these novels, then, is another plot—a plot of “recovery” or “reconstruction” that determines the narrative structure of the texts and reveals the attitudes that the narrators take toward the materials they dream and write about. These plots take a different form in each of the books, reflecting fundamentally different responses to the crisis of personal authority which haunted the period. But of central concern to all of them is the attempt to discover an appropriate language with which to

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of strange psychic events such as dreams and schizophrenia were often reductive and tended to minimize, manipulate, or ignore evidence that was contrary to their theories. His organization collected thousands of case studies and firstperson reports of mysterious dreams, visions, telepathy, sleepwalking, and related occurrences, concluding that this sort of experience proved the immortality of the human soul. In his influential book Human Personality (1903), Myers cogently expressed the characteristic double vision of the scientific and literary communities in the nineteenth century: “The permanent result of a dream, I say, is sometimes such as to show that the dream has not been a mere superficial confusion of past waking experiences, but has had an unexplained potency of its own,—drawn like the potency of hypnotic suggestion, from some depth in our being which the waking self cannot reach.”1 1 In a gesture typical of nineteenth-century ambivalence on the subject, Meyers simultaneously emphasizes the importance of explaining the hidden logic of the dream and the impossibility of doing so, comparing the dream logic to the mysterious “potency” of hypnotic suggestion. Like Jung, he forges a fragile compromise between the dictates of science and those of religion. The gothic novel of the period poses the issue more decisively: the dreams and their recollections are the sites of a struggle to gain authority over the self through language. At stake is a necessary choice between conceiving of the psyche as a supernatural soul facing damnation or redemption, on the one hand, and a medical subject capable of illness or recovery, on the other. Despite certain equivocations, however, figures like Myers and Sully anticipate the claims of psychoanalytic theory more faithfully when they trace dreams back to both immediate and distant memories and find them to be inextricably associated with current wakeful thoughts. These considerations also parallel the gothic preoccupation with the problems entailed in remembering and representing dream experience and in distinguishing it from waking life. Eventually, Freud would respond to this confusion raised independently by scientists such as Sully and Myers and novelists such as Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë. The realization that conscious thoughts “will be apt to be unconsciously read back into the dream” and become part of the dreamer’s memory of the dream is transformed by Freud into a form of confusion which contributes to, rather than detracts from, understanding the significance of a dream.1 2 For him, the language of disguise becomes the lan-

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represent and master the unsettling experience of their dreams. As Freud said of Gradiva, these gothic novels were all “working over the same material” that he would theorize about. They were merely using “a different method” to express it (Delusion and Dream, 117).

Notes 1. Letter of Horace Walpole to the Reverend William Cole, 9 March 1765, quoted in the Introductory Essay of Three Gothic Novels, ed. Mario Praz (1968), p. 17. 2. A number of studies of the gothic novel have emphasized its nightmarish quality. See Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (1979); Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot and Lawrence (1980); and William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy (1985). For a more specific consideration of the dreams of female characters in eighteenth-century fiction, see Margaret Anne Doody, “Deserts, Ruins, and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction and Development of the Gothic Novel,” Genre 10 (Winter 1977): 529-72. 3. See Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970). Ellenberger speaks of the two basic theoretical dispositions toward the mind during sleep as “open” theories (which regarded the dreaming mind as in communication with some mysterious other realm, whether it was a previous life, a disincarnated spirit, or simply some transcendent reality) and “closed” theories (which explained the dream material as composed of forgotten memories or sense impressions). He identified four approaches to the function of dreams at the turn of the century which grew out of these two positions: (1) a conservative function (to preserve traces of the past lost to conscious memory); (2) a dissolutive function (to aid in the transformation of once-conscious acts into unconscious, habitual acts); (3) a creative function (to produce lucid expressions of “higher” truths unavailable to the conscious mind); and (4) a mythopoetic function (to create cultural myth—often associated with the activity of mediums and somnambulism). See especially pp. 145-70 and 311-21. 4. Sigmund Freud, “On the Mechanism of Paranoia,” SE 12:71. 5. Freud, “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis,” SE 19:72, hereafter cited in the text. 6. T. S. Eliot, “Dante,” Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot (1960), p. 204. 7. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 214. 8. C. G. Jung, “Spirit and Life,” The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. Sir Robert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, William McGuire, trans. R. F. C. Hull, vol. 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (1953), p. 336. For a fuller discussion of the relation between Freud’s and Jung’s theories on dreams, see Liliane FreyRohn, From Jung to Freud: A Comparative Study of the Psychology of the Unconscious, trans. Fred E. Engreen and Evelyn K. Engreen (1976).

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9. On repression in Carmilla, see also Day, pp. 88-89; and William Veeder, “‘Carmilla’: The Arts of Repression,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22 (Summer 1980): 197-223. 10. For treatments of the relation of morals to dream theory in England, see Bernard, “Dickens and Victorian Dream Theory”; and Werner Wolff, The Dream— Mirror of Conscience: The History of Dream Interpretation from 2000 B.C. and a New Theory of Dream Synthesis (1952). 11. Frederick W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1954), 1:126. 12. F. W. H. Myers, Edmund Gurney, and Frank Podmore, Phantasms of the Living, quoted in The World of Dreams, ed. Ralph L. Woods (1947), pp. 278-79. 13. For a more general treatment of the importance of acts of writing in the gothic conception of character, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986), chaps. 3 and 4. 14. In the introductory essay to the Penguin edition of DeQuincey’s Confessions (1978), Alethea Hayter claims that with this book DeQuincey “brought to the art of prose autobiography something entirely new, and his influence has been felt by every self-conscious English writer, whether of reminiscences or of autobiographical novels, ever since” (p. 24).

FREDERICK BURWICK (ESSAY DATE SPRING 2003) SOURCE: Burwick, Frederick. “Romantic Supernaturalism: The Case Study as Gothic Tale.” Wordsworth Circle 34, no. 2 (spring 2003): 73-81. In the following essay, Burwick traces the use of Gothic literature as a means of discussing abnormal psychology during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Romantic period witnessed advances in rational and empirical modes of intellectual inquiry and, paradoxically, an increased interest in the supernatural. Ghosts were perceived as mental apparitions, illusions, and hallucinations and as supernatural phenomena bonded to a particular place, as by a curse of vengeance or retribution, because their bodies had met death under peculiar circumstances. What was wanted, then, was a supernaturalism informed by a probing of its very possibility. Ann Radcliffe owed her success in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) to her powerful conjuration of an exterior environment—a lonely castle, a wild and rugged landscape—charged with menacing gloom, and to her attentive tracking of the mental and emotional responses of her characters, their fears and forebodings. Rather than introducing an actual ghost or demon, Radcliffe revealed how the deep-seated dread of the supernatural was aroused and stirred into frantic alarm. Her strategy, of course, was not

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Prior to aberrational psychology, skeptics pronounced a person crazy because they claimed to see ghosts. With the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, an entire profession had emerged specializing in the pathology of apparitions. In this inquiry into the nature of Romantic Supernaturalism, I refer to some of the basic categories of mental aberration introduced by the physicians. Rather than trying to adhere to their categories, however, I shall attempt to distinguish between the hallucinations of the sane and the hallucinations of the insane. This division is as unstable as its subjects. Both in the literary examples and in the medical “case studies,” the sane tend to become insane if they persist too long in their hallucinations. And many of the insane become adept in disguising their delusions and acting sane. The boundaries between sane and insane are as indeterminate in medical practice as they are in literature. Among the effects of the rise of aberrational psychology, was that medical doctors begin to appear as characters in the Gothic novel. But to say that art imitates life is to tell but part of the story. Life and art, like two mirrors placed opposite one another, create an infinite regression of art imitating life imitating art. The books on mental pathology published in this era present their empirical evidence in the form of “case studies.” Not challenging the factual validity of this peculiar genre, I would like to point out that the medical authors in addition to recording their clinical observations, and citing pertinent medical sources, typically displayed their literary learning with references to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Milton’s Satan, and various lore from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy or Darwin’s Zoonomia. The physicians who write these “case studies” are conscious of literary parallels and have their own sense of dramatic effect in describing a patient’s delusions. But for the most remarkable interweaving of art and life, it is the patient who is the true shuttle in the loom. In his Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers (1830), Dr. Abercrombie reports the case of a patient who is visited by a spectral apparition, yet on all occasions knows the ghostly visitor to be his own hallucination. That conscious and rational awareness may accompany hallucination, Ab-

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ ELIZABETH BOWEN (1899-1973)

Noted for her subtle, evocative novels and short stories, Bowen has been compared to such novelists of sensibility as Jane Austen, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf. She is perhaps best known for her novel The Death of the Heart (1938), and critics point to that phrase as an apt summation of Bowen’s recurrent theme: the inevitable disillusionment inherent in human relationships, particularly as innocent characters make the painful passage to experience. Critics praise Bowen for her descriptive, finely pitched style, and they often compare her with Katherine Mansfield for her extreme sensitivity to perceptions of light, atmosphere, color, and sound. Like Mansfield, Bowen is considered expert at presenting the emotional dynamics of a situation and then swiftly illuminating their significance, particularly within the prescribed bounds of the short story. While Bowen is generally acclaimed as both a novelist and short fiction writer, some critics deem her stories superior to her novels. Bowen’s experiences living and working as an air-raid warden in the besieged city during World War II inspired what many critics consider her finest short story collection, The Demon Lover (1945), which explores war’s insidious effects on the human psyche. In the stories, composed between spring 1941 and late 1944, Bowen introduced to her short fiction a hallucinatory tone and supernatural themes in order to convey war’s effect on the human mind. In “The Mysterious Kor,” which is often cited among Bowen’s greatest stories, wartime London becomes a mysterious, terrifying nether-city by the light of a transformative moon. In “The Demon Lover” Mrs. Drover becomes dislocated in time, slipping from World War II back to World War I, where she waits feverishly for the arrival of her longdead fiancé. In this, as in other stories in The Demon Lover, Bowen employs a disturbing ambiguity, preventing the reader from knowing whether stories depict supernatural states, or illusions created by the characters’ neurotic and overburdened psyches.

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the only one; evil spirits and supernatural beings are prominent in the literature. The case that I would make, however, is that the supernatural provided occasion to examine the terra incognita of the mind, the unarticulated doubts, desires, fears, and longings that lurk beneath consciousness.

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ercrombie points out, demonstrates that the disturbance of the visual senses need not affect the rational capacities. As it happened, Dr. Abercrombie was also the personal physician and friend of Sir Walter Scott. In his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), Scott, too, had written on spectral illusions. He promptly inquired about Abercrombie’s patient. The patient may be aware of the hallucination, but was he aware that he was hallucinating someone else’s hallucination? Dr. Abercrombie’s patient had apparently taken a cue from a character in Le Sage’s Gil Blas. In the Twelfth and final book of the novel, Duke D’Olivarez, suffering from progressive physical decline, confesses the cause to Gil Blas: I am the prey of a morbid melancholy which eats inwardly into my vitals: a spectre haunts me every moment, arrayed in the most terrific form of preternatural horror. In vain have I argued with myself that it is a vision of the brain, an unreal mockery: its continual presentments blast my sight, and unseat my reason. Though my understanding teaches me, that in looking on this spectre I stare at vacancy, my spirits are too weak to derive comfort from the conviction. Thus much have you extorted from me: now judge whether the cause of my melancholy is fit to be divulged.1

Duke D’Olivarez, Scott explains in the Letters on Demonology was “haunted by an apparition, to the actual existence of which he gave no credit, but died, nevertheless, because he was overcome and heart-broken by its imaginary presence” (28, 54-55). Dr. Abercrombie’s patient seemed to have experienced in his hallucinations the very symptoms about which he had read in Le Sage. This strange case soon becomes even stranger. Dr. Abercrombie’s wife is infected with the very same disease, although not from reading Gil Blas. She had read her husband’s book, and read, too, the works that he had cited. Among these was Dr. Samuel Hibbert’s Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions (1824). Like Dr. Abercrombie, Dr. Hibbert was also a leading physician in Edinburgh, and had gained considerable acclaim for his investigation of spectral illusions. Shortly after reading this work, Mrs. Abercrombie began to see various phantom figures posing in her sitting room and bed chamber. Dr. Abercrombie consulted with another Scottish associate, Sir David Brewster, the leading scientist in optical phenomena. Concurring that these bizarre optical manifestations, stimulated by reading books, must be attributed to a “morbidly sensitive imagination,” Brewster published an account of the woman’s experience in his Letters on Natural Magic (1832)which were his reply to Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witch-

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craft (42-3; 49). To protect her identity, her name was not mentioned, and Dr. Abercrombie’s “Account of a remarkable case of Spectral Illusion,” appeared anonymously in Brewster’s Edinburgh Journal of Science. Here is his description of an episode on December 30, 1829: at about 4 o’clock P.M. Mrs. ——— came down the stairs into the drawing-room, which she had quitted a few minutes before, and on entering the room, saw me, as she supposed, standing with my back to the fire. She addressed me, asking how it was I had returned so soon. (I had left the house for a walk half an hour before.) She said I looked fixedly at her with a serious and thoughtful expression of countenance, but did not speak. She supposed I was busied in thought, and sat down in an arm-chair next to the fire, and close within a couple of feet at most of the figure she still saw standing before her. As, however, the eyes still continued to be fixed on her, after a few minutes she said ‘Why don’t you speak ———?’ The figure upon this moved of towards the window at the further end of the room, the eyes still gazing on her, and passed so very close to her in doing so, that she was struck by the circumstances of hearing no step nor sound, no feeling her clothes brushed against, nor even any agitation in the air. The idea then arose for the first time into her mind, that it was no reality, but a spectral illusion. (II [oct-apr, 1830] 319-321)

A month later, Mrs. Abercrombie’s visions took a morbid turn. The spectral illusions of her husband were no doubt disconcerting, but scarcely alarming. Then, late one evening, as she was “sitting before the dressing-glass . . . she was suddenly startled by seeing in the mirror the figure of a near relative, . . . over her left shoulder; his eyes meeting her’s in the glass.” This apparition was all the more frightening, because it “was enveloped in grave-clothes closely pinned, as is usual with corpses, round the head and under the chin.” Seeing a figure in a shroud, Dr. Abercrombie notes, is “nearer to the ordinary stories of supernatural visitation.” Certainly it was near, too, to Scott’s tale, “Aunt Margaret’s Mirror.” Acknowledging the superstitious lore of the wraith, Dr. Abercrombie closes this article by stating that if “the apparition coincided with illness or death, as had no doubt frequently happened in other instances, our philosophy would have had to stand a severe trial.” This is a peculiar admission for the man of science. He readily admits that the coincidence of death and a wraith-like apparition of the dying person had “no doubt frequently happened in other instances” (319-321). One more coincidence would presumably not present a “severe trial,” unless that coincidence was his own wife’s spectral illusion.

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Although she managed to muster admirable courage in dealing with these visitations, they continued to plague her. Two weeks later, on October 26, she watched from the window as a carriage drew up to the house. When “it arrived within a few yards of the window, she saw the figures of the postillions and the persons inside take the ghastly appearance of skeletons, and other hideous figures.” On December 3, she was again visited by a figure dressed in a shroud—this time the phantom was her husband’s brother. Dr. Abercrombie summarizes his case study by noting that “these successive delusions” have an “extraordinary resemblance . . . to the usual circumstances of the ghost stories we have all heard repeated, with more or less authority for them, from our cradles upwards.” Mrs. Abercrombie, the doctor insists, was in no way dwelling on the images that arose before her eyes: “Consequently the imagination, memory, and other faculties of the mind seem to be wholly unconcerned in the suggestion or production of the spectral forms.” (26163). That is a dubious conclusion, for Dr. Abercrombie himself has documented that she had been reading Hibbert’s Philosophy of Spectral Illusions, Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, and his own Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers. An interesting aspect of Mrs. Abercrombie’s case is that she was not reading the Gothic tales that deliberately indulge the aesthetics of fright. Instead, she was reading works, even Scott’s, that attempted to provide an objective explanation of spectral phenomena. Mrs. Abercrombie’s symptoms are part of a prevailing preoccupation of the medical literature. For a person to have an hallucination, knowing at once that it is only an hallucination, has a richer significance than I have yet acknowledged. My earliest example is from LeSage’s Gil Blas. Another interesting version is from a true master of ghost stories, Sheridan LeFanu. In the Dr. Hesselius stories from In a Glass Darkly (1872), the man of medical science, the expert in the mental pathology, has been fully absorbed into the narrative structure. He is no longer an intermittent figure, called upon in moments of crisis. The medical “case study” is now the fictive genre. Dr. Martin Hesselius, author of Essays on Metaphysical Medicine, is the narrator and commentator. The “case study” most resembling Mrs. Abercrombie’s is the one Le Fanu has titled “Green Tea.” The Reverend Mr. Jennings frequently drinks green tea. If vice it is, it is his sole

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My first response to the doctor’s account of his wife’s visions was that he had failed to see the obvious. With her husband devoting so much of his time to research on the pathology of hallucinations, she had devised a strategy for commanding his attention. And obviously it worked, for she was already the subject of two his articles in Brewster’s Edinburgh Journal of Science. But then I thought of Coleridge’s comment on Hamlet’s feigning madness: “O that subtle trick to pretend to be acting only when we are very near being what we act” (Lectures 1808-1809: On Literature, I:441). Dr. Abercrombie’s third article reports that his wife continues to see spirits of the dead: at 2:00 a.m. on October 5, 1831, the doctor is awakened by his wife who has seen the doctor’s “deceased mother draw aside the bed-curtains and appear between them.” A few days later, on October 11, she is seated with guests in the drawing-room when a deceased friend enters and takes a seat. She is less anxious about experiencing yet another spectral illusion, than she is about what the guests might think: “lest they should be astonished or alarmed at her staring in the way she was conscious of doing, at vacancy, and should fancy her intellect disordered.” Fortunately, Mrs. Abercrombie knew a way out of this predicament, for she was well read in the literature of spectral illusions. She recalled reading of a similar incident in Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft. Scott told of Captain C., who retired to the west of England. Because his health was failing, a local clergyman visited him regularly. On this occasion, several hours after the clergyman departed, the Captain was preparing to retire, when he was astonished to see the priest once again in his room, but refusing to answer the Captain’s questions. Suspecting that this was not the clergyman at all, the Captain “followed it round the bed, when it seemed to sink down on an elbow-chair . . . To ascertain positively the nature of the apparition, the soldier himself sate down on the same chair, ascertaining thus, beyond question, that the whole was illusion.” According to Scott, the Captain’s only remaining concern was whether the clergyman had died about the same time (35-36). Mrs. Abercrombie had already had that concern when she was visited by a relative wearing a shroud. Now her only challenge was to summon “the force and resolution necessary to enable her to cross the space . . . and seat herself in the chair which appeared occupied by the figure.” If Scott’s ghost stories were in part the cause of her hallucinations, in this instance at least they were also the means of abjuration.

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vice. He is a kind and good man, free from any crime that would haunt him with remorse. Nevertheless, he is a haunted man, relentlessly haunted; not by guilt and self-recriminations that typically persecute the villain of the Gothic tale, but by a monkey, an hallucinatory monkey. Dr. Hesselius is the dispassionate observer and recorder to whom Jennings has come in torment, desperate for some cure or relief from his hallucinations. For four years he has been writing a study of religious metaphysics of the ancients. It is a labour that he loves, and he works happily for long hours, drinking a strong green tea as a stimulant. He is not in his study, but riding on an omnibus, when he first sees a small, black monkey with red glowing eyes. He dispels the possibility that the monkey might be real by poking at it: his umbrella passes right through the phantom animal. To Jennings’s horror the animal becomes his companion. Dr. Hesselius documents the progression of Jennings’s hallucination. At first, because he knows that it is not real, he thinks the monkey is merely the symptom of some disorder of the eye. The constant presence, however, soon becomes a persecution, and Jennings begins to believe the monkey is a demon. In the final stage, he hears it telepathically in his head, urging him to commit evil acts and to destory himself. He has already reached this frantic state of torment when he turns to Dr. Hesselius. The doctor tells him that he has treated many similar cases and that he can be confident of a cure. Should the monkey again appear, Jennings is to summon the doctor. The monkey, of course, returns, but the doctor is unavailable. Hesselius arrives later at Jennings’ quarters to find the minister has slit his throat. Le Fanu gives many hints, but no satisfactory explanation, why Jennings might be the victim of such hallucinatory self-persecution. As in the case of Abercrombie’s patient, who had read Gil Blas, and Abercrombie’s wife, who had read Hibbert, and Scott, and her own husband’s book, Jennings too was guilty of reading in the lore of spectral illusions. Much of his reading, of course, was in the metaphysics of antiquity. In order to understand his monkey delusion, he had turned to Emanuel Swedenborg’s Arcana Celestia. Unlike the Duke D’Olivarez, or Mrs. Abercrombie, or up to this moment, Jennings himself, Swedenborg truly believed in the supernatural origin of his apparitions. He believed that good and evil spirits inhabit the world and manifest themselves to certain individuals. Through a kind of mental symbiosis, these spirits reside in the thoughts of the person with whom they associate. In the

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visual and auditory perceptions of their host, they take the form that corresponds to the elements in that individual’s character that initially attracted the spirits. Thus they may represent a lust hidden in the dark side of consciousness. The monkey might be a manifestation of repressed desire. But Le Fanu gives no hint what that desire might be. From first to last, Jennings’s only excesses have been green tea and metaphysics. Abstaining from tea, however, does nothing the retard the visual intrusions of the monkey, who sits on his book in the pulpit, so that Jennings cannot read to his congregation, and soon disrupts his prayers. If this is indeed a psychological projection of Jennings’s guilt, that guilt can only be devoting himself so ardently to “pagan” metaphysics. Dr Hesselius regrets, upon discovering Jennings’s corpse, not that the man is dead, but that he, Dr Hesselius, has not be able to record yet another success among his many cases. The Doctor is convinced that a dietary cure would have put an end to spectral illusions, some fluid to counteract the damage wrought by the green tea. Dr. Hesselius’s pronouncements on the physiological rather than psychological or supernatural causes for Jennings’s torment and suicide are uncontested at the end of this “case study,” which is to appear, as translated and edited by a younger doctor, in an entire volume of Hesselius’s “case studies.” Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius stories are among the obvious examples of the interweavings of Gothic tales and the medical accounts of mental pathology, and the “case study” of Rev. Jennings follows directly in that tradition of self-aware hallucination that was observed in the confession of Duke D’Olivarez. But the prominent example was the case of Friedrich Nicolai (1733-1811), bookdealer, friend of the playwright and critic, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), and founding editor of the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek (17651805), a journal dedicated to literary reviews. Throughout the year 1791, Nicolai suffered a series of hallucinations, fully aware that his spectral illusions were not real. Scott notes that this case was discussed by “the learned and acute Dr. Ferriar of Manchester,” in An Essay towards a Theory of Apparitions (1813), as well as by Dr. Hibbert in Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions (1824). Nicolai recorded the changes in his physical and mental condition, and described each of his visual illusions—delivered as a paper read to the Royal Society of Berlin in 1799. An English translation, “A Memoir on the Appearance of Spectres or Phantoms occasioned by Disease, with Psychological Remarks,” was published in William Nichol-

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Scott summarizes the case in the Letters on Demonology: These phantoms afforded nothing unpleasant to the imagination of the visionary either in sight or expression, and the patient was possessed of too much firmness to be otherwise affected by their presence than with a species of curiosity, as he remained convinced from the beginning to the end of the disorder, that these singular effects were merely symptoms of the state of his health, and did not in any other respect regard them as a subject of apprehension. After a certain time, and some use of medicine, the phantoms became less distinct in their outline, less vivid in their colouring, faded, as it were, on the eye of the patient, and at length totally disappeared. (20-22)

Scott goes on to cite Dr. Hibbert’s conclusions concerning the Nicolai case. Hibbert argues that several very different physical conditions are capable of eliciting optical spectres. The visitation of spectral phenomena is . . . a frequent hectic symptom—often an associate of febrile and inflammatory disorders-frequently accompanying inflammation of the brain-a concomitant also of highly excited nervous irritability—equally connected with hypochondria—and finally united in some cases with gout, and in others with the effects of excitation produced by several gases. In all these cases there seems to be a morbid degree of sensibility, with which this symptom is ready to ally itself, and which, though inaccurate as a medical definition, may be held sufficiently descriptive of one character of the various kinds of disorder with which this painful symptom may be found allied. (22-23)

Scott also mentions various forms of intoxication—from distilled spirits, opium, or nitrous oxide—which may also generate visual illusions. He may have recalled the little book by Humphry

Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, Concerning Nitrous Oxide (1800), which included personal accounts by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Peter Mark Roget on the effects of inhaling the gas. Scott testifies that “Very frequent use of the nitrous oxide which affects the senses so strongly, and produces a short but singular state of ecstasy, would probably be found to occasion this species of disorder” (20). Optical spectres, then, may result from physical disorders as well as mental disorders, and they may also be solicited by the use of opium and other drugs. As has already occurred to the Coleridgeans in the audience, optical spectres were not infrequent in Coleridge’s experience: the opening in the wall that he observed in his room in Bristol, the apparition of the Captain that he saw at his fire-side in Malta, the luminescent letters that he inscribed on his thigh while lying in bed, the adulterous nighttime wanderings of Wordsworth that he thought he witnessed at an inn on their way to Coleorton. Scott recalls, too, Coleridge’s reply to “a lady who asked him if he believed in ghosts:— ‘No, madam; I have seen too many myself’” (34). While such symptoms may seem trivial and whimsical, Scott argues that the imagination has the power “to kill the body, even when its fantastic terrors cannot overcome the intellect” (26-32). The mind, conscious of its own hallucinations, may be relieved from the horror of thinking that nightmare images are real, but that awareness cannot dispel the torment of knowing it has no control over their presence. From Kant’s Versuch über die Krankheiten des Köpfes (1764) Coleridge adapted his categories of madness as a disease of the will, of reason, of the feelings, and of the sensory organs. Coleridge’s refers to these categories in a lecture on Don Quixote (March, 1819): “1 Hypochondriasis, or out of his senses—2. Derangement of the Understanding, or out of his Wits—3 & Loss of Reason—4. Frenzy—or derangement of the Sensations—” (On Literature, 2:156-66; 414-20). Following this scheme, Coleridge can diagnose Don Quixote as having lost his wits, not his reason. Authors of the Gothic tales were aware of contemporary accounts of debility and derangement. Successful in its run at Drury Lane and much maligned in the critique by Coleridge, Robert Maturin’s Bertram (1816) is a remarkable study in the gradual mental deterioration of its heroine, Imogine. Nor is it easy for the audience to put all the blame on her own intemperate desires. Self-centered violence and lust for revenge are impelling motives for her lover, Bertram. The

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son’s Journal of Natural Philosophy in 1803. Nicolai stressed in his paper the important evidence for the interdependency of mind and body, and for the effects of a nervous indisposition on the organs of sense. Neglect of his scheduled bleeding to relieve a congestion in the head, compounded by death in the family and difficulties in business, had aggravated his condition. In February, the hallucinations commenced. While he realized that the phantasmata were the production of his own mind, he found that he could exercise no conscious control over their coming or going, their shape or their actions: “these visions in my case were not the consequence of any known law of reason, of the imagination, or of the otherwise usual association of ideas” (Nicholson’s Journal . . . , VI [1803] 167)

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moments of kindness that he shows are too little and too late. Too little, for example, when he kisses rather than kills, as he had planned, Imogine’s child. Too late, when he feels pangs of remorse at the cave where Imogine has fled in her madness and where her child lies dead. Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797) also enjoyed a successful run at Drury Lane with John Philip Kemble as the hero, Percy, Barrymore as the villain, Osmond, and Dorothy Jordan as the entrapped heroine, Angela. But in Lewis’s drama, it is not the victimized woman who is driven mad; rather it is the villain himself who is vanquished by his own paranoid fears. Osmond’s lust for Angela is driven more by jealous rivalry and possessive greed than it is by sexual desire. With Angela and her father, Reginald, trapped in the dungeon, Osmond lifted his arm to stab his brother, just as he had ten years earlier; and just as happened ten years earlier, Evelina, Reginald’s wife and Angela’s mother, threw herself between her husband and Osmond’s dagger. Ten years earlier she was killed by her brother-in-law. In a repetition of that very scene, Osmond is distraught by the appearance of the ghost, and Angela uses that moment of distraction to plunge a dagger into his chest. “The great run which this piece had,” observed a critic, “is a striking proof that success is a very uncertain criterion of merit—the plot is rendered contemptible by the introduction of the Ghost.”2 But the fault cannot be the Ghost, per se. One would presumably not argue that Macbeth is rendered contemptible by the appearance of the Ghost of Banquo (III.iv), or Hamlet by the appearance of the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father (I.iv and v), or Julius Caesar by the appearance of the Ghost of Caesar in Brutus’s tent (IV.iii). The critic’s complaint probably rests on the conviction that an optical spectre on this occasion, seen by Osmond alone, would have been more effective than an actress draped in a white shroud. Although there was a degree of conformity among the opinions of the medical doctors who were attempting to ascertain the causes of a patient’s visitations from spirits or demons, there was much less conformity in the actual diagnosis. The disparities, as seen in retrospect two centuries later, are astonishing. Speculative anatomy seemed to gain a professional following right along side clinical studies. The nervous system and the brain according to Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Caspar Spurzheim coexisted with Matthew Baillie’s physiological investigation of the nervous system and Johann Christian Reil’s mapping of the ganglia and the cerebral system. The disparities are even

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more remarkable when one looks at the investigation of apparitions: Gotthelf Heinrich Schubert’s theory in the Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (1808) seems as lunatic as the phenomena it describes. But how scientific were the scientific treatises on apparitions? Scott readily acknowledged the vast difference between his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft and Hibbert’s Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions which was subtitled An Attempt to Trace Such Illusions To Their Physical Causes. The difference, Scott asserted, was not only that “Dr. Hibbert . . . has most ingeniously, as well as philosophically, handled this subject,” but also that he “has treated it . . . in a medical point of view, with science to which we make no pretence, and a precision of detail to which our superficial investigation affords us no room for extending ourselves” (22). Hibbert’s most important predecessor in Britain was John Ferriar, in An Essay towards a Theory of Apparitions (1813). Among Hibbert’s immediate successors were John Abercrombie, in Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers (1830) and Walter Cooper Dendy, On the Phenomena of Dreams and other Transient Illusions (1832). But the topic of illusions and apparitions was also commonly addressed in the major works on mental pathology, as in Philippe Pinel’s A Treatise on Insanity, translated from the French in 1809, or John Haslam’s Observations on Insanity, first published in 1798 with an enlarged second edition in 1809. Dr. Haslam was also the author of Illustrations of madness: exhibiting a singular case of insanity and a no less remarkable difference in medical opinion: developing the nature of the assailment, and the manner of working events; with a description of the tortures experienced by bomb-bursting, lobster-cracking, and lengthening of the brain (1810). The book is especially relevant to this study for three reasons: 1) it delineates the conditions of complex mental illusions; 2) it provides an extensive “case study” of the hallucinations of Haslam’s patient, James Tilly Matthews; 3) it demonstrates the disparity in medical judgment. The “case study” of Matthews reads more like science fiction than medical observation. It is a story of conspiracy theory and mind control. Near the London Wall was the hidden establishment of a group of persons skilled in Pneumatic Chemistry. There they have constructed a large device, an Air Loom, capable of sending waves of magnetic energy that the compress the air and can be focused on an individual. Matthews has discovered that he is their experimental target. The team is headed by Bill, the King, who “actuated Rhynwick Williams to the

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Notwithstanding the recent regulations, there are many madhouses in the neighbourhood of the metropolis, which demand a very serious enquiry, The masters of these receptacles of misery, on the days that they expect visitors, get their sane patients out of the way; or, if that cannot be done, give them large doses of stupefying liquor, or narcotic draughts, that drown their faculties, and render them incapable of giving a coherent answer. A very strict eye should be kept on these gaolers of the mind; for if they do not find a patient mad, their oppressive tyranny soon makes them so. (126; the “recent regulations” refer to the Madhouse Act of 1774 and subsequent controls in response to legal actions against abuses)

From another article dated December, 1791: Private mad-houses are become so general at present, and their prostitution of justice so openly carried on, that any man may have his wife, or father, or brother confined for life at a stipulated price! The wretched victims are concealed from the inspecting doctors, unless it can be contrived that they are stupefied with drugs, or made mad with strong liquors, against the hour of visiting. (Pargeter, 126-27)

As happened in many cases, it was debated whether this patient was sane or insane. Matthews managed a successful business as tea-broker in Leadenhall Street, became an advocate of republican France, and was imprisoned during one of his visits to Paris. After his return, he worried that those who had tortured him in prison would track him down. The decision whether a patient should be placed in an asylum, was a decision that was fraught with a potential for abuse. Haslam had no hesitation in confining Matthews to Bethlem Hospital in January, 1797, and transferring him to the incurable ward one year later. In the meantime, a legal process was raised by his family demanding his release. Haslam responded that Matthews’s “insanity was most evident, yet his relatives did not possess the faculty of perceiving his disorder.” Ten years later, with Matthews’s still in confinement, Dr. Henry Clutterbuck and Dr George Burkback submitted affidavits that they had interviewed Matthews and found him perfectly sane. Haslam prevailed in the proceedings and Matthews remained in the hospital. Haslam responded to the debate over Matthews’s possible sanity by describing the cycle of “lucid intervals” and “relapses,” and the consequent difficulty for a physician not familiar with the case to reach a proper diagnosis.4

No wonder that the mad-house soon became a more lurid setting than a castle dungeon for the atrocities of the depraved Gothic villain.5 No wonder that driving a helpless victim to insanity was adopted as a Gothic plot. But it is equally compelling as a modern film plot: Gaslight (1944), a psychological suspense thriller, with Charles Boyer as the villainous Gregory Anton, Ingrid Bergman as Paula Alquist, who becomes his wife and victim, and Joseph Cotton as Brian Cameron of Scotland Yard. Adapted from Patrick Hamilton’s long-running play, Angel Street, the plot is about a ruthless jewel-thief, who ten years earlier murdered Paula’s aunt in attempt to steal her jewels. Knowing that the jewels are still hidden in the house, Gregory waits ten years until he can marry the niece who has inherited the house. After systematically and methodically tormenting her in order to drive her insane, he intends then to have her committed to an insane asylum, and live with the wealth and luxury of the recovered jewels and his wife’s inheritance. The title is derived from the frequent dimming and flickering of the gaslights, a key factor in driving the wife crazy. The plan almost succeeds, when the detective of Scotland Yard intervenes, rescues the wife, and arrests the husband.

In the concluding section of his Observations on Maniacal Disorders (1792), Dr. William Pargeter quoted recent newspaper accounts on the widespread abuse of mad-houses. From an article dated September, 1791:

The plot of Gaslight is the same as Joanna Baillie’s Orra: the mental stability of the female protagonist is undermined by deliberate abuse perpetrated by her male “protector.” In depicting a female character victimized by madness, Baillie

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commission of his monstrous practices” and “also took Hadfield in tow, by means of magnetic impregnations, and compelled him to fire his Pistol at his Majesty in the Theatre.”3 Other members of the team are Jack, the Schoolmaster, who serves as shorthand record-keeper; Sir Archy (who may be a woman in man’s apparel) who is the “liar of the gang” and uses the Air Loom to disseminate a protective cover of propaganda and to communicate with the targets by “brainsayings”; the Middleman, manufacturer and operator of the Air Loom; Augusta, either friendly and cajoling, or spiteful and malignant; she influences female targets with her “brain-sayings”; Charlotte, victimized by the gang, perhaps kept in chains, almost naked, poorly fed; the Glove Woman, who wears cotton gloves and a fawncolored Norwich gown. Matthews describes the various assaults on his mind and body delivered through the Air Loom, as well as how the Air Loom can also, across a vast distance, impregnate its target with various chemicals.

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is concerned in revealing her plight as caused more by the ruthless abuse of male authority, than by inherent fragility of mind. To be sure, Orra has the love and loyalty of Theobald, but the machinations of Rudigere, the “gaoler of the mind,” succeed in secluding her from his intervention. As heiress to the fiefdom of her deceased father, she lives as a ward to her uncle, Hughobert, who seeks to marry her to his son, and thus unite the two branches of the Aldenberg estates. Orra, however, recognizes the selfish motives and steadfastly rejects the suit of her cousin. With her insistence that drama should address the power of emotions to dictate behavior and compel the overwrought individual to acts of irrational excess, Joanna Baillie enters into the very same province of aberrational psychology that her brother, Matthew Baillie, had begun to explore in his 1794 lectures on the “Anatomy of the Nervous System” and the “Physiology of the Nervous System.” Matthew Baillie conceded that no simple discrimination of mind and brain, of psychological and physiological causes, was possible, but he also observed that the persistence of a psychological state frequently altered the physiological condition. 6 Joanna Baillie, too, sought to ground her analysis of behavior on empirical observation, and to identify the symptoms which foreshadow an impending emotional crisis: “the restless eye, the muttering lip, the half-checked exclamation and the hasty start.” Because actions in a state of excitement may override volition and even conscious awareness, they can be studied only in the observation of others. At the time when Orra was published in Plays of the Passions, volume three (1812), Matthew Baillie had already commenced his service as physician to the deranged George III (“Autobiography,” 59-60). An independent woman, Orra struggles against male domination. With sarcasm, she scorns the attempts to usurp her “lands and rights” through marriage: And so, since fate has made me, woe the day! That poor and good-for-nothing, helpless being, Woman yclept, I must consign myself With all my lands and rights into the hands Of some proud man, and say, ‘Take all, I pray, And do me in return the grace and favour To be my master.’ (II.i.1-7)

In spite of her assertiveness, Orra, no less than other characters in Baillie’s Plays of the Passions, has a mental weakness. As Brewster said of Mrs. Abercrombie, she possesses a “morbidly sensitive imagination.” Readily captivated by ghost stories,

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her superstitious imagination cannot resist their horrid delights. She confesses her fascination with tales of terror: when the cold-blood shoots through every vein: When every hair’s-pit on my shrunken skin A knotted knoll becomes, and mine ears Strange inward sounds awake, and to mine eyes Rush stranger tears, there is a joy in fear. (II.i.170-174)

Aware of her susceptibility to superstitious lore, Rudigere plots to possess her. He convinces Hughobert that his hopes to marry her to his son, Glottenbal, will be soon be blighted because she has taken a fancy for Theobald of Falkenstein, who lingers about the castle seeking opportunities to meet with Orra. He convinces Hughobert to present Orra with the ultimatum to accept Glottenbal as her husband. If she refuses, she must be sent to the family’s long-vacant, half-ruined castle in the Black Forest until she reconsiders. Rudigere offers his service to act as her protector during her banishment to the Black Forest, a banishment, he predicts, that will be short-lived because she will promptly repent her stubbornness and eagerly return to marry Glottenbal. Catherina, who attends Orra on this journey, has been blackmailed into obedience to Rudigere for some impropriety which he threatens to expose. Thus Orra, once she has arrived in the isolated castle, has no companion to help her avoid Rudigere’s sexual advances. Unable to assail her dignity and integrity, he seeks to undermine her courage by arousing her superstitious fear. He tries to convince her that he, too, dreads the spectre that haunts the place. He longs for her companionship to dispel the gloom: To hear thy voice, makes ev’n this place of horrors,— Where, as ’tis said, the spectre of a chief, Slain by our common grandsire, haunts the night, A paradise—a place where I could live In penury and gloom, and be most blessed. Ah! Orra! if there’s misery in thraldom, Pity a wretch who breathes but in thy favour: Who, till he look’d upon that beauteous face, Was free and happy.—Pity me or kill me! (III.i.83-89)

By exacerbating her fears, he thinks to make her so terrified that she will shrink from being left alone and choose to spend the night in his chamber. The gothic romance, as critics have often observed, uses the conventions of super-naturalism as a disguise for an exposition of sexual exploi-

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not her mind?—Oh direst wreck of all! That noble mind!—But ’tis some passing seizure, Some powerful movement of a transient nature; It is not madness? (V.ii.33-36)

But Orra responds not to attempts to release her from her delusions. She sees herself captive in a borderland where the spirits of the dead intermingle with the living. She rejects the friends who arrive from her uncle’s court. Neither the stringencies of a moral cure nor the sympathetic ministrations9 of Theobald’s loving kindness are capable of dispelling her madness: “Her mind within itself holds a dark world / Of dismal phantasies and horrid forms!” The uncle who had abused his responsibility as her guardian is compelled to listen to, and share, her vision of her avenging father who comes with hordes of the dead to wreak his retribution. With “all the wild strength of frantic horror,” she takes hold of Hughobert and Theobald and, as the curtain drops, pulls them back with her into the dark recesses of the stage. Haslam, in his Observations on Madness, argued that distinction that the between self-awareness and self-delusion in the experience of ocular spectres was irrelevant to the medical diagnosis of madness. Mania, for Haslam the condition of “false perceptions,” is not in itself a factor in madness. In his judgment, the subject only becomes mad when mania is accompanied by melancholia, which he defines as the intensity of idea. In its usual definition, mania itself involves precisely that intensity. Haslam redefined terms in order to establish a bipolar scheme in which a patient is said to vacillate between mania and melancholia, between “lucid intervals” and “relapse.” During the manic phase a mad person is capable of dissembling sanity and stifling or masking the disorder (41, 45-57). This argument, as in Matthews’s case, defends the physician’s discernment of madness, in spite of the patient’s appearance of sanity and the diagnosis of other physicians unfamiliar with the cycles of the patient’s behav-

ior. It is, for the very reasons that Pargeter pointed out in his Observations on Maniacal Disorders, potentially dangerous as a means of confining the sane in mad-houses. It also provides an apt psychological construct for the fictional character who can mask his obsession well enough to woo the bride whom he intends to destroy. Imogine, Orra, and other mad heroines in the Gothic tales played out fears and desires that readers recognized. The madness of Ambrosio or Osmond was driven by a perversity or cruelty perceived to lurk in men who were authoritarian “gaolors of the mind,” yet counted themselves normal and sane. In the Biographia, Coleridge insisted that “German tragedy” was a misnomer for such plays as Bertram, which he saw as Jacobinical through and through (ed. Engell and Bate, CW, II:221). The Gothic tale became an effective venue for examining current issues of domestic and urban violence, as well as challenges to religious and political authority. Character and situation in the Gothic tales paralleled the very concerns with aberrant behavior in contemporary medical works on apparitions and delusions. As Dr. Abercrombie acknowledged, the “case study” of the physician may seem a mirror image of the Gothic tale. Indeed, it could become such a perfect mirror image that, as in the Dr. Hesselius tales, it could pop right through to the other side, like Alice through the looking-glass.

Notes 1. Alain-René Le Sage (1668-1747), The Adventures of Gil Blas, of Santillane (1715-1735), translated in 1749 by Tobias Smollett (1721-1771), 4 vols. In 2 (Lions: Cormon and Blanc, 1815), vol. 4, Book the Twelfth, ch. 11, pp. 271-272. 2. J. Genest, English Stage from the Restoration to 1830, 10 vols. (Bath: H. E. Carrington, 1830), VII, 332-33. 3. Rhynwick Williams, the “London Monster,” was a forerunner of Jack the Ripper, who murdered women on the streets of London; he was captured and convicted in 1791, although there were doubts whether he was actually the one guilty of the crimes; James Hadfield was tried for shooting at his Majesty George III. at Drury Lane Theatre, on May 15, 1800. 4. Roy Porter, as editor of a reprint of Haslam’s Illustrations of Madness, reports that “Matthews’s fate became a cause célèbre; . . . the institution came under the scathing scrutiny of the House of ⫽ Commons committee investigating madhouses in 1815.” After being incarcerated by Dr Haslam for twenty years, an order for Matthews’s release from Bethlem hospital was given in 1816. Porter, Introduction, p. 15. 5. See also: Samuel Bruckshaw, One More Proof of the Iniguitous Abuse of Private Madhouses (London, 1794); William Belcher, Address to Humanity, Containing a Letter to Dr. Munro, a Receipt to Make a Lunatic, and Seize his Estates, and a Sketch of a True Smiling Hyena (London,

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tation.7 Baillie assembles the conventions: the wicked villain, the maiden in distress, the gothic castle, the rumors of a ghost. But she resorts to no supernatural disguise. Nor is the advent of Orra’s madness a substitute for supernaturalism. Rudigere’s threat of sexual assault combines with the “real agony of fear” to drive Orra over the brink into madness. Finding no escape left to her, she is plunged into insanity. Theobald arrives to rescue her—but too late. In Act V, Baillie reveals the devastating affliction. The cause, as surmised by those who see her, was some seizure of the brain:8

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1796); James Parkinson, Mad-Houses; Observations on the Act for Regulation of Mad-Houses (London: Sherwood, Neeley and Jones, 1811). 6. Matthew Baillie, Gulstonian Lectures (read before the Royal College of Physicians, May 1794), Lectures and Observations on Medicine, p. 123-124. 7. A major work delineating sado-masochistic motifs, Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (1951), has been followed by a vast number of studies on sexual desecration in Gothic fiction. William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire. A Study of Gothic Fantasy (1985), for example, states that “the specific material that made it [the Gothic] so compelling for contemporary readers” was the concern with “masculine and feminine identity” and problems challenging “conventional concepts of identity and family that dominated nineteenth-century middle-class life,” p. 5. 8. In his account of “Complaints of the Head,” Lectures and Observations on Medicine (1825), pp. 165-171, Matthew Baillie reviews the possibility that severe emotional shock as well as physical trauma may cause apoplectic or epileptic seizures. On “The Causes of Madness,” Treatise on Madness (1757), William Battie had earlier declared that “the fixed muscular marks of passion discover indeed in their operation that the turbulent storms of joy or anger, which in consequence of pressure upon the nerves, are as much the remoter causes of Madness, and indeed sooner or later are as destructive to every animal power.”

by Disease, with Psychological Remarks,” in William Nicholson’s Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts, VI (1803), 161-179; Pargeter, William. Observations on Maniacal Disorders. 1792; Pinel, Philippe. A Treatise on Insanity, trans. D.D. Davis. 1809; Traité Médico-Philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale ou la manie. 1st ed. 1801; Schubert, Gotthelf Heinrich. Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft. 1808; Swedenborg, Emanuel. Arcana Celestia, quae in scriptura sacra seu verbo Domini, sunt, detecta: hic primum quae in Genesi. Una cum mirabilibus, quae visa sunt in mundo spirituum et in coelo angelorum. 1749; trans. Arcana coelestia: or Heavenly mysteries, contained in the Sacred Scriptures, or Word of the Lord, manifested and laid open; beginning with the book of Genesis. Interspersed with relations of wonderful things seen in the world of spirits and the heaven of angels. 1803.

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9. Vieda Skultans, Madness and Morals, pp. 9-20, 98-139, and Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions, pp. 56-87, William Bynum, “Rationales for Therapy in British Psychiatry, 1780-1835,” in Mad-houses, MadDoctors, and Madmen, ed. Andrew Scull, pp. 35-57, survey major approaches to the treatment of the mad: moral management (imposing strict regimen of work and obedience), physical restraint (chains, braces, strait jackets); hydrotherapy (immersion, showers, wet-wraps); and domestication (recreating household routine and social interaction).

Works Cited Abercrombie, John. Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers. 1830; Baillie, Matthew. Gulstonian Lectures (read before the Royal College of Physicians, May 1794), Lectures and Observations on Medicine, pp. 123-140; Baillie, Matthew Morbid Anatomy (2nd ed. 1797); Dendy, Walter Cooper. On the phenomena of dreams and other transient illusions., 1832; Ferriar, John. An essay towards a theory of apparitions. 1813; Haslam, John. Observations on insanity: with practical remarks on the disease, and an account of the morbid appearances on dissection. 1798; 2d ed. 1809; Haslam, John. Illustrations of madness: exhibiting a singular case of insanity and a no less remarkable difference in medical opinion: developing the nature of the assailment, and the manner of working events; with a description of the tortures experienced by bomb-bursting, lobster-cracking, and lengthening of the brain. 1810. Facsimile reprint, with Introduction by Roy Porter, 1988; Hibbert, Samuel. Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions; Or, An Attempt to Trace Such Illusions To Their Physical Causes. 1824; Kant, Immanuel. Versuch über die Krankheiten des Köpfes (1764), in Werke, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. 1966. I:.887-901; Nicolai, Friedrich. presented to the Royal Society of Berlin on February 28, 1799. An English translation, “A Memoir on the Appearance of Spectres or Phantoms occasioned

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John William Polidori, 1798-1832.

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Title page of Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood.

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ JOHN WILLIAM POLIDORI (1795-1821)

Author of The Vampyre (1819), the first published vampire novel in English, Polidori is best remembered for his association with more famous literary figures. The Vampyre was initially misattributed to Byron; although Polidori borrowed some plot elements from an abandoned narrative fragment by Byron, his novel is an original composition, establishing many of the literary conventions of the vampire theme that were followed by subsequent nineteenth-century authors. A private physician to Lord Byron, Polidori traveled with the author through France, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland, where they encountered the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his future wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley). Byron and Polidori leased a villa on Lake Geneva; Shelley and Godwin took lodgings nearby and were frequent visitors. Although scholars dispute the account of a rainy night and “ghost-storywriting competition” giving rise to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s Vampyre, most concur that both works were conceived and started at the villa during the summer of 1816. The Vampyre may owe its existence in part to Byron: some commentators, citing Byron’s 1816 novel fragment that relates an encounter with the undead, speculate that the novel was first accepted for publication because Byron was thought to be the author. Nevertheless, Polidori’s novel is acknowledged as containing original elements that significantly influenced subsequent genre fiction. In particular, Polidori shifted focus from a passive, suffering protagonist to the compelling, dynamic figure of the vampire himself. Further, Polidori may have been the first author in any language to cast the bestial vampire of legend into the form most familiar to modern readers: a sophisticated nobleman who exerts a sexual fascination over both male and female victims. Polidori remains a marginal literary figure, overshadowed by his renowned associates, while The Vampyre has been characterized as a pivotal work of supernatural fiction.

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THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES (1803-1849)

A poet of great promise who failed to live up to the expectations of his literary peers, Beddoes is remembered today as an important figure in the Elizabethan literary revival of the nineteenth century, as an author of Gothic verse, and for his dark and troubled life, which ended in suicide when he was fortyfive. Critics have asserted that Beddoes deserves to be better known and have regarded him as the literary heir to William Shakespeare and the best of the Romantic poets, including his idol Percy Bysshe Shelley. After publishing a volume of poetry and his acclaimed verse drama The Brides’ Tragedy (1822) by age nineteen, Beddoes did not publish anything of consequence for the rest of his life. At twenty-three he exiled himself from England, studying and living in Europe and working intermittently at his ambitious verse drama Death’s Jest-Book (1850), which he revised until his death. During his life he was regarded first as a prodigy and then an eccentric. After Beddoes’s death Victorian poets Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson expressed admiration for his poetry. Scholarly interest in Beddoes began in the 1920s, and since then critics have examined in detail his interest in death, horror, and the Gothic; his treatment of themes such as marriage and the limits of art; his grim humor; his lyrical ear; and his fascination with words. He is admired for his genuine—albeit dark and disturbing—vision and presents themes and ideas that are otherwise absent in the more conventional works of late Romantic and early Victorian England.

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Regarding the theory of Samuel Weber on the uncanny, Bernstein asserts: “I would like to follow Weber’s lead in continuing to read the uncanny and outline some of its peculiar textual features.” Compares works by Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann, and theories of Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger. Bowen, Elizabeth. Introduction to The Second Ghost Book, by Lady Cynthia Asquith, n. p. London: J. Barrie, 1952. Contrasts ghost stories of the 1950s with their counterparts of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Brantlinger, Patrick. “The Gothic Origins of Science Fiction.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 14 (fall 1980): 30-43. Explores how “the conventions of science fiction derive from the conventions of fantasy and romance, and especially from those of the Gothic romance,” to demonstrate “why it has been difficult—maybe impossible—for science fiction to become a ‘realism of the future.’” Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber, 1977, 238 p. Well-regarded and comprehensive book-length study on the history of the ghost story in England from the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. Carlson, M. M. “What Stoker Saw: An Introduction to the History of the Literary Vampire.” Folklore Forum 10, no. 2 (fall 1977): 26-32. Discusses several influential works of vampire fiction and distinguishes between the literary vampire and its folkloric prototype.

FURTHER READING Bibliography Carter, Margaret L. The Vampire in Literature: A Critical Bibliography. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989, 135 p. Full-length bibliography of criticism on literature with vampire themes or characters.

Criticism Anderson, James. “New Wave Vampires.” Studies in Weird Fiction 20 (winter 1997): 18-21. Surveys the process of the modernization of themes and figures in vampire fiction.

Castle, Terry. Introduction to The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, pp. 3-20. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1995. Offers a cultural-historical approach to studying the treatment of the uncanny in eighteenth-century literature. Clery, E. J. “Laying the Ground for Gothic: The Passage of the Supernatural from Truth to Spectacle.” In Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter Davidson, and Jane Stevenson, pp. 65-74. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. Uses works of Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole to illustrate her assertion that they represent “alternative mental paradigms, distinct epistemological fields, positing two discrete objects: a ‘real supernatural’ and an ‘aesthetic supernatural.’”

Auerbach, Nina. “The Power of Hunger: Demonism and Maggie Tulliver.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30, no. 2 (September 1975): 150-71.

———. Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 222 p.

Examines George Eliot’s treatment of Maggie Tulliver as a demon in The Mill on the Floss.

Delineates the Enlightenment and its influence on the treatment of the supernatural in eighteenth-century fiction.

Barfoot, C. C. “The Gist of the Gothic in English Fiction; or, Gothic and the Invasion of Boundaries.” In Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter Davidson, and Jane Stevenson, pp. 159-72. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995.

Day, William Patrick. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985, 208 p.

Compares the treatment of ghosts and boundaries in works by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.

Del Principe, David. “Misbegotten, Unbegotten, Forgotten: Vampires and Monsters in the Works of Ugo Tarchetti,

Influential, full-length study of Gothic fantasy literature and film.

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Bernstein, Susan. “It Walks: The Ambulatory Uncanny.” Modern Language Notes 118, no. 5 (December 2003): 1111-139.

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Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and the Gothic Tradition.” Forum Italicum 29, no. 1 (spring 1995): 3-25. Relates Ugo Tarchetti’s Fosca to the Gothic tradition by comparing it to Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stoker’s Dracula and by illustrating how it “deftly recreates the vampire myth.” Engel, Leonard. “The Role of the Enclosure in the English and American Gothic Romance.” Essays in Arts and Sciences 11 (September 1982): 59-68. Studies the treatment of enclosure in works by Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, and the influence of this treatment on the works of Charles Brockden Brown. Fisher, Benjamin Franklin, IV. “Charles Lamb and Supernaturalism.” Charles Lamb Bulletin 69 (January 1990): 145-53. Surveys Lamb’s use of the supernatural in his works. Gelder, Ken. Reading the Vampire. London: Routledge, 1994, 161 p. Full-length study of vampires in literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gordon, Jan, and Veronica Hollinger, eds. Blood Read: The Vampire As Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, 264 p. Full-length examination of the vampire in twentiethcentury art, society, and culture. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995, 215 p. Full-length study of the monster in Gothic and horror literature and film. Hearn, Lafcadio. “The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction.” In Talks to Writers, edited by John Erskine, pp. 130-49. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1920. Observes the modern vitality of supernatural fiction, discusses its origins and function, and examines the relationship between dreams and supernatural stories. Howells, Coral Ann. Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978, 199 p. Focuses on the techniques used by Gothic novelists to suggest emotional states. Kullmann, Thomas. “Nature and Psychology in Melmoth the Wanderer and Wuthering Heights.” In Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter Davidson, and Jane Stevenson, pp. 99-106. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. Assesses the treatment of nature and the psyche in Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Lewis, Paul. “Beyond Mystery: Emergence from Delusion as a Pattern in Gothic Fiction.” Gothic 2 (1980): 7-13.

Applies the incongruity theory of Mary K. Rothbart to the treatment of mystery in Gothic narratives and its relation to humor and fear. Lydenburg, Robin. “Freud’s Uncanny Narratives.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 112, no. 5 (October 1997): 1072-86. Investigates “Freud’s potential usefulness to contemporary theories of narrative” and “the importance of his work to an understanding of the more general relation between literature and psychoanalysis.” Madoff, Mark. “The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, no. 8 (1979): 337-50. Surveys the origins of common themes and figures in Gothic literature. Magistrale, Tony, and Michael A. Morrison, eds. A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996, 141 p. Includes survey essays on film and horror literature from 1980-1999, as well as essays on the works of horror writers Thomas Harris, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, William Peter Blatty, and Whitley Strieber. Mahoney, Dennis F. “Double into Doppelgänger: The Genesis of the Doppelgänger-Motif in the Novels of Jean Paul and E. T. A. Hoffmann.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 4, nos. 1-2 (April 1983): 54-63. Regards the relationship of the double to the self in Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs and Titan and Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixir). McGuire, Karen. “The Artist as Demon in Mary Shelley, Stevenson, Walpole, Stoker, and King.” Gothic New Series 1 (1986): 1-5. Explores the similarities and differences of Shelley, Stevenson, Walpole, Stoker, and King’s use of “deformed monsters, ghosts, vampires, and haunted houses as metaphors for the creative process.” Mosig, Dirk W. “Lovecraft: The Dissonance Factor in Imaginative Literature.” Gothic 1, no. 1 (June 1979): 20-26. “[A]ttempts to apply [Leon Festinger’s cognitive] dissonance theory in the field of literature,” and asserts that “the theory provides an ideal framework to explicate the reasons for the disturbing emotional impact achieved by certain works of imaginative literature, especially the stories and novels of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.” Parks, John G. “Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson’s Use of the Gothic.” Twentieth Century Literature 30, no. 1 (spring 1984): 15-29. Examines Shirley Jackson’s use of Gothic conventions in her treatment of madness and victimization. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Essex, England: Longman, 1980, 449 p. Comprehensive book-length study of Gothic literature from 1765 through the late 1970s.

Considers the processes of recovering from a delusion as a Gothic narrative pattern in the works of Horace Walpole, Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville, and Henry James.

———. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, Volume. 2: The Modern Gothic. Essex, England: Longman, 1996, 234 p.

———. “Mysterious Laughter: Humor and Fear in Gothic Fiction.” Genre 14 (1981): 309-27.

Revised second edition of his comprehensive, book-length study of Gothic literature from 1765 through the 1990s.

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Asserts that the title character in Varney, the Vampire “appears to be the embodiment of evil yet instills no fear or dread in the reader.” Rubenstein, Roberta. “House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and Female Gothic.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15, no. 2 (fall 1996): 309-31. Feminist and psychoanalytic approach to Jackson’s treatment of mother-daughter relations in her works. Skrip, Jack. “I Drink, Therefore I Am: Introspection in the Contemporary Vampire Novel.” Studies in Weird Fiction 14 (winter 1994): 3-7. Outlines the treatment of introspective vampires in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, Peter Tonkin’s The Journal of Edwin Underhill, and John Skipp and Craig Spector’s The Light at the End. Smith, Andrew. Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press, 2000, 188 p. Maintains that Gothic literature by such writers as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker challenged leading nineteenth-century beliefs regarding the nature of the sublime and of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Spooner, Catherine. “Cosmo-Gothic: The Double and the Single Woman.” Women: A Cultural Review 12, no. 3 (winter 2001): 292-305. Studies the treatment of the double and female subjectivity in works by contemporary women writers and compares this to the treatment of the same subjects in Gothic fiction.

Thompson, G. Richard. “The Apparition of This World: Transcendentalism and the American ‘Ghost Story.’” In Bridges to Fantasy, edited by George Edgar Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert E. Scholes, pp. 90-107. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. Studies the treatment of the supernatural in literature and its association with Transcendentalism. Twitchell, James B. Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, 353 p. Examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century Gothic narratives from a psychological perspective, explaining why certain images and stories resonate with audiences. Varnado, S. L. Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987, 160 p. Full-length study of supernatural fiction in light of theologian Rudolph Otto’s concept of the “numinous” and examination of works by various authors as they relate to this concept. Wain, Marianne. “The Double in Romantic Narrative: A Preliminary Study.” The Germanic Review 36, no. 4 (December 1961): 257-68. Focuses on the role of the double in Romantic literature, suggesting that while writers used the theme of the split ego to illustrate a general malaise, they also searched for remedies. Woolf, Virginia. “The Supernatural in Fiction.” In Collected Essays. Vol. 1, pp. 293-96. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1967. Analyzes the purpose and experience of reading supernatural fiction, focusing on Sir Walter Scott’s “Wandering Willie’s Tale” and Henry James’s Turn of the Screw as examples of the supernatural and the psychological ghost story.

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Roberts, Bette B. “Varney, the Vampire, Or, Rather, Varney, the Victim.” Gothic New Series 2 (1987): 1-5.

PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

T

he English Gothic drama, like the Gothic novel, was characterized by a reliance on supernatural elements and dramatic spectacles of suffering. Generally confined to a brief period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Gothic plays were condemned by critics as atheistic and unenlightened, but were tremendously popular with audiences seeking the escapism the works provided. Romantic poets and dramatists ridiculed Gothic productions as superstitious, and the stereotypical ghostly figure slowly rising through a trap door on the stage became synonymous with Gothic excess, often eliciting more laughter than terror. Critics point to a number of factors that converged in the late eighteenth century to produce the sudden success of the English Gothic drama. These include domestic civil unrest in England, revolutionary events in America and France, and changes in theatrical aesthetics. According to Jeffrey N. Cox (see Further Reading), although Gothic plays appeared as early as the 1770s and continued far into the nineteenth century, the form’s popularity peaked around two important political events: the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the fall of Napoleon in 1815. Contemporary commentary posits a connection between the new form of drama and innovations in the political arena, between the real horrors of revolution and the staged horrors of the Gothic drama. Diane Long Hoeveler suggests that the plays convey an

anarchic message to the English monarchy to reform or risk revolution. According to Hoeveler, the dramas “attempt to mediate between classes, races, and genders that were at odds over the shape and power structure of the evolving bourgeois society.” Another factor that encouraged the rise of the Gothic genre was the expansion during the 1790s of two important London theaters—Drury Lane (capacity: 3,600) and Covent Garden (capacity: 3,013)—whose cavernous size dictated that visual spectacle on a grand scale would play better than subtlety and nuance, particularly since dialogue could barely be heard by many in the audience. Increased competition from the numerous new theaters in the area added to the pressure on theatrical producers to stage the spectacular and the unexpected in order to draw substantial audiences. The period also saw advances in staging techniques, lighting, and special effects that made possible some of the ghostly apparitions associated with the Gothic. Gothic dramas were typically set in dungeons or castles, ruined churches or cemeteries, dense forests, steep mountainsides, or other forbidding natural landscapes. Their dramatic situations were usually projected far into the past for the purpose of deflecting criticism by contemporary reviewers who found the Gothic reliance on ghosts and specters to be out of step with the post-

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Enlightenment age. By placing the action safely back in medieval times, playwrights attempted to make the characters’ belief in superstition and the supernatural seem more plausible. Gothic themes involved terror, jealousy, violence, death, abductions, seduction of virtuous young women in the sentimental novel tradition, and revelations of crimes and punishments. Progression from enclosure or imprisonment to freedom characterized many Gothic texts, as did the influence of the past on present (and future) characters and events. Stylistic devices at the staging level included ghosts and visions appearing behind gauzy screens or rising out of trap doors in the floor of the stage, disembodied voices, and clanking armor. Because the presence of ghosts on the stage drew so much ridicule from critics, Gothic playwrights often defended their inclusion in the drama by invoking Shakespeare’s use of ghosts in Macbeth (1606) and Hamlet (c. 1600-01), or by insisting that the supernatural elements were the product of a character’s imagination or an elaborate hoax played on one character by another. Romantic writers, sensitive to what they perceived as the lowbrow nature of Gothic theater, often distanced themselves from the genre by publishing their works anonymously or by writing “closet dramas,” those plays intended to be read rather than staged. Despite the stigma, though, a significant number of authors associated with the Romantic school produced dramas that drew on the Gothic tradition: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Remorse (1813); Lord Byron’s Manfred (1817) and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) are among them. Playwrights such as Joanna Baillie struggled to maintain their legitimacy as playwrights while competing with the popularity of Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797) or George Colman the Younger’s Blue-Beard (1798). The contemporary version of the eighteenthand nineteenth-century Gothic drama is the horror film, which often adapts works of Gothic fiction entirely and relies upon the stock elements of the Gothic to evoke fear, dread, and suspense. Beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, film directors adapted Gothic fiction for the screen. An early notable film in this genre is Nosferatu (1922), a vampire film that offered an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The silent film, which was directed by F. W. Murnau, has achieved notoriety not only as one of the earliest horror films and as an example of German Expressionism, but because it prompted a lawsuit by Stoker’s widow, who suc-

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cessfully sued the film’s production company for copyright infringement. As was the case with Gothic literature, horror films began in Europe with such silent films as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908) and Robert Wiene’s Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1920; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and were adopted and modified by American directors beginning in the 1930s, with such films as Dracula (1931), James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), and King Kong (1933). The enormously popular horror films of the 1930s gave way in the 1940s and 1950s to science fiction films centered on alien invasions or human travels into space. The horror film regained popularity in the late 1950s with Hammer Studios releases such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Mummy (1959), both directed by Terence Fisher, and in the 1960s, with such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Psycho not only sparked a resurgence in interest in the horror film, it set a standard for artistic achievement in the genre that since has been only occasionally matched, in films such as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) or Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). The vast majority of horror films are panned by critics and range in popularity from cult films—including Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Night of the Living Dead (1968)— viewed repeatedly by die-hard horror fans, to such box office record breakers as Stephen King’s Carrie (1976), or the various Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s works, including The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964). As Stephen King has asserted, “the artistic value the horror movie most frequently offers is its ability to form a liaison between our fantasy fears and our real fears.” In this respect, and in many others (including its popular appeal and almost universal critical dismissal), the modern horror film bears a strong resemblance to the Gothic drama. The numerous subgenres and classifications of horror films have been examined by such commentators as S. S. Prawer, Robin Wood, and King. The presence of the Gothic and horror in television has not matched that of film or literature, but can be found in such works as King’s teleplay ’Salem’s Lot (1979), the Rod Serling series The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and Night Gallery (1970-73), and in such comic spoofs on horror as The Addams Family (1964-66) and The Munsters (1964-66). The comic expression and reception of such stock Gothic trappings as monsters and ruined mansions is common in horror films and

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establishment and began instead to address emotional pain, mental illness, fear, and isolation. Goth musicians such as Joy Division, Morrissey, and The Smiths use haunting melodies and imagery in much the same manner as Gothic novelists and playwrights to express the deep-seated and— most importantly, to the Goth subculture— genuine agony of both performer and fans. Hannaham explains that “Goths, by turning death, madness and violence into archetypes, depersonalize their connection to horrific events. They position themselves as reporters or tour guides to the macabre, rarely its victims.”

Some of the more innovative and controversial early rock bands also tapped into the Gothic as a mode of communication and entertainment. “It is a long way from the 1764 appearance of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto to the 1968 Led Zeppelin I,” asserts Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, “but the monstrous subgenre behavior of the latter . . . surprisingly resembles the former, both formally and historically.” Hinds goes on to correlate the subversive nature of Gothic fiction with that of heavy metal music and concludes that both “are peculiar in their purposeful deformity and evocation of the Satanic.” Heavy metal music, performed by such bands as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath during the late 1960s and early 1970s, ushered in a subgenre of rock music that recalled the rebellion and culturally subversive nature of earlier rock music with a dark, violent, perverse, and overtly sexual approach. The music of these groups was excessive and designed to shock and evoke strong responses in both its proponents and its detractors. During the 1970s Alice Cooper, described by James Hannaham as an “iconoclastic, gender-bending social misfit,” became the first performer to embody the grotesque in rock music, to take “counterculture to its illogical extreme,” according to Hannaham. This grotesque figure became more common in the Gothic subculture (known as “Goth”) that grew out of punk rock during the late 1970s. Hannaham asserts that punk and Goth music were one and the same, until Siouxsie and the Banshees—led by Siouxsie Sioux, who pioneered the combination of deathly pale skin, a bird’s nest of tangled black hair, dark black eye makeup, and smeared bright-red lipstick that became what Hannaham called “a trademark of 80s ‘new wave’”—deliberately moved away from the punk rock trend of deriding anyone or anything considered conformist or part of the

REPRESENTATIVE WORKS Robert Aldrich What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? [director] (film) 1962 Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte [director] (film) 1964

Joanna Baillie *A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy. 3 vols. (plays) 1798, 1802, and 1812 Rayner (play) 1804

Bauhaus “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” [12-inch single] (album) 1979

Black Sabbath Black Sabbath (album) 1970 Paranoid (album) 1971

Blue Oyster Cult Agents of Fortune (album) 1976

James Boaden Fontainville Forest [adaptor; from the novel The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe] (play) 1794 The Italian Monk [adaptor; from the novel The Italian by Ann Radcliffe] (play) 1797 Aurelio and Miranda (play) 1798 The Cambrio-Britons (play) 1798

Carl Boese and Paul Wegener Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam [The Golem: How He Came into the World; directors] (film) 1920

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television. As Wood has noted, “many people who go regularly to horror films profess to ridicule them and go in order to laugh.” Critics Fred Botting (see Further Reading) and Lenora Ledwon have examined David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks (1990-91) in relation to the Gothic tradition. Ledwon uses Twin Peaks to illustrate her concept of “Television Gothic,” and maintains that “its very fluidity and resistance to boundaries make the Gothic a particularly apt genre for television. . . . Twin Peaks taps into this Gothic resistance, creating a Television Gothic characterized by a polysemous mingling of ‘authentic’ representations which constantly forces the viewer into an uneasy oscillation between ways of understanding.”

PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

Kenneth Branagh

David Cronenberg

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [director; adapted from the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley] (film) 1994

They Came from Within (film) 1975

Mel Brooks

The Apparition (play) 1794

Young Frankenstein [director; and screenwriter with Gene Wilder] (film) 1974

Julia of Louvain; or, Monkish Cruelty (play) 1797

The Brood (film) 1979

J. C. Cross

J. Searle Dawley

Tod Browning

Frankenstein [director; adapted from the novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley] (film) 1910

Dracula [director] (film) 1931

George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron

Brian De Palma

Manfred, A Dramatic Poem (play) 1817

John Carpenter Christine [director; adapted from the novel by Stephen King] (film) 1983

Carrie [director; adapted by Stephen King and Lawrence D. Cohen from the novel by Stephen King] (film) 1976

Richard Donner The Omen [director] (film) 1976

James Cobb The Haunted Tower (play) 1789

Gordon Douglas

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Them [director] (film) 1954

Remorse: A Tragedy, In Five Acts (play) 1813

Terence Fisher

George Colman the Younger

The Curse of Frankenstein [director] (film) 1957

The Battle of Hexham (play) 1789

The Mummy [director] (film) 1959

The Iron Chest (play) 1796 Blue-Beard; or, Female Curiosity (play) 1798

Robert Florey

Feudal Times; or, The Banquet Gallery (play) 1799

Murders in the Rue Morgue [director and adaptor; from the short story by Edgar Allan Poe] (film) 1932

Alice Cooper Killer (album) 1971 School’s Out (album) 1972

William Friedkin

Merian C. Cooper

The Exorcist [director; adapted from the novel by William Peter Blatty] (film) 1973

King Kong [director] 1933

Catherine Gore

Francis Ford Coppola

The Bond, a Dramatic Poem (play) 1824

Bram Stoker’s Dracula [director; adapted from the novel by Bram Stoker] (film) 1992

Ed Haas

Roger Corman

The Munsters [developer; with Norm Liebmann] (television series) 1964-66

The Fall of the House of Usher [director; adapted from the story by Edgar Allan Poe] (film) 1960 The Pit and the Pendulum [director; adapted from the story by Edgar Allan Poe] (film) 1961 The Premature Burial [director; adapted from the story by Edgar Allan Poe] (film) 1962 The Raven [director; adapted from the poem by Edgar Allan Poe] (film) 1963 The Masque of the Red Death [director; adapted from the short story by Edgar Allan Poe] (film) 1964

392

Victor Halperin White Zombie [director] (film) 1932

Alfred Hitchcock Rebecca [director; adapted from the novel by Daphne du Maurier] (film) 1940 Psycho [director; adapted from the novel by Robert Bloch] (film) 1960 The Birds [director; adapted from the short story by Daphne du Maurier] (film) 1963

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Matthew Gregory Lewis

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [director; and screenwriter with Kim Henkel] (film) 1974

The Castle Spectre: A Drama. In Five Acts (play) 1797

’Salem’s Lot [director; adapted by Stephen King and Paul Monash from the novel by Stephen King] (television movie) 1979

Jethro Tull Songs from the Wood (album) 1977

Joy Division Unknown Pleasures (album) 1979 Closer (album) 1980

Adelmorn, the Outlaw: A Romantic Drama, In Three Acts (play) 1801 Alfonso, King of Castille: A Tragedy, In Five Acts (play) 1802 The Captive: A Scene in a Private Mad-House (play) 1803

Val Lewton Cat People [producer] (film) 1942 I Walked with A Zombie [producer] (film) 1943 The Leopard Man [producer] (film) 1943

Erle C. Kenton Island of Lost Souls [director; adapted from the novel The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells] (film) 1933

Stanley Kramer

The Seventh Victim [producer] (film) 1943

David Lynch Twin Peaks [director; and writer with Mark Frost] (television series) 1990-91

On the Beach [director; adapted from the novel by Nevil Shute] (film) 1959

Charles Robert Maturin

Stanley Kubrick

F. W. Murnau

Bertram; or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (play) 1816

2001: A Space Odyssey [director; and screenwriter with Arthur C. Clarke] (film) 1968

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens [director] (film) 1922

The Shining [director; and adaptor with Diane Johnson from the novel by Stephen King] (film) 1980

New Order

Mary Lambert Pet Sematary [director; adapted by Stephen King from his novel] (film) 1989

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [producers; adapted from the novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson] (film) 1909

Sidney Lanfield

The Necklace of the Dead [producers] (film) 1910

The Addams Family [director; with others] (television series) 1964-66

Fritz Lang M [director] (film) 1931

Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin I (album) 1969 Led Zeppelin II (album) 1969 Led Zeppelin III (album) 1970 Led Zeppelin IV (album) 1971 The Song Remains the Same (album) 1976

Rowland V. Lee Son of Frankenstein [director] (film) 1939

Paul Leni Das Wachsfigurenkabinett [Waxworks; director, with Leo Birinsky] (film) 1924 The Cat and the Canary [director] (film) 1927

Power, Corruption, and Lies (album) 1983

Nordisk Company

Ghosts of the Vault [producers] (film) 1911

Richard Brinsley Peake Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (play) 1823

Roman Polanski Repulsion [director; and screenwriter, with Gérard Brach and David Stone] (film) 1965 The Fearless Vampire Killers [director; and screenwriter, with Brach] (film) 1967 Rosemary’s Baby [director; and adaptor, with Ira Levin; from Levin’s novel] (film) 1968

Michael Powell Peeping Tom (film) 1960

George A. Romero Night of the Living Dead [director; and screenwriter, with John A. Russo] (film) 1968 Dawn of the Dead [director and screenwriter] (film) 1978

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Tobe Hooper

PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

Jane Scott

The Phantom of the Opera [composer and screenwriter; and adaptor with Joel Schumacher from the novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra by Gaston Leroux] (film) 2004

The Old Oak Chest (play) 1816

Sir Walter Scott The House of Aspen (play) 1799 The Doom of Devorgoil (play) 1830

James Whale

Selig Polyscope Company

The Invisible Man [director] (film) 1933

Frankenstein [director] (film) 1931

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [producers; adapted from the novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson] (film) 1908

Rod Serling The Twilight Zone [creator] (television series) 1959-64 Night Gallery [with others; writer] (television series) 1970-73

William Shakespeare Hamlet (play) c. 1600-01

Bride of Frankenstein [director] (film) 1935

Robert Wiene Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; director] (film) 1920

Robert Wise The Body Snatcher [director; adapted from the short story by Robert Louis Stevenson] (film) 1945 The Haunting [director; adapted from the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson] (film) 1963

Frank Zappa

Macbeth (play) 1606

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Freak Out! [with The Mothers of Invention] (album) 1966

The Cenci: A Tragedy, in Five Acts (play) 1819

Uncle Meat (album) 1969

Henry Siddons

Burnt Weeny Sandwich [with The Mothers of Invention] (album) 1970

The Sicilian Romance; or, The Apparition of the Cliff [adaptor; from the novel A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe] (play) 1794 A Tale of Terror (play) 1803

Weasels Ripped My Flesh [with The Mothers of Invention] (album) 1970 *

Don Siegel Invasion of the Body Snatchers [director; adapted from the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney] (film) 1956

Siouxsie and the Banshees

The first volume was published anonymously in 1798, with the author identifying herself for the second and third volumes, in 1802 and 1812, respectively. Volume 1 includes De Monfort, Basil, and The Tryal. Volume 3 includes Orra: A Tragedy, in Five Acts.

PRIMARY SOURCES

Juju (album) 1981 Tinderbox (album) 1986

JAMES BOADEN (PLAY DATE 1794) SOURCE: Boaden, James. “Act 1.” In Fontainville Forest, a Play, in Five acts, (Founded on The Romance of the Forest,) as Performed at the Theatre-Royal Covent-Garden, pp. 1-10. London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1794.

The Smiths Louder than Bombs (album) 1987

Bram Stoker

The following excerpt comprises the first act of Boaden’s popular dramatization of Ann Radcliffe’s 1791 novel The Romance of the Forest.

Dracula (novel) 1897

Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto, A Story (novel) 1764

Scene.—A Gothic Hall of an Abbey, the whole much dilapidated.

The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (play) 1768

Andrew Lloyd Webber The Phantom of the Opera [composer; and adaptor with Richard Stilgoe and Charles Hart from the novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra by Gaston Leroux] (stage musical) 1986

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ENTER MADAME LAMOTTE, FOLLOWED BY PETER. MADAME.

Seek not to fill me with these terrors, Peter: Here are no signs of any late inhabitants,

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MADAME.

Lady, take my arm to assist you. ADELINE.

Gratefully.—I was born to trouble others.

PETER.

This is a horrid place, I scarce dare crawl Through its low grates and narrow passages; And the wind’s gust that whistles in the turrets, Is as the groan of some one near his end. Heaven send my Master back! On my old knees I begg’d him not explore that dismal wood; He comforted me then, but scorn’d my fears.

LAMOTTE.

Her spirits are violently agitated; But kindness will restore her mind its tone. MADAME.

Scarce did I ever see a face so beauteous! LAMOTTE.

The remark is womanish; I never knew Distress more poignant—the best reason, wife, To give our kind assistance and our love. Bear her in gently—so, now close the doors. [Exeunt Madame, Adeline, and Peter.

MADAME.

Woud’st have us perish here for want? Have comfort, Nor let thy Mistress teach thee fortitude. PETER.

Nay, dearest Madam, do not think your old, But faithful, servant backward to defend you! From an attack but mortal, against odds Chearful I’d risk this crazy tenement; But here my fear is not of human harm.

MANET LAMOTTE. LAMOTTE.

Misfortunes thicken on me; sorely pinch’d By poverty already, I have brought Another now, to drain away our life-means. Never admitted to my confidence, My wife suspects not our decaying store.— I have reach’d that climax of our wretched being, When the heart builds no more on heavenly aid. Despair has laid his callous hand upon me, And fitted me for deeds, from which I once Had shrunk with horror—I have no resource But robbery—The degradation! What! To nourish guilty life turn common stabber! Lurk in a hedge, and like an adder sting The unguarded passenger! Well, and what then? There’s courage in this theft comparatively— The sharper, routed from the loaded dice, With which he damns fame, fortune, honour, man, Rises in morals when he takes the road.

MADAME.

May there no greater danger press than your’s, The place will then yield us the needful shelter, Your master will be safe, and I be happy. But night is far advanc’d—his absence pains me. PETER.

He went at dusk; by the same token then The owl shriek’d from the porch—He started back; But recollected, smote his forehead, and advanc’d; He struck into the left hand dingle soon: I clos’d the Abbey gate, which grated sadly. MADAME.

Hark! his signal! How! a stranger with him! [A knocking against the pannel.

ENTER MADAME. MADAME.

Lamotte! He seems disturb’d! My dearest life!

ENTER LAMOTTE SUPPORTING ADELINE. LAMOTTE.

Receive this fair unfortunate with kindness. How she was forc’d to share our wretched fate, You’ll know anon! Peter, go make a fire; The rain has drench’d our garments through the leaves. Prepare the supper; our new guest must need Refreshment.

LAMOTTE.

O, is it you? Reflection on the past So busied me, I heard not your approach. How fares the stranger? MADAME.

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Sunk to startled sleep, In broken sentences she prays for mercy. I listen’d while she shriek’d, “Save me! That ruffian! “My father, fly me not!—If I must die,

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The fugitive fears nothing but discovery. While we are safe from all pursuit, no vain Or superstitious fancies shall disturb me.

PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

“Do you dispatch me;—send away that villain.” LAMOTTE.

’Tis horrible and strange! Her father, then, It was, who forc’d her on me—Listen where. The evening being calm, I took my walk To ruminate at full—wrapt up in thought, Night stole upon me—Through the pathless wild No signs could I discover that might lead My erring steps back to this Abbey’s towers— The storm came sudden on, a little while The shading trees protected me—At length, A distant taper threw its trembling light Across the alley where I stood; I ran, So guided, till I reach’d a paltry cottage. MADAME.

’Twas rash and unadvis’d to venture thus. LAMOTTE.

I knock’d aloud for shelter; from within One ask’d with surly voice my name and business. I said, a traveller, missing of the road, And drench’d with rain, begg’d house-room for a while. The man within replied—“Welcome, come in.” I enter’d and advanc’d, when he, in haste, Clapt to the door and lockt it—Stay, he cried, I shall return anon! Then from above Shrieks issued in a female voice— At length the crazy stairs Creak’d to the tread of feet, and ent’ring fierce, A ruffian by the hair dragg’d in a lady; She seem’d expiring. Stern he bad me swear To take her from his sight, and ne’er return; For, if I did, my life should be the forfeit. I promis’d what he claim’d, and then I told him, If he would bring us to Fontainville Abbey, I knew the way from thence—He hid our eyes, And led us to this gate. MADAME.

Why should a father thus drive out his child To want and wretchedness, or why believe She will not name him in recover’d reason, And make the law her refuge? By her dress She seems to have been taken from some convent, A holy sister, but not yet profess’d. LAMOTTE.

Of this no more; inscrutable to us The mystery; with her returning sense We may know all that now perplexes us. Certain he look’d as little like her father,

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As his deeds spoke him—But this well I know, There is a state of mind, when anguish keen For vices past, works on the heart of man, And wrings it sore, till rising desperation Bemonsters quite his nature—then, he spurns The ties of blood, cancels all obligation In which his Maker bound him to his kind, And is the image of the fiend that tempts him. MADAME.

Heaven ever shield our hearts from such despair! And yet, Lamotte, I own you wound my soul. Dark looks, that seek the memory’s inward scrolls, While the whole outward sense is lost, oft mark Your self-reproach—If I, by chance, arouse And chace you from your mood, your temper flames In causeless anger, which you check with shame, And wrap you straight in silence. LAMOTTE.

O, Hortensia, I have not liv’d a life can brook distress; He who is clear within may smile at storms, And dread no reckoning shou’d they chance to whelm him: My crimes press heavy on me: strong compunction, For miseries entail’d beyond myself, Is festering here, and when I look on you, Outcast for my offences, moody madness Weighs on my brain, and tells my shuddering soul, That I am only mark’d out for perdition. But see, an angel comes, to whisper peace, And soothe me with one act of kindness render’d!

ENTER ADELINE. ADELINE.

My honour’d Sir and Madam, I thus press From short repose, by anguish forc’d upon me, To pay the thanks your generous pity claims; For which my heart, in endless gratitude, Shall daily heave to heav’n, and blessing beg Upon your heads more bounteous than my own. LAMOTTE.

Fair Saint, a common benefit like this Your grateful mind o’erpays. My lovely daughter, Chance throws you on a rude and churlish soil, That cannot yield much medicinal balm, To heal the wound a parent’s hand has dealt you.

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But be of comfort, Lady; as we are, We live to serve you, while ourselves are safe. At some fit season of recover’d spirits, We shall request the story from your lips, Of what thus orphans you.

LAMOTTE.

A wretch, a very wretch, Mad with despair, and fell from biting poverty. Give me the means of life, or take thy death.

ADELINE.

With willingness, As far as I have knowledge; but my tale Is easy told, nor do I know myself, Why thus I fell under a father’s hate. LAMOTTE.

MARQUIS.

Thou’st caught me unawares, I’m in thy power. LAMOTTE.

Off, off your jewels! Come, your purse—dispatch! Stir not! your life will answer! Followers! Surprised! Then only speed can save me. [Runs off.

Of that anon! Now our refreshment calls. Please you to enter. ADELINE.

I have but slender wish For aught, save rest.—The conflict I have pass’d Beats at my heart, and fevers every sense. This friendly solitude, your generous pains, Will lull the throbbing smart of my affliction, And give me power to obey you. LAMOTTE.

PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

Ha! what art thou? [Lamotte rushes in, wild and dishevell’d.

MADAME.

RE-ENTER ATTENDANTS. 1ST ATTENDANT.

How’s this, my Lord, you look aghast with fear? What wretch was that who fled at our approach? MARQUIS.

Ever yours. [Exeunt.

A robber: Somewhere in these forest caves Most probably he lurks: Command my train, That there they make strict search to-morrow early.

Scene—Without the Abbey. ENTER FROM THE GATES. (MORNING DAWNS.)

1ST ATTENDANT. LAMOTTE.

Thus, like the savage lion from his lair, I wake to prowl for prey. My busy brain Riots in varied schemes of wickedness, And drives me from my bed, before the bird, Whose comfort springs from the return of day. Light shews me no relief! The morn is fresh; And hark! the distant hills ring with the sound Of the glad horn! The hunters are abroad: I’ll dog their chace, and haply seize my prey, Man, the destroyer, Man, and force the aid, That misery expects not from his pity. [Exit.

Scene—A Wood.

Will you know the villain’s face again, my Lord? MARQUIS.

Certain! He look’d not like a common ruffian, One shrunk from splendour rather—hunted hard By justice he had fled, and doom’d to wrest His chance support from the lone passenger, Whom, otherways, he harms not—for my life, Unlike our robbers, he attempted not. 2D ATTENDANT.

He shall be found, my Lord, e’re morrow night, If here he lurk.—Shall we support you hence? MARQUIS.

Alarm has quite enfeebled me—Lead on— Give up the chace to-day.

MARQUIS AND TWO ATTENDANTS. MARQUIS.

The chace fatigues—I’ll rest myself awhile— You to your sport again.—Anon, I’ll join you. [Exeunt Attendants. If we could trust to our presentiments, I had not ventur’d on the chace to-day. A tremulous reluctance to the last Flutter’d about my heart, and now I feel As if some dreadful certainty of evil Had led me on to meet impending fate.

ATTENDANTS.

This way, my Lord. [Exeunt.

Scene.—Another part of the Wood. ENTER LAMOTTE. LAMOTTE.

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Despair has lent me wings! I’ve burst my way

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ach—But now we are here, there is one little trifling circumstance to be discussed. LINDOR. What’s that? MARTIN. Only, how we are to get in, Sir. LINDOR. You know my Alinda arrived here last night, and is to be immediately married to the young Marquis of Otranto. MARTIN. He’s a bold man—Why, he buried his other wife but four months ago—Zooks! he’d make a fine soldier—He’d face the devil for money. LINDOR. Yes, as he never saw her, his motive must be sordid—I must contrive some means to carry her off—See the morning breaks—Knock, Martin.

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Through brake and briar!—Terror has steel’d my frame!— I’scap’d unhurt.—Unhurt! O memory, I’m all one wound, while I yet live to think! O dearly purchas’d wealth, won by the loss Of future peace! Up, damning baubles, up! Close to the heart, which you have wrung from comfort! Hence, Monster, hence, nor blot the beauteous day! Hail, cavern’d glooms, to your deep shade I fly, Darkness myself, to give you living horror. [Exit.

End of the First Act.

HENRY SIDDONS (OPERA DATE 1794) SOURCE: Siddons, Henry. “Prologue and Act 1, Scene 1.” In The Sicilian Romance, or, The Apparition of the Cliffs, An Opera, by Henry Siddons: As Performed with Universal Applause at the Theatre Royal, Covent-Garden, pp. 9-12. London: J. Barker, 1794. The following excerpt comprises Act I, scene 1, of Siddons’s operatic adaptation of Ann Radcliffe’s 1790 novel A Sicilian Romance.

A Wood, and a Tower of the Castle, with the Door. The Lights down, and the Moon shining. ENTER LINDOR AND MARTIN, DISGUISED AS PILGRIMS. AIR—Lindor. Borne on hope’s deluding gale, Yon tall turrets I explore; Trembling fears and doubts assail, As I tread the dang’rous shore. Thus the sea-boy on the mast, When he hears the howling storms, Hopes to reach the strand at last, Where fond love and friendship warms. Martin! Martin! MARTIN. Here, Sir. LINDOR. Where are you? MARTIN. Here, Sir, against my will. LINDOR. Well, thank heaven, we are at last at the castle of Otrano, the spot that contains my dear Alinda. MARTIN. St. James be prais’d! The fear of ghosts, and the cries of hunger have kept a continual grumbling in my poor stom-

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[Martin makes a thundering noise at the gate. D’ye mean to knock down the gate? Why d’ye knock so loud? MARTIN. Right, Sir—all right. [Raps. GERBIN. [Within.] Who’s there? MARTIN. [Through the key-hole.] Come, and see. GERBIN. Don’t know you. MARTIN. How the devil should you? Enter GERBIN. GERBIN. What’s your business? MARTIN. We’ve no business, fellow; we’re two gentlemen. LINDOR. Peace! We are two weary Pilgrims, my good friend, driven here by distress—For the love of Heaven, afford us a few hours shelter, from the rain. GERBIN. Why, master, I don’t like to drive the unfortunate from my gate—but my young marquis is very strict—I can give you an apartment, indeed, in a tower over the rocks; but then, it’s rather inconvenient. MARTIN. Why, pray? GERBIN. Why, a very strange apparition has been often seen to enter it, since our poor mistress died. MARTIN. An ap—ap—pa——O, no—very much obliged to you, but we’d rather not go in—Now, I think on’t, too, this place will be so purely comfortable—so cool, and airy, and so——— LINDOR. I’m fix’d. Lead the way. MARTIN. I can’t, upon my soul, Sir. LINDOR. Obey, scoundrel! MARTIN. Well, if I must———Oh dear, I shall have my body snapt up by a blue devil, or this pretty person of mine whisk’d away in a flash of fire—Well, Sir, I’m go——— Oh, dear! [Exeunt.

STEPHEN KING (ESSAY DATE 1982) SOURCE: King, Stephen. “The Modern American Horror Movie—Text and Subtext.” In Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, pp. 129-99. New York: Everest House, 1982. In the following excerpt from his book-length analysis of Gothic and horror in film and literature, King discusses various artistic, social, and cultural aspects of American horror movies.

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Boaden’s second play, Fontainville Forest, was first produced on 25 March 1794 at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. The story is derived from Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Romance of the Forest (1791), but Boaden simplifies it, focusing on the central incidents which transpire “in an Abbey chiefly, and the adjacent parts of the Forest.” Among the significant changes is a more sympathetic role for the character of Lamotte. Although he robs the marquis of Montault and is initially prepared to sacrifice Adeline to the marquis’ lust, he is forced to it by necessity, and in a soliloquy castigates himself. We observe him distraught and torn by his struggles with his conscience, angry with his wife, Hortensia, and impatient with his son, Louis, who replaces Radcliffe’s Theodore as the hero of the tale. . . . Aurelio and Miranda was first acted at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 29 December 1798, with music by Michael Kelly. Based on Lewis’s notorious novel The Monk, this play greatly simplifies the plot and significantly alters the characterization. The play was originally called The Monk, but the title and the names of the principal characters are

Right now you could be thinking to yourself: this guy must have one hell of a nerve if he thinks he’s gonna cover all the horror movies released between 1950 and 1980—everything from The Exorcist to the less-than-immortal The Navy vs. the Night Monsters—in a single chapter. Well, actually it’s going to be two chapters, and no, I don’t expect to be able to cover them all, as much as I would like to; but yes, I must have some kind of nerve to be tackling the subject at all. Luckily for me, there are several fairly traditional ways of handling the subject so that at least an illusion of order and coherence emerges. The path I’ve chosen is that of the horror movie as text and subtext. The place to start, I think, would be a swift recap of those points already made on the subject

James Boaden’s achievements form a significant contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the theater in this period. . . . Boaden’s plays are keenly attuned to the taste of the day, and he broke new ground in his exploitation of Gothic themes and melodramatic devices. SOURCE: Maynard, Temple J. “James Boaden.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 89: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Dramatists, Third Series, edited by Paula R. Backscheider, pp. 25-37. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group, 1989.

of the horror movie as art. If we say “art” is any piece of creative work from which an audience receives more than it gives (a liberal definition of art, sure, but in this field it doesn’t pay to be too picky), then I believe that the artistic value the horror movie most frequently offers is its ability to form a liaison between our fantasy fears and our real fears. I’ve said and will reemphasize here that few horror movies are conceived with “art” in mind; most are conceived only with “profit” in mind. The art is not consciously created but rather thrown off, as an atomic pile throws off radiation. I do not contend by saying the above that every exploitation horror flick is “art,” however. You could walk down Forty-second Street in Times Square on any given afternoon or evening and discover films with names like The Bloody Mutilators, The Female Butcher, or The Ghastly Ones—a

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ

changed in the manuscript, presumably because the Examiner of Plays objected. . . . The public and the critics continued to reprehend the choice of subject, while simultaneously they were disappointed with the altered ending. . . . The violence and incest of Lewis’s tale is omitted, and the play moves from the temptations of Aurelio by Miranda’s beauty to the contrived and incredible conclusion. The monk’s lust for his sister, Antonia, so prominent a feature of the novel, is omitted, as is the death of Agnes’s child in the vaults beneath the convent, with all the repellent details of its putrefaction. The audience, anticipating the Gothic horrors of Boaden’s source, led to expect them from the initial presentation in the first three acts, were simply disappointed in the denouement. . . .

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1972 film we are treated to the charming sight of a woman being cut open with a two-handed bucksaw; the camera lingers as her intestines spew out onto the floor. These are squalid little films with no whiff of art in them, and only the most decadent filmgoer would try to argue otherwise. They are the staged equivalent of those 8- and 16millimeter “snuff” movies which have reputedly oozed out of South America from time to time. Another point worth mentioning is the great risk a filmmaker takes when he/she decides to make a horror picture. In other creative fields, the only risk is failure—we can say, for instance, that the Mike Nichols film of The Day of the Dolphin “fails,” but there is no public outcry, no mothers picketing the movie theaters. But when a horror movie fails, it often falls into painful absurdity or squalid porno-violence. There are films which skate right up to the border where “art” ceases to exist in any form and exploitation begins, and these films are often the field’s most striking successes. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of these; in the hands of Tobe Hooper, the film satisfies that definition of art which I have offered, and I would happily testify to its redeeming social merit in any court in the country. I would not do so for The Ghastly Ones. The difference is more than the difference between a chainsaw and a bucksaw; the difference is something like seventy million light-years. Hooper works in Chainsaw Massacre, in his own queerly apt way, with taste and conscience. The Ghastly Ones is the work of morons with cameras.1 So, if I’m going to keep this discussion in order, I’ll keep coming back to the concept of value—of art, of social merit. If horror movies have redeeming social merit, it is because of that ability to form liaisons between the real and unreal—to provide subtexts. And because of their mass appeal, these subtexts are often culture-wide. In many cases—particularly in the fifties and then again in the early seventies—the fears expressed are sociopolitical in nature, a fact that gives such disparate pictures as Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist a crazily convincing documentary feel. When the horror movies wear their various sociopolitical hats—the B-picture as tabloid editorial— they often serve as an extraordinarily accurate barometer of those things which trouble the night-thoughts of a whole society. But horror movies don’t always wear a hat which identifies them as disguised comments on the social or political scene (as Cronenberg’s The

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Brood comments on the disintegration of the generational family or as his They Came from Within treats of the more cannibalistic side-effects of Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck”). More often the horror movie points even further inward, looking for those deep-seated personal fears—those pressure points—we all must cope with. This adds an element of universality to the proceedings, and may produce an even truer sort of art. It also explains, I think, why The Exorcist (a social horror film if there ever was one) did only so-so business when it was released in West Germany, a country which had an entirely different set of social fears at the time (they were a lot more worried about bombthrowing radicals than about foul-talking young people), and why Dawn of the Dead went through the roof there. This second sort of horror film has more in common with the Brothers Grimm than with the op-ed page in a tabloid paper. It is the B-picture as fairy tale. This sort of picture doesn’t want to score political points but to scare the hell out of us by crossing certain taboo lines. So if my idea about art is correct (it giveth more than it receiveth), this sort of film is of value to the audience by helping it to better understand what those taboos and fears are, and why it feels so uneasy about them. A good example of this second type of horror picture is RKO’s The Body Snatcher (1945), liberally adapted—and that’s putting it kindly—from a Robert Louis Stevenson story and starring Karloff and Lugosi. And by the way, the picture was produced by our friend Val Lewton. As an example of the art, The Body Snatcher is one of the forties’ best. And as an example of this second artistic “purpose”—that of breaking tabbos—it positively shines. I think we’d all agree that one of the great fears which all of us must deal with on a purely personal level is the fear of dying; without good old death to fall back on, the horror movies would be in bad shape. A corollary to this is that there are “good” deaths and “bad” deaths; most of us would like to die peacefully in our beds at age eighty (preferably after a good meal, a bottle of really fine vino, and a really super lay), but very few of us are interested in finding out how it might feel to get slowly crushed under an automobile lift while crankcase oil drips slowly onto our foreheads. Lots of horror films derive their best effects from this fear of the bad death (as in The Abominable Dr. Phibes, where Phibes dispatches his victims one at a time using the Twelve Plagues of

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Others derive their horror simply from the fact of death itself, and the decay which follows death. In a society where such a great store is placed in the fragile commodities of youth, health, and beauty (and the latter, it seems to me, is very often defined in terms of the former two), death and decay become inevitably horrible, and inevitably taboo. If you don’t think so, ask yourself why the second grade doesn’t get to tour the local mortuary along with the police department, the fire department, and the nearest McDonalds—one can imagine, or I can in my more morbid moments, the mortuary and McDonalds combined; the highlights of the tour, of course, would be a viewing of the McCorpse. No, the funeral parlor is taboo. Morticians are modern priests, working their arcane magic of cosmetics and preservation in rooms that are clearly marked “off limits.” Who washes the corpse’s hair? Are the fingernails and toenails of the dear departed clipped one final time? Is it true that the dead are enconffined sans shoes? Who dresses them for their final star turn in the mortuary viewing room? How is a bullet hole plugged and concealed? How are strangulation bruises hidden? The answers to all these questions are available, but they are not common knowledge. And if you try to make the answers part of your store of knowledge, people are going to think you a bit peculiar. I know; in the process of researching a forthcoming novel about a father who tries to bring his son back from the dead, I collected a stack of funeral literature a foot high—and any number of peculiar glances from folks who wondered why I was reading The Funeral: Vestige or Value? But this is not to say that people don’t have a certain occasional interest in what lies behind the locked door in the basement of the mortuary, or what may transpire in the local graveyard after the mourners have left . . . or at the dark of the moon. The Body Snatcher is not really a tale of the supernatural, nor was it pitched that way to its audience; it was pitched as a film (as was that notorious sixties documentary Mondo Cane) that

would take us “beyond the pale,” over that line which marks the edge of taboo ground. “Cemeteries raided, children slain for bodies to dissect!” the movie poster drooled. “Unthinkable realities and unbelievable FACTS of the dark days of early surgical research EXPOSED in THE MOST DARING SHRIEK-AND-SHUDDER SHOCK SENSATION EVER BROUGHT TO THE SCREEN!” (All of this printed on a leaning tombstone.) But the poster does not stop there; it goes on very specifically to mark out the exact location of the taboo line and to suggest that not everyone may be adventurous enough to transgress this forbidden ground: “If You Can ‘Take It’ See GRAVES RAIDED! COFFINS ROBBED! CORPSES CARVED! MIDNIGHT MURDER! BODY BLACKMAIL! STALKING GHOULS! MAD REVENGE! MACABRE MYSTERY! And Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You!” All of it has sort of a pleasant, alliterative ring, doesn’t it?

Note 1. One success in skating over this thin ice does not necessarily guarantee that the filmmaker will be able to repeat such a success; while his innate talent saves Hooper’s second film, Eaten Alive, from descending to The Bloody Mutilators category, it is still a disappointment. The only director I can think of who has explored this gray land between art and pornoexhibitionism successfully—even brilliantly—again and again with never a misstep is the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg.

DRAMA PAUL RANGER (ESSAY DATE 1991) SOURCE: Ranger, Paul. “The Gothic Spirit.” In Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast: Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750-1820, pp. 98-103. London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1991. In the following essay, Ranger details the various motifs, settings, stock characters, narrative devices, and themes of Gothic drama.

Neither eighteenth-century playwrights, nor members of their audiences, used the term ‘a gothic drama’. It was a label applied by literary critics only with hindsight to certain types of play. Instead, words suggesting the form rather than the content described the work. Thus the St James’s Chronicle referred to The Castle Spectre (Matthew Gregory Lewis, 1797) as ‘a drama of a mingled nature, Operatic, Comical and Tragical’ and at greater length the Morning Chronicle defined George Colman the Younger’s play, Feudal Times

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Egypt, slightly updated, a gimmick worthy of the Batman comics during their palmiest days). Who can forget the lethal binoculars in Horrors of the Black Museum, for instance? They came equipped with spring-loaded six-inch prongs, so that when the victim put them to her eyes and then attempted to adjust the field of focus . . .

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(1799), as ‘an exhibition of music and dialogue, pantomime and dancing, painting and machinery, antique dresses and armour, thunder and lightning, fire and water . . .’1 Yet in spite of this variety of form, there was an homogeneity about the content that prompts one to question why certain scenes or stock devices repeatedly appeared. An establishment of the common ground held by a multiplicity of plays categorised as ‘gothic’ would eventually be a help in arriving at an understanding of this term. In the prologue to The Castle Spectre Lewis suggested a starting point for this exploration. He used the figure of Romance to introduce his listeners to a number of specific locations which he would deem to be gothic: She loathes the sun, or blazing taper’s light; The moon-beam’d landscape and tempestuous night Alone she loves; and oft, with glimmering lamp, Near graves new-open’d, or midst dungeons damp, Drear forests, ruin’d aisles, and haunted towers, Forlorn she roves, and raves away the hours!2

In his list of church-yards, dungeons, forests, ruined churches, castles—all locations frequently used by the gothic playwright—Lewis was harking back to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary definition of the word ‘Romantick’:’wild . . . improbable; false . . .; fanciful; full of wild scenery’.3 Lewis wrote an epilogue to Thomas Holcroft’s play, Knave or Not (1798) in which he added to the list of locations some of the other appurtenances of the gothic: Give us Lightning and Thunder, Flames, Daggers and Rage; With events that ne’er happened, except on the Stage; When your Spectre departs, through a trapdoor ingulph her, Burn under her nose, too, some brimstone and sulpher.

Miles Peter Andrews, in his preface to the publication of the songs in The Enchanted Castle (1786), listed other elements he had detected in similar entertainments: The Clank of Chains, the Whistling of Hollow Winds, the Clapping of Doors, Gigantic Forms, and visionary Gleams of Light . . .4

Not all playwrights banished these listings to prologues and epilogues. The gothic motifs were so integral to the plot that the audience’s attention was drawn to them in the course of the action as John O’Keeffe did in The Castle of Andalusia (1782): standing in the moonlight outside the

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castle of the title, Don Caesar, the leader of the banditti, sang of the baying wolf, the midnight hour, shrieking females and maurauding brigands. To modern readers it appears that playwrights were setting out markers surrounding the gothic territory in which the action was to be placed.5 Eighteenth-century novelists had fused location and action more securely for the lengthier form in which they worked. Unencumbered by the necessity to compress a story into the couple of hours allowed to the playwright, writers took the opportunity to present themes of darkness in an expanded and integrated fashion. Many would nominate Horace Walpole’s romance, The Castle of Otranto, as the seminal gothic novel.6 On the banks of the Thames at Twickenham Walpole had created a miniature gothic castle, a fantasy which served as the backdrop of his own self-conscious existence. At first no more than a cottage, ‘the prettiest bauble’ said Walpole, his domain eventually boasted a library, the Round Tower, the Holbein Bedroom and the Great Cloister, whilst still retaining the bijou quality of the original building. Within, a warm darkness pervaded which Walpole termed ‘gloomth’.7 Here Walpole wrote his chivalric romance, a tale of strange, supernatural events. But whereas the details of his real castle, Strawberry Hill, were neat and contained, Otranto was conceived on a vast scale, the stage for colourful processions and tournaments. Both castles were alike in their enveloping gloom (‘Take away that light,’ shouted Manfred, demonstrating the villain’s hatred of the clear light of day); alike, too, in their respective owners’ love of the odd and the incongruous, and in the impression given that both buildings were likely environments in which to await supernatural visitants.8 Walpole’s own phobias were writ large in Otranto so that they might terrify the reader,—the giant feathers on the expanding helmet which killed the young Conrad for example. Terror was an important constituent in the gothic novel. The literary landscape which the essayists John Aikin and Anna Barbauld viewed was one strewn with such catastrophes as murders, shipwrecks, fires and earthquakes, all events with which the gothic playwrights were familiar. A ‘gothic fragment’ by the two writers was set in the ruins of a ‘large antique mansion’ on which a storm beat while hollow groans resounded in the subterranean vault. The effect of these circumstances was, claimed the authors, to elevate ‘the soul to its highest pitch’, again as much an aim of the playwright as the novelist.9 With such works

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A novel, now, is nothing more Than an old castle and a creaking door: A distant hovel— Clanking of chains—a gallery—a light— Old armour—and a phantom all in white— And there’s a novel.1 0

The writer who fashioned similar settings and circumstances into lengthy, involved works of art was Ann Radcliffe. For her the landscape was of paramount importance; through it her heroines were perpetually journeying from one great house to another. Although her settings were less overtly horrific than the Aikin-Barbauld scenery, Radcliffe supplied for dramatists many a castle in ruins, underrun by secret passages, rotting in a wild, brigand-infested landscape: This was a scene as Salvator would have chosen, had he then existed, for his canvas; St Aubert, impressed by the romantic character of the place, almost expected to see banditti start from behind some projecting rock, and he kept his hand upon the arms with which he always travelled.’1 1

No wonder that her novels found adaptors prepared to transmute them to the stage. All of the gothic plays were set in the past, the past of an indeterminate, quasi-mediaeval Europe. Precision may have seemed pedantic. Walpole, after the publication of The Castle of Otranto, wrote to William Cole that his mind was filled with ‘Gothic story’ and the preface to the first edition stated that the action took place between the first and the last of the Crusades; in other words, between 1095 and 1243, a leeway of over one hundred and fifty years.1 2 Clara Reeve, who, after Walpole, wrote a similar tale of chivalry in which a process of rationalisation was applied to supernatural events, forebore to make a precise statement about the period of her work, instead referring to it as a ‘picture of Gothic times and manners’.1 3 The term was used as an indication of atmosphere, rather than as a reference to given dates. When gothic works were staged this vagueness was an occasion of difficulty for the scene and costume designers, as well as leaving the audience with the impression that it was suspended in an indeterminate time-scale. A writer in the Critical Review, after seeing Andrew MacDonald’s play, Vimonda (1787), summed up this feeling of disorientation: Events are supposed to have taken place in the days of chivalry: a word with which we constantly connect the idea of something wild and extravagant.1 4

Many spectators, however, simply accepted the vagueness. After the first night of The Haunted Tower (James Cobb, 1789) the Prompter reported that history had ‘nothing to do with the groundwork of this Opera’.1 5 That admission made, there was no further reference to infelicities in the presentation of the past, for the interest of the audience lay in the characters and situations. The activities of these characters reflected not the actions of folk in mediaeval moralities and mysteries so much as the deeds of the dark characters of Jacobean and Caroline tragedy. Indeed, the later plays of Shakespeare and the blood-suffused dramas of Thomas Otway were highly popular in the latter part of the eighteenth century and their atmosphere seeped into the gothic. Not until the stage management of John Philip Kemble, with his antiquarian interest demanding correct and detailed settings, aided by his scene designer, William Capon, was the visual element of the gothic drama presented with historical accuracy. Capon scrupulously kept drawing books of London’s mediaeval and Tudor buildings which served as the basis for the scenes he painted in his large studio.1 6 Viewing the progress, in addition to Kemble, would be men such as James Boaden, the editor of the Oracle, and Sir Joshua Reynolds who commended, wrote Boaden, ‘the accuracy and bold execution’ of these ‘scenes of past ages’.1 7 The result of this accurate visual portrayal should have been to root the plays in an historical truth, but this eluded most of the audience. Applause was for the spectacular nature of Capon’s settings, not their veracity. More attention was, however, paid to an accuracy in the representation of the geographical settings for the concept of place is more tangible than that of time. Thomas Gray was but one of many writers who kept careful notes of tours, whether to the Lake District or further afield.1 8 The upkeep of a travel diary with its detailed descriptions of scenes and the accounts of the author’s response provided an important literary souvenir. These diaries were far from private: each traveller aimed to publish his thoughts, giving to library shelves such works as the Revd William Gilpin’s various sets of observations made whilst in the highlands of Scotland, Richard Warner’s prose account of his ramble through Wales and William Sotheby’s verse compilation on the sights of the principality. Farther from home the Revd William Coxe kept an account of his travels in the Alps and Ann Radcliffe commented on her visit to

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in mind, George Colman light-heartedly summed up the constituents of the gothic novel:

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Holland and Germany. This established habit of travellers putting pen to paper prompted Joseph Cradock to remark: As every one who has either traversed a steep mountain, or crossed a small channel, must write his Tour, it would be almost unpardonable in Me to be totally silent, who have visited the most uninhabitable regions of North Wales . . .1 9

Both playwrights and novelists made reference to this literary corpus which tended to improve the accuracy of scenic descriptions. Mrs Radcliffe’s Emily journeyed from one castle to another in The Mysteries of Udolpho surveying and responding to the wild scenery of her travels. Conversations, too, were full of the talk of scenery: as Valancourt conversed with Emily ‘there was often a tremulous tenderness in his voice, and sometimes he expatiated on [the scenes] with all the fire of genius’.2 0 Even when Emily reached her several destinations she would stand by the open casement gazing at the ‘wild grandeur of the scene, closed nearly on all sides by alpine steeps, whose tops, peering over each other, faded from the eye in misty hues . . .’2 1 Nevertheless, the landscape did not exist in its own right but as part of the heroine’s consciousness. Aesthetically it upheld her, although its benignity was sometimes at variance with the roughness of the terrain. Gothic romances served as a source for playwrights and the detailed visual backgrounds were helpful in creating settings in the text. They were equally helpful to the scene designer in his attempts to provide a setting for the play. James Boaden, for instance, took another of Radcliffe’s novels, The Italian, which he used as the basis for his play, The Italian Monk (1797). The descriptions of the lush Italian countryside found their echo in the dialogue. But they were doubly used, for Gaetano Marinari, the Haymarket’s scene painter, was in a position to use both the playwright’s stagedirections, as well as the novelist’s accounts of prospects and architecture, in creating the settings for the play.2 2 Painters travelled, as well as writers, recording in water-colour scenes which later were to be worked into easel paintings. The notes made on one of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s tours of the county of Derby were used as a series of scenes for an entertainment at Drury Lane entitled The Wonders of Derbyshire (1779), in which such concrete images as a view of Matlock, Chatsworth House and Gardens and the caverns of Castleton anchored the entertainment in a factual depiction of specific locations.2 3 The sketch-books of another scene painter, Michael ‘Angelo’ Rooker, reveal his

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detailed interest in such subjects as castles, the ruins of abbeys at Netley, Llanthony and Glastonbury and a variety of townscapes. It was this keen observation which gained commendation for his stage depictions of such locations as St James’s Park, Portsmouth illuminated for victory celebrations and the view of London from Highgate Ponds.2 4 Designers tended to resort to clichés in their over-easy presentation of castle and convent interiors. Then the audience found the stock scenes or rapid knock-ups unconvincing. On the other hand, specific townscapes were a challenge to which designers rose with aplomb. The portrayal of the Grand Square in Moscow in Frederick Reynolds’s play, The Exile (1808), was greeted with acclaim by the critic in the European Magazine and it had earlier praised extravagantly the view of Orleans seen at dawn in Valentine and Orson (Thomas Dibdin, 1804).2 5 In some respects the work of the stage designer was comparable with that of the garden designer in the eighteenth century for both attempted to create a scene which would induce in the spectator an emotional response. The visitor to the theatre had merely to sit and watch the progression of the scenes but the visitor to the garden was responsible for his own progression from one setting to another. In this he was guided by a circuit walk from which vistas opened before him; he also entered a series of enclosed spaces, each designed to elicit an emotional response: a prospect might arouse in him feelings of cheerfulness and alternatively the cool darkness of a cypress grove would fill him with quiet melancholy. This changing pattern of emotion was described in Richard Graves’s novel The Spiritual Quixote in the commentary on Mr Rivers’s garden. It was laid out in a romantic taste with a proper mixture of the allegro and the penseroso, the cheerful and the gloomy: tufts of roses, jasmines and the most fragrant flowering shrubs, with a serpentine walk of cypresses and laurels, here and there an urn, with suitable inscriptions, and terminated by a rough arch of rock work that covered a dripping fountain, were its principal beauties.2 6

In the garden of fiction the novelist created the responses. The factual garden could drawn responses just as surely, as is evident from Humphrey Repton’s selection of adjectives in his account of a visit to Downton Castle, Richard Payne Knight’s estate in Herefordshire: A narrow, wild and natural path sometimes creeps under the beetling rock, close by the margin of a mountain stream. It sometimes ascends to an awful precipice, from whence the foaming waters are heard roaring in the dark abyss below, or seen

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Repton contrasted awe and calmness, each induced by a separate prospect. Melancholy was envisaged as the heart’s cleanser and frequent opportunities were given to savour it in Alexander Pope’s garden at Twickenham, which contained a gloomy grotto, dusky groves and, as a climax at the end of a grove of cypresses, the tomb of the poet’s mother.2 8 This stress gave truth to Walpole’s dictum that it was ‘always comic to set aside a quarter of one’s garden to be melancholy in’.2 9 Sheer terror could also be encountered in these garden scenes. On a visit to China, Sir William Chambers noted an oriental gothic garden: Their scenes of terror are composed of gloomy woods, deep valleys inaccessible to the sun, impending barren rocks, dark caverns, and impetuous cataracts rushing down the mountains from all parts . . . Bats, owls, vultures, and every bird of prey flutter in the groves; wolves, tigers and jackals howl in the forests . . .3 0

He went on to tell of the inscribed stones set up in the garden which recorded barbarous acts perpetrated by brigands on the land over which the visitor passed. Chambers used the term ‘scene’ in describing these prospects.3 1 In this he was not alone. Thomas Whatley, gazing at one of the views at Hagley in Worcestershire, commended it as a ‘perfect opera scene’ and Repton contrasted the scene which the theatre-goer viewed with that of the garden visitor noting that the artist’s use of perspective gave value to the theatrical scene, a technique of which the garden design was deprived.3 2 Whether the scene was in the garden or the theatre it was designed to induce an emotional response in the beholder. Mention has already been made of those features in a garden which produced a feeling of melancholy. Other scenes would produce different responses: wild crags and a cascade of water could strike terror, a fear that the place was the lair of the banditti and yet, on the other hand, an open prospect of hills and clumped trees could impart serenity.3 3 Some of the responses were, of course, conventionalised but playwrights nevertheless made use of emotional settings in order to hint at the action which was to follow allowing the mood of the scene to be anticipated in advance. A formal appreciation of landscape painting, a privilege which educated members of the audience enjoyed, helped to foster discernment in viewing scenery. The eighteenth-century’s most

highly collectable painters were three artists active in the previous century, the Neapolitan, Salvator Rosa, and two French painters, Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin. Whate’er Lorraine light-touched with soft’ning hue, Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew . . .

wrote James Thomson in The Castle of Indolence. All three men influenced landscape design and thereby, indirectly, stage design. The paintings of Claude gave one a long vista of receding planes, as if the scene was composed of wings and back-drop. In the distance mountains and wild forests were just discernible and as the planes advanced to the foreground one was conscious of the force of natural elements: the gushing river, the waterfall, wild trees twisted into a series of frames to surround the prospect, all contrasted with the order of classical buildings, quays and the commerce of mankind. We have already noticed the awe with which eighteenth-century travellers viewed the natural setting. This was suggested in the landscapes of Claude but in those of Rosa it was more than suggested—it was exaggerated. For Rosa the natural scene was untamed and the hastily applied impasto on his canvas revealed his own response to the landscape. His scenes were dark but camp fires or the full moon highlighted the brigands and uncouth shepherds who inhabited the wild hills of his fevered imagination. The landscapes of the gothic dramas became conventionalised; castles were always ruinous, forests set in deep gloom and the seashore lashed by the storm-driven waves. Their stock nature enabled the theatre-goer to recognise the gothic quality of a play and it was only to be expected that stock characters would perform within these locations. Visitors to the playhouse could expect to see the clearly delineated stock characters of the romantic hero and heroine; the villain, a personification of relentless greed or self-devouring jealousy and the divided hero, a man at odds with himself who, through some insidious fault, crumbled before the spectators’ eyes. In contrast to these major characters, lighter entertainment was provided by a bevy of humorous domestics or rustics whose lives were lived on a different emotional plane than that of the intense and passionate breathings of their superiors. The conventional quality of each role allowed actors to specialise and for each type certain qualities were needed. A singing voice was a requisite

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wildly dashing against its opposite banks; while in other places, the course of the river being impeded by natural ledges of rock, the vale presents a calm, glassy mirror, that reflects the surrounding foliage.2 7

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for the part of the youthful hero. A sturdy figure and a bass voice through which a range of disturbed passions could be expressed was the essential physical apparatus of the older tragic hero. Alexander Rae failed vocally in the role of Ordonio (Remorse, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1813) for, in spite of his expressive face and intellectual clarity, he suffered from an ‘effeminacy of tone . . . that [did] away with the impression of manly energy . . .’3 4 Many popular light actresses took on the role of the younger heroine. When Mentevole (Julia, Robert Jephson, 1787), looking at a cameo of his sweetheart, rehearsed her virtues he was describing not one but a hundred heroines: O what a slender form is here! her polish’d front, Blue slender veins, winding their silken maze, Through flesh of living snow. Young Hebe’s hue, Blushing ambrosial health. Her plenteous tresses, Luxuriant beauty! Those bewitching eyes, That shot their soft contagion to my soul. . . . (3.1)

The sameness of the heroine’s role posed a problem for actresses, as Mrs Lister discovered while taking the part of Barbara in a revival of The Iron Chest (George Colman the Younger, 1796): . . . [she] sung her airs in her old way, which is assuredly very pleasing, but her compass is so narrow that she may be said to have a cuckoo voice— hear her once, and you have heard all that she can do.3 5

The villain brought dynamism and vitality to the play. William Barrymore, in spite of his ‘laboured enunciation’ was judged by Thomas Dutton to be ‘the best stage tyrant the theatre can boast’.3 6 It would be possible to multiply instances of this type-casting but these few examples give an indication of the expectations the performer hoped to match. The stock characters worked their way through repetitions of stock situations and devices. Strangely the audience seemed not to tire of these but found interest in the differing circumstances of each usage. Mention is made here of a few of the more common devices of the gothic stage. Mistaken identity was a convention which allowed a spate of horrors to be unleashed in the last act of the piece. The ending of Hannah Cowley’s Albina (1779) was typical. With the darkness of night shrouding the characters, Edward mistook Editha for Albina and, whilst he embraced her, Gondibert, making the same misassumption, plunged his dagger into Editha’s back. Rapidly avenging her death, Edward attempted to stab Gondibert who snatched the dagger from him and with it procured his own demise. The speed and

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complexity of the action, the gloom of the stage and the intensity of feeling produced a horrific but satisfying ending to the play. Disguise was another theme which ran through many a gothic drama. It was a device which worked only within the framework of the stage, for characters were not permitted to question the identity of the disguised person, an accepted convention reliant on the eighteenthcentury love of masquerading as a person other than oneself, whether at a masked ball or at the private theatricals which were so popular a feature of great houses or even at a fantasy such as the rituals Sir Francis Dashwood and his companions indulged in as the ‘Monks of Medmenham’, a village near Henley-on-Thames.3 7 Disguise offered a character an extra dimension within which to operate. It also infused the situation within which the disguised person operated with overtones of irony, strengthening the link between the performer and his audience as a bond of complicity was formed between them. For example, the central character of The Carmelite (Richard Cumberland, 1784), Lord St Valori, disguised through much of the play as the friar of the title, was able to move outside the main action and comment on it: the plot then revolved around the awaited reunion of Lady St Valori with her husband. In the early scenes of the play clues were planted which hinted at the troubled past of the friar. St Valori’s disclosure of his true self was incidental but most of the disclosures made by disguised characters were a flamboyance, bringing the play to a climactic ending. In The House of Morville (John Lake, 1812) Sir Thomas attended Hugh’s trial masked and disguised; both were thrown off with electric effect at the apex of the crisis. Rodmond the villain stood ‘terror struck’ and the presiding judge showed ‘an expression of astonishment’. ‘Oh, Heav’n’ cried the prisoner, ‘it is my father’ (5.6). Here the device of the disclosure of identity was interwoven with another, the discovery of a long-lost relative. The facility with which one recognised one’s kindred, for ‘relationship like murder, will out’ (3.1), was parodied by Richard Sheridan in The Critic (1779): his strictures, however, did not inhibit the gothic dramatists. The speed with which recognition was achieved in The Castle of Andalusia was as rapid as in Sheridan’s burlesque. With a rush the banditti, headed by Caesar their leader, entered the hall of Scipio’s castle. From Scipio the briefest of questions—‘Where’s now my son, Don Caesar?’—instantly elicited a revelation.

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DON CAESAR:

My father! (Kneels to Don Scipio). DON SCIPIO:

How, my Son, Don Caesar! DON CAESAR:

Yes, sir: drove to desperation by— My follies were my own—but my vices— DON SCIPIO:

Were the consequences of my rigour.— My child! Let these tears wash away the remembrance. (3.4)

Little more than a frivolous explanation of the cause of the rift was given. Other causes of the separation of relatives were varied, ranging from the prosaic to the fantastic—the Empress of Greece (Valentine and Orson) in flight from her husband gave birth to twins in a wood, one of whom was carried away by a bear. It was however rare for the cause itself to influence to any degree the structure of the plot. As well as these situations, several stage properties were used with a measure of repetition and incidents were created around them; the principal properties were the intercepted letter and the phial of poison. Some letters were forgeries as lacking in credibility as the conventional disguise: ‘Then this unravels all’ (2.2) cried the Doge in The Venetian Outlaw (Robert William Elliston, 1805) on reading that Vivaldi had been falsely implicated in dealings with the banditti. Plans of escape could also be outlined in letters. The flight of Agnes (Aurelio and Miranda, James Boaden, 1798) from the convent was thwarted when Aurelio discovered a missive outlining the details. Similarly Bireno (The Law of Lombardy, Robert Jephson, 1797) gained written information of a plan to rescue the Princess of Lombardy which offered the recipient an opportunity to share his strategy with the audience: Confusion! Rescue her! Come back, Ascanio! Fly to St Mark’s, collect the cohort there; Go, place them instantly around the prison! Bid them disarm the guard that holds that place; And, on their lives, drive back the populace. (5.1)

In each of these plays the letters were more than conveyances of information; they instigated further action and became an integral part of the plot structure.

The phial of poison was a suspense mechanism. John Kerr used it to effect in his play The Wandering Boys (1814). Roland determined on the use of a slow poison for the two sons of the Count de Croissy which he would administer by inviting them to take some refreshment. The Count, disguised as a servant of Roland’s, brought in various comestibles whilst keeping an eye on the bottle of poisoned wine that his master had introduced onto the table. Throughout the meal— lengthy for a stage repast—the audience was able to watch with growing suspense the Count adroitly switch the bottles and so poison Roland. The extraordinary length of time the drug took to become effective, for poison used as a means of resolving the action on stage usually worked with a degree of speed, was a cause of renewed suspense and it was not until two further scenes had passed that the Count opportunely told Roland, still not suffering from the effects of the draught, that it was he, not the boys who had been poisoned: ‘He who composed the hellish drug best knows how long or short his time of lingering, or what may be his torments’ (2.3). Audiences demanded finality from the poison. This was lacking in The Inquisitor (Thomas Holcroft, 1798) when the Patriarch, like a deus ex machina, descended to the dungeon in time to prevent the young lovers incarcerated there from taking poison. This inconclusive use was condemned in the epilogue: . . . if sad Melpomene must have rotation, Let her dagger be sharp, and her poison-bowl brimful, As Cowslip’s, who brings Rusty-fusty one, creamful: Let Juliet quite stabb’d be, and Romeo quite poison’d; And let not, by signal of moon just horizon’d, A Patriarch pop in, ’tween the cup and the lip so, Nor the Hero and Heroine dally and sip so!

Recurrent devices such as these were a further means of recognising the gothic qualities of a play; they added to its atmosphere and occasionally became telling symbols, capable of arousing terror and pity in the audience. So far we have looked at various motifs in the plays, the setting of the play within its time and place, and the stock characters and devices. Our purpose has been to discover the common ground on which the dramas were constructed. Before we can begin to answer the question ‘What constitutes a gothic drama?’ we must be aware of one important formative influence on the plays: the ideas of the German romantic playwrights Friedrich von Schiller and August von Kotzebue.3 8 The remarks of reviewers of Charles Robert Ma-

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Follies of the preceding years were washed away in a couple of sentences, lacking in intensity and pathos:

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turin’s play Bertram (1816) highlighted objections to the German school. The British Review attacked the tone of the play: Rotten principles and a bastard sort of sentiment, such, in short, as have been imported into this country from German moralists and poets, form the interest of this stormy and extravagant composition.3 9

The Monthly Review was more specific in its objections. The author was charged with sapping ‘the foundation of moral principle by exciting undue compassion for worthless characters, or unjust admiration of fierce and unchristian qualities’.4 0 A romantic presentation of low-life or roguery together with criticism of the ruling classes was to some a cause of outrage. John Larpent, the Lord Chamberlain’s Reader of Plays refused to grant a licence for Joseph Holman’s direct translation of Schiller’s banditti drama Die Räuber in the belief that the text offered an immoral glorification of brigandage. Holman was left to recast the subject matter, converting the banditti into Knights Templars, and to reissue the piece as The Red Cross Knights (1799).4 1 Spotting Germanic themes became a game for critics,—one played by the Monthly Mirror in reviewing Lewis’s play The Castle Spectre: Mr Lewis’s intimacy with German literature is strongly proclaimed . . . the dream of Osmond, his Atheism, Reginald’s sixteen years immurement, (derived, probably, from The Robbers) and the frequent appeals to Heaven, with a levity unusual to our stage, are all German.4 2

The dark side of human nature, its greed, lust and power, its attempts to over-reach, its suspected godlessness, when openly acknowledged by playwrights caused distress; more than that, its exemplification became a direct target for the Tory publication, the Anti-Jacobin Review. It is difficult to define the nature of gothic drama. The gothic was not a movement in the sense that it was built on clearly formulated principles. Instead, it can be thought of as an artistic climate assimilated by practitioners of a range of the creative arts. Its early manifestations were seen in such fantasies as the gothic temple which closed the canal vista at Shotover Park outside Oxford and in the delightful circuit walk and mystery ponds William Kent designed at Rousham House near Bicester.4 3 It found expression in the interior design of houses which were improved to contain a gothic library and chapel, as at Milton Manor in Oxfordshire.4 4 The sad reflections of John Dyer on human mutability in ‘Grongar Hill’ were an early manifestation of the

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gothic spirit in words, later developed by novelists who, in the expansiveness of their romances, were able to draw out a multiplicity of dark themes. It was to the novel that Bertrand Evans in his own work on the text of the gothic dramas turned in attempting to formulate a definition: A Gothic play . . . is one marked by features which have long served to identify a Gothic novel.4 5

There was a danger that the formulary would become imprisoned in its own cross-references. However, Evans went on to list some of the characteristics which have been considered in this chapter: These features include specialized settings, machinery, character types, themes, plots, and techniques selected and combined to serve a primary purpose of exploiting mystery, gloom and terror.

Why exploit ‘mystery, gloom and terror’? Whilst evenings of mystery, and even of terror, may be acceptable in the theatre, we might now think that there is slight hope that evenings of gloom will draw large audiences. Eighteenthcentury taste would deny that assertion. In 1763 James Macpherson published translations purporting to be of the Gaelic poet Ossian’s work, which was immediately admired for its wild spirit. Professor Hugh Blair, lecturing on this newly discovered poet, selected that paraphernalia in his works which appealed to readers—the darkness, hoary mountains, solitary lakes, old forests.4 6 These were, he said, ‘ideas of a solemn and awful kind, and even bordering on the terrible’; the effect of the motifs was to raise the reader out of himself to the sublime; in some measure they recreated the effect that the actual phenomena exerted on travellers in their original experience. A fellow professor, James Beattie, looking at objects more terrifying than those Blair contemplated—vast caverns, overhanging precipices and stormy seas— realised that even aesthetic horror could, in turn, lead beholders to the sublime.4 7 It was in this spirit that the ‘mystery, gloom and terror’ of the gothic dramas were acceptable in the theatre.4 8 A succinct definition of the gothic drama, then, is difficult to devise. In this chapter, however, we have seen that it was a reflection of the dark and wild side of human nature, mirrored in an equally violent natural world or in architectural settings which, in their ruinous state, spoke of human mortality. Although the gothic stage represented the psyche of eighteenth-century man— his innermost fears and longings—the presenta-

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Notes 1. St James’ Chronicle, 16-19 December 1797; Morning Chronicle, 21 January 1797. 2. Monthly Mirror, IV (December 1797), 357. 3. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1775). 4. Miles Peter Andrews, The Songs, Recitatives, Airs, Duets, Trios and Choruses introduced into the Pantomime Entertainment of ‘The Enchanted Castle’; (1786), p. iv. 5. An extended discussion on the gothic territory may be found in: David Jarett, ‘“Gothic” as a term in Literary Criticism in the Eighteenth Century’, unpublished thesis, University of Oxford, 1968; Alfred Longueil, ‘The Word “Gothic” in Eighteenth Century Criticism’, Modern Language Notes, XXXVIII (1923), 453-60; Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (1957). 6. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764), ed. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (1969). An evaluation of his contribution to the gothic genre is to be found in Varma, Gothic Flame, pp. 44-65. 7. Horace Walpole, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (193780), X, 307. 8. Walpole, Otranto, ed. Lewis, p.22. Warren Hunting Smith contrasted the two buildings in ‘Strawberry Hill and Otranto’, The Times Literary Supplement, 23 May 1936. Walpole’s eclectic taste and scholarship are explored in: Charles Locke Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival (1872), pp. 44-51. 9. John Aikin and Anna Letitia Barbauld, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1792), p. 121 and pp. 127 ff. 10. S. M. Ellis, The Life of Michael Kelly (1930), p. 254. 11. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), ed. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford, 1980), p. 30; see also pp. 78, 102, 227, 230, 302, 358 and 631. 12. Horace Walpole, Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Mrs Paget Toynbee (Oxford, 1903-05), VI, 195; Walpole, Otranto, ed. Lewis, p. 3. 13. Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron (1777), Preface to the Second Edition (1778), ed. James Trainer (1967), p. 3. 14. Critical Review, LXVI (1788), 359. A detailed and disapproving analysis of Vimonda is to be found in: Willard Thorp, ‘The Stage Adventures of Some Gothic Novels’, Papers of the Modern Language Association, XVIII (1928), 479-80.

15. Prompter, 27 November 1789. 16. William Capon’s notebooks are in the collection of Robert K. Sturtz, New York. 17. James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble (1825), II, 101. 18. Thomas Gray, Mr Gray’s Journal (1775). 19. Joseph Cradock, An Account of Some of the Most Romantic Parts of North Wales (1777), p. 1. 20. Radcliffe, Udolpho, ed. Dobrée, p. 105. 21. ibid., p. 241. 22. The influence of the gothic novel on the drama is discussed further in: Michael Booth, English Plays of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford 1969), I, 24. 23. Ralph G. Allen, ‘The Wonders of Derbyshire: A Spectacular Eighteenth Century Travelogue’, Theatre Survey, II (1961), 54-66. 24. Sybil Rosenfeld and Edward Croft Murray, ‘A Checklist of Scene Painters working in Great Britain and Ireland in the Eighteenth-Century’, Theatre Notebook, XIX (1965), 144-5; Patrick Conner Michael Angelo Rooker (1984), pp. 49-93 and 122-37. 25. European Magazine, LIV (1808), 391 and XLV (1804), 297. 26. Richard Graves, The Spiritual Quixote (1773), ed. Clarence Tracey (1967), p. 186. 27. Humphrey Repton, Sketches and Hints (1794), p. 103. 28. Pope’s villa at Cross Deep, Twickenham, was demolished in the 1820s by Sophia Howe, ‘Queen of the Goths’, but the mutilated grotto remains. 29. Horace Walpole, On Modern Gardening (1762-71), ed. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (New York, 1931), p. 60. 30. William Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (Dublin. 1773), p. 27. 31. Chambers, Oriental Gardening, p. 28. 32. Whatley’s remark is cited in: Lawrence Fleming and Alan Gore, The English Garden (1979), p. 109; and Repton’s in Peter Bicknell, Beauty, Horror and Immensity, Fitzwilliam Museum Exhibition Catalogue (Cambridge, 1981), p. 43. 33. The sentimental garden is discussed in Fleming and Gore’s book (see note 32), pp. 85-180. 34. Theatrical Inquisitor, II (1813), 64. 35. Monthly Mirror, XVI (1809), 117. 36. The Times, 25 June 1798; Thomas Dutton, Dramatic Censor, I (1800-01), 46. 37. The private theatre in the eighteenth century is described in: Sybil Rosenfeld, Temples of Thespis (1978). 38. This subject is fully explored in: F. W. Stokoe, German Influence in the English Romantic Period (Cambridge, 1926), pp. 19-34. 39. British Review, VIII (1816), 70. Informative biographical details of Charles Maturin are to be found in: Samuel Smiles, Memoirs and Correspondence of the Late John Murray (1891), pp. 288-303.

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tions were of plays set in an undefined and romantically conceived mediaeval past. The plays were subject to Germanic influences which queried the traditional eighteenth-century concepts of social hierarchy, sympathy and respectability. Finally, we have been aware that the playwright’s expression of the gothic was not an isolated art form: it was expressed through the visual and plastic arts as well as in verse and prose. The gothic was a spirit, moving where it would. Although it was a dark spirit, it was capable of illuminating some of the submerged recesses of human personality.

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40. Monthly Review, LXXX (1816), 179. Further information on the reception of the play is given in: Niilo Idman, Charles Robert Maturin, His Life and Works (1923), pp. 102-25. 41. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.: letter of Joseph Holman to John Larpent, W. b. 67 (63-63v); Joseph Holman, The Red Cross Knights (1799), pp. i-iv; L. W. Conolly, The Censorship of English Drama (San Marino, 1976), pp. 98-101. 42. Monthly Mirror, IV (1797), 356. 43. Kenneth Woodbridge, ‘William Kent’s Gardening’, Apollo, C (1974), pp. 286-9; Margaret Jourdain, The Work of William Kent (1984), p. 80. The gothic temple at Shotover is possibly by William Townsend, see: Jennifer Sherwood and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire (1974, rep. 1975), p. 765. 44. Stephen Wright was the architect; wood-carving by a London craftsman, Richard Lawrence; see: Suzanne Mockler, Milton Manor, Oxfordshire (n.d.). 45. Bertrand Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1947), p. 5. 46. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1787), I, 48-9. 47. Cited in: Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime. A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth Century England (Michigan, 1960), p. 129. 48. The theme of the beholder’s response to the sublime is explored also in: Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque (1967) and in Bicknell, Beauty, Horror and Immensity.

DIANE LONG HOEVELER (ESSAY DATE SUMMER 2000) SOURCE: Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Gothic Drama as Nationalistic Catharsis.” Wordsworth Circle 31, no. 3 (summer 2000): 169-72. In the following essay, Hoeveler examines the social and political implications of the popularity of Gothic drama.

In Spectacular Politics (1993), Paula Backsheider suggested that gothic drama is “the earliest example of . . . mass culture . . . an artistic configuration that becomes formulaic and has mass appeal, that engages the attention of a very large, very diverse audience, and that stands up to repetition, not only of new examples of the type but production of individual plays” (150). But what is repeated in the gothic drama, and how were those repetitions—often excessive, hyperbolic, blatantly fantastical—manipulated so that the genre gained mass appeal? This essay examines the social and political ideologies that are explicit in the major gothic dramatic adaptations of the most popular gothic novels of the period: Lewis’s Castle Spectre, a loose adaptation of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto; Siddons’ Sicilian Romance, an adaptation of Radcliffe’s novel of the same title; and Boaden’s Fountainville Forest, another adapta-

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tion based on Radcliffe. The essay will conclude by focusing on perhaps the least familiar of Boaden’s gothic dramas, his Cambrio-Britons, a drama that, like Wordsworth’s The Borderers (1796; 1842), is complicitous in constructing the new British nationalistic character that Burke was codifying in his prose. Curiously, all of these works use a ghost, a female ghost who in three of them embodies both a socially conservative message and a direct political warning to the protagonists of the drama, and, by extension, to the audience. Examining these dramas not simply as inferior adaptations intended for a mass audience, one sees that each participates in the ongoing national debate about the proper role of the monarchy, the threat of violent revolution, the shock of sudden class transformation, the anxiety of changing gender roles within the family structure, and, finally, the construction of a newly nationalistic British empire that sought to justify its absorption of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. As Jeffrey Cox has pointed out in relation to Romantic drama and the French Revolution, when history itself becomes theatrical, theater responds by “translating the representation of revolt from history to myth” (241). Is gothic drama, as Peter Brooks observed about melodrama, essentially conservative, a means of reinstating social and political order (15), or can it be understood as a species of what Hayden White has called “anarchistic,” calling for a dissolution of contemporary institutions in order to reclaim a more humane community that existed sometime in the past (24-5)? Each of these dramas is not simply politically conservative, as has often been argued, but rather constructs a distant past that the play reshapes as redeemable through the elimination of corrupt aristocrats. Each play presents a political and social warning to the monarchy: reform or be overthrown by violence, which constitutes an anarchist message. Under the spectre of the French Revolution these works introduce middle-class characters who embody the best of what Britain must become if it is to avoid the violent and chaotic fate of France. The dramas attempt to mediate between classes, races, and genders that were at odds over the shape and power structure of the evolving bourgeois society. The dramas function, then, as cathartic forms, public rituals in which the middle class haunted itself with its own act of imagined, fantasized revolution, usually depicted as some form of matricide or fratricide. In a series of what might be seen as social and political morality plays, the

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As Robert Miles has noted, those involved in the invention of the gothic embraced the hieratic function of keeping alive the sacred mementoes of the race. But ideological conservatism intersected with the democratic nature of artistic production for the masses, creating what Foucault has called a “site” of “power/knowledge” at odds with itself. As a site of opposing strategies, the gothic drama became a “hazardous play of dominations” seeking to compose a coherent position amid rapid social, historical, and cultural transformations. It is, according to Miles, in the moments of slippage and discontinuity that the ideological business of the gothic aesthetic is most apparent (32). For him, the gothic aesthetic incorporates an idealized national identity together with a myth of origins (50). This position is very close to James Watt’s in Contesting the Gothic (1999). For Watt, the 1790s through the early 1800s were dominated by what he calls the creation of “Loyalist Gothic” romances. He sees these works as reactions to Britain’s defeat in America in that they portray a proud heritage of military victory played out within a moral and political agenda. Set around a real castle in Britain, these works present a stratified yet harmonious society, use real historical figures from the British military pantheon (Arthur or Alfred were particular favorites), and consistently depict the defeat of effeminate or foreign villains. Loyalist gothics are structurally bound to depict an act of usurpation which is always arighted, often through the supernatural agency of a ghost (7). One example, according to Watt, is William Godwin’s early romance Imogen (1748), set in prehistoric Wales and idealizing a “pure, uncorrupted society in the mythical past as a bulwark against the hegemonic forces of English imperialism” (45). Unlike Gray’s “The Bard,” Godwin’s novel hints that the act of trespass and usurpation made when Edward I conquered Wales could be reversed. Because “Great Britain,” in other words, could only come into being through acts of usurpation of property and title condoned by the public, these acts were played out in veiled form on the gothic stage, where women were usually powerless pawns of powerful and corrupt aristocrats. The act of forming itself into a nation was, in effect, the real trauma that was occurring in

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ CLIVE BARKER (1952-)

Barker’s style is characterized by cinematic descriptions of blood and gore, as well as unabashedly graphic sexual imagery. His stories are applauded by critics as imaginative and unique. Barker has adapted several of his own short stories and novellas to the screen, in motion pictures he directed, including the films Hellraiser (1987), Nightbreed (1990), The Thief of Always (1998), and Lord of Illusions (1995). Barker is best known for Clive Barker’s Books of Blood (generally referred to as the Books of Blood), his six-volume collection of short stories and novellas published in 1984 and 1985 that encompass the overlapping genres of horror and fantasy fiction. Many of Barker’s stories feature monsters or apparitions, and in his fictional worlds the boundaries between life and death are often blurred. In a number of his stories, death is welcomed by the protagonist as a transformation into a higher state of being. Doppelgängers are also a staple of his stories. Barker’s fiction often expresses the sense that the world of humans is as dark, violent, and evil as the monsters and ghosts who terrorize his protagonists. Volume one of the Books of Blood (1984) includes “The Book of Blood,” in which ghosts exact revenge against a man pretending to be a medium by torturing him and writing the stories of their lives and deaths into his flesh. The ghosts’ stories are their “Books of Blood,” written in the language of pain. Volume five of the Books of Blood (1985) was published in the United States as In the Flesh: Tales of Terror (1986). In “The Forbidden,” a young woman investigating urban graffiti learns of a supernatural creature, known as Candyman, who commits acts of brutal violence against the inhabitants of an impoverished neighborhood. In 1992 “The Forbidden” was adapted to the screen in the film Candyman.

England, enacted vicariously on the London stage for all to witness and accept.

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middle class audience encountered its own mythology of origins, its own “Hyperion”—like creation of a new order built on the backs of an aristocracy that simply did not deserve to survive.

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Romantic consciousness such border communities, the “others” that England had to separate from, master and suppress, dominate and oppress in order to forge its own sense of amalgamated nationhood.

Title page of Henry Siddons’s The Sicilian Romance, 1794.

The quest for an idealized national identity, however, needs to be set into the still larger historical context in which popular gothic dramas were produced. England and Scotland signed the Act of Union in 1707, ending years of hostility and territorial skirmishing. But this document was, as Tom Nairn has pointed out, a largely “patrician bargain” because the signers were mostly aristocrats (136f). The task of the next hundred years was to imaginatively separate and differentiate England and Scotland in the popular consciousness—and that became largely the province of Romantic literature’s cultural work. As Benedict Anderson noted, one of the ways a country builds a sense of its own nationality is to imagine itself as antique (and thus the medievalism in Keats, Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Walter Scott). But an equally effective way to build the consciousness of a nation state is to construct a local adversary on the very borders in order, as Anderson points out, to create a clearly defined sense of space, a newly sacred territory potentially threatened by lawless of crude infidels (xiv). Scotland, Wales and Ireland, became for the

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Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797) was the most popular gothic drama performed in England in the late 1790s, based on Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, although the setting and characters differ in several important ways. The contested castle has moved from Italy to the border of Wales and England during the 10th century. This shift both localizes the place and makes the gothic a British phenomenon to explore British anxieties about nationhood, borders, and outsiders—women and blacks—clamoring to breech the moats that an aristocratic and maledominated culture had constructed for itself. Angela, the besieged gothic heroine in this drama, is aided in her struggle against her evil uncle Osmond by a group of social outcasts: a fool, a gluttonous friar, servants, and finally, the ultimate outcast, her murdered mother’s ghost. Osmond had murdered Evelina, his sister-in-law, in a botched attempt to kill the entire family of his eldest brother so that he could usurp the estate. At the drama’s climatic moment (Osmond’s second attempt to murder his brother Reginald), the ghost of Evelina appears and throws herself between the two brothers. This action so startles Osmond that he drops his sword and Angela “suddenly springs forward and plunges her dagger into Osmond’s bosom.” It is Angela who calmly steps forward and gives instructions for the care of her wounded father, cleaning up the mess made by the warring sons. The same matter-of-fact presentation is made of the black servant Hassan and the Indian Saib. It is as if Lewis has invited the empire’s colonial lackeys home for dinner, thereby highlighting the incongruity of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade and Indian expeditions. These recent historical realities are transplanted back into the 10th century, suggesting an analogy between the treatment of women and the treatment of slaves. Even more fraught with contradictory ideological baggage is Henry Siddons’ 1794 Sicilian Romance; or the Apparition of the Cliff, which also uses the device of a daughter saved by what appears to be her mother’s ghost. This drama undercuts the supernatural element by having the mother imprisoned by her evil husband so that he can marry a young and wealthy heiress. Her ghostly appearances at night, seen by many around the cliff where she is imprisoned, are

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Boaden’s Fountainville Forest, based on Radcliffe’s Mysteries of the Forest, is relevant here, as is his later gothic-historicist drama The CambrioBritons, his unsuccessful bid to be taken seriously as a dramatist in the manner of Shakespeare. Fountainville Forest (1794) presents a mysterious ghost, simply called a “phantom.” As Adeline, the heroine, reads her murdered father’s journal, the phantom speaks on three occasions to confirm her worst fears, that, yes, her uncle was the usurping murderer of his own brother and now, incestuously, pursues her, his niece. The phantom, although cowled and ambiguous, represents the heroine’s dead father, so that the crime here is not matricide, as it becomes in Lewis, but fratricide. Dynastic intrigue, warring brothers, and the eroticized daughter-figure are all stock devices by 1794, but their ritualistic embodiment on stage raises the questions: what cultural work is being performed? Why does a male ghost, the dead father, haunt this play rather than the dead mother? Is the state as well as the family under social and political siege? Rapid transformations in the family structure had caused even the patriarch, it would appear, to tremble in his own domicile. Boaden (1762-1839) wrote eight dramas during his lifetime, but is best known for his five theatrical biographies, notably the Life of John Philip Kemble, a primary source for materials on the late 18th and early 19th century theatre. Following his adaptations of Radcliffe’s novels, Boaden wrote Cambrio-Britons, an historical drama in the style of Shakespeare, first performed on July 21, 1798, at the Haymarket. A play that depicts the conquest of Wales by England in the 13th century, the drama was relevant to the contemporary war against France. As Boaden noted in his Life of Kemble, he used the play to meet “the menaces of foreign invasion, in the year 1798, with patriot sentiment.” Written at the height of

invasion fever, as Cohen observed, the play opened one month before France actually attempted to invade (xxvi). In the same biography Boaden explained that dramas should not be the venue for party politics, but that the theater would be “deficient in its noblest duty, when it inspires no ardour against an invading enemy” (“Preface” to Cambrio-Britons). Further, Boaden thought that the play would inspire every one in the audience to “thank” him for “seeking to sustain the independence of his country” (qtd in Cohen, xxvii). But he misunderstood, according to Cohen, that the sympathies of the play are with the Welsh, who are struggling to maintain their independence against the oppressive and corrupt English, led by King Edward in 1282. The drama’s analogy actually works against England, aligning the 1798 England with France, an unlawful and greedy usurper of land not its own. Like Lewis’s depiction of the African slave Hassan, the gothic is fissured, the exterior working against and undercutting the interior of the argument that the drama actually makes through both the action and the resolution. Beyond the confusing and contradictory political allegory, Boaden uses a female ghost, just as Lewis does. In this drama the dead mother of Prince Llewellyn and his traitorous brother David appears on the altar of a church, urging her two warring sons to reconcile and join to fight their common English enemy. This ghost garnered the most attention for the play, leading critics to accuse Boaden of plagiarizing Lewis’s Castle Spectre. In defense of himself, Boaden pointed out that if anyone were the plagiarist, it was Lewis, whom he accuses of stealing Boaden’s earlier ghost in The Fountainville Forest (“Preface” to Cambrio-Britons). Boaden’s play begins with an atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia, as every soldier, including Llewelyn’s own brother, is suspected of disloyalty to the preservation of Welsh independence. As one Welsh soldier remarks after accepting a bribe to change allegiance, “We have now no safety but in the conqueror’s mercy” (I.i.8). Interestingly, one of the first figures to speak in the drama is the Irish minstrel, O’Turloch, who entertains the Welsh royalty with a song about King Arthur, said to have been imported by Scottish minstrels. The song concerns a woman who pleads with Arthur to avenge her against a knight who has raped her, a situation that parallels Llewelyn’s wife who has been pursued aggressively and incestuously by David, his twin brother. The presence of Arthur, the last Celtic King, became a stock device in a number of Loyalist gothic texts that were trying

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resolved when the daughter Julia unbars a door and her mother magically returns, as if from the dead. When the evil Ferrand discovers the mother and daughter’s reunion, he resolves to kill them both himself. As he rushes on them, the mother pulls a dagger and says, “Advance not, on your life! / Spite of thy cruelty, I love thee still, / Still live in hopes to charm thy savage soul, / And melt it into tenderness and love” (III.iv). This melting never occurs, and the father cannot be assimilated into the restored family that sings the praises of the king in the closing scene. A drama that has presented the ruling patriarch of this tiny principality as a ravening, lustful madman concludes, then, with a song in praise of George III.

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to recall an idealized Celtic golden age, preNorman, pre-aristocratic, and pre-Hanoverian. But the bard, according to Katie Trumpenet, in Bardic Nationalism, “For nationalist antiquaries, . . . is the mouthpiece for a whole society, articulating its values, chronicling its history, and mourning the inconsolable tragedy of its collapse. English poets, in contrast, imagine the bard (and the minstrel after him) as an inspired, isolated, and peripatetic figure. Nationalist antiquaries read bardic poetry for its content and its historical information; their analyses help to crystallize a new nationalist model of literary history. The English poets are primarily interested in the bard himself, for he represents poetry as a dislocated art, standing apart from and transcending its particular time and place” (6). For Trumpener, the contrast points to the collapse of Celtic clan culture (in Ireland, Wales and Scotland) and the rise of a form of individualism and literary commodification in England that eventually triumphed over the earlier oral-based culture. The high point of the drama occurs in a gothic chapel at the shrine of the mother, Lady Griffyth. Informed by his wife Elinor that his brother stills pursues her and has traitorously thrown in with the English invader, the “haughty Edward,” Llewellyn confronts his brother before their mother’s tomb. As they each draw swords to settle their longstanding rivalry, the ghost of their mother suddenly appears and speaks: “Forbear!” As the swords magically fly out of the brothers’ hands, their ghostly mother goes on to pronounce: “Have I not loved you?—Be peace between you! / Confirm it at the altar!” After the two men kneel and embrace, their mother gives her blessing and the chorus of spirits declares: “Grateful the voice that bids your hatred cease, / A mother’s mandate of fraternal peace.” In the elaborate stage directions, the funereal dress falls off the mother and “her figure seems glorified; and through the opening window she is drawn, as it were, into the air, while music, as of immortal spirits, attends her progress. The brothers gaze silently after the vision” (II.v.58). This miraculous disrobing and ascent appears to replay aspects of the bleeding nun legend in which a murdered woman can have no eternal peace until she is avenged and buried in hallowed ground. Boaden’s adaptation of the legend suggests that the mother cannot ascend to Heaven until her two sons are reconciled, but as a political allegory, the image is loaded with contradictory freight. Reconciled, the brothers fight the tyrant Edward to a standoff. After much singing, Edward recognizes Llewellyn

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as the Prince of Wales, and declares to him, “Be my friend— / My nearest, best ally; and, in her perils, / Let England ever find her warmest champion, / Her grace, her glory, in the prince of Wales!” (III.iv.88). Politically, the drama appears to affirm a reconciliation of rival claims to land through the appearance of a beneficient maternal presence, ghostly but powerful, absent but present. The dead mother, rising from her grave to demand cooperation from the warring brothers, suggests at least the avatar of Elizabeth I, the dead but undead political mother, wise, skillful, and infinitely diplomatic in the ways of avoiding direct conflict and open warfare. Is it possible that the anxieties about the condition and suitability of the heir to George III’s throne precipitated the dynastic emphasis in popular gothic dramas? Beyond nationalistic debates or fear of French invasions, British gothic dramas expressed tangible fear that the House of Hanover had come to an inglorious end in all but name? The infant daughter of George IV, Princess Charlotte (b. 1796), appeared to be a fragile hope for the British monarchy. In order to buttress her potential status, the spectre of the last great female queen appears, disguised as a female ghost haunting the disputed borders of Wales and England, Scotland and England, England and its own colonies abroad. The intense mourning that gripped England when Charlotte died in childbirth a mere twenty-one years later found expression in, as Behrendt documents, a huge “Charlotte industry,” poems, broadsides, and souvenir trinkets (122ff). If her death caused such intense, hyperbolic, and theatrical displays of mourning, might it not be conjectured that her birth was also the subject of a certain amount of concern? The female ghost who appears in these dramas also suggests an intense uneasiness about the role and nature of women in the coming century. That these ghosts are mothers, murdered, displaced, separated from their children, also suggests a deeply conservative agenda. Women, it would seem, are being properly positioned on the stage in their maternal roles, because the gothic visual aesthetics presupposes a masculine subject dazzled not simply by an eroticization of the female body but also by her maternal function. (I am thinking in particular here of Lewis’s ambivalent presentation of Mathilda/Rosario in The Monk in contrast to Melmoth the Wanderer’s presentation of Isidora). In addition, the aesthetics of the sublime presupposes a female subject-position disciplined through the presence of the male gaze (Miles

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51)—or what I would call the bourgeois gaze. The mass audiences that flocked to the gothic dramas remembered the ghost scenes because those were the most dramatic, most frightening, most uncanny appearances of either dead mothers or dead fathers on the stage. In a nation struggling to consolidate land it had only recently claimed, as well as land it was claiming abroad on a tenuous basis at best, the political guilt and social anxiety must have been intense. At the same time that the national borders were viewed as precarious and diffuse, so were the psychic ones. The ghosts haunting the gothic stage were the ghosts of empires lost and found, mothers and fathers and children displaced and replaced, used and abused.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. 1991; Backsheider, Paula. Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England. 1993; Behrendt, Stephen C. Royal Mourning and Regency Culture: Elegies and Memorials of Princess Charlotte. 1997; Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. 1976; Cohen, Steven, ed. The Plays of James Boaden. 1980; Cox, Jeffrey. “Romantic Drama and the French Revolution.” In Revolution and English Romanticism. Ed. Keith Hanley and Raman Selden. 1990; Lewis, Matthew. “The Castle Spectre.” In Seven Gothic Dramas: 1789-1825. Ed. Jeffrey Cox. 1992; Miles Robert. Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy. 1993; Nairn, Tom. The Break-Up of Britain. 1977; Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. 1997; Watt, James. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 17641832. 1999; White, Hayden. Metahistory. 1973.

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ BORIS KARLOFF (1887-1969) AND FRANKENSTEIN

In 1930, Universal Pictures decided to capitalize on the public’s newfound taste for horror movies with Frankenstein (1931), in which Bela Lugosi was cast as the monster. When the studio informed Lugosi, who did not like the role, that he would only be released from his contract if he could find another actor for the part, Lugosi suggested Boris Karloff. Directed by James Whale, Frankenstein became an immediate classic. Karloff, whose strong features, athletic build, and considerable height were perfect for the role, gave a subtle and sympathetic performance that won over critics and touched the hearts of audiences. Universal immediately cast the versatile actor in two more leading roles, The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) and The Mummy (1932). The two films cemented his popularity and, in 1932, 45-year-old Boris Karloff became a star. Throughout the 1930s, Karloff starred in a string of popular horror pictures for Universal, including The Black Cat (1934), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), The Raven (1935), and Son of Frankenstein (1939), in which he portrayed mad scientists and tormented monsters. Unlike many Hollywood stars, Karloff never fought his typecasting. He understood that he owed his fame to Frankenstein and thus was good-humored about spoofing his horror image in films such as Abbot and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949). By the early 1960s, with horror movies once again in vogue, the aging actor found himself a cult hero and very much in demand. He appeared with fellow horror stars Basil Rathbone, Peter Lorre, and Vincent Price in two popular films, The Raven (1963) and The Terror (1963). He brought his deep, resonant, and chilling voice to the role of the Grinch in the television version of Dr. Seuss’s children’s Christmas tale, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966). Karloff appeared in his final film at the age of eighty-one, portraying an aging horror-movie star in Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968).

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Conrad Veidt and Lil Dagover in the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

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BELA LUGOSI (1882-1956) AND DRACULA

S. S. PRAWER (ESSAY DATE 1980) SOURCE: Prawer, S. S. “The Making of a Genre.” In Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror, pp. 8-47. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. In the following excerpt, Prawer traces the history and development of the horror film genre, highlighting seminal figures and works throughout the twentieth century.

With his aristocratic accent, distinctive profile, slicked-back dark hair, spidery fingers, mesmerizing eyes, and swirling black cape, Hungarian-born actor Bela Lugosi helped to create cinema’s definitive Dracula, the vampire as sexual and charming as he is villainous. Born Béla Ferenc Dezsö Blask¢ in Lugos (the town from which he derived his stage name) near Transylvania, Lugosi came to the United States in late 1920. His break came with the title role in the play Dracula, which ran for 33 weeks on Broadway in 1927 and successfully toured the West Coast in 192829; this led to the 1931 Universal film, whose romantic settings and sexual undercurrents revolutionized the horror film genre and established Lugosi’s place in Hollywood history. Lugosi, however, quickly became the victim of his own success. Despite the stardom that he achieved through Dracula, Lugosi resisted typecasting and aspired instead to the romantic leading roles he had performed on the Hungarian stage. Unfortunately, his poor judgment resulted in a series of bad career choices, long periods of unemployment, and perpetual financial problems. Perhaps his single worst mistake was rejecting a major role in Frankenstein (1932), Universal’s next big film after Dracula. Originally slated to play the monster, Lugosi disliked both the heavy makeup and the character’s lack of dialogue, and so the part went to Boris Karloff, who soon surpassed Lugosi in salary as well as fame, becoming his lifelong rival. When Universal teamed Karloff and Lugosi in such films as The Black Cat (1934), The Raven (1935), and The Body Snatchers (1945), Lugosi received second billing and played a decidedly supporting role to Karloff.

Quite a good scene, isn’t it? One man crazy—and three very sane spectators! Frankenstein (1931)

The Gothic terror-fictions which were so distinctive a legacy of the eighteenth century to the nineteenth lent themselves, not only to theatrical stage adaptation, but also to various kinds of light-and-shadow play: E. G. Robertson’s

‘phantasmagorias’ of the 1790s relied a great deal on nocturnal churchyard and castle scenes, on skeletons and ghostly apparitions that seemed to move when the lenses and reflectors behind lanterna magica slides were pushed forward or back-

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ

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ward and screens agitated. A hundred years later similar apparitions could be seen in the pioneering fantasy-films of the conjurer Georges Méliès: devils (usually played by Méliès himself) were ubiquitous, bodies turned into skeletons, selenites frightened travellers to the moon, in Bluebeard’s Chamber a row of well-dressed ladies appeared to be hanging from hooks, a living head seemed to be blown up with a pump and finally to explode, a seven-headed hydra writhed on the ground, and devils cavorted with torches as Mephistopheles made off with Dr. Faustus . . . The double exposures, jump-cuts, and other technical tricks which Méliès played with the shots he had taken from a fixed position corresponding to a fixed seat in the stalls of a theatre—these amused rather than frightened their audiences, and, in the end, wearied them sufficiently to ensure Méliès’s bankruptcy. What audiences failed to derive from Méliès’s delightful fantasies were sensations of safely terrifying shock: the kind of shock that the Lumière brothers provided when they photographed a train pulling into a station head-on, so that it seemed about to hurtle out of the screen on to the spectators in the cinema; or the kind of shock provided in 1895 by Alfred Clark’s The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, where interrupted camera-cranking and the substitution of a dummy gave startled spectators the illusion that they were seeing a human head being chopped off on the executioner’s block; or that purveyed by Edwin S. Porter, when he introduced into The Great Train Robbery (1903) a close-up in which a bandit pointed his gun directly at the audience. Méliès’s fantasy, Clark’s intimate view of extreme situations, and the Lumières’ as well as Porter’s apparent assaults on the audience were all to become important ingredients in the cinematic tale of terror.

The Avenging Conscience, a cento from the works of Poe first shown in 1915, and Maurice Tourneur’s Trilby (also 1915), which introduced the figure of the demonic hypnotist long before Krauss, KleinRogge, and Wegener made it their own, are the beginnings of a wave whose crest is reached in the silent German cinema, from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Richard Oswald’s terror-compendium Uncanny Tales (both 1919) to Galeen’s Alraune (1928); in the grotesque creations of Lon Chaney in the U.S.A., from The Miracle Man (1919) to The Unholy Three (1930); in the films of other nations from Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage (1920) and Carl Dreyer’s Leaves from Satan’s Book (1921) to Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness of 1926 and Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher of 1928. On the last-named film Epstein’s assistant was Luis Buñuel, whose collaboration with Dali on An Andalusian Dog in the same year laced surrealism with violent elements that recalled the tale of terror. The setting for all this was, of course, the First World War, its anticipatory rumbles, and the social and political upheavals that followed in its wake.

This genre began to define itself in the first decade of the twentieth century when the Selig Polyscope Company brought out a brief adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908); the Danish Nordisk Company followed suit with an adaptation of the same tale (1909) and with two ‘premature burial’ films entitled The Necklace of the Dead (1910) and Ghosts of the Vault (1911). The Edison Company was first in the field with an adaptation of Frankenstein (1910), which was followed by three further adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde— including one produced by ‘Uncle’ Carl Laemmle, whose Universal Studios were to corner the market for stories of this kind in a way equalled only by Hammer Films during their period of gory glory. These early productions, together with Griffith’s

The next wave comes on, against the dark sky of the Second World War and what led up to it, with a curiously muted roar. The dominant figure is the producer Val Lewton, whose modestly budgeted films, from Cat People (1942) to Bedlam (1946), tried to civilize the horror-movie into subtler evocations of terror—evocations that made the audience supply a good deal of what the screen only suggests. Arthur Lubin’s remake of The Phantom of the Opera (1943) also toned down considerably the shocks of the original (how feeble Claude Rains’s make-up looks when compared with Chaney’s in the same role!); and the talkative British movies about ghostly apparitions that belong to an afterlife but set this world to rights, Thunder Rock (1942), for instance, or The Halfway

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A second wave of terror-films emanated from the U.S.A. almost immediately after the coming of sound—Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and White Zombie (1932) were all made in Carl Laemmle’s Universal Studios, where German influences proved particularly powerful. Key figures in the dissemination of that influence were the director Paul Leni and the director/cameraman Karl Freund. The peak of this wave was reached with the masterly King Kong of 1933; it rolled on, with apparent vigour but slowly diminishing force, until it receded in mechanical compilations and parody towards the beginning of the Second World War. The background here is clearly the Depression in the U.S.A. and its worldwide repercussions.

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The time had now come for a fourth wave, stirred up by the reverberations of the rockets that had terrorized England during the last days of the Second World War, and the beginning of space exploration. From the outset, from the earliest Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde films, the cinematic tale of terror had shaded over into science fiction; their coincidence now increased as George Pal’s Destination Moon (1950) latched on to Fritz Lang’s pioneering Woman in the Moon (1924) and pointed forward to Christian Nyby’s (and Howard Hawks’s!) The Thing from Another World (1951) as well as to the peak of this whole sub-genre in the 1950s: Don Siegel’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Siegel’s title, suggested by that of Jack Finney’s novel and imposed on him by the front office, bespeaks another interesting continuity— for it recalls, deliberately, the restrained exercise in terror which Val Lewton and Philip MacDonald had adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson, and which Robert Wise had directed, under the title The Body Snatcher, in 1945. Television now not only rivalled but fed the cinema: a process dramatically demonstrated by the small British firm Hammer Films, whose first post-war success with the public came with their 1955 production of The Quatermass Experiment, based on a sciencefiction thriller in serial form which had kept the BBC’s audience in breathless suspense for several weeks. A great deal has been written about the science-fiction films that populated the screens in the fifties and sixties, and from this general discussion five main thematic categories have emerged:

(i) Invasion from outer space: Works embodying the neurosis of the Cold War, like The Thing from Another World, belong to

this category, as do The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and countless films in which earthmen face the task of destroying some Bug-Eyed Monster or other undesirable alien. Soon, however, significant variants began to appear, showing different relations between earthmen and visitors from beyond. In Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, made as early as 1951, the ‘invader’ comes, not to destroy, but to warn men against their selfdestructive course. From this two developments were possible: towards a film like Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), where the visitor from beyond is enfeebled and corrupted by the commercial civilization into which he comes; and towards one like Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), where plainly benevolent visitors are received with an almost religious veneration and awe.

(ii) Monsters from our own earth and seas: An atomic test or accident rouses The Beast from 20 000 Fathoms (Eugene Lourie, 1953), Godzilla (Inoshiro Honda, 1956), or some other prehistoric giant from his slumbers, or brings about mutations (the giant ants, for instance, in Gordon Douglas’s Them, 1954) which then go on the rampage. The hero of Them, the ultimate conqueror of the mutants, is an F.B.I. man haunted by fears of atomic explosion and subversion by an enemy within—a fact whose connection with American anxieties of the 1950s has not escaped film historians and commentators. Beings belonging to an earlier stage of evolution can also be discovered, and dangerously aroused, by expeditions into unknown territories, as films deriving ultimately from Conan Doyle’s The Lost World showed frequently and impressively. King Kong had belonged to that tribe in the 1930s; in the fifties his worthiest successor was Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). But monsters need not be discovered; they can also be made, like the radioactive children created by an unholy alliance of scientists and politicians in Joseph Losey’s The Damned (1961). And if Lourie’s Beast from 20 000 Fathoms still had to fall victim to the ‘search it out and destroy it’ philosophy of so many ‘monster’ films, his successors in Gorgo, made by the same director in 1960, were allowed to return to their own element in peace. In the seven years between these two films ecology concerns and the Vietnam War had done much to throw doubt on the morality and wisdom of destroying alien modes of life that seem to threaten us.

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House (1944), were likely to scare only the most susceptible. This cycle ended, however, with one of the universally acknowledged classics of the cinematic tale of terror: Dead of Night, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Robert Hamer, and others in 1945. In assessing the impact of Lewis Allen’s The Uninvited (1944) and Dead of Night, one has to remember that before these tales of supernatural happenings ghosts appearing on the screen tended to be garrulous moralizers, as in The Halfway House, or were played for comedy, as in Clair’s The Ghost Goes West (1935), or were rationally explained away, as in The Ghost Breakers (1940). In the history of the sound-film it was The Uninvited and Dead of Night which signalled the confluence of the ghost-story properly so called with the tale of terror.

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(iii) Atomic catastrophe and after: Characteristic works in this category are Stanley Kramer’s film of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1959), which depicts a dying world after a disastrous atomic war; Franklin Shaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968), in which we see a group of men preserved by chance fighting for survival in a society of monkeys that have taken over the earth; and Boris Sagal’s The Omega Man (1971), which portrays another battle for survival after a cataclysm, this time against post-atomic mutants.

(iv) The journey to the stars: This extension of the imaginary voyages of Jules Verne has many variants, from George Pal’s Destination Moon to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Such works may include intergalactic battles, whose apogee comes in the naïve but technologically wondrous Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), with its simple-minded hero fighting for good against evil much as Flash Gordon used to do in the old serials. Star Wars and its imitations have been seen, by several social commentators, as a reflection of the early Carter era, with its post-Watergate longings for clarity, simplicity, moral perspicuity, and a revival of the old frontier virtues.

(v) The tyrannous future: A multitude of films show us governments that forbid books (Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, 1966) or forbid natural expressions of the human affections (Lucas’s THX 1138, 1970) or heighten in various ways what are seen as undesirable features of our technological civilization (Godard’s Alphaville, 1965). If the ultimate inspiration behind star-journeys, or journeys into the human interior like Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage (1966), is Jules Verne, the inspiration behind ‘tyrannous future’ films are the dystopias of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Most frightening of all is the (near) future depicted in Joseph Sargent’s The Forbin Project (1969), in which super-computers reveal ‘ambitions’ that outrun and outwit those of their makers and would-be controllers, and come to rule the world without human interference. The anxieties which are mirrored in sciencefiction films from the U.S.A. are connected, in more obvious ways than those of the horrormovies, with socio-political anxieties: fears of invasion during the Korean War and the Cuban missile crisis, fears of being ‘taken over’ mentally and spiritually during the McCarthy era, a compound of fear and uneasy conscience during the

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Vietnam War, dread of brainwashing, genetic engineering, computerized policing, and bacteriological warfare, as well as growing ecological fears connected with atomic power, aggressive defoliation techniques, various kinds of man-made pollution, the growth of populations, and the penetration of outer space by more and more manmade objects. Fairy-tales like Star Wars would appear on this grid as an escapist reaction against the serious or bitterly satirical symbolization of this kind of anxiety. Even Star Wars has plain and obvious links with the horror-movie—one remembers the galactic bar with its assorted monsters, supplied by a London firm called Uglies Limited; but entertaining films of this nature have little in common with such serious projections of the plight of man trying to cope with his own technology as Stanislav Lem’s Solaris, memorably filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1971. It was, in fact, their venture into science fiction laced with horror which encouraged Hammer Films to believe that their public was ready for a new treatment of the old Universal favourites; a treatment which would take account of the possibilities opened up by larger screens, better colour processes, and greater permissiveness in the depiction of violence and sexual activities. The Curse of Frankenstein, made in 1957, proved them right: and so they started a fifth wave of terrormovies which bore with it not only Hammer’s own vampire-, zombie-, and mad-scientist-films, but also films on similar themes from Italy, France, Germany, Japan, and—above all—Latin America, where there had always been a keen interest in such things; an interest sufficiently translatable into commercial terms to induce Universal to accompany their Dracula of 1931 with a Spanishspeaking version of the same film, shot on the same sets but employing different actors. Japan, indeed, which had evolved a marvellous cinematic tradition of cinematic ghost-stories, culminating in two crucial episodes of Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) and in Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964), produced, with Shindo’s Onibaba (1964), the most horrifying unmasking scene since Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), and all but cornered the market in powerful monsters with Gojira (usually known as ‘Godzilla’ in the West) and his manifold progeny from 1955 onwards. Unlike the prototype, however, from which they derived—Lourie’s The Beast from 20 000 Fathoms—the monsters in Japanese movies could occasionally be helpful; they could become man’s allies in his fight against technological destruction and dessication. The Swedish cinema, in the meantime, through the

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While Hammer were reviving the Universal monsters in their own way, American International Pictures began a cycle whose appreciation was almost entirely tongue-in-cheek—a perfect example of ‘camp’ manufacture and reception of the iconography of terror. The first film in this series bore the (now notorious) title I Was A Teenage Werewolf (1957); it purported to show how a college student acquired bestial form through an experiment that went wrong. The absurdity of plot and acting, and the relentless pop music that filled the sound-track, gave various kinds of pleasure to young audiences and encouraged the film-makers to follow this pilot movie with I Was A Teenage Frankenstein, and with Teenage Monster and Teenage Zombie creations that were as awful to listen to as they were to see. Part of the profits from this Teenage cycle went into the financing of a more memorable series of films based, rather loosely, on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The first of these was The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), directed, like most of those that were to follow, by Roger Corman, written for the screen by Richard Matheson, photographed by Floyd Crosby, imaginatively designed by Daniel Haller, and starring Vincent Price. While many of these low-budget films were meant to be taken straight, a series of deliberate spoofs were interspersed with them: The Raven, for instance, directed by Corman in 1963 and bringing together Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Vincent Price, and The Comedy of Terrors, directed in the same year by Jacques Tourneur. As I write this, early in 1978, I feel myself borne along by yet another wave of terror-films, a

wave whose crest is formed by what is frequently called ‘meat’ or ‘road accident’ movies—films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), which provide shock through the maximum exhibition of flesh in the process of being mangled and blood in the process of being spilt (all simulated, of course, as one must hasten to add in view of some disturbing recent developments); by sensationalist marriages of terror-film and science-fiction idioms, as in Donald Cammell’s The Demon Seed (1977), which has Julie Christie raped by a computer; and by films of demonic possession, destructive paranormal faculties, and eerie reincarnations represented by such works as Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), de Palma’s Carrie (1976), Frankenheimer’s The Heretic (1977), and Skolimowski’s The Shout (1978). Particularly characteristic of our time are suggestions, in American films of the postWatergate era, from The Werewolf of Washington (1973) to The Omen (1976), as well as in some British films, that if we want to look for demons, monsters, and devil-worshippers, we shall be most likely to find them in the offices of those to whom the destinies of nations have been entrusted. The crest of this wave seems to have been passed, if one may judge by the uninventiveness of the imitations that are now about; but plentiful supply suggests that the demand continues. It must not be forgotten, by those who trace the history of the terror-film in this linear way, that no development is ever as neat as the historian would have it; that, at a given period, older types and models may exist alongside more recent ones. Mexican terror-films, for instance, as Carlos Clarens and others have reminded us, managed to perpetuate the Browning-Lugosi type with all seriousness into a time in which other countries saw this merely as a subject for parody, children’s amusement, or nostalgic recollection. Three characteristic groups have been isolated in the most recent history of the terror-film: Charles Derry, in his book Dark Dreams, describes them as centring, respectively, on ‘horror of personality’, ‘horror of Armageddon’, and ‘horror of the demonic’. In the first, the monster or monsters at the heart of the film resemble you and me rather than Frankenstein’s creature, or King Kong, or Godzilla—but owing to some kink in their psychic make-up, or some pressure felt as intolerable, these beings perform the dreadful acts we read about in the newspapers when we absorb our daily ration of rapes, mutilations, and sadistic killings. The key work here is Hitchcock’s Psycho, released in 1960; but a year later Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? popularized that

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films of Ingmar Bergman, showed the world what psychologically meaningful use could be made of the iconography the terror-film had evolved since the days of the silent German classics. There is, beyond doubt, a straight line running from Wiene’s Caligari over Lang’s Destiny (or Tired Death, 1921) and Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul (1926) to the terror, dream, and fantasy sequences of Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), The Face (or The Magician, 1958), and Hour of the Wolf (1967). The Hour of the Wolf pays a self-conscious tribute to that German inspiration by means of characters who bear names like Kreisler and Lindhorst; names familiar from the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann which had proved such a powerful influence on the early German film-makers. Even Bergman’s masterpiece Persona (1966) can be, and has been, seen as a series of variations on the vampire and Doppelgänger themes of the terror-film and the literary tales that preceded it.

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characteristic and particularly unpleasant variant which has become known as the ‘menopausal murder story’. Ageing actresses are engaged to perform gory mayhem or be subjected to grotesque tortures not only in Baby Jane, but also in Strait Jacket (1964), Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1965), Fanatic (1965), and Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969). In such works the line that divides exploration from exploitation is unmistakably crossed. The second or ‘Armageddon’ group dwells on large-scale rather than individual destruction, either performed or threatened: again our newspapers, ever since the dropping of the first atom bomb, have constantly fed that existential anxiety. Among the key works are not only the sciencefiction films already discussed above, but also Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and, more recently, Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1978), an intelligent Australian film which shows civilized man seeking a better understanding of nature through contact with an aboriginal culture—but not until his own culture has upset nature’s balance with apocalyptic results. As for Derry’s last category, the demonic: our newspapers have not lacked, in recent times, graphic accounts of satanic rites, witchcraft, and exorcisms in a world whose religious sense has sought other outlets than the traditional modes of worshipping God. Key works in the group of films which reflect this state of affairs are Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s austere black-andwhite transportation of the ‘Devils of Loudon’ story into seventeenth-century Poland under the title Mother Joan of the Angels (1961) and that film’s more garish and more popular successors in the English-speaking world: Ken Russell’s The Devils (1970) and Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Two things deserve to be noticed here. Firstly, although Derry has correctly described dominant trends, and has given many well-chosen instances of the different ways in which the themes he isolates have been treated in recent years, the themes themselves are not new, either in the cinema or in literature. All of them, in fact, had played some part in the German cinema of the twenties: ‘horror of personality’ in The Student of Prague, a man-made Armageddon in the flood sequences of Lang’s Metropolis, demonic possession in Caligari. Secondly, in two of the three cycles a key work comes from the cameras of Alfred Hitchcock, best known as a maker of suspense-thrillers not usually thought of as horrormovies. This demonstrates the fluidity of genres (what would the ‘horror of personality’ film be without the film noir, or the ‘Armageddon’ film

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without science fiction?); suggests that a genre can be powerfully affected by the work of eminent auteurs even if these are not primarily working in that genre; and reminds us once again that though the horror-movie or fantastic terror-film exists to scare us in delightful ways, it does not have a monopoly of terror-sequences or terror-themes. It should also turn our thoughts, once again, towards Germany; for Hitchcock worked at the UFA studios in the twenties and learnt a good deal from the German terror-film. ‘The Lodger’, Hitchcock said to François Truffaut, ‘is the first picture possibly affected by my period in Germany.’ Lang would seem to have been a particularly powerful influence. It may be regarded as a kind of homage that a film made by Hitchcock for Gainsborough Pictures in 1926 starred Bernhard Goetzke, who had portrayed Death in Lang’s Destiny or Tired Death (a film the young Hitchcock particularly admired), and that two films he made for Gaumont British in the early thirties prominently featured Lang’s latest terror-star, Peter Lorre, the psychopathic murderer of M—a work that had managed to transplant the Romantic fantasies of the early German cinema, and its central Doppelgänger image, into a realistic setting and an almost documentary story-line. The film-makers who brought about the revival of the German cinema after the Second World War have, on the whole, trodden paths remote from those of Wiene and the early Murnau. There are continuities, however. Peter Lorre returned to Germany for a while to direct, and star in, The Lost One (1951), which made the psychopathic killer he had portrayed in earlier films a homicidal Nazi scientist. Fritz Lang returned to project his master criminal Mabuse into the world of electronic surveillance (The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, 1960). The atmosphere of mystery and terror characteristic of the Weimar cinema has been to some degree preserved in a large number of films based on the works of Edgar Wallace; the actor Klaus Kinski has added to the cinematic repertoire a notable gallery of madmen, paranoiacs, sadistic killers, and drug addicts which recalls the Weimar period in its intensity and demonic power; Rainer Werner Fassbinder has been able to introduce Gothic-expressionistic elements into such films as Chinese Roulette (1976) with its monomaniac characters, its oppressive house whose obtrusive furnishings imprison the characters in geometric patterns, its sinister crippled child at the centre of the intrigue. The most talented of the younger directors, Werner Herzog, has shown an interest in unusual states of

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Herzog’s deep respect for the Weimar cinema, and his determination to make its traditions valid for his own contemporaries, are shared by HansJürgen Syberberg, whose trilogy of films on the lives of Karl May, Ludwig II of Bavaria, and Hitler (completed in 1978) introduces images from Caligari and other German movies of the same period; and by H. W. Geissendörfer, whose Jonathan: Vampires Do Not Die (1970) pays tribute to Murnau along with Bram Stoker. Despite its technical accomplishment and its memorable political overtones and implications, however, Geissendörfer’s film had so little success at its first release that the exhibitors refused to handle it further unless scenes of explicit sex and violence were spliced in—an inverted form of censorship which has been becoming more and more common since nude shots of Brigitte Bardot were inserted into Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris, 1963) at the behest of investors anxious to secure better returns. A host of other German directors of the most recent past have tried their hand at the evocation of Murnauesque terrors: Niklaus Schilling, for instance, whose Shades of Night, first shown in the early seventies, to be followed by Expulsion from

Paradise (1977) and Rhinegold (1978), suggested the sinister, demonic aspects of the German landscape with considerable flair; while Johannes Schaaf, whose Dream City, also released in the early seventies, successfully adapted to the modern screen motifs from Alfred Kubin’s uncanny novel The Other Side (1909). The Tenderness of Wolves (1973), made by Uli Lommel with the cooperation of the ubiquitous Rainer Werner Fassbinder, is often spoken of as a ‘vampire’-film; it turns out, however, to be a study of a homosexual murderer, well played by Kurt Raab; its graphic presentation of killings and mutilations—Raab is even shown licking blood off a table—deliberately distances it from Fritz Lang’s M, which had dealt with a related theme in 1931. Lang had only suggested the actual murders through shots of abandoned balloons, sweets, empty stair-wells, and so on, and had explained the philosophy behind his procedures in words very pertinent to the theme of this book: If I could show what is most horrible for me, it may not be horrible for somebody else. Everybody in the audience—even the one who doesn’t dare allow himself to understand what really happened to that poor child—has a horrible feeling that runs cold over his back. But everybody has a different feeling, because everybody imagines the most horrible thing that could happen to her. And that is something I could not have achieved by showing only one possibility—say, that he tears open the child, cuts her open. Now, in this way, I force the audience to become a collaborator of mine; by suggesting something I achieve a greater impression, a greater involvement, than by showing it . . . (Bogdanovich, 1967, pp. 86-7)

Lang here builds on one of the most important facts about the cinema-experience: that the spectator is never just the passive recipient of a message, but that he helps, in varying degrees, to create the experience he is enjoying. What the film-maker has to do is activate the imaginations that reach out to meet his own. Modern audiences, unfortunately, have acquired a craving for the literal and explicit which makes such artistic restraint less and less profitable in the competition for shrinking screen space. One vitally important factor determining the state of the market for modern films is, of course, the competition and the patronage of television. In recent years the small screen has not only introduced older terror-films to a new generation of viewers, whose response is significantly conditioned by the domestic setting in which they— unlike cinema-goers—watch such works, but has also evolved its own variations. Examples are

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mind and soul that even led to an experiment, Heart of Glass (1976), in which the whole cast was filmed while under hypnosis. Herzog’s Even Dwarves Started Small (1970) may be seen, in part, as an ironic modern variation on Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932). For the plot of his claustrophobic Signs of Life (1967), Herzog went to a tale by the Romantic writer Achim von Arnim, whose evocations of terror Heine had rated above those of Hoffmann himself. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) is dedicated to Lotte Eisner, the chronicler of the ‘Haunted Screen’ of the early German cinema and author of the standard work on Murnau; and the conjunction of Herzog and Klaus Kinski, thrillingly exhibited in Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972), inevitably pointed towards Murnau country—not least because Kinski had shown his mettle as a traditional horror-actor by his triumphant assumption of the part of Renfield in Jesus Franco’s Count Dracula of 1970. Writing in Écran in 1975, Herzog characteristically said of his Aguirre: ‘This film, I think, is not really a narrative of actual happenings or a portrait of actual people. At any level it is a film about what lies behind landscapes, faces, situations and words.’ It comes as no surprise, therefore, to find Herzog and Kinski collaborating on a version of Nosferatu (released in 1979) which plays a respectful game of theme and variations with Murnau’s famous film of the same name, first shown in 1922.

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legion; they range from ghost-stories based on the tales of M. R. James or specially written by Robert Muller and others to TV movies like Dan Curtis’s The Night Stalker (1971) and its sequel The Night Strangler (1972), scripted by Richard Matheson, which wittily and frighteningly revived the vampire- and rejuvenation-tales of the terrorcinema. The continuities between such works and the old ‘B’ movies are not only thematic: they are made under similar restraints of money, location, and shooting-time, though flexible and sophisticated technical equipment, specially adapted to the lower definition of the TV screen, is apt to disguise this. To discuss the relation between film and television is not part of this book’s purpose; but it must mention, at least in passing, the effect that the rediscovery of avant-garde devices— ‘violently clashing images, unusual angles of vision, frozen frames, shooting through gauze, negative prints etc.’—by the makers of TV commercials has had on the iconography, the rhetoric, and the tempo of terror-films all over the world. ‘Most of us’, Pauline Kael has justly said, ‘are now so conditioned by the quick cutting and free association of ideas in TV commercials that we think faster than feature-length movies can move. We understand cinematic shorthand’ (Toeplitz, 1974, pp. 240, 242). Let us now retrace our steps to look at a sequence from one of the undoubted classics of the terror-film—a seminal work of the cinema, a work that stands at a point to which many roads lead and from which many roads flow; a work, moreover, from which our culture has derived one of its most powerful, most easily recognizable, and most influential, visual images. That work is James Whale’s Frankenstein of 1931. By its very title this film places itself in a tradition which looks beyond the cinema: a tradition going back to an evening in the Villa Deodati in 1816 at which translations from German ghoststories were read aloud, and to a day in 1818 when Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus was launched on to a receptive public. That the majority of those lured into the cinema by the advertising campaign which preceded the film’s release would not be aware of this provenance does not matter—though James Whale felt strongly enough about it to bring Mary Shelley, Shelley, and Byron into the rather embarrassing prologue which introduced a sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, in 1935. In Whale’s original Frankenstein enough survives of the work that has been adapted to reevoke the literary climate of an age in which a German-sounding name in the title of a work at

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once brought suggestions of uncanny terrors; to suggest something of the cultural debates and heart-searchings that went on in the circle around Shelley and the Godwin family, with its passionate concern about the place of the natural sciences in the modern world, the nature of families, the acquisition of language, and the problems of moral choice; and to make probable that the central incident did indeed come to its author (as Mary Shelley assured her readers it did) in a dream. Between the elaborately structured and talkative novel—in which even the monster learns to speak learnedly and at length about Milton, Goethe, and Volney—and the straightforward story-line of the film, a large number of stage adaptations interposed themselves: Peake’s version, for instance, which introduced a superstitious servant called Fritz and deprived the monster of speech (T. P. Cooke had only grunted in that part); or, a century later, the version of Peggy Webling, in which Victor Frankenstein and his friend Henry Clerval interchanged their first names, and which also brought the monster face to face with a crippled girl, confronted him amorously with Frankenstein’s betrothed, and made him entranced by the sun when he first beheld it. These features were taken over, in slightly varied form, by the writers of the scenario and shooting-script, who included Robert Florey, Garret Fort, and Francis E. Faragoh. They added many new motifs, however: it was Florey, for instance, who suggested the monster’s final confrontation with his maker in a wooden flour-mill, as well as the motif of the ‘criminal brain’ inserted, through human error and muddle, into the poor monster’s skull. Despite all these additions, and despite the many omissions and simplifications necessary for the translation of the signifiers of written or printed texts into the iconic signs of the sound-film, a good deal of Mary Shelley’s original conception remains: not least those associations which she sought to evoke by her allusion to the Prometheus myth in her sub-title. Whale’s feelings that his film enshrined a myth—an ultimately religious myth, like that of Prometheus—is suggested by the famous answer he gave to members of his team who wanted a central scene to end in a different way. ‘No’, he said, ‘it has to be like that; you see, it’s all part of the ritual.’ The circle around Shelley took pride in the scope of man’s intellect revealed in science as well as in poetry; but as Mary Shelley’s novel showed, it was no stranger to worries about the ultimate effects of scientific endeavour and achievement if these outstripped social sympathies, responsibil-

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One of the charges that have been brought against Whale’s film is that it betrays its genre, and lets down the side of ever-advancing cinematic art, by failing to make use of the rich language of camera angle, camera movement, and editing which the great pioneers—Griffith, Eisenstein, Murnau—had evolved by the time James Whale came to make his celebrated movie. Even Richard Annobile, who chose this work above all others to open his Film Classics series, makes a complaint of this kind. One has only to look at the film’s opening sequence, however, to convince oneself that this charge is as mistaken as similar charges brought against The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. That opening sequence does three things superbly well: (i) placing the film which is to come within not a literary but a cinematic tradition, already well established despite the comparative newness of film art; (ii) presenting the forces which will be set clashing in the unfolding story through predominantly visual, cinematic means, without under-

lining by the portentous mood-music that spoils so many Hollywood films; (iii) introducing objects, characters, and actions which are essential elements of the unfolding story but which may also be seen to have symbolic significance. Several of them, in fact, become recurrent motifs, leitmotifs, when they are recalled in later shots and sequences. Let us look for a moment at the way all this is done. The film begins with a prologue, spoken by Edward Van Sloan in a pretence of stepping in front of a theatre curtain. This prologue links itself directly and deliberately to the original epilogue (now cut from most copies in circulation) of Tod Browning’s Dracula, spoken by the same actor in a very similar role; and the design behind the opening credits which follow in Frankenstein, with its two eyes emitting beams of light, recalls the play made with Lugosi’s eyes in Dracula, where pinpoints of light had been directed on to them by Tod Browning and his cameraman to make them shine out hypnotically. Indeed, an early poster of Frankenstein announces that Lugosi would play the central part and includes a visual allusion to his magnetic gaze. The ‘clawing hand’ motif behind these same opening credits of Frankenstein also refers us back to Dracula, and beyond that to a whole clutch of horror-movies and horrorcomedies—culminating in Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary (1927), a key work in the transition from the fantastic cinema of Weimar Germany to the American terror-film—in which this motif played a thrilling part. No less surely, however, does the design refer us forward—to the role which staring eyes and clawing hands will play in the early sequences of Frankenstein itself. Before we come to them, however, another design appears behind the titles: a revolving collage of eyes, which bears a striking and surely not accidental relation to the famous collage of eyes in the false Maria’s dance sequence of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). The shadowy demonic face that appears behind these eyes has what was known in those days as ‘the German look’; it recalls advertisements for German films which concentrated on the angular features of Conrad Veidt, or the demonic apparition that materializes in Rabbi Loew’s study in the conjuration scene of The Golem: How it came into the World (1920). This is only the first of several visual allusions, in Whale’s film, to the German cinema of the macabre: the central creation-scene embodies reminiscences of a similar scene in Rotwang’s laboratory in Metropolis, while The Golem is recalled, no less surely, by the impressive staircase down which Dwight Frye scuttles in

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ity, and imagination. Such worries had intensified in the century that elapsed between the novel and the film—a film which bears as distinct and complex a relation to the time within which it was conceived, the early thirties of our century, as did the novel to the time of Godwin, Shelley, and Erasmus Darwin. Part of a cycle of cinematic tales of terror conceived and executed in the Depression years in the U.S.A., James Whale’s Frankenstein deals in terrors that have an underground relation to the frightening economic and social world in which they took shape: a world in which manipulations of the stock-market had recoiled on the manipulators; in which human creatures seemed to be abandoned by those who had called them into being and those who might have been thought responsible for their welfare; in which men were prevented from being men, from feeling themselves full and equal members of society, and were thereby filled with destructive rages such as those the poor monster gives way to after his taunting by the sadistic hunchback who is just a little better off than the monster himself. Like other films in this cycle, Frankenstein not only gave expression to such resentments but also offered escape from the burden they placed on the consciousness, through delicious thrills, through cathartic acts of violence and destruction, and through scenes of baronial high life and ethnic merry-making which have worn least well in a film that still has power to excite a modern audience.

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Frankenstein’s tower laboratory, and by the lakeside confrontation of the monster and a little girl. Like Rex Ingram in The Magician of 1926 (a film which Whale would seem to have studied very carefully indeed) and like Tod Browning and Robert Florey, Whale was able to draw on German traditions as well as on the American tradition of the grotesque exemplified in the films of Lon Chaney Senior. It must be stressed, at this point, that the town and countryside constructed for James Whale in the Universal studios by Charles D. Hill and others are much less stylized than the medieval Prague Hans Poelzig had built for Wegener and Galeen in 1920. Jack C. Ellis (1979, p. 100) has described Poelzig’s sets admirably: ‘The abstractly fashioned medieval town, with its sharply angled roofs and tilted chimney-pots, looks like twisted gingerbread; there isn’t a straight line visible. A gigantic gate dwarfs the human beings. Irregular arches and inverted V’s predominate. The camera frequently shoots through the archways, imposing their strange shapes on the frame itself . . .’ Nevertheless, Whale’s film demonstrates that he is quite consciously working in an established and developing genre that includes the Scandinavian and German along with the American cinema, and that he is playing a significant game of theme and variation. The iconography of his own film, in its turn, influenced the developing genre indelibly, and has been a source of inspiration and allusion for a multitude of film-makers—though no one has ever paid to it as moving and as meaningful a tribute as Victor Erice, who in The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) confronted a little girl growing up in Franco’s Spain with Whale’s Frankenstein, showed what a central part Karloff’s monster assumed in her fantasies and dreams, and demonstrated how it helped her to interpret and to come to terms with her own world. . . . Whale’s first Frankenstein film has its detractors—but there is one thing on which there is almost universal agreement: the scenes in which the monster appears must be reckoned among the classics of the cinema. Here much of the credit must again go to Whale; but he shares it, as every director must, with his cameraman (Arthur Edeson), with the special effects department which set up the impressive laboratory-scene, with the make-up designer Jack Pierce, and—above all—with Boris Karloff. From the moment its hand twitches into life while face and body are yet hidden beneath their shroud, Karloff’s monster is unforgettable: nothing can ever quite efface the thrill of watching the successive views Whale’s

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mobile camera allows us of the lumbering figure first announced by the sound of its heavy footsteps: a medium-shot view from behind is followed by one of head and shoulders as the monster turns around; only then are we given our first look at those infinitely sad features in two closeups that fill the screen as no others will in the course of the whole film. A hundred imitations and parodies cannot dull the impact of the images created by Whale, Edeson, Pierce, and Karloff when we see the monster raise his misshapen hands towards the light from which he received life, to have that light immediately shut out by his creator and to be confronted with another kind of light, the flaming torch wielded by Dwight Frye’s malevolently hunched figure, the fire in which the monster will ultimately find his death, in mocking inversion of the Prometheus myth of Mary Shelley’s sub-title; when we see Karloff’s monster discover his own humanity by comparing his hands with those of the little girl who befriends him by the lake, and when we watch him being taught the delights of play by this little girl—how can one ever forget the radiant happiness that illuminates and beautifies his charnelhouse features at this point? No later debasements, in countless sequels, parodies, and exploitational variations—not even Mel Brooks’s charmingly conceived comedy Young Frankenstein (1974)—can ever dispel the magic of that classic, wordless performance. Karloff’s performance was not without its precedents, however. If his make-up in Frankenstein occasionally reminds us of Cesare’s in Caligari, his whole demeanour recalls even more forcibly the animated clay-figure that Paul Wegener had portrayed in the Golem films of 1914 and 1920. Here is a contemporary reaction to the first Golem: What makes the film worth discussing is only Wegener’s embodiment of the Golem—the affecting portrayal of a creature struggling out of mere existence towards some sentient connection with the world, struggling to become a man . . . In lyrical passages Wegener demonstrates possibilities of the film which transcend those of the theatre: a mere creature, he stands on the dream-breathing earth and slowly lifts his arms in astonishment, in halfconscious joy, in agitation—an image never to be forgotten. This creature of inadequacy is surrounded by an atmosphere of sadness: a melancholy sense of doomed efforts to reach the unattainable, as if the animal kingdom had sent a representative to mirror the human environment in its soul; as if, on an enchanted midnight, the gates of a felt beauty, a soul-suffused landscape,

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What Arnold Zweig here says of Wegener’s Golem in 1915 he could have applied verbatim, sixteen years later, to Frankenstein’s monster as Boris Karloff played it. . . . As everyone knows from seeing comedythrillers in the cinema and watching The Munsters or Monster Squad on television, terror and laughter are near neighbours in our reaction to the iconography of the cinematic tale of terror. We are here in the presence of grotesque art, in which impulses towards horrified recoil are stirred up at the same time as impulses to laugh; these inhibit one another and what results is a characteristically complex response. The masters of this kind of grotesque film have worked out all sort of devices to prevent us from laughing at the wrong moments. They introduce figures specifically designed as comic relief, to drain off our laughter, or induce the sort of double-take which Ivan Butler has described as characteristic of James Whale’s The Old Dark House: the hideous apparition everyone has been waiting for turns out to be a harmlesslooking little old man; but almost as soon as this anti-climax has taken effect the camera focuses, for a moment, on that little old man’s expression when he thinks himself unobserved and freezes laughter by making us realize, in a flash, that the real horror is, indeed, here. Nor have the masters of the macabre shown themselves averse to pushing their own effects towards the response of laughter through controlled experiments in parody. Paul Leni followed up the ‘Ivan the Terrible’ and ‘Jack the Ripper’ episodes of Waxworks with a classic comedy-thriller, The Cat and the Canary; James Whale succeeded his serious and dignified Frankenstein with the more tongue-incheek Bride of Frankenstein, where the grotesquely amusing element is most effectively concentrated in Ernest Thesiger’s performance as Dr. Pretorius; and the Polanski who made Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is the same director who also made the parodistic Dance of the Vampires (1967)—a parody in which large portions, particularly towards the end of the film, are played chillingly ‘straight’. With his usual virtuosity, Alfred Hitchcock has memorably demonstrated the improbable affinity of farce and terror at the opening of Vertigo (1958). The hero of the film, played by James Stewart, is discovered in that very position of peril at which cinema-audiences had laughed again and again in

the films of Harold Lloyd: clinging perilously to the window-sill of a high building, while a city street is held in focus far below him. The terror we are made to share in that sequence is in no way diminished—is, if anything, intensified—by our recollection of such comedies as Safety Last. Within the terror-film, however, the bravest confrontation of the risible remains the central figure of Murnau’s Nosferatu. The vampire’s huge ears and claws, his long pointed nose, his rabbit teeth, his jerky movements would seem to be made for laughter; yet the power of the film’s imagery is such that even modern audiences watch, for the most part, in awed and thrilled silence. Comic and parodistic elements enter the various terror-film cycles with increased force as they near their end: one need think only of the sequence Caligari—Waxworks (with its parodistic ‘Haroun al Rashid’ episode)—The Cat and the Canary; or of the way in which the terrifying creations of the early thirties were made to encounter Abbott and Costello, the Dead End Kids, the Ritz Brothers, and Old Mother Riley; or of the fun poked at Universal and Hammer films in Carry on Screaming and What a Carve Up (1961), Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Young Frankenstein. In each case, however, such spoofs are accompanied and succeeded by seriously meant exercises in terror as a new cycle gets under way: the Universal cycle of the early and mid-thirties, the Val Lewton cycle in the forties, The Exorcist, The Omen, and Burnt Offerings in the seventies. The cyclic development of the terror-genre which I have just sketched is accompanied by a more linear, temporally more straightforward development conditioned by the film-makers’ desire to test out various degrees of explicitness and thresholds of acceptability. Early terror-films showed monsters, but had perforce to be very reticent in showing sexual activity and violence: the only blood I can remember seeing in the Dracula films from Universal is that which oozed from Renfield’s finger when he had cut it accidentally, and such nuzzlings as were shown were very restrained indeed. The Val Lewton cycle tried even greater reticence, believing that no monster actually shown can be as frightening as the monster the audience will produce for itself if the right suggestions are implanted by what it actually sees on the screen. Films like The Uninvited and The Haunting operated on similar principles. From the emergence of the Hammer horrors on, however, films have tested their audience’s shockability further and further: in the exhibition of

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had been opened before the animal—but there it stands, in perplexity and anguish, unable to grasp what is before it; and the hour goes by. (Die Schaubühne, xi, 1915, 225-7)

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ ALFRED HITCHCOCK (1899-1980)

Universally acknowledged as “The Master of Suspense,” British-born film director Hitchcock is renowned for a series of now classic psychological thrillers that remain a constant presence in the cultural landscape of the moviegoer. Hitchcock created and perfected his own genre of thriller, one which was by turns romantic, comedic, and macabre. Hitchcock’s first American film was a collaboration with producer David O. Selznick, Rebecca (1940), based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier and starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. Sometimes cited by Hitchcock as his personal favorite, Shadow of a Doubt (1943), which starred Joseph Cotten as a killer escaping detection by “visiting” his adoring relatives, dramatized the terrors that can lurk in the shadows of a seemingly normal small town. It was this penchant for perceiving the disturbance underneath the surface of things that helped Hitchcock’s movies to resonate so powerfully. In Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958) Hitchcock examines obsession under the deceptive guise of a straightforward thriller. In Rear Window the lead character, portrayed by actor James Stewart, witnesses a murder while engaging in his hobby of spying on his neighbors. In Vertigo, a man (played by Stewart) is tormented by a lookalike of his deceased lover (both played by Kim Novak), with whom he had had an illicit affair. Vertigo has been praised for Hitchcock’s cinematographic artistry as well as Stewart’s grim, haunted performance. The director’s first horror film, Psycho (1960), inspired by the Ed Gein multiple murder case, has been analyzed by numerous film historians and academics, and is generally considered Hitchcock’s last great film. The murder of the woman (portrayed by Janet Leigh) in the shower has been imitated in countless films since Psycho’s release, and has become part of the cinema’s iconography. The Birds (1963)— based on a short story by Du Maurier—was less highly regarded, but is considered a durable and complex experiment in terror, and a testament to Hitchcock’s technical expertise.

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straightforward and homosexual (especially Lesbian) libidinous activity, in the showing of blood and mutilations of all kinds, in the repulsiveness of the monsters created by make-up experts, in everything calculated to excite disgust and even nausea, from the green vomit of The Exorcist to the wriggling monsters emerging from a man’s stomach by erupting through his skin in David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1976). The fact that evil is so often allowed to triumph at the end of more recent films is as much connected with this change in the tolerance threshold as with the incidence of a darker, more pessimistic outlook on life. We have come a long way from the days in which Graham Greene could say, as he did in 1936, that ‘terror on the screen has always, alas! to be tempered to the shorn lamb’. Mass production, saturation advertising, and exploitation of tried and proven formulas have become ever more noticeable features of terrorfilm manufacture. When Hammer had shown the market for such things, companies all over the world jumped on to the bandwagon and made vampire-, monster-, and ‘resurrection’- films; when The Exorcist made money, companies all over the world brought out films that linked demonic possession with heads spinning round 360° and graphically shown sores and vomiting. In the process, convention tended to be degraded to cliché, development to shameless imitation or unimaginative ‘going one better’, terror to physical repulsion, and genre to formula. In such a situation, imaginative and original film-making tends to become submerged by inferior exploitationproducts; one may trust to time, however, to winnow the wheat from this mass of chaff. As the history of the terror-film genre proceeds, directors frequently introduce allusions calculated to place their films within that genre—as when Eugene Lourie has the infant monster of Gorgo transported past a London cinema showing Hammer’s 1959 version of The Mummy. At the same time the characters, themes, images, lighting-patterns, and atmospheric ambience characteristic of the genre appear more and more often in films that are not primarily terrorfilms or horror-movies—films by directors with a strong artistic purpose, like Buñuel, Bergman, and Fellini, and also films by entertainers like Norman Jewison, whose resurrectionscene in Fiddler on the Roof (1974) makes an amusing parodistic use of ‘horror’ conventions. Has any terror-film after Nosferatu ever employed a more startling shock-cut than that which occurs at the opening of David Lean’s version of Great Expectations (1946) when G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1

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Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho.

Magwitch, the convict, suddenly looms up among the graves? Analysts of the Hollywood cinema in particular have vied with one another in pointing to the manifold uses distinguished directors have made of horror-movie imagery. Here is Eric Rhode on Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940): Rebecca opens . . . with its camera edging forward through a dank, leafy garden to a shrouded country house called Manderley. In the past, such evocations of the eerie—of entombed emotions brought to light—had been the preserve of the horror movie. Hollywood studios now applied it to nearly every genre. (Rhode, 1976, p. 385)

Here is Pauline Kael, on resemblances between Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and Karl Freund’s Mad Love (1935): . . . there was the Gothic atmosphere, and the huge, dark rooms with lighted figures, and Peter Lorre, bald, with a spoiled-baby face, looking astoundingly like a miniature Orson Welles . . . Not only is the large room with the fireplace at Xanadu similar to Lorre’s domain as a mad doc-

tor, with similar lighting and similar placement of figures, but Kane’s appearance and make-up in some sequences might be a facsimile of Lorre’s . . . (Kael, 1974, p. 64)

And here, lastly, is Richard Corliss on Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950)—a film which anticipated the ‘menopausal murder story’ of the 1960s: Sunset Boulevard is the definitive Hollywood horror movie. Practically everything about this final Brackett-Wilder collaboration is ghoulish. The film is narrated by a corpse that is waiting to be fished out of a swimming pool. Most of it takes place in an old dark house that opens its doors only to the walking dead. The first time our doomed hero . . . enters the house, he is mistaken for an undertaker. Soon after, another corpse is buried—that of a pet monkey, in a white coffin. Outside the house is the swimming pool, at first filled only with rats, and ‘the ghost of a tennis court.’ The only musical sound in the house is that of the wind, wheezing through the broken pipes of a huge old organ. The old man who occasionally plays it calls to mind Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera—that and other images of the Silent Era. The old man is

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Erich von Stroheim, playing himself as he plays the organ, with intimations of melancholia, absurdity and loss . . . Desmond-Swanson is Dracula, or perhaps the Count’s older, forgotten sister, condemned to relive a former life, sucking blood from her victim . . . (Corliss, 1975, pp. 147-8)

Analyses such as these serve to show up vividly how the American cinema has used genreconventions to transcend genre while most seeming to affirm it. What we have just heard Rhode say of Rebecca reminds us that it is not only specific characters and specific images which migrate from the terrorfilm into other genres. Whole feeling-patterns reemerge in different context as the history of the cinema proceeds along its rapid way. Take Robert Sklar’s description, in Movie-Made America, of the claustrophobia characteristic of the Hollywood film noir, the psychological thriller of the 1940s: The hallmark of the film noir is its sense of people trapped—trapped in webs of paranoia and fear, unable to tell guilt from innocence, true identity from false. Its villains are attractive and sympathetic, masking greed, misanthropy, malevolence. Its heroes and heroines are weak, confused, susceptible to false impressions. The environment is murky and close, the setting vaguely oppressive. In the end, evil is exposed, though often just barely, and the survival of good remains troubled and ambiguous. (Sklar, 1978, p. 253)

That evokes admirably an atmosphere which the film noir shares with many a studio-bound horror-movie. Nor is the influence all one way, from horror-movie to other kinds and genres. What Citizen Kane may have taken from Mad Love or Son of Kong it amply repaid with The Haunting, in which Robert Wise applied to the ghost-story the lessons he had learnt while cutting and editing Kane under Welles’s direction. The house that turns out to be the most memorable character in the film is Kane’s Xanadu transported into a New England setting. The development traced in this chapter has, from the first, proceeded along international as well as national lines. We saw macabre German films influence Hollywood—where the most distinguished of its directors and actors found themselves at one time or another; in its turn Hollywood influenced film-making in England, France, Spain, and Italy; and just as an actor like Conrad Veidt played important roles in England and the U.S.A. as well as in his native Germany, so, at a later date, would Christopher Lee, Barbara Steele, and Boris Karloff turn up in Italian or

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Hispanic terror-films as readily as in British or American ones. With the growing sophistication of post-synchronizing and dubbing techniques the cinema is once again becoming as international in its appeal as it was before the coming of sound. It is obvious that audience reactions will differ to some degree from country to country, from region to region, just as expectations will vary. Popular films will therefore try to work at many levels, to appeal to many differing audiences, while attempting, at the same time, to establish conventions through which expectations and responses may be standardized. Recent British horror-movies have aimed, for instance, at an international target audience aged between eighteen and thirty; and in an interview with Edward Buscombe one of their most popular stars, Peter Cushing, has described their appeal by means of a telling comparison: Well, you see, for eighteen years these pictures have been popular and the mass of people who go to these pictures, it’s rather like those who buy their favourite brand of chocolates; they know that when they open the box they’ll find the coconut creams and the truffles and that sort of thing, and they know when they see this kind of film they’ll get what they’re looking for. And so they’re catered for by the scriptwriters. (Buscombe, 1976, p. 23)

That pinpoints admirably the paradoxically reassuring, familiar side of horror-movies, their ‘culinary’ or ‘confectionary’ qualities, as well as one kind of feed-back between audiences and movie-makers on which a profit-oriented industry has to rely. There is no lack of socially conscious commentators who have spelt out for us what Peter Cushing’s remarks imply: that the cinema is no mere technology which can be used by artists of varying kinds for their own purposes; that it is, rather, a means of production and distribution owned and to some extent controlled by entrepreneurs, ‘movie moguls’, tycoons, bankers, and— increasingly—vast multinational companies. Various mechanisms are, however, at work in competitive societies like our own to ensure that the cinema can never become a too easily manipulated money-spinner or a wholly reliable instrument of social control. True, the necessity of making a profit by means of an expensive commodity like the film will inevitably lead to questionable ‘public relations’ exercises, to the taking of easy options, to truckling (at times) to what is least attractive in the popular mood or the official ‘line’ of a given moment, to exploitation and overexploitation of what has proved attractive in the

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means, on the one hand, that people want to satisfy various latent needs and predispositions, and on the other hand, that they want to be surprised with something new or different. Because people have these predispositions, their choices follow some analyzable pattern. But while there may be enough of a pattern to encourage the movie makers to inferences about future choices, there is never enough to provide reliable predictions. (Rosenberg and White, 1957, pp. 315-16)

Select Bibliography Bogdanovich, P., The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1963. ———, Fritz Lang in America, London, 1967. Buscombe, E., Making ‘Legend of the Werewolf’, London, 1976. Corliss, R., Talking Pictures. Screenwriters in the American Cinema, New York, 1974 (Penguin edn., 1975). Derry, C., Dark Dreams. A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film, London, 1977. Kael, P., I Lost it at the Movies, New York, 1965. ———, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. New York, 1968. ———, and others, The Citizen Kane Book, Boston, 1971 (Paladin edn., 1974). Rhode, E., Tower of Babel. Speculations on the Cinema, London, 1966. ———, A History of the Cinema. From its Origins to 1970. London, 1976. Rosenberg, B., and White, D. M., (eds.), Mass Culture. The Popular Arts in America, New York, 1957.

Sklar, R., Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, New York, 1975 (London, 1978). Toeplitz, J., Hollywood and After. The Changing Face of American Cinema, London, 1974.

DAVID PUNTER (ESSAY DATE 1996) SOURCE: Punter, David. “Gothic in the Horror Film 1930-1980.” In The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Vol. 2, pp. 96-118. Essex, England: Longman, 1996. In the following essay, Punter offers an assessment of the Gothic as represented in horror films produced between 1930 and 1980.

The international history of the horror film to 1980 may be seen in three principal phases: the German masterpieces of the silent era; the developments in America between 1930 and the late 1950s; and the largely British-centred product of the 1960s and 1970s. In this chapter, I want, as with the fiction, to restrict myself to American and British work, but it is worth noting from the outset that behind all subsequent horror films there lurks, in a curiously resonant parallel with eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, a German presence. It manifests itself in theme, in content, in a specific set of photographic styles, indeed in an entire mise en scène which runs from the range of Universal Studios films of 1931 and 1932 to the Hammer cycle of the 1960s. The horror film thus has a complexly twisted provenance: out, originally, of a body of legendry which owes much to real or fake German and central European sources and ‘Transylvanian’ settings, via English nineteenth-century fictional developments, but then mediated again through the directorial styles of the great German directors, Wegener, Wiene, Murnau and Lang. This is by no means to assume that all horrifying films are Gothic; but at the same time it is true that the fundamentally formulaic model which is conventionally known as ‘the horror film’ has indeed many Gothic aspects. In order to investigate these, I intend to examine briefly six different areas of the horror film, treating each through one or two specific examples. First, there are the 1930s American films, mostly out of Universal Studios, mostly again making use of previously existent horror plots, and relying heavily on both the directorial talents of such men as Tod Browning and James Whale, and even more on the acting presence of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, still the forgers of the most culturally prominent images of Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula respectively. A period of comparative

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past. If the public has signified its approval of a film called Psycho by flocking to the box-office in great numbers, we may be sure that a whole series of similar subjects will follow, under such titles as Maniac, Paranoiac, Fanatic, or Hysteria. This in turn will mean that the public’s appetite becomes jaded—demanding either stronger and stronger doses of the same sensations, or something altogether new. To this demand the industry will sometimes respond with gimmicks that soon lose their attractiveness: 3-D effects, skeletons creaking across the auditorium, ‘fear-flashers’, ‘horrorhorns’, cinema seats wired to give harmless tingling shocks . . . In the end, however, it will have to turn to creative film-makers, realizing that it cannot rely on ‘safe’ recipes, that it needs fresh ideas and forms which will appeal to many kinds of audiences, will attract new viewers, and are clearly beyond studio-hacks content to exploit well-tried formulas. ‘Being entertained’, the sociologist Herbert J. Gans has said, in a study of the accommodations that take place between directors, screen-writers, producers, financiers, and various kinds of audience,

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infertility, relieved only by the undoubted but minor-key successes of the Lewton/Tourneur production team, is followed by an upsurge in the 1950s, typically of horror films with a sciencefiction bias and an all too obvious political content; here a succession of extended images emerges in which are encoded arguments about the Cold War, about fears of invasion from the East, and about the dangers of technologisation. The 1960s are marked by two rather divergent developments: the emergence, in America, of Roger Corman as a horror auteur of enormous significance, more specifically identified as a major reinterpreter of Poe; and in England the prominence of Hammer Studios, which give rise to a whole series of further reinterpretations of the classic myths, and also to a less well-known but equally important series of examinations of psychopathology (Taste of Fear (1960), Maniac (1962), Paranoiac (1963), Fanatic (1965), The Anniversary (1967)). Historically alongside the work of Corman and Hammer there runs a rather different emergent tradition, superficially very much outside the Gothic formulae and represented in the work of such diverse directors as Hitchcock, Polanski and Michael Powell: films which might be described as revelations of the terror of everyday life, which prise apart the bland surfaces of common interaction to disclose the anxieties and aggressions which lie beneath. And finally we have the 1970s and the coming of a new range of films, of which one of the most prominent examples is The Exorcist, films which have been widely condemned as exploitative, yet which, if we are to follow through any argument about the social significance of the forms of terror, must be considered in a more detailed way. In one sense at least the horror film is very similar to eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, in that, while being a popular form, it demonstrates on closer inspection both a surprisingly high level of erudition, actual on the part of its makers and also imputed to its audience, and also a very high level of technical virtuosity. Films like Freaks (1932), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), the Hammer Dracula (1958), and Peeping Tom (1960) (to name only one film from each of the first five categories listed above) all demonstrate in different ways both the amount of technical care and ingenuity lavished on horror films and also the degree of psychological sophistication possessed by many of their makers. In fact, it would be fair to say that the whole development of the horror film is closely interlocked with the rather belated spread and reception of Freudian theory.

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The prolificness of horror films in the years 1931 to 1933 is extraordinary; these two years saw the appearance not only of Browning’s Dracula and Whale’s Frankenstein, but also of Rouben Mamoulian’s splendid version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (to date the most frequently filmed of Gothic fictions); Schoedsack and Pichel’s The Most Dangerous Game; Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls; Victor Halperin’s White Zombie; Karl Freund’s The Mummy; and of course King Kong, a key twentiethcentury myth, also directed by Schoedsack and Pichel. One obvious feature which connects many of these films is their dependence on Gothic literary sources; but there are other, more important aspects which justify defining them as a sub-genre. First, there is the genuine complexity of their attitudes towards the monstrous. In Frankenstein and King Kong, of course, we are now all too familiar with the ambiguous emotional effects which these early directors proved so unexpectedly adept at producing; but there are also strong veins of unexpected sympathy running through the Mamoulian Jekyll and Hyde, largely because of the sensitive playing of Fredric March, through The Most Dangerous Game, a ‘tightly constructed, literate horror film’1 which brings to the screen a fresh and important image of the displaced, anachronistic and bloodthirsty aristocrat, and through White Zombie, with its languorous style and sharpness of social perception. Allied with this is the photographic inventivenes of the films. Real or unreal as the settings may supposedly be, they are linked by an air of doom, whether it be evidenced in the first graveyard sequence of Frankenstein or in the endless revolution of the zombie-powered mill-wheel in White Zombie. And the monsters themselves, whatever form they may take, are allowed the same grace, are allowed frequently a shadowiness, a half-seen quality which effectively permits a space for the complex interplay of audience emotions. To connect the thematic and the technical, one might perhaps say that what the 1930s horror films essentially possessed was a rare seriousness, of tone and feeling; their directors were content to be unrushed, to allow space and time for their conceptions to emerge on the screen, and in doing so they managed to create a series of works which possessed a genuinely tragic quality, at least insofar as they realised a sense of powerful forces, forces of destiny, operative in human life. Whale’s Frankenstein is, in fact, not one of the more consistently tactful of these films, and this is largely reflective of the conflict within the film between fidelity to the original story and an at-

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Much of the complexity of Mary Shelley’s text remains present in the film. The obsessional nature of Frankenstein’s motives, the monster’s thwarted groping towards understanding, the emphasis on the contradiction between ‘correct’ family life and isolation, the arguments about natural evil, all persist in Whale’s hands; and what is improved above all else in the film, due to Karloff’s participation, is the presence of the monster himself. His acting is poised precisely on the edge of the monstrous, never degenerating into the clodhopping vulgarity with which he is sometimes parodied; the creature may have a preternaturally beetling brow, but beneath it is a face capable of a sensitive and moving range of expressions; the figure itself may initially appear mechanical and robot-like, but Karloff’s sense of movement endows it with an uncanny fluidity which keeps our doubts about what is and what is not human ever open. Mary Shelley’s over-compensatory denunciations of her creation are absent, which renders the scenes between the monster and the uncomprehending villagers all the more poignant. In wider terms, Frankenstein and its sister films represent a strange collection of social and cultural forces. Schoedsack and Pichel made the social point apparent in the plot of King Kong, with its film director out to provide bread and circuses for the masses of the Depression; yet these films, like the Gothic novels, are not mere pot-boilers, and for an exactly identical reason: because they spring not only from social roots but also from the logic of internal technical development within culture. They are the first interesting product of the sound revolution, and of the accompanying situation in which film therefore stood poised on the brink of

becoming a popular medium. And just as the expansion of the reading-public in the late eighteenth century led to a series of experiments in popular fiction, so the potential expansion of the film-watching public in the late 1920s generated a field in which directors could remain imbued with the excitement of the medium while attempting to provide popular filmic fare. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls, a film version of The Island of Dr Moreau, is another example of this. Here, in fact, directorial intention considerably outstripped public response: the theme of miscegenation was pushed out into the open and personified in the form of an all too seductive pantherwoman, and the result was outrage. Yet in terms of actual violence, Island of Lost Souls, like almost all the horror films of the early 1930s, was extremely reticent; it is greatly to the credit of both Whale and Kenton, in these particular films, that they used the possibilities of visualisation not to emphasise lurid situations but for quite a contrary purpose: to illumine further the conflicts of aspiration and doom which are at the heart of the Gothic. For Moreau, as played by Charles Laughton, is just as complex a monster as Frankenstein or his creation. He is a splendid mixture of the diabolical and the gentlemanly, his whole being seemingly pivoted around the ambivalent connotations of his whip: is this a matter of life, death and pain, or merely, like hunting, another way for the bored upper classes to pass the time? Laughton manages to oscillate between venom and joviality in a way which at times surpasses the potential of the tale itself, strongly assisted by the settings, encapsulations of colonialism. One of the finer points of both Island of Lost Souls and Frankenstein, in fact, is a use of shadow, inherited from the German cinema, which serves as a direct intensification of the Gothic mood: both Moreau and the monster, in crucial scenes, are accompanied by a larger-than-life-size shadow which is a direct visual equivalent of both the transcendence of human life which they variously represent and the doom which consequently awaits them. To concentrate on directors and production company styles in the early horror film is, of course, to beg an obvious question: clearly many of the films were vehicles for particular stars. Lugosi, at the high point of his career, was receiving as much fan-mail as any more conventional male romantic lead, and the whole history of the horror film, like the history of the Gothic novel, can be read as the evolution of a series of types of the hero/villain. Frankenstein and Island of Lost

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tempt, interesting in its details, at updating. The laboratory in which Frankenstein’s experiments take place, for instance, is an odd blend of early nineteenth-century scientific paraphernalia and more advanced apparatus based on electricity. There is also the much criticised story change which resulted in the monster being given a madman’s brain. Whale, a remarkably sophisticated director, was clearly attempting to suggest further ways, technical and psychological, in which the Frankenstein myth might be explored and recast for our times, and to a considerable extent he succeeded. If part of the essence of the Gothic is an insistence that it is possible to take melodramatic forms and conduct within them a complex and contemporary psychological argument, then Whale’s Frankenstein is indeed a Gothic film at a deeper level than merely in terms of the portrayal of settings.

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Souls, like many other horror films then and since, end in the same way (with some literary justification in the latter case, precious little in the former): with an uprising of the repressed—angry villagers or beast-men—and the ritual purgation of the disordering element, but without leaving the audience feeling that all the relevant moral issues have thereby been solved. It is easy to scorn the horror-film convention whereby the hero/ villain lives to fight another day and reappears in endless sequels, and clearly this device has some of its roots in the box-office, but it also reflects a genuine difficulty, native to the Gothic, with allaying the fears which these powerful figures represent. In the context of the long series of Frankenstein and Dracula films which have followed the originals, the problem of the undead gains an added dimension. One of the most depressing features in the evolution of the horror film is the way in which, after the Second World War, these complexities of response seemed to come for a time to be systematically eliminated from the genre. The typical product of the 1950s lies on the edge of horror and science fiction: it confronts order with disruption in a simplistic fashion, usually by allowing some kind of generalised human society to stand as unquestioned and by throwing against it an alien being or species which never stands a chance. The beast may come from the stars or from 20,000 fathoms, from Mars or from beneath the earth, from the moon, Venus, the ocean floor or the black lagoon (Flying Disc Men from Mars (1950), Radar Men from the Moon (1952), War of the Worlds (1952), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), It Came from Outer Space (1953), Invaders from Mars (1953), Killers from Space (1953), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), The Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), to name but a few), but wherever it comes from generally it might as well not have bothered: the moral virtues of the cleancut American hero, sometimes backed up by clean-cut American tanks and guided missiles, prove far too strong—or unattractive—for it to withstand. It is easy to read in this phenomenon a new American defensiveness, a Cold War paranoia, a continual acting-out of physical, mental or moral invasion and of strategies for resistance. Yet even here, in a most unpromising field, there were considerable achievements. Perhaps the most imposing still remains Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with its solid evocation of small-town America and its uncompromising insistence on vulnerability. Here there is no question of a direct battle between hero and

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invaders; the invaders have come not to wipe out the human race but to replace it with exact duplicates, and the hero’s problem is to convince anyone that this is happening before the authorities themselves are taken over. The last scene of all, where his story is finally beginning to be believed, is rather a letdown; but that immediately preceding, in which, fleeing from the invaders, he arrives at a busy highway and wastes several minutes in a hysterical attempt to persuade someone to stop and take notice before being knocked down, has a nightmare power. The mise en scène of films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a very long way from the 1930s films: settings are contemporary and normative to the point of deliberate banality, photography is mostly clear and flat, although Siegel in this respect produces a more inventive film than most. The great practical virtue of his plot-line, of course, is that he is able to raise the issue of the human and the non-human without having to call on a special-effects department: the only way of telling the supplanters from the supplanted is by their lack of emotion, which is a matter for acting skill rather than heavy machinery. This stylistic naturalism, however, becomes in Siegel’s hands, an appropriate way of exploring contemporary social anxieties, not about the inability to understand but about the inability to communicate the understanding which has been forced upon one. Yet in the end, Invasion of the Body Snatchers remains a conservative film. The invaders represent a possible order based on pure reason, the excision of the messiness of emotion, and there is no doubt that this alternative is held by the director in low esteem, but the psychological conflict is displaced: instead of being between ego and id, between reason and the uncontrolled, it is merely between two different kinds of conventionality. The hero and his fiancée—before she is herself taken over—do not represent any form of emotional life dominant enough to engage us in real choices: the change which would be involved were they to succumb would not, we feel, be particularly large anyway. Yet the film manages to haunt, to linger in the mind: largely because of the sense of a closing circle which it powerfully conveys, the sense of impending isolation against which succumbing to the ‘easeful death’ which the invaders promise gains a certain concreteness. A film on which it is worth concentrating more closely is the rather later Night of the Living Dead (1968), directed on a limited budget by George Romero and played by amateur actors. It

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Basically, it works through a series of inversions, which can only be properly understood by an audience which already has a certain familiarity with the assumptions both of the zombie film and of 1950s science fiction. The plot is initially conventional: a ‘representative’ group of Americans gets holed up in an isolated house, and in attempting to defend it against the returning dead go through the usual gamut of hysteria, courage and leadership struggles. Precisely those clean-cut kids, however, whom one naturally expects to survive get rather satisfyingly killed. Several of the group reveal themselves to be so generally appalling that one starts to want the living dead to get on with the job. And the one apparent survivor, a competent black who manages to outlast the siege, eventually emerges from the house in such a state of exhaustion and personal disappointment that he is instantly gunned down by the sheriff’s men as one of the walking dead. Almost all zombie films reflect fears about deindividuation. In Night of the Living Dead, it is highly unclear where the state of zombiedom begins and ends: some of the inhabitants of the house are such withered creatures of convention that one supposes absorption into this inverted afterlife would make little difference. Romero takes advantage of the besieged house to conduct a very similar exploration to that which takes place in almost all 1970s disaster movies: an investigation into what happens to people under the dual stress of external danger and internal claustrophobia. But where disaster movies typically emerge with a Fascist answer (strong leadership, the dispensability of the weak), Romero’s attitude is very different: danger usually brings out not the best but the worst in people, and where it does bring out the best, that best is generally unrecognisable to the world outside. One is reminded

forcibly of the ending of Lord of the Flies, where matters which have seemed of vital importance are suddenly dwarfed by the reappearance of adult reality. One of the more disturbing features of Night of the Living Dead is that Romero is content to reside neither within the expressionism of the 1930s nor in the naturalism of the 1950s, but moves between one and the other: the house is depressingly, flatly real and unexciting, but some of the shots of the slowly but inexorably approaching zombies are ‘atmospheric’ almost to the point of parody. The effect of this appears to be to deprive the viewer of a consistent perspective, which is perhaps one source of the film’s power. A problem with it is that, because of the film’s self-consciousness, any attempt at a discussion of it makes it sound as though parody is indeed an important element; yet this is very far from the actual effect of the film, which is intensely serious. It seems, in fact, almost like the product of a mood of exasperation: as if the people involved with making it had finally become irritated with the horror film’s unwillingness to speak its name, to confess explicitly its psychological and social emphases, and had set about trying to rectify the situation by producing a film which proved that apparently melodramatic and outworn apparatus could still be profoundly disturbing, and not only at the sensory level. Returning to the late 1950s, the commercial initiative in horror films passed decisively to Britain with the release in 1957 of Hammer Studios’ Curse of Frankenstein. I want for the moment, however, to remain with America, and with the horror films of Roger Corman. It should be stressed that these are only a small and transient part of his whole output: the most prolific director/producer in the cinema of these decades, Corman turned his hand to horror most consistently between 1960 and 1964, very possibly precisely as a response to Hammer’s demonstration of the further commercial possibilities of the field. During these years he made a cycle of seven films (The House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Premature Burial (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)), which are usually referred to, not without reservations, as the Poe cycle. The reservations are important in two specific ways: although in each of the films Corman adapts elements of Poe’s stories (except in The Haunted Palace, which is in fact based on Lovecraft’s Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927-8)) he is forced, by the brevity of the

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might seem historically out of place to consider it at this point, but the film is a self-conscious comment on and extension of the 1950s mode, marking a circling back from science-fiction stereotypes into a Gothicism of setting and authorial attitude. Huss and Ross summarise it as ‘underground cult film on zombies, now emerging above ground’,2 which is either a very unselfconscious or a very witty summary, its theme being precisely the return of the dead from their graves. Its immense yet offbeat popularity is certainly in need of explanation: made by a television crew, shot in unfashionable black-and-white and with acting which is patchy at best, it yet became one of the most frequently shown films on the university and film society circuit.

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stories themselves and by audience assumptions regarding narrative film, to add much to them, and he also makes little attempt, except in The Tomb of Ligeia, to invoke the drowsy, opiated tone of Poe. To criticise Corman as an exploiter of Poe seems to be beside the point: Corman’s cycle is surely very much a self-consistent set of horror films, with their own detailed and impressive mise en scène, within which elements of Poe are embedded. What the films show is that Corman, as of himself, has a thoroughly distinctive Gothic vision. The intricate passageways, the creaking tombs, the wry but gleeful ironies of dialogue have more in common with Matthew Lewis than with Poe; indeed, Corman is probably the only contemporary director who could satisfactorily film The Monk. The films are a set of variations on a group of essential elements, not necessarily all present in any one film: a bravura use of colour and décor; a masterful if repetitive evocation of suspense; the inimitable acting of Vincent Price, which slides from high tragedy to high camp with no evident disruption of tone—perhaps Jacobean would be the best term for Price’s style; a brilliant use of dream inserts; and an insistence on not simplifying or resolving the battle between good and evil which the films dramatise. The two best films in the cycle are the last two, partly because Corman had at last a reasonable budget available, partly too because they contain Price’s most extraordinary performances. With The Masque of the Red Death, it must have been apparent from the outset that there was not a great deal Corman could do within the bounds of the story, exiguous as it is: he bolsters it up with an insert adaptation of ‘Hop-Frog’, but even so the result bears little relation to Poe’s world. What it does take from Poe, and put to excellent use, is the décor of Prospero’s castle, with its single-colour rooms opening into each other in vistas of breathtaking magnificence. The Poe story, however, is essentially in a monotone, and this is a source of its power: the situation is imbued with doom from the outset, with Prospero’s attempt to resist the Red Death by shutting himself and his friends in his castle and indulging in narcotic revelry resembling a Gothic act of divine defiance, and thus necessarily entailing its own defeat. Corman’s film is far more various: the lusts and appetites of Prospero’s curious ‘court’ and of Prospero himself are foregrounded, and suspense is created by Corman’s ability precisely to enable his audience to forget the inevitable outcome for considerable periods of time. The ending has been much criti-

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cised: after the dance is finished, and Price has encountered a satisfactorily bloody death, the Red Death figure is seen meeting with other hooded figures and conferring with them on the success of their operation. It may be that the realisation of this scene is crude, but the purpose is important: first as a simple parody of the happy ending, but second as a demonstration of the smallness of the world in which we have just been absorbed. Like Chinese boxes, the ending of the film shows the tale of Prospero’s doom only to have been one among others, and we are left still having to adumbrate a further level: in whose service do these various Deaths operate? In a sense, it is an unusual role for Price: whereas he is usually constrained to act the part of a doom-laden and enfeebled aristocrat, here he is permitted the full range of Promethean defiance—again, most unlike any of Poe’s more fully realised characters, but with a very close relation to Schedoni, Melmoth and those other more lusty and powerful rejecters of divine limitation. His role in The Tomb of Ligeia is more typical: in this film the elements of Poe are at their strongest in narrative terms, although again there is a vitality, even in some cases an ordinariness, to the characterisation which belies Poe’s dream-tones even while giving added filmic bite to the intrusion of the supernatural into a world which at least has one or two features in common with our own. As in the Corman House of Usher, Price chooses to emphasise febrility (most notoriously by wearing dark glasses almost throughout), and admirably complements Corman’s scenery of decaying grandeur. The cycle gained a popularity similar in kind to that of Romero’s film: critics were at best lukewarm, pointing reasonably to a grand guignol quality which inevitably lapsed into self-parody, yet there is clearly something about the films which transcends this danger. It could be hypothesised that their appeal may lie in their reflection of a crumbling adult world, certainly a possible way to appeal to a predominantly youthful audience.3 It would seem, though, that perhaps the matter is more complex than this: certainly the conflagrations which terminate several of the films are satisfying in these terms, but they would not be so were it not for the loving care with which Corman chooses to portray the world which is passing. As with the Gothic, there are elements here of both attraction and repulsion. What is totally absent from the films is any kind of bourgeois moralism: usually one of the strongest audience reactions comes from the portrayal

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And this is perhaps the most curious fact about Corman’s work—and, as we shall see, about the success of Hammer Studios: that both subgenres demonstrate the extent to which our images of terror have become embedded in the endless recasting of a specific historical period. This is not to say that Corman’s films possess intricate period accuracy, but that they accurately reflect what appears to be a received notion of period, and one which still occasions interest and indeed considerable excitement. In this sense, Corman works not so much from Poe as alongside him: both men express a fascination with the original Gothic, and in both cases it is mediated through a deliberate vulgarisation, which is presumably in itself a significant element of an attempt to deal with historical problems. To go further than this would be difficult without an extended discussion of the concept of ‘camp’;4 but at least one can say that camp is a form of irony, and that Corman’s films work through a dialectic of response. That is to say, they appear to be appealing to the terrible, and to a certain extent they are; but they are also appealing to shared assumptions about the limitations of terror, and thus are self-ironising in a way which earlier Gothic films were not. Corman’s films—and Price’s acting—demand audience collusion, and it is in this structural sense, and not merely because of the extent of their appeal, that they can most fairly be called ‘cult’ films. They permit their audience to acknowledge its own intelligence and reasonableness before deliberately abandoning it. It has often been said that only a secure avant-garde can afford seriously to affront or abandon good taste, and certainly Corman’s films afford intellectual relief— not escape—of a kind which cannot be far distant from the excitement ladies in the late eighteenth century derived from observing the wickedness of an Ambrosio. Corman’s cinema is neither realist nor psychological: it is, in a sense, a cinema of pure formalism, and only because it is so reliant

on fixed form can it afford the gross excesses of colour and dialogue which typify it. Although Corman’s work and the horror films, directed mostly by Terence Fisher and made by Hammer have often, quite reasonably, been contrasted, nonetheless there are similarities. The mingled audience response of fear and laughter which greets Dracula’s fifteenth resurrection is the sure mark of ‘cult’, of a situation in which the rules are clearly known, and because they are, the filmmaker is free to move knowingly between the many variations possible on a theme. Yet in the long run what seems to be most remarkable about Hammer’s films is, as David Pirie points out in A Heritage of Horror, their place in specifically British cultural life: It certainly seems to be arguable on commercial, historical and artistic grounds that the horror genre, as it has been developed in this country by Hammer and its rivals, remains the only staple cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim as its own, and which relates to it in the same way as the western does to America. . . . The rather striking truth is that in international commercial terms, the British cinema . . . has effectively and effortlessly dominated the ‘horror’ market over a period of almost twenty years with a series of films which, whatever their faults, are in no way imitative of American or European models but derive in general from literary sources.5

The reason for this, clearly, lies in the ‘Britishness’ of the sources with which the Hammer films deal; their international success, real as it undoubtedly is, would only have been possible under conditions where Hammer found itself— unexpectedly—able to reach a large home market with a product which, in 1957, already seemed to American film companies outmoded and preposterous. A point from which to begin in trying to establish the nature of Hammer’s contribution to the development of the horror film is that, just as it is deceptive to consider the Corman horror cycle as remakes of Poe, so it is deceptive to regard Hammer as indulging in remakes of American 1930s horror cinema. The roots of Hammer’s treatment of the Frankenstein and Dracula myths, like the roots of Corman’s films, lie not in nineteenth- or twentieth-century American adaptations of the Gothic, but more directly in the Gothic itself considered from the vantage-point of the 1960s. That is to say that Hammer horror is, again like Corman’s, self-ironising; but this is only a similarity of means, and the ends of Corman and Fisher are radically different. Hammer’s films do not on the whole embark on the tricky balancing of good

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of the ‘hero’ in House of Usher, who is indeed a bourgeois character, trying to impose a schema of rationalism on the events with which he is confronted; naturally he fails at every turn, much to the intended and actual delight of viewers. In this sense the Corman cycle plays out yet again the problem of the bourgeoisie’s relations with the aristocracy, and in doing so demonstrates the extraordinary fact that audiences in the 1960s and 1970s have not lost their taste for watching yet again a struggle which has been historically superseded for 150 years.

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and evil which Corman attempts, and nor do they strive so cheerfully to establish their own fictionality. Fisher is a moralistic director, not in any particularly strong sense, but in the simplicity of his demarcations between good and evil and in the way in which it is assumed that the moralism in some sense justifies the depiction of terror. It is not without symbolic significance that where Corman turned to the amoral nightmares of Poe, Hammer began its venture into horror with a version of Frankenstein which took with great seriousness many of Mary Shelley’s more erudite arguments, or that in film after film they stress the nature/artifice contradiction which so beset a writer like Radcliffe. When The Curse of Frankenstein first appeared, it was rapidly condemned on the grounds of explicit sadism, a criticism which seems to us now rather surprising, for the kinds of ritualised violence which occur in Hammer films seem very much bounded by assumptions of the form. What has been more shocking in Hammer films over their latter years has been the boldness and explicitness with which successive directors have dwelt upon the connections between violence and sexuality. Undoubtedly commercial pressures are partly responsible for this, but there again in the context of the Gothic tradition as we have tried to outline it, it seems hardly reprehensible for the film to bring into the open aspects of texts which are already present; and in fact one of the consequences of Fisher’s moralism is that the fatal attractiveness of evil is inevitably undermined in all his films by his insistence on punishing the seductive. One can fairly see the Frankenstein cycle as a set of explorations of various sides of the multifaceted Frankenstein myth, informed by no little intelligence and discrimination. In The Curse of Frankenstein, for instance, the character of Frankenstein himself is deliberately altered in order to bring him more into line with the more charismatic Gothic heroes, with the consequence that the Faustianism of the original is brought closer to the surface; also he is considerably foregrounded at the expense of the monster, which provides opportunities for investigation of the psychological significance of the creator himself. In The Revenge of Frankenstein (1957), the scientist’s character becomes more complex again, as Fisher shows him simultaneously capable of cruelty and disinterested kindness, and brings him into close proximity with the stereotype of the victimised pioneer. While The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), directed not by Fisher but by Jimmy Sangster, demonstrates Hammer’s ability to parody itself:

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the very fact that the parody is far from successful underlines the complexity of approach which lies behind the better films, despite their apparent simplicity of appeal. But clearly it is in the context of their Dracula films that Hammer has moved furthest into the realm of horror as sexual pathology. This is partly a question of character presentation: while Lugosi was well equipped to emphasise the shadowy foreignness and supernatural menace of the Dracula figure, he never made it quite clear what it was that his victims found so fatally attractive in a fate worse than death. Christopher Lee, on the other hand, has all the makings of an acceptable alternative to conventional life and sexuality: he has not only power but seductiveness, plausibility and a glint of knowing humour. Where Lugosi’s posturings often seemed directed principally at the audience, and his films therefore suffered from a lack of internal psychological coherence, Lee’s mesmeric effect on his usually nubile victims is readily appreciable as rooted in the obliging attractiveness of noblesse. The strength of Hammer’s Dracula films lies in an odd closeness to Stoker’s text: not usually in terms of plot, but then Dracula was hardly remarkable for plot in the first place, but for a decadent poetic treatment of ancient legendry. The Hammer Draculas have a sense of historical depth: as in the Corman films, the fact that we as audience are assumed to be already fully conversant with the details of the legends frees the various directors Hammer have employed—Fisher being here again the most important—to weave free-floating poems of colour and allusion around the basic elements. In the later years, this took directions which seem entirely justifiable in terms both of passages from Stoker and also of other, later, literary treatments of vampirism: the transference of vampiric powers back from male to female, and the appearance of elements of both male and female homosexuality within the narrative. Stoker’s Dracula becomes rightly blended with LeFanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (1872) and Stevenson’s sultry ‘Ollala’ (1886) in a hypnotic anthology of perversions. That all the vampires, male and female, in Hammer’s films are sexually attractive, sometimes to the point of caricature, recalls precisely scenes in Stoker like that of the three female vampires, all long-drawn hisses and blood-red lips: that the breast into which the stake is plunged is invariably beauteous only brings out one of the principal arguments behind vampire fiction, that only for those who are in unfortunate possession of sexual attractions and urges which they are

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Hammer’s films are undoubtedly of variable quality, and they have committed some genuine disasters; nonetheless, the Frankenstein and Dracula cycles constitute a real attempt to accept, and even strengthen, the period bases of the literature while bringing out psychological implications in a way which has only more recently become permissible. Their other claim to fame may possibly come to rest on their series of psychological thrillers, from Taste of Fear on, in which various everyday psychopathologies are explored: here Hammer works the other way round, by taking precisely the contemporary and demonstrating within it the continuing presence of archaic fears and lusts. Both modes are varieties of melodrama, and both juxtapose past and present in such a way as to question the historical and social limits of reason. With respect to this latter sub-genre, however, Hammer has neither the psychological sophistication nor the directorial talent to rival the masters whom it attempts to imitate, and here I want to glance briefly at three films which fall into the general field of terror pathology: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). They are all much written about, and I have no intention here of attempting any kind of detailed analysis: rather I want to bring out what seems to me one important feature of them in relation to other horror material, namely their relation to Gothic motifs and attitudes. To start from simple premises: each of the three films is a study in paranoia. Each of them posits a correlation between paranoia and a thwarting in the relation between the ordered and the chaotic. Each of them, in the search for a visual equivalent for a psychological state, finds a setting which relates closely to traditional imagery: in Psycho, the house, with its cellars and mysterious doors, is pure American Gothic, as Hitchcock of course intended; in Peeping Tom, the film-processing laboratory which is a substitute for the hero’s homelessness, shot as it is in half-tones and impossible as it is to discern its physical limits, is the laboratory of generations of Frankensteins, in which the endless attempt is continued to discern the secrets of (the hero’s own) creation; Catherine Deneuve’s apartment in Repulsion, albeit outwardly contemporary, is nonetheless capable at times of sprouting supernatural apparitions worthy of the direst secrets of Udolpho.

One of the most remarkable features of Psycho is Hitchcock’s determination and ability to involve the audience in complex ways with the unfolding of the plot. The obvious example is the shower murder of Janet Leigh, which requires us to find a whole new way of engaging with what is left of the film, a moment which follows on from our unwelcome realisation that we are being required to participate in Norman Bates’s unpleasant voyeurism. If one of the principal strengths of Gothic fiction was its undermining of simple processes of identification, its development of the intense ambiguities of persecution, then it is a strength which Psycho shares. The most remarkable feature in this respect is the ending: since by then we are being invited to take simultaneously two opposite views of the putative inhabitant of Norman’s body, we are effectively prevented from absolute moral resolution. We have, as Robin Wood comments, been led into a complicity with Norman, and with the film itself;6 we are provided with no way out of the maze in which this has trapped us. And the way in which Hitchcock achieves this manipulation is shameless: subtle though he is in technical terms—and the stabbing of Leigh is a supreme example of photographic virtuosity and even reticence—in other ways his style is pure bravura. He is quite unashamed of coincidence; he is addicted to nasty jokes (for example in the film, there is the revelation of Mummy’s ‘mummy’, and his general practicaljoker reputation is always a necessary adjunct to reading the films); and he is overjoyed by the possibilities of sexual titillation of his audience, as in the entire treatment of Leigh’s body. A film which can be referred to as ‘balancing us, even at its most horrifying, on the knife-edge where there is almost no distinction between a laugh and a scream’7 is once again elaborating the mixture of seriousness and grotesquerie which has always been a hallmark of the Gothic: like Matthew Lewis’s writing, like Vincent Price’s acting, Hitchcock’s directing is to do with virtuoso spectacle. Both camerawork and acting are theatrical; the music which accompanies Psycho would not be out of place in a Victorian melodrama. Psycho is not precisely a study of an obsession: it is an investigation of what effect viewing the outcome of an obsession has on an audience. It has often been remarked that the interpretation which the psychiatrist offers at the end is inadequate, and this is perfectly true, not because Hitchcock wanted it to be specifically so, but because it does not matter one way or the other. Hitchcock is interested only in the fact that

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personally or socially incapable of expressing is vampirism a significant psychological danger.

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reasonably similar obsessions do occur, and in the possibilities which this fact affords for cinema. Here again, as in the fiction, specific concern with narrative is intertwined with a concern for exploring the limits of the medium itself: terror is the clearest and most easily examinable of audience responses to attempt to provoke, the reaction which therefore gives most satisfaction to the virtuoso director of popular films. Just, again, as with the fiction, Psycho is at least partly an exploration of the potential of disruption of expectations, and its horror emerges from its form as well as from its content. Many of the same things could be said about Powell’s Peeping Tom, except that here the director has added important extra twists to the argument by making the paranoiac hero himself a film cameraman, and by rendering as the source of his disturbance a set of previous experiences—at the hands of his sadistic father—which also involved film. This complexity makes for a highly selfreflexive film; it has by no means the same power for instant shock as Hitchcock’s best work, but its central thematics are far more tightly woven. Discussion of Psycho, so widely regarded as the most important modern exercise in filmic terror, may well suggest that there is indeed no such thing as a ‘straight’ horror film, and perhaps this is true: but Peeping Tom certainly comes very close to it. As hinted above, it is far from free from Gothic devices but these are put to use not as irony but as density; the fact that the audience is aware of the cultural provenance of motifs such as the discovery of a murder victim in a trunk does not undermine the intensity with which we are required to confront Carl Boehm’s psychosis but reinforces it, since it is precisely through the power of film that he endures his repression. Boehm acts a photographer and amateur filmmaker whose principal obsession is with photographing moments of pure terror. To facilitate this task, he has an array of specialist equipment including a tripod the front leg of which is able to snap up and pierce the throat of its victim. As the film progresses, Powell reveals more and more of the origins of Boehm’s situation: in particular he shows, through clips inserted from film supposed to be in Boehm’s own possession, how his father, played by Powell himself, had sought to investigate his fear responses by such devices as releasing live lizards into his bed and filming his reaction. The father is supposed to be the author of a series of works on the psychology of fear, in respect of which the son was his guinea-pig. Where the psychological interest in Psycho is largely spurious

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or at best secondary, in Peeping Tom it is central: Powell is tracing the genesis and operations of a psychosis. Interestingly, this seems to make his actual horrors not more convincing to the audience but less: precisely because of the absence of forced suspense or melodrama, we lack equipment with which to deal with the film, and the result is often a great deal of nervous laughter. To say, then, that Boehm’s photographic laboratory bears a relation to Frankenstein’s haunts is not to say that this is a device for directly alerting the audience’s assumptions; instead, it is a further indication of the kind of grotesquely distorted world in which Boehm perforce lives—in which, as we come to realise, he has been effectively placed by his dead father. Similarly, there is a Gothic complexity to the narrative structure and to the unfolding of stories within stories, films within films, but this is not a mere device but an essential way of representing the induced tortuousness of Boehm’s mind. Every sudden and apparently inexplicable cut, every narrative twist, every insertion of the past replicates the false channels of action and response which have been set up in his psyche. The father’s investigations into fear, into what prevents us from confronting the world directly, have produced in the son a syndrome whereby methods of evasion have been honed to a fine point (the point of the bayonet tripod) and the world has ceased to appear real except insofar as it appears on a screen or through the lens of a camera. The implications for the nature of the horror film are vast: the whole issue is raised here of the dimming of responses through overexposure, of the moral ambiguity of confronting one’s own fears in real or represented form, of the effects film may have when it takes it upon itself to experiment with emotional response. Psychological concerns and the concerns of the medium are elided in a brilliant series of metaphors: after all, all Boehm is seeking in his murderous procedures is a moment of recognition, a moment when he can perceive in another (momentarily) living being the basic configuration which has been made into the basis of his own personality. Through film he seeks a repetition, confirmation and explanation of previous experience, as do we all; the fact that film for him is film of terror means only that his own previous experience has been of a suffering too intense and too unintelligible for him to get past without the aid of cultural props. Aristotle’s concept of the tragic is not very different. Andrew Sarris says of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion that it is ‘the scariest if not actually the gori-

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The repertoire of effects gains novelty only from its incorporation into a contemporary location in South Kensington: otherwise, they are traditional—the beauty parlour in which Carol works appears at first sight to be some kind of torture chamber; darkened corridors yield dire experiences; the entire flat at one point expands in Carol’s mind to enormous proportions in which items of furniture are lost. Horror is present here even—and particularly—in the heroine’s Gothic retreat. Furthermore, Carol’s problem is partly presented as one of excessive sensibility, linked with a problematic urge towards excessive cleanliness and order which turns into chaos. Carol is unable to stand contact with the gross world: the presence of her sister’s boyfriend, Michael, and his belongings in the flat provoke her to fury and eventually terror. Strangely, however, her sensibility does not actually produce much sympathy on the part of director or viewer; it is mostly presented as a profoundly irritating absentmindedness and selfishness. Carol’s world is one in which other people have ceased to exist except as intrusions into her privacy; when she realises her inability to keep them out, she abandons all attempt at order, allowing the flat to degenerate into filth and chaos. Many critics have suggested that the importance of Repulsion is that it allows us entrance into the heroine’s own perspectives on the world, and this is partly true, but there is also a further element of directorial presence which dialectically

alienates us from her. The fact that we see her delusions as real does not encourage us to accept the view she has of other characters or of herself. The fact that we are able to share the manifestations of her paranoia carries with it the corollary that we remain aware that the actual extent of her persecution is minimal: the attempt to indicate an explanation by tracking into her family photograph at the end is perfunctory, certainly by comparison with the genuine attempts, ironic or serious, to introduce a level of explanation in Psycho or Peeping Tom. In terms of relations of repression, Polanski’s treatment of Deneuve is more sadistic than Hitchcock’s treatment of Leigh: he offers us an attractive but unobtainable heroine, and then proceeds to martyr her as a ritual punishment for her purity. In this context it is significant that when Carol is finally carried from the flat, it is by Michael. It has been suggested that this, and the curious look which he gives her, reflect a possibility that she has been in love with him all along, despite her apparent revulsion, but it seems more likely that Polanski is here reasserting a characteristic treatment of women in horror literature, leaving Carol passive and broken in the arms of the male who, through doing nothing at all, has emerged once more as successful, capable and dominant. In these three films, then, we have a range of attitudes to the possibilities of terror for outlining and underlining psychopathology: in Psycho, a black irony which involves characters and audience in a playing-off of moods, attitudes and interpretations; in Peeping Tom, a flat presentation designed to engage our sympathies by a wellrounded statement of the hero’s plight; in Repulsion, a presentation of spectacle which involves us in the director’s vindictiveness towards his heroine and the qualities which she symbolises. Fundamentally, these are three different balances of the dreadful and the pleasurable, three different relations between terror and psychological well-being. It is, of course, thoroughly understandable that alongside the development of the ‘traditional’ horror film there should have arisen a genre more designed to cope with specifically contemporary perceptions of terror: what is harder to understand is that in the 1970s both of these forms appear to have been temporarily supplanted at least in terms of commercial success by a third form, which returns to age-old themes of satanism and possession. Rather ironically, the first important exponent of the form was Polanski himself in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), but a more typical example is

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est Grand Guignol since Psycho’, but in terms of tone it is very different from either Psycho, with its ironic black humour, or the seriousness of Peeping Tom. On the one hand, it was passed by the censor on release without cuts because of professional affirmation that it constituted an important study of a psychopathic condition; on the other, as Sarris goes on to say, ‘Polanski is actually interested more in the spectacle of repression released than in the psychology of the repressed female’.8 What Polanski appears at first glance to do in the film is invite us to share in distorted perception: Catherine Deneuve’s obvious delusions are presented in an identical filmic texture to the rest of the events. The delusions themselves are extensions of environment: the heroine spends most of the film locked in her flat, which gradually becomes more and more menacing as walls crack, unused doors are forced open and hands appear where no hands should be. Repulsion is a study less of claustrophobia than of invasion, finding a series of visual correlatives for the rape anxiety which is the main form Carol’s paranoia takes.

PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC Max Schreck as Count Orlok in the 1922 film Nosferatu.

The Exorcist (1973), directed by William Friedkin from a book by W. P. Blatty. As Pauline Kael says, The Exorcist is a Gothic work in its trappings, and not a Gothic relieved with the ironic spice of comedy, as are Psycho and Rosemary’s Baby in their different ways, but a film of ‘gothic seriousness’ which functions ‘below the conscious level’.9 In other words, and in sharp contrast with almost all the other works we have discussed in this chapter, it is a work which professes not knowledge but ignorance, ignorance of the psychological ambivalence of the vocabulary of Gothic images. Yet this ignorance is itself fake: clearly Blatty—who actually, as writer and producer, appears to have had most say in the shape of the film—is in fact all too well aware of the manipulative potential of film, but chooses to delude us into believing in his literal-mindedness. It is doctors and psychiatrists themselves who in the film recommend that the case of twelve-yearold Regan MacNeil be referred to the exorcists; thus the audience is put in the position, not of interpreting horror symbolism as commentary on psychological disorder, but of accepting it wholesale as the outward and visible sign-system of the Devil.

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On the whole, immersion in Gothic fiction and film makes one very wary of using the term ‘exploitation’, and it is in any case a difficult term to justify objectively in the case of a highly popular work. Any work which attempts to provide a point of view can be judged in some sense as non-exploitative, whether that point of view be regarded as good, evil, valid, invalid or criminal. What makes it possible nonetheless to call The Exorcist a work of exploitation is precisely that it does not have a point of view at all. It is not the case that what ought to be disturbing about the film is its apparent spurious vindication of the Catholic Church and of the real existence of the Devil; the really disturbing feature is that this is clearly a matter of no importance whatever in the film, despite Blatty’s own religious affiliations. The Exorcist is simply a sequence of special effects, its narrative submerged during the actual viewing experience, and deliberately so. Let it not be said that there is much wrong with the effects themselves: they work extremely well for the most part, and several of the images of terror which are called upon are also quite new. What is good in the best horror films, from Hammer to Psycho, is their ability to use images of

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This being said, The Exorcist nonetheless is a horror film, and as such it corresponds with the most uninspired Gothic magazine fiction of the 1840s in its literal-mindedness and lack of ironic tension. What makes it remarkable is only the technical skill—and 10 million dollars—which went into its making. It would perhaps be as well, however, to conclude on a more positive note. Despite the existence of The Exorcist and its numerous progeny, horror film has substantially, and to a rather surprising extent, continued in the Gothic tradition of providing an image-language in which to examine social and psychological fears. The idea that we have all become too sophisticated to watch the traditional horror film has been long belied at Hammer’s turnstiles: of course the way in which we watch them is profoundly self-conscious and complicated, but this was certainly true for most early Gothic fiction. For it is not enough to say that horror motifs have lost their bite because we no longer ‘believe in’ them; we have never believed in them as simply existent, but more as valuable and disturbing fictional images which gain their vitality, when they do, from the underlying truth which they represent.

Notes 1. Carlos Clarens, Horror Movies (London, 1968), p. 123. 2. Focus on the Horror Film, ed. Roy Huss and T. J. Ross (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972), p. 12.

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ F. W. MURNAU (1888-1931) AND NOSFERATU

Next to Fritz Lang and G. W. Pabst, motion picture director F. W. Murnau (born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe) was one of just three directors responsible for revolutionizing German silent cinema during the 1920s. Almost universally considered a masterpiece of expressionist theatre, the 1922 film Nosferatu provided Murnau with his first artistic breakthrough in Germany. Subtitled Ein Symphonie des Grauens (“A Symphony of Horror”), Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation—as well as the earliest surviving screen rendering—of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Murnau’s version of the ageold vampire tale was as much a reflection of the horror that befell Germany in the postWorld War I era as it was of Stoker’s novel. Beyond reflecting a period of cultural unease, Nosferatu provided the dramatic template for every big-screen vampire that followed, from Bela Lugosi’s 1931 portrayal of Dracula to Klaus Kinski’s 1979 reprisal of the original Murnau character created by actor Max Schreck. Viewed from a modern perspective, Murnau’s film is no longer horrifying in the traditional sense, yet it remains effective for its dark, minimalist approach, as well as its dramatic tension and uncomfortably believable tone. Despite screenwriter Henrik Galeen’s and Murnau’s efforts to disguise the film’s debt to Dracula by changing the title, character names, and settings, Stoker’s widow sued Nosferatu’s production company, Pana-Film, for copyright infringement and in the process nearly crushed the film. In part because of the financial distress surrounding the Stoker lawsuit, the already troubled PanaFilm was unable to distribute Nosferatu widely, leaving the film for later audiences to discover.

3. See Clarens, p. 185. 4. The most interesting arguments are those in Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York and Toronto, 1966), pp. 275-92.

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terror to provoke powerful tensions between different interpretations; this is a process which The Exorcist sets out to short-circuit. From the first moments, we are left in no doubt whatever as to the reality of the little girl’s possession. The audience is thus reduced to a nadir of passivity: it is highly significant that one of the most appalling and horrifying scenes occurs when an attempt is made at medical treatment of the girl’s condition, for what this demonstrates is that the film’s makers were drawing throughout upon a single language and a single level of intensity with complete disregard of the film’s narrative or thematic coherence. The object-lesson which one might draw from The Exorcist is not about a decreasing vitality in the horror film, or about the dangers of pop religion, but about a crisis in film itself, which is well outside the scope of this book, and which rests on recognition and exploitation of the extraordinary power of film to appear to make its audiences accept assumptions which in the cold light of day appear the most arrant nonsense; this crisis, which bears upon media proliferation, will be addressed more thoroughly in Chapter Seven.

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5. David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946-1972 (London, 1973), pp. 9-10. 6. See Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films (London, 1969), pp. 112-23. 7. John Russell Taylor, Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear (London, 1964), pp. 197-8. 8. Andrew Sarris, Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 1955-1969 (New York, 1971), pp. 208, 209. 9. Pauline Kael, Reeling (London, 1977), p. 250.

TELEVISION LENORA LEDWON (ESSAY DATE 1993) SOURCE: Ledwon, Lenora. “Twin Peaks and the Television Gothic.” Literature/Film Quarterly 21, no. 4 (1993): 260-70. In the following essay, Ledwon defines “Television Gothic” and demonstrates how this modification of the early Gothic novel resembles and differs from its Gothic literary predecessors as exemplified by the television series Twin Peaks. I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. Sylvia Plath, “Elm”

Twin Peaks as a Television Gothic is a distinctly post-modern form, Gothic as process rather than product. The basic methodology of this process involves the combination and exploitation of two highly domestic forms—television and the Gothic novel. The result of this process is a series in which the domestic is the Gothic and television becomes the ghost in the home. In exploring this new Television Gothic, it is useful to: (1) start with a working definition of “Gothic,” then (2) present an overview of typical Gothic devices operating in Twin Peaks, and finally, (3) analyze two fundamental Gothic elements that are transmuted through the medium of television—incest and the family romance, and the fragmented and multi-formed narrative.

Definitions

The twentieth century has proven congenial to the Gothic. Gothic literature and film attest to the continuing vitality of the genre. Examples of today’s popular Gothic include such works as Stephen King’s The Shining with its Gothicized haunted hotel, modern Gothic romances and Harlequin clones whose covers feature persecuted maidens in the shadow of gloomy mansions, and horror films as diverse as Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, and the perennial remake of Dracula. However, while many scholars and critics have addressed the use of Gothic elements in literature and film, the field of the Television Gothic has yet to be explored in any detail.1 This is despite the fact that television would seem an ideal medium for Gothic inquiry. It is, after all, a mysterious box simultaneously inhabited by spirit images of ourselves and inhabiting our living rooms. In fact, television has aired its fair share of programs with Gothic elements. (“Aired” itself is a good Gothic concept—ghostly messages traveling through the air.) Thriller, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, The Night Stalker, Friday the 13th: The Series, the original Dark Shadows and its stupendously dull 1991 remake (a sort of Dynasty with fangs) are but a few examples of series that utilized Gothic devices. However, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks is the first series to tap the full potential of the “Television Gothic.”

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This new Television Gothic utilizes familiar Gothic themes and devices such as incest, the grotesque, repetition, interpolated narration, haunted settings, mirrors, doubles, and supernatural occurrences. But these elements undergo a sea change once they are immersed in the “currents” of television. What could have been a soothing repetition of formula instead becomes a disturbing process of transgression and uncertainty.

“I perceive,” said Emily, smiling, “that all old houses are haunted. . . .” Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolfo (1794)

Definitions, like old mansions, are inclined to be haunted—haunted by past definitions. “Television Gothic” is a haunted phrase, testifying to the intrusion of the past into the present. In order to appreciate the nature of this haunting, we must begin with a definition of the Gothic and with an acknowledgment of the limits of such a definition. Any definition of a genre is at best incomplete. There will always be exceptions, overlaps, and grey areas. Further, such definitions all too often reduce and trivialize a complex subject. Those of us interested in genre criticism console ourselves by the hope that well thought out models will be recognized as just that—models. As such, they should serve as aids to understanding, not as prescriptive chains on thinking. Even among other genres, the Gothic seems particularly difficult to define. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that, rather than speaking of one monolithic category of “Gothic,” it is more appropriate to recognize that there are many Gothics.2 But a larger part of this difficulty lies in the fact that the Gothic itself is an unstable genre, one that is characterized more by its process than

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Although difficult to define, its very fluidity and resistance to boundaries make the Gothic a particularly apt genre for television. As will become evident, Twin Peaks taps into this Gothic resistance, creating a Television Gothic characterized by a polysemous mingling of “authentic” representations which constantly forces the viewer into an uneasy oscillation between ways of understanding. Given all the above caveats, we will, for the sake of convenience, focus our definition on three commonly accepted fundamental characteristics of the Gothic. Our working definition of “Gothic” will include the following primary elements: (1) the use of standard Gothic devices which generally are recognized as capable of producing fear or dread, (2) the central enigma of the family, and (3) a difficult narrative structure (one that frustrates attempts at understanding). The transformation of these Gothic elements into “Television Gothic” in Twin Peaks is the subject of the rest of this essay.

Gothic Devices in Twin Peaks “I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.” “Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?” Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818)

Something “horrid” is the first recognizable hallmark of the Gothic. Commentators note that the Gothic is “a literature of nightmare” (MacAndrew 3), “literature where fear is the motivating and sustaining emotion” (Gross 1). In fact, fear is one of the engines that drives the plot of Twin Peaks. Windom Earle would have agreed with Austen’s two young friends concerning their interest in the horrid. Discovering the secret of what draws BOB to humans, Earle comments, “It’s fear! My favorite emotional state!” Those particular Gothic devices used to promote fear are fairly well identified. In her study of Gothic conventions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes that one knows generally what to expect in the way of Gothic paraphernalia: You know the important features of its mise en scène: an oppressive ruin, a wild landscape, a Catholic or feudal society. You know about the trembling sensibility of the heroine and the

impetuosity of her lover. You know about the tyrannical older man with the piercing glance who is going to imprison and try to rape or murder them. You know something about the novel’s form: it is likely to be discontinuous and involuted, perhaps incorporating tales within tales, changes of narrators, and such framing devices as found manuscripts or interpolated histories. You also know that, whether with more or less relevance to the main plot, certain characteristic preoccupations will be aired. These include the priesthood and monastic institutions; sleeplike and deathlike states; subterranean spaces and live burial; doubles; the discovery of obscured family ties; affinities between narrative and pictorial art; possibilities of incest; unnatural echoes or silences, unintelligible writings, and the unspeakable; garrulous retainers; the poisonous effects of guilt and shame; nocturnal landscapes and dreams; apparitions from the past; Faust- and Wandering Jewlike figures; civil insurrections and fires; the charnel house and the madhouse. (Sedgwick 9-10)

All these devices are recognizably Gothic, and many of them occur in Twin Peaks. For example, the woods around Twin Peaks are a wild and mysterious landscape. (“There’s a sort of evil out there. Something very, very strange in these old woods,” muses Sheriff Truman.) The Book House Boys form a secret, quasi-mystical institution. Subterranean spaces exist (Owl Cave), as do resonant silences, guilt and shame, nocturnal landscapes and dreams. Strange fires occur (the fire at the Packard Mill and the mysterious command, “Fire, walk with me”). The flickering torches of the charnel house are replaced with the cold glare and strobe effect of fluorescent lights in the morgue. Discovered manuscripts (Laura Palmer’s diary) and mediated narratives (Cooper’s tapes) abound. Cooper’s quest for knowledge and his decision to sell his soul qualify him as a Faustlike figure. And, of course, the unspeakable occurs: rape, incest, and murder. The most antisocial of crimes intrude into the sanctuary of domesticity.

Doubles in Twin Peaks The stranger youth and I approached each other in silence. . . . What was my astonishment on perceiving that he was the same being as myself! James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)

Exploring all the Gothic devices in Twin Peaks at any great length would be impractical here, but the device of the Double can exemplify how rich the series is in Gothic terms. It should not be surprising that a series titled “Twin Peaks” should be filled with doubles. In fact, there are several

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by its individual products. The Gothic is easy to recognize, but hard to define.

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dozen examples of doubles in Twin Peaks, typically serving as mirror images of good and evil, original and imitation, appearance and reality. A few examples follow.

(327). When the boundary between the normal and the Gothic begins to crack, it becomes clear that for Twin Peaks the normal is the Gothic.

Laura and Maddy are identical cousins (reminiscent of a warped version of The Patty Duke Show). There are two sets of BOBs and Mikes—the teen-agers (Bobby and Mike) and the spirit presences of the demonic BOB and the mysterious Mike. There is an enigmatic White Lodge and its counterpart Black Lodge, one representing good and one evil. Laura has led a double life as goodgirl Prom Queen and as a wanton bad girl. There are two sets of books for the Packard Sawmill (one the original, one a fake). There are two diaries of Laura Palmer (one a “cover” story and one a secret diary). The series Twin Peaks is doubled by the series Invitation to Love. Love and fear double as mirror images, as engines which attract spirits from another plane of existence. Dream beings have counterparts in the town of Twin Peaks (BOB/Leland, the giant/the old bellhop, Mike/the one-armed man). The same actress, Sheryl Lee, plays both Laura Palmer and Maddy Ferguson. The same actress, Piper Laurie, plays both Catherine Martell and the mysterious Japanese businessman. The dwarf warns Cooper of the existence of a “dopplegänger” (German for “double”). There are two Dale Coopers in the final episode, one good and one evil.

Domestic Gothic

The sheer exuberance behind the use of such Gothic devices is extraordinary. Lynch exploits the television potential of Gothic devices to the hilt. While a literary text can only create doubles through written representations, television permits such visual doubling devices as the same actor or actress playing two characters, or a giant suddenly appearing where an old bellhop stood a moment before. The visualization of Gothic images heightens and intensifies the standard function of the double—to problematize the distinction between appearance and reality. Equally significant for the Television Gothic is how Twin Peaks uses Gothic devices such as the double to challenge the distinction between the normal and the abnormal, the domestic and the uncanny. Lynch transforms standard Gothic devices into Television Gothic by domesticating them. He brings the horrid and the normal into juxtaposition until the viewer is unsure what is normal anymore. By using television to do this, Lynch challenges the most deep-seated expectations of the aim of television. As David Marc notes, “the aim of television is to be normal. The industry is obsessed with the problems of norms, and this manifests itself in both process and product”

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Heaven directed my bloody hand to the heart of my child. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)

Television, the most domestic of all mediums, is a natural venue for the Gothic, the most disturbed of domestic fictions. As John Ellis observes in Visible Fictions, “broadcast TV is a profoundly domestic phenomenon” (113). A television set is an everyday item within the home, it is “another domestic object” (Ellis 113). Like that other strangely domestic item, the Gothic novel, television can create a sense of the uncanny precisely by drawing on the unfamiliarity of the familiar. In fact, the Television Gothic is the uncanny/ unheimlich contained within the familiar/heimlich of the home. In his essay, “The Uncanny,” Freud traces the development of the German terms, “unheimlich” and “heimlich.” Initially, heimlich meant homely, plain, familiar, comfortable. Unheimlich, or uncanny, meant everything that was not home-like. Over time, the meaning of “heimlich” changed, so that which had been familiar and domestic came to mean that which was guarded, furtive, withdrawn, and hidden. The key point here is that unheimlich and heimlich are not two antithetical states. Rather, one thing is contained within the other. The uncanny is that which ought to remain hidden and secret, but which has become visible. What strikes us as uncanny is not something new, but something familiar. Just as the heimlich contains within it the unheimlich, so does the familiar domestic home contain within it the Gothic potential of Television.

Heimlich Unheimlich

Home Television

The home contains the uncanny. The uncanny is familiar and terrible in its familiarity.

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television has achieved the status of “myth,” as Roland Barthes uses the word. He means by myth a way of understanding the world that is not problematic, that we are not fully conscious of, that seems, in a word, natural. A myth is a way of thinking so deeply embedded in our consciousness that it is invisible. This is now the way of television. We are no longer fascinated or perplexed by its machinery. We do not tell stories of its wonders. We do not confine our television sets to special rooms. We do not doubt the reality of what we see on television, are largely unaware of the special angle of vision it affords. (79)

Television’s Gothic potential stems in large part from its reassuring domesticity (its “natural” presence and acceptance in the home) combined with its under-utilized ability to disrupt viewers’ comfortable notions of domesticity. What is so frightening about the Television Gothic? The fact that it returns to the domestic sphere something repressed yet familiar—the specters of incest and family violence. Like the early Germanic invaders after whom it takes its name, the Gothic brings with it the threat of the destruction of culture. The Television Gothic, even more so, makes such threats strikingly visible and manifest. There it is, on your television screen, in your own living room—a father assaulting and killing a “daughter” in his living room.3 Sarah Palmer voices the complaint of the Television Gothic when she cries, “What is going on in this house?” The domestic gone horribly wrong is the essence of the Television Gothic. Lynch taps into our need to turn common life into the stuff of nightmare so that we can call it unreal. Better the Gothic, than the horror of everyday domestic life. As James B. Twitchell astutely points out in Dreadful Pleasures, “the early gothic usually tells the story of a single and specific family romance run amok: ‘father’ has become monstrous to ‘daughter.’” (“Father” includes any role of paternal dominance [Twitchell 42].) The dysfunctional family lies at the heart of the Gothic, and thus the Gothic is profoundly domestic. In what is generally known as the earliest Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, Prince Manfred of Otranto desires to marry his prospective daughter-in-law (a barely concealed incestuous desire), and eventually kills his real daughter by stabbing her with his phallic dagger. In Twin Peaks, fathers are repeatedly monstrous to daughters. Leland Palmer compulsively kills daughters. He rapes and kills his real daughter, Laura, as well as killing her double,

Maddy, and another young girl. Ben Horne sleeps with one daughter-figure, Laura, and narrowly avoids sleeping with his own daughter, Audrey. Facing a masked Audrey in the brothel, One-Eyed Jack’s, Ben suggestively comments, “You know how to interest a man.” Father/daughter incest marks the Gothic plot. Both Castle of Otranto and Twin Peaks feature the most anti-domestic (that is, destructive of domesticity) of crimes, but a crime that is ineluctably tied to the domestic. Early Gothics distance this crime by placing it in the past (the Middle Ages were a popular time period) or in a foreign locale (Italy was a favorite spot for dark deeds). In contrast, Twin Peaks affirms the closeness of the Gothic. Where Twin Peaks modifies the Gothic genre, causing a shifting in the Gothic process, is in its insistence on the quotidian, the common, the ordinary as the essence of Gothic. The prom queen, the town diner, the local sheriff, the high school football star, the motorcycle-riding rebel, the family dinner table—all these are familiar television fare. Even that most ubiquitous of all twentieth-century artifacts—plastic—assumes the mantle of the uncanny. “She’s dead. Wrapped in plastic,” says Pete in the pilot episode after finding the body of Laura Palmer, prom queen. Common plastic appropriates the heady status of the Gothic veil. Layers of translucent plastic tease the viewer’s eye with the suggestion of a female body. When a hand removes the plastic, revealing Laura Palmer’s face, the lingering camera shot is as resonant as the moment Emily lifts the black veil in Mysteries of Udolfo, but for different reasons. Udolfo resonates with the strangeness of the Gothic, Twin Peaks with the ordinariness of the Gothic. The terrible object behind the veil is a gruesome wax figure of a body in the last stages of decay. The figure beneath the plastic is a much more common object—a dead body. Where the wax figure creates distance between viewer and text because of its exotic, unusual, and bizarre qualities, the body creates closeness because of its ordinariness. The Television Gothic reveals what is behind the veil in the first episode, while readers of Udolfo had to wade through several hundred additional pages before learning the mystery of the veil. What is the difference? By postponing revelation, Radcliffe makes the Gothic moment remote, attenuated and rarefied. By beginning with the unveiling, David Lynch makes the Gothic immediate. It may be objected that with this early unveiling, Lynch is in fact destroying the Gothic. “How obvious,” we think. “We recognize this. Here is

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Television is the ghost in the home, a barely perceptible presence that can be at once familiar and strangely disturbing. Neil Postman notes that:

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that most ordinary of objects in any mystery—a body.” But our moment of certainty is short-lived. It is precisely Lynch’s point (and a point that characterizes Twin Peaks as a Television Gothic) that the ordinary is the Gothic. Consider, for example, the bizarre image of blood dripping on a donut. A commonplace, ubiquitous object such as a donut can be uncanny when it is juxtaposed with another common item—blood. And this point, the ordinariness of the Gothic, is reinforced through the series’ emphasis on the enigma of the family. Incest and child murder are not the only family enigmas in the series. Gothics fairly bristle with family mysteries, and Twin Peaks is no exception. In fact, Lynch uses physical and mental deformity metonymically to suggest the extent of the distorted and dysfunctional family. The strained family dinners at the Horne’s are silent except for the monotonous humming of the teen-aged autistic son, dressed in full Indian war bonnet. Donna’s mother is in a wheelchair. Nadine has only one eye and limits her discussions with her husband to her obsession with silent drape runners. The Log Lady talks to her log in lieu of a husband. Sarah Palmer is subject to visions and fits of (demonic?) possession and her husband, Leland, goes insane. In addition to the above examples of dysfunctional families, examples of spouse abusers are plentiful in Twin Peaks. Leo routinely beats his wife, Shelley, and leaves her to die in a fire he sets. Nadine emotionally abuses Ed. Windom Earle kills his wife, Caroline. Earle approves of Leo’s abusive behavior (“domestic violence—now I’m partial to that!”) and in turn keeps Leo imprisoned as a slave/pet/torture object in a cabin in the woods. Earle as the manic ex-husband plots to destroy a King and Queen (Cooper and Annie), as if no symbols of wedded power can be allowed to exist. In his glee over his plotting, Earle comments, “I haven’t been this excited since I punctured Caroline’s aorta!” Domestic violence and dysfunctional families are the norm in the series. In fact, it is difficult to find any “normal” nuclear family within the world of Twin Peaks. This is particularly telling, in light of comments such as John Ellis’s that “home” and “family” are part of “a powerful cultural construct . . . broadcast TV assumes that this is the basis and heart of its audience” (Ellis 113). If this is the case, Lynch’s construction of anti-nuclear families, a construction meant to be projected into the homes of other families, must be powerfully unsettling. In fact, it must be Gothic.

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Narrative Structure and Television Gothic The explanation occupied several pages, which, to the torture of young Melmoth, were wholly illegible. Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)

In addition to the enigma of the family, another key aspect of the Gothic is its narrative ambiguity. Gothic novels are characterized by problematic structures. One much-commentedupon characteristic of the Gothic is “the difficulty the story has in getting itself told” (Sedgwick 13), a problem in structure which means that Gothics “cannot be efficiently told” and are criticized for being “unaesthetic, anti-artistic, preserving only the unities of the subconscious” (Twitchell 41). The Gothic structure is complex and convoluted. In the Gothic, stories are interrupted by other stories, fragments of lost manuscripts give tantalizing hints at meaning, poetry is interspersed throughout prose, and baroque, overly-detailed explanations and descriptions contribute to a general hemorrhaging of language. Similarly, the Television Gothic as exemplified by Twin Peaks is filled with multiple story lines (love stories, a murder mystery, international business deals, a paternity mystery, a beauty contest, etc.), fragments of interpolated narratives (such as Laura Palmer’s diary or Cooper’s dictation, and perhaps even the commodified products of the series including books, tapes, newspapers, and even collectible trading cards), poetry and cryptic messages (“Fire, walk with me,” “I will tell you three things”) and puzzles within puzzles. If, as Raymond Williams suggests, “flow” is “the characteristic organization and therefore the characteristic experience” of television, then what is one to make of a series that resists such organization (Williams 86)? An important aspect of the workings of flow, according to Williams, is the creation of “a sense of the world,” that is, of some meaning (Williams 116-18). Twin Peaks frustrates flow by its constant fracturing, restructuring and undercutting of meaning. Catherine Martell, waiting to discover the secret of Eckhardt’s black puzzle box, sums up the frustrating process, saying, “I can’t take any more of this. Boxes inside boxes. Whatever is in that better be worth a fortune.” In fact, inside the box within the box within the box is a key—suggesting only the existence of yet another box. Twin Peaks takes our desire for meaning and aggravates it. Explanations are baroque and overly complicated, like Gothic architecture. In place of highly detailed decora-

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Scene from David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks.

tions (which distract and bewilder), or elaborate stained glass (glass which is opaque rather than transparent), the Television Gothic gives us too many clues and too many messages. For example, Cooper’s explanation (in episode seventeen) of the solution to the murder of Laura Palmer is spoken very rapidly, overwhelms the viewer with a profusion of explanation, and is not based on scientific rationality but on allegory and the language of dreams. (Cooper explains that the dwarf in his dream danced and that Leland danced; he says that BOB had gray hair, and Leland’s hair turned gray; and he says that the letters under the fingernails of the victims were spelling out BOB’s name.) Such a baroque explanation is closer to a parody of meaning than to a real explanation. (In fact, Saturday Night Live successfully parodied Twin Peaks in a skit starring Kyle MacLachlan as Dale Cooper.) Even more significantly, the narrative process of Twin Peaks frustrates our very expectations of genre itself. This Television Gothic never comes to rest at any one point. There is no moment of complete ease or comfort, no point at which the series settles into one easy mode. Rather, there is a

constant slippage of meaning. The series never settles into a familiar groove for any significant length of time. The Television Gothic frustrates attempts to pin it down to any one particular narrative form. It is a commonplace of genre criticism to assume that viewers are attuned to those semiotic cues that forecast the type of genre, and hence the type of narrative to follow. As Jane Feuer notes in her discussion of the sitcom, television genre “assures the interpretability of the text” for the audience (119). Genre makes a series comfortable and understandable (or perhaps boring and predictable). For example, the various semiotic cues of the conventional Gothic are part of our cultural furniture. We understand that mysterious wounds in the heroine’s throat signal a vampire story. However, unlike the run-of-the-mill television Gothic, a characteristic of the “new” Television Gothic (as exemplified by Twin Peaks) is that the genre does not assure the interpretability of the text. Rather, the genre assures a multiplicity of possible interpretations. (In this respect, Twin Peaks is not so much a “newer” Gothic than series such as Dark Shadows, as it is “true-er” to its Gothic

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origins. It is the first television series to fully explore the potential of the Television Gothic, and hence the first “pure” Television Gothic.) Signs which ordinarily would determine a set pattern, when proliferated in the Television Gothic, create an opening in time and space (like the opening to the Black Lodge) which allows for an excess or superabundance of meaning. Where Television Gothic breaks the bounds of genre is in its resistance to a single, discrete form of narrative. This resistance is carried out through obsessive, exuberant multiplicity. Twin Peaks not only offers multiple story lines (Cooper’s investigation of the murder, business intrigues between Catherine and Ben, adulterous affairs carried on by Bobby and Shelley and by Ed and Norma, etc.), and multiple narratives, but also multiple shifts between conventional or more “settled” Gothic genres. In contrast, a viewer of the 1991 remake of Dark Shadows knows what to expect from the very first episode, if not from the very first scene. All the symbols and apparatus of the vampire story are familiar and predictable territory. Twin Peaks teases the viewer by focusing on not one, but a multitude of potential narratives, each of which itself is open to multiple interpretations. To grasp the extent of this multiplicity, it is helpful to contrast the operation of narrative drive in Twin Peaks with the operation of narrative drive in the horror film genre. In American Film Genres, Stuart M. Kaminsky charts out seven main branches of the horror film, noting a separate “source of horror” in each branch: (1) “Animal drives which threaten man”; (2) “Immortal parasite”; (3) “Witches, corrupt humans who worship evil”; (4) “Rescurrected dead, or possessed beings who are figuratively dead”; (5) “Unpredictable madmen”; (6) “Mad scientist and created monster”; and (7) “Creatures from outer space, inside the Earth, or from the id” (152-53). Typically, we expect one primary source of horror per film. Twin Peaks, as a Television Gothic, manages to fit into each of these categories at various points in the series, while resisting allegiance to any one. For example, (1) Animal drives of sexuality, fear, and rage fuel the crimes in the series; (2) BOB is called a “parasite”; (3) Lana may be a witch, and Windom Earle has studied a tribe of Indians who worship evil; (4) Leland is possessed by BOB; (5) Earle is a madman; (6) Earle also is a mad scientist, and his creature is Leo (called “Leo-stein” by Bobby, in a reference to Frankenstein’s monster); and (7) Project Bluebook references in the show suggest the possibility of alien creatures from outer space, while “the evil in

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the woods” suggests the presence of evil within Nature itself, and Albert suggests that BOB may simply be “the evil that men do.” Part of the contrast, of course, lies in the nature of the two media. Film does not have the same Gothic potential as television, precisely because of the finite time period for a film. A film must end, while a television series has a seemingly infinite potential to continue telling the story and to continue multiplying meanings. However, other television shows with Gothic elements have failed to fully utilize the Gothic potential of television. Each Night Stalker episode, for example, simply introduced a new monster which reporter Carl Kolchak would destroy. (Interestingly, Kolchak narrates his story into a tape recorder, like Cooper.) There never was any real doubt or uncertainty about the outcome. The clues pointing to the existence and type of the monster in each series proceeded in a logical, linear fashion. In Twin Peaks, on the other hand, logic and meaning are confounded. Each semiotic cue which ordinarily would narrow the range of narrative meaning combines with other cues to expand the possible meanings. (Are there aliens at work in Twin Peaks? Is BOB a demonic spirit or a parasite from another planet? What do the Indians have to do with this? Is it all something in the coffee or the cherry pie?) A proliferation and superabundance of meaning is the result. In addition to Twin Peaks’ multiple narrative drives and resistance to any one form, the series demonstrates a second narrative technique unique to the Television Gothic—the use of a domestic technological device to explore the ways technology transmits emotional extremes. Repeatedly, the viewer experiences moments in which emotionally-charged voices and images are mediated through technological devices such as telephones, microphones, tape recorders, video cameras and even television. Such technological reproductions, because they are reproductions and not “originals,” are themselves ghostly. And the final device transmitting these extremes of fear and love is the television set. Television becomes the ghost in the home. Examples of technology as a mediating narrative tool are plentiful. In the pilot episode, Sarah Palmer’s anguished cries at first learning of her daughter’s death are mediated through a telephone receiver. As Leland drops the phone, Sarah’s pain registers through the lingering sound of her voice on the dangling receiver. In another example from the pilot episode, the school principal announces the death of Laura Palmer over the

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Such moments of technological mediation reoccur throughout the series. For example, in several episodes we hear the tape-recorded voice of Laura Palmer discussing things that frighten her and excite her. We see a videotape of a highly distraught Windom Earle discussing his obsession with an Indian tribe devoted to evil for its own sake. Microphones squeak and buzz, preventing important announcements (“Is this thing on?”). A tape recording of Waldo the mynah bird transmits the final painful words of Laura Palmer, “hurting me, hurting me.” On several occasions, individuals are wired for eavesdropping purposes under circumstances fraught with danger. Radio transmissions from outer space (or perhaps from the woods) warn Cooper of danger. Audrey is tied up and videotaped for purposes of extortion. And, in perhaps the most blatant example, Windom Earle uses an electronic device to administer painful shocks to Leo. Lucy, the dippy secretary, pinpoints the problem of all this mediation in one of her deceptively naive remarks, saying, “I’m going to transfer him—well, not him, but his call.” What you get with an electronic transfer is not the individual, and not even the original message, but the recreation of a message. Whether the message must travel along miles of television wire, be transferred to audiotape, or be split up into signals that are sent into space and bounced off a satellite before re-emerging in the images on your television, there exists the haunting possibility that something is lost in the mediating process. Such images are not the original. They are ghostly. The fact that so many important communications in Twin Peaks are mediated through technological devices highlights two standard Gothic complaints—the difficulty of communication and the impossibility of ever really knowing another human being. Additionally, there is one final explanation for this narrative device, an explanation highly significant for the Television Gothic. Twin Peaks’ emphasis on mediated messages— messages that are transmitted through technological devices—underscores the limits of the medium, and suggests that television itself is the ghost in the home.

Conclusions O! what an infinite difference between this moment and the next! Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolfo (1794)

The more things change, the more they stay the same. When Horace Walpole wrote the first Gothic novel in 1764, he was attempting something new. In his Preface to the Second Edition of The Castle of Otranto, he comments on his intent to create a new form: It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romances, the ancient and the modern. In the former, all was imagination and improbability; in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with great success. Invention has not been wanting, but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life. (19)

Castle of Otranto Walpole’s attempt to “reconcile the two kinds” of writing (19). Similarly, television’s heavy reliance on “reality programming” would seem to tip the scales in favor of common life, drying up television’s potential for “fancy.” Lynch’s Twin Peaks can be seen as a twentieth-century reconciliation of common and uncommon, home-like and uncanny, domestic and Gothic. The result of this new Television Gothic is a format in which the domestic itself operates as the Gothic.

Notes 1. Analysis of the Gothic in literature is extensive, and what follows is a very selective list. Standard background reading should include Montague Summers’s The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (London: Fortune P, 1938). Two particularly useful bibliographies are Robert Donald Spector’s The English Gothic: A Bibliographic Guide to Writers from Horace Walpole to Mary Shelley (Westport: Greenwood P. 1984) and Frederick S. Frank’s Gothic Fiction: A Master List of Twentieth Century Criticism and Research (Westport: Meckler, 1988). Recent works focusing on the American Gothic include: Louis S. Gross, Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland to Day of the Dead (Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1989) and Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne, eds., The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1987). Finally, of particular interest for those interested in Gothic narrative structure is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s excellent analysis, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Arno P, 1980). Turning to film, a selective sampling of work on Gothic and horror (the two terms, though deserving separate definitions, are often used interchangeably) includes the following: Gregory A. Waller, ed., American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film (Urbana, U of Illinois P, 1987); Stuart M. Kaminsky, American Film Genres: Approaches to a Critical Theory of Popular Film (New York: Dell P, 1974); Barry Keith Grant, ed., Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film

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school P.A. system. He is overcome by grief during his announcement. We see the effect of the announcement on the students, followed by a lingering shot of the empty school hallway with the principal’s disembodied voice echoing through the hall.

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(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow P, 1984); James Donald, ed., Fantasy and the Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1989); Emily D. Edwards, “The Ecstasy of Horrible Expectations: Morbid Curiosity, Sensation Seeking, and Interest in Horror Movies,” Current Research in Film 5, ed. Bruce A. Austin (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1991): 19-38; and Ruth Perlmutter, “The Cinema of the Grotesque,” Georgia Review 33.1 (Spring 1979): 168-93. A useful analysis of the “boom and bust” cycle of horror films for the period of 1978 to 1983 can be found in Robert E. Kapsis’s “Hollywood Genres and the Production of Culture Perspective,” Current Researches in Film 5 (1991): 68-85. Particularly interesting for students of the Gothic are Charlene Burnell’s “The Gothic: a Literary Genre’s Transition to Film,” Planks of Reason: 79-100 and Roger Dadoun’s “Fetishism in the Horror Film,” Fantasy and the Cinema: 3961. Finally, mandatory readings are Robin Wood’s two articles on American horror films of the ’60s and ’70s—“Return of the Repressed,” Film Comment 14.4 (1978):25-32 and “Gods and Monsters,” Film Comment 14.5 (1978): 19-25.

Feuer, Jane. “Genre Study and Television.” Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Robert C. Allen. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987. 113-33.

The pickings are lean as far as finding essays on television and the Gothic, but Gregory A. Waller’s “Madefor-Television Horror Films,” American Horrors: 145-61, is an insightful work which explores the technical limitations of made-for-television horror films: Additionally, while not a scholarly work, Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (New York: Berkley Books, 1981) contains an interesting and entertaining chapter on the limits of television horror, titled, “The Glass Teat, or, This Monster Was Brought to You by Gainesburgers.”

Kapsis, Robert E. “Hollywood Genres and the Production of Culture Perspective.” Current Researches in Film 5. Ed. Bruce A. Austin. Norwood: Ablex, 1991. 68-85.

2. While most commentators trace the origins of the Gothic to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), there is less agreement on how to categorize the branches of the Gothic. It is possible to discuss the Sentimental Gothic, the Schauer-Romantik Gothic, the Explained Supernatural Gothic, the Unexplained Supernatural Gothic, the Historical Gothic, etc. 3. What makes such moments significantly different from scenes of family violence in soap operas is the series’ insistence on the uncanny moment, an insistence that is purely Gothic in origin.

Works Cited Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. 1818. Ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis. New York: Penguin, 1987. Burnell, Charlene. “The Gothic: A Literary Genre’s Transition to Film.” Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1984.

Frank, Frederick S. Gothic Fiction: A Master List of Twentieth Century Criticism and Research. Westport: Meckler, 1988. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Studies in Parapsychology. Ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Collier Books, 1963. 19-60. Grant, Barry Keith, ed. Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1984. Gross, Louis S. Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland to Day of the Dead. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1989. Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. 1824. London: Cresset, 1947. Hoppenstand, Gary, and Ray B. Browne, eds. The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1987. Kaminsky, Stuart M. American Film Genres: Approaches to a Critical Theory of Popular Film. New York: Dell, 1974.

King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Berkley Books, 1981. MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1979. Marc, David. “Beginning to Begin Again.” Television: The Critical View. Ed. Horace Newcomb. 4th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. 323-60. Maturin, Charles Robert. Melmoth the Wanderer. 1820. Intro. William F. Axton. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1961. Perlmutter, Ruth. “The Cinema of the Grotesque.” Georgia Review 33:1 (1979): 168-93. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 1985. Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolfo. 1794. Ed. Bonamy Dobree. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York: Arno, 1980. Spector, Robert Donald. The English Gothic: A Bibliographic Guide to Writers from Horace Walpole to Mary Shelley. Westport: Greenwood, 1984. Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. London: Fortune, 1938. Twitchell, James B. Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.

Dadoun, Roger. “Fetishism in the Horror Film.” Fantasy and Cinema. Ed. James Donald. London: British Film Institute, 1989. 39-61.

Waller, Gregory A. “Made-for-Television Horror Films.” American Horrors. Ed. Gregory A. Waller. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987.

Donald, James, ed. Fantasy and the Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1989.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. 1764. Intro. Marvin Mudrick. New York: Macmillan, 1963.

Edwards, Emily D. “The Ecstasy of Horrible Expectations: Morbid Curiosity, Sensation Seeking, and Interest in Horror Movies.” Current Research in Film 5. Ed. Bruce A. Austin. Norwood: Ablex, 1991. 19-38.

Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken Books, 1975.

Ellis, John. Visible Fictions—Cinema: Television: Video. London: Routledge, 1982.

———. “Return of the Repressed.” Film Comment 14.4.(1978): 25-32.

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Wood, Robin. “Gods and Monsters.” Film Comment 14.5 (1978): 19-25.

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ELIZABETH JANE WALL HINDS (ESSAY DATE WINTER 1992) SOURCE: Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. “The Devil Sings the Blues: Heavy Metal, Gothic Fiction and ‘Postmodern’ Discourse.” Journal of Popular Culture 26, no. 3 (winter 1992): 151-64. In the following essay, Hinds correlates Gothic fiction and heavy metal music, asserting that, among other features, the two artistic forms share a culturally subversive nature and “are peculiar in their purposeful deformity and evocation of the Satanic.” Maybe it’s the time of year; And then maybe it’s the time of man. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young “Woodstock”

It is a long way from the 1764 appearance of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto to the 1968 Led Zeppelin I, but the monstrous subgenre behavior of the latter, one of the first unabashedly Heavy Metal albums, surprisingly resembles the former, both formally and historically. The first in a series of albums that came to define Heavy Metal music, this LP did to what had by then become mainstream Rock what Walpole, and later, M.G. Lewis and Mary Shelley, had done to the mainstream novel. Zeppelin I retained the outward form of its parent—standard LP format, largely with newlywritten material, but also with one cover version (“You Shook Me”), the four-man band with bass and electric guitars, drums and vocals and the general outline of the Rock lyric—and proceeded to rearrange those basic elements into a genre with an altogether more brash, raunchy and musically subversive arrangement.1 As I will illustrate momentarily, the appearance of Gothic fiction in the late eighteenth century and that of Heavy Metal in the late twentieth follows the same historical path as their two parent-forms, namely the novel and Rock music, both of which served subversive purposes at the time of their birth. While both parentgenres followed the same trajectory from radicalism to mainstream culture as do many new genres, their offspring share more than just the historical movement of subversion-to-hegemonic form. The histories of both subgenres are peculiar in their purposeful deformity and evocation of the Satanic: both can be described as a monstrous Gothic Other whose family resemblance to their respective parent was inescapable, but which was, like an unwashed and slightly retarded younger brother, an Other whose distortions of the parentform became repulsive to the very audience who had supported its entry into the world.

By concentrating on these two species of subgenre, what I aim to discover is three-fold. First, I will describe the nature of the two species Gothic fiction and Heavy Metal. By “nature,” however, I do not mean to abstract a principle of operation separate from its cultural context, or what is better called its historical position, but rather to discover this “nature” in that very historical position itself. Thus, the epigraph to this paper. The second, or ulterior, motive is to come to an understanding of “subgenre” as both a term and a concept—what it is we mean when we say “subgenre” rather than “movement”—thereby reclaiming the value of those generic (i.e., aesthetic) categories that have been lost to the forward rush of New-Historical and ideological criticism. It is by redefining “subgenre,” a manageable if somewhat reductive category, as taking its characteristics from the flux of epistemic history that I hope to achieve this recuperation. My third and final goal is to register a critique of the very historicist— indeed Marxist—theoretizing gesture that makes this kind of study possible in the first place. Through this final critique, in hopes of opening a new space for understanding, I will imitate the defining feature of the subgenres under discussion in their habit of biting the hands that feed them. Nineteen sixties Rock music, very like the novel in the mid-eighteenth century, was for a short time a radical, subversive form. No one would argue against the novel’s being, by definition, a “new” and popular form, appealing to the sensibilities of an undereducated mass audience and frequently claiming as its own the values of this bourgeois crowd. The 1960s Rock audience was just such a crowd—one who liked the sounds music made, felt its instrumental and lyrical power, but who lacked the resources to educate itself formally. Partly due to its youthful energy and partly due to its position in history, the 1960s Rock band found itself speaking the language of rebellion: instrumentally, it found the sound of Big Bands and Bing Crosby too easy on the ear, too mushy; its lyrics found the crooning of euphemistic love songs and the nonsense verse of 1950s “bubblegum” pop too arid and politically unaware. This group of musicians—foreseen in Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley—found its leading voices in The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones— those bands who insisted that a handful of people could make a loud and joyful enough noise to forge a Revolution in sound. The music became louder, it became more sexually suggestive, and, most importantly, it began to express the News of

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the World in lyrics about the pleasures and punishments of the drug culture (The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”) and, especially, in lyrics about the Vietnam War (John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “Give Peace a Chance”). Indeed, no one would question the formation of Rock & Roll in the 1960s as a radical casting off of previous popular music standards. By the late 1960s, however, a hegemonic force had taken hold of Rock music—the same force, spurred by a species of international capitalist ideals brought about by the very nature of “the popular,” meaning “that which sells,” that had very quickly drawn the novel into its maw in the later eighteenth century. Completely unawares, these two “radical” forms suddenly found themselves co-opted into the mainstream, produced and bought in outrageous numbers, consumed quickly and rehearsed widely. The sign of the novel’s sudden acceptance—indeed, an even bourgeois status—came in the lightning bolt of parody, in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Rock was less parodied than simply engulfed and accepted: witness the appearance in 1967 and 1970 respectively of “Elenor Rigby” and “Hey Jude” in Muzak. Not much later, the lyrics of both began appearing in anthologies used for Freshman English courses. The power of international capitalism to embrace and celebrate that which is initially subversive had taken hold, in their respective eras, of both the novel and of Rock music, incorporating both genres into its mass marketing strategies, thereby recreating the form itself vis-a-vis the marketplace. It is at this point—or rather the two points of the late eighteenth and late twentieth centuries—of absolute assimilation that the subgenres of Gothic fiction and Heavy Metal were born. The Gothic novel was undoubtedly a relation of the parent in its prose, highly-storied form, the “well-made” novel of Richardson and Fielding. But where the novel had revealed a closelyknit formal design—a beginning, middle and end centered about a causally-connected universe of motivation and action—the Gothic novel was generally episodic in structure, often with muchmaligned “flaws” consisting in unmotivated (usually evil) actions and strands of plot that tend to appear and disappear without explanation. Where the novel had espoused restraint, the Gothic novel demonstrated uninhibited libido, even outright perversion with incest, rape and sado-masochism of all varieties. And finally, where the novel had espoused the singularly righteous in moral vision, detailing the rewards of a good heart and virtuous action within the social sphere,

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the Gothic novel, although conservative like its parent, took the low road, demonstrating in tooclose detail the rewards and punishments of the carnally evil, the best full-blown example of which was Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, organized over a chronology of three hundred years, detailing the desperate attempts of Melmoth who, having sold his soul to the devil for an extended life, attempts to prolong his term on earth by converting others in a series of disconnected episodes ending in Melmoth’s eventual failure: in the end, he is “called home” to Satan and must return by way of falling through a craggy abyss, wasting away by starvation for three days and finally being torn to shreds by demons. Early Heavy Metal music concentrated more intensively on the reward end of the carnal spectrum, but in its totality bespoke the same message of perversion as did the Gothic Novel. Instrumentally, this Heavy Metal style—a name anachronistically applied, I should and—twisted the basic Rock arrangement into what one might call an episodic format. Where the standard Rock single was approximately three minutes long, contained three or sometimes four verses alternating with a two-to-four-line chorus and faded out with repetitions of the chorus, Led Zeppelin I contained a range from three to seven and a half minutes (the latter with “Baby, I’m Gonna Leave You”) and a very irregular pattern of repetition for the chorus. Further, while the Heavy Metal form retains the electric guitar emphasis and solos of mainstream Rock, these solos became famous for irregularity and a seemingly uncontrolled formlessness; to call on the originators again, “Dazed and Confused”—including the studio version from Zeppelin I, but especially the live version of the concert film The Song Remains the Same— demonstrates the limits of the guitar solo that changes both rhythm and key and that extends its length to the outrageous—nearly ten minutes. To draw out the analogy, the drum and keyboard solos of early Metal music draw on the “virtuoso” performance style of Rock’s Jazz roots to distort and intensify the mainstream Rock concept of the solo. In short, with its irregular placement and number of choruses and verses, its length of solo performances, the intensified role of the bass guitar and lower registers in general, Heavy Metal perverted the well-made, beginning-middle-end structure of the standard into more a series of loosely connected “episodes” than a coherency of “song.” It is in its lyrics, however, that Heavy Metal most systematically subverts its mother form;

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Like many others, Will Straw points out “an expression of violent sexuality” in Heavy Metal, but seeks to gloss over this overt sexual message by hurriedly noting that Heavy Metal’s lyrics are often at the same time “explorations of nonromantic and nonerotic themes” (107). It is precisely those “nonromantic and nonerotic themes” which surround the overtly sexual notations that cause Heavy Metal’s sexuality to be, or to be received as, “subversive”: when “Dazed and Confused” places the line “Sweet little baby, I want you again” in a series of lamentations on the unfaithfulness of women, the juxtaposition is, at the very least, paradoxical. The magnified range of sexual attention in Heavy Metal music should recall the sexual frankness of the Gothic’s “School of Horror,” of which M.G. Lewis’ The Monk is only the most notorious example, in which Ambrosio, the monk, rapes and later murders his sister, with the help of Matilda, a young initiate of a Satanic order, who has dressed as a man to enter the monastery and “convert” Ambrosio.2 The monk’s

sexual exploits are made all the more “horrific” by placing them in the context of the monastery (appropriately, under the monastery in the labyrinthine dungeon). More importantly, these subgenres are distinguished by their use of sex as a literal act rather than a metonymic expression of romantic love. If Rock music indeed takes part in what Bram Dijkstra calls an “aesthetic of sensuousness” (qtd. in Wicke 53), as one could argue for the novel as well—an aesthetic that glorifies or at least takes as subject and object the physical, everyday activities of dancing, flirting, courting, marrying—then the subgenres of Heavy Metal and Gothic fiction take those barely-disguised and socially sanctioned euphemisms for sex and draw them from the “hidden” background into a surface of literal action. Of the staple Gothic theme of incest, for example, William Patrick Day has pointed out that “it was also an aspect of popular fiction, though the threat seems to have been more popular than the actuality” (emphasis added) (120). This literal sexuality distinguishes the two subgenres not only from their parent genres, but also from the closelyrelated subgenres of “hard” Rock and the picaresque novel, both of which went directly for the sensuous throat, as did the Gothic novel and Heavy Metal, and refused the “communalism” implied in mainstream Rock’s dance music format (e.g., the Beatles’ “She Loves You”) and the mainstream novel’s insistence on societal values (e.g., Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe). These related subgenres formally rejected the communal values of the mainstream in much the same way as Heavy Metal and Gothic fiction rejected the same popular forms, but the message of sexuality in hard Rock and the picaresque remained euphemized: Jethro Tull could produce a number like “Velvet Green,” instrumentally and structurally diverse and as evocative of sexuality as any Heavy Metal band, but those evocative lyrics still came from the “lyric” tradition of suggestion (“Won’t you have my company? / Yes, take it in your hand”); likewise, Moll Flanders may live and breathe in a loosely episodic universe, peopled by first one husband or lover after another (an important subgenre marker: one cannot always tell the difference), but the sex act itself is kept in the background, even though Moll can thrive, literally, only on sex (Defoe, Moll Flanders). Gothic fiction’s and Heavy Metal’s making literal the act of sex is, as indicated in the previous plot summary of The Monk, frequently of a piece with Satanic subject matter, although the Satanic takes up a life of its own in both subgenres

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Robert Pattison accounts for the centrality of these lyrics by writing that they “may be trite, obscene, and idiotic—which is to say, they may be vulgar— but they are certainly not incidental, and the proof of their importance is their consistency” (ix). In response to the generally positive—one might say the “feel-good” lyrics of mainstream 1960s Rock—Heavy Metal lyrics focused more particularly on the blatant, the sexual and often, the horrific. Recall some of the most popular of 1960’s lyric messages: “Love is all you need” (Beatles, “All You Need is Love”) and “I want to hold your hand” (Beatles, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”) are both sweetened versions of social and personal closeness. Even the lyrics of the Stones’ “Satisfaction” and The Who’s “Squeeze Box” euphemistically suggest the sex act, drawing largely on the metaphor and allusion of the previous fifty years of popular music. Subverting the genre, indeed, epitomizing the notion of “subgenre,” Heavy Metal made sex, not love. The lyrics here are blatant and often violent. The range of sexual conversation in even the early days of this music moves from the frank—again, the “Dazed and Confused” of Zeppelin I repeats, “Sweet little baby, I want you again”—to the outright bluntness of the third Zeppelin album (Led Zeppelin III) in “Whole Lotta Love”: “Way down inside, woman, you need it. . . .” Coupled with the alternating short bass and guitar notes and Robert Plant’s moaning, the sexual message could not be more clear or less softened by any euphemism of romance.

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ SHIRLEY JACKSON (1919-1965)

Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” (1948) established her literary reputation as an author of Gothic horror fiction. This frequently anthologized tale exemplifies the central themes of Jackson’s fiction, which include such ordinary yet grotesque realities as prejudice, psychological malaise, loneliness, and cruelty. In works that often contain elements of conventional Gothic horror, Jackson chronicles the universal evil underlying human nature. Her relatively impassive prose style belies the nihilism of her outlook; similarly, the charming hamlets that serve as settings for her tales contrast with the true malevolence of their inhabitants. “The Lottery” opens on a lovely June morning when the citizens of a tranquil village gather in the town square for an annual drawing. Amidst laughter and gossip, families draw slips of paper from a ballot box until housewife Tessie Hutchinson receives the paper with a black mark on it, and the villagers stone her to death as a ritual sacrifice. The shocking impact of this unanticipated ending is intensified by Jackson’s casual, detached narrative and serene setting. Jackson was perpetually intrigued with the powers of the mind, and her fiction is replete with psychological insights. Her protagonists are frequently forlorn, socially misfit young women who undergo turbulent passages into adulthood. The Haunting of Hill House (1959) is at once considered Jackson’s most powerful exploration of individual loneliness and her greatest work of horror fiction. Eleanor Vance is one of four individuals who is asked to come to Hill House in order to investigate the possibility of paranormal phenomena there. It rapidly becomes clear that Eleanor’s loneliness and weakness of will make her unusually susceptible to the influences at the house. In effect, the house subsumes her: she identifies herself with the house and its previous occupants, and the supernatural manifestations make it clear that she will not be allowed to leave. She attempts to drive away, but the car crashes into a tree and she dies. Jackson possessed more than 200 books on black magic and considered herself a practicing witch.

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beyond its connection with the sexual. A healthy branch of Metal music is overtly Satanic, beginning popularly with Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore,” from their untitled fourth album, and extending through Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” to the lyrics of present-day Ozzie Osborn, former lead singer for Black Sabbath. The late 1960s was the beginning of outright Satanism in the Rock format, I should say, since the Devil has long been a powerful character in the Blues lyric, another ancestor of both mainstream Rock and Heavy Metal; this diabolical lineage has been noted by almost every critic to write on either the Rock genre or its Heavy Metal subgenre.3 The Blues lyrics of Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Skip James, and particularly of Robert Johnson were filled with references to Satan, as in Johnson’s line, “Hello, Satan, I believe it’s time to go,” to such a degree that the Blues became known as “Devil’s music.”4 These references continued to thrive in the later Zeppelin and other Heavy Metal lyrics, building up a myth of the Heavy Metal band as necessarily Satanic. The rumor of “back-masking” on “Stairway to Heaven,” (Led Zeppelin, Untitled) supposedly designed to record the statement, “I worship you, my Satan,” backward throughout the song, was no doubt spurred by this overarching myth of the Satanic within the Blues. It is especially interesting that the Satan-hunters felt it necessary to play “Stairway to Heaven” backward in search of the satanic message, when the song preceding it on the album, “The Battle of Evermore,” constitutes an openly Satanic epic battle, even played forward.5 As Pattison explains, however, the occult underpinnings of the Blues mythology as embraced by Heavy Metal bore only a marginal relationship to “reality”; in effect, occult references play on the already-established mythology in order to forge a sense of the subversive more than through any “real” belief in Satan or occult practices. Pattison argues that the players of both Rock and Heavy Metal are quite aware that their occult is a myth (30-55).6 To put it differently, the occult serves merely as a sign-system within which Satanic references signify, in one sense, only “subversion.” What would be the point of an admittedly empty myth, then? To fly in the face of established—mass cultural—mythologies, just as Gothic fiction, particularly in its “school of horror” phase, attempted to supply a shock element to carve out an identity in contradistinction to, not simply as one variation upon, mainstream culture. As Peter Wicke notes, subcultures within “highly developed capitalism” may express “disG O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1

In 1984, the New York Daily News ran an Associated Press story under the headline, “Satan-Rock Girl Murdered Mom”: “A teenage girl who a prosecutor said was involved with her boyfriend in Satanism and heavy-metal rock music has been convicted of murdering her mother, former chairman of a group dedicated to stopping violence in the home.” To make matters worse, her boyfriend “had orange hair.” (175)

The orange hair is the give-away: that the Associated Press found the boyfriend’s hair color relevant speaks to consumer culture’s deep fear of the subculture as it takes the subculture’s bait. To some extent, this bait merely enforces “difference.” It is in this respect that the two sub-popular forms under discussion represent “subgenre” par excellence, and here that they become more than just examples of generic behavior. The subgenre differs in kind from a “movement,” such as Imagism in the early twentieth century, which differs from its parent genre, Modernism, only in degree. A movement lifts out a select number of the parent genre’s characteristics, to magnify and elaborate those few characteristics. Alastair Fowler’s definition of subgenre, in fact, more closely approximates what I see as the behavior of a movement: “such groups have a relatively simple logical relation [to the parent genre]: their features are more or less disjunct subsets of the sets of features characterizing kinds . . . external forms and all” (112). The subgenre, I believe, while it is a “disjunct subset,” is labelled “sub-” in the vernacular not without reason. It positively revolts against many of the parent form’s “external forms,” and in a sort of adolescent rage, pits itself against the very universe its parent inhabits, retaining only the family resemblance. Gothic fiction and Heavy metal epitomize this subgeneric behavior because they manifest the “sub-” in several conceptions: subversive, substandard, subliminal and, if one takes the parent genres’ form as the “well-made” standard, substandard. These two “Satanic” offspring go to great lengths to define and illustrate “difference,” and further, a difference “beneath,” hidden under the socially acceptable. This difference, however, does not merely indicate the rebelliousness of youth (although it is that—remember that Lewis was eighteen when he wrote The Monk), nor does it merely signify “subversion,” but more subtly implies a critique

of the mainstream culture it exists within, a critique manifested in the very Satanism which appears to be a mythology emptied of its value. If the subculture, expressed through the subgenres of Heavy Metal and Gothic fiction, rebels through excess in a kind of parody of the mass movements surrounding it, its rebellion is of a deeply conservative nature, one which rejects the ideology that can take part so willingly in mass production and consumption. The now-commodifed genres are ridiculed and rejected by their subgenres for the commodification itself, for their own emptiness of value, while the subgenres Gothic fiction and Heavy Metal attempt to reinsert absolute value into the apparently value-less free-play of commodity consumption. Absolute value, in this case, is not positive or “religious,” yet it does pretend to worship a deity, thereby subscribing to the concept of transcendence. This mythology reinscribes an essential value outside of, or prior to, the alternating currents of supply and demand which equate value with capital and makes valuable only that which sells, in what Dana Polan terms “a spectacle of superficiality” (46). The absolute value asserted by these subgenres, then, can only be spiritual, and then only in the Emersonian sense, in which the non-material is placed in the position of power. The devil positively causes destruction in the Gothic novel; and the devil is the source of energy in “The Battle of Evermore,” as is Blake’s Satan in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. To be sure, this Satan does destroy—usually individual lives in the Gothic novel, sometimes entire civilizations in Heavy Metal lyrics—but its power is nevertheless spiritual, asserting itself against the Hallmark-card “spiritualism” of commodity culture, the one that pays lip-service to a God who likes everyone equally and wants “only the best” for everyone. Through this “alternate” spirituality, the Satanic impulse bears out the remarkable ability of popular audiences to make meaning of those products presented as empty form, little more than advertising, whether the ad is for bourgeois moral virtues or for Reeboks. As Paul Willis writes, Though the whole commodity form provides powerful implications for the manner of its consumption, it by no means enforces them. Commodities can be taken out of context, claimed in a particular way, developed and repossessed to express something deeply and thereby to change somewhat the very feelings which are their product. And all this can happen under the very nose of the dominant class—and with their products. (6)

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tance through excess” (84). The “horror” of excess, regarding both genres, is best expressed in a news item retailed by Pattison as indicative of actual mass cultural response to the “cult” of Heavy Metal:

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To witness this active reinscription of the commodified into an alternate universe of spiritual, albeit retrograde, power, is to return some modicum of power to the otherwise passive receiver of popular genres: the young female of the late eighteenth century, reading novels in place of being educated, or the young male or female sitting in front of MTV.7 So how far can we push the analogy between Gothic fiction of the eighteenth century and the Heavy Metal beginning in the late 1960s? Historically, the movements are entirely of a piece: both arose on the heels of new and hugely popular forms of cheap entertainment intended for the amusement of the masses. And as we have seen, both subgenres of those more popular, more widespread forms took shape by intensifying the focus of the parent-genres, by perverting the structure of the parent-genres through appeals to a lower order of sensibility and by making literal what was euphemized in the parent-genres. In effect, both Gothic fiction and Heavy Metal represent a return of the repressed—a once-again, newly repressed freedom of form and sexuality— emerging in the wake of supposedly revolutionary genres whose radicalism had become hegemonic manifestations of the larger culture and who, as a result, had lost their power to move. Naturally, both Gothic fiction and Heavy Metal music succumbed to the very influences they initially set out to subvert. Naturally, that is, because both subgenres belong to already co-opted discourses, those parent-genres which exist, or existed in the past, only by virtue of participation in commercial culture. By definition, those coopted discourses can be defined only in terms of their production/consumption matrix, what Mary Poovey describes, discussing Rock music, as the mutual dependence of the product with its advertisement (615-16). Fredric Jameson describes Rock music and Gothic fiction alike, in their popular natures, likewise as products of “late capitalism”; as “products,” they may only produce subgenres that must finally grow into products as well, in order to survive in a consumer culture. Gothic fiction and Heavy Metal both became instant successes, so much so that as early as 1803 Jane Austen was to publish Northanger Abbey, the first widely-known parody of the Gothic form. Heavy Metal has likewise been parodied—most successfully in the 1984 Rob Reiner film This Is Spinal Tap—but has, more importantly, been imitated extensively and without variation, possibly more than any other Rock genre. As a result, popular Heavy Metal productions can be nearly indistin-

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guishable from each other. At the same time, some of Heavy Metal’s subversive impulse has cooled, resulting in the shortened form and euphemistic lyrics of its parent twenty years ago. A staple of the form has become, in fact, the love ballad, painfully sentimental and often as painfully selfreferential, as with Bon Jovi’s “Wanted, Dead or Alive,” which chronicles the life of the suffering Heavy Metal band on the road. With its quickness to imitate its own form, Heavy Metal, like Gothic fiction, as quickly has ceased to be a subversive, energized genre, and has instead become both a subject of parody and a product of ravenous consumer appetite. While Jameson’s description of this process sheds light on both the nature of the subgenre and the nature of consumerism, it is in the weakness of his (and others’—I only take Jameson as a leading voice of ideological criticism) label “postmodernism” that we may discover the power of the subgenre as an activity. Jameson aptly describes the “new” of any genre as “ugly, dissonant, bohemian, sexually shocking” to the prevailing bourgeois culture, noting simply that that newness, in becoming co-opted, ceases to shock and opens a space for a yet-newer genre to come along and make its noise (27). However, he goes on, the postmodern newness is of a different order; “it is not just another word for the description of a particular style” (15). Jameson insists, in fact, that the postmodern is indeed what it sounds like: “a periodizing concept” which describes such a high degree of integration among production, product and consumption that it can take place only in the historical era of late capitalism. Which returns us to the question of Gothic fiction. If what I have argued is correct—that both Gothic fiction upon its first arrival and Heavy Metal Music are by definition subgeneric because they assert the transcendent spiritual against a prevailing commodification, and that they both succumbed to weakened stylization in capitulating to consumer demands—then what Jameson describes as “postmodern” cannot be a periodizing concept, rather, must be “the description of a particular style,” since the first Gothic fiction arrived, not in a period of late capitalism, but during the boom years of emergent Western capitalism. The Gothic fiction Jameson refers to, in fact, is a “paraliterature” in his terminology, an “airport paperback category” (14). Jameson’s Gothic fiction, it turns out, is not the historical Gothic fiction of this essay, but is instead a genre uprooted from its “periodized” moorings. Jameson’s “airport Gothic” is the

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There are, of course, distinguishing features of postmodernism, in particular the species of “hyperspace” Jameson identifies in the postmodern “texts” of architecture and novel; I do not wish, therefore, to disempower the term altogether. I have attempted, instead, to re-historicize the discussion of commodity culture: to identify the emergence of two subgenres I see as absolutely dependent upon the economic conditions within which they have prevailed, and thereby to describe the nature of “subgenre” itself, as it exists and existed historically, rather than elide historical necessity with the theoretizing gaze that would telescope all manner of texts, both genre and subgenre, into the space of the postmodern, in spite of their varying historical “ages.”9 What the Satanic subgenres do have in common, historically speaking, is their appearance during respective ages of cultural shift, at times of deep change which bring about a dual sense of belatedness and dread, an understanding that an “age” has passed and the new one is none other than chaos itself. As Raymond Williams argues in The Country and the City, there have been many ages of such shift, each of which views the just-passed age in its newly historicized or narrative form as unified in ideology and “whole” in the perception of its inhabitants. It matters little whether this deep change is “real,” as we have been taught by Foucault to believe of the late eighteenth century, or perceived but untested, as we speculate about the late twentieth century. What matters is that the emergent subgenre, attempting to assert a “nostalgic” value, responds to what is perceived as chaos—the necessary chaos of the ongoing—by thrusting at it a spiritual power of destructive force. But rather than privilege our own age by calling this phenomenon postmodern, it might

better be served under the label “the Henry Adams effect,” for it was Adams who best described the vertigo of experience in an as-yet-unstoried present. At the Great Exposition of 1900, “his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new” (382), Adams sounds like a guest of “postmodernism,” come to remind us of history: armed with instruments amounting to new senses of indefinite power and accuracy, while they chased force into hiding-places where Nature herself had never known it to be, making analyses that contradicted being, and syntheses that endangered the elements. . . . (389) In 1900 they were plainly forced back on faith in a unity unproved and an order they had themselves disproved. They had reduced their universe to a series of relations to themselves. (495)

Notes 1. For a more thorough description of Heavy Metal’s characteristics, see Robert L. Gross, “Heavy Metal Music: A New Subculture in American Society,” Journal of Popular Culture 24.1 (Summer 1990) 119-30. Gross notes that different critics “place” the origin of Heavy Metal with different bands and different times, but most agree on the years 1967-1968, and disagree only whether it was Led Zeppelin (1968) or Black Sabbath (1969) who recorded Heavy Metal first. Will Straw’s essay, “Characterizing Rock Music Culture: The Case of Heavy Metal,” On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (New York: Pantheon, 1990) also lays out some parameters of Heavy Metal, with more attention to its sociological, subcultural status. 2. For a good synopsis of the “School of Horror” within Gothic fiction, see Brendan Hennessay, The Gothic Novel (Essex: Longman, 1978) or Devendra Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence Disintegration and Residuary Influences (New York: Russell and Russell, 1957). 3. Just three among a score of commentators on this subject are Robert Gross, “Heavy Metal Music”; Janet Podell, ed., Rock Music in America Vol. 58.5 of The Reference Shelf (New York: Wilson, 1987); Robert Pielke, You Say You Want A Revolution (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1986). 4. For thorough discussions of Satan’s role in the Blues, see Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York: Viking, 1981). 5. The Blues influence on Led Zeppelin goes beyond the lyrics to instrumentation and even Robert Plant’s vocal style. Compare Palmer’s description of William Bunch (a.k.a. Peetie Wheatstraw, the devil’s son-inlaw, the High Sherrif from Hell) whose “distinctive calling card” was a “frayed timbre” embellished with a falsetto “ooh, well, well” (Palmer 114-15) to Plant’s equally falsetto moaning in several lyrics, especially the ending of “Kashmir” (Physical Graffiti [US: Swan Song, 1975]). Palmer likewise notes in passing one of Wheatstraw’s lyrics, in which he “advertised his sexual prowess” in graphic sexual description: “Well, the first woman I had, she made me get on my knees / And

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already co-opted product, already made imitative and already long past its prime; existing in the same culture as Heavy Metal music, this Gothic may indeed be a postmodern product, historically speaking. But the postmodern itself, pastiche in style, effacing of boundaries, particularly the boundaries of high-and mass-culture, and not least of all existing outside the categories of “art” and “taste”—this postmodernism, which Jameson among others insists results in a value-less culture of late capitalism, is precisely what I have described as “mainstream” culture against which the subgenre revolts.8 In other words, what Jameson has described as a late twentieth-century phenomenon was already emergent with capitalism itself, born with what Foucault has identified as a great epistemic upheaval in the late eighteenth century.

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had the nerve to ask me, ooh, well, well, if I liked limburgercheese” (Palmer 115-16). 6. The Satanic is, however, a myth taken seriously from time to time: note Palmer’s anecdote about Muddy Waters, who said he was afraid of Robert Johnson because of rumors that Johnson was in league with the devil, who supposedly taught him to play guitar during a year-long, mysterious absence from the Mississippi Delta. Waters said simply, “he was a dangerous man” (Palmer 111). 7. See Ann Kaplan’s Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture (London: Methuen, 1987) for a discussion of MTV’s now-central position within the world of Rock music. 8. See also Ann Kaplan, “Feminism/Oedipus/ Postmodernism: The Case of MTV,” Postmodernism and Its Discontents Theories, Practices, ed. Ann Kaplan (New York: Verso, 1988) 30-44. 9. I share some portion of this critique of postmodern theorizing with Jean-Francois Lyotard, who likewise argues that the postmodern age is not the first to assert an energy of subversion against prevailing culture; however, Lyotard tends to pit postmodernism only against modernist culture, where he discovers a similar movement, where I have preferred to reach backward to an earlier era, one more consonant with burgeoning capitalism. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 10 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984).

Works Cited Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. Boston: Houghton, n.d. Day, William Patrick. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy. Chicago, n.p.: 1985. Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. N.p., 1722. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Random, 1965. Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices. Ed. Ann Kaplan. New York: Verso, 1988. 13-29. Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Monk: A Romance (!). London: Bell, 1796. Maturin, Charles. Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale. London: Hurst and Robinson, 1820. Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. New York: Viking, 1981. Pattison, Robert. The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Polan, Dana. “Postmodernism and Cultural Analysis Today.” Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices. Ed. Ann Kaplan. New York: Verso, 1988. Poovey, Mary. “Cultural Criticism: Past and Present.” College English 52.6 (Oct. 1990). Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa Harlowe; or The History of a Young Lady. N.p., 1747-48.

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Straw, Will. “Characterizing Rock Music Culture: The Case of Heavy Metal.” On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word. Ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. New York: Pantheon, 1990. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. Three Gothic Novels. Ed. E.F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1966. Wicke, Peter. Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology. Trans. Rachel Fogg. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, Willis, Paul. Profane Culture. London: Routledge, 1978.

Discography The Beatles. “All You Need is Love.” Parlophone, 1967. “Elenor Rigby.” Capitol, 1966. “Hey Jude.” Apple, 1968. “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Parlophone, 1963. “She Loves You.” Parlophone, 1963. Blue Oyster Cult. “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” Columbia, 1976. Bon Jovi. “Wanted, Dead or Alive.” MCA, 1986. The Byrds. “Eight Miles High.” Columbia, 1966. Jethro Tull. “Velvet Green.” Songs From the Wood. Chrysalis, 1977. Led Zeppelin. “Dazed and Confused.” The Song Remains the Same. Swansong, 1976. Led Zeppelin I. Atlantic, 1968. Led Zeppelin III. Atlantic, 1970. Untitled. Atlantic, 1971. Lennon, John and Paul McCartney. “Give Peace a Chance.” Apple, 1969. Rolling Stones. “Satisfaction (I Can’t Get No).” Atlantic, 1965. The Who. “Squeeze Box.” MCA, 1975.

JAMES HANNAHAM (ESSAY DATE 1997) SOURCE: Hannaham, James. “Bela Lugosi’s Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Either: Goth and the Glorification of Suffering in Rock Music.” In Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art, edited by Christoph Grunenberg, pp. 118-92. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. In the following essay, Hannaham delineates the themes, artists, and works associated with the Gothic in rock music.

If rock and roll is just the blues with an emphasis on adolescent sex, then Goth rock is rock and roll with death and madness. Gothic imagery and influence has skulked at the margins of rock music for decades, and indeed the blues has plenty of subject matter in common with what came to be known, in the late 1970s and

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Even though blues songs might have dealt with death, madness, and loss, the blues were meant to be part testimony and part catharsis. Black blues singers wailed in order to explain and share their hardship, and by extension build a sympathetic society. In a similar way, one of the predecessors of the blues, the Negro spiritual, attempted to accomplish this feat in a more literal way. The spiritual was often used as a code to signal slave escapes, and its lyrics usually drew parallels between making a break for the promised land in heaven and stealing away to the promised land up north. Once rock and roll became the engine of American youth culture it remains today rather than simply “jungle music,” however, the social meaning of the blues was altered. To say that it had a positive or negative effect on the quality of the music is irrelevant. But when people who were fans of the blues rather than originators began to play it, this fact allowed for the subject matter of the blues to become an end in itself. The pain it described could not only be felt by the singer, but fetishized and focused inward as well. Pain could be treated not just as something to express, but something to strive for. As Shel Silverstein once sang, “What do you do if you’re young and white and Jewish. . . . And you’ve never spent the night in a cold and empty boxcar . . . and the only levee you know is the Levy who lives down the block?” The answer is, as Bob Dylan proved, you sing the blues anyway. It’s easy to forget that most white Americans first heard the blues and rock and roll created in their backyards only once it had been filtered through the ears of the British Invasion. It arrived, not sanitized, exactly, but translated, idealized, and somewhat abstracted. Not that England’s bluesmen couldn’t feel authentically disenfranchised or sad, but their sadness was the result of an entirely different environment than, say, your average Mississippi bluesman. But by the time it reached England, the form of the blues had been established. It then became possible for the most salient component of the blues—misery—to switch from impassioned declaration to a kind of rapture, a goal, the ultimate state of being for a blues singer. Chances are when a black American sang the blues, she just had them. When an Englishman did it, he also wanted them.

The simple glorification of suffering, of course, was not enough to give rise to the excesses of Gothic rock. For that, a certain degree of showmanship and capitalism was necessary. Gothic rock perhaps began with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ 1957 hit. “I Put a Spell On You,” which radio stations banned for his “cannibalistic” howling, supposedly the result of Hawkins’ intoxication during the recording session. Legendary DJ Alan Freed encouraged the natural showman Hawkins to milk the controversy for all it was worth, advising him to make his stage entrances from out of coffins (an act for which he later was paid five thousand dollars every time he performed it), dressed in high vampire style, with a black cape and a walking staff adorned with a skull. He eventually sold two million copies of the record and later quipped “I wish they’d ban all of my records.” As the late 50s and 60s progressed, rock and roll became the theater of the world. As pop stars got more ambitious and successful, following the Beatles’ example and turning their bands into entertainment industries in their own right that made films and stage shows and produced the work of other artists, their positions of wealth and power became ironic: they’d come to play rock music with the ideals of young rebels, determined to dismantle the system, only to be swallowed by it. Their creative output and personae were used by advertisers to sell products rather than change society. The hypocrisy in packaging grandiosity and teenage rebellion for mass consumption created another Gothic monster: Alice Cooper. Cooper, a minister’s son who named himself and his band after a girl at his Sunday school, was discovered by rock’s mad genius, Frank Zappa. Unlike Zappa, however, Alice Cooper the band was not known for musicianship, but for its bizarre theatricality. Audiences at Alice Cooper shows were regularly treated to mock chicken slaughtering, simulated autoerotic erections and fake blood. In a particularly notable dramatization of his epic song “Dead Babies,” Cooper, made up in the runny black mascara that became his trademark, brought out hundreds of plastic dolls and dismembered them, to the delight of his audience. Cooper’s antics may have shocked people, but his Grand Guignol rock-theater seemed rooted deeply enough in the realm of fantasy to let his audience retain a sense of order. Cooper himself, born Vincent Furnier, was usually quick to make a distinction between his onstage and offstage images. “My posture changes when I become Alice, even my voice,” he told Kerrangg! in 1987.1 “It’s like a possession—well, I wouldn’t call it posses-

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early 80s, simply as “Goth.” Its less-than-subtle influences streamed from the Gothic novels of the nineteenth century as well as contemporary horror films, especially 1950s B-movies.

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zard’s description of how to appreciate a Goth classic: “You can totally emerge yourself in the music, the consuming power of this song. This conjures up images of horror films, dark skies, castles and forbidden vaults. The lyrics are of a vampire nature and intoxicate you.”2 Goth inspired a euphoric if cheesy utopianism rather than heavy metal’s warlike feudalism. At the same time, punk flicked its emotional switch from anger to depression, and became more atmospheric in the process. But not all atmospheric post-punk bands sported Goth fashion, and not every death-rocker played atmospheric post-punk. The careers of the most successful atmospheric post-punk bands—The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, New Order, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance—tended to be long and uneven, ranging stylistically from New Order’s “death disco” to Dead Can Dance’s Middle Eastern and medieval-influenced ragas. The Cure switched gears a number of times, from snappy power pop to ponderous dirges to happy ditties about being in love on a Friday.

Singer Alice Cooper performing on the In Concert television show on November 24, 1972.

sion but it is like being overcome with this character.” Offstage, Cooper is an avid golfer. His character, Alice Cooper, the iconoclastic, genderbending social misfit, not only exorcised Furnier’s personal demons, but channeled that suffering into a larger-than-life cartoon of pain. Furnier created in himself a grotesque rock star that symbolized music industry excess, self-absorption, cult of personality—in short, he took counterculture to its illogical extreme. Cooper’s influence remains one of rock’s biggest triumphs of style-oversubstance. That same style-over-substance turned into the albatross around the neck of the particular branch of subculture that emerged from punk in 1978 and later become known as “Goth.” In fact, it’s difficult to distinguish between “Goth” and “post-punk,” for the simple reason that Goth is more of a fashion statement than a coherent musical style. In the period from 1978 to about 1984, hundreds of bands dyed their hair black, wore black lipstick and white pancake makeup, black lace and chains. Despite stylistic similarities, heavy metal music remained separate from this phenomenon; in fact, the two genres can be said to have divided along gender lines. Heavy metal was aggressive, sexist and therefore “masculine,” while Goth had a softer, more accepting, “feminine” cast. You can hear it in “Goth-chick” Claudia Haz-

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Punk and Goth were indistinguishable at first. In 1976, at age 17, Siouxsie Sioux, the Ur-Goth, was part of a clique of Sex Pistols fans known as The Bromley Contingent, famed for their outrageous modes of dress. At the time, Sid Vicious of the Pistols was drumming for an early incarnation of Siouxsie and the Banshees that had played an either disastrous or cathartic date at London’s 100 Club: A wall of noise illuminated the fact that no one could play. Siouxsie said the Lord’s Prayer. The melange lasted 20 minutes. They walked off, bored. “She is nothing if not magnificent,” Caroline Coon wrote at the time. “Her short hair, which she sweeps in great waves over her head, is streaked with red like flames. She’ll wear black plastic non-existent bras, one mesh and one rubber stocking and susbender belts all covered by a polka dotted transparent plastic mac.” Another observer said that the set was “unbearable.”3

Already, those enraptured by the visual rather than musical aspects of punk began to idolize Siouxsie. When The Bromley Contingent made their way into the studio audience when the Pistols played the Today show, the rules changed. “From that day on,” Sex Pistol Steve Jones recalled, “It was different. Before then it was just music— the next day it was the media.”4 Once they’d given punk a name, Siouxsie wanted no part of it. Avidly anti-establishment, The Banshees had taken two years to land a record deal despite their high profile, partially because

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Siouxsie and the Banshees’ material took a turn from punk’s habit of rooting out poser hypocrites—“Too many critics / Too few writing” she summed up in “Love in A Void” (Kaleidoscope, 1979)—to obsessions with madness and exotica. For the center of a scene whose fashion and contrary stance idealized and emulated old horror films and witches, the powerful vibrato howl that won Siouxsie “best female singer” polls in the British music press for years running became the siren song. Her heavy black makeup, tangled pile of black hair and smear of red lipstick, pioneered during gigs when Cure leader Robert Smith became the Banshees’ guitarist for a while, became a trademark of 80s “new wave.” Rock and roll’s Gothic undercurrents, however, have rarely merged their dramatic elements—think vampires—with their purely existential ones. Everyone feels a certain amount of alienation, mental stress, and fear of death. However, not everyone puts on white pancake makeup, black lipstick, teases their hair and then gets onstage and sings about it. The requisite adornment that goes hand in hand with a “Gothic” aesthetic, as rock and roll defines it, calls the sincerity of the wearer into question. They’ve dealt with their feelings of alienation from society by reinventing themselves as “monsters.” The observer then wonders whether or not, in addition to the artifice meant to reinforce the message of the music, or as Morrissey puts it, wearing “black on the outside / ’Cause black is how I feel on the inside” (in the song “Unlovable,” Louder than Bombs, 1987), doesn’t in fact cancel out the sincerity of the wearer by further obscuring his or her identity. The pop culture legend that finds his way into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is an eloquent, unpretentious and genuinely tortured soul who can represent the pain of his listeners in the mass media—a secular Christ figure. It’s an extraordinary person from humble beginnings—the poorer the better—who lives his pain and often dies

young and/or tragically, à la John Lennon or Kurt Cobain. Except for his race, the archetypal rock icon remains essentially unchanged since the heyday of the blues. The more rock stars live up to their images, the more “real” they appear. Rap stars are held so closely to their outlaw standard that Snoop Doggy Dogg’s murder trial only raised his credibility, and Tupac Shakur was killed in a drive-by shooting. Goths, by turning death, madness and violence into archetypes, de-personalize their connection to horrific events. They position themselves as reporters or tour guides to the macabre, rarely its victims. Even when Siouxsie puts her own memory of an encounter with a child molester into song, she casts herself not as nine-yearold Susan Ballion, but as the sex offender, “Candyman” himself, who intones, “Oh trust in me my pretty one / Come walk with me my helpless one” (Tinderbox, 1986). When Peter Murphy of the seminal Goth band Bauhaus informs us in a scary voice that (as we already suspected), “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” or Siouxsie, decked out in Theda Bara exotica, serenades the victims of Mount Vesuvius, they emphasize the distance between their own pain and that which they describe. Their icy remove doesn’t leave us with the impression that it matters to them if Lugosi has passed away, or if the volcano petrified hundreds of Pompeii’s citizens under molten lava, merely with the feeling that death is forbidden, mysterious and therefore glamorous. Of course, any long-lived movement for whom fetishizing death is a primary directive must be, by necessity, taking this stance in the service of art. Those that truly had the courage of their convictions would simply kill themselves, or so the logic seems to go. If this is the case, Joy Division was the only atmospheric post-punk band that managed to combine the ideals of bluesstyle confessional of which legends are made with the bleak vision of Goth. As author and critic Jon Savage explains in his foreword to a biography of Joy Division’s lead singer Ian Curtis: [Joy Division’s] first album Unknown Pleasures, released in June 1979, defined not only a city [the depressed, postindustrial Manchester, England] but a moment of social change: according to writer Chris Bohn, they “recorded the corrosive effect on the individual of a time squeezed between the collapse into impotence of traditional Labour humanism and the impending cynical victory of Conservatism.”6

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their lead singer had made it a habit to insult record company executives in the audience. Fans were writing “Sign Siouxsie Now!” on the sides of record company buildings. By 1981 The Banshees had converged upon London’s legendary Batcave, the Soho establishment run by members of the band Specimen. “It was a lightbulb for all the freaks and people like myself who were from the sticks and wanted a bit more from life. Freaks, weirdos, sexual deviants . . . that’s very much the spirit of what the Batcave was,” former Specimen keyboardist Jonny Melton remarked.5

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Thus, death rock became a moot point on May 18, 1980, when Ian Curtis’ wife Deborah discovered that Ian had hanged himself in their kitchen, their phonograph’s stylus still stuck in the dry groove of a copy of Iggy Pop’s The Idiot in the next room. He was twenty-three. At the time, Joy Division was well on the way to becoming famous for a gloomy, impressionistic sound and lyrics that didn’t just describe feelings of doom and hopelessness but embodied them. Curtis’ suicide, coming on the heels of an attempt a month before, and at least one other when he was fifteen years old, put the stamp of authenticity on Joy Division’s dour oeuvre. At the time of Curtis’ suicide, the band’s discography consisted of a few EPs and only one full-length LP, the stark and lonely Unknown Pleasures. They’d completed their second, Closer, in March of that year, but had not yet released it. Amid much British music press fanfare, the band had made plans to embark on their first tour of the United States. Joy Division defined what Goth could have become. When they began in 1977, under the name Warsaw (later changed when they got word of a London band called Warsaw Pakt), their angular guitar hackery and fuzzbass echoed the Sex Pistols and The Buzzcocks. But by the time they recorded 1979’s Unknown Pleasures, the angsty minimalism of songs like “Digital” had given way a bit, to a slow, dreamy brooding heretofore unheard-of in punk rock. They began the switch from the energy and anger of 1976’s punk revolution to the self-pity that would characterize the new wave of the 80s. Plenty of bands had used echoey reverb before, but with the assistance of producer Martin Hannett, Joy Division pioneered its use as a metaphor for emptiness. Many Joy Division songs sound as if they were recorded in the deserted school buildings, abandoned factories, or under the lonely bridges of Manchester. These bleak soundscapes reinforced Curtis’ lyrics, which nakedly display his obsession with isolation. Curtis wasn’t simply describing the alienation of the individual from others and society, but the way in which numbness and surrender divide the self. On “New Dawn Fades,” he sang, “Oh, I’ve walked on water / Run through fire / Can’t seem to feel it anymore / It was me, waiting for me / Hoping for something more / Me, seeing me this time, hoping for something else” (Unknown Pleasures). Despite his youth, Curtis’ voice sounded old. He was off-key a great deal of the time, but his intonation had a haunting power and a creaky

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authority to it. It unevenly lurched from vulnerability to anger, from deadpan to melodrama. It was the perfect instrument to deliver his vision: shaky and unsure of itself, at times nearly conversational in tone, it said nothing if not that Ian Curtis was an ordinary man in extraordinary pain. Though Curtis’ pen touched on subjects like Nazi death camps (Joy Division was named for the term the Nazis used to describe women prisoners kept to be used as prostitutes) and, on “Atrocity Exhibition,” an insane asylum turned roadside attraction, his view of death leaned toward existentialism. “Existence, well what does it matter? / I exist on the best terms I can / The past is now part of my future / The present is well out of hand,” he sang on Closer’s “Heart and Soul.” In image, too, Joy Division lacked the theatrical pretensions of other bands that grew up alongside them and in their wake. Instead, they used funereal black-and-white photographs of religious statues on their record sleeves. They presented themselves on stage without referring to the glam-rock image-makers like T. Rex or David Bowie who influenced their peers, preferring to appear simply as regular if dull and remarkably disaffected working-class Mancunians. They were regular blokes who happened to be suicidal, a stance that contrasted heavily with the usual methods of incorporating Gothic influence into rock music. Despite their punk roots, they didn’t accessorize with makeup, safety pins or outrageous hair. Nothing was posed. Curtis had developed a reputation as an energetic live act, due in no small part to his epilepsy. His bandmates were not even fully aware of the degree to which he owed his stage presence to his seizures. As guitarist Bernard Sumner reminisced, “[Ian] had a fit and we went on, he was really ill and we did a gig. That was really stupid.”7 Curtis’ wife also observed: The fact that most of Ian’s heroes were dead, close to death or obsessed with death was not unusual and is a common teenage fad. Ian seemed to take growing up more seriously than the others, as if kicking against it would prolong his youth. He bought a red jacket to match the one James Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause. He wanted to be that rebel, but, like his hero, he didn’t have a cause either. Mostly his rebellion took the form of verbal objection to anyone else’s way of life.8

The restraint with which Curtis and Joy Division approached their misery, like their neighbors The Smiths after them, was one reason for the pervasiveness of their influence. Perhaps not all of the Goths who flocked to Joy Division’s posthumous releases, who dressed as creatures of the night to prove their love of death, really wanted

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Notes 1. TK, “TK,” Kerrangg! 1987.

Examines Gothic literature and film in order to evaluate interrelationships. Cox, Jeffrey N. Introduction to Seven Gothic Dramas: 17891825, edited by Jeffrey N. Cox, pp. 1-77. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1992. Provides an overview of the history of Gothic drama and an examination of its main features and themes. Evans, Bertrand. Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947, 257 p.

2. Quoted in Mick Mercer, Gothic Rock. Los Angeles: Cleopatra, 1993, p. 37.

Influential scholarly analysis of Gothic drama in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

3. Jessica Berens, “Portrait: The Masque,” Guardian Weekend Page (January 14, 1995).

———. “Manfred’s Remorse and Dramatic Tradition.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 62, no. 3 (September 1947): 752-73.

4. Ibid. 5. Mercer, Gothic Rock, p. 102. 6. Deborah Curtis, Touching From a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division. London: Faber and Faber, 1995, p. xii. 7. Ibid, p. 113. 8. Ibid, p. 5.

FURTHER READING Criticism Backscheider, Paula R. “Gothic Drama and National Crisis.” In Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England, pp. 149-88. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Maintains that the enormous popularity of Gothic drama can be accounted for by its ability to reproduce and contain the cultural anxieties that accompanied the political and social unrest in eighteenth-century England. Botting, Fred. “Signs of Evil: Bataille, Baudrillard and Postmodern Gothic.” Southern Review 27, no. 4 (December 1994): 493-510. Applies the theories of Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard to analysis of postmodern gothicism in the television series Twin Peaks and the film Angel Heart. Brederoo, N. J. “Dracula in Film.” In Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter Davidson, and Jane Stevenson, pp. 271-81. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. Surveys film adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Bunnell, Charlene. “The Gothic: A Literary Genre’s Transition to Film.” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 1984. Reprint, pp. 79-100. Lanham, Md. and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1996. Appraises Gothic films and maintains that there are aspects of Gothic literature that make it particularly amenable to screen adaptation, including the encouragement of active reader participation, the co-existence of both a diurnal and nocturnal worldview, and the use of “the setting, the journey, the double . . . , and the supernatural.” Collins, Michael J. “Culture in the Hall of Mirrors: Film and Fiction and Fiction and Film.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, pp. 110-22. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

Analyzes Lord Byron’s depiction of his dramatic hero in Manfred and its connection to remorse and the Gothic tradition. Forry, Steven Earl. “The Hideous Progenies of Richard Brinsley Peake: Frankenstein on the Stage, 1823 to 1826.” Theatre Research International 11, no. 1 (spring 1986): 13-31. Traces the history of Peake’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a Gothic drama. Franceschina, John. Introduction to Sisters of Gore: Seven Gothic Melodramas by British Women,1790-1843, pp. 1-13. New York: Garland, 1997. Examines the contributions of women playwrights to the Gothic genre. Gamer, Michael. “Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama.” ELH 66, no. 4 (winter 1999): 831-57. Examines the role of the authorial self as determined by literary reputation and social status in Gothic dramas by Sir Walter Scott and Matthew Gregory Lewis. Goddu, Teresa A. “Bloody Daggers and Lonesome Graveyards: The Gothic and Country Music.” South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 1 (winter 1995): 57-80. Considers the gothicism present in folk literature and bluegrass music. Gunn, Joshua. “Gothic Music and the Inevitability of Genre.” Popular Music and Society 23, no. 1 (spring 1999): 31-50. Discusses genre formation in popular music and uses Gothic or “goth” music “to illustrate the way genres are constructed through the discussions of fans and artists.” Hogle, Jerrold E. “The Culture of Adolescence: The Lloyd Webber Musical and the Adaptations that Paved the Way, 1962-1986.” In The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux’s Novel and its Progeny, pp. 173-204. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Comprehensive treatment of the underlying, and varying significance of the Phantom of the Opera through an analysis of the original novel by Leroux and the numerous adaptations it has spawned through the twenty-first century, as well as the cultural context surrounding each work. Hutchings, Peter. “Tearing Your Soul Apart: Horror’s New Monsters.” In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited and with an introduction by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, pp. 89-103. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.

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to die. They wanted a community of the living dead: a society that aligned itself with death because life was substandard. They wanted an Ian Curtis to die for them, so they wouldn’t have to discover for themselves that death had no sting.

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Discusses the portrayal of serial killers in such films as Halloween, The Silence of the Lambs, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Jerrentrup, Ansgar. “Gothic and Dark Music: Forms and Background.” World of Music 42, no. 1 (2000): 25-50.

Demonstrates how Joanna Baillie and Jane Scott utilized supernatural elements in Gothic drama to represent and comment upon scientific conceptions of the human body informed by early nineteenth-century innovations in medicine.

Asserts that “[w]ithin music-oriented youth subculture, the Gothics and Darks represent an extraordinary phenomenon” in Germany, and examines the music, lyrics, and accompanying cultural context.

Reno, Robert P. “James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest and Matthew G. Lewis’ The Castle Spectre: Challenges of the Supernatural Ghost on the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage.” Eighteenth-Century Life 9, no. 1 (October 1984): 95-106.

Morgan, Jack. The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002, 263 p.

Examines the treatment and staging of ghosts and supernatural elements in eighteenth-century dramatic works by James Boaden and Matthew Gregory Lewis.

Compares the treatment of the human body and the macabre in Gothic fiction and film. Morris, Nigel. “Metropolis and the Modernist Gothic.” In Gothic Modernisms, edited by Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace, pp. 188-206. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave, 2001. Examines the gothicism and modernism in Fritz Lang’s science fiction film Metropolis. Mulvey, Laura. “The Pre-Oedipal Father: The Gothicism of Blue Velvet.” In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited and with an introduction by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, pp. 38-57. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Discusses Blue Velvet, a film by David Lynch, in terms of its treatment of tension between conscious and unconscious thought and the Oedipal narrative. Pérez Riu, Carmen. “Two Gothic Feminist Texts: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and the Film, The Piano, by Jane Campion.” Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos 22, no. 1 (June 2000): 163-73. A feminist analysis of the Gothic elements in the novel Wuthering Heights and in the film The Piano. Pirie, David. A Heritage of Horror: the English Gothic Cinema, 1946-1972. London: Gordon Fraser Gallery Ltd., 1973, 192 p. Wide-ranging study of gothicism in English literature and English horror films. Includes many film stills and comprehensive filmographies. Purinton, Marjean D. “Science Fiction and Techno-Gothic Drama: Romantic Playwrights Joanna Baillie and Jane Scott.” Romanticism On the Net, no. 21 (February 2001): .

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Riley, Michael. “Gothic Melodrama and Spiritual Romance: Vision and Fidelity in Two Versions of Jane Eyre.” Literature/Film Quarterly, no. 3 (1975): 145-59. Compares film adaptations of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. Roberts, Marilyn. “Adapting Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey: Catherine Morland as Gothic Heroine.” In Nineteenth-Century Women at the Movies: Adapting Classic Women’s Fiction to Film, edited and with an introduction by Barbara Tepa Lupack, pp. 129-39. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Discusses Giles Foster’s television adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Stovel, Bruce. “Northanger Abbey at the Movies.” Persuasions: Journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America 20 (1998): 236-47. Surveys film and television adaptations of Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey. Stuart, Roxana. Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19th Century Stage. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994, 377 p. Comprehensive study of the depiction of vampires in stage dramas during the nineteenth century. Includes discussions of specific plays and films, origins, themes, satire, and misogyny. Also includes biographical material, a filmography, and cast lists. Thorp, Willard. “The Stage Adventures of Some Gothic Novels.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 43, no. 2 (June 1928): 476-86. Discusses strategies employed by Gothic playwrights to minimize the effects of the horrors they were staging.

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he dominant style of architecture in Europe from the twelfth century to the sixteenth century was first classified as “Gothic” by art critics and architects such as Giorgio Vasari and Sir Christopher Wren in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively. The term was applied disparagingly, derived from “Goth,” the common term for the fourth- and fifth-century Tuetonic invaders who were viewed as cruel barbarians. It is commonly held that the style originated in France c. 1100 with the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis, designed by Abbot Suger of Saint Denis. The Gothic style in architecture is characterized by vaulted ceilings, “flying” buttresses, and pointed arches, and stems from the desire among medieval architects to create earthly structures that reflected a sense of inspired, divine beauty. Gothic sculpture, which also began in France during this same period and appeared largely as decorative elements adorning Gothic structures, reflects the inspiration of the divine, but incorporates as well the beginnings of a humanist approach, with figures engaged in a search for meaning in their daily lives. Gothic period sculpture retained the religious and theological themes of the Romanesque period that preceded it, but focused closely on the depiction of mortal figures as pious and physically beautiful. Gothic sculpture became more and more naturalistic as the style spread through Europe, and included celebrations

of the humanity (rather than the divinity) of such revered religious figures as the apostles, the Madonna, and Jesus Christ. Gothic painting began sometime during the early thirteenth century in France, England, and then Germany, and toward the end of the thirteenth century in Italy. The four forms of painting to which the delicate and linear, yet vibrant and lush Gothic style was applied were frescoes, panel paintings, manuscript illumination, and stained glass. As with Gothic sculpture, Gothic painting and stained glass were largely commissioned to enhance Gothic architecture, with the exception of manuscript illumination, which grew out of a movement toward a more secular society, the growth of cities, the expansion of trade, the founding of universities, increased literacy, and the expansion of the bourgeois class. Art was no longer limited to works commissioned by church and aristocratic patrons, and as artists were increasingly required to obtain membership in a trade guild, their works became shaped by their participation in apprenticeships with established artists. The Gothic style fell out of favor during the sixteenth century, with the dawn of the Renaissance. The Gothic Revival period in art and architecture began near the middle of the eighteenth century in England, and was characterized by an interest in exploring the same human-

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divine (or supernatural) connections found in the works of Gothic-period artisans. The Romantics’ interest in classicism spurred an interest in studying the past, but rather than the Romantics’ focus on the ancient Greeks to study democratic ideals, the nationalism of the participants in the Gothic Revival led them to concentrate on their own heritage. The desire to define and (sometimes) glorify the ideals of “Old Europe” by erecting structures and producing artwork in the medieval Gothic style ran parallel to this same desire as expressed in Gothic literature. Horace Walpole’s Gothic cottage, Strawberry Hill (c. 1750-76) in Twickingham, England is one of the most famous examples of Gothic Revival architecture, and has been equally admired and disparaged by commentators for centuries. Other dominant figures in the Gothic Revival in England include architect A. W. N. Pugin, art historians and critics Batty and Thomas Langley, and designer Richard Bentley. Gothic Revival art and architecture in the United States were heavily influenced by the literature of Gothic writers, particularly the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Major American Gothic Revival architects included Alexander Jackson Davis and Ralph Adams Cram. American Gothic painters, such as Washington Allston, David Gilmour Blythe, and Thomas Cole depicted the darker side of the American cultural and natural landscapes.

William Atkinson Abbotsford [architect] (residence of Sir Walter Scott) 1812-15

David Gilmour Blythe Art versus Law (painting) 1860 The Hideout (painting) c. 1863

Hieronymus Bosch Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins (painting) 1485 The Garden of Earthly Delights (triptych painting) c. 1500 The Temptation of St. Anthony (triptych painting) c. 1500 The Last Judgment (triptych painting) c. 1504

Thomas Cole Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (painting) 1828 Ruined Tower (painting) c. 1836

Ralph Adams Cram St. Thomas’s Church, New York City [architect] (church) 1906-14 Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago [architect] (church) 1911-37 Swedenborgian Cathedral at Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania [architect] (cathedral) 1913-17 The Substance of Gothic: Six Lectures on the Development of Architecture from Charlemagne to Henry VIII (art history) 1917; second edition, 1925

REPRESENTATIVE WORKS

Alexander Jackson Davis

Washington Allston

Glen Ellen, Maryland [architect] (residence of Robert Gilmor III) c. 1832

Tragic Figure in Chains (painting) 1800 Belshazzar’s Feast (painting) 1817-43

Andrea Pisano Baptisery, Florence, Italy [sculptor] (bronze doors) c. 1329-36 Campanile of the Florentine Cathedral Florence, Italy [sculptor] (marble reliefs) 1337-40

Anonymous Cathedral of Notre Dame at Chartres, France [architect] (cathedral) c. 1194-1220

Arnolfo di Cambio Santa Croce, Florence, Italy [architect] (cathedral) c. 1294-1310 Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, Italy [architect] (cathedral) c. 1296-1310 Palazzo della Signoria, Florence, Italy [architect] (cathedral) c. 1299-1310

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Robert De Luzarches, Thomas de Cormont, and Regnault de Cormont Cathedral of Amiens, France [architects, c. 1220-35, c. 1240-80, and c. 1280, respectively] (cathedral) c. 1220-80

Jean D’Orbais, Jean (le) Loup, Gaucher de Rheims, Bernard de Soissons, and Robert de Coucy Notre Dame de Rheims, France [also known as Rheims Cathedral; architects] (cathedral) c.1211

Master Elias of Dereham Salisbury Cathedral, England [designer] (cathedral) c. 1220-80

Henry Fuseli The Nightmare (painting) 1781

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William of Sens

Church of Sankt Jakob at Straubing, Germany [architect] (cathedral) c. 1395

Canterbury Cathedral, London, England [architect] (cathedral) c. 1175-78

Church of Heilig Geist at Landshut, Germany [architect] (cathedral) c. 1407 Franciscan church at Salzburg, Germany [architect] (cathedral) c. 1409

Henry of Reynes Westminster Abbey, London, England [first architect] (cathedral) c. 1245

Batty and Thomas Langley Ancient Architecture Restored and Improved (art history) 1742; second edition published as Gothic Architecture Improved, 1747

Nicola Pisano

PRIMARY SOURCES JOHN HENRY PARKER (ESSAY DATE 1849) SOURCE: Parker, John Henry. “The Renaissance, and Jacobean Gothic.” In An Introduction to the Study of Gothic Architecture. 1849. 14th edition, 1902. Reprint, pp. 212-16. Wakefield, England: EP Publishing, 1978. The following excerpt is from the 1902 edition of Parker’s comprehensive study of the history of Gothic architecture, originally published in 1849. In it, Parker surveys the precursors to the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival.

Pisa Baptisery Pulpit, Pisa, Italy (sculpture) 1259 Arca di San Domenico in San Domenico, Bologna, Italy (sculpture) 1264-67 Altar of St. James in Pistoia Cathedral (sculpture) 1278 Siena Cathedral Pulpit, Siena, Italy (sculpture) 1265-68

A. W. N. Pugin Contrasts (art history) 1836; second revised edition, 1841 Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (art history) 1843 St. Augustine’s Church, Ramsgate, England [architect] (church) c. 1844 St. Edmund’s College Chapel, Ware, England [architect] (church) c. 1844-53

Claus Sluter Tomb of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy (sculpture) c. 1389-1406 The Well of Moses (sculpture) c. 1395-1403 Chapel of Chartreuse (portal sculptures) c. 1397

Suger of Saint Denis Abbey Church of Saint-Denis, France [architect] (cathedral) c. 1127-44

Maurice de Sully Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, France [first architect] (cathedral) c. 1163

Horace Walpole, Richard Bentley, John Chute, and others Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, England [designers and architects] (Walpole’s residence) c. 1750-76

The Renaissance. After the time of Henry the Seventh the style loses its purity; indeed, at that time we find Italian features introduced, though sparingly, among the true Gothic, and these become more numerous in the reign of his successor. In foreign countries the Classical or Pagan styles were revived at an earlier period than with us. The French call it the style of the “Renaissance.” The Elizabethan style is a singular mixture of Gothic and Italian details; it is almost confined to domestic buildings, but may occasionally be found in additions and alterations of churches, as at Sunningwell, Berkshire. In the time of James the First a strenuous effort was made to revive the Gothic style, more especially in Oxford, and although the details are poor and clumsy imitations, the general effect is frequently very good. Of this period the Schools are a good example, especially the vaulted room called the “Pig Market,” Lincoln College Chapel is also a very favourable specimen of Jacobean Gothic, as it is often called. The choir of Wadham College Chapel is another very remarkable example, the design and details of which are so good that it would appear incredible that it could be of this period, but for the fact that the weekly accounts kept by the clerk of the works for the foundress are preserved among the records of the college, and leave no room for doubt on the subject. It is still more extraordinary that the windows of the hall and ante-chapel were erected at the same time, week by week, by another gang of men: the inferiority of taste displayed in them would make them appear at least fifty years later. At first sight it would

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Hanns von Burghausen

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ SUGER OF ST. DENIS (1081-1151)

A highly capable administrator, Suger, abbot of St. Denis and royal adviser to King Louis VI, was very successful in rebuilding the fortunes of St. Denis. He recorded his activities in Liber de rebus in administration sua gestis (Book on the Things Accomplished during his Administration). In 1127 he set about reforming the abbey and the lives of its monks, who had acquired a reputation for worldliness under Suger’s predecessor. The most visible and lasting result of his energetic reforms was the restoration, under his supervision, of the abbey church. The existing church had been erected about four hundred years earlier and had fallen into disrepair. The restored church would become a model for all of Europe and for the new architectural style, Gothic. It featured innovations like ribbed vaults, the predominance of pointed arches, and the use of rose windows and other instances of stained glass; some of these innovations are attributed to Suger himself. The restoration involved a lengthy three-stage process. In 1144 the final stage was completed, and the choir was dedicated to St. Denis. In contrast to the darker, lessopen churches of Romanesque style, the choir magnificently exhibits the potentials of glass and light. In his Liber de rebus in adminsratione sua gestis Suger records the inscription on the doors of the church, typical of the symbolism of the new Gothic style, with an aesthetic based on Dionysian Neoplatonic theory: “The noble work is bright, but being nobly bright it should brighten the mind, allowing it to travel from [earthly] light to the true light, where Christ is the true door.” . . . In addition to his career as abbot and royal advisor, Suger was a minor historian, composing biographies of Louis VI and Louis VII. He died at the age of seventy on 13 January 1151. SOURCE: “Suger of St. Denis.” In World Eras, Vol. 4: Medieval Europe (814-1350), pp. 91-3. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2001.

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appear impossible that these two buildings, so very different in style, can be of the same period, but we must remember that there was always “an overlapping of the styles.” Some people would build in the old-fashioned way, and others in the new-fashioned way, so that for the space of perhaps five-and-twenty years a building may be in the style of the fathers or of the sons. The oldfashioned style went out of use gradually, not suddenly; this is the case now, and it has always been so. The cast window of Jesus College Chapel, Oxford, as seen from the Turl, might very well be supposed to be the work of the fifteenth century, if we judged by the design only. Oriel College Chapel, erected at the same time, is in very inferior taste. Specimens of fan-tracery vaulting of this period are numerous in Oxford, chiefly over the entrance porch or gateway of the colleges; but by far the most elegant and remarkable example is the vault over the staircase to the hall of Christ Church: this was built about 1640, as appears from the evidence of Antony Wood, who was living at the time, and from the royal arms in the vault having Scotland quartered in them. The elegance of the design of this vault springing from the slender pillar in the centre is much and justly admired, but an examination of the details of the work shews that it is extremely shallow and poor; it is an evidence of how much may be done by good design even with bad detail. In London, the hall of the Archbishop’s Palace at Lambeth, and Middle Temple hall, copied at Lincoln’s Inn in 1860, may be mentioned as good examples of this imitation. Another attempt at the revival of Gothic was made in the time of Charles the Second; it was still less successful in the details, but even then many of the designs were good. There are many towers of this period of very good proportions, though of very clumsy details. The towers of Westminster Abbey may perhaps be cited as an instance, for although the detail is wretchedly bad, the general effect at a distance is good. It is remarkable also that the chancels built at this period are as large and deep as those of any earlier period; for instance, the chancel of Islip, Oxfordshire, built by the celebrated Dr. South1 . The idea of the divines of this period, under whose directions these churches were built, appears to have been that the chancel was the place for the celebration of the Holy Communion, and should bear the same proportion to the body of the church as the number of communicants to the G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1

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Ribbed vaults of the Nave of Basilique de Saint-Denis in Paris, France.

whole congregation. These churches were also usually furnished with credence-tables 2 , and lecterns, many of which remain. Even during the eighteenth century, when every kind of taste was at the lowest possible ebb, the people seem to have still retained a lingering wish for the imitation of Gothic or Christian forms, and many rude attempts may be seen in our country churches: and although the architects and builders considered it necessary to repress this taste, and make everything in the pseudo-Grecian or Pagan style, still the love for the Gothic would peep out here and there. The spire is essentially a Gothic feature, unknown to Classical art; yet many spires were rebuilt, and even new ones built, during this period. The spire of All Saints’ Church, Oxford, a fine example 3 , was built from the designs of Dean Aldrich, soon after 1700, and notwithstanding the purely Italian character of the building, there is a sort of Gothic tracery in the tower windows. The same curious and evidently unintentional mixture may be observed in the tower windows of the church of St. Clement Danes, Strand, which are of a common Gothic form.

Towards the close of that century arose the school of Horace Walpole and Batty Langley, which, however ridiculous it may appear to us now, served to keep alive the taste for Gothic forms, and paved the way for the revival which has taken so glorious a start in our own day, and to the improved character of which “The Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture” materially contributed, by acting on the minds both of the architects and of their patrons, and enforcing upon them the necessity for the careful study of ancient examples4 .

Notes 1. This historical example was unfortunately destroyed in 1860 (?), by what is falsely called restoration, which usually means the total destruction of every original feature and the substitution of the wretched improvement of some modern architect, who entirely despises and ignores the history of his art. 2. So called from the Italian credenza, a side-board. 3. This elegant and interesting spire was taken down in 1873, and rebuilt, being much out of repair and supposed to be dangerous. 4. The Oxford Architectural Society, established in 1839, was the earliest in the field, the Cambridge Camden

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Society was very nearly simultaneous with it, and the idea was rapidly taken up and followed subsequently in numerous other places; still it is only just to give Oxford the credit of having originated the movement. Upon the whole, this movement has done much good, although accompanied by much evil, occasioned by the exuberant zeal of young men eagerly setting about the “restoration” of their churches before they knew the proper mode of doing it, and before either architects or workmen were prepared for the work. In consequence of this unfortunate haste, many valuable specimens of ancient art have been irreparably destroyed, instead of being carefully preserved as models for future ages. At the time that the movement for the revival of the old English architecture began, it was almost impossible to get workmen to execute the details of it with any tolerable accuracy, all the prejudices of their education in their trade were against it. Much credit is due to Mr. Blore for his perseverance in establishing a school of workmen. This idea was afterwards taken up by others, and more recently the Architectural Museum was formed to supply the workmen with models, chiefly by the support of Mr. A. J. B. Beresford-Hope, M.P., who had been one of the leaders of the Cambridge Camden Society. The Oxford Society in 1860 changed its title to the “Oxford Architectural and Historical Society.” The object of this change is to connect the study of architecture with that of history, which now forms part of the course of study pursued at the University. It is obvious, on a very little consideration, that the architecture of every people is an essential part of its history, although it has hitherto been entirely neglected by historians. As the Oxford Society is now under the patronage of the Professors of Modern History and of Ecclesiastical History, we may venture to expect that this long neglect will be remedied, and that the history of architecture will form a regular part of the studies of the University.

OVERVIEWS LINDA BAYER-BERENBAUM (ESSAY DATE 1982) SOURCE: Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda. “The Relationship of Gothic Art to Gothic Literature.” In The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art, pp. 47-71. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. In the following essay, Bayer-Berenbaum explores the common elements of and connections between the Gothic in art and in literature.

Some critics have alluded to a superficial correspondence between Gothic architecture and literature, such as an analogy between the winding, subterranean hallways and the secret recesses of the mind, but the relationship between the two art forms is far more fundamental. Gothicism in art, as in literature, expresses a coherent aesthetic and philosophic perspective. The different aspects of Gothic art can be explained in terms of this

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underlying principle, and direct parallels can be drawn between Gothic techniques in art and in literature. The origins of Gothic architecture can be traced back to a particular style of ornamentation, and even in these early designs we detect the restless energy that characterizes Gothicism in both architecture and literature. In literature this energy fuels the compulsion that drives Gothic characters to pursue the objects of their curiosity or desires; it fosters a restlessness that leads them to wander into the realms of the unknown, and gives them the requisite strength to defy social prohibitions. In his work The Paradox of Cruelty, Philip Hallie emphasizes this type of drive: “Down to his core, the Gothic villain or the Devil he embodies is restless, ever-active energy, energy always intensified by single-mindedness.”1 This same frantic dis-ease is visually apparent in the linear design of early Gothic ornament and later in the Gothic cathedral. The earliest evidence of Northern ornament appears on the tombstones of Teutonic graves and subsequently in illuminated manuscripts and decorative carvings. This “linear fantasy” 2 is characterized by certain intertwining motifs, in earlier specimens the dot, line, and ribbon, and later the curve, circle, spiral, zigzag, and S-shape. The repertoire of motifs is extremely limited, but a great variety of combinations occurs. The shapes are knotted and twisted together in a frantic, springy, undulating pattern. They separate from one another, run parallel, and then cross again in a maze of latticed activity, producing “a fantastic spaghetti-like interlace”3 “whose puzzle asks to be unraveled, whose convolutions seem alternately to seek and avoid each other, whose component parts, endowed as it were with sensibility, captivate sight and sense in passionately vital movement.”4 The restlessness of the design is reminiscent of the sleepless, puzzled, tortured souls who populate the Gothic novel and of the equally devious and allusive reality their twisted minds contemplate. This compulsion and lack of peace characterize the Gothic in all forms, preventing relaxation and the lapse into partial awareness. Gothic nervousness quickens the senses as more of the mind becomes awake to more of the world. Even in its embryonic state, Gothic art displayed the type of agitation that would continue to appear in Gothic architecture and literature. The Gothic line can be described as both violent and unnatural, for it does not flow rhythmically back and forth in any sort of organic pattern. We could almost say that the Northern line

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On the other hand, the expression of Northern ornament does not directly depend upon us; we are met rather by a vitality which appears to be independent of us, which challenges us, forcing upon us an activity to which we submit only against our will. In short, the Northern line does not get its life from any impress which we willingly give it, but appears to have an expression of its own, which is stronger than our life.5

Worringer illustrates his psychological analysis of line with an example from children’s drawings. We can easily distinguish between the playful scribbling made by an idle youngster and the erratic, forceful, angry scribbles made by a disturbed child. We also know in ourselves the difference between the control exerted when doodling pleasurably and the desperation in frustrated scratchings. In the latter case we are overtaken by our emotions, and the course of our lines seems to follow a dictate of its own. In this sense Gothic ornament appears more emotional and less controlled than Classical ornament. Worringer terms the Northern line superorganic rather than simply nonorganic, indicating that the line surpasses measured configurations. When once the natural barriers of organic movement have been overthrown, there is no more holding back: again and again the line is broken, again and again checked in the natural line of its movement, again and again it is forcibly prevented from peacefully ending its course, again and again diverted into fresh complications of expression, so that, tempered by all these restraints, it exerts its energy of expression to the utmost until at last, bereft of all possibilities of natural pacification, it ends in confused, spasmodic movements, breaks off unappeased into the void or flows senselessly back upon itself.6

A force overcoming nature must be beyond nature, and so we speak of the supernatural in Gothic line. The theme of the unnatural or supernatural is certainly fundamental in Gothic literature, as is the sense of obstruction in the ordinary course of events. If we describe the Gothic line in art as repeatedly checked in the

flow of its movement and thus strengthened by its need to seek devious resolution, we have visually approximated the excess of energy bred by repression in the Gothic novel. Irresolute hopelessness, lack of escape, surrender in the face of despair, and an eventual turning upon the self are typical attitudes in Gothic literature. The Gothic character submits to the will of superior powers, be they internal or external, spirits or fate. Finally, Worringer speaks of “supersensuous activity” in Gothic art and of a need to be “freed from the direct feeling of thraldom to reality.”7 Worringer’s choice of words in Form in Gothic, as well as Andrew Martindale’s in Gothic Art, Marcel Aubert’s in The Art of the High Gothic Era, or Charles Moore’s in The Development and Character of Gothic Architecture, is remarkably applicable to Gothic literature when we consider that these art historians did not deal with Gothic literature or that literary critics had not distinguished any connection between Gothic art and literature beyond the use of the same word, which was considered an accident of etymology. Yet these art critics’ descriptions belie a more basic correspondence. Gothic art, like Gothic literature, suggests an expanded reality when it threatens to break through the confines of linear space in its twisting inward and outward. In the absence of restriction, the intensity of movement in Gothic ornament is actually a picture of the intense, wide-awake souls incarnate in Gothic novels. A total expansion of reality is impossible if we accept the limitations of a purely physical world. It is for this reason that Gothicism in literature stresses the spiritual, the penetration of the natural by the supernatural. Admittedly, it is more difficult for a comparable interpenetration of the physical and spiritual in a material art form as concrete as sculpture or architecture, but Gothic art has used every technique possible to minimize its physical restricitons. In other words, Gothic art attempts to dematerialize its composition in order to spiritualize its material components. The result achieved in art, as in literature, is the creation of a greater single reality in which the spiritual and physical merge. In Northern ornament, once again, the convolutions of the line threaten the confines of physical space and can thus be interpreted as asserting the spiritual. The line does not appear to be a product of its space; it defies containment. Whether we speak of the line as emotional, psychological, or spiritual, a dimension beyond the physical is implicit.

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is supernatural rather than natural, that it has surrendered to the fury of spirits dwelling within it, which drive it frantically first one way and then another in ecstatic, relentless activity. Wilhelm Worringer speaks of the unnatural quality of the Gothic line when he contrasts early Gothic ornament with Classical ornament. He describes Classical ornament as an extension of our sense of harmony. Classical man chooses the proportions within and around himself that he finds most pleasing and consciously, carefully applies them to his art.

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Gothic architecture incorporated the spiritual quality of the Northern line into its entire structure, as well as into the decorative, spiral, plant tendrils adorning the capitals or the complicated carvings inside and outside the cathedral. In order to minimize the heavy quality of stone and stress its spirituality, Gothic architecture adopted flying buttresses and pointed arches to facilitate a towering, vertical structure unimpaired by internal supports. As a result, solid wall space could be reduced and great windows accommodated. The height and the open spaces achieved counteract the natural weight of stone, and the thrust of steep pinnacles opposes the pull of gravity. The joining of pillars to the cross ribs of the vaults through attached columns draws the structure up in a sweeping movement. The pillars do not appear to be supporting weight or to be pressing down, but rather soaring upward. Similarly, the outer towers do not seem to burden the buttressing but rather to shoot skyward. If we speak in terms of active carrier and passive burden, these are “standing, not lying, buildings.”8 The structure of the Gothic cathedral, like the plot of the Gothic novel, is dominated by action, by both the tiny, frenetic movement in ornamentation or detail and the larger, sweeping, rising movements of construction or plot. Another form of dematerialization appears within the intricate filigree carvings that cover the walls like a spider-web, the flowing fan tracery on vaults and windows, and the clutter of ornament on exterior walls, arches, portals, and towers. These carvings are often so incredibly delicate that it is difficult to believe they are actually made of stone. One carving at the Cloisters in New York brought there from a French cathedral depicts the Crucifixion of Christ, a crowd of people, and an entire city in more than thirty layers of overlapping perspective all within a cup-shaped oval little bigger than a walnut! Matter has been challenged here in that the stone seems to have dissolved into a tiny, magical world. In the whole of the Gothic cathedral, weight gives way to levitation. The capitals of columns, indeed the entire building, has lost its Romanesque heaviness; we could say it has been disembodied. Within the interior of the cathedral, a third spiritual effect is achieved by the stained glass windows, which create a sense of illusion through the colors and patterns they cast upon the stone. The Gothic cathedral is designed to create a spiritually altered experience for those who enter, its great height and monstrous proportions dwarfing the viewer. The building is grossly out of

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proportion with human beings and seeks to emphasize their diminution in the face of larger and greater forces. The architecture shocks the viewer out of his normal perception of himself and distorts the magnitude of his surroundings, rendering the worshiper, like the victim in Gothic literature, at the mercy of supernatural forces within and beyond the self. The victim finally submits to these forces and to a changed perspective on reality. The longer one remains within the Gothic cathedral, the harder it is to project a human perspective. The structure ceases to appear abnormally large while the visitor perceives himself as abnormally small. This shock effect is not unlike that produced in Gothic literature, encouraging a keener perception of the self and the environment and an altered relationship between the two. Gothic architecture evokes the world of the spirits in another way, which is at once more direct and more superficial than either its dematerialization or its altered proportions. The gargoyles and other carvings on the building designed to frighten away evil spirits are an obvious allusion to divine malevolence. The presence of pagan symbols on religious buildings also underscores a psychological connection between a sense of God and a sense of the grotesque, between religion and Gothicism. The gargoyles also express an interest in psychology paralleling the psychological emphasis in Gothic literature. In his book Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Erwin Panofsky explicitly connects this sculpture with a renewal of interest in psychology. Insofar as the plant or animal in Gothic carving came to be considered an organism in itself rather than merely a copy of the idea of a plant or animal, Gothic art cultivated both individual variation and a closer study of nature. This naturalism can be seen in the individual species of vegetation and foliage appearing on the capitals of columns and in the extensive variety of flora adorning the entire building. In contrast to the inorganic treatment of nature in Classical art, the plants and animals in Gothic sculpture are very much alive. “Leaves and buds spring from growing stems, fruits depend naturally from their branches, animals live and leap.”9 An interest in particular variation is expressed in animal and human figures (or in combinations of the two) by particular facial expressions or body gestures that convey a range of psychological states from anger, hatred, fear, and pain, to joy or ecstasy. According to Panofsky, the perspective interpretation of space in these carvings also involved a subjectiv-

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The subjective realism in Gothic sculpture led to both individualism and sensualism. It is something new and stupendous in medieval ideas that the divine is no longer sought in nonsensuous abstractions, which lie beyond all that is earthly and human, in a realm of supernatural invariables, but in the center of the ego, in the mirror of self-contemplation, in the intoxication of psychical ecstasy. It is an entirely new human selfconsciousness, an entirely new human pride, that deems the poor human ego worthy to become the vessel of God. Thus, mysticism is nothing but the belief in the divinity of the human soul, for the soul can look upon God only because divine itself.1 1

A self-conscious egoism and a reinsertion of the divine within the human is displayed in Gothic literature through the self-consciousness and egocentricity of its characters and through its general descendental mood. Besides human deification, the negative depiction of humanity and divinity (as seen in Gothic villains) is not totally absent in Gothic art, either. It is immediately apparent in the grotesque aspects of Gothic carving, but also in a progressive divisibility in Gothic architecture, the separation into smaller and smaller parts, that may in a hidden way hint of a breakdown, of decomposition, of individualism to the point of isolation. “The Northern individualizing process lead . . . to self-negation to selfcontempt. Individual character is here felt to be something negative, in fact, even something sinful.”1 2 Hence the mystical need to transcend the self and the tragic inability to do so in the context of Gothic descendentalism. The grotesque element in Gothic art, in gargoyles and carvings and even in altarpieces, is probably the most obvious parallel between Gothic art and literature. As was the case in Gothic literature, the grotesque in Gothic art is not achieved by an outright departure from reality but by a distortion of it or by unusual combinations. Naturalism is not really abandoned. In Moore’s words: A remarkable quality of the grotesque creations of Gothic art is the close and accurate observation of nature which they, no less than the images of real things, display. However fabulous the imaged creature may be, the materials out of which he is made are derived from nature. Whether it be vertebra or claw, wing or beak, eye or nostril, throat or paw—every anatomical member displays

an intimate familiarity with the true functional form, and an imaginative sense of its possible combinations with other members.1 3

The horror in these creatures is not otherworldly but disturbingly familiar; it is the more frightening for its fusion of good and evil, beauty and ugliness. The Gothic refusal in literature to be limited to the beautiful or the moral is likewise a part of Gothic art. The representation of physical beauty being, with the Gothic carver, subordinated to the purpose of enforcing that the soul is more than the body, and of illustrating the doctrine of the salvation of the soul by the goodnes of life, and the loss of the soul by evil life, it was necessary that beings and things not beautiful should enter into his compositions. The evils that beset the lives and souls of men had to be in some way set forth, no less than the good things he is permitted to enjoy. The unhappy lot of the wicked had to be figured as well as the felicities of the good. Hence conspicuous elements in Gothic sculpture, especially after the beginning of the thirteenth century, are the monstrous and the grotesque . . . and these elements have a value apart from their moral significance, as affording contrasts to the forms of beauty.1 4

Moore contrasts the principle of “inclusion” in Gothic art with that of “selection” in Classical art. The Greek artist selected the beautiful and rejected the ugly or imprecise, whereas the Gothic artist sought to represent the greatest vision and thus favored a principle of addition rather than elimination, indicating that beauty may coexist with imperfection in the wider range of existence. The principle that Moore calls inclusion Panofsky terms synthesis and totality, a totality rendered even more effective by the simultaneous subdivision in Gothic art. A greater breadth and greater vision—inevitably a vision of infinity—permeates both Gothic literature and art. The inclusion of the ugly may also be related to the Gothic esteem for power. Moore noticed the importance of power in Gothic art. “This distinction between beauty of expression and power of expression is immediately applicable to the whole character of the two stylistic phenomena of Classic and Gothic art.”1 5 “Classical architecture culminates . . . in beauty of expression, Gothic architecture in power of expression; the former speaks the language of organic existence, the latter the language of abstract values.”1 6 Just as Gothic architecture amplifies the intensity of reality, it expands its range by simultaneously exploring inward and outward, the

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ism.1 0 Accurate perspective facilitated the naturalistic portrayal of individual forms as opposed to a symbolic equivalent for all forms. Extreme subjectivity, to the point of distortion, is comparably present in Gothic literature.

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decay, but in a cumulative sense, multiplication and repetition create the effect of infinite complication. With the ceaseless repetition of towers and pinnacles, the compounding of moldings and shafts, and the elaboration of lacelike spokes of tracery in windows, portals, arches, and buttressing, variety and complexity replace simplicity and contribute to the predominant sense of movement in Gothic art, a dynamism that parallels the fast-moving action of plot and the pervasive emotional agitation in the Gothic novel.

Roettgen Pieta, a prominent wood carving in the gothic style, c. 1300.

minute and the immense. The tiniest of decorations are located within a towering edifice, and fragile pieces of colored glass are set in stone. The small and delicate aspects of Gothic architecture direct our attention inward toward an infinity of tinier and tinier divisions, progressive divisibility pointing toward a world within worlds too small to be seen. During the height of the Gothic development supports were divided into main, major, minor, and subminor shafts; the tracery of windows, blind arcades, and triforia were subdivided into primary, secondary, and tertiary profiles and millions of ever-increasing complexity; and the arches and ribs were split into a series of moldings. These progressive divisions contrast with the enormous height and size of the exterior and the open, boundless interior, which direct our attention upward and outward toward an infinity of larger and larger proportions, toward the world beyond worlds too large and distant to be seen. The expansion in either of these directions challenges the mind to imagine the unimaginable. In its erosive sense, divisibility in Gothic art may suggest fragmentation, disintegration, and

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The great within toward which Gothic architecture points in its tiny intricacies and divisionswithin-divisions is analogous to the great within in Gothic literature—the psychological recesses of the mind, the remote secrets of the unconscious. The great beyond in Gothic architecture suggested by greater and greater proportions and by the upward, vertical thrust can be compared to the great beyond in Gothic literature—the world of the supernatural, of forces beyond reason, knowledge, and control. Gothic architecture juxtaposes extremes of size, weight, and mass in much the same way that Gothic literature juxtaposes extremes of color, sound, setting, and character. (Gothic sculpture of the Middle Ages and the foliage and animals that ornamented the cathedral were often painted in simple, contrasting colors, as were the decorative borders of illuminated manuscripts.) Sharp contrasts can also be seen texturally in the sculptured drapery on figures where the ridges are pronounced with deep hollows between them. A contrast in thrust is operative in the flying buttresses where, in a sense, the building has been built too high to support itself. An overextension of height leads to an excessive outward pressure that must be countered by the inward pressure of the flying buttresses with added weight from the towers. A juxtaposition of excessive thrusts maintains the structure rather than an initial, selfcontained equilibrium. Persistent repetition is a key technique in Gothic art contributing to a sense of infinity. Repetition is crucial to any form of art, be it in a repeating color scheme, basic linear patterns, or selected motifs, but in Gothic art repetition is less modified. In Classical art, repeated lines and forms usually appear in reverse, creating a mirror image to complement the original and conveying a sense of completion and serenity. Hurried, mechanical repetition is always avoided in the Classical. In Gothic art, however, a ceaseless pounding of identical strokes suggests the infinite persistence of a particular form. Such reappearance at regular

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A strong movement propels the entire structure of Gothic architecture both vertically and horizontally. Pointed arches obviously accentuate an upward motion, yet they also contribute to a longitudinal direction in that they make possible the vaulting of oblong areas. (With the rounded arch only square areas could be vaulted.) Furthermore, with the use of pointed arches, both the bays and the main aisles could rise together. The addition of ribs to cross vaulting (and the more important structural innovation of having the ribs bear the weight of the vaults) also created a sense of linear movement and produced the illusion of rising height at the center point where the sectroids meet. The attached columns that join the pillars to the ribs give even heavy pillars a sense of soaring movement as the eye is led upward to the peak of the vault. The body of Gothic architecture has “taut sinews and pliant members . . . without any superfluous flesh or any superfluous mass”1 8 like the lean, bony, angular characters whose quick, furtive movements and dramatic actions hurry the pace in Gothic novels. The double movement in Gothic architecture can be contrasted with the single movement in earlier church architecture. Artistically, the early Christian basilica had one definite goal—the altar. The Gothic cathedral moves both toward the altar and toward heaven (although the vertical movement is clearly stronger). The simplicity of the basilica with its single, tangible goal gives way in the Gothic to a less definite, infinite location. In a philosophical if not visual manner, the use of perspective in the interpretation of space, mentioned earlier in connection with the grotesque, lends “visual expression to the concept of the infinite; for the perspective vanishing point can be defined only as the projection of the point in which parallels intersect.”1 9 Intellectually, the inclusion of endless variety in the representation

of different plants and animals also points toward infinity by informing the viewer of the unending variety of God’s creation. These carvings “induce a sense of infinity by permitting the beholder to submerge his being in the boundlessness of the Creator Himself.”2 0 Beyond the suggestion of infinity, repetition functions as an organizing principle in Gothic art that replaces symmetry. In Northern ornament there is little attempt to harness the activity of the line or force it to conform to the rules of balance and proportion. There is rarely a center in these ornaments, and when a center is present, the movement is peripheral rather than radial. (The eye follows the pattern round and round on the periphery.) In the eccentric Northern ornament the eye is led through a labyrinth without the pattern of a self-contained whole. “Every point in this endless movement is of equal value and all of them combined are without value compared with the agitation they produce.”2 1 Asymmetry communicates a living dynamism; it is not absolute, like a geometric figure, and is lifelike in its irregularities. Gothic architecture is also markedly asymmetrical; the building is without a center; one side need not mirror the other. Just as the line in Gothic ornament does not circumscribe a space, so too in Gothic architecture lines indicate movement rather than encompass an area. Space is not shaped and enclosed but dissected. The internal volume is not defined by firm walls or shaped by an arching vault, for Gothic architecture gradually perfected a rudimentary skeleton of piers, arches, and buttresses that freed the walls from structural support and thus from their inert massiveness. In Gothic literature plot and characters are often stereotyped and repetitive. We follow them through a maze of ceaseless complications that seem to defy organization as well as the laws of probability. The plot structure itself is asymmetrical insofar as it is often difficult to locate the climax toward which the action builds and from which it declines. A rapid palpitation prolonged uninterruptedly replaces development. In the Gothic novel the process rather than the outcome is crucial. (Try to remember the resolution in The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, or even Dracula.) Both Gothic art and Gothic literature are not self-contained. Symmetry and centricity create a sense of order and completion. We see it all; all is controlled. Gothic creation, however, is “on the way”; it is incomplete. The work of art spreads out from itself at will and goes where the forces of chance or fate may take it. In the end there is no

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intervals creates the type of immediacy that Edgar Allan Poe produced through auditory repetitions, such as the ticking of a clock, the dripping of water, or a pounding heart. In Gothic architecture vertical lines repeat themselves from pillar to pillar, and in Northern ornament and Gothic sculpture repetition continues without accentuation or pause, building to a state of frenzy. Some critics consider this exalted hysteria the distinguishing characteristic of Gothic art. Every inch of available space is covered with ceaseless activity. Gothic art is never still as it pushes for greater visual awareness. “It uses the tumult of sensations to lift itself out of itself.”1 7 This is the same intoxication and indulgence displayed in Gothic literature.

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pattern, no answer. The process of life for the Gothic soul is beyond reason, and contact with life takes place beyond the confines of orderly illusions or restrictive limitations. Gothicism tells people that they must surrender to the process of living and to the forces of an uncertain future. In this surrender one is heedless of the balancing principles of art or society. The goal is the process itself, an intensified perception of a limitless reality.

Notes 1. Philip Hallie, The Paradox of Cruelty (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), p. 67. 2. Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Ltd., 1927), p. 41. 3. Andrew Martindale, Gothic Art (New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1967), p. 140. 4. Lamprecht, quoted in Worringer, Form in Gothic, p. 41. 5. Worringer, Form in Gothic, p. 42. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., pp. 44-45. 8. Wilhelm Worringer, Form Problems of the Gothic (New York: G. E. Strechert and Company, 1912), p. 97. 9. Charles Herbert Moore, The Development and Character of Gothic Architecture (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1890), p. 24. 10. Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), p. 16. 11. Worringer, Form Problems, p. 139. 12. Ibid., pp. 144-45. 13. Moore, Development and Character, p. 266. 14. Ibid., p. 265.

The whole history of the Gothic Revival in England from the time of Batty Langley until the present is closely connected with the history of romanticism. No architectural style has been less associated with aesthetics and abstract principles of art. That would require more objectivity than is compatible with the romantic spirit. In the eighteenth century the artistic interest in the Gothic was confined to decoration. At that time it was almost wholly divorced from Christianity. It was used for garden architecture and for dwellings. What could be more romantic than a sham ruin when romantic was defined as fantastic and fictitious? Nothing is more displeasing to a classicist than a ruin, for he enjoys the completed whole. On the other hand, nothing is more pleasing to the romantic temperament, which likes the unfinished, the incomplete, for then there is always the possibility of change. The following quotations well express the romantic attitude. The first was written by Shenstone in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the second by A. J. Downing in the middle of the nineteenth.

15. Ibid., p. 51. 16. Ibid., p. 87. 17. Worringer, Form in Gothic, p. 73. 18. Worringer, Form Problems, p. 120. 19. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture, p. 17. 20. Ibid., p. 19. 21. Worringer, Form in Gothic, p. 54.

ARCHITECTURE AGNES ADDISON (ESSAY DATE 1938) SOURCE: Addison, Agnes. “Romanticism and the Gothic Revival.” In Romanticism and the Gothic Revival, pp. 144-52. New York: Richard R. Smith, 1938. In the following essay, Addison provides an overview of the Gothic Revival movement in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century.

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If there had been no Romantic Movement, there would have been no Gothic Revival. If the classic spirit, which is content with gradual and continuous growth, had continued throughout the eighteenth century, the architectural style of the nineteenth century would have been modified Renaissance. But as romanticism, with its spirit of discontent and love of change, disrupted the natural evolution of history and architectural styles, the nineteenth century resulted in a period of eclecticism. The two most important styles of the Romantic period were connected with the two dominating ideals of the nineteenth century, democracy and nationalism. The Greek Revival was the expression of the former, and the Gothic Revival of the latter. And even as democratic idealism was in large measure superseded by imperialistic nationalism, so the Greek Revival was followed by the Gothic Revival.

“Ruinated structures appear to derive their power of pleasing from the irregularity of surface which is variety; and the latitude they afford the imagination to conceive an enlargement of their dimensions, or to recollect any events, or circumstances appertaining to their pristine grandeur and solemnity.”1 “It is but a mile from Newport to Carisbrook Castle, one of the most interesting old Ruins in England. It crowns a fine hill, and from the top of its ruined towers, you look over a lovely landscape

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The eighteenth century was looking for something different rather than something new. It was not so interested in creation, as in adaptation. Therefore any artistic style which had been used before or elsewhere was pleasing. It was a century of talent rather than of genius; an age of refinement rather than of innovation. The Adam brothers refined Roman art and Batty Langley attempted to refine the Gothic. There was some scholarship, but more dilettantism. Eighteenthcentury Gothic reflects all these characteristics. A stanza from the Lay of the Last Minstrel by Sir Walter Scott sums up the purely romantic approach to the appreciation of a mediaeval building. The subjective, emotional reaction is of paramount importance, therefore,— “If thou would’st view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moonlight; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild, but to flout, the ruins gray.”3

About 1820 the attitude toward the Gothic changed. The architects, at least, instead of looking at the old buildings sentimentally began studying them carefully. The archaeological approach followed the emotional; instead of hiding the outlines of a Gothic building in trees and shrubs, they began drawing them mathematically to scale. The sentimental attitude has not completely died out even today and it continued throughout the last century. A. W. Pugin gives a good description of the tourist of about 1835. “. . . the third class are persons who go to see the church. They are tourists; They go to see everything that is to be seen; therefore they see the church,—id est, they walk round, read the epitaphs, think it very pretty, very romantic, very old, suppose that it was built in superstitious times, pace the length of the nave, write their names on a pillar, and whisk out, as they have a great deal more to see and very little time.”4 Nevertheless, the archaeological and scientific interest in Gothic was beginning among a small group as early as 1820. The elder Pugin was drawing Gothic details to a mathematical scale. At the same time Rickman was trying to give a stylistic label to each phase of mediaeval building. The purely emotional appreciation of the Gothic was

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827)

Romantic poet and artist William Blake had no formal schooling, but he learned to read and write at home. At the age of ten he was sent to Henry Pars’s drawing school. The family could not afford further instruction in art, so at fourteen Blake was apprenticed to an engraver, James Basire. At one point during his apprenticeship, Basire sent Blake to Westminster Abbey to draw monuments that Basire had been hired to engrave; the Gothic atmosphere of the church influenced Blake’s imagination and his artistic style. It was at this time that he began writing poetry. In 1779 Blake left his apprenticeship and enrolled briefly at the Royal Academy before setting out to make his living as an engraver. In 1787 Blake’s favorite brother, Robert, died. Blake had been tending to Robert in his final illness and was with him when he died. Later Blake had a vision in which, he claimed, Robert visited him and showed him the technique of “illuminated writing,” or reliefetching. This process consisted of producing a text and a drawing on a copper plate with an acid-resistant liquid; the plate was then dipped in acid, which ate away the untreated surfaces and left the text and drawing in relief; Blake would then print the design on paper and color it with watercolors. He used the method for all of his books, beginning in 1788 with There Is No Natural Religion, a collection of aphorisms. Blake exemplified the revolutionary spirit of the Gothic in both his written and visual artistic endeavors. Blake’s engravings depicting Biblical themes are evocative of Gothic illuminated manuscripts, and his paintings in A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions (1809) anticipate the supernaturalism of the Gothic revival. In addition, Blake’s writing, including The (First) Book of Urizen (1794), contains many Gothic elements, including doppelgängers, the supernatural, the demonic, and the treatment of socially taboo subjects.

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of hill and vale, picturesque villages, and green meadows. The castle, itself, with its fortifications, covers perhaps half a dozen acres, and is just in that state of ruin and decay, best calculated to excite the imagination, and send one upon a voyage into dreamland.”2

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being replaced by a more minute and painstaking study of the architectural remains of the Middle Ages.

one attitude of the period: one Gothic cathedral is worth more than ten Renaissance buildings: “They were weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

About a decade later in England there was a wave of religious feeling which manifested itself in various ways. Perhaps most important were the Tractarians at Oxford and the Ecclesiologists at Cambridge. Both felt that the only way to improve divine worship was to improve church planning, and that by making churches conform to the liturgy and rubrics, the services would naturally improve. The only known type of architecture which conformed to the old usage was the Gothic. Hence they advocated the revival of Gothic for religious reasons, and in the ’40’s a moral consideration was added to the appreciation of the Gothic.

In England the Gothic Revival was not dependent on the literature of the Romantic Movement to any great extent, for none of the greatest of the School, except Walter Scott, were interested in the Middle Ages. The reason for that was that Shakespeare and early ballads were no novelty to the English as they were to the Germans and French. In England, there had been no far-reaching classicism to stamp out the late mediaeval literature. Even in the Augustan Age Spenser was read and admired. Therefore the English Romantics, in their quest for change, could not turn to the authors whose work was always read. Instead, Wordsworth received mystic inspiration from Nature, Shelley and Keats from antique Greece, and Byron from the Orient. In England, there were two phases of the Gothic Revival: the secular revival of the eighteenth century which was more closely connected with the literature of the period; and the ecclesiastical revival of the nineteenth century which was connected with the reform of the Anglican church.

It may seem strange that the Romanticists were content with the Gothic instead of creating a new style. But the eighteenth century did not want anything completely original, merely adaptations of many different styles. Chambers built a Chinese pagoda with gilt dragons in Kew Gardens. It was as much admired and marvelled at as Walpole’s Gothic Strawberry Hill or the classical façades and interiors of the Adams. “Variety’s the very spice of life That gives it all its flavour.”5

Those lines from The Task by Cowper, published in 1785, might well be the motto of the second half of the eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century and the beginning of the Romantic Movement, the Gothic had come to symbolize certain of the aims and aspirations of the period. No new art could have been more symbolic, more expressive of the nineteenth-century manifestation of the romantic spirit. Gothic was non-classical, closely connected with Christianity, with national history. It appeared to be fantastic, imaginative, irrational and emotional. They saw in it the reproduction in stone of the primeval forests. Almost every aspect of their new attitude toward art and life they saw in Gothic architecture. Therefore, naturally, the architects did not attempt to create a new style when an old one would most perfectly fit the taste of their clients. The Middle Ages as seen through romantic spectacles seemed very good to most people and they were content to have a Gothical house to live in, and later in the century, people felt morally better to worship in an Early Decorated church. No other architectural style would have suited the mediaevalists, so there had to be a Gothic Revival. An etching by Pugin well sums up

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In France the literature of the Romantic Movement was more important in forming an interest in Gothic architecture, especially Chateaubriand’s Le Génie, and Hugo’s Notre Dame. But the classic tradition was so strong in France that they could not accept modern Gothic as a usable style, but contented themselves by restoring the mediaeval monuments, by archaeology and history. In Germany, the spirit of the literature of the Romantic Movement and that which animated the building of modern Gothic, seem to be most closely connected, for both express the coming nationalism. The Gothic Revival in the United States is an importation from England. At first it seems most incongruous, for it has not even the excuse of being a reminder of former national greatness. On reflection, both the Gothic Revival and the eclecticism of American architecture are seen to be true expressions of American history. The Colonies became a nation in the Romantic period, and romantic ideas were in large measure responsible for the formation of American ideals. The keynote of American civilization was given in the often quoted words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life,

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The most reiterated criticism of Gothic Revival architecture runs as follows: Architecture must conform to the spirit of the time in which it is built. It must conform to the main characteristics of the age in material, construction and design. The nineteenth century was an age of mechanical inventions, of the growth of democratic theory in government, of trade and industry, of materialism and agnosticism. It was as completely different from the Middle Ages as was possible in government, social conditions and religious feeling. Therefore every building of the Gothic Revival was false to the spirit of the age, and in consequence cannot be considered as good architecture. This criticism has grown out of a one-sided interpretation of the nineteenth century. It ignores the importance of the Romantic Movement. As early as 1870 when Eastlake was writing his History of the Gothic Revival, people were beginning to feel that it was incongruous to erect buildings in a Gothic style in the nineteenth century. Eastlake, himself, writes, “At first it may seem strange that a style of design which is intimately associated with the romance of the world’s history should now-a-days find favour in a country distinguished above all others for the plain business-like tenour of its daily life.”6 And at heart, although he was a Gothic Revivalist, he did find it strange. But thirty years earlier, when Pugin was writing his Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England, the Gothic Revival was at its strongest and no such doubt of its fitness had entered his mind. He wrote as follows: “It will not be difficult to show that the wants and purposes of Civil Buildings now are almost identical with those of our English forefathers. In the first place, climate, which necessarily regulates the pitch of roofs, light, warmth, and internal arrangement, remains of course precisely the same as formerly. Secondly, we are governed by nearly the same laws and the same system of political economy. The

Sovereign, with the officers of state connected with the crown,—the Houses of Peers and Commons,—the judges of the various courts of law, and form of trial,—the titles and rank of the nobility,—the tenures by which their lands are held, and the privileges they enjoy,—the corporate bodies and civic functionaries,—are all essentially the same as in former days. There is no country in Europe which has preserved so much of her ancient system as England.”7 These two quotations shows the difference in attitude toward the Gothic Revival even during the nineteenth century. So long as the spirit of the Romantic Movement was prevalent, the Gothic Revival expressed the spirit of romanticism. But later, when that spirit was almost crushed out by Victorian materialism, the Gothic Revival was no longer a vital style and it did seem strange that England should be dotted with modern Gothic buildings. But whether current taste says that the Gothic Revival is good or bad, it is at least one of the most lasting and tangible legacies of the Romantic Movement, and shows that the nineteenth century was not completely engrossed by Progress, Industry, Science and the Future, but, also, looked backward to discover the Middle Ages.

Notes 1. Shenstone, [William]. Essays on Men and Manners, p. 67. 2. Downing, [Andrew]. Rural Essays, p. 525. 3. Scott, [Sir Walter]. Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto II, st. 1. 4. Pugin, Contrasts, p. 36. 5. Cowper, The Task, Bk. 2, l. 606. 6. Eastlake, op. cit., p. 2. 7. A. W. Pugin, Apology, p. 37.

Works Cited Langely, Batty and Thomas. Ancient Architecture Restored and Improved. London, 1742. Langley, Batty and Thomas. Gothic Architecture Improved. 2nd ed. of foregoing work with new title. London, 1747. This is the first architectural work to be devoted to Gothic architecture since the Renaissance. It has been much criticized but it is a sincere attempt to analyze the styles of mediaeval architecture. His historical theories have all been proved wrong. He thought that the Gothic, or Saxon, as he preferred to name it, style was formed before the Danish invasions. Yet, as a pioneer and example of the mid-eighteenth century fad for the Gothic, it is important.

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liberty and pursuit of happiness.” That sentence might be called the epitome of romantic political thought, and it has molded the attitude of the citizens of the United States to the present day, and most especially that of the immigrants. It is by recognition of the fundamental romanticism of the United States that the present inconsistencies in its civilization become understandable. Love of change might better be the motto of the United States than e pluribus unum. So if this romantic attitude be accepted, it is not surprising that the romantic style of the Gothic Revival flourishes in the United States.

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Pugin, A. W. Contrasts. London, 1836. 2nd revised edition, London, 1841. One of the most brilliant and stimulating books written by an architect, glowing with the fiery zeal and enthusiasm of a convert to Rome. The central theme that the world and art were good before the Reformation and the Renaissance perverted religion and aesthetics has since been often echoed by Catholic historians. The plates contrasting fifteenth and nineteenth-century architecture are as good propaganda as the text. Pugin, A. W. An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England. London, 1843. The first book points out in what a bad state architecture is and the second shows how it can be improved by a sincere and conscientious rival of “Christian” styles. Eastlake, Charles L. A History of the Gothic Revival. London, 1872. The first and only book giving a detailed history of the Gothic Revival in England. Absolutely indispensable.

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ALEXANDER JACKSON DAVIS (1803-1892)

Alexander Jackson Davis was a leading figure of the nineteenth-century Gothic revival in American architecture. Picturesqueness was predominant in all Davis’s works, including his design for Glen Ellen (1832), the Maryland residence of Robert Gilmor III. Yet in his last major project, an unsuccessful submission in the 1867 competition for the New York City Post Office, he designed a metal and glass structure which clearly presaged twentiethcentury “functional” concepts. Far from being contradictory, however, both picturesqueness and functionalism were from the first inherent in the American—as distinct from English or French—Gothic revival. In America, Gothic revival architecture never challenged the Roman or Greek revival in mass popularity; indeed, its associations were fundamentally “anti-establishment.” Gothic was an “arty” style, associated with the idea of the “natural man.” There was always something eccentric about it: a typical example was the exaggerated asymmetry and anticlassical proportions of Davis’s H. K. Harral house in Bridgeport, Conn. (ca. 1846; demolished). Such stylistic self-consciousness inevitably encouraged self-conscious formalism— emphasis on the “naturalness” of Gothic forms and structure as an end in itself—and thence to the kind of “functionalism” exhibited in Davis’s 1867 Post Office design. For historical reasons, however, the picturesque side of Gothic revival architecture predominated in America so that its chief legacy was the Arts and Crafts movement of about 1890 to about 1910, prefaced by the Romanesque of H. H. Richardson and climaxed by the early work of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Combining something of both trends, Davis has claim to be the most representative of all American Gothic revivalists.

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KERRY DEAN CARSO (ESSAY DATE DECEMBER 2002) SOURCE: Carso, Kerry Dean. “Diagnosing the ‘Sir Walter Disease’: American Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature.” Mosaic 35, no. 4 (December 2002): 121-42. In the following essay, Carso demonstrates how Gothic literature influenced Gothic Revival architecture in the United States, particularly the designs of architect Alexander Jackson Davis.

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Gothic novels and historical romances, such as those written by Sir Walter Scott, were devoured with pleasure by an avid reading audience. Walpole wrote his novel The Castle of Otranto as a method of escapism, a way of “exchanging what is called the realities of life for dreams” (letter to George Montagu, 5 January 1766, Correspondence X. 192). Recent critics have argued that Gothic literature is not an escapist form of literature—a way for readers to revel in nostalgic representations of an idealized past—but rather a literature reflective of the historical and cultural forces of contemporary life. For instance, in Gothic America: Narrative, History and Myth, Teresa A. Goddu argues that American Gothic literature should be read within an historical and racial context, rather than as an escapist literature. My interpretation negotiates between these two apparently conflictive approaches. I argue that Gothic literature does transport its reader to imaginary realms and bygone eras of castles and superstitious awe, and that people read Gothic novels to escape from the humdrum reality of real life, but, like any form of cultural production, Gothic literature cannot help but engage with the time in which it is written. These two interpretations do not have to be mutually exclusive. What is clear is that Gothic novels and historical romances influenced the architects and clients of American architecture quite seriously. Indeed, “works of the imagination” (as Davis labelled them in his catalogue of books) profoundly affected American architecture in the heyday of Gothic Revival design (the 1830s and 1840s). Scott’s novels were particularly widely read and admired. In Europe, as in the United States, Scott’s fiction and his home Abbotsford had a large influ-

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Architect Cottingham became interested in the preservation of medieval architecture and in the design and construction of structures built in the Gothic style while studying Westminster Hall and the Chapel of Henry VII in his early thirties. Cottingham’s passionate defense and promotion of Gothic Revival architecture departed from the majority of English architects and scholars, who favored Classicism. Cottingham’s archeological and preservationist approach to architecture was unique and influenced both his contemporaries and his successors. While most of his original architectural work has been destroyed or restored in a contrasting style, Cottingham’s role in preserving medieval structures and the education of his colleagues and the public about Gothic and Gothic Revival architecture had a lasting impact on nineteenth-century English architecture. His work exerted a tremendous influence on later artists and scholars, including A. W. N. Pugin and John Ruskin.

ence on later European architecture, as critic Charles L. Eastlake acknowledged in the nineteenth century (115). For the most part, architectural historians have failed to examine the complex interrelationships between Gothic Revival architecture and Gothic literature. One notable exception is William Pierson, who acknowledges the influence of Scott and Walpole (who both built influential Gothic Revival houses) in his important book American Buildings and Their Architects: Technology and the Picturesque, The Corporate and the Early Gothic Styles. But Pierson never mentions Gothic novelists such as Ann Radcliffe and Charles Maturin, both of whom held a prominent place on the reading lists of Gothic Revival architects and clients alike. In the end, formal analysis takes precedence over cultural history in Pierson’s approach. Besides Pierson’s book, there are three other major architectural histories on the American Gothic Revival in this period: Phoebe Stanton’s The Gothic Revival and American Church

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When a client commissioned American Gothic Revival architect Alexander Jackson Davis (1803-1892) to design a house, the first thing Davis wanted to know was his client’s reading habits. Davis wrote to one client, “It is impossible for me to tell what expression to give the exterior that will answer your own beau ideal unless I am better acquainted with your temper! That is, whether you read Shakespeare more than Thomson; Moore more than Collins; or Homer at all; either in the Iliad or Odyessy [sic]; or whether you read the great book of Nature” (emph. Davis’s; Brendel-Pandich 79). Although Davis does not mention Ann Radcliffe or Horace Walpole here, he very well could have, because on Davis’s bookshelf, along with Boydell’s Shakespeare library, were a number of Gothic novels that he read on a regular basis.

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Architecture: An Episode in Taste, 1840-1856; Calder Loth and Julius T. Sadler Jr.’s The Only Proper Style: Gothic Architecture in America; and Wayne Andrews’s American Gothic: Its Origins, Its Trials, Its Triumphs. Stanton’s book is limited to ecclesiastical Gothic and is now three decades old, while The Only Proper Style and American Gothic are aimed at a popular audience. In general, the study of nineteenth-century Gothic Revival architecture has been limited to formal analyses and attempts to see the style as prefiguring later architectural movements. About Gothic Revival architects such as Davis and Richard Upjohn, architectural historian Talbot Hamlin writes: “Creation, not nostalgia, was their brightly burning torch” (3). Hamlin highlights how these architects were innovators in the new materials of glass and iron. Often, architectural historians attempt to place Gothic Revival buildings into a modernist continuum, as if the style’s relationship to modernism is the only way in which it can be redeemed. Epitomizing this kind of analysis is Vincent Scully’s book The Shingle Style and the Stick Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright. In this seminal book, Scully argues that Andrew Jackson Downing’s advocacy of wooden cottages, often in a Gothic Revival mode and harmonizing with their rural environment, prefigured twentieth-century architecture. Inspired by Scully, James Early’s book Romanticism and American Architecture argues that nineteenth-century Romantic functionalist theory, especially the work of A. J. Downing, influenced Modern architects, and Frank Lloyd Wright in particular. My approach in this essay is different. Rather than analyze Gothic Revival architecture in light of proto-modernist innovations, my aim is to place the style in its historical and cultural context. Examining American romanticism in architecture in light of the contemporaneous Gothic novelreading craze reveals new interpretative possibilities. My goal is to recreate the intellectual climate of the period. In this sense, my approach to the Gothic is revisionist. In the past few decades, Gothic literature has experienced a renaissance of sorts. Scholarly books and articles on the Gothic have proliferated, while paperback editions of long-forgotten Gothic novels have become available. With the waning popularity of Gothic novels in the second quarter of the nineteenth century came obscurity. It was not until the 1920s and 1930s when Gothic literature became a subject for serious scholarly study, beginning with Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of

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Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance and Montague Summers’s The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. These pioneering works were followed by Devendra Varma’s The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England. Because of its irrationality and mystery, the Gothic novel lends itself to psychoanalytic interpretations. One of the best-known psychoanalytic studies of American Gothic is Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (first published in 1960). In the 1970s and beyond, feminist scholars have begun examining Gothic literature, focussing on women writers and women readers. Recently, a wide range of approaches including poststructuralism, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and Marxism have been applied to the Gothic genre with provocative results. With this new interest and the elevation of Gothic literary studies, we can now look at the effect of Gothic literature on other cultural expressions, including art and architecture. But, even with this recent explosion of Gothic criticism, scholars have failed to juxtapose Gothic novels and dramas with archival architectural sources to explore the interrelationship between literature and architecture in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. My goal is to reveal these connections. The scholars who have rescued the Gothic novel from literary history’s dust heap have provided cultural historians with a base from which to examine the sweeping influence of this significant literary genre. In the United States, Gothic novels and Scott’s historical romances (which were inspired by Gothic pioneers Walpole and Radcliffe), had an enormous impact on architecture in the period between 1800 and 1850. The groundwork in Gothic literary scholarship allows us to move beyond literature to examine how the Gothic seeps into other forms of artistic creation. One of the earliest American architects to enjoy Gothic novels was Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820). Although born in Great Britain and educated in Europe, Latrobe immigrated to the United States at the age of thirty-one, arriving in March 1796. About three months after relocating to Virginia, Latrobe wrote in his journal that he found Radcliffe’s descriptions of buildings so “successful” that he “once endeavored to plan the Castle of Udolpho from [Radcliffe’s] account of it and found it impossible” (Latrobe 166). Latrobe began experimenting with Gothic architectural forms for residential design in the United States in 1799. Latrobe’s Gothic work includes Sedgeley (built for William Crammond near Philadelphia in 1799 and considered the first

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Other American architects, too, dabbled in Gothic Revival design before the 1830s. Some notable examples include Maxmilian Godefroy’s St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore (1806); Charles Bulfinch’s Federal Street Church in Boston (1809); and the unexecuted design for Columbia College (1813) by James Renwick Sr., engineer and father of the architect James Renwick. Daniel Wadsworth, who designed for himself a Gothic Revival villa called Monte Video (c. 1805-1809) near Hartford, Connecticut, explained that, to him, the Gothic style was not inherently menacing as are the castles and convents of Gothic novels: “There is nothing in the mere forms or embellishments of the pointed style [. . .] in the least adapted to convey to the mind the impression of Gothic Gloom” (qtd. in Andrews 38, emph. Wadsworth’s). His house bears out this belief; Gothic details appear as an afterthought, a decorative motif rather than a programmatic agenda. It was not until the 1830s and 1840s that American Gothic Revival architecture came of age. The most prominent designer of Gothic residences in this period was Davis. Davis was born in New York City in 1803 and, during his boyhood, lived in New Jersey and New York. When he was sixteen, he moved to Alexandria, Virginia, to learn a trade with his older brother Samuel. Davis worked as a type compositor in the newspaper office.

Besides work, his four years at Alexandria were filled with two of his favourite activities: reading and acting. An amateur actor who performed in several plays while he was in Virginia, Davis was a voracious reader as well. His two pocket diaries from this period, preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, are filled with youthful exuberance. Elaborately illustrated (Davis was an aspiring artist as well), these diaries reveal an acute interest in Gothic fiction and dark drama. Often, Davis would begin an entry with an illustration from a text, which would then be excerpted in his own handwriting. Among the dramas that he read and illustrated were Maturin’s Bertram: or the Castle of St. Aldobrand and Heinrich Zschokke’s Abaellino. Maturin was an Irish Gothic novelist and dramatist who corresponded with an encouraging Scott. After reading Maturin’s drama Bertram, Scott wrote that the character of Bertram had a “Satanic dignity which is often truly sublime” (qtd. in Lougy 42). Starring Edmund Kean, Bertram opened on 9 May 1816 at the Drury Lane Theatre in London, with the support of Lord Byron, who was impressed with the play. Bertram and Maturin’s Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer were young Davis’s favourites (Donoghue). In one of his pocket diaries, Davis made an illustration of the play’s first act, showing a ship tossed on a stormy sea in view of a Gothic convent. On the shore are monks kneeling in prayer for the safety of the ship, which is captained by Bertram, the herovillain of the play. The setting of the play is quintessentially Gothic from the “rock-based turrets” (3) of the convent to the moonlit “terrassed rampart” of the castle of Aldobrand (26). Davis copied an excerpt from the play into his diary and as the budding actor included Bertram in his list of recitations. Heinrich Zschokke’s Abaellino is a German drama that was translated and adapted to the American stage by William Dunlap and opened in New York on 11 February 1801. A popular play, it was performed in New York for the next twentyfive years and was also produced in Philadelphia, Boston, Albany, Charleston, and other American cities. Like Bertram, Abaellino is a fascinating Gothic hero-villain. Davis chooses Act I, Scene I to illustrate in his journal. In Davis’s drawing, Abaellino sits sullenly in a “mean apartment,” as it is described in the play. On the table are “a Bottle and Glasses, Chairs” (3). Such is the extent of the stage directions. Davis greatly elaborates this meagre description by adding what appear to be instruments of torture and weapons hanging

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Gothic Revival house in the United States); the Baltimore Cathedral design (unexecuted; 1805); Christ Church in Washington, DC (1806-07); the Bank of Philadelphia (1807-08); and St. Paul’s in Alexandria, Virginia (1817). But, overall, Latrobe’s Gothic output pales in comparison to his rational neoclassical efforts such as the Bank of Pennsylvania (1799-1801). Although Latrobe’s landscape paintings display an intense interest in the picturesque and his interiors (such as the south wing of the United States Capitol, 1804-06; altered c. 181827) betray these leanings (Cohen and Brownell 15-24), in general, his Gothic Revival buildings are not full-blown picturesque. Indeed, his Gothic Revival designs are symmetrical with superficial Gothic detailing. For example, Sedgeley is a geometric form gothicized by the placement of pointed arch windows in the pavilions that protrude from the corners of the house. Despite this Gothic touch, there is little mystery or surprise in store for the observer of Latrobe’s Gothic creations. Although he clearly read Radcliffe’s books and was quite possibly influenced by them, he did not translate the mysterious, rambling architectural spaces of her stories into his own architecture.

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on the wall. Alongside these mediaeval-looking implements are a shelf and more bottles, which hint at the wanton excess of the bandit lifestyle (do they contain poison? Liquor?). The figure of Abaellino is seated off-centre, a compositional choice that emphasizes the room rather than the figure. A Gothic representation, Davis’s visualization of the bandit’s chamber suggests the potential cruelty and perversity of the outlaws. One potential source for Davis’s drawing is the stage set from a performance of the play in which Davis acted. While he was a youth in Alexandria, Davis engaged in amateur theatricals and became interested in stage design. He dreamed of becoming a professional actor. Davis and his brother Samuel took part in the Philo-Dramatic Society, a group that performed plays in Alexandria. In his diary, he kept a list of his performances, which included Shakespearean tragedies (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear) and contemporary pieces (Douglas, Lovers’ Vows, Abaellino, and Venice Preserved). In the same diary in which Bertram and Abaellino appear, he illustrates “Bed Scene in Othello.” Davis’s illustration filters the Shakespearean scene through contemporary Gothic, emphasizing the mysterious flicker of the nightstand candle and the inky blackness of unknowable architectural spaces. Again, it is possible that Davis’s representation of Othello derives from contemporary performances of the play that he witnessed. In the spring of 1823, on his way to New York City, Davis stopped in Baltimore where he made an attempt at professional acting by auditioning with a group of players from North Carolina. He was not selected, so he moved on to Wilmington, Delaware, where he performed “Rhetorical Entertainments” to support himself. Again, in Philadelphia and in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he attempted acting, but to no avail. These youthful experiences were just the beginning of Davis’s lifelong interest in the theatre. Throughout his life, he advised builders on acoustics and sight lines in theatre design (Donoghue). At the age of twenty, Davis moved to New York City, and his fascination with the theatre continued. In the evenings, he frequented the theatre and was on the free list at both the Park Theatre and the Castle Garden Theater in 1826 and 1828 (Donoghue). He also expressed his love of drama in his artistic work. In 1825, he completed a study for a proscenium featuring Egyptian columns and Greek bas-relief sculpture and numerous portraits of actors in character, including “Brutus in the Rostrum” and “Mr. Kemble as Roma” (Rebora 27).

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That so early in his life Davis was fascinated with the theatre is significant to his later Gothic Revival architectural creations. The dramatic images he drew for his youthful diaries display his acute interest in stage design and scenography. Indeed, Gothic Revival architecture is inherently theatrical, a quality often commented upon by architecture critics. For instance, architectural historian William Pierson declares that Strawberry Hill “is a stage set. It was meant to create a special kind of environment, to accommodate the taste and vision of the owner” (Pierson 107, emph. Pierson’s). Davis often used trompe-l’oeil materials to create theatrical effects, substituting plaster for stone. Davis’s houses, then, become stage sets, in which the owners’ mediaeval fantasies, inspired by Gothic romances, can take flight. While still in Alexandria, Davis’s sensible older brother bristled at what he perceived to be the younger Davis’s useless pastime of reading Gothic books. Later in life, Davis wrote to William Dunlap about himself in the third person for Dunlap’s History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States: “Like another Franklin, strongly addicted to reading, he limited himself to the accomplishment of a fixed task, and being a quick compositor, he would soon complete it, and fly to his books, but not like Franklin, to books of science and useful learning, but to works of imagination, poetry, and the drama; whence, however, he imbibed a portion of that high imaginative spirit so necessary to constitute an artist destined to practise in the field of invention” (Dunlap 210). Davis’s brother condemned such reading and turned Davis’s attention to “history, biography and antiquities, to language and the first principles of the mathematics” (211). His brother’s concern was perhaps warranted: one British critic lambasted Maturin’s Bertram for its “rotten principles and a bastard sort of sentiment,” while another felt that the play excited “undue compassion for worthless characters, or unjust admiration of fierce and unchristian qualities” (Ranger 16). His brother’s admonitions taught the young Davis that reading Gothic novels was a frivolous activity. From the evidence of his diaries, it appears that Davis took little heed of his brother’s warnings. In fact, he becomes a life-long reader of Gothic novels and plays. The architectural allure of Gothic literature fascinated Davis. As a young man, Davis was known to “pass hours in puzzling over the plan of some ancient castle of romance, arranging the trap doors, subterraneous passages, and drawbridges, as pictorial embellishment was the least of his

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That the future Gothic Revival architect delighted in Gothic romances comes as little surprise, since architectural space is a pre-eminent concern of writers such as Walpole and Radcliffe. Indeed, in Udolpho, the castle plays such an important role that it almost transforms into a freethinking character in the text. When the heroine Emily first views Udolpho, the castle “seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all, who dared to invade its solitary reign.” The mood evoked by the mysterious mediaeval architectural setting is crucial to the genre. Emily looks at the castle with “melancholy awe” and almost expects to see “banditti start up from under the trees.” Illuminated by the setting sun, “the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object” (226-27). Such descriptions no doubt piqued Davis’s architectural curiosity. As an adult, Davis remained faithful to his early love of Gothic novels. To Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest he gave the highest praise. His day book indicates that he spent 22 April 1848 rereading Radcliffe’s novel. Around the same time, he also reread Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield. In his day book, in the margin next to these entries, he had scribbled “considering forgetfulness of these works a fault.” It is likely that Davis was reading his edition of Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library. Both The Romance of the Forest and The Vicar of Wakefield were in this collection. Indeed, by owning this collection, Davis had in

his library all of Radcliffe’s books, as well as Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, all of which he carefully notes in his catalogue of books. And he made a point to remember these early influences even in the course of his busy architectural practice in 1848, when he was at the height of his popularity as a designer of Gothic villas for wealthy clients. The popularity of Radcliffe, “the Queen of Ghost Stories and Subterranean Horror” (as one of Scott’s contemporaries called her), along with her “numerous train of imitators,” gave way in the early nineteenth century to Scott’s brand of historical romance (qtd. in Robertson 31-32). Scott turned from writing poetry to writing novels with Waverley, the first in a long succession of historical novels that enchanted his readers in both Great Britain and the United States. Among his more than twenty novels are Guy Mannering, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, Ivanhoe, and Redgauntlet. Scott was the first major historical novelist; his popularity outlived him and continued long after his death in 1832. Mark Twain later derisively labelled American interest in the Middle Ages “The Sir Walter Disease” (Twain 501). Scott’s books were republished in the United States soon after they appeared in England. Boston publisher Samuel Goodrich gives us a sense for Scott’s renown on this side of the Atlantic: “The appearance of a new novel from his pen caused a greater sensation in the United States than did some of the battles of Napoleon, which decided the fate of thrones and empires. Everybody read these works; everybody—the refined and the simple—shared in the delightful trances which seemed to transport them to remote ages and distant climes” (qtd. in Hart 74). Goodrich reported that one of his younger sisters memorized the long poem The Lady of the Lake and “was accustomed of an evening to sit at her sewing, while she recited it to an admiring circle of listeners” (69). Goodrich’s sister was not the only American reading Scott by the fireside. Davis also recorded such pleasant pastimes in his journals. On a visit with friends in October 1841, Davis recorded in his letterbook that he and his hosts, Mr. and Mrs. James, “passed the evening in agreeable conversation, and reading Scott and Shakespeare” before retiring to bed at 11 p.m. On 15 October 1848, he was engrossed in Waverley (see Davis, Day Book). Indeed, Davis’s catalogue of books shows that he owned all of the Waverley novels, and his day book indicates that he read them often. Scott cannot be considered a Gothic novelist in the same way that his predecessors Walpole

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care, invention all his aim” (Dunlap 211). Any Gothic novel of the late eighteenth century may have been the subject of his artistic dreaming, but most likely he is referring here to either Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto or Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, two of the most popular and influential of the Gothic novels. Davis’s catalogue of books show that he owned both books. One of his early architectural drawings from age fifteen (1818) survives at the Avery Library at Columbia University. The image depicts a partly ruinous labyrinthine space with a multitude of pointed arches leading to mysterious staircases (perhaps inspired by Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri). Light filters in through barred windows. The architectural space of this dungeon is inherently unknowable. This drawing shows his early interest in the Gothic underworld, which is described in detail in The Castle of Otranto. The castle of Otranto contains intricate subterranean passages that lead from the castle to the church of St. Nicholas, and through which the virtuous Isabella is chased by the lustful Manfred.

VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC Sir Walter Scott’s castle, Abbotsford.

and Radcliffe are. Scott’s genre is historical romance, but the influence of the Gothic is omnipresent in his work. From his earliest days and throughout his life, Scott read tales of terror. In 1808, in his “Ashestiel Autobiography,” he wrote of a youthful taste for “the wonderful and terrible, the common taste of children, but in which I have remained a child even unto this day” (qtd. in Robertson 52). He contributed to Matthew Lewis’s Tales of Wonder; wrote reviews of Gothic novels, including Maturin’s Fatal Revenge in 1810 and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818; and composed studies of individual Gothic authors Walpole, Radcliffe, and Clara Reeve for Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library. In 1812, after the success of his three poems and before he began writing his Waverley novel series, Scott purchased 110 acres, upon which he built his elaborate Gothic castle (1812-1815; enlarged in 1819). He named his new home Abbotsford after the monks of Melrose Abbey. The architect was William Atkinson. Abbotsford has been described as “an asymmetrical pile of towers, turrets, stepped gables, oriels, pinnacles, crene-

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lated parapets, and clustered chimney stacks, all assembled with calculated irregularity” (Pierson 292). Visitors flocked to Abbotsford to see the author and his residence first-hand, and, according to Thomas Carlyle, Abbotsford soon “became infested to a great degree with tourists, wonderhunters, and all that fatal species of people” (qtd. in Pierson 290). Included among the tourists was notable American Robert Gilmor III (1808-1874), who later returned to the United States with visions of Abbotsford and its charming host prominent in his fertile imagination. Gilmor was the nephew of the well-known Baltimore art collector Robert Gilmor. In 1828, Gilmor graduated from Harvard and received a diplomatic appointment that took him to Europe from 1829 until 1830. When his father died in 1830, the young Gilmor returned to the United States. His travel diary, now at the Maryland Historical Society, details his visits to France, Italy, Switzerland, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. On 24 May 1830, Gilmor visited Strawberry Hill, “the famous residence of Walpole” (Gilmor, 24 May 1830), as he (Gilmor) called it.

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Architectural historians often praise Strawberry Hill for introducing asymmetry into British domestic design and historicism into the Gothic Revival. But it is also important for another reason: the castle inspired Walpole to write his Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764. In A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, Walpole writes that Strawberry Hill is “a very proper habitation of, as it was the scene that inspired, the author of The Castle of Otranto” (iv). One June morning, Walpole awoke from a dream: “I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled, like mine, with Gothic story) and that, on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase, I saw a gigantic hand in armor” (letter to William Cole, 9 March 1765, Correspondence, I.88). That evening, Walpole sat down to write The Castle of Otranto. The setting of the story, as Walpole tells us in the preface, is “undoubtedly laid in some real castle” (Preface to the 1st ed. 8); indeed, as W.S. Lewis has shown, the rooms at Strawberry Hill and those in the pages of The Castle of Otranto correspond (88-90). Read by British and American readers alike, The Castle of Otranto enjoyed popularity long after Walpole’s death in 1797. When Gilmor visited Strawberry Hill in 1830, the castle was in the possession of Walpole’s heir, the Earl of Waldegrave. Upon arriving at Strawberry Hill, Gilmor admired the “superb pile,” and especially enjoyed the company of his hosts, the Earl of Waldegrave and his wife. About the castle, Gilmor wrote: Tis in the most beautiful Gothic (light) style. Much cut up into small rooms, none, except the long picture gallery being large. Some of the ceilings beautifully gilded others beautifully fitted in

wood or scagliola. But all things, wainscottings,— door—fireplaces—all Gothic. [. . .] These same rooms crammed—most literally crammed—with chef d’oeuvres of Antient and modern paintings, statuary, sarcophaguses, Bronzes and silver carvings of Benvenuto Cellini and others. [. . .] In this superb cabinet of curiosities for such the gothic castle deserves to be called, I strolled delighted. (24 May 1830, emph. Gilmor’s)

Gilmor is most affected by the fact that he is in the actual building in which Walpole wrote his Gothic tale, The Castle of Otranto. About that evening he wrote: “We retired about 11—I to my nice little Gothic chamber where I slept most soundly till [. . .] next morning. Lord W and I breakfasted together in the superb gothic library— where the Castle of Otranto was written.” Gilmor clearly relishes the proximity to Walpole and to the place where the first Gothic novel was written. On 28 May 1830, Lady Waldegrave opened to Gilmor “all the precious cabinets” of Walpole, bringing the young Gothic enthusiast that much closer to the fascinating figure of Walpole (Gilmor). Three months later, on 18 August 1830, Gilmor actually met a great novelist: Scott. Upon meeting the “Great Enchanter,” Gilmor was struck by his countenance in which beamed “all that genius which his voluminous and highly interesting works indicate.” The next day, Gilmor went to Abbotsford, where Scott led him through his “splendid castle.” Gilmor admired Scott’s library and armoury, “the finest things of the kind” he had ever seen. The highlight for Gilmor was his visit to Scott’s “little sanctum sanctorum, a snug place from which have emanated those great works which have so long enchanted the world” (Gilmor). Again, what most impressed Gilmor was his proximity not just to the novelists themselves but also to the fiction he loved. Scott entertained Gilmor on rides through the countryside with storytelling. On one occasion, Scott recounted the ending of his novel The Bride of Lammermoor, and on another, Gilmor himself recited a couplet from Scott’s poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel. An aspiring poet, Gilmor, like Davis, was an avid reader of Scott’s works. Gilmor has been described as having “an almost fanatical passion for the romances of Sir Walter Scott” (Donoghue). Perhaps it was a love of Gothic fiction that brought Gilmor and Davis together when the former returned to the United States in 1830. In 1832, Gilmor commissioned Davis and his partner Ithiel Town to design for him a castellated residence on the Gunpowder River near Baltimore.

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Horace Walpole bought Strawberry Hill, a small house overlooking the Thames River in Twickenham, in 1748. In 1754, he created the Strawberry Hill Committee, including himself and designers Richard Bentley and John Chute. (Other architects also contributed to the design.) Over the course of the following decades, Walpole and his associates made additions to Strawberry Hill, creating a Gothic Revival castle unlike any building before it. The style, which has been called everything from “light Gothic,” to “rococo Gothic,” relied as much on whimsical inventiveness as on archaeological research into mediaeval architectural forms. For the overall affect, Walpole sought the “gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals” (letter to Horace Mann, 27 April 1853, Correspondence XX.372). He filled his castle with his collection of curiosities and opened it for viewing to the public.

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Gilmor named the house Glen Ellen, after his wife Ellen Ward (with the additional association of Scott’s Ellen, the heroine of The Lady of the Lake); the addition of the word Glen gave the name a Scottish ring (Pierson 292). During the design process, Davis reduced the height of the house from two stories to one storey. Crenellated towers and ornate pinnacles vertically interrupt the horizontal massing of Glen Ellen. The halfoctagonal bay on the west façade features delicate tracery. Davis called Glen Ellen the “first English Perpendicular Gothic Villa [in America] with Barge Boards, Bracketts, Oriels, Tracery in Windows, etc.” (Schimmelman 155). The executed design is significant in American architectural history as the first consciously designed asymmetrical American house since the seventeenth century. On 21 September 1832, not long after Gilmor’s return in late 1830 or early 1831, Scott died. Two weeks later, on 5 October 1832, Davis makes his first notes on Glen Ellen in his day book. Perhaps Gilmor may have conceived of Glen Ellen as a tribute or romantic memorial to his genial host at Abbotsford (Snadon 93). Indeed, as William Pierson has shown, the plans of Abbotsford and Glen Ellen both display a progression from left to right of octagonal corner turret to octagonal bay to square corner tower (Pierson 295). Davis also designed a ruined gatelodge for the Glen Ellen estate, reminiscent of Scott’s beloved Melrose Abbey, a ruined mediaeval structure near Abbotsford (Schimmelman 155). But Abbotsford is not the only source for Glen Ellen. Gilmor was very impressed with the rococo Gothic he saw at Strawberry Hill, and the interior decoration of Walpole’s residence becomes the inspiration for the exterior ornamentation at Glen Ellen (Snadon 95). The battlements, pinnacles, towers, and pointed arch windows all recall Strawberry Hill, and the long rectangular parlour mirrors Walpole’s mediaeval gallery (BrendelPandich 70-71). Both Abbotsford and Strawberry Hill are sited along rivers; it is significant, then, that Gilmor chose a site for Glen Ellen on the Gunpowder River, twelve miles north of Baltimore (Snadon 101). While Town, Davis, and Gilmor were clearly indebted to Walpole and Atkinson, Glen Ellen is quite unlike anything that had come before it in American architecture. Most striking is its adoption of the complete Gothic program: it is asymmetrical in plan and elevation; its rooms are of disproportionate sizes; its ornamentation is both whimsical and reliant on recognizable mediaeval architectural forms. Glen Ellen is certainly not a

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repetition of Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s and Daniel Wadsworth’s earlier forays into the Gothic Revival style for domestic architecture. Unlike Sedgeley and Monte Video, where Gothic Revival ornament appears as an afterthought, Glen Ellen wears its mediaeval styling in a more assertive manner. Here Town and Davis enlisted the picturesque element of surprise; the beholder of Glen Ellen views a shifting façade with unexpected tower protrusions and heavily ornamented bay windows. Although light and airy Glen Ellen lacks the gloom of Radcliffe’s architectural spaces, the architects do create a villa in which the element of surprise is paramount. What is most significant about Glen Ellen is its conception as a place of fantasy, a literary indulgence to whet the Gothic appetite of its welltravelled owner. That Glen Ellen imitates the façade of Abbotsford or the interior ornamentation of Strawberry Hill is important; but more momentous is the idea of Glen Ellen as a retreat into the mediaeval world popularized by Gothic novels and historical romances. Finding particular architectural motifs at Glen Ellen inspired by specific literary passages in Gothic fiction is difficult (in part because Glen Ellen was demolished in the 1930s). But Glen Ellen is Gothic fiction transformed into stone, a constant reminder of its owner’s preferred reading material. With Glen Ellen, Gilmor pays homage to his favourite writers, thus participating in the cult of the Gothic author. Although he is the first, Gilmor will not be the last to yield to his literary fantasies by creating a permanent reminder of his Gothic passion. Influenced by Gothic novels and historical romances, American writers James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving gothicized their houses (Otsego Hall and Sunnyside, respectively) after visiting Gothic sites in Europe. After Glen Ellen, Davis went on to design numerous Gothic Revival cottages and villas, including his masterpiece, Lyndhurst in Tarrytown, New York (1838; 1865). Why were American architects, artists, and their clients so interested in mediaeval architecture? Their reading habits tell us a great deal. Mediaeval architecture plays a crucial role in Gothic novels and historical romances, leading some curious readers to visit mediaeval and Gothic Revival architectural sites related to their favourite novels. That American Gothic Revival architecture was closely related to the fictional works of writers such as Radcliffe and Scott is highlighted by a nineteenth-century observer’s comments on a Gothic Revival building in New York City. Thomas Aldrich Bailey wrote in 1866

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The links between Gothic literature and Gothic Revival architecture is certainly strong, beginning with Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. Indeed, as Anne Williams has pointed out, Walpole’s castle itself was in part inspired by Alexander Pope’s poem Eloisa to Abelard. Architecturally, Strawberry Hill represents a pastiche of mediaeval forms, knitted together by lath and plaster rather than traditional Gothic stonework. Walpole and his committee on taste ignored mediaeval building methods to create a whimsical building, more a work “of fancy than of imitation,” as Walpole admits (letter to Mary Berry, 17 October 1794, Correspondence XII.137). It is Walpole’s residence that inspires him to write the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, in 1764. In the first preface, written anonymously, Walpole states that the author seems to describe certain parts of a presumably real castle: “The chamber, says he, on the right hand; the door on the left hand; the distance from the chapel to Conrad’s apartment: these and other passages are strong presumptions that the author had some certain building in his eye” (8, emph. Walpole’s). The building the author had in mind was his own castle, Strawberry Hill. From the very beginning, the Gothic Revival is a phenomenon that crosses modern disciplinary boundaries. Therefore, the Gothic as an aesthetic movement should not be studied in isolation, as the work of architect Davis indicates. That American architects and clients read Gothic literature and historical romances changed the course of American architecture. When Davis

first became a practising architect, neoclassicism, and the Greek Revival in particular, held sway. But Davis and his clients, their imaginations full of Gothic stories, transformed American domestic architecture, creating neo-mediaeval fantasies in stone unlike anything that had come before.

Works Cited Andrews, Wayne. American Gothic: Its Origins, Its Trials, Its Triumphs. New York: Random House, 1975. Ballantyne, James, ed. Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library. London: Hurst, Robinson, 1821-24. Birkhead, Edith. The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance. London: Constable, 1921. Brendel-Pandich, Susanne. “From Cottages to Castles: The Country House Designs of Alexander Jackson Davis.” Alexander Jackson Davis, American Architect, 1803-1892. Ed. Amelia Peck. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rizzoli, 1992. 58-79. Cohen, Jeffrey A., and Charles E. Brownell. The Architectural Drawings of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Vol. II. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. Davis, Alexander Jackson. Alexandria Pocket Diary, I and II. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. ———. Catalogue of Books. New York Historical Society. ———. Day Book (1827-1853). New York Public Library. ———. Letterbook. New York Public Library. ———. Papers and Drawings Collections, I and II. Avery Architecture and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York City. Donoghue, John. Alexander Jackson Davis, Romantic Architect, 1803-1892. New York: Arno Press, 1982. N. pag. Dunlap, William. History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States. 1834. Vol. 3. Ed. Alexander Wyckoff. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965. Early, James. Romanticism and American Architecture. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1965. Eastlake, Charles. A History of the Gothic Revival. 1872. Leicester: Leicester UP; New York: Humanities, 1970. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960 and 1966. New York: Stein and Day, 1982. Gilmor, Robert, III. European Travel Diary. 2 vols. Sept. 27, 1829 to Sept. 9, 1830. Unpublished ms. Robert Gilmor Jr. Papers (ms. 387). Maryland Historical Society. N. pag. Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Goldsmith, Oliver. The Vicar of Wakefield. 1766. Ed. Arthur Friedman. Oxford: Oxford, UP, 1999. Hamlin, Talbot. “The Rise of Eclecticism in New York.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 11.2 (May 1952): 3-8. Hart, James D. The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste. New York: Oxford UP, 1950. Latrobe, Benjamin Henry. The Virginia Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 1795-1798. Vol. 1. Ed. Edward C. Carter II. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.

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about the University of the City of New York (now New York University; original building demolished) on Washington Square: “There isn’t a more gloomy structure outside of Mrs. Radcliff’s [sic] romances, and we hold that few men could pass a week in these lugubrious chambers, without adding a morbid streak to their natures—the genial immates [sic] to the contrary notwithstanding” (Donoghue). Usually, though, the Gothic Revival buildings constructed in the United States in this period were anything but gloomy. Like Strawberry Hill, Davis’s designs were light and airy, delicate rather than dark and massive (Davis does begin to experiment more with fortified castle designs in the 1850s). As Janice Schimmelman has argued, Scott’s novels recast the Gothic architectural style, moving it away from the barbarism associated with the Middle Ages and toward a more domestic ideal. An American author who wrote at the same time as Scott sums it up nicely by saying, “A castle without a ghost is fit for nothing but to live in” (Schimmelman 19).

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Lewis, Matthew. Tales of Wonder. London: W. Bulmer, 1801. Lewis, W.S. “The Genesis of Strawberry Hill.” Metropolitan Museum Studies. 5.1 (June 1934): 88-90. Loth, Calder, and Julius T. Sadler Jr. The Only Proper Style: Gothic Architecture in America. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975. Lougy, Robert E. Charles Robert Maturin. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1975. Maturin, Charles. Bertram: or the Castle of St. Aldobrand. 1816. Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1992. ———. Fatal Revenge. 1807. Intro. Maurice Lévy. New York: Arno, 1974. ———. Melmoth the Wanderer. 1820. Ed. Douglas Grant. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Pierson, William H., Jr. American Buildings and Their Architects: Technology and the Picturesque, The Corporate and the Early Gothic Styles. 1978. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1980.

Snadon, Patrick. “A.J. Davis and the Gothic Revival Castle in America, 1832-1865.” Diss. Cornell U, 1988. Stanton, Phoebe. The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture: An Episode in Taste, 1840-1856. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1968. Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. London: Fortune, 1938. Twain, Mark. “Life on the Mississippi.” 1883. Mississippi Writings. New York: Library of America, 1982. 217-616. Varma, Devendra. The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England. 1957. New York: Russell and Russell, 1966. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. 1764. Ed. W.S. Lewis. Intro. E.J. Clery. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. ———. A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole. 1784. London: Gregg, 1970. ———. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence. Ed. W.S. Lewis. 48 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1937-1983.

Pope, Alexander. Eloisa to Abelard. 1717. Intro. James E. Wellington. Coral Gables, FL: U of Miami P, 1965.

Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. 1794. Ed. and intro. Bonamy Dobrée. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

Zschokke, Heinrich. Abaellino. 1802. Trans. William Dunlap. Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1995.

———. The Romance of the Forest. 1791. Ed. and intro. Chloe Chard. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Ranger, Paul. “Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast”: Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750-1820. London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1991. Rebora, Carrie. “Alexander Jackson Davis and the Arts of Design.” Alexander Jackson Davis, American Architect, 1803-1892. Ed. Amelia Peck. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rizzoli, 1992. 22-39. Robertson, Fiona. Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Schimmelman, Janice Gayle. “The Spirit of the Gothic: The Gothic Revival House in Nineteenth-Century America.” Diss. U of Michigan, 1980.

ART ANDREW MARTINDALE (ESSAY DATE 1967) SOURCE: Martindale, Andrew. Introduction to Gothic Art, pp. 7-15. London: Thames and Hudson, 1967. In the following essay, Martindale offers an overview of the forms and periods of Gothic art, and how “Gothic” has been variously defined.

Scully, Vincent. The Shingle Style and the Stick Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright. 1955. New Haven: Yale UP, 1971.

It is traditionally held that Gothic art makes its debut with the patronage of the Abbot Suger, of the monastery of St Denis near Paris. Suger ruled from 1122 to 1151, and during the period of his abbacy a start was made on the rebuilding of the abbey church. The decoration and architecture of this building contained features which were to make it important and influential in the development of French art; and it is with this development and with its effect outside the territory of its origin that the first part of this book is concerned. This is one of the great transition periods in the history of European art. It was a period of intense experiment, unevenly and untidily distributed. But by c. 1250, European art had been transformed, and in all media what might be called a recognizably Gothic style was in the process of emerging.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Ed. and intro. Marilyn Butler. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

It is always wise to be cautious in the use of the word ‘Gothic’. The hunt for ‘Gothic charact-

Scott, Sir Walter. The Bride of Lammermoor. 1819. Ed. and intro. Fiona Robertson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. ———. Guy Mannering. 1815. Ed. P.D. Garside. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. ———. The Heart of Midlothian. 1818. Ed. and intro. Claire Lamont. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. ———. Ivanhoe. 1819. Ed. and intro. Ian Duncan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. ———. Redgauntlet. 1824. Intro. Kathryn Sutherland. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. ———. Rob Roy. 1818. Ed. Ian Duncan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. ———. Waverley. 1814. Ed. and intro. Claire Lamont. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

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sign that a sustained interest in art and artists was anything but exceptional. The main reason for this must have been that anyone passing through any form of academic training was instilled with certain prejudices which made such an interest very difficult to sustain.

This period actually extends for at least two hundred years, and during this time, not unexpectedly, European art underwent so many changes that it is hardly possible to divine a ‘Gothic style’ underlying the whole process. Insight into these changes is moreover hampered by one serious lack. To trace the changes in art in any detail almost inevitably entails some comment on the apparent purpose of the artists. The processes of artistic creation are hard enough to divine even in cases with copious documentation. In medieval studies, the lack of documents containing useful comment on actual works of art even by interested spectators—let alone practising artists—is almost complete. Renaissance writers, rightly or wrongly, thought that they knew what art was about and what artists were trying to do, and educated people made it their business to be interested in the subject. Medieval artists appear to have escaped this type of interest, but, as a result, the art historian is deprived of a very important and illuminating source of information. There are almost no explanations by contemporaries of works of art around them.

One here passes to the second important strand of scholastic thought which inhibited perceptive thinking about art. Material things, it was taught, were of value only in as far as they revealed some aspect of the eternal world and of the nature of God. The roots of this attitude are also to be found in the ancient world, particularly in the writings of Plato and later in those of the neo-Platonists. To these writers, the highest task of man was to attempt to know the truth which resided in the eternal world. Christian thought was profoundly affected by this outlook, and Christian philosophers came to teach that the visible world was only worthy of attention to the extent that it reflected and revealed some aspect of the Divinity. This automatically created a division between matter and its revealed content. As John Scotus Erigena, the ninth-century scholar, wrote, ‘We understand a piece of wood or stone only when we see God in it’. Earlier and later examples of this type of thought are not difficult to find, and it will be apparent that reflection of this kind effectively excluded all appreciation of style in art. Art derived its importance from what it represented and not how this was achieved.

This feature creates such a deep division between the writing of medieval and postmedieval art history that some comment is worth while. The exaltation of art and the artist is, and has been for about four centuries, a common feature of western European culture. One might perhaps think that this is an attitude immutable and unchanging, but in fact it is one which was entirely alien to the Middle Ages. There can be little doubt that people did on occasion exercise intelligent patronage in the arts. But there is no

The influence of the Schools was felt particularly in two ways. In the first place, there was a prejudice against any occupation involving manual work—against the so-called mechanical arts, among which painting, sculpture and building were certainly numbered. This prejudice can be traced back to Aristotle but it was incorporated into the teaching of the Christian Church, which set contemplation above action, thinking above performing, and, after the example of Christ, Mary above Martha. Artificers were not worth serious thought; and neither were their artefacts, or, at least, not for any inherent characteristics which they might possess.

It would be wholly unrealistic to suppose that, because this type of approach to art was the recommended one, all educated people adopted it to the exclusion of any other. There is every reason to suppose that more recognizably normal attitudes to art existed, if only because they were specifically ridiculed by Christian writers. St Augustine was very firm with those who professed an instinctive enjoyment of music, saying that this placed them on a level similar to birds. True

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eristics’ is hampered from the start by the vague and imprecise nature of the term. As is well known, it was first applied to art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in a derogatory sense to denote art which possessed in general a preRenaissance and non-Italianate appearance. It was never a precise descriptive word, since it was coined by men who were uninterested in making it precise. It meant, in effect, ‘barbarian’. At the time of the Gothic revival in the eighteenth century it ceased to be abusive, and became merely descriptive of all medieval art up to the time of the Italian Renaissance. Subsequent to this, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a large section was split off at one end to be labelled ‘Romanesque’ or ‘Norman’. Thus, by a rather unsatisfactory process of elimination, ‘Gothic’ came to describe that art which was produced between the Romanesque and Renaissance periods.

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appreciation consisted in knowing the intervals and consonances and understanding in them the reflection of the divine harmony of the universe. John Scotus, already mentioned, makes it clear that looking at an object with what today would be called a collector’s eye was frowned on because it almost certainly invoked cupidity and avarice. This general attitude or prejudice cannot have prevented people from entertaining views about artists and exercising preferences. But it did effectively prevent them from publicizing their preferences in writing; and it effectively prevented the growth of any sort of tradition of informed comment on art. One therefore enters a period of art history deprived of two important classes of evidence. Almost nothing is known during the Middle Ages of people’s reactions to art. There are no accounts of how a monastic chapter reacted when faced by three different designs for a new abbey church. It was probably much like any modern committee, but one does not know for certain. The second lack is more serious since it concerns the individual artists and works. Almost no biographical material exists. For instance, William of Sens, one of the great names of English twelfth-century architecture, had no biographer. Nothing is known about his training from direct contemporary testimony or early life—where he was born, where he travelled, what other buildings he was responsible for apart from Canterbury Cathedral, and so on. This is true of most of the names in medieval art; and usually, of course, not even the names survive. This means that much medieval art history becomes a rather depersonalized study. The historian has perforce to deal in ‘Schools’, by which he means rough groups of monuments which appear to have a stylistic affinity. This is an unavoidable misfortune, to be deplored the more because it leads on the one hand to accounts of works of art as if they were ‘untouched by human hand’, or rather by ‘human foibles’; and on the other hand, to a great deal of sentimental nonsense about the ‘anonymity’ of medieval artists which is best relegated to the pages of romantic fiction. It also results in misleading discussions on the ‘meaning of Gothic art’, about which, by the nature of the surviving literary evidence, we can never know very much. We can, however, gather up some of the shreds of evidence that remain concerning attitudes to art. In practice, medieval patrons appear to have approached art in an ordinary businesslike way. From the mid-thirteenth century contracts begin to survive, and these sometimes

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specify another work to be used as a model for the undertaking involved. The exemplar is found set up as a point of reference for beauty as well as size, and this at least suggests what one would expect, namely that medieval patrons knew what they liked and were anxious to have their requirements met. Alberti, the fifteenth-century scholar and architect, wrote the following advice to architects: ‘Lastly, I advise you not to be so far carried away by the desire of glory rashly to attempt anything entirely new or unusual. . . . Remember . . . with how much grudging and unwillingness people will spend their money in making trial of your fancies.’ This advice would seem to be entirely appropriate at almost any period in history, not excluding the Middle Ages, and to all forms of art. Addiction to sight-seeing is not a modern phenomenon but has probably always existed. At its lowest level, it seldom does any service to art. But at an intelligent level it must in the Middle Ages have helped the circulation of ideas and objects. Pilgrimages and diplomatic missions provided fruitful possibilities from which people returned armed with both ideas and souvenirs. Rome was, of course, at all times much visited, and there is a series of medieval handbooks on the sights to be noted. The Abbot Suger, we know, cast envious eyes on the marble columns of the Baths of Diocletian, but in the end contented himself with imitating the Roman basilicas by including a small portion of mosaic on the west front of St Denis. The Bishop of Winchester, Henry of Blois, bought a number of antique statues while on a visit to Rome in 1151 and sent them home to Winchester. The Abbot of Westminster, returning from the Court of Rome in 1269, brought back men and materials to construct a marble pavement in the new church of Westminster after the Roman manner. Not much is known about local arrangements for dealing with sight-seers. But it is perhaps worth noting that in the Monastic Constitutions compiled for Christchurch, Canterbury, in the third quarter of the eleventh century, special provision was made for sightseers wishing to see the domestic quarters of the monks. The duty of showing people round was entrusted to the monk responsible for receiving guests. Presumably all monasteries of any splendour or size found similar arrangements necessary. It was observed above that by c. 1250 a European Gothic style was beginning to emerge. Books of this nature are liable to get entangled in definitions of ‘Gothic’, and in order to avoid this,

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During the period covered by the second chapter, 1240-1350, the position clarifies briefly. During the reign of Louis IX, there was a sudden wave of enthusiasm for north-French artistic ideas both in the peripheral areas of Frence itself and outside. This emerges with particular clarity in architecture but it is true of all the arts. From this time, Paris became an important European centre of fashion and art. The third chapter deals with what is perhaps the joker in this art-historical pack—Italian art. The Italian resistance to orthodox French Gothic art as it materialized around 1240 seems to have been considerable. Italian artists were certainly impressed by particular details of French art. But at no point did any Italian try to build a rayonnant cathedral or to carve a French type of portal; and not until the fourteenth century are there signs of anyone imitating the dainty style associated with the court of Louis IX. Such resistance arouses a certain admiration, but makes it impossible to deal with Italian Gothic art at the same time as that of Germany or England. The final chapter is concerned with the period c. 1350-1400 throughout Europe, and including Italy. There appears to have been an increased exchange of ideas across the Alps during that period which lends some justification to this grouping. Certainly the Parisian painters showed more and more awareness of Italian art. The one unexpected phenomenon during these years was the sudden emergence of Prague as a centre of curious hybrid culture, when it became for a

comparatively short time the centre of the empire and the seat of the imperial court. The historian of art is usually held to be under some obligation to explain his subject-matter as the emanation of the age with which he is dealing. Art may be a reflection of the human spirit, but it is notoriously difficult to explain how the spirit of an age renders inevitable the type of art which is produced during that age. There is always a residue of doubt left at the end which leads one to reflect that in history nothing is inevitable until it has actually happened. To try to explain artistic form in terms of history seems to be an occupation of doubtful value. It is, of course, easy enough, and illuminating, to reverse something of this process and to use art to throw light on history. Every major work of art is an expression of some aspect of the people and society that produced it. It is not fanciful to see the power of a monastery reflected in a great monastic church. The splendour of the east end of St Denis in Paris will tell us a great deal about the Abbot Suger who built it, just as the bareness of the abbey church of Fontenay will illustrate general propositions about the austerity of St Bernard and the early Cistercians. Likewise, the sumptuous fittings of the surviving medieval basilicas in Rome form an appropriate background to claims of the thirteenthcentury papacy. Art, in fact, has and had a function both then and now as a background against which major events were played out and against which they may still be imagined. But can one deduce from the surviving evidence why a particular individual in a particular society produced a particular form of art? This would lead to a complex line of speculation which sought a connection between the history of changing forms and the flux of ideas. There are, on the other hand, certain quite obvious ways in which ideas influence the content of art. Emile Male began his book on thirteenth-century art by saying that ‘art in the Middle Ages is a script’. Every large and complicated assembly of art represents a certain amount of book-work on the part of somebody; this applies to secular as well as religious art. A cathedral portal was almost certainly worked according to a programme laid down by a scholar—probably a canon—and its significance is generally to be apprehended through some text with which the man was familiar. To this extent, such art will express some aspect of contemporary thought, and in its content will be the product of its historical background.

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something should be said at the start about the position taken in this book. ‘Gothic art’ has here been taken in the first instance as that art which was developed in the Île-de-France and northern France between c. 1140 and 1240. It is the art of an area taken over a rather long period of development and the story to be followed concerns the process by which other areas of France and other countries surrounding France came by degrees to accept the idea that it was desirable to copy this art. In this story, the reign of Louis IX (1226-70) forms a central point. In most countries before this time, the influence of France and, by this definition, the Gothic style of art, is confused. Questions concerning what is or is not Gothic are difficult and occasionally acrimonious. The first chapter of this book deals with this developmental period. An attempt is made to sketch out events in the north of France and around Paris and then to set alongside this the art of other countries in order to see at what point these came to be affected by Gothic ideas.

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ EDWARD GOREY (1925-2000)

In Gorey’s darkly drawn alphabets and picture stories, the comic and macabre combine in a unique mix of sophisticated nonsense. Despite the fact that the cast of characters in his quaint vignettes include hapless and unfortunate children who meet their demise in his singular alphabets—“G is for George smothered under a rug; H is for Hector done in by a thug”—and the child-eating Wuggly Ump, young people as well as adults respond gleefully to Gorey’s morbid sense of humor. Gorey’s black and white pen and ink images expose a shadowy corner of our collective memory, conjuring up a shroud of Victorian darkness sparingly highlighted by Edwardian innocence: dapper young men in striped jackets and straw boater hats play croquet amid the bleak, desolate landscape of an isolated country estate; proper young children are left unattended by maids and nannies to wander amid the suffocating shadows of dark hallways and forgotten rooms; bustled, corseted ladies in lace and veils stand primly about; and diaphanous damsels, beaded and bobbed, lounge languorously on musty, overstuffed Victorian furniture. There is always an impending threat, sometimes unmentioned and unseen, but more often brought to life in Gorey’s typically menacing but never overstated manner. The elements of childhood terror—the bad dream that wakes us from a sound sleep, the irrational fears we laugh at in the cheerful light of dawn but that become darkly oppressive when conjured up alone at night—these are the ingredients of Gorey’s art. Wordplay is used to great effect in tempering the pall of malevolence that would otherwise overwhelm Gorey’s Gothic tales. The author’s nightmarish world is rendered less threatening when the hapless victims of his calamitous plots carry silly names: Maudie Splaytoe, the ballet dancer who meets a tragic end in The Gilded Bat (1966); vapid Miss Scrim-Pshaw, the menacing Throbblefoot Spectre; and others, residing in such places as Wunksieville, Weedhaven Laughing Academy, or Penwiper Mews.

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Art is also to a large extent the product of economic circumstance. The raw material and the labour have to be obtained and paid for, and expensive art (most good art is expensive) appears in places where funds are available. The most obvious instances of this are to be found in architecture—by far the most expensive of the arts. Architecture on a large scale flourished mainly in areas where commerce flourished. This means that in almost any century during the Middle Ages, the greatest concentration of important building activity in Europe is to be found in the vicinity of a line drawn on the map from Bologna to London, allowing a slight divergence to take in the Rhine Valley. This was the central ‘corridor’ of European trade, and the presence of money is obvious from the amount of significant architecture. The directness of this dependence emerges when one considers the sources tapped in order to raise money for church building. The bishop, of course, almost always contributed, if the work was a cathedral. The ruling chapter might divert funds from revenues to aid the work. But many of the means depended directly on the presence of a large quantity of people with surplus money. Indulgences were sold, and gifts were solicited in return for perpetual prayers for benefactors. Offerings were taken from pilgrims at shrines and the relics were taken on a tour of the surrounding countryside and even farther afield. Local confraternities were organized in the area to raise funds, and the perennial box or trunk was left in evidence for people to drop contributions into. All these devices depended for their yield on ready access to money. A tour of the relics through an area populated only by impoverished peasants was not going to help the church fabric even though it might help the peasants. One change in the nature of buildings erected began to take effect during the period covered by the first chapter of this book. Much of the major building is cathedral architecture. With certain obvious exceptions (St Denis in Paris is one), monastic church building dwindled in importance. This does not in itself denotes some sort of monastic decline, but probably means that by 1200 the greater monasteries had on the whole got churches with which they were satisfied. By contrast, many towns were not satisfied with their chief ecclesiastical buildings, and were willing to pay a great deal in order to make it possible for the bishop and chapter to replace them. The years 1140-1250 were a period in which it became possible to build churches the size and height of which had not been known since the fall of the G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1

One further development had important consequences for art during this period, namely the growth of the universities and the increasing demands of scholarship. This slow process which was spread across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries produced an increasing demand for texts, and this demand came to be satisfied by workshops of scribes working independently of monastic scriptoria. The era of commercial bookproduction had dawned. This type of production did not, of course, necessarily involve high-quality artistic endeavour. The point at which illumination became primarily a secular craft carried out by professionals is harder to judge. There were still eminent monastic scriptoria in Italy during the fifteenth century. But the change had already begun in the twelfth.

PAUL WILLIAMSON (ESSAY DATE 1995) SOURCE: Williamson, Paul. Introduction to Gothic Sculpture 1140-1300, pp. 1-7. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. In the following essay, Williamson analyzes the cultural, philosophical, and theological traditions that contributed to the popularity of Gothic sculpture during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The Context of Gothic Sculpture In the middle of the twelfth century the prestige of the great monasteries was unchallenged, the most influential religious and intellectual figures being powerful monks such as the Benedictine Abbot Suger and the Cistercian St Bernard of Clairvaux. Artistic endeavour was, as ever, dominated and controlled by its principal patrons, and at this time the monastic houses provided the greatest opportunities for employment. By 1300 all this had changed. The intervening century and a half witnessed not only events of pivotal importance for the history of European civilisation but also saw a fundamental shift in the perception of man’s relation to God, propagated by great thinkers such as Albertus Magnus and St Thomas Aquinas and spread through the agency of the new universities. Towns grew in size, communications and literacy improved, and better technology—including the development of the deep plough and the introduction of the windmill— revolutionised farming methods, bringing a new prosperity which provided the wherewithal for a vast increase in building. By the late twelfth

century the traditional monastic orders seemed irrelevant to the lives of the growing urban populace, and a plethora of more accessible new sects— some heretical—had sprung up. It was because of their ability to channel popular support in their own direction, away from these dangerous minorities, that the mendicant orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans were able to exert control so quickly over both the laity and the papacy. Throughout this period the Pope struggled to retain a position of pre-eminence. His temporal power was increasingly undermined by ambitious leaders and forced alliances and conflicts, first with the Hohenstaufen then with the Angevins. The growing power of Capetian France, set in train by the advances gained by Philip Augustus (11801223), culminated in the ignominious ‘Babylonish Captivity’, when the papal court was transferred to Avignon in 1307. Various attempts were made to unite the Christian community, either by decree—such as the Fourth Lateran Council, convened by the brilliant and successful Innocent III in 1215—or by military muscle-flexing against an outside enemy. Crusades were one of the most effective ways of doing this as they offered both spiritual profit (through indulgences) and material gain; the Fourth Crusade, which ended with the disgraceful sacking of Constantinople in 1204, was only the most notorious of these adventures. The granting of indulgences, used so effectively to finance many of the cathedrals constructed in the thirteenth century, reached a climax in 1300 with the first Roman Jubilee (the Anno Santo). This was the brainchild of the beleaguered Pope Boniface VIII, but rather than signalling a celebration of unity it represented nothing less than a desperate final attempt to raise money, not from wealthy individuals but from the public at large.1 The Jubilee was created to harness popular devotion to St Peter, the first saint of Christendom. As a phenomenon, a fixed point in time, it was no more than the essence of a well-established ecclesiastical practice. The standing of every cathedral was dependent on the status of its relics or patron saint, and it was in the interest of any bishop to forge strong links between his church, the civic authorities and the populace. Very few churches had the aristocratic financial support that Cologne Cathedral, for instance, could muster, and instead there was the expectation that contributions would come from a broad spectrum of society. It should never be forgotten how central the cathedral was to the life of the medieval citizen, although it is as well to recognise that most contemporary accounts of the relations

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Roman Empire. The initial driving force behind these various enterprises must have gathered part of its momentum from civic pride.

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between town and chapter were compiled by ecclesiastical chroniclers and are necessarily onesided. The most well-known illustration of the common devotion of the populace is the celebrated episode of the hauling of plaustra (carts filled with building material) by people from all walks of life to help with the construction of Chartres Cathedral in around 1145, an event that was copied elsewhere and again at Chartres itself after the fire of 1194. It has been pointed out that this dedication on the part of the people may not always have been disinterested, as the spending by pilgrims at the time of the Chartres Fair accounted for a large proportion of the town’s annual income. Nevertheless, it was important to approach the collecting of building funds with sensitivity, especially in straitened times: the mass rebellion against the chapter of Reims Cathedral in 1233 was a reminder that Christian charity had its limits.2 The cathedral also dominated the thirteenthcentury town by dint of its sheer size. In a society unused to large buildings the visual effect of a church of Lincoln Cathedral’s dimensions can only be imagined. The silhouettes of these structures would have been visible for miles around, dwarfing the shops and domestic buildings in their shadow and acting as magnets for visitors. When the faithful approached the cathedrals more closely they would have noticed, as we do today, that the architecture was articulated by sculpture; and stepping through the main portal, perhaps sculpted with the Last Judgement or the Coronation of the Virgin, they would have been confronted by the figured choirscreen with a painted triumphal cross above. At every turn, in every chapel, they would have seen images of the Virgin and Child and numerous saints, and their progress through the church would have been punctuated by architectural sculpture both ornamental and figurative. How did all this strike the medieval spectator and how was the sculpture understood? It has long been recognised that one of the most important results of the so-called ‘Twelfthcentury Renaissance’ was to change the common man’s attitude to God. The medieval humanism of St Anselm, Master Eckhart and others encouraged philosophers to re-discover the individual and to analyse the relationship between the soul and God. Through the joint channels of the new universities and preaching to the masses, new light pierced the darkness of a blind faith invariably centred on a frightening eschatology. The translation of classical texts—especially Aristo-

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tle—in the century between 1150 and 1250 provided a corpus of rational treatises which trickled down into public consciousness, and this independence of thought, of unbiased enquiry, began to permeate the arts. The spirit of scientific curiosity which stimulated the production of herbal manuscripts, for example, allowed the sculptors of Paris, Bourges and Reims, and later at Southwell, to experiment with the carving of naturalistic leaf forms; and the remarkable and epoch-making heads at Reims, grimacing and grinning with a verisimilitude unknown in the twelfth century, are no less eloquent evidence of a new fascination with physiognomy and the mental condition.3 Man was freeing himself from a fear bred through ignorance, and the church needed to appeal to an audience quite different from that to be found in the monasteries. No generalisation can escape the criticism of the specialist, but there is something to be said for a view that sets the typical Romanesque Last Judgement tympanum— perhaps exemplified by Conques—against the Gothic topos at Reims [93] as an illustration of the changes which took place. In the former Christ sits in Majesty, the Damned to his left, the Blessed to his right, in a straightforward image of the Judgement Day, offering no hope to the sinner. Although at Reims the figure of Christ is still awesomely omnipotent, the prospect of Salvation is emphasised by the presence of the interceding figures of the Virgin and St John to each side of Christ and a reduction in the size of Hell at the bottom right. This comparison could be repeated, using different examples and gaining similar results, but the point has been made.4 As God, through Christ, was made to appear more human and more forgiving, so the Virgin assumed an increasingly important rôle as his caring mother and as an intercessor for mankind. The cult of the Virgin grew up as a result of the Queen of Heaven’s perceived position at Christ’s side, and between 1150 and 1300 this public devotion was also manifested in an expansion of Marian iconography—the appearance of the Coronation of the Virgin on the tympanum being perhaps the most conspicuous development—and the creation of an unprecedented number of statues of the Virgin and Child.5 Starting off simply as images of the Virgin, in due course many of these cult statues came to be worshipped in their own right, despite the warnings against idolatry issued by Durandus and several other thirteenth-century commentators. Miracles were often reported in connection with statues of the Virgin, especially at sites of pilgrim-

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If these single images offered the greatest emotional and spiritual attraction to the medieval onlooker, the sculptures of the portals were the means by which instruction and moral exegesis were passed on. The sculptures on the outside of the Gothic church provided the approaching public with its first experience of Christian doctrine made visible, while inside the building, narrative programmes in stained glass replaced the wall-paintings and historiated capitals which had fulfilled the same rôle in Romanesque structures. It will be seen that what distinguished the iconographic schemes on the earliest Gothic portals, at Saint-Denis and Chartres, from their predecessors was the amount of thought that went into their creation, and it is self-evident that their value as tools for teaching was recognised by influential theologians. Both Abbot Suger and Thierry, the Chancellor of the School of Chartres in the middle of the twelfth century, seem to have played an important part in the development of the portal as a bearer of intellectually coherent messages, and at the beginning of the following century another chancellor of Chartres, Peter of Roissy, apparently used the decoration of the right-hand portal of the north transept to rebut contemporary heresies.8 Elsewhere, ‘site-specific’ iconographic programmes were also planned—most notably on the transepts of Notre-Dame in Paris in the middle of the thirteenth century—which would have had a special resonance for a particular audience.9 The cathedral was often at the centre of the town, usually next to the market, so was uniquely well-placed for social gatherings. The deep porches of the more ambitious churches would have provided shelter for large numbers of people and could be used in a variety of ways. The ubiquitous subject of the Last Judgement on Gothic portals, often with the supporting figures of Virtues and

Vices and Wise and Foolish Virgins, would serve as an especially appropriate backdrop to the dispensation of justice, as was the case at León Cathedral. Here, from an early date, a column set on the front of a Gothic canopied tabernacle was placed between the piers to the left of the Judgement portal [2]. Its function is literally spelt out by the inscription LOCUS APPELLACIONIS carved on its front face, and the arms of León and Castile appear below.1 0 Presiding over this symbol, in the niche behind, is the seated figure of King Solomon, and a later personification of Justice, holding a sword and scales, has been inserted among the jamb figures of the adjacent doorway. León was not an isolated case, and it is known that trials were also conducted in the area of the south transept of Strasbourg Cathedral, in the west porches of the Minster of Freiburg im Breisgau, Saint-Urbain at Troyes, and elsewhere.1 1 The centrality of the cathedrals and lesser churches to medieval society is also illustrated by the numbers of workmen involved in their construction and embellishment. At the peak of the great period of rebuilding, roughly speaking in the years between 1180 and 1250, no member of society living within reach of a cathedral undergoing construction would have been untouched by the work, and a good proportion would have been actively engaged on it. Peasants and other unskilled workers normally employed in the fields might have been called upon to carry wood or stone to the building-site, but once the material had arrived it was handed over to the specialist mason, usually described as a cementarius, lathomus, maçon or tailleur de pierre in contemporary documents.1 2 In the absence of any qualifying descriptions referring unequivocally to carvers of figures in the period before about the middle of the thirteenth century, one cannot assume that the masons responsible for sculpting the jamb figures and reliefs on Gothic portals were specialists in that area. It may well have been the case that such people existed, but it is more likely that they formed part of a masons’ lodge charged with a wide variety of stone cutting.1 3 One of the most significant developments in the production of sculpture throughout Europe in the period with which this book is concerned is the emergence of the specialist ymagier tailleur during the thirteenth century, a profession at first limited to the making of smaller images—predominantly in wood—and not part of the building trade. By 1300 such specialists were also engaged in the making of monumental sculpture.

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age, and in this general climate it is hardly surprising that there should be stories of statues acting as intermediaries or even coming to life.6 One of the most celebrated fables of this period, the story of Theophilus and his pact with the Devil, invariably shows the former praying before a figure of the Virgin [225] in the hope that his plea for mercy would be rewarded. Many other miracles of this type are recounted in Gautier de Coincy’s Miracles de la Sainte Vierge and illustrated in the mid thirteenth-century Cántigas of Alfonso X El Sabio in the Escorial, and a comparable episode is played out on the trumeau socle of the Judgement portal on the north transept of Reims Cathedral [1]. Similar incidents were recorded in connection with figures of the Crucified Christ.7

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The Making of Gothic Sculpture The mason-sculptor of the Early Gothic cathedral was of course subordinate in all he did to the master mason or architect, who in turn was answerable to a body of canons charged with the supervision of work.1 4 Once the design of the portal, for instance, was worked out, the selection of stone blocks was made and the sculptors set to work in the masons’ yard. The freestone used for architectural sculpture was almost always the same as for the rest of the building.1 5 It is probable that for large figures instructions were sent to the quarry to hew blocks of the appropriate size, but in numerous instances there is evidence that the sculptors made do with the ready-cut blocks already available. On the west portal of Rochester Cathedral of around 1170 the jamb figures were made from two separate pieces joined together below the knee [155], and the same feature is visible in the thirteen century on at least four of the life-sized figures of the Wells west front; in Germany, the statues of Ecclesia [263] and Synagoga in the Paradise porch at Magdeburg Cathedral are also constructed in this way, and Arnolfo di Cambio had to piece together two blocks of marble before carving the seated Virgin and Child for the façade of the Florence Duomo [379].1 6 Occasionally two figures from the same ensemble are carved from different stones, as was the case in the famous Annunciation group in the Westminster chapter house [305-6]: the choice of Caen limestone for one and Reigate sandstone for the other goes some way towards explaining the different condition of the two pieces.1 7 It also illustrates the pragmatism of the Westminster masons, who would obviously have been aware that the sculptures were destined to be painted. In other instances different types of stone may have been selected in the recognition that some were more amenable to detailed carving than others: this would appear to be the case on the nowdismantled canopy tomb from Sawley [316], of about 1275-80, where the angels are carved from a fine limestone but the sections of roll-moulding are sandstone.1 8 The block was reduced with a variety of tools, ranging from a mason’s axe—to rough out the basic shape of the figure—to different types of chisels, drills and points. No working drawings by Gothic sculptors have survived, and it is likely that most carving was done directly on to the block, which had first been marked out.1 9 The marks of the larger flat chisels have often survived on the backs of the sculptures, while the herringbone patterns of the finest claw chisels some-

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times remain, usually hidden under paint. Although the fine grid of ridges left by the claw chisel would often have acted as a suitable foundation for the application of a ground for pigmentation it was nonetheless the usual practice to finish the carving by rubbing the surface down with files or rasps, and it is this smooth appearance that is now most often encountered. A telling illustration of the different stages of carving a relief is provided by the recently uncovered back face of the midtwelfth-century lintel at Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris. Intended as a relief of the Last Supper— finally completed on the other side—this shows the carving progressing from barely blocked-out figures on the right to a virtually finished head on the far left.2 0 Two different stages of carving can be seen in a stained glass window at Chartres, of about 1225 [3]. On the right a sculptor uses a mallet and chisel on a propped-up semi-carved crowned figure (comparable to a king on the north transept porch) while a second workman stands at rest, lifting a glass to his lips. It can be seen that the figure has reached the intermediate stage between blocking out and the carving of fine detail, and the facial features have not been completed. On the left the same sculptor has almost completed the figure—note the detailed finish of the head— and is shown using a long flat chisel or scraper to refine the drapery folds. On finishing life-sized statues such as this the sculptor would sometimes hack out the back of the figure—as at Wells and later at Exeter—to reduce the weight and make it easier to lift into position. The sculptures were also frequently given numbers or other assembly marks to ensure correct installation.2 1 There can be no doubt that large jamb figures and much of the relief sculpture associated with portals or other ensembles were almost invariably made on the ground in the masons’ yard, and not carved in situ. Confirmation of this is provided by occasional evidence of sculptures being cut down, presumably at the point of installation, because of inconsistencies in measurement. The lintels on the south portal of the west façade of Chartres Cathedral were shortened on the right side and the bottom voussoirs truncated for this reason, and it can be seen that many reliefs constructed of more than one block of stone were divided compositionally to take into account the fact that each slab was carved separately.2 2 On the other hand it is as well to be aware of the practice of reusing portals within a later architectural context, an occurrence which happened surprisingly frequently and which often involved the adaptation

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After the sculptures had been installed, the scaffolding would have remained in place while they were painted. Before passing on to this vital component of Gothic sculpure, it should also be pointed out that just prior to the final stage it is likely that some more carving was done and joints were filled. Certain parts of the portal were more likely to be carved in situ than others, especially those architectural features which formed an integral part of the construction, such as archivolts; and although there is overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of figured voussoirs were carved in the masons’ yard and constructed on site, this was not always the case. In chapter three it will be seen that the two portals of the Lady Chapel at Glastonbury Abbey were in position but unfinished in 1189; the carving of the archivolts of the south doorway—which was clearly being executed in situ—had barely started by this time, only two of the scenes being partially indicated on the second order [4]. It is possible that when work came to a halt the decorative programme was completed in paint in the hope that carving might be resumed at a later date. This was not to be the case on the south portal, although the figured archivolts of the north doorway were eventually carved in around 1220.2 3 Another probable instance of carving après la pose may be found in the north porch of the collegiate church of Candes-Saint-Martin on the Loire (c.1240-50). Here the jamb figures were worked from rectangular blocks set into the wall (some of these still remain outside the porch), and the architectural sculptures—the voussoirs, the demi-angels above the heads of the jamb figures, the spandrels of the canopies which enclose them, and the bosses— were seemingly in the process of being carved in situ before being left in an unfinished state, perhaps because funding had ceased [5].2 4 The painting of stone sculpture would usually have been carried out by specialists rather than the sculptors who had taken the work to its penultimate stage. This is indicated by the Paris guild regulations (gathered together by the provost of Paris, Etienne Boileau, in around 1268) which list

how such ymagiers paintres (sic) should conduct themselves. It is also apparent from the few thirteenth-century accounts of payments made to individuals for painting sculptures, such as that of April 1253 at Westminster Abbey, ‘to Warin the painter for painting 2 images with colour—11s’.2 5 The sculptures were first treated with a sealant or insulation layer, usually of animal or fish glue or casein, to counteract the porosity of the stone, and to this was added a ground—often of gypsum or lead white with a drying medium—upon which the paint would be applied. In some cases, as at Lausanne Cathedral and on a number of sepulchral effigies, the ground was built up and modelled (or cast and applied) before being painted, giving the surface a detailed finish difficult to achieve in carved stone.2 6 The original coloured aspect of Gothic sculpture is now difficult to reconstruct in the mind’s eye and very few external sculptures retain any visible remains of pigmentation. A fortunate exception is the Lausanne south porch [88, 89], where recent conservation work has revealed the astonishingly high quality of the painted decoration.2 7 However, many of the major monuments of Gothic sculpture are beginning to yield something of their original coloured appearance to conservators prepared to make painstaking inspections of their weathered surfaces, and considerable traces of paint have been discovered on the Royal Portal at Chartres, at Etampes and Bourges, the west façade and Kings’ gallery at Notre-Dame in Paris, the gabled porch of Ferrara Cathedral, and elsewhere.2 8 Sculptures made for interior settings usually preserve their colouring more completely than those outdoors. Of these, it is the sculptures in wood which offer the largest sample of polychromed work. As already noted, there were guilds of ymagiers-tailleurs in Paris from at least the early thirteenth century, and the regulations laid out in Etienne Boileau’s Livre des Métiers give clear instructions as to how wood (and ivory and bone) sculptures should be made and how they should be painted, so as to protect patrons from inferior workmanship. These imagers worked in small ateliers, with only one apprentice; the regulations go into some detail over the training of the latter (which should take at least seven years) and continue with advice on the correct procedures for carving figures and crucifixes: None may or should work on a holiday observed by the town, nor at night, because darkness does not allow the work of our profession, which is carving. None in the profession above may or should make a figure (ymage) or crucifix, or any other thing

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of the earlier composition to its new setting. The most celebrated instance of this is the installation of the largely twelfth-century St Anne portal in the early thirteenth-century façade of Notre-Dame in Paris, but other examples are to be found at Bourges Cathedral (the north and south lateral portals), Dijon (Saint-Bénigne), Laon Cathedral (the right portal of the west front) and Ávila Cathedral (the north portal, formerly on the west façade).

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pertaining to the Holy Church, if he does not make it of the appropriate material, or if it has not been ordered by another, by a cleric or some man of the Church, or a knight or nobleman, for their use. And this has been established by the master of the guild because one of our number had made works which were blameworthy, and the master was held responsible. No workers in this profession may or should make a crucifix or figure which is not carved of a single piece. And this has been ordained by the master of the guild because one of our number had made figures and crucifixes which were neither good nor proper, because they were made of many pieces [in the margin is added: No workers in this profession may or should make a figure of more than one piece, excepting the crown, if it is not broken during carving, then one may make it good; and excepting the crucifix, which is made of three pieces, the body of one piece and the arms. And this has been established by the master of the guild because one of our number had made figures which were not well constructed, good or proper, because they were made of many pieces].2 9

Two guild masters were appointed by the King to oversee the standards established by the guild regulations, who were empowered to levy fines for any infringement. The general regulations connected with the painting of sculpture were similar to those for the ymagiers-tailleurs, although the painters were allowed to take on as many apprentices as they liked [6] and to work at night; consistent with the regulations for the sculptors the most detailed comments were concerned with the technical side of the work. Hence: No figure painters should or may sell something as gilded, where the gold is not applied to silver; and if the gold is applied to tin and is sold as gilded, without saying the work is faulty, then the gold and the tin and all the other colour should be scraped off; and whosoever has sold such a work as gilded should remake it in a good and legal manner, and pay a fine to the King according to the judgement of the provost of Paris. If figure painters apply silver over tin, the work is faulty, if it has not been ordered as such or declared at point of sale; and if it is sold without saying, the work should be scraped, and made good and legal, and a fine should be paid to the King in the manner stipulated above. No faulty works of the profession above should be burnt, out of respect for the saints, in whose memory they were made.3 0

There is no reason to doubt that other major centres in Europe also had guilds and regulations of a similar type at this date, although it is not until the following century that documentary evidence emerges. Variations obviously existed from country to country, so that in Italy, for

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instance, crucifix figures were frequently made from five pieces: the arms, legs and torso—including the head—being carved separately and fitted together prior to being painted.3 1 Different types of wood were used throughout Europe, depending on local availability, with a preponderance of oak and walnut in the North and pine or poplar in Italy and Spain, and as a general rule the heartwood was removed from large sculptures to prevent splitting.3 2 If the common complaint in connection with stone sculpture is that most of it has been stripped of its original colour, the major impediment to the appreciation of wood sculpture is overpainting. Wood sculptures, especially cult statues, were regularly repainted from the Middle Ages onwards (see pp. 113-14), so that their present colouring is often very different from that intended. Inevitably, the later layers of paint—in some cases up to twenty separate applications— distort and coarsen the subtle original relationship between the carved and the painted, but as more sculptures are conserved an increasingly clear picture is emerging of the consummate skill of the statue painters.3 3 Finally, something should be said about the size of the workshops. By the end of the thirteenth century all the evidence points to a common pattern, moving away from the great masons’ yards of the cathedrals towards comparatively small workshops, some based in one place, others peripatetic. This was of course at least partly to do with the reduction in the number of large-scale sculptural programmes and a subsequent change in patronage. Around 1300 there was nothing to compare with the volume of work generated by the decoration of Reims or Wells cathedrals, and the new methods of employment, exemplified by the ‘taskwork’ payments pioneered in the mid century at Westminster Abbey, favoured small groups of sculptors, moving from one job to the next. The équipe assembled by the Parisian master mason Etienne de Bonneuil in 1287 to travel to Uppsala Cathedral in Sweden was therefore probably typical, and his arrangements for payment reflect the increasing professionalism of the workshop leaders. An excerpt from the contract bears this out: To all who will see this letter, Renaut le Cras, Provost of Paris, gives greeting. We make known that before us appeared Etienne de Bonneuil, to be master mason and master of the church of Uppsala in Sweden, proposing to go to said country as he had agreed upon. And he acknowledged having rightfully received and obtained advance payment of forty Paris livres from the hands of Messrs. Olivier and Charles, scholars and clerks at Paris, for the purpose of taking with him

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6. See the illuminating discussions in T. A. Heslop, ‘Attitudes to the visual arts: the evidence from the written sources’, in J. Alexander and P. Binski (eds), Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200-1400 (exh. cat., London, 1987), 26-32, and M. Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1989), 197-241.

It is of interest to compare this document with the slightly earlier agreements made between the operarius of Siena Cathedral and Nicola Pisano in 1265-7 for the Siena pulpit (p. 248). Although referring to very different commissions, both sets of documents vest responsibility for the completion of work in one man, the leader of a small team. In their own ways they reveal the beginning of a trend towards independence, setting the agenda for the development of artists in the fourteenth century.

7. V. F. Koenig (ed.), Gautier de Coincy, Les miracles de la Sainte-Vierge (4 vols, Geneva, 1955-66); J. Guerrero Lovillo, Las Cántigas: Estudio arqueológico des sus miniaturas (Madrid, 1949), 266-82. The precise interpretation of the Reims trumeau socle remains unclear (W. Sauerländer, Gothic Sculpture in France 1140-1270 (London, 1972), 482).

Notes 1. R. and C. Brooke, Popular Religion in the Middle Ages: Western Europe 1000-1300 (London, 1984), 153-5. A succinct account of the rise of the mendicant orders and their relationship to the Papacy is to be found in G. Barraclough, The Medieval Papacy (London, 1968), 127-40. 2. For the ‘cult of carts’ see T. G. Frisch, Gothic Art 1140c.1450. Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), 23-30, and B. Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: theory, record and event 1000-1215 (London, 1982), 150-3. The importance of Chartres Cathedral for the generation of income for the townspeople is laid out in O. von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of gothic architecture and the medieval concept of order (3rd ed., Princeton, 1988), 166-9. For Reims see B. Abou-el-Haj, ‘The urban setting for late medieval church building: Reims and its cathedral between 1210 and 1240’, Art History, XI (1988), 17-41. 3. There is of course a vast literature on the development of learning and philosophy in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries but the essays contained in R. L. Benson and G. Constable, with C. D. Lanham (eds), Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1982), the brilliant selective observations by R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and other studies (Oxford, 1970), and a percipient article by G. B. Ladner, ‘The life of the mind in the Christian West around the year 1200’, in The Year 1200: A Symposium (New York, 1975), 1-23, provide an introduction to the field. A more general survey is given by J. H. Mundy, Europe in the High Middle Ages 1150-1309 (London and New York, 1973). 4. See M. H. Caviness, ‘“The simple perception of matter” and the representation of narrative, ca. 11801280’, Gesta, XXX (1991), 48-64, esp. 48-9, who, by pointing out the similarities between such exemplars, demonstrates the dangers of a too facile approach to the separation of ‘Gothic’ from ‘Romanesque’. 5. P. Verdier, Le Couronnement de la Vierge. Les origines et les premiers développements d’un thème iconographique (Montreal, 1980); P. Schine Gold, The Lady and the Virgin. Image, attitude and experience in twelfth-century France (Chicago and London, 1985), 43-75.

8. See p. 39. A note of caution in regarding certain Romanesque schemes as responses to current heresies is sounded by W. Cahn, ‘Heresy and the interpretation of Romanesque art’, in Romanesque and Gothic. Essays for George Zarnecki (Woodbridge, 1987), I, 27-33. 9. See p. 153. Again, for a judicious commentary on the twelfth-century spectator, see W. Cahn, ‘Romanesque sculpture and the spectator’, in D. Kahn (ed.), The Romanesque Frieze and its Spectator (The Lincoln Symposium Papers) (London, 1992), 45-60. 10. F. B. Deknatel, ‘The thirteenth century Gothic sculpture of the cathedrals of Burgos and Leon’, Art Bulletin, XVII (1935), 339-40. 11. See pp. 57 and 195. A similar function can also be traced as far away as Stary Zamek in Lower Silesia in around 1260 (P. Crossley, ‘Kasimir the Great at Wis´lica’, in Romanesque and Gothic, op. cit., 46-7). 12. See D. Knoop and G. P. Jones, The Mediaeval Mason (2nd edition, Manchester, 1966); R. Recht (ed.), Les bâtisseurs des cathédrales gothiques (exh. cat., Strasbourg, 1989); and the individual case studies of different French cathedrals in D. Kimpel and R. Suckale, L’architecture gothique en France 1130-1270 (Paris, 1990). An excellent study by C. R. Dodwell, ‘The meaning of “Sculptor” in the Romanesque period’, in Romanesque and Gothic, op. cit., 49-61, is of use for the earlier part of the thirteenth century. 13. Knoop and Jones, op. cit., 74-5; for the case of Exeter Cathedral around 1300 see J. A. Givens, ‘The fabric accounts of Exeter Cathedral as a record of medieval sculptural practice’, Gesta, XXX (1991), 112-18. 14. Von Simson, op. cit., 228-29. 15. E. Farrell and R. Newman, ‘The materials of Gothic sculpture’ in D. Gillerman (ed.), Gothic Sculpture in America. I. The New England Museums (New York and London, 1989), ix-xxi. 16. For Rochester and Wells see W. H. St John Hope and W. R. Lethaby, ‘The imagery and sculptures on the west front of Wells cathedral church’, Archaeologia, LIX (1904), pls XXXVI (Rochester), XXVII (N.78), XLII (S.22), XLVII (N.44), XLIX (N.74). 17. P. Williamson, ‘The Westminster Chapter House Annunciation group’, Burlington Magazine, CXXX (1988), 123-4, and idem., 928. 18. Idem., Northern Gothic Sculpture 1200-1450 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1988), 43 (cat. nos 5-8). 19. The drawings by Villard de Honnecourt are more likely to be records of sculptures he had seen than working

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at the expense of said church four mates and four yeomen (bachelers), seeing that this would be to the advantage of said church for the cutting and carving of stone there. For this sum he promised to take said workmen to said land and to pay all their expenses . . .3 4

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sketches: for these see H. R. Hahnloser, Villard de Honnecourt. Kritische Gesamtausgabe des Bauhüttenbuches ms.fr 19093 der Pariser Nationalbibliothek (2nd ed., Graz, 1972). 20. P. Plagnieux, ‘Le portail du XIIe siècle de SaintGermain-des-Prés à Paris: état de la question et nouvelles recherches’, Gesta, XXVIII (1989), 21-9. For an analysis of the tool-marks on certain sculptures in Regensburg Cathedral see F. Fuchs, ‘Beobachtungen zur Bildhauertechnik an den mittelalterlichen Skulpturen des Regensburger Domes’, in Der Dom zu Regensburg. Ausgrabung—Restaurierung—Forschung (Munich and Zürich, 1990), 237-47. On tools see P. Rockwell, The art of stoneworking: a reference guide (Cambridge, 1993), 31-68 and pls 1-10. 21. In the case of Reims see H. Deneux, ‘Signes lapidaires et épures du XIIIe siècle à la cathédrale de Reims’, Bulletin Monumental, LXXXIV (1925), 99-131, and now, most comprehensively, R. Hamann-MacLean and I. Schüssler, Die Kathedrale von Reims, Die Architektur (Stuttgart, 1993), I/1, 261-94; I/2, figs 349-77; I/3, pls 167-8. 22. See, for instance, the tympanum from St Cäcilien in Cologne [100]. These prefabricated blocks were not always installed correctly (or did not always fit together accurately in situ), as may be seen in one of the angels in the Lincoln Angel choir (A. Gardner, The Lincoln Angels (Lincoln Minster Pamphlet (First Series), 6, 1952), fig. S.5).

‘The polychromy of the portals of the Gothic cathedral of Bourges’, Preprints of the ICOM Committee for Conservation 7th Triennial Meeting, Copenhagen, 10-14 September 1984, 84.5.1-4; M. Chataignère, ‘Etude technique de la polychromie’, in A. ErlandeBrandenburg and D. Thibaudat, Les sculptures de NotreDame de Paris au musée de Cluny (Paris, 1982), 121-3; R. Rossi Manaresi and O. Nonfarmale, Notizie sul restauro del protiro della cattedrale di Ferrara (Bologna, 1981). For an overview see R. Rossi Manaresi, ‘Considerazioni tecniche sulla scultura monumentale policromata, romanica e gotica’, Bollettino d’Arte, XLI (1987), 173-86. 29. Translated from Depping, op. cit., 156-7. 30. Ibid., 158-9. 31. For a typical Central Italian example of around 1230-50 see P. Williamson, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Medieval sculpture and works of art (London, 1987), cat. no. 13. 32. See Williamson, op. cit., note 18 (1988), 14-16. 33. For an exemplary investigation into a Mosan Virgin and Child of about 1270, with a coloured illustration showing its evolution through eight different paint schemes, see R. Didier, L. Kockaert, M. Serck-Dewaide and J. Vynckier, ‘La Sedes Sapientiae de Vivegnis: étude et traitement’, Bulletin de l’Institut royal du Patrimoine artistique, XXII (1988/89), 51-77. 34. Frisch, op. cit., 56-7.

23. See p. 107 and pl. 164. 24. L. Schreiner, Die frühgotische Plastik Südwestfrankreichs (Cologne-Graz, 1963), 106-12, 162-4. 25. H.-B. Depping (ed.), Réglemens sur les arts et métiers de Paris, rédigés au XIIIe siècle, et connus sous le nom du Livre des Métiers d’Etienne Boileau (Paris, 1837), 157-9 (see also the comments of M. Blindheim, Main trends of East-Norwegian wooden figure sculpture in the second half of the thirteenth century (Oslo, 1952), 92). A later edition may also be consulted: R. de Lespinasse and F. Bonnardot (eds), Histoire Générale de Paris. Les métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris. XIIIe siècle. Le Livre des Métiers d’Etienne Boileau (Paris, 1879). It should be noted that a separate guild existed for Maçons, Tailleurs de pierre, Plastriers and Morteliers (for its regulations see Depping, op. cit., 107-12). For the Westminster reference see H. M. Colvin (ed.), Building Accounts of King Henry III (Oxford, 1971), 228-9. 26. A. Brodrick, ‘Painting techniques of Early Medieval sculpture’, in Romanesque: stone sculpture from medieval England (exh. cat., Leeds, 1993), 18-27. 27. E. Deuber-Pauli and T. A. Hermanès, ‘Le portail peint de la Cathédrale de Lausanne: histoire, iconographie, sculpture et polychromie’, Nos monuments d’art et d’histoire, XXXII (1981), 262-74; V. Furlan, R. Pancella and T. A. Hermanès, Portail peint de la Cathédrale de Lausanne: analyses pour une restauration (Lausanne, n.d. [1982]); T. A. Hermanès and E. Deuber-Pauli, ‘La couleur gothique’, Connaissance des Arts, no. 367 (September 1982), 36-45. 28. O. Nonfarmale and R. Rossi Manaresi, ‘Il restauro del “Portail Royal” della cattedrale di Chartres’, Arte Medievale, 2nd series, I (1987), 259-75; C. di Matteo and P.-A. Lablaude, ‘Le portail polychrome de Notre-Dame d’Etampes’, Monuments historiques, 161 (JanuaryFebruary 1989), 86-90; R. Rossi-Manaresi and A. Tucci,

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Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare, 1781.

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ WASHINGTON ALLSTON (1779-1843)

Allston, America’s first important painter of the romantic movement, created landscapes, historical scenes, and literary pieces that exude dramatic terror as well as quiet mystery. Allston was in Paris in 1803 and 1804, and in Rome from 1804 to 1808, where he became acquainted with poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and author Washington Irving. Allston returned to America in 1808 and stayed in Boston, occupying the very room that the painters John Copley and John Trumbull had used. In 1811 he sailed with his wife to England, where she died in 1815. Among the paintings of this second English period were the Angel Releasing St. Peter from Prison (1812) and the Dead Man Revived by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha (1811-13), both developed into scenes of Gothic suspense. Allston returned to America (where he would remain for the rest of his life) in 1818 and took up residence in Boston. In Europe, Allston had painted scenes of either a dramatically bizarre or a sweetly joyous nature, treating emotional subjects openly, and exploring themes of supernatural salvation. His American paintings are usually more intimate and smaller in scale than those done in Europe. The heroic Belshazzar’s Feast (1817-43) was out of keeping with the more subdued mood of the American period. This huge canvas, begun in Europe, was taken up, put down, and taken up again at the end of Allston’s life but never finished. Allston was preparing to work on the figure of the King on the day of his death. The image of the prophet Daniel interpreting the handwriting on the wall haunted Allston to the point that he found himself unable to undertake other commissions. Allston’s insistence that colors and forms could produce psychological reactions in the spectator, regardless of the subject of the painting, anticipated the work of James McNeill Whistler and the thinking of early-twentieth-century theoreticians of nonobjective painting. Allston was the first American painter to draw more from the workings of his personal inner vision than from external reality.

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Washington Allston, 1779-1843.

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FURTHER READING Criticism Barnes, Carl F., Jr. “The Gothic Architectural Engravings in the Cathedral of Soissons.” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 47, no. 1 (January 1972): 60-64. Studies the material culture and folk art in the medieval French Gothic Cathedral of Soissons.

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Blum, Pamela Z. Early Gothic Saint-Denis: Restorations and Survivals. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, 187 p. Discusses the nineteenth-century restoration of the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis in France, and argues that contrary to the opinions of other experts, much of the original twelfth-century sculpture survived the restoration. Bolton, Jonathan. “Empire and Atonement: Geoffrey Hill’s ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England.’” Contemporary Literature 38, no. 2 (summer 1997): 287-306. Explores Geoffrey Hill’s use of poetry as a means of reconciling England’s policies of imperialism and oppression of the lower classes with the opulence and grandeur of Gothic architecture in his sonnet sequence “An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England.” Eastlake, Charles L. A History of the Gothic Revival. London, 1872, n.p. Earliest detailed study of the Gothic Revival in England. Gaborit, Jean René. “General Notes.” In Great Gothic Sculpture, translated by Carole Sperri and Lucia Wildt, pp. 177-84. New York: Reynal and Company, in association with William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1978. Traces the progress of Gothic art and architecture in Europe from the twelfth century through the late nineteenth century. Howard, Seymour. “Blake: Classicism, Gothicism, and Nationalism.” Colby Library Quarterly 21, no. 4 (December 1985): 165-87. Asserts that “[w]hat William Blake . . . made of Classic and Gothic art in his work is akin to the patriotic and personal interests of his contemporaries.” Hyman, Timothy. Sienese Painting: The Art of a City-Republic 1278-1477. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003, 224 p. Provides an overview of painting in Siena during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, including links to French Gothic architecture and Sienese Gothic art.

Marius, Richard C. “Goodbye to Gothic: On Finding Oneself in the Camp of the Enemy.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 79, nos. 1-2 (spring-summer 1996): 79-93. Discusses themes and figures in architecture of Gothic cathedrals, as well as the treatment of folk craft, architecture, and French Gothic cathedrals in literature. Masheck, J. D. C. “Irish Gothic Theory Before Pugin.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 70 (summer-autumn 1981): 206-19. Discusses the Gothic Revival movement in Ireland during the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Myles, Janet. L. N. Cottingham, 1787-1847: Architect of the Gothic Revival. London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 1996, 176 p. Comprehensive study of the contributions of leading Mediaevalist architect L. N. Cottingham to the Gothic Revival in nineteenth-century architecture. Ogden, Daryl. “The Architecture of Empire: ‘Oriental’ Gothic and the Problem of British Identity in Ruskin’s Venice.” Victorian Literature and Culture 25, no. 1 (1997): 109-20. Studies John Ruskin’s treatment of Gothic architecture in The Stones of Venice, and how this relates to British identity and orientalism. Patrick, James. “Newman, Pugin, and Gothic.” Victorian Studies 24, no. 2 (winter 1981): 185-207. Discusses architecture by A. W. Pugin, and Cardinal John Henry Newman’s relationship to the Gothic Revival movement and Tractarianism. Toman, Rolf, editor. The Art of Gothic: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, translated by Christian von Arnim. Köln, Germany: Könemann, 1999, 521 p. Full-length study of the development of Gothic art forms worldwide throughout history.

Jones, Peter Blundell. “Architecture as Mnemonic: The Accumulation of Memories around Morris’s Red House.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 21, no. 4 (2000): 513-40.

von Simson, Otto. “Gothic Form.” In The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order, pp. 3-20. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956.

Examines the role of memory in the Gothic Revival architecture of William Morris.

Illustrates the essential components of Gothic form as it applies to the architecture of cathedrals.

526

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1

A Abaellino (Zschokke) 1: 499–500 Abartis, Caesarea 2: 115–20 The Abbess (Ireland) 3: 199 The Abbot (Scott) 3: 307, 310 Abbotsford 1: 502, 503, 504 “Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht” (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 395–96 Abercrombie, Dr. 1: 333–35 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner) 2: 293–94, (sidebar) 304 Beardsley, Aubrey and 2: 299

Faustian legend 2: 302 sexuality 2: 303 Abyss (motif) 3: 480–83 “Act 1” (Boaden) 1: 394–98 “Adam Bell” (Hogg) 2: 422 Addison, Agnes 1: 486–90 Addison, Augustan 1: 41, 44–45 “An Address to the Muses” (Baillie) 2: 67 “Address to the Reader” (Reeve) 1: 113–15 “Addresses to the Night” (Baillie) 2: 56 Adelgitha; or The Fruits of a Single Error (Lewis) 3: 44–45 Adventure fiction 3: 359 “An Adventure of Hardress Fitzgerald” (Le Fanu) 3: 7 “The Adventure of My Aunt” (Irving) 2: 452 “The Adventure of the German Student” (Irving) 2: 442–46 as ambiguous gothic 2: 452–53 burlesque 2: 454 parody 2: 458–59 psychological gothicism of 2: 450–51 sexual innuendo 2: 456–58 The Adventure of the Popkins Family” (Irving) 2: 452 The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (Smollet) 1: 1–2, 5 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 3: 158 “Advertisement” (Brown) 2: 155–56

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

“Advertisement to the History of Good Breeding” (Walpole) 3: 446 Aedes Walpolianae (Walpole) 3: 430, 446 Aestheticism 1: 107–8 in eighteenth-century Europe 1: 48–57 Wharton, Edith 3: 468–69 Wilde, Oscar 3: 487, 489, 493– 99, 511–16 African American experience 1: 108, 118–27, 180–92; 3: 146–48 After Dark (Collins) 2: 220 “After Holbein” (Wharton) 3: 459 “The Aftermath of Gothic Fiction” (Lovecraft) 1: 260–64 “Afterward” (Wharton) 3: 459, 468, 469, 471 “Afterword: Reflections on the Grotesque” (Oates) (sidebar) 3: 179 “Against Gothic” (Clery) 3: 437–42 “Against Nature” (Oates) 3: 182 Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (Brownmiller) 1: 216 Agapida, Fray Antonio. See Irving, Washington The Age of Innocence (Wharton) 3: 458, 459–60, 483 “Age of Lead” (Atwood) 2: 11 Aikin, John 1: 2, 4–7, (sidebar) 7, 46 Ainsworth, William Harrison (sidebar) 1: 94, 95

545

SUBJECT INDEX

The Subject Index includes the authors and titles that appear in the Author Index and the Title Index as well as the names of other authors and figures that are discussed in the Gothic Literature set. The Subject Index also lists literary terms and topics covered in the criticism. The index provides page numbers or page ranges where subjects are discussed and is fully cross referenced. Page references to significant discussions of authors, titles, or subjects appear in boldface; page references to illustrations appear in italic.

SUBJECT INDEX

AL AARAAF, TAMERLANE, AND MINOR POEMS

Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (Poe) 3: 187 “Alastor” (Shelley, P.) 1: 24 The Albigenses (Maturin) 3: 74, 79–81, 84 Alcott, Louisa May Angel in the House 1: 203–4 compared to Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 175 social violence 1: 197–206 Alcuin (Brown) 2: 153–54, 159 The Alhambra (Irving) 2: 442 Alias Grace (Atwood) 2: 2–3 “Alice Doane’s Appeal” (Hawthorne) 2: 371 “Alkmene” (Dinesen) 2: 276 “‘All She Said Was “Yes”’” (Jackson) 1: 277 “All Souls” (Wharton) 3: 467, 468, 469, 471, 473–74 Allegory 1: 69–73 Allston, Washington (sidebar) 1: 522, 523, 524 Alnwick 1: 494–96 “The Altar of the Dead” (James) 2: 466–67 The Ambassadors (James) 2: 462 Ambiguous Gothic Irving, Washington 2: 453–55 The Island of Dr Moreau 1: 164 Mysteries of Winterthurn 3: 176 psychoanalysis 2: 412–17 “Der Sandmann” 2: 412 “Ambitious Nature of Man” (Godwin) 2: 324–27 The American (James) 2: 462, 472 American Appetites (Oates) 3: 165 American culture 3: 168–77 “American Female Gothic” (Showalter) 1: 210–20 American Gothic (painting) 1: 73, 73–74 American Gothic tradition 1: 57–74 Brown, Charles Brockden 2: 156–62 compared to medieval literature 2: 298–99 cultural identity in 1: 121–27 vs. European Gothic tradition 1: 57–65; 2: 156–58 Faulkner, Wiliam 2: 298–305 fear 1: 65 feminist literary theory 1: 210–19 founding authors 1: 2; 2: 158 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 1: 212–15 grotesques 2: 300–301 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 368–77 historiography of 1: 68–69 iconography of 2: 301 Irving, Washington 2: 443, 446–51, 451–55 King, Stephen 2: 494–99

546

Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 168–84 Otherness in 1: 67–74 painting and 1: 518–25 patterns 2: 301–3 psychological horror 2: 299 Rice, Anne 3: 279–85 Salem witch trials 1: 62–65 Southern Gothic 2: 300–306 theological debate in 3: 277–78 women writers 1: 210–19 See also Gothic movement American International Pictures 1: 429 “American Literature—Dr. Channing” (Hazlitt) (sidebar) 2: 163 American Mineralogical Society 2: 165 American Psycho (Ellis) 1: 36–38 American realism, Gross Clinic (painting) 1: 519 American Review and Literary Journal 2: 162–64 The American Scene (James) 2: 472 “An Analysis of The Monk and Its German Sources” (Conger) 2: 349–54 Ancient literature 1: 16 Andrézel, Pierre. See Dinesen, Isak Andriano, Joseph 2: 411–19 Anecdotes of Painting (Walpole) 3: 446–47 “The Angel at the Grave” (Wharton) 3: 468 Angel in the House 1: 131, 203–4 The Angelic Avengers (Dinesen) 2: 258, 263 The Animals in That Country (Atwood) 2: 2 Animism 3: 243–44 “Ann Radcliffe” (Scott) (sidebar) 3: 238 Anne of Geierstein (Scott) 3: 311, 312, 315 “Anne Rice: Raising Holy Hell, Harlequin Style” (Ingebretsen) 3: 277–86 Antebellum period 1: 180–92, 520 Anti-Catholicism. See Catholicism The Antiquary (Scott) 1: 96–97; 3: 299, 314 Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome (Collins) 2: 201–2, 206–10 Anxiety. See Fear “An Apology for The Monk” (A Friend to Genius) 3: 48–51 Appel, Alfred 2: 300–301 The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories (du Maurier) 2: 279 “L’Apres-midi-d’un faune” (Faulkner) 2: 293 Apuleius 1: 20–21 Arbus, Diane 1: 215 Archetypes Gothic fiction 3: 464–65

King, Stephen 2: 485 “Pomegranate See d” 3: 464–66 Prometheus 3: 338–42 “Der Sandman” 2: 413–14 Architecture 1: 40–41, 52, 475–76, 486–506; 2: 252–55 Alnwick renovation 1: 494–96 American 1: 497–505 castles 1: 492–94 Cottingham, L. N. (sidebar) 1: 497 European history 1: 490–96; 3: 142–43 gargoyles 1: 482 Gilmor, Robert III 1: 502–5 Glen Ellen 1: 504 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 2: 344–49 Gothic revival 1: 477–78, 486– 89, 497–505 in Gothic Wood 1: 73–74 grotesques 1: 483 houses 3: 143–44 imagination in 1: 483–84 inclusion of the ugly 1: 483 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry 1: 498–99 as metaphor 1: 69–70, 72; 2: 242–45, 301, 344–48 as motif 3: 315–16 naturalism and 1: 482–83 nineteenth-century attitude toward 1: 487–88 in Northanger Abbey 2: 41–45 origins 1: 480 physical restrictions 1: 481–82 relationship to literature 1: 480–86, 497–505 religious buildings 1: 510–11, 511–13 repetition 1: 484–85 Romantic attitude toward 1: 486–87, 488 Scott, Sir Walter 3: 315–16 spiritual world and 1: 482 Strawberry Hill 1: 58, 502–3; 3: 430, 442, 447–48 as sublime 1: 55–56 supernatural and 1: 481, 484; 3: 315 Wadsworth, Daniel 1: 499 written histories 1: 497–98 Aristocracy Decadent Aristocrat 3: 189 “The Fall of the House of Usher” 3: 221 family curse and 1: 294–96 vampires 1: 344, 350 Wharton, Edith 3: 448, 466–68 Armadale (Collins, Wilkie) 1: 88 Armageddon in films 1: 430 Art 1: 506–26 Christianity and 1: 507

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

THE BETROTHED

B Bachman, Richard. See King, Stephen Backsheider, Paula 1: 410 A Backward Glance (Wharton) 3: 469, 476–80 Bag of Bones (King) 2: 482 Bailey, Thomas Aldrich 1: 504–5 Baillie, Joanna 2: 49, 49–77 compared to Wollstonecraft, Mary 2: 63 on human nature 2: 51–54, 56–57 madness as theme 1: 340–41 obituary (sidebar) 2: 55 principal works 2: 50–51 on utopia 2: 63–65 witchcraft 2: 69–73 Baillie, John 1: 56 Bailyn, Bernard 1: 121–22 Baldick, Chris 3: 84–91, 219–20 “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (Wilde) 1: 34 The Ballad of Reading Gaol,and Other Poems (Wilde) 3: 488, 499 Balzac, Honoré de 3: 100–103 Banshees (musical group) 1: 470–71 Baptiste, Jean 1: 291–92 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia (Aikin) 1: 2, 4–7, (sidebar) 7, 46; 3: 24–25, 443 “The Barber of Duncow” (Hogg) 2: 422 Barker, Clive 1: 287–90, (sidebar) 411 Barker, Martin 2: 184 Barkham, John 2: 282–83 Barnaby Rudge (Dickens) 2: 252 Barnes, Djuna 2: 188 “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville) 3: 108 compared to “The Fall of the House of Usher” 3: 122–23 Gothic language 3: 124 landscape motif 3: 123–24 modernity of 3: 122–24 Basil (Baillie) 2: 50, 54 Basil: A Story of Modern Life (Collins) 2: 205, 214 Basilique de Saint-Denis 1: 479 “The Battle of Evermore” (song) 1: 463 Baudelaire, Charles 3: 99–100 Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda 1: 480–86 “The Beach of Falesá” (Stevenson) 3: 360–61 Beardsley, Aubrey 2: 299 “The Beast in the Jungle” (James) 2: 466–70, 471 Beating fantasy 3: 329, 330 Beattie, James 1: 50, 51, 220 “The Beauties” (Walpole) 3: 446

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (Oates) 3: 165 Beckett, Samuel 1: 31, 38–39 Beckford, William 2: 79, 79–102 Fonthill Abbey 2: 85–86 Henley, Samuel and 2: 87–88 homosexuality 2: 87, 98 Oriental tales 1: 260–61; 2: 88–89 principal works 2: 81 self-identity 2: 95–101 “Becoming an Author in 1848: History and the Gothic in the Early Works of Wilkie Collins” (Heller, Tamar) 2: 205–10 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (sidebar) 1: 377 “Bela Lugosi’s Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Either: Goth and the Glorification of Suffering in Rock Music” (Hannaham) 1: 468–73 Belinda (Edgeworth) 1: 207 Bell, Currer. See Bronte¨, Charlotte Bell, Ellis. See Bronte¨, Emily The Bell Jar (Plath) 1: 215–16 Bell, Michael Davitt 2: 451–56 “The Bell Tower” (Melville) 3: 108, 110–11, (sidebar) 111, 113 La Belle Dame sans Merci (Keats) 1: 19 Bellefleur (Oates) 3: 163–65, 177, 179 American culture 3: 172–74, 178 American Gothic tradition 3: 172–74 castle as Gothic convention 3: 172 sexuality 3: 173 Beloved (Morrison) 3: 136 Atwood, Margaret on 3: 149 Echo mythology 3: 140 excerpt (sidebar) 3: 151 ”Foreword” 3: 137–38 ghosts 3: 138 house in 3: 144–47 as slave narrative 3: 146–47 trauma in 3: 150–60 Belshazzar’s Feast (painting) 1: 524 Benedict, Williston R. 2: 429–32 “Benito Cereno” (Melville) 3: 108, 113, 119–22 “Berenice” (Poe) 3: 189, 203–4 Bergman, Ingrid 2: 468 “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 399 Berkman, Sylvia 2: 283–84 Berry, Mary 3: 430–31 Bertram; or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (Maturin) 1: 337–38, 407–8, 499, 500; 3: 74, 84 Bessborough, Lady 2: 85–86 The Betrothed (Scott) 3: 311, 314

547

SUBJECT INDEX

Middle Ages attitude toward 1: 507–12 religious influence on 1: 512–13 sculpture 1: 475–76, 511–17 “The Art of Fiction” (James) 2: 467 The Art of the Novel (James) 2: 473 Arthur Mervyn (Brown) 2: 154, 159–62, 168 “Artist of the Beautiful” (Hawthorne) 2: 381 Arvin, Newton 3: 111–19, 118 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) 2: 293–95, 304 Askew, Alice and Claude 1: 362, 365 “Aspects of the Supernatural in the Shorter Fiction of James Hogg” (Mack) 2: 425–28 The Assassins (Oates) 3: 164 “The Assassins” (Shelley, P.) 1: 9–12 The Assignation (Oates) 3: 179–80 Astoria; or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains (Irving) 2: 442–43 “At Home All Was Blood and Feathers: The Werewolf in the Kitchen—Angela Carter and Horror” (Wisker) 2: 182–90 “At the Tourist Centre in Boston” (Atwood) 2: 9 The Athenaeum (periodical) 3: 393 “Atrophy” (Wharton) 3: 471 “Atwood Gothic” (Mandel) 2: 5–10 Atwood, Margaret 2: 1, 1–24 on Beloved 3: 149 portrayal of women 2: 189 principal works 2: 3–4 “Atwoodian Gothic: From Lady Oracle to The Robber Bride” (Howells) 2: 10–17 Auerbach, Nina 1: 203–4, 361–76; 3: 20 Austen, Jane 1: 74–76, 80–81, 221–22; 2: 25, 25–47, 236 Atwood, Margaret and 2: 3 principal works 2: 27 Radcliffe, Ann and 2: 36–40 Austen-Leigh, R. A. 2: 32 Austen-Leigh, William 2: 32 “Austen’s Sense and Radcliffe’s Sensibility” (Conger) 2: 35–40 “The Author in the Novel: Creating Beckford in Vathek” (Gill) 2: 95–101 “Automata” (Hoffmann). See “Die Automate” (Hoffmann) “Die Automate” (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 395 “Aylmer Vance and the Vampire” (Askew) 1: 362, 365 Azemia (Beckford) 2: 80

SUBJECT INDEX

BEUMEIER, BEATE

Beumeier, Beate 2: 194–200 Beutel, Katherine Piller 3: 138–42 “Bewitched” (Wharton) 3: 457, 459 “Beyond Blood: Defeating the Inner Vampire” (Valente) 3: 415–27 “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud) 1: 87 Bhabba, Homi 3: 151–52 Bierce, Ambrose 1: 198, (sidebar) 199 The Big Sleep (Chandler) 1: 36 The Big Sleep (film) (Faulkner) 2: 294 Bildungsroman 2: 246–48 Billy Budd (Melville) 3: 109, 111–12 Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (Beckford) 2: 79 “The Birds” (du Maurier) 2: 280, 283–84 The Bird’s Nest (Jackson) 1: 276 Birkhead, Edith 1: 16–21, (sidebar) 3: 246 “The Birthmark” (Hawthorne) 2: 365, 375 “Black Andie’s Tale of Tod Lapraik” (Stevenson) 3: 360 The Black Book (Morrison) 3: 146 “The Black Cat” (Poe) 3: 188–89, 189, 213 The Black Dwarf (Scott) 3: 307, 315 Black House (King) 2: 482, 487, 491–93 The Black Robe (Collins) 2: 202, 217–26 Black Venus (Carter) 2: 180, 183 Black Water (Oates) 3: 165 “The Blackness of Darkness: E. A. Poe and the Development of the Gothic” (Fiedler) 3: 205–11 Blackstone, William 1: 224–25 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1: 25 review of Die Elixiere des Teufels 2: 391–92 review of Melmoth the Wanderer (sidebar) 3: 98 Blair, Hugh 1: 45 Blair, Robert 1: 53 Blake, William engravings of (sidebar) 1: 487 influence on Faulkner, William 2: 306–12 Prometheus mythology 3: 339 Blatty, W. P. 1: 450 Bleak House (Dickens) 2: 229–30, 237, 242–45 Bleiler, E. F. 1: 351; 2: 85–89, 393–401 The Blind Assassin (Atwood) 2: 2–3, 3

548

The Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne) 2: 364, 371 Blixen, Tania. See Dinesen, Isak Blood Canticle (Rice) 3: 264 Blood Is Not Enough (Datlow) 1: 366–67 A Bloodsmoor Romance (Oates) 3: 163–65, 177 American culture 3: 178 compared to Little Women 3: 175 fetishism 3: 174 heroines 3: 174–75 “Bloodstains” (Oates) 3: 180–81, 182–83 “The Bloody Chamber” (Carter) 2: 182, 187 The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Carter) 2: 180–83, 187–88, 199 Bloom, Harold 3: 337–42 “Blue-Bearded Lover” (Oates) 3: 179–80 Bluebeard’s Egg (Atwood) 2: 11 Blues (music) 1: 369, 464 The Bluest Eye (Morrison) 3: 135–36, 144, 148 Blythe, David Gilmour 1: 524 Boaden, James 1: 394–98, (sidebar) 399, 413–15 “Bodies” (Oates) 3: 183 Bodily Harm (Atwood) 2: 11, 189 The Body Snatcher (film) 1: 400 “The Body-Snatcher” (Stevenson) 3: 360 Boileau, Etienne 1: 515–16 Boileau, Nicolas 1: 41, 44, 148 “The Bold Dragoon” (Irving) 2: 449 Booker Prize 2: 2 The Bookman (periodical) (sidebar) 3: 405 Borges, Jorges Luis 2: 9; 3: 179 Bosch, Hieronymous 3: 53–60 The Bostonians (James) 2: 462 Botting, Fred 1: 21–30, 48–57; 2: 215–17; 3: 348–56 “The Bottle Imp” (Stevenson) 3: 360, 362–64 “A Bottle of Perrier” (Wharton) 3: 459, 467, 468, 471 Boulger, James 3: 92 Bowen, Elizabeth 1: 173–79, (sidebar) 333 Bowen’s Court (Bowen) 1: 173–79 Boz. See Dickens, Charles “Boz’s Gothic Gargoyles” (Hollington) (sidebar) 2: 252 Bracebridge Hall; or, The Humorists: A Medley (Irving) 2: 442, 447, (sidebar) 450 Bradbury, Ray (sidebar) 1: 172 Braddon, May Elizabeth 1: 354 Brantly, Susan C. 2: 269–78

The Bravo of Venice (Lewis) 3: 43–44 Brennan, Matthew C. 3: 372–82 Breve fra Afrika (Dinesen) 2: 258 Brewster, David 1: 334 “The Bridal of Polmood” (Hogg) 2: 437 The Bride of Lammermoor (Scott) 1: 25; 3: 300, 312, 314 The British Critic (periodical) 2: 327 Brockway, James (sidebar) 2: 191 Bromley Contingent 1: 470–71 Bronte¨, Charlotte 2: 103, 103–30 compared to Bronte¨, Emily 2: 104 compared to Wharton, Edith 3: 480 depravity 2: 115 Gothic conventions 2: 108–9, 111–13, 121–27 heroines 2: 107–14 influence of Lewis, Matthew Gregory 2: 122–27 principal works 2: 105 Bronte¨, Emily 1: 262–63, 331; 2: 131, 131–51 compared to Bronte¨, Charlotte 2: 104 influence of Byron, Lord George Gordon 2: 145 principal works 2: 133 Brook Farm 2: 364 Brooke-Rose, Christine 2: 410 Bross, Addison 2: 299 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevski) 1: 315 Brown, Charles Brockden 1: 2; 2: 153, 153–78 American Gothic tradition 2: 156–62 compared to Schiller, Friedrich (sidebar) 2: 171 detective fiction 1: 250–51 Godwin, William and 2: 168, 170–72, (sidebar) 171 principal works 2: 155 protagonists 2: 159–62 Brown, Jane K. 2: 354–62 Brown, Marshall 2: 354–62 The Brownie of Badsbeck (Hogg) 2: 422, 437–38 “The Brownie of the Black Haggs” (Hogg) 2: 422, 428 Brownmiller, Susan 1: 216 Buch Annette (Goethe) 2: 341 “Bulletin” (Jackson) 1: 271–72 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 1: 2, 12–16, 14, (sidebar) 15, 262–63 Burke, Edmund 1: 55, 97, 107–8, 110–13, 149 on French Revolution 3: 350–51

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO: A STORY

C C. 3. 3. See Wilde, Oscar Cabbalism 1: 254–55 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (film) 1: 419 Calder, Jenni 1: 131 Caleb Williams (Godwin) 1: 2, 81, 87; 2: 321–24, 335 compared to Wieland; or, The Transformation 2: 168, 170–71 doubles 3: 369 as early detective fiction 1: 249–50 European Gothic tradition 2: 337–38 as evil 2: 327 Gothic narrative 2: 330–37 influence of French Revolution 1: 78–80 influence on Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 339 motifs 2: 333–34 narrative structure 3: 86 Poe, Edgar Allan on 3: 212 as political commentary 3: 212–13 preface 2: 324 review 2: 327–30 social injustice in 1: 22–23 Calhoon, Kenneth S. 2: 344–49 Calvinism in horror fiction 3: 277 Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 91–96

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 2: 429–31 sublime 3: 91–96 “Calvinism and Gothicism: The Example of Brown’s Wieland” (Gilmore) 2: 170–77 The Calvinist Temper in English Poetry (Boulger) 3: 92 Cambrio-Britons (Boaden) 1: 413–15 Candid Reflections . . . on what is commonly called the Negroe-Cause, by a Planter (Long) 1: 208 Cannibalism 2: 237 “The Canterville Ghost” (Wilde) 3: 487–88 Capitalism, Wharton, Edith 3: 467–75 Capon, William 1: 403 Capote, Truman 1: 66, 70, 2: 304 Captain Bonneville (Irving) 2: 443 “Cardillac the Jeweller” (Hoffmann). See “Das Fräulein von Scuderi” “The Cardinal’s Third Tale” (Dinesen) 2: 267–68 “Carmilla” (Le Fanu) 1: 31, 139, 352–58; 3: 2–5 doubles 1: 382 dreams 1: 329–30 mother-child relationship 1: 382–84 narrative structure 3: 271 power of women 1: 355–58; 3: 18–21 as supernatural horror tale 3: 22–27 vampire-victim relationship 1: 356–57; 3: 19–20 victimization of women 1: 355–58; 3: 17–21 women in nineteenth century 3: 16–21 Carmilla and 12 Other Classic Tales of Mystery (Le Fanu) 3: 3–5 “Carmilla and the Gothic Legacy: Victorian Transformations of Supernatural Horror” (Geary) 3: 21–27 “Carnival” (Dinesen) 2: 264–65 Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales (Dinesen) 2: 258 Carrie (King) 2: 481 Carrion Comfort (Simmons) 1: 366 Carso, Kerry Dean 1: 496–506 Carter, Angela 2: 179, 179–200 fairy tales 2: 185–86 fantasy 2: 183–90, 197–99 fetishism 2: 184–85 gender construction 2: 199 humor 2: 185 literary influences of 2: 188 portrayal of women 2: 183–85

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

principal works 2: 181 psychological horror 2: 183–89 on Rice, Ann (sidebar) 3: 267 sexuality as theme 2: 184–89 Carwin the Biloquist (Brown) 2: 160, 161, 169–70 “The Caryatids: an Unfinished Tale” (Dinesen) 2: 264–65, 269 Casebeer, Edwin F. (sidebar) 2: 492 “The Cask of Amontillado” (Poe) 3: 188, 189, 197–98 Castle (Gothic convention) 1: 251, 284–85 Barker, Clive 1: 287–90 Bellefleur 3: 172 Bleak House 2: 242–45 The Castle of Otranto 1: 402; 2: 301; 3: 196–97 feminist literary theory 1: 211 King, Stephen 1: 284–90 Little Dorrit 2: 252–53 Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale 3: 128–32 Morrison, Toni 3: 136 The Mysteries of Udolpho 1: 226 Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 194–97 Radcliffe, Ann 2: 252 See also Haunted house Castle Dangerous (Scott) 3: 307, 311, 315 The Castle of Andalusia (O’Keeffe) 1: 406–7 The Castle of Otranto: A Story (Walpole) 1: 57–58, 459; 2: 36, 299–300; 3: 449 authorship of 3: 434–35, 437, 444–46 castle as Gothic convention 1: 402; 2: 301; 3: 196–97 “counterfeit” Gothic in 3: 451–52 critical reception of 3: 442–52 doubles in 3: 369 excess as theme 3: 355 family murder 2: 310–11 ghosts 3: 451–52 heroine in 2: 138, 144 influence of Strawberry Hill 1: 503 influence on Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 501 influence on Dracula 3: 395– 404 influence on Pierre; or, The Ambiguities 3: 115 labyrinth in 3: 197 mysterious portrait in 1: 252, 254; 2: 252; 3: 25, 199 as original Gothic literature 1: 1–2, 402; 2: 116; 3: 431 political elements 3: 450 preface 3: 338–40, 432–34, 449 prophecy in 3: 200 review 3: 435, 436–37 Scott, Sir Walter on 3: 432

549

SUBJECT INDEX

as political writer (sidebar) 1: 30 on the sublime 1: 148–50; 3: 91–92 Burlesque 2: 298, 452–54 Burns, Robert 1: 18 Burns, Sarah 1: 518–25 Burwick, Frederick 1: 332–42 “The Bus” (Jackson) 1: 268 “A Bus Along St. Clair: December” (Atwood) 2: 6 Butler, Judith 1: 379, 384 Butler, Marilyn (sidebar) 3: 328 By the North Gate (Oates) 3: 164 Byron, Lord George Gordon 1: 2, 240–43, (sidebar) 241; 3: 342 Clairmont, Claire and 3: 344–46 influence on Bronte¨, Emily 2: 145 lampoon of The Monk 3: 51–52 on Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3: 36, (sidebar) 42 romantic heroes of 1: 24, 253– 54; 2: 299 Shelley, Mary and 3: 344 on Vathek (sidebar) 2: 95

SUBJECT INDEX

CASTLE OF WOLFENBACH; A GERMAN STORY

servants 2: 299–300 subversive nature of 3: 437–42, 448 supernatural 3: 449–51 Castle of Wolfenbach; a German story (Parsons) 1: 2, 7–9, 96 The Castle Spectre (Lewis) 1: 402; 3: 32, 37 German romantic influence 1: 408 ghosts 1: 338 inspiration for 3: 34–36 literary influences on 3: 42 madness 1: 338 as model for Gothic melodrama 3: 41–43 nationalism 1: 412 “To the Reader” 3: 34–36 The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (Radcliffe) 1: 2; 3: 231–32, 239–340 Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors (Walpole) 3: 446 Catharine,or the Bower (Austen) 2: 32–33 Cathedrals. See Religious buildings “Catherine Morland’s Gothic Delusions: A Defense of Northanger Abbey” (Glock) (sidebar) 2: 37 Catholicism Collins, Wilkie 2: 217–26 Martineau, Harriet 2: 218 Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 87– 88, 94–96 misogyny and 2: 221 Rice, Anne 3: 279 Cat’s Eye (Atwood) 2: 2, 11–13 “The Cenci” (Shelley, P.) 1: 24 Chamber’s Cabinet Cyclopedia (Shelley) 3: 320 Chambers, Sir William 1: 405 Chandler, Helen 3: 417 Chandler, Raymond 1: 36 “Chapter 1” (Bronte¨, E.) 2: 133–35 “Chapter 1” (Brown) 2: 156 “Chapter 1” (du Maurier) 2: 281–82 “Chapter 14” (Austen) 2: 27–31 “Charles” (Jackson) 1: 265–66, 269 “Charles Brockden Brown and the Invention of the American Gothic” (Fiedler) 2: 156–62 “Charles Dickens and Mrs. Radcliffe: A Farewell to Wilkie Collins” (Coolidge Jr.) (sidebar) 2: 237 “Charlotte Bronte¨’s Lucy Snowe” (Waring) (sidebar) 2: 121 “Charlotte Bronte¨’s ‘New’ Gothic” (Heilman) 2: 107–14 Charnas, Suzy McKee 1: 368–169

550

Chase (motif) Faulkner, William 2: 301–2 James, Henry 2: 473–74 Shelley, Mary 3: 339 Chekhov, Anton 1: 2 Chesterton, G. K. 3: 366, 368 “A Child is Being Beaten” (Freud) 3: 329 Child, Lydia Marie 1: 187–88 Childbirth 1: 216 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron) 1: 24 Children punishment of 2: 239–40 relationship to mother 1: 377–81 in ’Salem’s Lot 1: 372 “The Children of the Corn” (King) 2: 481 A Child’s Garden of Verses (Stevenson) 3: 359–61 The Chimes (Dickens) 2: 230 de Chirico, Giorgio 1: 147 Chorley, H. F. (sidebar) 2: 137 “Christabel” (Coleridge) 1: 19, 24, (sidebar) 48 Christianity art and 1: 507 The Sphinx 3: 498–99 Wharton, Edith 3: 470–71 Christine (King) 2: 482 castle in 1: 285–86 compared to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 2: 487 family 2: 501 film 2: 488 werewolf myth 2: 486 A Christmas Carol (Dickens) 2: 229–30 A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (Irving) 2: 442 The Circle Game (Atwood) 2: 1–2, 3, 8 Citizen Kane (film) 1: 437 Civilisation and its Discontents (Freud) 1: 90; 3: 372 Clairmont, Claire 3: 344–46 Clara Howard (Brown) 2: 154, 162 Clark, Robert 1: 58 Cleishbotham, Jedediah. See Scott, Sir Walter Cleland, John 1: 50 Clendenning, John 2: 446–51 Clery, E. J. on Baillie, Joanna 2: 54–61 on The Castle of Otranto: A Tale 3: 437–42 value of Gothic fiction in 18th century 1: 220–28 Clover, Carol 3: 284 Cobb, Palmer (sidebar) 2: 412 The Cock and Anchor (Le Fanu) 3: 1, 7–10, 16 Cock Lane ghost 1: 18

The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (Sedgwick) 1: 72; 2: 10 Cole, Thomas 1: 524 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1: 2, 18–19, 24, (sidebar) 48, 236–41 ghosts 1: 337 on The Mysteries of Udolpho 3: 245–46 review of The Monk 3: 46–48 sea stories 1: 251 Collected Stories of William Faulkner (Faulkner) 2: 294, 307–8 Collins, Wilkie 1: 88–89; 2: 201, 201–28,219 anti-Catholicism 2: 218–26 curse narratives 1: 298–300 detective fiction 2: 216 development of writing style 2: 205–10 Dickens, Charles on (sidebar) 2: 223 Eliot, T. S. on (sidebar) 2: 215 Gothic conventions 2: 215–17 principal works 2: 202 sensation fiction 2: 211–15, 218–19, 223–26 Collins, William 1: 18, 53–54 Colman, George 1: 403 Come Along with Me (Jackson) 1: 276 Comedy. See Humor “The Company of Wolves” (Carter) 2: 182, 186, 187 “The Composition of Northanger Abbey” (Emden) 2: 31–35 Confessional novels 3: 211–17 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (DeQuincey) 1: 331 The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (Melville) 3: 108–9 Conger, Syndy McMillen 2: 35–40, 136–46, 349–54 Conrad, Joseph 1: 31–32 Convent stories 2: 223–24 Coolidge, Archibald C. Jr. (sidebar) 2: 237 Cooper, Alice 1: 469–70, 470 Cooper, James Fenimore 1: 2, 58; 3: 206 Corliss, Richard 1: 437–38 Corman, Roger 1: 443–46 Cottingham, L. N. (sidebar) 1: 497 “Councillor Krespel” (Hoffmann). See “The Cremona Violin” Count Basil (Baillie) 2: 50, 63, 65 Count Dracula (character) 1: 166–69, 342–55, 362–63, 424, 3: 417 characterization of 3: 405–10 compared to psychic vampires 1: 365–66

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

DISGUISE

D Dacre, Charlotte 1: 208–10 “The Daemon Lover” (Jackson) 1: 269–70 Dagover, Lil 1: 419 “Daisy” (Oates) 3: 180, 181, 183–84 Daisy Miller (James) 2: 462 The Damnation Game (Barker) 1: 289–90 Danse Macabre (King) 2: 481–82, 483–85, 485–86

“Daphne du Maurier and Gothic Signatures: Rebecca as Vamp(ire)” (Horner and Zlosnik) 2: 284–91 Dark Dreams (Derry) 1: 429–30 The Dark Half (King) 2: 486, 489–90 The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla (King) 2: 482 The Dark Tower VI: The Songs of Susannah (King) 2: 482 The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (King) 2: 482 Datlow, Ellen 1: 366–67 Davenport, Basil (sidebar) 2: 285 Davenport-Hines, Richard Treadwell 1: 490–96 David Copperfield (Dickens) 2: 248 Davis, Alexander Jackson (sidebar) 1: 491, 497, 499–501, 503–4 Day, William Patrick 2: 312–13, 317; 3: 178 “De Grey: A Romance” (James) 2: 462, 463 De Monfort (Baillie, Joanna) 2: 50, 54–56, 58–60 review of (sidebar) 2: 68 social progress of 2: 62–66 De Profundis (Wilde) 3: 488 Deacon Brodie,or the Double Life (Stevenson) 3: 368 “The Dead” (Oates) 3: 179 The Dead Zone (King) 2: 482, 490–91 “Death by Landscape” (Atwood) 2: 11 Decadence movement 3: 487, 489 Decadent Aristocrat (Gothic convention) 3: 189 “The Decay of Lying” (Wilde) 3: 493 “Dedication” (Goethe) 2: 343–44 DeFoe, Daniel 3: 212 Degeneration Machen, Arthur 1: 169–71 Stevenson, Robert Louis 1: 158–60 Stoker, Bram 1: 166–69 Wells, H. G. 1: 162–66 Wilde, Oscar 1: 160–62 Deleuze, Gilles 3: 226–27 “The Deluge at Norderney” (Dinesen) 2: 257–58, 267–68, 272 Delusion and Dream (Freud) 1: 326–27 Demon and Other Tales (Oates) 3: 167–68 Demonic possession 1: 328, 430 “Demons” (Oates) 3: 164 Dennis, John 1: 148–49 DeQuincey, Thomas 1: 331 Derrickson, Teresa 1: 197–207 Derrida, Jacques 1: 154–55; 3: 350 Derry, Charles 1: 429–30

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

A Description of Strawberry Hill (Walpole) 3: 442 Desire (theme) 2: 194–99 Detective fiction 1: 36–37 Caleb Williams 1: 249–50 Collins, Wilkie 2: 216 Edgar Huntly or Memoir of a Sleep-Walker 1: 250–51 The Murders in the Rue Morgue 1: 250–51 Mysteries of Winterthurn 3: 175–77 “Development of a Child” (Klein) 1: 381 Devil 1: 313; 2: 434–36; 3: 198 “The Devil and Anne Rice” (Rice and Gilmore) (sidebar) 3: 278 “The Devil and Tom Walker” (Irving) 2: 442 “The Devil in Manuscript” (Hawthorne), witchcraft 2: 371 “The Devil Sings the Blues: Heavy Metal, Gothic Fiction and ‘Postmodern’ Discourse” (Hinds) 1: 461–68 The Devil’s Elixir (Hoffmann). See Die Elixiere des Teufels Devlin, James E. 2: 456–58 “Diagnosing the ‘Sir Walter Disease’: American Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature” (Carso) 1: 496–506 Diamond, Cora 3: 515–16 Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethe) 2: 344 Dickens, Charles 2: 229, 229–56 cannibalism 2: 237 childhood memories (sidebar) 2: 237 on Collins, Wilkie (sidebar) 2: 223 Eliot, T. S. on (sidebar) 2: 215 Gothic conventions 2: 251–55 humor 2: 234–41 imagery 2: 242–45 principal works 2: 231 “Dickens’ Gloomiest Gothic Castle” (Ronald) 2: 242–45 Dinesen, Isak 2: 257, 257–78 European Gothic tradition 2: 261–68, 271 horror specialist 2: 283–84 imagination 2: 262–63, 268 Kierkegaard, Søren and 2: 272 on “The Monkey” 2: 276 portrayal of women 2: 264–68 principal works 2: 259 supernatural 2: 263 “‘Dirty Mama’: Horror, Vampires, and the Maternal in Late Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fiction” (Michelis) 1: 376–85 Disguise (theatrical device) 1: 406–7

551

SUBJECT INDEX

“counterfeit” Gothicism of 3: 397–404 supernatural 1: 358–59 Count Robert of Paris (Scott) 3: 300, 311 Covent Garden (theater) 1: 389 Cox, Jeffrey 2: 62 Craft, Christopher 3: 284 Crayon, Geoffrey. See Irving, Washington The Crayon Miscellany (Irving) 2: 442 “The Cremona Violin” (Hoffmann) 2: 388 Cresserons, Charles de. See Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan The Cricket on the Hearth (Dickens) 2: 230 The Critic (periodical) (sidebar) 3: 125 “The Critic as Artist” (Wilde) 3: 507 A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (Blair) 1: 45–46 The Critical Review (periodical) 3: 434–35, 444 Critique of Judgement (Kant) 1: 150 Crosman, Robert 2: 308–10 Cross, Wilbur 2: 368 Crowe, Catherine 3: 24 Cry to Heaven (Rice) 3: 263–64 Cujo (King) 2: 491 Cultural identity 1: 121–27, 171–79 Curse narratives Baptiste, Jean 1: 291–92 haunted house 1: 290–300 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1: 292–95 “The Curse of Ancient Egypt” (Carter) (sidebar) 3: 267 The Curse of Frankenstein (film) 1: 428, 446 Curtis, Ian 1: 471–73 Cycle of the Werewolf (King) 2: 482, 486, 487–89

SUBJECT INDEX

DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL

Do with Me What You Will (Oates) 3: 164 “Doge und Dogaressa” (Hoffmann) 2: 398 The Dolliver Romance (Hawthorne) 2: 376 “Dolph Heyliger” (Irving) 2: 449 Dombey and Son (Dickens) 2: 230, 251–52 Domestic fiction 1: 265–69 “Don’t Look Now” (du Maurier) 2: 280 Doppelgänger definition 2: 485 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1: 305; 2: 391–92, 399–400, 414, 431 James, Henry 2: 473–77 A Legend of Montrose 3: 314 in nineteenth-century literature 1: 232–33 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 183–84 Old Mortality 3: 314 Persona (film) 1: 429 The Picture of Dorian Gray 1: 160–62 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 1: 158–60 “Dorian Gray and the Gothic Novel” (Poteet) 3: 504–9 Dostoevski, Fyodor 1: 2, 315–16; 2: 433–34 “The Double as Immortal Self” (Rank) 1: 310–16 “‘Double Born’: Bram Stoker and the Metrocolonial Gothic” (Valente) 1: 33 Double Persephone (Atwood) 2: 1–2, 8 Doubleday, Ellen 2: 289 Doubleday, Neal Frank 2: 368–78 Doubles (literary device) Beckett, Samuel and 1: 38–39 Caleb Williams 3: 369 “Carmilla” 1: 382–84 The Castle of Otranto 3: 369 definition 2: 485–86 Dinesen, Isak 2: 272–73 “The Fat Boy” 2: 236 Foucalt, Michel 3: 350 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 1: 26; 3: 338–42, 350 The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents 3: 369 King, Stephen 2: 485–93 Lacan, Jacques 3: 350 Lives of the Twins 3: 178 Melmoth the Wanderer 1: 27 in modern literature 1: 32–35 Nemesis 3: 178 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 178 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 1: 29 Snake Eyes 3: 178 Soul/Mate 3: 178

552

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3: 368–69, 372, 374–81 as supernatural self 1: 310–16 Twin Peaks (television show) 1: 453–54 Vathek 3: 369 The Woman in White 2: 216 See also Doppelgänger Dougherty, Stephen 3: 218–28 Douglas, Mary 1: 132–33 Douglas, Sir George 2: 432 Douglass, Frederick “Down, Satan!” (Barker) 1: 287–88 Doyle, Arthur Conan 1: 365 Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret (Hawthorne) 2: 376 “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (Hawthorne) 2: 364, 375 “Dr. Jekyll and the Emergence of Mr. Hyde” (Miyoshi) 3: 365–70 Dracula (character). See Count Dracula Dracula (film) 1: 424, (sidebar) 425; 3: 417 Dracula (Stoker) 1: 31, 33–34, 358–59; 3: 385–87 American Psycho and 1: 37 Anglo-Irish identity 1: 171–79 characterization of Count Dracula 1: 342–44; 3: 405–10 characters as Irish allegory 3: 415–27 “counterfeit” Gothic in 3: 397–404 critical reception 3: 386–87 degeneration 1: 166–69 dreams 1: 168, 330 eroticism in 1: 136–38 film adaptations 1: 446–47 influence of The Castle of Otranto 3: 395–404 mythology 1: 166–69 narrative structure 3: 270–71 review 3: 393–95, (sidebar) 405 sensationalism 3: 393 Summers, Montague on (sidebar) 3: 395 victims in 1: 133–36 as Victorian text 1: 128–40 Dracula’s Guest (Stoker) 3: 386–93, 401 Drama 1: 389–91, 401–15 character development 1: 405–6 Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 499–500 disguise in 1: 406–7 Gothic motifs in 1: 401–9 importance of 1: 26–27 influence of German romantic playwrights 1: 407–9 landscape as motif 1: 402–5

Lewis, Matthew Gregory 1: 338, 402, 408, 412; 3: 32, 34– 36, 37, 41–43 Maturin, Charles Robert 1: 337–38, 407–8, 499, 500; 3: 74, 84–85 nationalism 1: 412 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 164 repetition in 1: 407 sociopolitical ideology 1: 410–15 stage design 1: 404–5 vampire plays 1: 348–49 Wilde, Oscar 3: 488, 495–97 See also specific names of plays The Drawing of the Three (King) 2: 486–87 The Dream (Baillie) 2: 58 “The Dreamers” (Dinesen) 2: 258 Dreams Dracula 1: 168, 330 horror films 1: 415–16 Jung, Carl G. 1: 329 Myers, F. W. H 1: 330–31 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 2: 431–32 psychology of 1: 326–32 role in Gothic fiction 1: 329– 32; 2: 253 Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents (Beckford) 2: 79–80, 87, 89, 97–98 Drury Lane theater 1: 389 Druse, Eleanor. See King, Stephen du Maurier, Daphne 2: 115, 118, 279, 279–92 Doubleday, Ellen and 2: 289 horror 2: 283–84 Jung, Carl G. and 2: 289 principal works 2: 280 self-identity 2: 289–90 vamp vs. femme fatale 2: 285–86 Dunbar, William 1: 121–22 “The Dungeon” (Oates) 3: 183, 184 “The Dutchess at Prayer” (Wharton) 3: 463 Duthie, Peter 2: 61–67 Dyer, Richard 2: 188

E Eakins, Thomas 1: 519 “The Early Gothic Novel” (Lovecraft) (sidebar) 3: 443 The East Indian (Lewis) 3: 38 “Echoes” (Dinesen) 2: 258 “Edgar Allan Poe” (Lawrence) (sidebar) 3: 203

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

“THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER”

“Epistle to Thomas Ashton from Florence” (Walpole) 3: 446 The Epistolary Intrigue (Lewis) 3: 37–38 “The Erl-King” (Goethe). See “Der Erlkonig” (Goethe) “The Erl-King. From the German of Goethe. Author of the Sorrows of Werter” (Scott) (sidebar) 2: 350 “The Erl-King’s Daughter” (Scott) 3: 293–94 “Der Erlkonig” (Goethe) (sidebar) 2: 350 Eroticism in Dracula 1: 136–38 homoeroticism 3: 274–75 vampires 3: 274–76 See also Sexuality Essay on Sepulchres (Godwin) 1: 98, 101 An Essay on the Sublime (Baillie) 1: 56 “Ethan Brand” (Hawthorne) 2: 365, 374 Ethan Frome (Wharton) 3: 457–58 Ethics of the Sexual Difference (Irigaray). See Ethique de la difference sexuelle Ethique de la difference sexuelle (Irigaray) 1: 90–91 Ethwald (Baillie) 2: 58 Europe, eighteenth century aestheticism in 1: 48–57 attitude toward architecture 1: 486–87, 488; 3: 142–43 copyright laws 1: 95 function of literary criticism 1: 95–96 as impetus for Gothic movement 1: 1, 30–31 marriage laws 1: 224–26 role of women 2: 63–65 value of Gothic fiction 1: 221– 27; 3: 23–24 “European Disruptions of the Idealized Woman: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and the Marquis de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine” (Wright) 3: 61–70 European Gothic tradition 1: 74–104, 3: 124–25 vs. American Gothic tradition 1: 57–65; 2: 156–58 Caleb Williams 2: 337–38 development of Gothic fiction 1: 260–64 Dinesen, Isak 2: 261–68, 271 Faulkner, William 2: 298–305 feminist literary theory of 1: 86–91 French Revolution and 1: 74–85 German Romanticism 2: 271–72

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 378– 79; 3: 125 influence on Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 188, 194–95 Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 84–91 Melville, Herman 3: 118–22 nationalism in 1: 93–102, 158– 71; 2: 240 Romanticism 1: 249–58 See also Gothic movement The Europeans (James) 2: 462 “The Eve of St. Agnes” (Keats) 1: 19, 24 Evil eye (superstition) 1: 307 Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder (Fielding) 3: 24–25 “Excerpt from a letter dated 3 March 1886” (Symonds) (sidebar) 3: 365 Excess (theme) 3: 352–55, 355 The Exorcist (Blatty) 1: 450 The Exorcist (film) 1: 450–51 “Expedition to Hell” (Hogg) 2: 424–25 Expensive People (Oates) 3: 164, 178 “Extract from a note appended to a letter on December 9, 1838” (Beckford) 2: 83–85 Eyes (motif) 3: 472–73 “The Eyes” (Wharton) 3: 457, 459, 472–73

F A Fable (Faulkner) 2: 294 “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic” (Savoy) 1: 66–74 The Fair Maid of Perth (Scott) 3: 312–13 Fairy tales 2: 13, 185–86 “The Fall of the House of Clennam: Gothic Conventions in Little Dorrit” (Jarrett) 2: 251–55 “The Fall of the House of Usher” (Poe) 1: 71–72; 3: 188–89, 196 aristocracy 3: 221 castle in 3: 194–97 compared to “Bartleby the Scrivener” 3: 122–23 family curse in 2: 221 family murder 2: 311 film adaptation 3: 224 haunted house in 3: 225–26 madness in 3: 204 miscegenation 3: 221–27 slavery 3: 223

553

SUBJECT INDEX

“Edgar Allan Poe” (Lovecraft) (sidebar) 3: 219 Edgar Huntly or Memoir of a Sleep-Walker (Brown) 1: 250–51; 2: 154, 159–60 Edgeworth, Maria 1: 207, (sidebar) 3: 306 The Edible Woman (Atwood) 2: 1, 9 Edinburgh Journal of Science, 1: 334–35 Edinburgh (Scot’s) Magazine, 1: 25 Edmundson, Mark 1: 520 “Edward Randolph’s Portrait” (Hawthorne) 2: 370 Edwards, Jonathan 3: 277–78 The Effusions of Sensibility; or, Letters from Lady Honoria Harrowhart to Miss Sophonisba Simper (Lewis) 3: 37–38 Egan, James 3: 168–78 Ehrengard (Dinesen) 2: 258 “The Eighteenth-Century Psyche: The Mysteries of Udolpho” (Williams) 3: 252–60 Elbert, Monika 3: 466–75 Elder, Marjorie 2: 382–86 Elinor and Marianne (Austen) 2: 25, 33 Eliot, T. S. (sidebar) 2: 215 Die Elixiere des Teufels (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 394, 405 compared to The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 2: 431 doppelgänger 2: 391–92, 400 influence of The Monk 3: 40–41 uncanny 1: 304 Elizabethan literature 1: 17 Ellis, Bret Easton 1: 36–38 Ellis, S. M. (sidebar) 3: 6 Elwin, Malcolm 3: 368 Emden, Cecil S. 2: 31–35 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 3: 468, 470, 472, 474 “Emily’s Demon-Lover: The Gothic Revolution and The Mysteries of Udolpho” (Graham) 3: 249–52 Emma (Austen) 2: 26–27, 32 Emmeline,or, the Orphan of the Castle (Smith) 1: 96 “Endicott and the Red Cross” (Hawthorne) 2: 370 Enfield, William 3: 246–49 The English Review, 2: 85 Enigmatic code 1: 319–20 Enlightenment 1: 48–57, 67 An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (Godwin) 1: 22; 2: 321–23, 330–31, 334; 3: 212

SUBJECT INDEX

“THE FALL RIVER AXE MURDERS”

“The Fall River Axe Murders” (Carter) 2: 182–83 “Fame” (Jackson) 1: 266 Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott (Hogg) 2: 422 Family in horror films 1: 420–22 Jackson, Shirley 1: 265–82 King, Stephen 2: 501–3 Twin Peaks (television show) 1: 455–56 “Family” (Oates) 3: 164 Family curse (Gothic convention) 1: 290–300; 3: 221 The Family Legend (Baillie) 2: 58 Family murder (Gothic convention) 2: 216, 311 “Family Portraits” (Baptiste) 1: 291–92, 292 “Famine Country” (Oates) 3: 181, 183, 184 Famous Imposters (Stoker) 3: 402 Fanshawe: A Tale (Hawthorne) 2: 364, 379 “Fantasia of the Library” (Foucault) 1: 92 Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Hoffmann) 2: 393, 395 Fantasmagoriana (Shelley) 1: 25 Fantastic (genre) definition 1: 128–29 Dinesen, Isak 2: 270–71 Dracula 1: 139 Gebir 1: 257–58 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 168–77, 180 Fantasy (Gothic element) 2: 183–90, 197–99 “The Fat Boy” (Dickens) 2: 235–38 Fatal Revenge; or The Family of Montorio (Maturin) 3: 73–74, 84, 92–93 Faulkner, William 2: 293, 293–320 chase in 2: 301–2 grotesques 2: 301 influence of Beardsley, Aubrey 2: 299 influence of Blake, William 2: 306–12 principal works 2: 295–96 Southern Gothic 2: 297–305 Wandering Jew 2: 302 “Faulkner’s Miss Emily and Blake’s ‘Sick Rose’: ‘Invisible Worm,’ Nachträglichkeit, and Retrospective Gothic 2: 306–12 Faust (character) 2: 156–57, 299 See also specific works “Faust and the Gothic Novel” (Brown, J. and M.) 2: 354–62 Faust: Ein Fragment (Goethe) 2: 342, 349–53 Faust II (Goethe) 2: 342, 354–61

554

Faust: Part I (Goethe). See Faust—Der Tragödi erster Teil Faust—Der Tragödi erster Teil (Goethe) 2: 341–42, 343–44, 354–61 Fear 2: 10 “All Souls” 3: 473–74 architecture as representation 2: 344–48 comedy and, in films 1: 435 of death 1: 400–401 Gothic response to 1: 1–2 vs horror 3: 237–38, 463 King, Stephen 2: 495, 504 in literary history 1: 16–21, 65 The Marble Faun 2: 383–84 nationalism and 1: 93–102 Radcliffe, Ann 2: 336 of Rice, Anne (sidebar) 3: 278 Scott, Sir Walter 3: 309–13 sublime and 1: 110–13, 148–49 See also Horror; Psychological horror; Supernatural The Feast of All Saints (Rice) 3: 263–64 Fedorko, Kathy A. 3: 476–85 Female Gothic 1: 210–19 freaks 1: 215–16 Radcliffe, Ann 3: 252–59 Shelley, Mary 3: 327–33 “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother” (Moers) (sidebar) 3: 338 “Female Sexuality” (Freud) 1: 378 Feminist literary theory 1: 86–91, 108–9 American Gothic tradition 1: 210–19 “Taming a Tartar” 1: 203–6 Wharton, Edith 3: 459–60, 480–82 Femme fatale, 2: 139, 285–86 “Die Fermate” (Hoffmann) 2: 397 Ferriar, John 1: 207 Fetishism 2: 184–85; 3: 174 Fiedler, Leslie 1: 66–67, 212, 520 on American Gothic tradition 2: 298–305 on Brown, Charles Brockden 2: 156–62 on Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 205–11 Fielding, Henry 1: 490; 3: 24–25 Fielding, Penny 1: 38 Films, horror 1: 398–401, 415–52 American International Pictures 1: 429 Armageddon 1: 430 comedy and fear 1: 435 Corman, Roger 1: 443–46 demonic 1: 430 Dracula films 1: 446–47 family portrayal in 1: 420–22 German 1: 429, 430–31, 439 Hammer Films 1: 428–29, 435, 440, 445–47

history of development 1: 425–39 Japanese 1: 428 King, Stephen 1: 398–401 Lang, Fritz 1: 429, 431 monsters 1: 416–17, 427–30, 442 Poe, Edgar Allan 1: 429, 444–45 popularity of 1: 415 psychological thrillers 1: 438 science fiction 1: 427–29 Surrealist movement and 1: 416 television and 1: 431–32 zombie films 1: 443 See also specific names of films Fingal (Macpherson) 1: 97–98 Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (Carter) 2: 180, 183–85, (sidebar) 191 First Impressions (Austen) 2: 25, 32, 33 First Love: A Gothic Tale (Oates) 3: 165 Fisher, Bejamin F. IV 3: 128–32 Five Sermons on the Errors of the Roman Catholic Church (Maturin) 3: 92, 95 Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling (Godwin) (sidebar) 2: 330, 331 Flight (motif). See Chase (motif) Folklore, vampire 1: 344–45, 349, 353 Fontaine, Joan 2: 119 Fonthill Abbey 2: 85–86 Forbes, Esther 1: 62–65 “’A Forced Solitude’: Mary Shelley and the Creation of Frankenstein’s Monster” (Tillotson) 3: 342–48 “Foreword” (Morrison) 3: 137–38 “A Forgotten Creator of Ghosts: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Possible Inspirer of the Brontës” (Kenton) (sidebar) 3: 22 The Fortunes of Nigel (Scott) 3: 298, 311, 313 The Fortunes of Perkin Warbek (Shelley) 3: 320 The Fortunes of Torlough O’Brien (Le Fanu) 3: 7, 10–15 “Foucault in the House of Usher: Some Historical Permutations in Poe’s Gothic” (Dougherty) 3: 218–28 Foucault, Michel 1: 92, 145–46 doubles in 3: 350 family curse in 1: 295–96; 3: 221

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

GENRES

as social philosophy 1: 255 supernatural 3: 336–37 “Frankenstein, or the New Prometheus” (Bloom) 3: 337–42 Fraser, Graham 1: 38–39 “Das Fräulein von Scuderi” (Hoffmann) 2: 398 Fredolfo: A Tragedy (Maturin) 3: 74, 84–85 “Das fremde Kind” (Hoffmann) 2: 397 French authors 1: 2; 3: 97–103 French Revolution 1: 74–85, 410; 3: 350–52 French Ways and Their Meaning (Wharton) 3: 476, 479 Freund, Karl 1: 437 Freud, Sigmund 1: 70–71, 87, 90; 3: 372 beating fantasy 3: 329 demonic possession 1: 328 dream interpretation 1: 326–32 ghost stories 3: 462–63 on humor 2: 18 on hysteria 3: 243 Jung, Carl G. and 1: 329 Nachträglichkeit 2: 310 Oedipal complex 1: 377–79, 380, 384 pre-oedipal 1: 377–79 on “Der Sandmann” 2: 402–3, 408–9, 413 on the sublime 1: 152–53 uncanny 1: 301–10, 454, (sidebar) 2: 308 See also Psychoanalysis Friedkin, William 1: 450–51 A Friend to Genius (critic) 3: 48–51 “The Friends of the Friends” (James) 2: 471, 473 Frisch, Shelley L. 2: 408–11 “From Otranto to Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner’s Gothic Heritage” (Kerr) 2: 297–306 “From the Sublime to the Uncanny: Victorian Gothic and Sensation Fiction” (Milbank) 1: 86–92 The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton) 3: 463 Fugitive Verses (Baillie) 2: 49 “The Fullness of Life” (Wharton) 3: 458 Furnier, Vincent. See Cooper, Alice “Further Confessions” (Oates) 3: 180 Fuseli, Henry 1: 519, 520 Fuss, Diana 1: 72–73

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

G Gamer, Michael 3: 442–54 A Garden of Earthly Delights (Oates) 3: 164 The Garden of Earthly Delights (painting) 3: 56 Gardiner, H. W. 3: 379 Garner, Margaret 3: 146–47 Gaslight (film) 1: 339–40 Geary, Robert F. 3: 21–27 Gebir (Landor) 1: 257–58 Gender identity Klein, Melanie on 1: 379–81 pre-oedipal stage 1: 377–79 vampires 1: 382–84; 3: 275, 281–85 Gender relations Northanger Abbey 1: 221–22 “Taming a Tartar” 1: 199–200 Villette 2: 122–27 Gender roles 3: 476–80 Genres adventure fiction 3: 359 Ambiguous Gothic 2: 412–17, 453–55; 3: 176 Bildungsroman 2: 246–48 comic Gothic 2: 17–23 confessional novels 3: 211–17 convent stories 2: 223–24 curse narratives 1: 290–300 detective fiction 1: 36–37, 249–51; 2: 216; 3: 175–77 domestic fiction 1: 265–69 doppelgänger 1: 158–60, 305; 2: 391–92, 399–400, 414, 431, 473–377, 485 fantastic 1: 128–29; 3: 168–77, 180 female Gothic 1: 210–19; 2: 20, 36; 3: 252–59, 327–33 ghost stories 2: 6–8, 11, 229, 230, 364, 395, 462–64, 466– 71, (sidebar) 471; 3: 181, 459, 461–62, 466–75 historical novels 1: 58–65; 2: 400 horror 1: 261–62; 2: 481–504 Jacobin 1: 78 mystery 2: 249 novel of manners 2: 247–48 Oriental 1: 260–61; 2: 88–89, 96 romances 1: 49–52, 129–33, 220–26, 249–58, 501–2; 2: 115–20, 213–17, 368–77, 380–81; 3: 6–15 satire 3: 283 sea stories 1: 251–52; 3: 205–11 sensation fiction 1: 87–91, 354; 2: 211–15, 218–19, 223– 26, 431, 447; 3: 5–6 slave narratives 1: 183–92; 3: 146–48

555

SUBJECT INDEX

Fountainville Forest,a Play, in Five acts, as Performed at the Theatre-Royal Covent-Garden (Boaden) 1: 394–98, 413 Foxfire (Oates) 3: 165 The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Nussbaum) 3: 510 “Fragment of a Novel” (Byron) 1: 240–43 Frank, Frederick S. 2: 89–95, (sidebar) 3: 434 Frankenstein (film) (sidebar) 1: 416, 432–35, 440–42 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (Shelley) 1: 2, 25–27, 31; 2: 116; 3: 319–21, 343 as autobiography (sidebar) 3: 328, 342–47 birth metaphor (sidebar) 3: 338 British politics in 3: 348–55 compared to Caleb Williams 3: 339 compared to Pet Sematary 2: 500 compared to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3: 371 compared to “The Bell Tower” (sidebar) 3: 111 compared to Wonderland 3: 169–70 doubles in 3: 338–42, 350 dramatization of 1: 26 enigmatic code 1: 319–20 excess in 3: 352–55 female body 3: 330 feminist literary theory of 1: 108 film adaptation of 1: 422–25, 440–42 French Revolution 1: 82–85; 3: 350–52 heroine in 2: 138 as horror classic 1: 261–62 influence of St. Leon 2: 323 influence on Interview with a Vampire 3: 280 influences on 3: 321 loneliness in 3: 342–47 Milton, John in 3: 341 monster 3: 335–36, 339–42, 348–55 morality of 3: 335–36 narrative structure 3: 86 Promethean mythology 3: 338–442 psychoanalysis of 1: 322–24, 331 Scott, Sir Walter on 3: 336–37, (sidebar) 349 Shelley, Percy Bysshe on 3: 335–36

SUBJECT INDEX

“A GENUINE BORDER STORY”

Southern Gothic 2: 297–305; 3: 178 sportive Gothic 2: 447–51, 451–53 television Gothic 1: 452–59 terror-romances 1: 249–58 travel narrative 3: 107–8 urban Gothic 1: 129, 130–33, 139 vampire fiction 3: 266–76 Westerns 3: 205–6 See also Gothic movement “A Genuine Border Story” (Hogg) 2: 427 Getatore (superstition) 1: 308–9 “The Ghost of Edward” (Baillie) 2: 59 “The Ghost of Fadon” (Baillie) 2: 60 Ghost stories Atwood, Margaret 2: 6–8, 11 “Die Automate” 2: 388, 395 Dickens, Charles 2: 229, 230 Freudian analysis 3: 462–63 James, Henry 2: 462–64, 466– 71, (sidebar) 471 “Legends of the ProvinceHouse” 2: 364 “Night-Side” 3: 181 Wharton, Edith 3: 459, 461– 63, 466–75, 482 Wilde, Oscar 3: 488 Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (Le Fanu) 3: 1 The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (Wharton) 3: 466 “The Ghostly Rental” (James) 2: 461, 463, 471–72 Ghosts 1: 18 Beloved 3: 150–60 Cambrio-Britons 1: 413–15 The Castle of Otranto: A Story 3: 451–52 The Castle Spectre 1: 338 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1: 337 hallucinations 1: 333–41 Morrison, Toni 3: 138 Shelley, Mary on 3: 321–24 Wharton, Edith 3: 460–62, 466–75 See also Grotesques; Supernatural Ghosts (Wharton) 3: 457, 459, 460–62 “Ghosts in the Machines: The Haunted Castle in the Works of Stephen King and Clive Barker” (Oakes) 1: 283–90 “The Giant Woman” (Oates) 3: 180 The Giaour (Byron) (sidebar) 2: 95 Gibbs, Kenneth 2: 494–99 Giddens, Anthony 1: 130–31 Gide, André 2: 423

556

Gil Blas (Le Sage) 1: 334 Gill, R. B. 2: 95–101 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 1: 109, 212, (sidebar) 213, 214–15 Gilmor, Robert III 1: 502–5 Gilmore, Michael T. 2: 170–77 Gilmore, Mikal (sidebar) 3: 278 “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (Leiber) 1: 364–65, 367 Girouard, Mark 1: 490 Glen Ellen (house) 1: 504 “Glenallan” (Bulwer-Lyton) 1: 12–16 Glock, Waldo S. (sidebar) 2: 37 Go Down, Moses (Faulkner) 2: 294 Gobineau, Arthur de 3: 222 “Goblin Market” (Rossetti) (sidebar) 1: 143 “The Goblin Who Stole a Sexton” (Dickens) 2: 231–34 Goddu, Teresa A. 1: 180–97, 520 Godwin, William 1: 2, 20, 81, 87; 2: 321, 321–39 canonization of writers 1: 98 compared to Brown, Charles Brockden (sidebar) 2: 171 confessional style of 3: 211–13 on cultural nationalism 1: 99, 101 detective fiction 1: 249–50 on government 3: 350–51 influence of DeFoe, Daniel 3: 212 influence of Richardson, Samuel 3: 212–13 influence of the French Revolution 1: 78–80 influence on Brown, Charles Brockden 2: 168, 170–72 influence on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym 3: 213–17 necromancy 2: 326–27 philosophy of 2: 330–37 Poe, Edgar Allan on (sidebar) 2: 328; 3: 212 “Preface” to Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling (sidebar) 2: 330 principal works 2: 323–24 Shelley, Mary and 3: 319, 339, 345–46 social injustice 1: 22–23 sorcery 2: 325 supernatural 2: 324–27 witchcraft 2: 325–26 Wollstonecraft, Mary and 2: 322 “The Godwinian Confessional Narrative and Psychological Terror in Arthur Gordon Pym” (Markley) 3: 211–18 “Godwin’s Necromancy” (Poe) (sidebar) 2: 328 “Godwin’s Things As They Are” (The Monthly Review) 2: 327–30

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1: 2; 2: 341, 341–62 architecture 2: 344–49 Lewis, Matthew Gregory and 2: 349–53 märchen 2: 396 translation of “Der Erlkonig” (sidebar) 2: 350 uncanny 1: 308 Goethe’s Faust: Part II (Goethe). See Faust II Goethe’s Roman Elegies (Goethe) 2: 341 Goetz of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand (Goethe). See Goetz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand Goetz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (Goethe) 2: 341 “The Gold Bug” (Poe) 3: 206 The Golden Ass (Apuleius) 1: 20–21 The Golden Bowl (James) 2: 462 “The Golden Pot” (Hoffmann). See “Der goldene Topf” “Der goldene Topf” (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 402, 415 interpretations of 2: 393–97 supernatural 2: 412 Golem (film) 1: 434–35 Gondal (imaginary island) 2: 131, 132 Goodness, nature of 3: 510–11 Goodrich, Samuel 2: 364 Gorey, Edward (sidebar) 1: 510 Goth (music) 1: 470–73 Gothic (term) architecture 3: 142 Bronte¨, Charlotte and 2: 104–5 definition 1: 507; 2: 10–11, 113–14 negative connotations of 1: 40–42, 507; 2: 297–98 Oates, Joyce Carol on 3: 178–80 Gothic America (Goddu) 1: 520 “Gothic and Decadence: Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen” (Punter) 1: 158–71 “Gothic and Romance: Retribution and Reconciliation” (Sage) 3: 6–16 “The Gothic Arsenal of Edith Wharton” (Murray) 3: 462–66 “The Gothic Caleb Williams” (Rizzo) 2: 337–38 “Gothic Drama as Nationalistic Catharsis” (Hoeveler) 1: 410–15 “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution” (Paulson) 1: 74–86 “The Gothic Formula of ‘Bartleby’” (Ryan) 3: 122–24

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

A HAUNT OF FEARS

social history of 1: 48–57 television 1: 452–60 Victorian period and 1: 61–62, 86–91 visual arts 1: 475–526 women’s lack of recognition 1: 212 See also American Gothic tradition; European Gothic tradition; Genres; specific topics “Gothic Origins” (Botting) 1: 48–57 “Gothic Plot in Great Expectations” (Loe) 2: 245–51 “Gothic Possibilities in Moby-Dick” (Fisher) 3: 128–32 “Gothic Pyrotechnics” (Brockway) (sidebar) 2: 191 “Gothic Repetitions: Toni Morrison’s Changing Use of Echo” (Beutel) 3: 138–42 Gothic revival American 1: 497–505 architecture 1: 477–78, 486– 89, 497–505 Davis, Alexander Jackson (sidebar) 1: 491 England vs. United States 1: 488–89 “Gothic Spaces, The Political Aspects of Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (Weissberg) 3: 142–50 “The Gothic Spirit” (Ranger) 1: 401–11 “The Gothic Text: Life and Art” (Fedorko) 3: 476–85 “Gothic Transformations: Isak Dinesen and the Gothic” (James, S.) 2: 261–69 “The Gothic Unity of Godwin’s Caleb Williams” (Graham) 2: 330–37 “The Gothic Vathek: The Problem of Genre Resolved” (Frank) 2: 89–95 “The Gothic Wilde” (Lawler) 3: 493–502 Governor General’s Award 2: 1, 3 Graham, Kenneth 2: 330–37; 3: 249–52 Graham’s Magazine, (sidebar) 2: 369 “The Grave” (Blair, R.) 1: 53 Graveyard poetry 1: 52–55 Gray, Thomas 3: 446 “The Great Carbuncle,” 2: 374 Great Expectations (Dickens) 2: 229–30, 247, 252 as Bildungsroman 2: 246–48 cannibalism 2: 237 Gothic plot 2: 248–51 as novel of manners 2: 247–48 punishment of children 2: 239–40

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

The Great God Pan (Machen) 2: 169–70 The Greater Inclination (Wharton) 3: 457 Green, Howard 2: 261 “Green Tea” (Le Fanu) 1: 335–36; 3: 2 Greg, W. R. 2: 120–21 “The Grey Champion” (Hawthorne) 2: 370 Griffin, Susan M. 2: 217–28 Griffith, Clark 3: 202–5 Grimké, Sarah 1: 182 Gross Clinic (painting) 1: 519 Gross, Louis S. 1: 57–66 “The Grotesque and the Gothic” (Appel) 2: 300–301 Grotesques 1: 19 American Gothic tradition 2: 300–301 architecture 1: 483 Carter, Angela 2: 190–94 definition 2: 300 sublime and 2: 300 techno-gothic 2: 68–72 See also Ghosts Guattari, Felix 3: 226–27 Guy Deverell (Le Fanu) 3: 1–2 Guy Domville (James) 2: 462, 466–67, 473 Guy Mannering (Scott) 3: 306–7, 310–14

H Halberstam, Judith 1: 197–99, 205; 2: 234 Hale, Sarah J. 1: 211–12 Halloween (Burns) 1: 18 Hallucinations 1: 333–41 The Hamlet (Faulkner) 2: 294 Hammer Films 1: 428–29, 435, 440, 445–47 The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood) 2: 1–2, 11, 13 Hannah, Barbara 3: 380 Hannaham, James 1: 468–73 The Happy Prince (Wilde) 3: 488 Hardy, Thomas 1: 34–35 The Harlem Book of the Dead (Van Der Zee) 3: 146 Harlequin formula 3: 281–83 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, (sidebar) 2: 55 Hartman, Geoffrey 2: 302 Haslam, John 1: 338–39 Haslam, Richard 3: 91–97 Hassan, Ihab 2: 301, 302 A Haunt of Fears (Barker) 2: 184

557

SUBJECT INDEX

“Gothic Genealogies: Dracula, Bowen’s Court, and Anglo-Irish Psychology” (Ingelbien) 1: 171–80 “The Gothic Imaginary: Goethe in Strasbourg” (Calhoon) 2: 344–49 “Gothic in the Horror Film 1930-1980” (Punter) 1: 439–52 “Gothic Letter on a Hot Night” (Atwood) 2: 8 “Gothic Libraries and National Subjects” (Lynch) 1: 92–102 Gothic literature. See Gothic movement “Gothic Motifs in the Waverly Novels” (Le Tellier) 3: 305–16 Gothic movement abnormal psychology 1: 332–41 aestheticism 1: 48–57, 107–8 African American experience 1: 108, 180–92 American vs. European 1: 57– 65; 2: 156–58 Antebellum period 1: 180–92 art 1: 506–26 cannibalism 2: 237 character types 1: 20; 2: 298– 302, 403–7 compared to modernism 1: 30–39 “counterfeiting” 3: 397–404, 451–52 demonic women in fiction 2: 14–16 drama 1: 26–27, 401–15 evolution of 1: 40–47 Faustian legend 2: 156–57, 299 films 1: 415–52 French authors 1: 2 French Revolution 1: 74–85, 410 Irish authors 1: 38 language of 1: 38–39 libraries in 1: 92–102 as masculine endeavor 1: 523 medieval in 1: 49–51, 61, 511–13 music 1: 461–73 1990s 1: 520 origins 1: 1–2, 30–31; 2: 116, 189 overviews 1: 1–102 performing arts 1: 389–474 poetry of 1: 18–20, 24, 52–55 reader appreciation 1: 4–5 relationship of architecture to literature 1: 480–86, 497–505 romances vs. novels 1: 49–52 Romanticism and 1: 2, 21–29, 42–45; 2: 271, 494; 3: 124, 308–9 Russian authors 1: 2 Scottish writers 1: 2

SUBJECT INDEX

THE HAUNTED CASTLE

The Haunted Castle (Railo) 1: 284 “The Haunted Chamber” (Radcliffe) 3: 233–37 Haunted house (Gothic convention) “The Fall of the House of Usher” 3: 225–26 The House of Seven Gables 1: 292–94 symbolism of family curse 1: 290–300 See also Castle (Gothic convention) “Haunted Houses I and II” (Mighall) 1: 290–301 The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (Dickens) 2: 230 “The Haunted Palace” (Poe) 3: 223–24 Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (Oates) 3: 163–64, 180, 184 The Haunting (film) 1: 281 “A Haunting Back: Harriet Jacobs, African-American Narrative, and the Gothic” (Goddu) 1: 180–97 The Haunting of Hill House (Jackson) (sidebar) 1: 464 film adaptation 1: 281 loneliness in 1: 273–74 supernatural 1: 274–75 To Have and Have Not (film) (Faulkner) 2: 294 Hawkins, Anthony Hope 1: 130 “Hawthorne and the Gothic Romance” (Lundbland) 2: 378–82 Hawthorne, Julian (sidebar) 3: 503 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 363, 363–86 curse narratives 1: 292–95 European Gothic tradition 2: 378–79; 3: 125 Goodrich, Samuel and 2: 364 influence of German Romanticism 2: 379 influence of Maturin, Charles Robert 2: 374 influence of Radcliffe, Ann 2: 376 influence on James, Henry 2: 462–63 mysterious portrait and 2: 370 Poe, Edgar Allan on (sidebar) 2: 369, 379 principal works 2: 365–66 spiritualism 2: 379–80 witchcraft 2: 371–73 “Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun: A Gothic Structure” (Elder) 2: 382–86 “Hawthorne’s Use of Three Gothic Patterns” (Doubleday) 2: 368–78 The Hay Wain (painting) 3: 55

558

Hazlitt, William (sidebar) 2: 163, (sidebar) 3: 298 The Heart of Midlothian (Scott) 3: 292 fear 3: 310 mystery 3: 308 robbers 3: 313 violence 3: 311–12 “Heat” (Oates) 3: 178 Heat: And Other Stories (Oates) 3: 165 Heavy metal music compared to Gothic novel 1: 461–67 Led Zeppelin I 1: 461 Satanism 1: 463–65 sexuality in lyrics 1: 462–63 subversive nature of 1: 466–67 Hedonism 3: 512–15 Heilman, Robert B. 2: 107–14 “The Hellbound Heart” (Barker) 1: 288–89 Heller, Tamar 2: 205–10 Heller, Terry 2: 312–19 Helyer, Ruth 1: 36–37 Henley, Samuel 2: 87–88 Hennelly, Mark M. Jr 3: 51–61 Henriquez (Baillie) 2: 58 “Henry James’ Ghost Stories” (Woolf) (sidebar) 2: 471 Heredity. See Family curse (Gothic convention) A Heritage of Horror (Pirie) 1: 445 Heroes 1: 24; 2: 299 Byronic (sidebar) 1: 241, 253–54 doubles and 1: 313 in drama 1: 405–6 Melville, Herman 3: 116 solitude 1: 253–54 Heroes and Villains (Carter) 2: 180, 188 Heroines A Bloodsmoor Romance 3: 174–75 of Bronte¨, Charlotte 2: 107–14 The Castle of Otranto 2: 138, 144 of Dinesen, Isak 2: 264–68 in drama 1: 405–6 femme fatale 2: 139 Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus 2: 138 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 1: 214–15 The Italian 2: 138, 139 Jane Eyre 2: 115–20, (sidebar) 116 Justine 3: 64, 67–69 Little Dorrit 2: 253 madness 1: 339–41 Melmoth the Wanderer 2: 138– 41, 144 Melville, Herman 3: 115–16 The Monk 2: 138–39; 3: 64–67

“The Monkey” 2: 274–75 The Mysteries of Udolpho 2: 138, 139, 144; 3: 254–59 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 183 Radcliffe, Ann 1: 221–24; 3: 64 in Rebecca 2: 118–19, 285–90 submissiveness 2: 138 Wuthering Heights 1: 138–45 See also Women “Heroines of Nineteenth-Century Fiction” (Howells) (sidebar) 2: 116 Herzog, Werner 1: 430–31 Hibbert, Samuel 1: 334, 336–37, 338 Hieroglyphic Tales (Walpole) 3: 431 The High Bid (James) 2: 462 Hill, Leslie 1: 376 The Hill of Dreams (Machen) 1: 170–71 Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall 1: 461–68 Historical novels 1: 58–65; 2: 400 Historiography 1: 68–69 The History of Caliph Vathek: An Arabian Tale (Beckford). See Vathek History of English Poetry (Wharton) 1: 54 A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (Irving) 2: 441–42 A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Irving) 2: 442–43 Hitchcock, Alfred 1: 435, (sidebar) 436, 437, 447–48 Hoeveler, Diane Long 1: 410–15; 3: 327–35 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1: 2; 2: 387, 387–420 Cobb, Palmer on (sidebar) 2: 412 compared to Shelley, Mary 3: 330 doppelgänger 1: 305; 2: 391–92, 399–400, 414, 431 Gide, André and 2: 423 influence of Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3: 40–41 influence on Hogg, James 2: 431 märchen 2: 395, 397 musical life 2: 387, 398 principal works 2: 388–89 psychological horror 2: 411–17 Scott, Sir Walter on (sidebar) 2: 392, 401, 407 uncanny guest 1: 302–4; 2: 403–11 “Hoffmann’s Uncanny Guest: A Reading of ‘Der Sandmann’” (Prawer) 2: 401–8

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

“INTERRACIAL SEXUAL DESIRE IN CHARLOTTE DACRE’S ZOFLOYA”

in Wuthering Heights 1: 262–63 zombie films 1: 443 See also Fear; Psychological horror; Supernatural “The House” (Jackson) 1: 280 The House and the Brain (Bulwer-Lytton) 1: 262–63 House at Hawk’s End (Nicole) 2: 120 The House by the Churchyard (Le Fanu) 3: 1–2, 5 The House of Mirth (Wharton) 3: 457–358, 459–60, 481 The House of Raby; Or, Our Lady of Darkness (Hooper) 1: 296–98, 300 The House of Seven Gables (Hawthorne) 2: 364–65, 380 family curse 1: 294–95 haunted house 1: 292–94 mysterious portrait 2: 370 witchcraft 2: 373 The House of the Vampire (Viereck) 1: 363 “How Readers Make Meaning” (Crosman) 2: 308–10 Howe, S. G. 1: 296 Howells, Coral Ann 2: 10–17 Howells, William Dean (sidebar) 2: 116, 462 “Howe’s Masquerade” (Hawthorne) 2: 369 Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 1: 125–26 Human nature 2: 51–54, 56–57 Hume, David 2: 95, 99–100 Hume, Marilyn 2: 146–50 Humor Carter, Angela 2: 185 Dickens, Charles 2: 234–41 in early Gothic literature 2: 298 and fear, in films 1: 435 Irving, Washington 2: 451–54 Lady Oracle 2: 17–23 “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” 2: 447–48 The Magic Toyshop 2: 185 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 2: 433–34 Hurd, Richard 1: 42–46, 54–55; 3: 449–50 Hysteria as deception 2: 69–73 feminist literary theory 1: 211 Freud, Sigmund on 3: 243 See also Madness

I “I and My Chimney” (Melville) 3: 114

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

I Lock the Door upon Myself (Oates) 3: 165 “’I Wants to Make Your Flesh Creep’: Notes toward a Reading of the Comic-Gothic in Dickens” (Wolfreys) 2: 234–42 “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber” (King) 2: 481 Identity crisis, “Der Sandmann,” 2: 412–17 Illustrations of madness: exhibiting a singular case of insanity and a no less remarkable difference in medical opinion: developing the nature of the assailment,and the manner of working events; with a description of the tortures experienced by bomb-bursting, lobster-cracking, and lengthening of the brain (Halsam) 1: 338–39 “‘I’m in the Business Too’: Gothic Chivalry, Private Eyes, and Proxy Sex and Violence in Chandler’s The Big Sleep” (Rzepka) 1: 36 Imagery in Bleak House 2: 242–45 Melville, Herman 3: 113–14 music 3: 114 tower 3: 113–14 Imagination 2: 262–63, 268 Imogen (Godwin) 1: 411 The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde) 3: 488 In a Glass Darkly (Le Fanu) 1: 335–36; 3: 2 “In Cold Blood” (Capote) 1: 66 In the Circles of Fear and Desire (Day) 2: 312–13, 317 “In the Region of Ice” (Oates) 3: 183 Incest. See Sexuality, incest Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) 1: 185–92 The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (Carter) 2: 180, 195–99 Ingebretsen, Edward J. 3: 277–86 Ingelbien, Raphael 1: 171–80 Ingemann, Bernhard Severin 2: 272–73 An Inland Voyage (Stevenson) 3: 359 Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers (Abercrombie) 1: 333–34 Insanity. See Madness Intentions (Wilde) 3: 488, 493, 504, 507 Interlunar (Atwood) 2: 11 The Interpretations of Dreams (Freud) 1: 326–28 “Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya” (Mellor) 1: 207–10

559

SUBJECT INDEX

“Hoffmann’s Weird Tales” (Literary World), 2: 392–93 “Hogg” (Saintsbury) (sidebar) 2: 429 Hogg, James 1: 2, 28–29, 80; 2: 421, 421–39 compared to Dostoevski, Fyodor 2: 433–34 influence of Hoffmann, E. T. A. 2: 431 influence on Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 213 poetry 2: 421–23, 427 principal works 2: 423–24 Scott, Sir Walter and 2: 421– 22, 432–33 supernatural 2: 422–23, 425– 28, 431–32 Hogle, Jerrold E. 3: 395–405 Hollington, Michael (sidebar) 2: 252 “The Hollow of the Three Hills” (Hawthorne) 2: 364, 366–68, 371 Holt, Victoria 2: 115, 119–20 “Homely Gothic” (Botting) 2: 215–17 Homosexuality 1: 72–73 Beckford, William 2: 87, 98 in “The Monkey” 2: 273–76 See also Sexuality Hooper, Jane Margaret 1: 296–98, 300 Hope, Anthony. See Hawkins, Anthony Hope “Hop-Frog: Or, the Eight Chained Orang-Outangs” (Poe) 3: 189 Horace 1: 41 “Le Horla” (Maupassant) 1: 314 Horner, Avril 2: 284–91 Horror architecture as representation 2: 344–48 Calvinist motifs in 3: 277 Dinesen, Isak 2: 283–84 drama 1: 390 films, 1930-1980 1: 439–51 films, American 1: 398–401, 415–39 films, German 1: 429, 430–31, 439 films, Japanese 1: 428 Lewis, Matthew Gregory (sidebar) 3: 62 in The Mysteries of Udolpho 1: 225–26 Oates, Joyce Carol on (sidebar) 3: 179 pornography and 2: 187–88; 3: 284 science fiction films 1: 427–29 slavery as 1: 181–92, 520 television 1: 390–91, 431–32 vs. terror 3: 237–38, 463 Wharton, Edith 3: 463–66

SUBJECT INDEX

“THE INTERRUPTED CADENCE”

“The Interrupted Cadence” (Hoffmann). See “Die Fermate” “An Interview with Angela Carter” (Carter and Katsavos) 2: 181–82 Interview with the Vampire (Rice) 1: 369–70; 3: 263–65 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 280 theological debate in 3: 278–85 See also Vampire Chronicles “The Intoxicated” (Jackson) 1: 271, 272 “Introduction: The Art of Haunting” (Burns, S.) 1: 518–25 “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” (Wood) 1: 415–25 Introduction to The Best Tales of Hoffmann (Bleiler) 2: 393–401 Introduction to The Castle of Otranto (Gamer) 3: 442–54 Introduction to The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story and The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (Frank) (sidebar) 3: 434 Introduction to Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (Butler, M.) (sidebar) 3: 328 Introduction to Gothic Art (Martindale) 1: 506–11 Introduction to Gothic Sculpture 1140-1300 (Williamson) 1: 511–18 Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer (Baldick) 3: 84–91 Introduction to Plays on the Passions (Duthie) 2: 61–67 “Introductory” (Birkhead) 1: 16–21 “Introductory Discourse” (Baillie) 2: 51–54, 56–57, 62, (sidebar) 68 Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner) 2: 302 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (film) 1: 442 Iphigenia in Tauris (Goethe). See Iphigenie auf Tauris Iphigenie auf Tauris (Goethe) 2: 341 Ireland, W. H. 3: 199 Irigaray, Luce 1: 90–91 “Irving and the Gothic Tradition” (Clendenning) 2: 446–51 Irving, Henry 3: 400–401 Irving, Washington 1: 262; 2: 379, 441, 441–60 Ambiguous gothic 2: 453–55 American Gothic tradition 2: 443, 446–55 burlesque 2: 452–54 compared to Radcliffe, Ann 2: 453–55

560

compared to Scott, Sir Walter 2: 453 humor 2: 451–52 innovator of sportive Gothic 2: 447–51, 451–53 parody 2: 448–49, 453, 458–59 principal works 2: 443 the sublime 2: 452 use of sexual innuendo 2: 456–58 “Irving’s ‘Adventure of the German Student’” (Devlin) 2: 456–58 “Irving’s German Student” (Lupack) 2: 458–59 “Irving’s Use of the Gothic Mode” (Ringe) (sidebar) 2: 450 Irwin, Joseph James (sidebar) 3: 62 Island Nights’ Entertainments (Stevenson) 3: 360 The Island of Dr Moreau (Wells) 1: 162–66, 163 Island of Lost Souls (film) 1: 441–42 “Isle of the Devils” (Lewis) 1: 208 “The Isle of Voices” (Stevenson) 3: 360 IT (King) 2: 501 The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (Radcliffe) 2: 36; 3: 232, 243 doubles in 3: 369 heroine in 2: 138, 139 women’s education 3: 239–40, 242–44 Italy: With Sketches of Spain and Portugal (Beckford) 2: 80 Ivanhoe (Scott) 3: 308, 310, 312

J Jackson, Shirley 1: 264–82, (sidebar) 464 house theme 1: 280–82 loneliness theme 1: 272–78 marriage reflected in fiction 1: 266 misanthropy theme 1: 278–80 science fiction 1: 271–72 supernatural 1: 264, 267–72, 274–75 Jacobs, Harriet 1: 185–92 Jaffe, Aniela 3: 465 “James Boaden” (Temple) (sidebar) 1: 399 James, Henry 1: 31, 129; 2: 214–15, 461, 461–80 compared to Lewis, Matthew Gregory 2: 446–47 doppelgänger 2: 473–77 ghost stories 2: 462–64, 466– 71, (sidebar) 471

Gothic conventions 2: 470–77 house metaphor 2: 472–77 Howells, William Dean and 2: 462 influence of Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 462–63 principal works 2: 464–65 supernatural 2: 463–64, 470–73 Wharton, Edith and 3: 459, 483 James, M. R. 1: 38 James, Sibyl 2: 261–69 “Jamesian Gothicism: The Haunted Castle of the Mind” (Shelden) 2: 470–78 Jameson, Fredric 1: 146–47, 466–67 Jane Austen and her Art (Lascelles) 2: 32 “Jane Austen’s Gothic Architecture” (Lamont) 2: 41–46 Jane Eyre (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 103–5, 111, (sidebar) 121 Gothic conventions 2: 108–9 heroines (sidebar) 2: 116 masculine tone 2: 114–15 as prototype for modern Gothic 2: 115–20 Jane Eyre (film) 1: 119 Jane Talbot (Brown) 2: 154, 162 “Janice” (Jackson) 1: 269 Jarrett, David 2: 251–55 Jazz (Morrison) 3: 140–41 Jentsch, E. 1: 301–2 The Jewel of Seven Stars (Stoker) 3: 386 Jewsbury, Geraldine (sidebar) 2: 207 “Joanna Baillie and Charlotte Dacre” (Clery) 2: 54–61 Johnson, Diane 1: 217–19 Johnson, Greg 3: 178–85 Johnson, Heather 2: 190–94 Johnson, Samuel 1: 50–51 “The Jolly Corner” (James) 2: 461, 463–64, 466–77 “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu” (Ellis) (sidebar) 3: 6 “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu” (Rolleston) 3: 5–6 Joshi, S. T. 1: 264–83 “A journal entry of October 15, 1821” (Byron) (sidebar) 3: 42 Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (Lewis) 3: 32–33 The Journal of Julius Rodman (Poe) 3: 206 Journal of Natural Philosophy (Nicholson) 1: 336 The Journal of Sir Walter Scott (Scott) 3: 299

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

A LEGEND OF MONTROSE

K Kael, Pauline 1: 437 Kafka, Franz 3: 170 Kant, Ïmmanuel 1: 150–55 Karloff, Boris (sidebar) 1: 416, 434–35; 3: 353 Karpinski, Joanne B. 1: 68 Kater Murr (Hoffmann) 2: 403 Katsavos, Anna 2: 181–82 Keats, John 1: 2, 19, 24, (sidebar) 2: 171 Kemble, John Philip 1: 403 Kenilworth (Scott) 3: 297, 310, 312 Kenton, Edna (sidebar) 3: 22 Kerenyi, Karl 3: 465 “Kerfol” (Wharton) 3: 459, 471, 474 Kerr, Elizabeth M. 2: 297–306 Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 1: 185–86 Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751 (Stevenson) 3: 359–60 Kierkegaard, Søren 2: 272 Kilgour, Maggie 1: 67 “Kilmeny” (Hogg) 2: 423, 427 Kincaid, James 2: 236–37 King, Stephen 2: 481, 481–505 American Gothic tradition 2: 494–99 castle in 1: 284–90 compared to Shelley, Mary 2: 500 compared to Stevenson, Robert Louis 2: 485–87 doubles in 2: 485–93 families, American 2: 501–3 fear 2: 495, 504 on film adaptation of The Shining 1: 219

horror films 1: 398–401 influence of Melville, Herman 2: 494–99 principal works 2: 482–83 quest in (sidebar) 2: 492 serial killers 2: 490–93 supernatural 2: 501–4 vampires 1: 371–73; 3: 270 “The King’s Betrothed” (Hoffmann). See “Die Königsbraut” Kirland Revels (Holt) 2: 119–20 Kiss Me Again, Stranger (du Maurier), review of 2: 282–83 Klein, Melanie 1: 317–25 Lacan, Jacques on 1: 381 on mother 1: 379–81 Oedipal complex 1: 380 Klein Zaches (Hoffmann) 2: 405 Knapp, Steven 1: 144 Knickerbocker, Diedrich. See Irving, Washington Kollin, Susan 1: 36 “Die Königsbraut” (Hoffmann) 2: 400–401 Kotzebue, August von 1: 407–9 Kristeva, Julia 2: 287; 3: 482 Kroker, Arthur 1: 147 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge) 1: 19, (sidebar) 48

L Labyrinth (Gothic convention) 3: 197–98 Lacan, Jacques 1: 317, 381; 3: 350 LaCapra, Dominick 3: 152–55, 158 “The Lady of the House of Love” (Carter) 2: 182, 199 The Lady of the Lake (Scott) 3: 290, 306 Lady Oracle (Atwood) 2: 2, 3, 10 as comic Gothic 2: 17–23 compared to Cat’s Eye 2: 12 excerpt (sidebar) 2: 18 literary conventions in 2: 11–13 Lady Susan (Austen) 2: 33 Lady Windermere’s Fan (Wilde) 3: 488, 495 “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” (Wharton) 3: 458, 467, 471 The Lair of the White Worm (Stoker) 3: 386 Lamb, Mary 1: 100 Lamont, Claire 2: 41–46 “Landing in Luck” (Faulkner) 2: 293 Landor, Walter Savage 1: 257–58 Landscape (motif) “Bartleby the Scrivener” 3: 123–24

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

The Castle of Otranto 1: 402 in drama 1: 402–5 Moby-Dick; or, The Whale 3: 113 Radliffe, Ann 1: 403; 3: 113 Lang, Fritz 1: 429, 431 Langbaum, Robert 2: 262 Langhorne, John 3: 435 Langstaff, Launcelot. See Irving, Washington Lanone, Catherine 3: 97–104 Laplanche, Jean 2: 310–11 Lascelles, Mary 2: 32 Lasher (Rice) 3: 264 The Last Days of Pompeii (Bulwer-Lytton) (sidebar) 1: 15 The Last Man (Shelley) 3: 320 Last Tales (Dinesen) 2: 258 “The Later Years, 1820-1824” (Lougy) 3: 76–84 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry 1: 498–99 “The Laugh” (Wharton) 3: 478 Laurencin, Marie 2: 261 Lawler, Donald 3: 489, 493–502 Lawrence, D. H. (sidebar) 3: 203 Lay of the Last Minstrel (Scott) 1: 487; 3: 290 Lay Sermons (Hogg) 2: 427 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 1: 31, 89–90, 139; 3: 1, 1–29, (sidebar) 6 abnormal psychology in 1: 335–36 development of vampire 1: 353–58 doubles in 1: 382–84 dreams 1: 329–30 historical romances 3: 6–15 influence of (sidebar) 3: 22 influence on Stoker, Bram 1: 358 marriage of 3: 17–18 principal works 3: 3 sensation fiction 1: 354; 3: 5–6 women in 3: 16–17 Le Guin, Ursula K. (sidebar) 1: 291 Le Sage, Alain René 1: 334 Le Tellier, Robert Ignatius 3: 305–16 Leatherdale, Clive 3: 405–15 Led Zeppelin (musical group) 1: 461–62, 463 Led Zeppelin I (music recording) 1: 461, 462 Ledwon, Lenora 1: 452–60 Lee, Sophia 1: 115–18, (sidebar) 119 A Legend of Montrose (Scott) architecture motif 3: 315 doppelgänger 3: 314 fear 3: 310

561

SUBJECT INDEX

The Journals of Eleanor Druse: My Investigation of the Kingdom Hospital Incident (King) 2: 482 The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Atwood) 2: 2, 6, 11 A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (Radcliffe) 3: 232 Joy Division (musical group) 1: 471–73 Jude the Obscure (Hardy) 1: 35 Jung, Carl G. 2: 147, 412 dream interpretation 1: 329 du Maurier, Daphne and 2: 289 Freud, Sigmund and 1: 329 individuation 3: 481 psychological horror 3: 463 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3: 373–74 Justine (Sade) 3: 61–69

SUBJECT INDEX

“THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW”

mystery in 3: 307 violence 3: 312 “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (Irving) 2: 441–43, 447, 447–48, 457 Legends. See Mythology Legends of Angria (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 103 “Legends of the Province-House” (Hawthorne) 2: 364 Leiber, Fritz 1: 364–65 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Goethe) 2: 341 “Leixlip Castle” (Maturin) 3: 75–76 “Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood” (Freud) 1: 152 Lerner, Gerda 3: 17 Leroux, Gaston 1: 2 Lestat (character) 1: 369–70; 3: 269–70, 271–76, 280–83 A Letter from Xo Ho,a Chinese Philosopher at London, to His Friend Lien Chi at Peking (Walpole) 3: 446 Letter to Katharine de Mattos: 1 January 1886 (Stevenson) (sidebar) 3: 373 “A Letter to Richard Woodhouse on September 21, 1819” (Keats) (sidebar) 2: 171 Letter to Sir Walter Scott (Edgeworth) (sidebar) 3: 306 “Letter to Wilkie Collins on September 20, 1862” (Dickens) (sidebar) 2: 223 Letters (correspondence) du Maurier, Daphne 2: 289–90 Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3: 37–38 Walpole, Horace 3: 429, 431–32 See also specific letters Letters from Africa (Dinesen). See Breve fra Afrika (Dinesen) Letters of Horace Walpole (Walpole) 3: 429 The Letters of Oscar Wilde (Wilde) 3: 504–5 Letters on Chivalry and Romance (Hurd) 1: 42–46, 54–55; 3: 449–50 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (Scott) 1: 334, 335, 337, 338 Letters on Natural Magic (Brewster) 1: 334 Lévy, Maurice 3: 193–202 Lewes, George Henry 1: 300 Lewis, Matthew Gregory 1: 2, 48, 76–79, 81, 86–87, 402; 3: 31, 31–71 Byron, Lord George Gordon on 3: 36, (sidebar) 42

562

compared to Bosch, Hieronymous 3: 53–60 compared to James, Henry 2: 446–47 compared to Rice, Anne 3: 279 German romantic influence 1: 408 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von and 2: 349–53 heroines 2: 138–39, 144, 297–98 influence of 3: 40–45 influence on Bronte¨, Charlotte 2: 122–27 influence on Hoffmann, E. T. A. 3: 40–41 letters of 3: 37–38 madness as theme 1: 338; 3: 203 marriage of 3: 36 mastery of horror (sidebar) 3: 62 on The Mysteries of Udolpho 3: 39 nationalism 1: 412 plagiarism 3: 61 principal works 3: 33 racial phobia of 1: 208 Sade, Marquis de and 3: 61–69 Scott, Sir Walter on 3: 36 Shelley, Percy Bysshe and 3: 59–60 wasted talent of 3: 355 Lewis, W. S. 3: 447 Libraries 1: 92–102 Life among the Savages (Jackson) 1: 266–67 Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Laplanche) 2: 310–11 “Life and I” (Wharton) 3: 470, 476–78, 482–84 Life before Man (Atwood) 2: 2 “Ligeia” (Poe) 3: 188, 189 animated tapestry in 3: 200 castle in 3: 194–95 madness in 3: 204 Light in August (Faulkner) 2: 293–94, 302, 304 Lionel Lincoln (Cooper) 1: 58–62 Literary criticism, function of 1: 95–96 Literary Women: The Great Writers (Moers) 1: 210–11 Literary World, 2: 392–93 “The Little Antiquary” (Irving) 2: 452 Little Dorrit (Dickens) 2: 229–30, 251–55 “The Little Photographer” (du Maurier) 2: 284 Little Women (Alcott) 3: 175 Lives of the Necromancers; or, An Account of the Most Eminent Persons in Successive Ages, Who Have Claimed for Themselves, or

to Whom Has Been Imputed by Others, the Exercise of Magical Power (Godwin) 2: 324–27 Lives of the Novelists (Scott) 3: 313 Lives of the Twins (Oates) 3: 165, 178 Livre des Métiers (Boileau) 1: 515–16 Loe, Thomas 2: 245–51 Loneliness (theme) 1: 272–78; 3: 342–47 Long, Edward 1: 208 The Long Story (Beckford). See The Vision Longinus (philosopher) 1: 148–49 “The Looking Glass” (Wharton) 3: 467–68, 471 “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” (Wilde) 3: 487 Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories (Wilde) 3: 488 “The Lottery” (Jackson) 1: 272–73, (sidebar) 464 Lougy, Robert 3: 76–84 Louis (character) 1: 369–70; 3: 268–70, 280–84 as narrator 3: 271 sexuality of 3: 274–75 Love (Carter) 2: 180 Love and Death in the American Novel (Fiedler) 1: 67, 212, 520; 2: 298–303 Lovecraft, H. P. 1: 260–64, 261 on Poe, Edgar Allan (sidebar) 3: 219 supernatural (sidebar) 1: 260 on Walpole, Horace (sidebar) 3: 443 Loved and Lost (Le Fanu) 3: 17 “The Lovely Night” (Jackson) 1: 268–69 “The Lover’s Tale” (Maturin) 3: 77–78, 87, 90 Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Nussbaum) 3: 511 “The Loves of the Lady Purple” (Carter) 2: 183–84, (sidebar) 191 The Loving Spirit (du Maurier) 2: 279 Lubbock, Percy 3: 436–37 “Lucky to Get Away” (Jackson) 1: 266 “Luella Miller” (Wilkins-Freeman) 1: 365 Lugosi, Bela 1: 424, (sidebar) 425; 3: 353, 417 Lukacs, George 1: 58; 2: 209 Lundblad, Jane 2: 378–82 Lupack, Barbara Tepa 2: 458–59 Lynch, David 1: 454–56 Lynch, Deidre 1: 92–102 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 1: 153 “Lyttil Pynkie” (Hogg) 2: 422

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

MEMNOCH THE DEVIL

M

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

Medieval literature compared to American Gothic tradition 2: 298–99 horror as theme 1: 16–17 Meigs, J. Aitken 3: 218–19 “Meister Martin der Küfner und seine Gesellen” (Hoffmann) 2: 398–99 Méliès, George 1: 426 Mellard, James M. 2: 306–12 Mellor, Anne K. 1: 207–10 Melmoth réconcilié (Balzac) 3: 100–103 Melmoth, Sebastian. See Wilde, Oscar Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin) 1: 2, 31, 80, 87; 2: 254; 3: 73–74, 76, 297 as autobiography 3: 77 Calvinism 3: 91–96 compared to The Picture of Dorian Gray 3: 504–9 European Gothic tradition 3: 84–91 evil 1: 462 Gothic conventions in 1: 27–29 heroine in 2: 138–41, 144 influence on Fanshawe: A Tale 2: 379 labyrinth in 3: 197 mysterious portrait 1: 252; 3: 506–7 narrative structure 3: 77–78, 86–87, 98–99 “Preface” (sidebar) 3: 85 psychological horror in 1: 27–28 religion in 3: 79, 87–89 review (sidebar) 3: 98 sadism 3: 199 sequel to 3: 100–103 sublime 3: 91–96 “Melville and the Gothic Novel” (Arvin) 3: 111–19, 118 Melville, Herman 1: 143–44; 3: 107, 107–33 compared to Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 122–23 European Gothic tradition 3: 118–22 Gothic influence on 3: 111–16 imagery 3: 113–14 influence on King, Stephen 2: 494–99 monsters 3: 116 music imagery 3: 114 mysterious portrait convention 3: 114–15 principal works 3: 109–10 “Melville’s Use of the Gothic Tradition” (Shetty) 3: 118–22 Memnoch the Devil (Rice) 3: 264, 273–74 See also Vampire Chronicles

563

SUBJECT INDEX

“The Macabre and the Unexpected” (Barkham) 2: 282–83 MacAndrew, Elizabeth 3: 465 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 3: 447 Machen, Arthur 1: 169–71 Mack, Douglas S. 2: 425–28 Macpherson, James 1: 20, 97–98 MacPherson, Jay (sidebar) 3: 111 Mad Love (film) 1: 437 “Mad Monkton” (Collins) 1: 298–300 “Mademoiselle de Scuderi” (Hoffmann). See “Das Fräulein von Scuderi” Madness Bertram 1: 337–38 The Castle Spectre 1: 338 Gaslight 1: 339–40 as Gothic theme 1: 339–41; 2: 67–68 heroines 1: 339–41 Matthews, James Tilly 1: 338–39 Maupassant, Guy de 1: 314 Orra 1: 340–41 Poe, Edgar Allan 1: 314–15; 3: 202–5 Witchcraft 2: 72–73 “The Yellow Wallpaper” 1: 214–15 See also Hysteria Magic. See Sorcery The Magic Toyshop (Carter) 2: 180, 182, 183–85 Magistrale, Tony 3: 124–28 “Main Street” (Hawthorne) 2: 375 “The Making of a Genre” (Prawer) 1: 425–39 “The Making of the Count” (Leatherdale) 3: 405–15 Malin, Irving 2: 300–302 “The Man of the Crowd” (Poe) 3: 198 Mandel, Eli 2: 5–10 “Manfred” (Byron) 1: 24 Mangan, James Clarence 3: 82, 83 Mansfield Park (Austen) 2: 26–27, 32 Manuel (Maturin) 3: 74, 77, 84 The Marble Faun (Faulkner) 2: 294, 376 The Marble Faun (Hawthorne) 2: 363–65, 371–73, 382–85 Märchen (literary myth) 2: 394–95, 397 Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (Melville) 3: 108 “Markheim” (Stevenson) 3: 360, 368 Markley, A. A. 3: 211–18

Marmion (Scott) 3: 290, 306, 309, 312 The Marne (Wharton) 3: 458 Marriages and Infidelities (Oates) 3: 164, 180 Martindale, Andrew 1: 506–11 Martineau, Harriet 2: 218 “Mary Burnet” (Hogg) 2: 427–28 “Mary Shelley and Gothic Feminism: The Case of ‘The Mortal Immortal’” (Hoeveler) 3: 327–35 Marya (Oates) 3: 164 The Masque of Red Death (film) 1: 444 “The Masque of the Red Death” (Poe) 3: 188–89, 204, 224 The Master Flea (Hoffmann) 2: 397 The Master of Ballantrae (Stevenson) 3: 360 Mathilda (Shelley) 3: 330 “Matthew Gregory Lewis” (Montague) 3: 36–46 Matthews, James Tilly 1: 338–39 “Maturin and the ‘Calvinist Sublime’” (Haslam) 3: 91–97 Maturin, Charles Robert 1: 2, 80, 87, 337–38; 3: 73, 73–105 Catholicism 3: 87–88, 94–96 compared to Don Quixote 3: 82 compared to Wilde, Oscar 3: 504–9 death of 3: 81–82 German romantic influence 1: 407–8 heroines 2: 138–41, 144 influence of Romantic poets 3: 82 influence on Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 499 influence on French authors 3: 97–103 influence on Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 374 labyrinth convention 3: 197 on Melmoth the Wanderer (sidebar) 3: 85 portrayal of women 3: 80 principal works 3: 74 religion and 3: 79, 81 Scott, Sir Walter and 3: 82–83 use of Gothic conventions 1: 27–29 Maupassant, Guy de 1: 314 “Mayfair Witches” series (Rice) 3: 263–65 Maynard, Temple J. (sidebar) 1: 399 “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (Hawthorne) 2: 364 McCullers, Carson 1: 215; 2: 298, 300 McDowill, Margaret 3: 464

SUBJECT INDEX

MEMOIRS OF CARWIN THE BILOQUIST

Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (Brown) 2: 171–72, 176 Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (Brown) 2: 170 Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Es., R. A. (Collins) 2: 201, 205–10 “The Merry Men” (Stevenson) 3: 360 The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (Stevenson) 3: 360 “The Metamorphosis” (Oates) 3: 179 Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (Baillie) 2: 60 “Metzengerstein” (Poe) 3: 189, 199–200 Miall, David S. 3: 238–45 Michelis, Angelica 1: 376–85 “The Midnight Mass” (Collins) 2: 218 Mighall, Robert 1: 290–301 Milbank, Alison 1: 86–92 Miles, Robert 1: 411 The Milesian Chief (Maturin) 1: 27; 3: 73–74, 83, 84, 85 Milton, John 2: 170–76; 3: 339, 341 “The Mines of Falun” (Hoffmann). See “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” “The Minister’s Black Veil” (Hawthorne) 2: 364 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Scott) 3: 290 “The Mirror and the Cameo: Margaret Atwood’s Comic/Gothic Novel, Lady Oracle” (Vincent) 2: 17–24 A Mirror for Witches (Forbes) 1: 62–65 “Mirrored Worlds and the Gothic in Faulkner’s Sanctuary” (Heller, Terry) 2: 205–10 Mirroring (literary convention) 2: 312–18 Misanthropy 1: 278–80 Miscegenation 3: 218–19, 221–27 Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (Aiken, Barbauld) 1: 2, (sidebar) 7 Miscellaneous Plays (Baillie) 2: 50 Mishra, Vijay 1: 143–57 Misogyny 2: 221 “Miss Braddon” (James, H.) 2: 214–15 “Miss Jeromette and the Clergyman” (Collins) 2: 203–4 The Mist (King) 1: 286–87 Mitchell, S. Weir (sidebar) 1: 213, 213–14 Miyoshi, Masao 3: 365–70

564

Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale (Melville) 3: 107–9 Captain Ahab as Gothic villain 3: 126–27 castle in 3: 128–32 compared to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym 3: 206–8 compared to The Shining 2: 494–99 film adaptation 3: 129 landscape motif 3: 113 mysterious portrait in 3: 114 review (sidebar) 3: 125 “The Modern American Horror Movie—Text and Subtext” (King) 1: 398–401 Modern Novel Writing; or, The Elegant Enthusiast (Beckford) 2: 80 Modernism 1: 30–39, 109 Moers, Ellen 1: 210–11, 215, (sidebar) 3: 338 Mogen, David 1: 68 Mona Lisa 1: 32–33 Monasteries. See Religious buildings The Monastery (Scott) 3: 314 The Monk (Lewis) 1: 2, 48, 76–79, 81, 86–87; 3: 32–33, 66 as advocate of virtue 3: 48–51 compared to Justine 3: 61–69 compared to paintings of Bosch, Hieronymous 3: 54–60 compared to Villette 2: 122–27 excess in 3: 355 heroine in 2: 138–39; 3: 64–67 indecency of 3: 46–48 influence of Faust: Ein Fragment 2: 349–53 influence on Die Elixiere des Teufels 3: 40–41 Lord Byron’s lampoon of 3: 51–52 madness as theme 3: 203 as original Gothic literature 2: 116 “The Preface” 3: 34 publishing history 3: 39–40 as sensational fiction 3: 31 sexuality 1: 463 Monk, Samuel H. 1: 148, 152 “The Monkey” (Dinesen) 2: 259–61, 269 doubles in 2: 272–73 Gothic conventions 2: 263–68 heroine in 2: 274–75 homosexuality 2: 273–76 monsters 2: 267 reader response 2: 276–77 “The Monk’s Gothic Bosh and Bosch’s Gothic Monks” (Hennelly) 3: 51–61

“’The Monster Never Dies’: An Analysis of the Gothic Double in Stephen King’s Oeuvre” (Strengell) 2: 485–93 Monsters ambivalence toward 1: 417 as cultural symbols 1: 198–99 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 1: 25–26, 83–85, 255; 3: 335–36, 339–42, 343, 348–55 horror films 1: 416–17, 427– 30, 442 Karloff, Boris 1: 434–35 Melville, Herman 3: 116 “The Monkey” 2: 267 Pet Semetary 2: 486 sexuality of 2: 188 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3: 370–72 in “Taming a Tartar” 1: 199– 207 techno-gothic grotesques 2: 68–72 See also Vampires; Werewolves “Monte Verità” (du Maurier) 2: 284 The Monthly Review (periodical) 2: 327–30; 3: 51, 444–45 The Moonstone (Collins) 2: 201, (sidebar) 207 “‘More Demon than Man’: Melville’s Ahab as Gothic Villain” (Magistrale) 3: 124–28 Moretti, Franco 2: 234 Morrison, Toni 1: 108; 3: 135, 135–61 on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 3: 158 American Africanism 1: 118–27 castle convention 3: 136 Echo mythology 3: 138–41 ghosts 3: 150–60 inspiration for Beloved 3: 137–38 oral tradition 3: 147 portrayal of women 3: 139–41, 147–48 principal works 3: 136 Pulitzer Prize 3: 135 supernatural 3: 138–42, 148–49 Morse, Heyward 2: 468 “The Mortal Immortal: A Tale” (Shelley) 3: 330–33 Mosses from an Old Manse (Hawthorne) 2: 364–65, 379, 381 Mothers Freud, Sigmund on 1: 377–79 Klein, Melanie on 1: 379–81 power of 3: 480–84

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

NIXON, RICHARD

Lewis, Matthew Gregory on 3: 39 as original Gothic literature 2: 116 Psyche mythology 3: 252–56 sublime theme in 3: 313 suspense narrative of 3: 249–52 women’s education 3: 239–43 Mysteries of Winterthurn (Oates) 3: 163–65, 175–78 The Mysterious Mother (Walpole) 3: 431, (sidebar) 434 The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Dickens) 2: 230 Mysticism 1: 254–55 Mythology Carter, Angela 2: 188–89 Dracula 1: 166–69 Echo 3: 138–41 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 338–42 horror films 1: 445–47 märchen 2: 394–95 motherhood (sidebar) 3: 338 Prometheus 3: 338–42 Psyche 3: 252–56 sexuality 2: 188–89 The Sphinx 3: 498 vampire 3: 266–76 Wharton, Edith 3: 465, (sidebar) 467 Mythology of the Secret Societies (Roberts) 1: 79

N Nachträglichkeit (deferred action) 2: 310 Nachtstüke (Hoffmann) 2: 397 “Naked” (Oates) 3: 182 “Napoleon and the Spectre” (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 105–7 “Narrative and Psychology in Gothic Fiction” (Punter) 1: 317–26 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Poe) 1: 118, 251; 3: 204, 207 biographical analysis of 3: 205–11 compared to Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale 3: 206–8 history of critical reception 3: 189–90 influence of Godwin, William 3: 211–17 as Western novel 3: 205–6 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass) 1: 183–85 Nash, Jesse W. 2: 499–504 National Book Award 3: 163–64

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

Nationalism drama 1: 412 European Gothic tradition 1: 93–102, 158–71; 2: 240 Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 83 Native Son (Wright) 1: 180 Naturalism 1: 129–30, 482–83 Naylor, Gloria 3: 142 Necromancy 2: 326–27, (sidebar) 328 Nemesis (Oates) 3: 165, 178 Neoclassicism 1: 50–55 “Never Bet the Devil your Head” (Poe) 3: 198 New American Gothic (Malin) 2: 301–2 “New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History” (Lerner) 3: 17 “New Life for an Old Tradition: Anne Rice and Vampire Literature” (Wood, M.) 3: 266–76 The New Magdalen (Collins, Wilkie) 1: 88 The New Monthly Magazine, 2: 428–29 “New Novels: The Moonstone: A Romance” (Jewsbury) (sidebar) 2: 207 “New Publications, with Critical Remarks: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” (The New Monthly Magazine) 2: 428–29 “A New Year’s Eve Adventure” (Hoffmann). See “Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht” Newgate novels (sidebar) 1: 94 Newton, Judith 3: 17, 21 Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens) 2: 230 Nicholson, Jack 2: 498 Nicholson, William 1: 336 Nicolai, Friedrich 1: 336–37 Nicole, Claudette 2: 115, 120 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1: 147; 3: 470 Night of the Living Dead (film) 1: 442–43 Night Side: Eighteen Tales (Oates) 3: 163–65, 170, 180–84 Night Thoughts (Young) 1: 53 Nightmare (Gothic element) “The Company of Wolves” 2: 187 Gorey, Edward (sidebar) 1: 510 horror films 1: 415–16 Nightmare (painting) 1: 519 Nights at the Circus (Carter) 2: 180, 182, 185–86, 197–99 “Night-Side” (Oates) 3: 181 The Night-Side of Nature (Crowe) 3: 24 Nightwood (Barnes) 2: 188 Nixon, Richard 1: 369

565

SUBJECT INDEX

relationship to children 1: 377–81 Wharton, Edith and 3: 476–77, 483–84 The Mountain Bard: Consisting of Ballads and Songs, Founded on Facts and Legendary Tales (Hogg) 2: 422 Movie-Made America (Sklar) 1: 438 “The Moving Finger” (Wharton) 3: 458 “Mr Adamson of Laverhope” (Hogg) 2: 426–27 “Mr. Jones” (Wharton) 3: 459 “Mrs. Ann Radcliffe: The Craft of Terror” (Varma) (sidebar) 3: 253 “MS. Found in a Bottle” (Poe) 3: 188, 202 Murder in the Dark (Atwood) 2: 10, 11, 17 Murders in the Rue Morgue (film) 1: 418–19 Murders in the Rue Morgue (Poe) 1: 250–51 Murdoch, Iris 3: 510–11 Murnau, F. W. (sidebar) 1: 451 Murphy, Dennis Jasper. See Maturin, Charles Robert Murray, Margaret P. 3: 462–66 Music 1: 391, 461–73 blues 1: 464 Bromley Contingent 1: 470–71 Goth 1: 470–73 heavy metal 1: 461–67 imagery 3: 114 punk 1: 470–73 rock 1: 461–62, 469–73 See also specific names of musical groups, songs and albums My Heart Laid Bare (Oates) 3: 165 “My Life with R. H. Macy” (Jackson) 1: 265 Myers, F. W. H 1: 330–31 Mysteries 2: 249; 3: 306–8 The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe) 1: 2, 80–81, 92–93; 2: 25, 59; 3: 231–33, 255 castle convention in 1: 226 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor on 3: 245–46 compared to Billy Budd 3: 111–12 compared to Twin Peaks 1: 455 Enfield, William on 3: 246–49 “The Haunted Chamber” 3: 233–37 heroine in 1: 221–24; 2: 138, 144; 3: 254–59 horror 1: 225–26 influence on Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 501 influence on Northanger Abbey 2: 34–40

SUBJECT INDEX

“’NO MORE THAN GHOSTS MAKE’”

“’No More Than Ghosts Make’: The Hauntology and Gothic Minimalism of Beckett’s Late Work” (Fraser) 1: 38–39 No Name (Collins, Wilkie) 1: 88 The Nocturnal Minstrel (Sleath) 1: 98 Northanger Abbey (Austen) 1: 74–76, 80–81; 2: 25–31, 236 architecture 2: 41–45 compared to The Blind Assassin 2: 3 gender relations 1: 221–22 Gothic extravagance in (sidebar) 2: 37 influence of The Mysteries of Udolpho 2: 34–40 revision of 2: 31–35 sensibility in 2: 36–40 Northanger Novelists 1: 7 Nosferatu (film) 1: 450, (sidebar) 451 Nostalgia 1: 69 The Notebooks of Henry James (James) 2: 473 Nothing Sacred (Carter) 2: 180 “Novel Notes: Dracula” (The Bookman), (sidebar) 3: 405 Novel of manners, Great Expectations, 2: 247–48 ““The Novel of Suspense’: Mrs. Radcliffe” (Birkhead) (sidebar) 3: 246 Novels. See Genres “Novels of the Season” (Whipple) 2: 114–15, 135–36 “The Nuns of Magwan” (Collins) 2: 218, 219–20 Nussbaum, Martha C. 3: 510–11 “Nussknacker und Mausekönig” (Hoffmann) 2: 396–97 “Nutcracker and the King of Mice” (Hoffmann). See “Nussknacker und Mausekönig” “Nymph of the Fountain” (Beckford) (sidebar) 2: 84

O O. Henry Award 3: 164 Oakes, David A. 1: 283–90 Oates, Joyce Carol 1: 216–17; 3: 163, 163–86 American Gothic tradition 3: 168–84 compared to Alcott, Louisa May 3: 175 doppelgänger 3: 183–84 fantastic 3: 168–77 on Gothic 3: 178–80 heroines 3: 183 on horror (sidebar) 3: 179

566

Kafka, Franz and 3: 170 National Book Award 3: 163–64 O. Henry Award 3: 164 otherness as theme 3: 170, 183 principal works 3: 165–66 Southern Gothic 3: 178 on The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3: 370–72 Observations on Maniacal Disorders (Pargeter) 1: 339 O’Connor, Flannery (sidebar) 1: 68, 69, 215; 2: 304 O’Connor, William Van 3: 118 “October 4, 1957, and an Invitation to Dance” (King) 2: 483–85 Ode on Melancholy (Keats) 1: 19 Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands (Collins, William) 1: 18 “Ode to Fear” (Collins, William) 1: 53–54 Oedipal complex 1: 377–79, 380, 384 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Rich) 1: 216 O’Keeffe, John 1: 406–7 “Olalla” (Stevenson) 3: 368 The Old Curiosity Shop (Dickens) 2: 229–30, 252 The Old English Baron (Reeve) (sidebar) 1: 112, 113–15, 115, 2: 252 Old Mortality (Scott) doppelgänger 3: 314 fear 3: 309–10 violence 3: 312 “An Old Woman’s Tale” (Hawthorne) 2: 364 Oldstyle, Jonathan. See Irving, Washington Oliphant, Margaret 2: 211–14 Oliver Twist (Dickens) 2: 230, 239–40, 248 O’Malley, Patrick 1: 35 The Omen (film) 1: 422 Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (Melville) 3: 108, 114, 119 “On Fable and Romance” (Beattie) 1: 50 “On Frankenstein” (Shelley, P.) 3: 335–36 “On Ghosts” (Shelley) 3: 321–24 “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror, with Sir Bertrand, A Fragment” (Aiken, Barbauld) 1: 4–7, (sidebar) 7, 46 “On the Relative Simplicity of Gothic Manners to Our Own” (Walpole) 3: 446

“On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition” (Scott) (sidebar) 2: 392, (sidebar) 3: 349 “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (Radcliffe) 3: 237–38 “On the Uncanny” (Freud) 1: 70–71, 87 On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (King) 2: 482 “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts” (Jackson) 1: 279 Oral tradition Morrison, Toni 3: 147 supernatural as theme 1: 17–18 Oriental tales 1: 260–61; 2: 88–89, 96 Orlok, Count (character) 1: 450 Ormond (Brown) 2: 153–54, 159–61 Orra (Baillie, Joanna) 1: 340–41; 2: 50, 56, 58, 59–60 Osceola. See Dinesen, Isak Osmyn the Renegade (Maturin) 3: 76 Ossian (Macpherson) 1: 20, 45–46 The Other House (James) 2: 472 “Other Themes” (Railo) 1: 249–60 Otherness (theme) 1: 67–74 in American Gothic paintings 1: 521–25 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 170, 176, 183 “The Others” (Oates) 3: 179–80 “Our Library Table” (Chorley) (sidebar) 2: 137 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens) 2: 229–30, 237 “Our Vampire, Our Leader: Twentieth-Century Undeaths” (Auerbach) 1: 361–76 Out of Africa (Dinesen) 2: 257–58 The Outcry (James) 2: 462 “The Oval Portrait” (Poe) 1: 252–53; 3: 189, 192–95, 199 “Owen Wingrave” (James) 2: 463 “Oxford’s Ghosts: Jude the Obscure and the End of the Gothic” (O’Malley) 1: 35

P Pain 1: 110–13 “The Painter’s Adventure” (Irving) 2: 452 Painting 1: 475–76, 518–25; 3: 53–60, 447 See also specific names of paintings Pandora (character) 3: 271 Paradise Lost (Milton) 2: 170–76; 3: 339, 341

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

POETRY

author’s defense of 3: 492–93 compared to Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 504–9 degeneration 1: 160–62 doubles in 1: 34 Hedonism 3: 512–15 morality 3: 510–16 mysterious portrait convention 1: 253; 3: 488, 494–95, 506–7 review 3: 502–4 supernatural 3: 511–15 themes 1: 162 Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Melville) 1: 143–44; 3: 108–9 music imagery 3: 114 mysterious portrait conventiion 3: 114–15 symbolism in 3: 115 tower imagery 3: 113 Pierson, William 1: 497 The Pilgrims of the Sun (Hogg) 2: 422–23, 427 “Pillar of Salt” (Jackson) 1: 268 The Pirate (Scott) 3: 292, 297, 315 architecture motif 3: 315 buccaneers 3: 313 fear 3: 310 mystery in 3: 300–304, 307 superstition 3: 314 Pirie, David 1: 445 “The Pit and the Pendulum” (Poe) 3: 189, 198–99 Planche, J. R. 1: 348–49 Plath, Sylvia 1: 215–16 Playing in the Dark (Morrison) 1: 108 Plays on the Passions (Baillie). See A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy “A Plea for Sunday Reform” (Collins) 2: 218 “The Pleasure Principle” (Freud) 1: 90 “Poe and Hoffmann” (Cobb) (sidebar) 2: 412 “Poe and the Gothic” (Griffith) 3: 202–5 “Poe and the Gothic Tradition” (Lévy) 3: 193–202 Poe, Edgar Allan 1: 2, 71–72; 2: 311; 3: 187, 187–230 American Africanism and 1: 118 animated tapestry convention 3: 199–200 Blythe, David Gilmour and 1: 524 castle convention 3: 194–97 Cole, Thomas and 1: 524 compared to Melville, Herman 3: 122–23

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

compared to Stevenson, Robert Louis 3: 365 on Cooper, James Fenimore 3: 206 cultural identity in 1: 126–27 decadent aristocrat convention 3: 189 detective fiction 1: 250–51 devil 3: 198 on Godwin, William (sidebar) 2: 328 horror films 1: 429, 444–45 influence of European Gothic tradition 3: 188, 194–95, 202, 211–13 influence of Hogg, James 3: 213 influence of Walpole, Horace 2: 310–11 influence on Gothicism 1: 31 labyrinth convention 3: 197–98 Lawrence, D. H. on (sidebar) 3: 203 Lovecraft, H. P. on (sidebar) 3: 219 madness as theme 1: 314–15; 3: 202–5 on Mosses from an Old Manse 2: 379 mysterious portrait convention 3: 199 mysticism 1: 254–55 Otherness of 1: 523–24 principal works 3: 190 prophecy convention 3: 200 sadism 3: 198–99 transcendence 2: 494–96 on Twice Told Tales (sidebar) 2: 369 Wandering Jew (Gothic convention) 3: 198 Poems (Wilde) 3: 487 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (Bronte¨, C. and Bronte¨, E.) 2: 103, 132 Poems. by Edgar Allan Poe (Poe) 3: 187 Poems: Wherein It Is Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners (Baillie) 2: 49–50, 56 The Poetic Mirror; or, The Living Bards of Britain (Hogg) 2: 422 “Poetics of the Uncanny: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Sandmann’” (Frisch) 2: 408–11 Poetry ballads 1: 258 Graveyard school 1: 52–55 Hogg, James 2: 421–23, 427 Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 187–88, 189 Romanticism and 3: 369

567

SUBJECT INDEX

“The Parasite” (Doyle) 1: 365 Pargeter, William 1: 339 Parisi, Peter 3: 284 Parker, John Henry 1: 477–80 “Parodied to Death: The Postmodern Gothic of American Psycho” (Helyer) 1: 36–37 Parody 2: 448–49, 458–59 Parsons, Mrs. Eliza 1: 2, 7–9 “Part II: Sections I and II, and Part IV: Sections V, VI, VIII, and IX” (Burke) 1: 110–13 Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Hawthorne) 2: 382 The Passion of New Eve (Carter) 2: 180, 190–94 A Passionate Pilgrim (James) 2: 477 Pater, Walter 1: 32–33 “The Pathology of History” (Gross) 1: 57–66 Patriarchy Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome 2: 206–10 The Magic Toyshop 2: 185 Wharton, Edith 3: 476–80 Patterns (literary convention) 2: 301–3, 368–77 Pattison, Robert 1: 463, 464–65 Paulson, Ronald 1: 74–86 “The Pavilion on the Links” (Stevenson) 3: 360 Peabody, Sophia 2: 364 Peck, Gregory 3: 129 Peeping Tom (film) 1: 447–48 Penny dreadful 1: 2 Percy, Thomas 1: 54 Peregrine Pickle (Smollet) 1: 50 The Perfectionist (Oates) 3: 164 Peri Hypsous (Longinus) 1: 148–49 Perkins, Anthony 1: 437 Persona (film) 1: 429 Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (Irving, H.) 3: 400–401 Persuasion (Austen) 2: 25–27, 32, 42 Perversity, sexual 2: 186, 288 Pet Sematary (King) 2: 482, 486, 499–504 Petersen, Karen 2: 261 Peveril of the Peak (Scott) 3: 292, 297, 311, 315 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Burke) 1: 107, 110–13 Physiognomy 1: 107 The Piazza Tales (Melville) 3: 108, 110–11 The Pickwick Papers (Dickens) 2: 229–34, 235, 237 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde) 1: 31, 37–38; 3: 487–89, (sidebar) 503 aestheticism 3: 494–95

SUBJECT INDEX

THE POISONED KISS AND OTHER STORIES FROM THE PORTUGUESE

Scott, Sir Walter 3: 289–90, 293–94 supernatural themes 1: 18–20 Walpole, Horace 3: 446 Wilde, Oscar 3: 487, 488, 497– 99, 499 See also specific titles and authors The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (Oates) 3: 164, 170, 180 Polanski, Roman 1: 449 Polidori, John 1: 243–49, 262, 344–47, 345, (sidebar) 362 Political ideology. See Sociopolitical ideology “The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s” (Clery) 1: 220–28 “Pomegranate See d” (Wharton) 3: 457, 459, 461, 470, 471 female archetypes 3: 464–66 female mythology (sidebar) 3: 467 as ghost story 3: 463–65 Pornography American Psycho 1: 37 horror and 2: 187–88; 3: 284 The Magic Toyshop 2: 184–85 psychological horror and 2: 187–88 The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History 2: 187–88 See also Sexuality The Portable Faulkner (Faulkner) 2: 294 Porte, Joel 3: 277 Portrait, mysterious (Gothic convention) The Castle of Otranto 1: 252; 2: 252, 254; 3: 25, 199 “Family Portraits” 1: 292 The House of Seven Gables 2: 370 Little Dorrit 2: 254 Melmoth the Wanderer 1: 252; 3: 199, 506–7 Melville, Herman 3: 114–15 The Oval Portrait 1: 252–53 The Picture of Dorian Gray 1: 253; 3: 488, 494–95, 506–7 Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 199 Rossetti, Christina 1: 252–53 terror-romanticism and 1: 252–53 The Portrait of a Lady (James) 2: 462, 471–72 The Possessed (Dostoevski) 1: 315 “The Possibility of Evil” (Jackson) 1: 275–76 The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (Dickens). See The Pickwick Papers Postman, Neil 1: 455

568

“Postmodern Gothic: Desire and Reality in Angela Carter’s Writing” (Neumeier) 2: 194–200 “Postmodern Gothic: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary” (Nash) 2: 499–504 Postmodernism Carter, Angela 2: 188 Jameson, Fredric on 1: 466–67 Pet Sematary 2: 500–504 sublime 1: 147–48 Poteet, Lewis J. 3: 504–9 Powell, Michael 1: 447–48 “The Power of Allusion, the Uses of Gothic: Experiments in Form and Genre” (Johnson, G.) 3: 178–85 Power Politics (Atwood) 2: 1, 9 Prawer, S. S. 1: 425–39; 2: 401–8 “The Preceptor as Fiend: Radcliffe’s Psychology of the Gothic” (Miall) 3: 238–45 “Preface” (Godwin) (sidebar) 2: 330 “Preface” (Lewis) 3: 34 “Preface” (Maturin) (sidebar) 3: 85 “Preface” (Wharton) 3: 460–62, 472, 474 “Preface to Wuthering Heights” (Bronte¨, C.) (sidebar) 2: 147 The Prelude (Wordsworth) 1: 21 Prest, Thomas Preckett 1: 349 Price, Vincent 1: 444–45 Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 2: 26–27 The Prince of Angola (Ferriar) 1: 207 The Prisoner of Zenda (Hawkins) 1: 130 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Hogg) 1: 80; 2: 421–23, 427 bad grammar in 2: 428–29 Calvinism 2: 429–31 compared to Die Elixiere des Teufels 2: 431 criticism of 2: 432 Devil as divine 2: 434–36 dreams 2: 431–32 German Romanticism and 2: 432 as greatest Scottish book 2: 432–38 narrative structure 3: 86 publication history 2: 429 Saintsbury, George on (sidebar) 2: 429 Scottish influence in 1: 28–29; 2: 436–37 supernatural 2: 423, 431–32 The Professor (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 103–4, 107, 122 The Progress of Romance (Reeve) 1: 51–52

“Prologue and Act 1, Scene 1” (Siddons) 1: 398 Prophecy (Gothic convention) 3: 200 “The Prophetic Pictures” (Hawthorne) 2: 364, 370 “Providence and the Guitar” (Stevenson) 3: 361 Psycho (film) 1: 437, 447–48 Psychoanalysis 1: 70–71, (sidebar) 2: 308 Ambiguous Gothic 2: 412–17 beating fantasy 3: 329, 330 of Beloved 3: 150–60 The Castle of Otranto 1: 322 dreams 1: 326–29 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 1: 322–24 Klein, Melanie 1: 317–25, 379–81 LaCapra, Dominick 3: 152–55, 158 object-relations psychology 1: 319, 321 “A Rose for Emily” 2: 310–11 symbolism 1: 321–22 See also Freud, Sigmund Psychological horror American Gothic tradition 2: 299 Carter, Angela 2: 183–89 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 2: 411–17 Jung, Carl G. 3: 463 The Marble Faun 2: 383–84 Melmoth the Wanderer 1: 27–29 Mosses from an Old Manse 2: 365 pornography and 2: 187–88 psychological thrillers 1: 438 “Young Goodman Brown” 2: 365 See also Horror Psychology abnormal 1: 332–41 Gil Blas 1: 334 interpretation of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson) 3: 373–81 in Night Side: Eighteen Tales 3: 180–84 supernatural and 1: 232 Pugin, A. W. 1: 487 Pulitzer Prize Morrison, Toni 3: 135 Wharton, Edith 3: 458, 459 Punch (periodical) 2: 218, 226 Punk music 1: 470–73 Punter, David 1: 158–71, 317–26, 439–52; 3: 278 The Purcell Papers (Le Fanu) 3: 1–2, 6–7, 9–10, 12 Purcell, Reverend Francis. See Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan Purinton, Marjean D. 2: 67–76

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

A REVIEW OF DRACULA, BY BRAM STOKER

“Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis” (Spencer) 1: 127–43 “Puss-in-Boots” (Carter) 2: 182 Putzel, Max (sidebar) 2: 304

Q

R “Race and the Gothic Monster: The Xenophobic Impulse of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Taming a Tartar’” (Derrickson) 1: 197–207 “Race, Labor, and the Gothic Western: Dispelling Frontier Myths in Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind” (Kollin) 1: 36 Race relations 1: 108 Alcott, Louisa May 1: 200 in early American literature 1: 118–27 Gobineau, Arthur de 3: 222 interracial desire 1: 207–10 miscegenation 3: 218–28 in The Shadow Knows 1: 218 in “Taming a Tartar” 1: 200– 203, 205–6 in Zofloya 1: 208–10 Radcliffe, Ann 1: 20, 80–81; 3: 231–62 animism 3: 243–44 Austen, Jane and 2: 36–40 Birkhead, Edith on (sidebar) 3: 246 castle in 2: 252 compared to Irving, Washington 2: 453–55 compared to Scott, Sir Walter 3: 310 compared to Walpole, Horace 2: 36 fear 2: 336 female Gothic 3: 252–59 feminist literary theory and 1: 86 founder of Gothic genre 1: 2 Gothic veil 1: 455

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

Rebecca (du Maurier) 2: 118–19, 279–80 “Chapter 1” 2: 281–82 film adaptation 1: 437 heroine as vampire 2: 286–90 melodrama (sidebar) 2: 285 symbolism 2: 284–91 vamp vs. femme fatale 2: 285–86 Rebecca (film) 1: 437 “Recent Novels” (The Spectator), 3: 393–94 “Recent Novels” (The Times, London) 3: 394–95 “Recent Novels: Villette” (Greg) 2: 120–21 “Recent Popular Novels: The Woman in White” (Dublin University Magazine) 2: 211 The Recess; Or, A Tale of Other Times (Lee) 1: 115–18, (sidebar) 119, 126 Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaca Batalha (Beckford) 2: 80 “The Reconstruction of the Gothic Feminine Ideal in Emily Bronte¨’s Wuthering Heights” (Conger) 2: 136–46 “Recovering Nightmares: Nineteenth-Century Gothic” (Thomas, R.) 1: 326–32 Redburn: His First Voyage (Melville) 3: 107, 108, 112, 114, 119 Redgauntlet (Scott) 3: 299, 307, 311 Reeve, Clara 1: 51–52, 80, (sidebar) 112, 113, 113–15; 2: 252 “Reflections of Excess: Frankenstein, the French Revolution, and Monstrosity” (Botting) 3: 348–56 “Reflections on the Grotesque” (Oates) (sidebar) 3: 179 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke) 1: 97; 3: 350–51 The Reivers (Faulkner) 2: 294 “The Relationship of Gothic Art to Gothic Literature” (Bayer-Berenbaum) 1: 480–86 Religious buildings 1: 510–13 “The Renaissance, and Jacobean Gothic” (Parker) 1: 477–80 “The Renegade” (Jackson) 1: 270–71, 277 Repetition (theatrical device) 1: 407 Repulsion (film) 1: 449 The Return of the Vanishing American (Fiedler) 2: 304–5 Reversals (literary device) 1: 23, 26 A review of Dracula, by Bram Stoker (The Athenaeum), 3: 393

569

SUBJECT INDEX

“Queen of May” (Jackson) 1: 266 The Queen of the Damned (Rice) 3: 263–64 See also Vampire Chronicles The Queen’s Wake, 2: 422 Quentin Durward (Scott) 3: 311, 313 Quest (Gothic convention) 2: 473–74, (sidebar) 492

heroines 1: 221; 2: 138, 144; 3: 64 influence on Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 501 influence on Gothic fiction 3: 40 influence on Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 376 influence on Melville, Herman 3: 111–16 influence on Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 194–95, 202 influences on 3: 232 landscape as motif 1: 403, 404; 3: 113 legacy of (sidebar) 3: 253 Lewis, Matthew Gregory on 3: 39 library in 1: 92–93 mysterious portrait 1: 252 obsoleteness of 2: 452 patterns in 2: 301 principal works 3: 233 Scott, Sir Walter on (sidebar) 3: 238 sublime as theme 1: 87; 3: 313 supernatural 1: 332–33 Wollstonecraft, Mary and 3: 239 on women’s education 3: 238–44 Radical Innocence (Hassan) 2: 301, 302 Railo, Eino 1: 249–60, 284 Raising Demons (Jackson) 1: 267–68 The Rambler (Johnson) 1: 50–51 Rambles Beyond Railways (Collins) 2: 218, 219 Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (Shelley) 3: 320 Ranger, Paul 1: 401–11 Rank, Otto 1: 310–16 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (Hawthorne) 2: 365, 375 “Rat Krespel” (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 397 Rathbone, Basil 3: 353 Die Räuber (Schiller) (sidebar) 1: 275 “The Raven” (Poe) 3: 189 “Ravenna” (Wilde) 3: 497 Raven’s Wing (Oates) 3: 179 Rayner (Baillie) 2: 58 “The Readerhood of Man” (Brooks-Rose) 2: 410 “Reading Rooms: M. R. James and the Library of Modernism” (Fielding) 1: 38 “The Real Right Thing” (James) 2: 473 The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Diamond) 3: 515–16

SUBJECT INDEX

A REVIEW OF MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHITE WHALE

A review of Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale (The Critic), (sidebar) 3: 125 A review of Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe (Coleridge) 3: 245–46 Review of The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe (Enfield) 3: 246–49 “Review of New Books: Twice Told Tales” (Graham’s Magazine), (sidebar) 2: 369 A review of The Castle of Otranto: A Story (Langhorn) 3: 435 A review of The Castle of Otranto: A Story (Lubbock) 3: 436 A review of The Castle of Otranto: A Story(The Critical Review), 3: 434–35 “A review of The Monk” (Coleridge) 3: 46–48 A review of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde(The Times), 3: 364–65 Reynolds, David S. 1: 520 Rhode, Eric 1: 437 Rice, Anne 3: 263, 263–87 American Gothic tradition 3: 279–85 author’s fears (sidebar) 3: 278 Catholicism 3: 279 compared to Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3: 279 Harlequin formula and 3: 281–83 principal works 3: 265–66 rewriting vampire mythology 3: 266–76 self-consciousness of (sidebar) 3: 267 vampires of 1: 369–71 Rich, Adrienne 1: 216 Richardson, Samuel 3: 212–13 Richter, David H. 3: 278–79 Rieger, James 1: 346 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge) 1: 19, 251 Der Ring des Polykrates (Schiller) 1: 306–7 The Ring of Polykrates (Schiller). See Der Ring des Polykrates Ringe, Donald A. (sidebar) 2: 450 “Rip Van Winkle” (Irving) 2: 441–43, 449–50, 457 Riquelme, John Paul 1: 30–40 The Rise of Life on Earth (Oates) 3: 165 Rizzo, Betty 2: 337–38 “The Roads Round Pisa” (Dinesen) 2: 269 Rob Roy (Scott) 3: 292, 297, 299–300, 312 The Robber Bride (Atwood) 2: 2, 10, 13, 213–17

570

“The Robber Bridegroom” (Atwood) 2: 11 “Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (Brennan) 3: 372–82 Roberts, Bette 3: 279 Roberts, J. M. 1: 79 Robertson, Fiona 3: 297–305 Rock (music) 1: 469–70 Rock music 1: 469–73 The Rocky Mountains; or, Scenes, Incidents, and Adventures in the Far West (Irving) 2: 442 Roderick Hudson (James) 2: 462 Roettgen Pieta (carving) 1: 484 “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (Hawthorne) 2: 364 Rogers, Samuel 2: 85 Rokeby (Scott) 3: 290, 306 Rolleston, T. W. 3: 5–6 “The Romance Feeling” (Summers) 1: 40–48 “’Romance of a Darksome Type’: Versions of the Fantastic in the Novels of Joyce Carol Oates” (Egan) 3: 168–78 “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (James) 2: 462, 463, 465–66, 471 The Romance of the Forest (Radcliffe) 1: 2; 2: 252; 3: 232, 239–40, 246 “The Romance of the Impossible” (Hawthorne) (sidebar) 3: 503 Romances Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 368– 77, 380–81 Jane Eyre as prototype 2: 115–20 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 3: 6–15 vs. novels 1: 49–52 as reflection of female oppression 1: 220–26 revival of 1: 129–30 The Robber Bride 2: 213–17 Scott, Sir Walter 1: 501–2 sea stories 1: 251–52 terror-romance 1: 249–58 urban Gothic and 1: 130–33 The Woman in White 2: 216 “Romancing the Shadow” (Morrison) 1: 118–27, 520–21 “Romantic Supernaturalism: The Cast Study as Gothic Tale” (Burwick) 1: 332–42 “Romantic Transformations” (Botting) 1: 21–30 Romanticism African American experience 1: 119–27 cabbalism and 1: 254–55 drama 1: 258, 390 European Gothic tradition 1: 249–58; 2: 271–72

German 1: 407–9; 2: 271, 379, 411–12, 432 Gothic heroes in 1: 24 Gothic movement and 1: 2, 21–29, 42–45; 2: 271, 494; 3: 124, 308–9 Gothic revival and 1: 486–89 grotesques 2: 300 Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 82 opposition within movement 1: 255–56 poetry 3: 369 “Romanticism and the Gothic Revival” (Addison) 1: 486–90 Romiero (Baillie) 2: 58 Römishe Elegien (Goethe) 2: 341 Ronald, Ann 2: 242–45 The Rose and the Key (Le Fanu) 1: 89 “A Rose for Emily” (Faulkner) 2: 293–95, 296–97, 306–12 Rose, Jacqueline 1: 380 Ross, Marlon 1: 101 Rossetti, Christina (sidebar) 1: 143, 252–53 Ruskin, John 2: 300 Russian authors 1: 2 Ryan, Steven T. 3: 122–24 Rymer, James Malcolm 1: 349 Rzepka, Charles 1: 36

S “The Sacrifice” (Oates) 3: 180–81, 182, 184 Sade, Marquis de 3: 61–69, 249 The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (Carter) 2: 180, 187–88, 199 Sadism 3: 198–99 Sage, Victor 3: 6–16 Saint-Germain, Count (character) 1: 367–68 Saintsbury, George (sidebar) 2: 429 ’Salem’s Lot (King) 2: 482, 499 family 2: 502 influence of Watergate scandal 1: 371 vampires 1: 371–73; 3: 270 Salmagundi; or, The Whim-whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others (Irving) 2: 441–42 Salomé (Wilde) 3: 487, 489, 495–97 “Salvator Rosa” (Hoffmann). See “Signor Formica” Sampson, George 1: 102 Sanctuary (Faulkner) 2: 293–94, 312–18 Sanders, Scott P. 1: 68

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

SEXUALITY

letter from Edgeworth, Maria (sidebar) 3: 306 on Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3: 36 literary legacy and 1: 92–93, 96–97, 102 Maturin, Charles Robert and, 3: 82–83 mystery and 3: 298–304, 306–8 on Nicolai, Friedrich 1: 336–37 popularity in America 1: 501 principal works 3: 292–93 on Radcliffe, Ann (sidebar) 3: 238 romances 1: 501–2 Romantic attitude toward architecture 1: 487 Southern Gothic 2: 303 supernatural 3: 313–16, (sidebar) 349 translation of Goethe (sidebar) 2: 350 Wavery Novels 3: 289–92, 297–304, 305–16 Scottish writers 1: 2 Sculpture 1: 475–76, 514–17 Sea stories 1: 251–52; 3: 205–11 A Season of Dreams (Appel) 2: 300–301 “Secrecy, Silence, and Anxiety: Gothic Narratology and the Waverly Novels” (Robertson) 3: 297–305 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 1: 72; 2: 10 “A Select Party” (Hawthorne) 2: 373–74 Self-identity of Beckford, William 2: 95–101 doubles as supernatural 1: 310–16 of du Maurier, Daphne 2: 289–90 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 183 “Der Sandmann” 2: 412–17 Senf, Carol A. 1: 342–61; 3: 16–21 Sensation fiction 1: 87–91 German 2: 431 Irving, Washington 2: 447 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 1: 354; 3: 5–6 The Woman in White 2: 211– 15, 218–19, 223–26 “Sensation Novels” (Oliphant) 2: 211–14 Sense and Sensibility (Austen) 2: 25–27, 32, 33 The Sense of the Past (James) 2: 472 Sensibility 2: 36–40 The Separation (Baillie) 2: 58 Septimius Felton (Hawthorne) 2: 376

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

The Serapion Brethren (Hoffmann). See Die Serapionsbrüder Die Serapionsbrüder (Hoffmann) 2: 392–93, 397–401, 402–3, 405 Serial killers, King, Stephen 2: 490–93 A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy (Baillie) 2: 50–51, 51–60 authorship of 2: 54–55 modern critical reception 2: 65–67 review (sidebar) 2: 68 social progress in 2: 61–65 “Seven Gothic Tales” (Brantly) 2: 269–78 Seven Gothic Tales (Dinesen) 2: 257–61, 269–71, (sidebar) 270 “Seven Gothic Tales: The Divine Swank of Isak Dinesen” (Updike) (sidebar) 2: 270 Several Perceptions (Carter) 2: 180 Sex Pistols (musical group) 1: 470–71 Sexual innuendo 2: 456–58 Sexuality 1: 30 Absalom! Absalom! 2: 303 American South 2: 303 Bellefleur 3: 173 Black House 2: 482 Carter, Angela 2: 184–89 fetishism 2: 184–85; 3: 174 heavy metal lyrics 1: 462–63 incest 2: 310–11; 3: 329–30 interracial 1: 207–10 The Monk 1: 463 monsters 2: 188 mythology and 2: 188–89 perversion 2: 186, 311 pre-oedipal stage 1: 377–79 Rebecca 2: 286–90 “A Rose for Emily” 2: 310–11 The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History 2: 187–88 Salomé 3: 496–97 Sanctuary 2: 315–17 The Shadow Knows 1: 217–18 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 2: 482; 3: 375–76 vampires 1: 350–51, 357, 368, 370 Victorian attitudes 1: 132, 137, 207 in Victorian Gothic 1: 87–91 Wharton, Edith 3: 478–79, 483–84 of Wilde, Oscar 3: 488 See also Eroticism; Homosexuality; Pornography

571

SUBJECT INDEX

“The Sand-man” (Hoffmann). See “Der Sandmann” “Der Sandmann” (Hoffmann) 2: 388–91 as Ambiguous Gothic 2: 412 archetypes 2: 413–14 compared to “The Mortal Immortal: A Tale” 3: 330 Freud, Sigmund on 2: 402–3, 408–9, 413 identity crisis 2: 412–17 narrative structure 2: 401–7 ncanny guest in 1: 302–4; 2: 403–11 reader response 2: 397, 410–11 Sartoris (Faulkner) 2: 294 Satanism 1: 463–65 See also Devil Satire 3: 283 Savage, Jon 1: 471 Savoy, Eric 1: 66–74 Scarborough, Dorothy 1: 36 The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne) 2: 363–65 symbolism 2: 376 witchcraft 2: 372–73 “Scheme for Raising a large Sum of Money by Message Cards and Notes” (Walpole) 3: 446 Schiller, Friedrich von 1: 152, 274, (sidebar) 275 compared to Brown, Charles Brockden (sidebar) 2: 171 influence on Gothic drama 1: 407–9 uncanny 1: 306–7 Scholes, Robert 3: 249 Schopenhauer, Arthur 1: 152–53 Schreck, Max 1: 450 Scott, Sir Walter 1: 2, 262, 335; 3: 289, 289–317 Abbotsford 1: 502 anonymity 3: 290 antiquarianism influence on 1: 25 architecture motif and 3: 315–16 on The Castle of Otranto 3: 432, 443–44 compared to Irving, Washington 2: 453 compared to Radcliffe, Ann 3: 310 on Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 336–37, (sidebar) 349 Gilmor, Robert III and 1: 503 on Gothic ambiguity 2: 453 on hallucinations 1: 334, 338 Hazlitt, William (sidebar) 3: 298 on Hoffmann, E. T. A. (sidebar) 2: 392, 401, 407 Hogg, James and 2: 421–22, 432–33

SUBJECT INDEX

SEXUALITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Sexuality and Its Discontents (Weeks) 1: 138 The Shadow (Gothic convention) 2: 146–50 Shadow Dance (Carter) 2: 180 The Shadow Knows (Johnson) 1: 217–19 “Shadow—A Parable” (Poe) 3: 190–92 Shadows on the Grass (Dinesen) 2: 267 Shakespeare, William, influence of 1: 98 Shelden, Pamela Jacobs 2: 470–78 Shelley, Mary 1: 2, 31, 261–62; 3: 319, 319–35 attitude toward female body 3: 329–33 Byron, Lord George Gordon and 3: 344 chase motif and 3: 339 Clairmont, Claire and 3: 344–46 compared to Hoffmann, E. T. A. 3: 330 compared to King, Stephen 2: 500 education of 3: 345–46 female Gothic 3: 327–33 film adaptation of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 1: 432–33 Frankenstein as autobiography (sidebar) 3: 328 on ghosts 3: 321–24 Godwin, William and 2: 323; 3: 319, 339, 345–46 heroines 2: 138; 3: 327–33 incest 3: 329–30 influence of the French Revolution 1: 82–85 loneliness 3: 342–47 Polidori, John and 3: 344 principal works 3: 321 Shelley, Percy Bysshe and 3: 319–21, (sidebar) 328, 344–46 social philosophy 1: 255 use of Gothic elements, 1: 25 Wollstonecraft, Mary and 3: 319, 328–29, 342 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1: 2, 9–12, (sidebar) 76, 82–83 Clairmont, Claire and 3: 344–46 on Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 335–36 Lewis, Matthew Gregory and 3: 59–60 Polidori, John and 3: 344 Shelley, Mary and 3: 319–21, (sidebar) 328, 344–46 The Shepherd’s Calendar (Hogg) 2: 425–28, 427–28 Shetty, Nalini V. 3: 118–22 Shilling shocker 1: 2

572

The Shining (film) 1: 69, 219, 498 The Shining (King) 2: 482, 494–99 Shirley (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 104, 110–11 “Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror” (Joshi) 1: 264–83 Showalter, Elaine 1: 210–20 A Sicilian Romance (Radcliffe) 1: 2, 398; 2: 254; 3: 232 The Sicilian Romance,or, The Apparition of the Cliffs, An Opera, by Henry Siddons (Siddons) 1: 398, 412, 412–13 “The Sick Rose” (Blake) 2: 306–12 Siddons, Henry 1: 398, 412–13 The Siege of Salerno (Maturin) 3: 76 “The Signalman” (Dickens) 2: 230 “Signor Formica” (Hoffmann) 2: 399–400 Simmons, Dan 1: 366 “Sinister House” (Davenport) (sidebar) 2: 285 Sioux, Siouxsie 1: 470–71 “Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” (Aiken, Barbauld) 1: 2, 5–7, (sidebar) 7, 46–47; 3: 24–25 “Sir Edmund Orme” (James) 2: 463 “Sir Walter Scott” (Hazlitt) (sidebar) 3: 298 The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Irving) 2: 441–42, 447–49, (sidebar) 450 Sketches by Boz (Dickens) 2: 230, (sidebar) 252 Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparations (Hibbert) 1: 334, 336–37, 338 “A Skilled Hand Weaves a Net of Horror” (Berkman) 2: 283–84 Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Halberstam) 1: 197–99 Sklar, Robert 1: 438 Skywalk (Brown) 2: 153 Slave narratives 1: 183–92; 3: 146–48 Slavery American creativity and 1: 520–21 “The Fall of the House of Usher” 3: 223 Garner, Margaret 3: 146–47 as horror 1: 181–92, 520 Sleath, Eleanor 1: 98 A Small Boy and Others (James) 2: 472 Smith, Alexander 2: 225 Smith, Charlotte 1: 96 Smith, Iain Crichton 2: 432–38 Smith, Rosamond. See Oates, Joyce Carol Smollet, Tobias 1: 1–2, 5, 20, 50 Snake Eyes (Oates) 3: 165, 178 Snitow, Ann 3: 281–82

The Snow-Image, and Other Tales (Hawthorne) 2: 365 “The Snowstorm” (Oates) 3: 180, 183 Social criticism 3: 458, 466–75 Social history 1: 48–57; 2: 61–67 Social philosophy 1: 255 “Socialized and Medicalized Hysteria in Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft” (Purinton) 2: 67–76 Sociopolitical ideology in drama 1: 410–15 Soldier’s Pay (Faulkner) 2: 294, 299 Solstice (Oates) 3: 183 Son of Frankenstein (film) 3: 353 Son of the Morning (Oates) 3: 164, 168, 170–72, 177 Song of Solomon (Morrison) 3: 136, 138–39 Sorcery 2: 325 The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe). See Die Leiden des jungen Werthers “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (Wilde) 3: 495 Soul/Mate (Oates) 3: 165, 178 The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner) 2: 294 South, American and Gothic tradition 2: 302–5 South, European and terror-romanticism 1: 256–57 Southam, B. C. 2: 32 Southern Gothic 2: 297–305; 3: 178 The Sovereignty of God (Murdoch) 3: 510–11 Spargo, R. Clifton 3: 150–60 Spark, Muriel 3: 338 The Spectator (periodical) 3: 393–94 “The Spectre Bridegroom” (Irving) 2: 448–49 Spectres. See Ghosts; Grotesques “Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein” (Atwood) 2: 4–5 Spencer, Kathleen L. 1: 127–43 The Sphinx (Wilde) 3: 497–99 “The Sphinx without a Secret” (Wilde) 3: 490–92 Spiritualism 1: 482; 2: 379–80 “The Split Second” (du Maurier) 2: 284 The Spoils of Poynton (James) 2: 472 Sportive Gothic 2: 447–51, 451–53 The Spy (periodical) 2: 422 “The Squaw” (Stoker) 3: 386 St. Irvyne (Shelley, P.) 1: 24 St. James Gazette (periodical) 3: 502–4 St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (Godwin) 2: 321–23

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

TABLETOP OF THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS

“The Stout Gentleman” (Irving) 2: 442 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 1: 182–83, 185–90; 3: 223 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson) 1: 31, 314; 3: 359–61, (sidebar) 365 as autobiography 3: 368 compared to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 371 compared to works of King, Stephen 2: 485–87 critical reception 3: 361, 366 dedication of (sidebar) 3: 373 degeneration 1: 158–60 doubles in 3: 368–69, 372, 374–81 film adaptation 3: 368 Jung, Carl G. 3: 373–81 monster 3: 370–72 review 3: 364–65 sexuality 2: 487; 3: 375–76 Victorian morality and 3: 370–72 The Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson (Elwin) 3: 368 “Strange Stories by a Nervous Gentleman” (Irving) 2: 452, 455 “Strange Stories: Irving’s Gothic” (Bell) 2: 451–56 A Strange Story (Bulwer-Lytton) (sidebar) 1: 15, 263 “Strangers in Town” (Jackson) 1: 277 Strawberry Hill (castle) 1: 58, 502–4; 3: 430, 442, 447–48 Strawberry Hill Press 3: 446 Strengall, Heidi 2: 485–93 “The Strength of Backward-Looking Thoughts” (Davenport-Hines) 1: 490–96 “The Student from Salamanca” (Irving) 2: 442 Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Pater) 1: 32–33 “A Study in Puppydom” (St. James Gazette), 3: 502–4 Sublime 1: 55–56, 87–91, 143–55 architecture as 1: 55–56 vs. beautiful 1: 107–8 Burke, Edmund on 1: 148–50; 3: 91–92 fear and 1: 110–13, 148–49 grotesques and 2: 300 Irving, Washington 2: 452 Kant, Immanuel on 1: 150–55 in Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 91–96 Radcliffe, Ann 1: 87; 3: 313 Suger of St. Denis (sidebar) 1: 478, 506, 508 “Suger of St. Denis” (World Eras), (sidebar) 1: 478 Sula (Morrison) 3: 148

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

Summers, Montague 1: 40–48; 3: 36–46, (sidebar) 395 The Sundial (Jackson) 1: 277–78, 279–81 Sunset Boulevard (film) 1: 437–38 Supernatural 1: 231–33; 2: 10–11 architecture and 1: 481, 484 “Carmilla” 3: 26–27 The Castle of Otranto: A Story 3: 449–51 Count Dracula 1: 342–44, 358 Dinesen, Isak 2: 263 doubles and 1: 310–16 dreams 1: 327 fantastic novels 1: 128–29 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 336–37 Godwin, William on 2: 324–27 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 378 history in Gothic literature 3: 22–27 Hogg, James 2: 422–23, 425– 28, 431–32 Jackson, Shirley 1: 264, 267– 72, 274–75 James, Henry 2: 463–64, 470–73 King, Stephen 2: 501–4 Lovecraft, H. P. (sidebar) 1: 260 Morrison, Toni 3: 138–42, 148–49 oral tradition 1: 17–18 The Picture of Dorian Gray 3: 511–15 poetry 1: 18–20 psychology and 1: 232, 332–41 Scott, Sir Walter 3: 313–16, (sidebar) 349 urban Gothic 1: 139 Wharton, Edith 3: 457, 458– 59, 470–75 See also Fear; Ghosts; Horror; Psychological horror Superstition evil eye 1: 307 getatore 1: 308–9 Scott, Sir Walter 3: 314–16 vampires 1: 345, 348–49 “Superstition” (Hogg) 2: 422, 427 Surfacing (Atwood) 2: 2, 3, 6–8, 11 Surrealist movement 1: 416 Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Atwood) 2: 3, 7 Swithen, John. See King, Stephen Symonds, John Addington (sidebar) 3: 365

T Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins (painting) 3: 54

573

SUBJECT INDEX

St. Ronan’s Well (Scott) 3: 292, 308, 311 “Stairway to Heaven” (song) 1: 464 “Stephen King and the Tradition of American Gothic” (Gibbs) 2: 494–99 “Stephen King’s Canon: The Art of Balance” (Casebeer) (sidebar) 2: 492 Stevenson, Robert Louis 1: 31, 314; 3: 359, 359–84, (sidebar) 373 compared to King, Stephen 2: 485–87 compared to Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 365 degeneration 1: 158–60 principal works 3: 361–62 Stoker, Bram 1: 32–34, 127–40, 358–59, 364; 3: 385, 385–428 characterization of Count Dracula 3: 405–10 “counterfeit” Gothicism 3: 397–404 cultural identity in Dracula 1: 171–79 degeneration 1: 166–69 development of Count Dracula 1: 342–44 dreams 1: 330 influence of Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 1: 358 influence of Walpole, Horace 3: 395–404 Irish allegory in Dracula 3: 415–27 Irving, Henry and 3: 400–401 principal works 3: 387 “Stoker’s Counterfeit Gothic: Dracula and Theatricality at the Dawn of Simulation” (Hogle) 3: 395–405 Stone, Edward 2: 309 Storm and Stress movement 2: 349–53 “Storms” (Hogg) 2: 425–26 “The Story of a Lie” (Stevenson) 3: 361 The Story of a Lie,and Other Tales (Stevenson) 3: 360 “The Story of Prince Alasi and the Princess Firouzkah” (Beckford) 2: 88 “The Story of Prince Barkiarokh” (Beckford) 2: 88 “The Story of Princess Zulkais and the Prince Kalilah” (Beckford) 2: 88 “The Story of the Young Italian” (Irving) 2: 455 “The Story of the Young Robber” (Irving) 2: 447, 448, 452 “A Story Replete with Horror” (Benedict) 2: 429–32

SUBJECT INDEX

“THE TALE OF GUZMAN’S FAMILY”

“The Tale of Guzman’s Family” (Maturin) 3: 77, 87, 90 “The Tale of Stanton” (Maturin) 3: 77–78 The Tale of the Body Thief (Rice) 3: 264 See also Vampire Chronicles “Tale of the Indians” (Maturin) 3: 77–78 “Tale of the Spaniard” (Maturin) 3: 77–78, 93–94 A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) 2: 230 Tales of a Traveller (Irving) 2: 442, 447, 452–53 Tales of the Dead (Shelley) 1: 25 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (Poe) 3: 198–99 Tales of the Wars of Montrose (Hogg) 2: 422 Tales of Wonder (Lewis) 3: 32 The Talisman (King) 2: 482, 487–89 The Talisman (Scott) 3: 307–8, 310, 312, 315 Taltos (Rice) 3: 264 Tam O’Shanter (Burns) 1: 18 Tamerlane, and Other Poems (Poe) 3: 187 “Taming a Tartar” (Alcott) Angel in the House 1: 203–4 feminist literary theory 1: 203–6 gender relations 1: 199–200 monster 1: 199–207 race relations 1: 200–203, 205–6 “The Tapestried Chamber” (Scott) 3: 294–97 Tapestry, animated (Gothic convention) 3: 199–200 Tar Baby (Morrison) 3: 136, 138 Techno-Gothic 2: 68–73 Television 1: 452–60 “The Tell-Tale Heart” (Poe) 3: 188–89, 213 “The Temple” (Oates) 3: 167–68 The Temptation of Saint Anthony (painting) 3: 57 The Tenants of Malory (Le Fanu) 3: 10 Terror. See Fear “Terror Made Relevant: James’s Ghost Stories” (Thorberg) 2: 466–70 Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy) 1: 34–35 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (film) 1: 422–25 “Textualising the Double-Gendered Body: Forms of the Grotesque in The Passion of New Eve” (Johnson) 2: 190–94 them (Oates) 3: 163

574

Theology debate in Gothic tradition 3: 277–78 “Theorizing the (Gothic) Sublime” (Mishra) 1: 143–57 “A Theory of Knowledge” (Oates) 3: 181–82, 184 “They Eat Out” (Atwood) 2: 9 Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (Godwin). See Caleb Williams “The Third Baby’s the Easiest” (Jackson) 1: 265–66 “This is a photograph of Me” (Atwood) 2: 8 Thomas, Ronald R. 1: 326–32 Thompson, G. R. 2: 301 Thorberg, Raymond 2: 466–70 Thoreau, Henry David 3: 468, 469, 472, 474 “Thrawn Janet” (Stevenson) 3: 360 “The Three Graves: A Fragment of a Sexton’s Tale” (Coleridge) 1: 236–41 The Three Imposters (Machen) 1: 170 The Three Perils of Man; or War, Women, and Witchcraft (Hogg) 2: 422 The Three Perils of Woman; or Love, Leasing, and Jealousy (Hogg) 2: 427 “Tibby Hyslop’s Dream” (Hogg) 2: 428 “The Tiger’s Bride” (Carter) 2: 182 Tillotson, Marcia 3: 342–48 The Times, London, review of Dracula, 3: 394–95 “To the Editor of the St. James Gazette” (Wilde) 3: 492–93 “To the Reader” (Lewis) 3: 34–36 “Tobias Martin, Master Cooper and His Men” (Hoffmann). See “Meister Martin der Küfner und seine Gesellen” The Token (Goodrich) 2: 364 Tom Jones (Fielding) 1: 490 The Tomb of Ligeia (film) 1: 444 The Tommyknockers (King) 1: 287 Torquato Tasso (Goethe) 2: 341 A Tour on the Prairies (Irving) 2: 442–43 “Toward a History of Gothic and Modernism: Dark Modernity from Bram Stoker to Samuel Beckett” (Riquelme) 1: 30–40 Tracy, Spencer 3: 368 Transcendence 2: 494–96 “The Transcendental Economy of Wharton’s Gothic Mansions” (Elbert) 3: 466–75 Transcendentalism 3: 468, 470–71, 472, 474 “The Transformation” (Shelley) 3: 324–26

“The Translation” (Oates) 3: 180, 184 “Translation from an Ancient Chaldee MS” (Hogg) 2: 422 “Translator’s Preface” (Walpole) 3: 432–34 “Trauma and the Specters of Enslavement in Morrison’s Beloved” (Spargo) 3: 150–60 Travel narratives 3: 107–8 “The Travelling Companion” (Stevenson) 3: 368 Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (Stevenson) 3: 359 Treasure Island (Stevenson) 3: 359–60 “The Trial for Murder” (Dickens) 2: 230 “Tricks with Mirrors” (Atwood) 2: 6 “The Triumph of Night” (Wharton) 3: 459, 468, 471–73 The Tryal (Baillie) 2: 50, 63, 66 The Turn of the Screw (James, H.) 1: 31; 2: 461–68, 468, 471, 473 Turner, Nat 1: 181–82 “Turtle-God” (Oates) 3: 183 Twain, Mark 1: 125–26; 3: 158 Twice-Told Tales (Hawthorne) 2: 364, (sidebar) 369 Twin Peaks (television show) 1: 453–59, 457 “Twin Peaks and the Television Gothic” (Ledwon) 1: 452–60 “Twins” (Oates) 3: 178 Twister (film) 1: 69 Twitchell, James P. 1: 344, 351 Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (Melville) 3: 108

U “The Ugly-Pretty, Dull-Bright, Weak-Strong Girl in the Gothic Mansion” (Abartis) 2: 115–20 Uncanny 1: 454 Freud, Sigmund 1: 301–9, 454 guest 1: 302–4; 2: 403–11 repetition and 1: 305–6 Schiller, Friedrich von 1: 306–7 television Gothic and 1: 454–56 “The Uncanny” (Freud) 1: 301–10, (sidebar) 2: 308 “’Uncanny Drives’: The Depth Psychology of E. T. A. Hoffmann” (Andriano) 2: 411–19 Uncanny guest (Gothic convention) 1: 302–4; 2: 403–11

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

WALPOLE, HORACE

V Valente, Joseph 1: 33; 3: 415–27 Valperga (Shelley) 3: 320 The Vampire Armand (Rice) 3: 264 “The Vampire as Gothic Villain” (Senf) 1: 342–61 Vampire Chronicles (Rice) 1: 369–70; 3: 262–65 eroticism 3: 274–76 Harlequin formula 3: 283 narrative structure 3: 271–72 as revisionist vampire mythology 3: 266–76 See also specific titles of books Vampire fiction 3: 266–76 “The Vampire in Literature” (Summers) (sidebar) 3: 395 The Vampire Lestat (Rice) 3: 263–64 See also Vampire Chronicles The Vampire; or, the Bride of the Isles (Planche) 1: 348 The Vampire Tapestry (Charnas) 1: 368–169 Vampires 1: 32–33, 233, 342–87, 3: 266–76 as aristocracy 1: 344, 350 “Carmilla” 1: 353–58, 382–84; 3: 19–20 Count Dracula 1: 166–69, 342– 44, 358–59, 362–64, 424, 3: 405–10, 417 drama 1: 348–49 Edwardian 1: 363 eroticism 3: 274–76 folklore 1: 344–45, 349, 353 gender identity 1: 382–84; 3: 275, 281–85 “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” 1: 364–65

Jewish characteristics of 2: 287 King, Stephen 1: 371–73; 3: 270 “The Lady of the House of Love” 2: 188 Lestat 1: 369–70; 3: 269–76, 280–83 literary history of 1: 255 Louis 1: 369–70; 3: 268–70, 271, 274–75, 280–84 Mona Lisa 1: 32–33 1980s movies 1: 372 Nixon, Richard and 1: 369 parasitism 1: 351–52, 356, 365 psychic 1: 362–67 Rebecca 2: 286–90 revisionist mythology 3: 266–76 Rice, Anne 1: 369–71; 3: 262– 76, 280–84 Saint-Germain, Count 1: 367–68 sexuality of 1: 350–51, 357, 368, 370 superstition 1: 345, 348–49 The Vampyre. A Tale 1: 243–29, 344–47 Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (Rymer or Prest) 1: 349–52 women 1: 352–58, 364–67; 3: 19–20 See also Monsters; Rice, Anne; Stoker, Bram The Vampyre. A Tale (Polidori) 1: 243–49, 262, 344–49, (sidebar) 362 Van Der Zee, James 3: 146 Varma, Devendra P. (sidebar) 3: 253, 463 Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (Rymer or Prest) 1: 349, 349–52 Vathek (Beckford) 2: 79–81 author’s personae in 2: 96–101 criticism of 2: 91 doubles in 3: 369 as Gothic tale 2: 89–94 influence on The Giaour (sidebar) 2: 95 inspiration for 2: 83–85 as Oriental tale 1: 260–61; 2: 88–89, 96 review 2: 85, (sidebar) 86 unauthorized translation 2: 81–83, 88 writing of 2: 87–89 Veidt, Conrad 1: 419 “Verging on the Gothic: Melmoth’s Journey to France” (Lanone) 3: 97–104 Vertigo (film) 1: 435

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

Victimization “Carmilla” 1: 355–58 Dracula 1: 133–36 of women 1: 355–58; 2: 185, 188–89; 3: 327–33 Victorian period 1: 61–62, 86–91 Angel in the House 1: 131, 203–4 cultural attitudes 1: 131–33 Dracula and 1: 128–40, 166–69 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and 3: 370–72 Viereck, George Sylvester 1: 363 Villette (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 103–4 compared to The Monk 2: 122–27 Gothic conventions 2: 108, 111–13, 121–27 review 2: 120–21, (sidebar) 121 as reworking of The Professor 2: 122 Vincent, Sybil Korff 2: 17–24 Violence American Psycho 1: 36–38 The Castle of Otranto 2: 310–11 “The Fall of the House of Usher 2: 311 Oates, Joyce Carol on 1: 217 O’Connor, Flannery (sidebar) 2: 168 Scott, Sir Walter 3: 311–11 social 1: 197–206 against women 1: 218–19; 2: 185, 188–89 “A Virtuoso’s Collection” (Hawthorne) 2: 374 The Vision (Beckford) 2: 79 Visual arts 1: 475–526, 480–86 La Volonté de savoir (Foucalt) 1: 295–96 Von Deutscher Baukunst (Goethe) 2: 344 Voyagers to the West (Bailyn) 1: 121–22

W Wadham College Chapel 1: 477–78 Wadsworth, Daniel 1: 499 “Waiting for Shilo” (MacPherson) (sidebar) 3: 111 Walden (Thoreau) 3: 468, 470, 474 Waller, Gregory 3: 269 Walpole, Horace 1: 31, 80; 2: 297, 299–300; 3: 429, 429–55 Berry, Mary and 3: 430–31 compared to Radcliffe, Ann 2: 36 excess as theme 3: 355 Gray, Thomas and 3: 446

575

SUBJECT INDEX

Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh (Le Fanu) 1: 89–90; 3: 1–3, 5, 16–17 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 1: 185–90; 3: 223 The Uncommercial Traveller (Dickens) 2: 238–39 “Der unheimliche Gast” (Hoffmann) 2: 402 Unholy Loves (Oates) 3: 164 Unknown Pleasures (music recording) 1: 472 The Unvanquished (Faulkner) 2: 294 Updike, John (sidebar) 2: 270 Urban Gothic 1: 129, 130–33, 138–40 Urfaust (Goethe) 2: 357 Utopia 2: 63–65

SUBJECT INDEX

WANDERING JEW

heroines 2: 138, 144 influence of Hurd, Richard 3: 449–50 influence on Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 501 influence on Gothic genre (sidebar) 3: 443 influence on Melville, Herman 3: 115 influence on Poe, Edgar Allan 2: 310–11 influence on Stoker, Bram 3: 395–404 legacy of 1: 57–58 letters of 3: 429, 431–32 literary form of 1: 459 mysterious portrait in 1: 252; 2: 252, 254; 3: 25, 199 originator of Gothic literature 1: 1–2, 402; 2: 116 patterns in 2: 301 poetry of 3: 446 principal works 3: 432 prophecy in 3: 200 psychoanalysis of 1: 322 singularity of 3: 447 Strawberry Hill 1: 58, 502–3; 3: 430, 447–48 Strawberry Hill Press 3: 446 Wandering Jew (Gothic convention) Faulkner, William 2: 302 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 373–74 “The Man of the Crowd” 3: 198 Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 74 “The Mortal Immortal: A Tale” 3: 330 precursor for Count Dracula 3: 402 Warfel, Harry R. 2: 164–70 Waring, Susan M. (sidebar) 2: 121 Washington Square (James) 2: 462 Watching (motif) 3: 471 Watergate scandal 1: 371 Watt, James 1: 411 Waverly Novels 3: 289–92, 297–316 See also specific titles in series Waverly; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (Scott) 1: 2; 3: 289–90, (sidebar) 306 fear, 3: 309, 310 mystery in 3: 306 supernatural 3: 313–14 violence 3: 312 We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Jackson) 1: 278, 280–82 We Were the Mulvaneys (Oates) 3: 165 Weeks, Jeffrey 1: 138 Wein, Toni 2: 121–29 Weir of Hermiston (Stevenson) 3: 360

576

Weissberg, Liliane 3: 142–50 Weld, Theodore 1: 182 “Welldean Hall” (Hogg) 2: 437 Welles, Orson 1: 437; 2: 119 Wells, H. G. 1: 162–66 Werewolves The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories 2: 188 Christine 2: 486 King, Stephen 2: 487–89 See also Monsters Werke (Goethe) 2: 344–48 Wesley, John 1: 17–18 Westerns (novels) 1: 36; 3: 205–6 Whale, James 1: 422–25 Wharton, Edith 3: 457, 457–86 abyss in 3: 480–83 aestheticism 3: 468–69 on American writers 3: 468–69 aristocracy 3: 448, 466–68 autobiographies 3: 476–84 capitalism 3: 467–75 Christianity 3: 470–71 compared to Bronte¨, Charlotte 3: 480 cultural elitism of 3: 468–69 European heritage 3: 468–69 feminist literary theory 3: 459–60 gender roles 3: 476–80 ghost stories 3: 461–75, 482 ghosts 3: 460–62, 466–75 horror 3: 463–66 James, Henry and 3: 459, 483 mythology 3: 465, (sidebar) 467 Nietzsche, Friedrich and 3: 470 patriarchy 3: 476–80 principal works 3: 460 Pulitzer Prize 3: 458, 459 realism 3: 468 relationship with mother 3: 476–77, 483–84 sexuality 3: 478–79, 483–84 social criticism 3: 458 supernatural 3: 457, 458–59, 470–75 Thoreau, Henry David 3: 468, 469 Transcendentalism 3: 468, 474 as woman writer 3: 478, 480 Wharton, Thomas 1: 54 What I Lived For (Oates) 3: 165 “What is Gothic About Absalom, Absalom!” (Putzel) (sidebar) 2: 304 “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (Oates) 1: 216–17; 3: 164, 179 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Stories of Young America (Oates) 3: 164 Whipple, E. P. 2: 114–15, 135–36 A Whisper of Blood (Datlow) 1: 366–67

White Goddess 3: 211 White-Jacket: or, The World in a Man-of-War (Melville) 3: 108, 115 “Who Is Heathcliff? The Shadow Knows” (Hume, M.) 2: 146–50 “Why Is Your Writing So Violent?” (Oates) 1: 217 Wicke, Jennifer 3: 396 Widdicombe, Toby 3: 468 “The Widows” (Oates) 3: 180, 183 Wieland; or, The Transformation (Brown) 2: 153–55, 159–61, 167 compared to Caleb Williams 2: 168, 170–71 influence of Paradise Lost 2: 170–76 introduction to 2: 155–56 Keats, John on (sidebar) 2: 171 as original Gothic literature 2: 116 review 2: 162–64 “Wieland; or, The Transformation” (Warfel) 2: 164–70 The Wild Irish Boy (Maturin) 3: 73, 83, 84, 94 The Wild Palms (Faulkner) 2: 294 Wilde, Oscar 1: 31, 34; 3: 487, 487–518 aestheticism 3: 487, 489, 493– 99, 511–16 compared to Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 504–9 Decadence movement 3: 487 defense of The Picture of Dorian Gray 3: 492–93 degeneration 1: 160–62 ghost stories 3: 488 influence on The House of the Vampire 1: 363 morality of 3: 509–16 principal works 3: 489–90 sexual misconduct charge 3: 488 Wilder, Billy 1: 437–38 Wilderness Tips (Atwood) 2: 11 “Wilkie Collins and Dickens” (Eliot) (sidebar) 2: 215 Wilkins-Freeman, Mary E. 1: 365 “William Beckford and Vathek” (Bleiler) 2: 85–89 “William Wilson” (Poe) 3: 189, 213, 215 Williams, Anne 1: 67, 69; 3: 252–60 Williamson, Paul 1: 511–18 Willing to Die (Le Fanu) 3: 17 Willis, Paul 1: 465 Wilson, J. J. 2: 261 The Wind (Scarborough) 1: 36 The Wings of the Dove (James) 2: 462, 471 Winter’s Tales (Dinesen) 2: 258 Wise Children (Carter) 2: 186 Wisker, Gina 2: 182–90

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

ZSCHOKKE, HEINRICH

power in nineteenth century 1: 356–58; 3: 16–21 pre-oedipal stage 1: 377–79 as puppets 2: 183–85 romance as reflection of oppression 1: 220–26 Sanctuary 2: 317–18 “Taming a Tartar” 1: 203–6 vampires 1: 352–58, 364–67; 3: 19–20 victimization of 1: 355–58; 2: 185, 188–89; 3: 327–33 in Victorian England 1: 131– 33, 203–5; 2: 63–65; 3: 20–21 violence against 1: 218–19; 2: 185, 188–89 White Goddess 2: 303 Willing to Die 3: 17 as writers 3: 478, 480 See also Heroines “Women and Power in ‘Carmilla’” (Senf) 3: 16–21 Women; or Pour et contre (Maturin) 3: 74, 79, 81, 83, 84, 95–96 Women, Power, and Subversion (Newton) 3: 17, 21 Wonderland (Oates) 3: 164–65, 177, 183 American culture 3: 168–70 American Gothic tradition 3: 168–70 compared to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 169–70 as Southern Gothic 3: 178 “Wonderlands” (Oates) 3: 178–79 Wood, Grant 1: 73–74 Wood, Martin J. 3: 266–76 Wood, Robin 1: 415–25 Woodstock (Scott) 3: 311, 315 Woolf, Virginia (sidebar) 2: 471 “The Wool-Gatherer” (Hogg) 2: 422, 438 Wordsworth, William 1: 21 “A Work of Genius: James Hogg’s Justified Sinner” (Smith) 2: 432–38 World Eras, (sidebar) 1: 478 “Worldly Goods” (Jackson) 1: 267 Worringer, Wilhelm 1: 481 “Wrapping Workhouse” (Dickens) 2: 238–39 Wren, Sir Christopher 1: 40–41 Wright, Angela 3: 61–70 Wright, Richard 1: 180 “Writer and Humanitarian” (Irwin) (sidebar) 3: 62 The Writing of Fiction (Wharton) 3: 464, 468, 470, 476, 479–80 Wuthering Heights (Bronte¨, E.) 2: 131–33, 264 “Chapter 1” 2: 133–35 dream interpretation in 1: 331

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1

film adaptation 2: 142 Healthcliff as The Shadow 2: 146–50 heroine in 2: 138–45 immorality of 2: 135–36 influence of Gothic on 2: 136– 38, 145 preface (sidebar) 2: 147 review (sidebar) 2: 137 spiritual horror 1: 262–63 Wylder’s Hand (Le Fanu) 1: 89; 3: 1–2 Wyler, William 2: 142

X Xenophobia 1: 93–94

Y Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn 1: 367–68 Yeats, W. B. 1: 31–32 “The Yellow Mask” (Collins) 2: 202, 217–26 “The Yellow Mask, the Black Robe, and the Woman in White: Wilkie Collins, Anti-Catholic Discourse, and the Sensation Novel” (Griffin) 2: 217–28 “The Yellow Wallpaper” (Gilman) 1: 109, 212–15, (sidebar) 213 Yoknapatawpha novels 2: 297–306 You Are Happy (Atwood) 2: 5–6, 8 You Can’t Catch Me (Oates) 3: 165 You Must Remember This (Oates) 3: 164–65 Young, Edward 1: 53 “Young Goodman Brown” (Hawthorne) 2: 363, 365, 372–73, 378

Z Zanoni (Bulwer-Lytton) (sidebar) 1: 15 Zastrozzi (Shelley, P.) 1: 24 Zgorzelski, Andrzej 1: 128 Zlosnik, Sue 2: 284–91 Zofloya (Dacre) 1: 208–10 Zombie (Oates) 3: 165 Zschokke, Heinrich 1: 499–500

577

SUBJECT INDEX

“The Witch of Fife” (Hogg) 2: 423 Witchcraft Godwin, William 2: 325–26 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 371–73 Victorian attitudes 1: 132–33 Witchcraft (Baillie) 2: 50, 58, 69–73 The Witching Hour (Rice) 3: 264 With Shuddering Fall (Oates) 3: 164–65, 178 “‘Withered, Wrinkled, and Loathsome of Visage’: Reading the Ethics of the Soul and the Late-Victorian Gothic in The Picture of Dorian Gray” (Womack) 3: 509–17 Within the Rim and Other Essays, 1914-15 (James) 2: 472 Wolfreys, Julian 2: 234–42 Wollstonecraft, Mary 1: 83, 221, 223 compared to Baillie, Joanna 2: 63 Godwin, William and 2: 322 Radcliffe, Ann and 3: 239 Shelley, Mary and 3: 319, 328– 29, 342 Womack, Kenneth 3: 489, 509–17 Woman and the Demon (Auerbach) 3: 20 The Woman in White (Collins, Wilkie) 1: 88–89; 2: 201–2, 211 Gothic conventions in 2: 215–17 review 2: 211 as sensation fiction 2: 211–15, 218–19, 223–26 A Woman of No Importance (Wilde) 3: 488 Woman’s Record (Hale) 1: 211–12 Women 1: 210–29 American Gothic writers 1: 210–19 artists 2: 261 attraction to Gothic 2: 11, 189 demonic (fictitious) 2: 14–16 education of 3: 238–44 eighteenth-century marriage laws 1: 224–26 female body 3: 329–33 Gothic portrayal of 1: 108–9; 3: 465 Gothic writers, lack of recognition 1: 212 hysteria as deception 2: 69–73 interracial sexual desire 1: 207–10 Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 80 Morrison, Toni 3: 139–41, 147–48 mythology 3: 465

GOTHIC LITERATURE A Gale Critical Companion

GALE CRITICAL COMPANION ADVISORY BOARD

Barbara M. Bibel Librarian Oakland Public Library Oakland, California

Mary Jane Marden Collection Development Librarian St. Petersburg College Pinellas Park, Florida

James K. Bracken Professor and Assistant Director University Libraries The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio

Heather Martin Arts & Humanities Librarian University of Alabama, Sterne Library Birmingham, Alabama

Dr. Toby Burrows Principal Librarian The Scholars’ Centre University of Western Australia Library Nedlands, Western Australia Celia C. Daniel Associate Librarian, Reference Howard University Washington, D.C. David M. Durant Reference Librarian Joyner Library East Carolina University Greenville, North Carolina Nancy Guidry Librarian Bakersfield Community College Bakersfield, California

Susan Mikula Director Indiana Free Library Indiana, Pennsylvania Thomas Nixon Humanities Reference Librarian University of North Carolina, Davis Library Chapel Hill, North Carolina Mark Schumacher Jackson Library University of North Carolina Greensboro, North Carolina Gwen Scott-Miller Assistant Director Sno-Isle Regional Library System Marysville, Washington Donald Welsh Head, Reference Services College of William and Mary, Swem Library Williamsburg, Virginia

Preface ............................................................. xix Acknowledgments .......................................... xxiii Chronology of Key Events ............................. xxxiii

VOLUME 1 Gothic Literature: An Overview Introduction ..................................................... 1 Representative Works ....................................... 2 Primary Sources ................................................ 4 Overviews ....................................................... 16 Origins of the Gothic ..................................... 40 American Gothic ............................................ 57 European Gothic ............................................ 74 Further Reading ............................................ 104 Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ John Aikin (1747-1822) and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld (1743-1825) ................................. 7 On the Subject Of ѧ Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) .............................................. 15 On the Subject Of ѧ Edmund Burke (1729?-1797) ............................................. 30

On the Subject Of ѧ Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) ............................. On the Subject Of ѧ Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) .............................................. On the Subject Of ѧ Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) .............................................. On the Subject Of ѧ William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) ............................

Society, Culture, and the Gothic Introduction ................................................. Representative Works ................................... Primary Sources ............................................ Overviews ..................................................... Race and the Gothic .................................... Women and the Gothic ............................... Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ Clara Reeve (1729-1807) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Sophia Lee (1750-1824) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Ray Bradbury (1920-) .................................................... On the Subject Of ѧ Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) and “The Yellow Wallpaper” ..............................................

48 68 76 94

107 109 110 127 180 210 228

112 119 143 172 199

213

v

CONTENTS

Foreword by Jerrold E. Hogle ............................ xiii

CONTENTS

Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures Introduction ................................................. Representative Works ................................... Primary Sources ............................................ Overviews ..................................................... Haunted Dwellings and the Supernatural ... Psychology and the Gothic ......................... Vampires ....................................................... Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron (1788-1824) ............... On the Subject Of ѧ H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) ............................... On the Subject Of ѧ Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-) .................................................... On the Subject Of ѧ Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and “The Uncanny” .......... On the Subject Of ѧ Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ John William Polidori (1795-1821) .............................. On the Subject Of ѧ Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) ..............................

Performing Arts and the Gothic Introduction ................................................. Representative Works ................................... Primary Sources ............................................ Drama ........................................................... Film ............................................................... Television ...................................................... Music ............................................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ James Boaden (1762-1839) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Clive Barker (1952-) .................................................... On the Subject Of ѧ Boris Karloff (1887-1969) and Frankenstein ................ On the Subject Of ѧ Bela Lugosi (1882-1956) and Dracula ........................ On the Subject Of ѧ Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ F. W. Murnau (1888-1931) and Nosferatu ..................... On the Subject Of ѧ Shirley Jackson (1919-1965) ............................................

231 233 236 249 264 301 342 385

241 260 275 291

480 486 506 525

478 487 491 497 510 522

308 333

Author Index .................................................. 531

362

Title Index ...................................................... 535

377

389 391 394 401 415 452 461 473

399 411 416 425

Subject Index .................................................. 545

VOLUME 2 Margaret Atwood 1939Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, critic, and author of children’s books Introduction ..................................................... 1 Principal Works ................................................ 3 Primary Sources ................................................ 4 General Commentary ...................................... 5 Title Commentary .......................................... 17 Further Reading .............................................. 24 Sidebars: From the Author: An excerpt from Lady Oracle ................................................ 18

436 451 464

Visual Arts and the Gothic Introduction ................................................. 475 Representative Works ................................... 476 Primary Sources ............................................ 477

vi

Overviews ..................................................... Architecture .................................................. Art ................................................................. Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ Suger of St. Denis (1081-1151) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ William Blake (1757-1827) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Alexander Jackson Davis (1803-1892) .................................. On the Subject Of ѧ L. N. Cottingham (1787-1847) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Edward Gorey (1925-2000) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Washington Allston (1779-1843) ............................................

Jane Austen 1775-1817 English novelist Introduction ................................................... Principal Works .............................................. Primary Sources .............................................. Title Commentary .......................................... Further Reading .............................................. Sidebars: About the Author: “Gothic Extravagance” in Northanger Abbey ..................................

25 27 27 31 46

37

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2

49 50 51 54 61 76

55 68

William Beckford 1760-1844 English novelist and travel writer Introduction ................................................... 79 Principal Works .............................................. 81 Primary Sources .............................................. 81 Title Commentary .......................................... 85 Further Reading ............................................ 101 Sidebars: From the Author: An excerpt from “Nymph of the Fountain,” written c. 1791 ...................................................... 84 About the Author: An early review of Vathek ....................................................... 86 About the Author: Byron notes Vathek as a source for oriental elements in The Giaour ....................................................... 95

Charlotte Brontë 1816-1855 English novelist and poet Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: William Dean Howells lauds the title character of Jane Eyre .................................................. About the Author: Susan M. Waring praises Villette .........................................

Emily Brontë 1818-1848 English novelist and poet Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................

103 105 105 107 114 129

116 121

131 133 133 135

Further Reading ............................................ 150 Sidebars: About the Author: H. F. Chorley’s negative response to Wuthering Heights .................................................... 137 About the Author: Charlotte Brontë’s Preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights ................................... 147

Charles Brockden Brown 1771-1810 American novelist, essayist, and short story writer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: William Hazlitt assesses Brown’s literary talent .............. About the Author: John Keats on Wieland ...................................................

Angela Carter 1940-1992 English novelist, short story writer, nonfiction writer, scriptwriter, and author of children’s books Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: James Brockway on Carter’s “Gothic Pyrotechnics” in Fireworks .................................................

Wilkie Collins 1824-1889 English novelist, short story writer, travel writer, and playwright Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Geraldine Jewsbury on the beauty of The Moonstone ............ About the Author: T. S. Eliot on Collins and Charles Dickens ................. About the Author: Charles Dickens remarks to Wilkie Collins on Collins’s talent ......................................................

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2

153 155 155 156 162 177

163 171

179 181 181 182 200

191

201 202 203 205 211 228

207 215

223

vii

CONTENTS

Joanna Baillie 1762-1851 Scottish poet, playwright, editor, and critic Introduction ................................................... Principal Works .............................................. Primary Sources .............................................. General Commentary .................................... Title Commentary .......................................... Further Reading .............................................. Sidebars: About the Author: An excerpt from a death notice in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine ................................................... About the Author: An early reviewer applauds Baillie’s talent ...........................

CONTENTS

Charles Dickens 1812-1870 English novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, and essayist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Archibald C. Coolidge Jr. on Dickens’s childhood memories and the Gothic ...................... About the Author: Michael Hollington on “Dickensian Gothic” ........................

Isak Dinesen 1885-1962 Danish short story writer, autobiographer, novelist, playwright, and translator Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: John Updike on Dinesen’s “Divine Swank” in Seven Gothic Tales .............................................

Daphne du Maurier 1907-1989 English novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, and editor Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Basil Davenport on Rebecca as a melodrama .........................

William Faulkner 1897-1962 American novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and essayist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Max Putzel on Faulkner’s Gothic ...................................

viii

229 231 231 234 242 255

237

William Godwin 1756-1836 English philosopher, novelist, essayist, historian, playwright, and biographer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Edgar Allan Poe reviews Godwin’s Lives of the Necromancers ........................................... From the Author: An excerpt from the Preface to Fleetwood ................................

321 323 324 327 338

328 330

252

257 259 259 261 278

270

279 280 281 282 291

285

293 295 296 297 306 319

304

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749-1832 German poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer, essayist, critic, biographer, memoirist, and librettist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: From the Author: Sir Walter Scott’s translation of Goethe’s “Der Erlkonig” (“The Erl-King”) .....................................

Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-1864 American novelist, short story writer, and essayist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Edgar Allan Poe reviews Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales ... About the Author: Herman Melville reviews Mosses from an Old Manse .........

E. T. A. Hoffmann 1776-1822 German short story writer, novella writer, novelist, and music critic Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................

341 342 343 344 349 362

350

363 365 366 368 382 385

369 380

387 388 389 391 401 419

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2

James Hogg 1770-1835 Scottish poet, novelist, short story and song writer, journalist, editor, playwright, and essayist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: George Saintsbury on The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner ..................................

421 423 424 425 428 438

Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Edwin F. Casebeer on the influence of King’s life on his works ......................................................

482 483 485 494 504

492

Author Index .................................................. 511 Title Index ...................................................... 515 Subject Index .................................................. 525

430

VOLUME 3 Washington Irving 1783-1859 American short story writer, essayist, historian, journalist, and biographer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Donald A. Ringe on Irving’s Gothic .......................................

Henry James 1843-1916 American novelist, short story and novella writer, essayist, critic, biographer, autobiographer, and playwright Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Virginia Woolf on James’s ghost stories ..............................

441 443 444 446 456 459

450

461 464 465 466 470 478

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Stephen King 1947American novelist, short story writer, novella writer, scriptwriter, nonfiction writer, autobiographer, and author of children’s books Introduction ................................................. 481

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 1814-1873 Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, journalist, and editor Introduction ..................................................... 1 Principal Works ................................................ 3 Primary Sources ................................................ 3 General Commentary ...................................... 5 Title Commentary .......................................... 16 Further Reading .............................................. 27 Sidebars: About the Author: S. M. Ellis on Le Fanu’s horror fiction ............................. 6 About the Author: Edna Kenton on Le Fanu’s legacy ....................................... 22

Matthew Gregory Lewis 1775-1818 English novelist, playwright, diarist, prose writer, and poet Introduction ................................................... Principal Works .............................................. Primary Sources .............................................. General Commentary .................................... Title Commentary .......................................... Further Reading .............................................. Sidebars: About the Author: Lord Byron on “Monk” Lewis .......................................... About the Author: Joseph James Irwin on Lewis’s mastery of horror and terror .........................................................

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31 33 34 36 46 70

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Sidebars: About the Author: Sir Walter Scott on Hoffmann’s talent and mental state ..... 392 About the Author: Palmer Cobb on Hoffmann’s genius ................................. 412

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Charles Robert Maturin 1780-1824 Irish novelist and playwright Introduction ................................................... 73 Principal Works .............................................. 74 Primary Sources .............................................. 75 General Commentary .................................... 76 Title Commentary .......................................... 84 Further Reading ............................................ 104 Sidebars: From the Author: An excerpt from Maturin’s Preface to Melmoth the Wanderer ................................................... 85 About the Author: An excerpt from an early review of Melmoth the Wanderer ................................................... 98

Herman Melville 1819-1891 American novelist, short story writer, and poet Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Jay MacPherson on Melville’s “The Bell Tower” and Frankenstein ............................................ About the Author: Excerpt from an early review of Moby-Dick ......................

Toni Morrison 1931American novelist, essayist, playwright, critic, author of children’s books, and editor Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: From the Author: An excerpt from the conclusion of Beloved .............................

Joyce Carol Oates 1938American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, playwright, author of children’s books, nonfiction writer, and poet Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................

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107 109 110 111 118 132

111 125

135 136 137 138 142 160

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163 165 167 168 178

Further Reading ............................................ 185 Sidebars: From the Author: Oates’s “Reflections on the Grotesque” ................................. 179

Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849 American short story writer, poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and critic Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: D. H. Lawrence on the purpose of Poe’s tales ..................... About the Author: H. P. Lovecraft on Poe’s literary innovations ......................

Ann Radcliffe 1764-1823 English novelist, poet, and journal writer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Sir Walter Scott on Radcliffe’s talent ..................................... About the Author: Edith Birkhead on Radcliffe and the Gothic ........................ About the Author: Devendra P. Varma on Radcliffe’s legacy ...............................

Anne Rice 1941American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Angela Carter on Rice’s self-consciousness ........................ From the Author: Rice on her fears .........

187 190 190 193 205 228

203 219

231 233 233 238 245 260

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263 265 266 277 286

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Sir Walter Scott 1771-1832 Scottish novelist, poet, short story writer, biographer, historian, critic, and editor Introduction ................................................. 289

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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 1797-1851 English novelist, editor, critic, short story and travel writer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Marilyn Butler on Shelley’s life and its impact on Frankenstein ............................................ About the Author: Ellen Moers on motherhood, the Female Gothic, and Frankenstein ............................................ About the Author: Sir Walter Scott on Frankenstein and the use of the supernatural in fiction ...........................

Robert Louis Stevenson 1850-1894 Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and playwright Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: John Addington Symonds on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ...... From the Author: Stevenson’s dedication in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde .......................

Bram Stoker 1847-1912 Irish novelist, short story writer, and essayist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................

292 293 297 317

Sidebars: About the Author: Montague Summers on the enduring nature of Dracula ........ 395 About the Author: An excerpt from an early review of Dracula ..................... 405

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Horace Walpole 1717-1797 English novelist, biographer, memoirist, historian, essayist, playwright, and letter writer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Frederick S. Frank on The Mysterious Mother ....................... About the Author: Sir Walter Scott offers high praise for Walpole and The Castle of Otranto ..................................... About the Author: H. P. Lovecraft on Walpole’s influence on the Gothic ........

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319 321 321 327 335 356

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359 361 362 364 382

365 373

385 387 387 393 427

429 432 432 434 454

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Edith Wharton 1862-1937 American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and autobiographer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Annette Zilversmit on Wharton’s “Pomegranate Seed” .......

457 460 460 462 485

Oscar Wilde 1854-1900 Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, critic, poet, and short story writer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Julian Hawthorne on The Picture of Dorian Gray .................

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Author Index .................................................. 523 Title Index ...................................................... 527 Subject Index .................................................. 537

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Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: William Hazlitt on Scott’s achievements as a writer of prose ....................................................... About the Author: Maria Edgeworth, in a letter to Sir Walter Scott, 1814 .......

Gothic initially—Walpole saw it as a combination of the supernatural “ancient” and the more realistic “modern” romance—have made it unstable from the start and so have led it to “expatiate” widely and wildly (Walpole’s own word in his 1765 Preface) and hence to carry its volatile inconsistency into every form it has assumed, from its beginnings in mid-eighteenth century England to its current profusion throughout the Western world at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Yet what are the traits that hold “the Gothic” together, if only just barely, as it spreads itself like one of its specters or monstrosities across literary, dramatic, and other audio-visual forms? As the following essays and excerpts show, all truly Gothic stories or stagings take place, at least part of the time, in some sort of antiquated (sometimes falsely antiquated) space, be it a castle, ruin, crumbling abbey, graveyard, old manor house or theater, haunted wilderness or neighborhood, cellar or attic full of artifacts—or aging train station, rusted manufacturing plant, or outdated spaceship. This space, reminiscent of medieval “Gothic” castles or churches but often existing long after those in more modern recastings of their features, threatens to overwhelm and engulf protagonists (including readers or viewers) in the setting’s vastness, darkness, and vaguely threatening, even irrational, depths. That is usually because this space is haunted or invaded by some form of ghost,

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These very useful Critical Companion volumes offer a wide range of historical accounts about, literary excerpts from, and critical interpretations of a long-standing mode of fiction-making that has come to be called “the Gothic.” Though this label has most often been attached to “terrifying” or “horrific” pieces of prose fiction ever since Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (the founding text of this form, first published in 1764) added the subtitle A Gothic Story to its Second British Edition of 1765, the hyperbolic and haunting features of this highly popular, but often controversial, mode have proliferated across the last twoand-a-half centuries in an increasing array of forms: novels, prose “romances,” plays, paintings, operas, short stories, narrative and lyric poems, “shilling shocker” tales, newspaper serials and crime-reports, motion pictures, television shows, comic books, “graphic” novels, and even video games. That variety of presentation is what now makes “the Gothic” the best phrase for describing this ongoing phenomenon. It has proven to be a set of transportable features more than it has been a single genre. Its variations are not so much similar in compositional form as they are inclined to share certain settings, symbols, situations, psychological states, and emotional effects on readers or audiences, all of which appear at least somewhat in The Castle of Otranto but have gone on to vary greatly in their manifestations over time. The incompatible generic ingredients of the

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specter, or monster, a frightening crosser of the supposed boundaries between life and death, natural and supernatural, or “normal” and “abnormal.” Usually this figure betokens some hidden “primal crime” buried from sight ages ago or having occurred in the recent past, the truth about which at least seems to lie in the darkest depths, or deepest darkness, of the antiquated space. Gothic protagonists and their readers or viewers, faced with this haunting in such a setting, are thus pulled back and forth (like the Gothic as a mode) between older and newer states of being, longing to escape into the seeming safety of one or the other but kept in a tug-of-war of terrifying suspense between the powers of the past and the present, darkness and daylight, insane incoherence and rational order. At the same time, the extreme fictionality of all these elements is so emphasized in the melodramatic exaggeration of Gothic description and characterizations that the threats in these situations are made to seem both imminent (about to appear) and immanent (sequestered within) and yet safely distant, at least for readers or audiences. As in the “scary movies” of more recent times, many of which employ or derive from the Gothic, the spectators of such fictions can experience the thrill of fear that the threats really arouse and at the same time feel entirely safe from those threats because it is all so obviously artificial and unlikely to become real or lead to real consequences. Any fiction that does not have all these basic features to some extent is not really “Gothic” through and through, although many adjacent fictions (such as those of Charles Dickens or Herman Melville or most films directed by Alfred Hitchcock or M. Night Shyamalan) use pieces of the Gothic to arouse some of the suggestions and effects associated with it. Even when fictions are thoroughly Gothic, however, as are the ones most emphasized in these volumes, they can vary widely across a continuum between terror and horror. Near the end of her life and career, Ann Radcliffe, arguably the most influential British author of Gothic romances in the turbulent 1790s (including The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian), composed a dialogue “On the Supernatural in Poetry” that appeared posthumously with her last novel, Gaston de Blondeville, in 1826. There her fictional interlocutors make a clear distinction between devices that invoke “the terrible” (a suspenseful uncertainty about hidden possibilities that could be violent or repulsive or supernatural but rarely appear in such extreme forms) and blatant descriptions that

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expose “the horrible” (the unambiguously violent, deadly, grotesque, and even horrifically supernatural, so much so that the line between what is “sanctioned” and “forbidden” has been crossed without a doubt). Radcliffe herself, as her novels show, clearly prefers the suggestiveness of terror, to the point where her violence is more potential than actual and the apparently supernatural is always explained away, as is the case with many of her successors in Gothic writing. She thereby places herself and her imitators squarely in the tradition of the “sublime” defined as the safely fearful or awesome by Edmund Burke in his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Gothic “horror,” by contrast, became most epitomized in Radcliffe’s time by Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), filled as it is, not just with a vociferous anti-Catholicism that Radcliffe shares, but with explicit sexual intercourse, incestuous rape and murder, the brutal dismembering of a tyrannical nun by a mob, and the physical appearance of Satan himself as homosexually seductive. The blatantly stagey hyperbole of Lewis’s style makes all this less immediate than it might otherwise be, but it also defines the “horrible” extreme of the Gothic continuum that locates the mere potentiality of “terror” at its opposite end. It thus helps establish a polarity across which the Gothic has played ever since, as it wafts between, say, Daphne du Maurier’s Radcliffean Rebecca (1938) and William Peter Blatty’s horrific The Exorcist (1971) and their ongoing imitators of both types. The Gothic is set off from other forms of fiction by its Walpolean features but also demarcated within itself by its leanings at times towards “terrific” suspense, on the one hand, and graphic “horror,” on the other. The two come together mostly in extreme cases such as Stoker’s original novel Dracula (1897), where suspenseful intimations about the Count’s vampiric nature in “sublime” Transylvania give way to his graphic gorging of himself with the blood of a married woman before witnesses in Victorian London, after which he breaks all “normal” gender boundaries by drawing the same woman to his breast to suck up his own already vampiric blood. It is this whole range of Gothic possibilities that the following excerpts and accounts explore, since this anamorphic (or self-distorting) and metamorphic (or shape-shifting) form of fiction has been pulled between these extremes, we now see, from its earliest manifestations. The tension between the terrifying and the horrible in the Gothic, moreover, has developed

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As supernatural levels of being have become increasingly doubted in the post-Renaissance world of the West, the terrors or horrors generated from within have become a staple of the Gothic and projected onto its haunted settings, just as much as older beliefs in seductive Satan-figures have continued to be in the vein of The Monk, The Exorcist, or Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (19762001). The most debated Gothic story in Western history may be Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw

(1898), in which the highly repressed governess of two children in a castellated old estate-house is convinced she sees the ghosts of her predecessor, Miss Jessel, and Jessel’s lower-class lover, Peter Quint, but may just as likely be projecting them onto the estate-world she observes as she sublimates her own desires for an absentee Master far above her in social station. Even today, as parts of these volumes show, readers and viewers cannot be sure when they begin Gothic tales or films— though they often find out in “twist” endings (in such pictures as The Sixth Sense and The Others)— whether the haunting specters they see are the delusions of characters or unambiguously otherworldly, outside any psychological point of view. We sometimes long for the comfort of supernatural visitations but fear how much this longing comes from irrational psychic forces in ourselves and others, and the Gothic plays on and explores these apprehensions, as it has for over two hundred years. But this last point demands a fuller answer to the most lingering question about the conflicted oddity that is the Gothic as it multiplies into all the forms explored in these volumes: Why do we have this malleable symbolic mode in AngloEuropean Western culture and its former colonies, and why does this anamorphic form, torn as it is between extremes (supernatural/realistic, horrible/ terrifying, really frightening/merely fictional, ontological/psychological, and others), persist from The Castle of Otranto in the 1760s through Frankenstein and Dracula to films, novels, and video games of today, some of which keep repeatedly adapting some of those older stories for new audiences? Numerous answers are offered in the definitional and interpretive essays that follow, as well as in some Gothic tales themselves, here excerpted at their most indicative moments. But I would like to begin the discussion by suggesting the most overriding reasons why the Gothic has arisen and why it persists as a cultural formation clearly needed, as well as wanted, by Western readers and audiences. To begin with, “the Gothic” comes about at a time in the West when the oldest structures of Christian religiosity (including Roman Catholicism) and social hierarchies seemingly predetermined to the advantage of hereditary aristocrats (symbolized by their castles or estate-houses) are starting to fragment and decay, as in Walpole’s principal Ghost (who appears initially in pieces), even as these receding forms hang on as standard grounds of being in the minds of many. At such a time, the older symbols of power seem increas-

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into another continuum of symbolic possibilities—the “psychological” versus “ontological” or supernatural Gothic—especially since 1800. If Radcliffe’s heroines in the 1790s think themselves into states of fear that are finally based on associations of ideas not corroborated by the outside world, it is a small step from there to the projection of a whole state of mind into an external space that is vast, dark, and threatening more because of drives inside the observer than its own separate features. Hence the tormenting Spirits that rise in the Higher Alps at the bidding of the title character in Lord Byron’s Gothic verse-drama Manfred (1817) are, as he admits, “The mind, the spirit, the Promethean spark, / The lightning of my being” as much as anything else. At about the same time, though, Dr. John Polidori, Byron’s personal physician and occasional lover, forecasts the late Victorian coming of Dracula with his Byronic novella The Vampyre (1819), in which the predatory Lord Ruthven seems threatening at first only in the suspicious thoughts of the hero (Aubrey) until the latter faces the horror that his own sister “has glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE,” which Ruthven turns out to have been for centuries. In this latter case, Gothic monstrosity is granted the ontological state of being quite outside any observer, a distinct existence confirmed from multiple points of view, as in Stoker’s Dracula. Throughout the nineteenth century, starting with the Romantic era of Byron and Polidori, the Gothic careens incessantly between the strictly psychological, where ghosts or monsters are more mental than physical, and the unabashedly supernatural in which an other-worldly horror violently invades the space of the self from outside its boundaries. When both are involved, though, the nineteenth century tilts more often towards rooting the supernatural in the psyche. That is certainly the case in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), now the most famous Gothic tale in history, where the half-fantastic creature composed from multiple carcasses is mostly an outsized sewing-together of his creator’s most repressed, libidinous, and boundary-crossing impulses.

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ingly hollowed out, like the ruins of medieval Gothic structures, while they also seem locations that vaguely harbor historical foundations for human minds newly liberated by the rational and scientific Enlightenment that is overthrowing the older orders by degrees in the eighteenth century. In this situation, while beliefs about the selfdetermining (rather than strictly hereditary) individual start to gain ascendancy and give greater weight to personal psychology over predetermined roles, Westerners face an existential anxiety about where they really come from and the orders to which they belong when the bestknown external indicators of those groundings are becoming empty repositories, realms filled up with the nostalgic desires projected into them more than the metaphysical and cultural certainties once manifested by them. As Leslie Fiedler has shown by exposing the basis of the American Gothic in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), this uprooted, yet rootseeking, condition for Westerners around 1765 makes them hover between longings for past securities, though these are also seen as primitively irrational and confining, and longings for rebellion against those patriarchal schemes, which simultaneously produce a sense of guilt about the overthrow of those “fathers,” making that revolution a sort of “primal crime.” Guilt, after all, is what Walpole’s Prince Manfred feels when he finds that his own grandfather once murdered the original founder of Otranto and usurped its birthright from the latter’s heirs, the same way as the rising middle class of the eighteenth century (the main readership of the Gothic as time went on) probably felt about gradually decimating the very power-bases it now sought to occupy in place of the aristocracy. In addition, Fiedler writes, this sense of haunted guilt and uncertainties about middle-class entitlement raised “the fear that in destroying the old ego-ideals of Church and State, the West has opened a way for the inruption of darkness: for insanity and the disintegration of the self.” The Gothic of Walpole and its acceleration by the 1790s in Radcliffe and Lewis come about, since fictions always respond to the needs of their audiences, to address and symbolize this cultural and psychological condition of early capitalist and pre-industrial modernity. That is why the early Gothic places both desires for lost foundations and fears about the irrational darkness lying outside the limits of newly enlightened reason in the same antiquated spaces and their mysterious depths, which Gothic characters from Manfred to Lewis’s monk then seek to penetrate

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or recover and escape or destroy so as to construct a sense of identity that is somehow both grounded and self-determined. The Gothic is a powerful symbolic indicator, then, of the social and psychic contradictions out of which the modern Western self emerged and keeps emerging, and we need and want it, I would argue, to keep retelling that story that is so basic to our modern sense of ourselves. The story has kept developing in the West, however, and the Gothic has developed with it. As the ideological belief in personal self-making becomes even more accepted towards the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the individual mind comes to be viewed as the dynamic, but also anxious, site of its own “ghosts” and increasing depths. Ann Radcliffe and many of her contemporaries accept the basic premises of empirical psychology, which claims (since John Locke in the 1690s, anyway) that the human mind begins as a near-vacancy and gradually accumulates and organizes the memories it retains (hence the “ghosts”) of earlier and more recent sense-perceptions. Adult observations in later life are therefore colored by the associations of previous, and now ghost-like, impressions that are applied to the intake of newer phenomena. Terry Castle can consequently see in The Female Thermometer (1995) that the Radcliffean Gothic turns landscapes as well as characters into “spectralized” thoughts within reflective states of mind that make nature seem already painted (and thus filtered by perceivers) and people already colored by older sayings and texts about their “types.” To observe at any moment in the Gothic from the 1790s on is to call attention, at least some of the time, to the lenses of perception and the gradually accumulated psychic layers of associated memories that are projected onto any object contemplated or produced by the perceiving self. Ruins and old houses, as well as Frankenstein-ian creatures, are now filled with dark indications of deep past threats because the mind transfers its own layers of developing perceptions, as well as middle-class guilt, into what it sees and thus confronts its own “doubling” there, its deepest internal memories reembodied in perceptions of external depths now haunted by mental ghosts. When Victor Frankenstein first sees the face of his finished creature in Mary Shelley’s Gothic book, he falls into a regressive dream in which the mottled visage of his fabrication from dead bodies becomes linked to his longing for his own deceased mother, whose corpse he preconsciously has seen himself re-embracing while

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It is no wonder, then, that the Gothic comes to be torn constantly between terror and horror, on one level, and the psychological and the clearly supernatural, on another. Terror offers the uneasy comfort that what we fear, being mentally constructed for the most part, could be non-existent in the end (as in Radcliffe’s conclusions), except in our own minds. Such solipsism, however, can also be seen as a myopic middle-class or even aristocratic avoidance of the violent upheavals and even greater displacements of older orders brought on by the exploding mercantile and industrial economies—and the racist imperialism that went with them—in the nineteenth century. Consequently, this era’s Gothic invasions of the isolated psyche by “horror,” the external violence and many forms of non-middle-class “ugliness” that cannot be wished away as mere thought, force this counter-awareness on audiences, albeit through extreme fictionality, increasingly so in the form of the vampire made prominent by Polidori. By the time of the serialized Varney the Vampire (1847), usually attributed to Thomas Peckett Prest, and the many stagings of vampire plays in Victorian England, France, and America, this Gothic monster can symbolize many potential invaders of middle-class security simultaneously, from vengeful old aristocrats to foreign and racial “others” to diseases of the blood made more virulent by urban growth, foreign tourism, and the expansion of prostitution. The nineteenth century in the West, we can say, needs the Gothic to carry out and fictively obscure the cultural hesitation at the time between middle-class withdrawal into increasing private spaces, including sheer thought (which thereby confronts its own deep irrationalities), and the need of the same people to face the horrors of growing cities and empires with their illnesses, “unclean” impoverished laborers, exploited women, and enslaved “colored” races.

What the Gothic does in part, among its reaction to these changes, is to increase the struggle between its psychological and supernatural tendencies. First, it becomes the source of many symbols for the concept of the “unconscious” that Sigmund Freud, building on many others, brought into wide prominence by the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. Especially insofar as the Gothic has gradually become a realm of mental projection and of the mind forced back to the beginnings and hauntings of its own development, it has provided the archaic depths, dim repositories, memory-traces, accumulations of memories layer upon layer, and primal states (including regressions back to “mother” or sheer vacancy) from which Freud and his contemporaries craft their description of the unconscious and its sublimation by pre-conscious and conscious levels of thought. In the early twentieth century, the Gothic therefore comes to be seen as primarily psychological in the sense of psychoanalytic, as long having manifested in its haunted spaces and the mental quandaries of its characters the processes of thought described by Freud, even though it is more accurate to say that the Gothic first helped make Freud’s schemes conceivable and expressible. Back in Freud’s formative period, though, the assertion of the human species’s long physical evolution by Charles Darwin and others from the 1850s on challenges the layerings of personal consciousness with a biologically historical progression beyond, yet still working inside, individual people. The Gothic reacts by reinvoking its old invasions of supernatural, or at least trans-individual, forces to show psychological projections running up against pervasive external drives that may really control the psyche after all. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) may seem to suggest a psychological bifurcation in the Victorian self, with Jekyll as internalized superego and Hyde as raging libido, but the Doctor’s attempts to control this internal split finally cannot prevent the “troglodytic” emergence of all that remains primitively devolved in his superficially evolved condition. Even more dramatically, Stoker’s Count Dracula arouses and enacts unconscious libidinal desires by being a devolved, “child-brain” force supernaturally driving across centuries that invades “civilized” England with all the diseases and the racial and animalistic “others” that the supposedly evolved want to keep distant from themselves and cannot. The Turn of the Screw plays out an undecidability between the dominance of the psychological and

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he tries to make life out of death without the biological involvement of a woman. By 1820 at least, the Gothic has become the fictional locus where outward quests for self-completion now are seen as mainly inward probings through the archaic layers of the self. Gothic “objects,” from antiquated locations to other people to mere things, have thus become manifestations of the perceiver’s own growing depths of thought in which the desire for pre-rational foundations is actually pursuing “the mother” conceived of as the initial interplay of self and other that produces the confused beginnings, later repressed, of all thought, sensation, and memory.

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the power of the supernatural because the nineteenth-century West in its final years needs ways to articulate that it is frantically at odds with itself over what to believe about the deepest foundations of life. The Gothic from its beginnings and as it evolves with the cultural changes around it, in other words, turns out to be the modern Western world’s most striking, if most conflicted, symbolic method for both confronting and disguising its own unresolved struggles with incompatible beliefs about what it means to be human. Walpole’s Castle starts the tradition by leaving its readers caught where most of them already were: between longings for a fading hierarchical order underwritten by supernatural assurances (“ancient romance”) and desires for greater selfdetermination based on free re-imaginings of uprooted older perceptions (“modern romance”). Radcliffe and Lewis, during the revolutionary 1790s, help readers confront and prevent cultural dissolution by offering reassurances that spectral perceptions of danger to the self can finally control the terror those specters produce and shocking revelations at the same time that current upheavals are but symptoms of multiple irrationalities that established religion and governments have tried to repress only to force them towards more extreme violence. Frankenstein offers a condemnation and a celebration of the scientific and industrial advances puzzled over by its readers, along with symbols for the unsettled debate over whether life is externally infused (by, say, some ultimate Father) or internally generated (primarily within the mother whom Victor both remembers and tries to forget). Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula both blame individual free will for inviting its underlying depravities into consciousness and point to attacks on the evolved Anglo race by “devolved” levels of humanity from other times and places. In extreme forms of expression that allow us to perceive or avoid such levels in our thinking, the Gothic holds up to us our conflicted conservative and progressive tendencies in the full cry of their unresolved tug-of-war in our culture and in ourselves. Our hesitation between psychological and supernatural causes for events or

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between inherited and self-determined foundations of identity or between feeling controlled by our pasts and asserting our capacities to alter ourselves decisively in the present: all these stillactive antinomies of modern existence are what the Gothic is fundamentally generated to articulate and to obscure. Over one hundred years after Stoker’s Dracula, of course, the kinds of tendencies we are torn between have changed somewhat, as the more recent Gothic certainly shows. We both want to transcend, even forget, and want to throw ourselves fully into the past (or is it fully past?) condition of slavery and racism that haunts the history of America in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). We want to preserve childhood innocence and see it as really filled with dark drives to be conquered and controlled in Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and Daniel Mann’s Willard (1982) as well as The Exorcist and its “prequels” and sequels on film. We paranoiacally want to find evidence of old conspiracies that explain our current confusions of values and see them as but the imaginings of diseased nostalgic minds in the quite Gothic X-Files television series (1993-2002) or the four Alien films (1979-97) full of Gothic echoes. Still, the Gothic, as the accounts and excerpts in these volumes will reveal in fuller detail, remains one of the key ways we come to terms, while also avoiding direct confrontation, with the betwixtand-between, regressive-progressive, seemingly predetermined-hopefully undetermined nature of modern life. The Gothic is complex and tangled in its proliferations, but fairly simple in its aims: it allows us to play with our inexplicable and haunted modern lives in some fictional safety while concurrently helping us give shape and form to the conflicted beings we really are. I therefore invite our readers to enjoy and ponder the following descents into the Gothic maelstrom of pleasure and fear that reveals so much about modern Western existence. —Jerrold E. Hogle, Ph.D. University of Arizona

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In response to a growing demand for relevant criticism and interpretation of perennial topics and important literary movements throughout history, the Gale Critical Companion Collection (GCCC) was designed to meet the research needs of upper high school and undergraduate students. Each edition of GCCC focuses on a different literary movement or topic of broad interest to students of literature, history, multicultural studies, humanities, foreign language studies, and other subject areas. Topics covered are based on feedback from a standing advisory board consisting of reference librarians and subject specialists from public, academic, and school library systems. The GCCC is designed to complement Gale’s existing Literary Criticism Series (LCS), which includes such award-winning and distinguished titles as Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (NCLC), Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism (TCLC), and Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC). Like the LCS titles, the GCCC editions provide selected reprinted essays that offer an inclusive range of critical and scholarly response to authors and topics widely studied in high school and undergraduate classes; however, the GCCC also includes primary source documents, chronologies, sidebars, supplemental photographs, and other material not included in the LCS products. The graphic and supplemental material is designed to extend the usefulness of the critical essays and

provide students with historical and cultural context on a topic or author’s work. GCCC titles will benefit larger institutions with ongoing subscriptions to Gale’s LCS products as well as smaller libraries and school systems with less extensive reference collections. Each edition of the GCCC is created as a stand-alone set providing a wealth of information on the topic or movement. Importantly, the overlap between the GCCC and LCS titles is 15% or less, ensuring that LCS subscribers will not duplicate resources in their collection. Editions within the GCCC are either singlevolume or multi-volume sets, depending on the nature and scope of the topic being covered. Topic entries and author entries are treated separately, with entries on related topics appearing first, followed by author entries in an A-Z arrangement. Each volume is approximately 500 pages in length and includes approximately 50 images and sidebar graphics. These sidebars include summaries of important historical events, newspaper clippings, brief biographies of important figures, complete poems or passages of fiction written by the author, descriptions of events in the related arts (music, visual arts, and dance), and so on. The reprinted essays in each GCCC edition explicate the major themes and literary techniques of the authors and literary works. It is important to note that approximately 85% of the essays reprinted in GCCC editions are full-text, meaning

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The Gale Critical Companion Collection

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that they are reprinted in their entirety, including footnotes and lists of abbreviations. Essays are selected based on their coverage of the seminal works and themes of an author, and based on the importance of those essays to an appreciation of the author’s contribution to the movement and to literature in general. Gale’s editors select those essays of most value to upper high school and undergraduate students, avoiding narrow and highly pedantic interpretations of individual works or of an author’s canon.

Scope of Gothic Literature Gothic Literature, the fourth set in the Gale Critical Companion Collection, consists of three volumes. Each volume includes a detailed table of contents, a foreword on the subject of Gothic literature written by noted scholar Jerrold E. Hogle, and a descriptive chronology of key events throughout the history of the genre. The mainbody of volume 1 consists of entries on five topics relevent to Gothic literature and art, including 1) Gothic Literature: An Overview; 2) Society, Culture, and the Gothic; 3) Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures; 4) Performing Arts and The Gothic; and 5) Visual Arts and the Gothic. Volumes 2 and 3 include entries on thirty-seven authors and literary figures associated with the genre, including such notables as Matthew Gregory Lewis, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Bram Stoker, as well as entries on individuals who have garnered less attention, but whose contributions to the genre are noteworthy, such as Joanna Baillie, Daphne du Maurier, Washington Irving, Edith Wharton, and Oscar Wilde.

Organization of Gothic Literature A Gothic Literature topic entry consists of the following elements: • The Introduction defines the subject of the entry and provides social and historical information important to understanding the criticism. • The list of Representative Works identifies writings and works by authors and figures associated with the subject. The list is divided into alphabetical sections by name; works listed under each name appear in chronological order. The genre and publication date of each work is given. Unless otherwise indicated, plays are dated by first performance, not first publication. • Entries generally begin with a section of Primary Sources, which includes essays, speeches,

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social history, newspaper accounts and other materials that were produced during the time covered. • Reprinted Criticism in topic entries is arranged thematically. Topic entries commonly begin with general surveys of the subject or essays providing historical or background information, followed by essays that develop particular aspects of the topic. For example, the Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures entry in volume 1 of Gothic Literature begins with a section providing primary source material that demonstrates gothic themes, settings, and figures. This is followed by a section providing topic overviews, and three other sections: Haunted Dwellings and the Supernatural; Psychology and the Gothic; and Vampires. Each section has a separate title heading and is identified with a page number in the table of contents. The critic’s name and the date of composition or publication of the critical work are given at the beginning of each piece of criticism. Unsigned criticism is preceded by the title of the source in which it appeared. Footnotes are reprinted at the end of each essay or excerpt. In the case of excerpted criticism, only those footnotes that pertain to the excerpted texts are included. • A complete Bibliographical Citation of the original essay or book precedes each piece of criticism. • Critical essays are prefaced by brief Annotations explicating each piece. Unless the descriptor “excerpt” is used in the annotation, the essay is being reprinted in its entirety. • An annotated bibliography of Further Reading appears at the end of each entry and suggests resources for additional study. In some cases, significant essays for which the editors could not obtain reprint rights are included here. A Gothic Literature author entry consists of the following elements: • The Author Heading cites the name under which the author most commonly wrote, followed by birth and death dates. Also located here are any name variations under which an author wrote. If the author wrote consistently under a pseudonym, the pseudonym will be listed in the author heading and the author’s actual name given in parenthesis on the first line of the biographical and critical information. Uncertain birth or death dates are indicated by question marks.

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• The Introduction contains background information that introduces the reader to the author that is the subject of the entry. • The list of Principal Works is ordered chronologically by date of first publication and lists the most important works by the author. The genre and publication date of each work is given. Unless otherwise indicated, plays are dated by first performance, not first publication. • Author entries are arranged into three sections: Primary Sources, General Commentary, and Title Commentary. The Primary Sources section includes letters, poems, short stories, journal entries, and essays written by the featured author. General Commentary includes overviews of the author’s career and general studies; Title Commentary includes in-depth analyses of seminal works by the author. Within the Title Commentary section, the reprinted criticism is further organized by title, then by date of publication. The critic’s name and the date of composition or publication of the critical work are given at the beginning of each piece of criticism. Unsigned criticism is preceded by the title of the source in which it appeared All titles by the author featured in the text are printed in boldface type. However, not all boldfaced titles are included in the author and subject indexes; only substantial discussions of works are indexed. Footnotes are reprinted at the end of each essay or excerpt. In the case of excerpted criticism, only those footnotes that pertain to the excerpted texts are included. • A complete Bibliographical Citation of the original essay or book precedes each piece of criticism. • Critical essays are prefaced by brief Annotations explicating each piece. Unless the descriptor “excerpt” is used in the annotation, the essay is being reprinted in its entirety. • An annotated bibliography of Further Reading appears at the end of each entry and suggests resources for additional study. In some cases, significant essays for which the editors could not obtain reprint rights are included here. A list of Other Sources from Thomson Gale follows the Further Reading section and provides references to other biographical and critical sources on the author in series published by Gale.

Indexes The Author Index lists all of the authors featured in the Gothic Literature set, with references to the main author entries in volumes 2 and 3 as well as commentary on the featured author in other author entries and in the topic volumes. Page references to substantial discussions of the authors appear in boldface. Authors featured in sidebars are indexed as well. The Author Index also includes birth and death dates and cross references between pseudonyms and actual names, and cross references to other Gale series in which the authors have appeared. A complete list of these sources is found facing the first page of the Author Index. The Title Index alphabetically lists the titles of works written by the authors featured in volumes 2 and 3 and provides page numbers or page ranges where commentary on these titles can be found. Page references to substantial discussions of the titles appear in boldface. English translations of foreign titles and variations of titles are cross-referenced to the title under which a work was originally published. Titles of novels, plays, nonfiction books, films, and poetry, short story, or essay collections are printed in italics, while individual poems, short stories, and essays are printed in roman type within quotation marks. The Subject Index includes the authors and titles that appear in the Author Index and the Title Index as well as the names of other authors and figures that are discussed in the set. The Subject Index also lists hundreds of literary terms and topics covered in the criticism. The index provides page numbers or page ranges where subjects are discussed and is fully cross referenced.

Citing Gothic Literature When writing papers, students who quote directly from the GL set may use the following general format to footnote reprinted criticism. The first example pertains to material drawn from periodicals, the second to material reprinted from books. Markley, A. A. “The Godwinian Confessional Narrative and Psychological Terror in Arthur Gordon Pym.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 4, no. 1 (spring 2003): 4-16; reprinted in Gothic Literature: A Gale Critical Companion, vol. 3, ed. Jessica Bomarito (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006), 29-42. Mishra, Vijay. “Theorizing the (Gothic) Sublime,” in The Gothic Sublime (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 19-43; reprinted in Gothic Literature: A Gale Critical Companion, vol. 1, ed. Jessica Bomarito (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006), 21117.

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• A Portrait of the Author is included when available.

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Gothic Literature Advisory Board The members of the Gothic Literature Advisory Board—reference librarians and subject specialists from public, academic, and school library systems—offered a variety of informed perspectives on both the presentation and content of the Gothic Literature set. Advisory board members assessed and defined such quality issues as the relevance, currency, and usefulness of the author coverage, critical content, and topics included in our product; evaluated the layout, presentation, and general quality of our product; provided feedback on the criteria used for selecting authors and topics covered in our product; identified any gaps in our coverage of authors or topics, recommending authors or topics for inclusion; and analyzed the appropriateness of our content and presentation for various user audiences, such as high school

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students, undergraduates, graduate students, librarians, and educators. We wish to thank the advisors for their advice during the development of Gothic Literature

Suggestions are Welcome Readers who wish to suggest new features, topics, or authors to appear in future volumes of the Gale Critical Companion Collection, or who have other suggestions or comments are cordially invited to call, write, or fax the Product Manager. Product Manager, Gale Critical Companion Collection Thomson Gale 27500 Drake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535 1-800-347-4253 (GALE) Fax: 248-699-8054

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Copyrighted material in Gothic Literature was reproduced from the following periodicals: Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), v. 2, spring, 2003. Copyright © 2003 Americana: The Institute for the Study of American Popular Culture. Reproduced by permission.—American Transcendental Quarterly, v. 9, March 1, 1995; v. 1, 2001. Copyright © 1995, 2001 by The University of Rhode Island. Both reproduced by permission.—Arizona Quarterly, v. 34, 1978 for “The Gothic Formula of ‘Bartleby’” by Steven T. Ryan. Copyright © 1978 by Arizona Board of Regents, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Bucknell Review, v. XII, May, 1964. Reproduced by permission.—Col-

lege English, v. 27, March 1, 1966 for “Dr. Jekyll and the Emergence of Mr. Hyde” by Masao Miyoshi. Republished in The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians, New York University Press, 1969, University of London Press, 1969. Copyright © 1966 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Comparative Literature Studies, v. 24, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—Costerus, v. I, 1972. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Critical Survey, v. 15, September, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Critical Survey. Republished with permission of Critical Survey, conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.— Dalhousie Review, v. 47, summer, 1967 for “Terror Made Relevant: James’s Ghost Stories” by Raymond Thorberg. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, March 1, 2001 for “The Gothic IMAGINARY: Goethe in Strasbourg” by Kenneth S. Calhoon. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Dickens Quarterly, September 1, 1989; v. 16, September 1, 1999. Copyright © 1989, 1999 by the Dickens Society. Both reproduced by permission.—Dickens Studies Newsletter, v. VI, September 1, 1975. Copyright © by the Dickens Society. Reproduced by permission.—Dickensian, September 1, 1977 for “The Fall of the House of Clennam: Gothic Conventions in Little Dorrit” by

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors wish to thank the copyright holders of the excerpted criticism included in this volume and the permissions managers of many book and magazine publishing companies for assisting us in securing reproduction rights. We are also grateful to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library, the Library of Congress, the University of Detroit Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/ Kresge Library Complex, and the University of Michigan Libraries for making their resources available to us. Following is a list of the copyright holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this edition of Gothic Literature. Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let us know.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

David Jarrett. Reproduced by permission of the author.—The Edgar Allan Poe Review, v. IV, spring, 2003 for “The Godwinian Confessional Narrative and Psychological Terror in Arthur Gordon Pym” by A.A. Markley. Copyright © 2003 The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.— Eighteenth-Century Fiction, v. 15, January 1, 2003. Copyright © 2003 Eighteenth-Century Fiction, McMaster University. Reproduced by permission.—ELH, v. 48, autumn, 1981; v. 59, spring, 1992; v. 70, winter, 2003. Copyright © 1981, 1992, 2003 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All reproduced by permission.—ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, v. 18, 1972 for “Poe and the Gothic Tradition” by Maurice Lévy. Translated by Richard Henry Haswell. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the translator.—European Romantic Review, v. 13, June 1, 2002 for “Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya” by Anne K. Mellor. Copyright © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals—Faulkner Journal, v. II, fall, 1986. Copyright © 1987 by Ohio Northern University. Reproduced by permission.—German Life and Letters, v. XVIII, 1964-1965. Copyright © 1964-1965 Basil Blackwell Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Blackwell Publishers.—Gothic. New Series, v. I, 1986; 1987; v. II, 1987. Copyright © 1986, 1987 by Gary William Crawford. All reproduced by permission of the author.—Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, v. X, August 1, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by the Institute for Evolutionary Psychology. Reproduced by permission.— Journal of Popular Culture, v. 13, 1979; v. 26, winter, 1992; v. 30, spring, 1997. Copyright © 1979, 1992, 1997 Basil Blackwell Ltd. All reproduced by permission of Blackwell Publishers.— Literature/Film Quarterly, v. 21, 1993. Copyright © 1993 Salisbury State College. Reproduced by permission.—Malahat Review, 1977 for “Atwood Gothic” by Eli Mandel. Copyright © The Malahat Review, 1977. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of the author.— Mississippi Quarterly, v. XLII, summer, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by Mississippi State University. Reproduced by permission.—Modern Fiction Studies, v. XVII, summer, 1971; v. 46, fall, 2000. Copyright © 1971, 2000 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Both reproduced by permission.—Mosaic, v. 35, 2002; v. 35, March 1, 2002. Copyright © Mosaic 2002. All acknowledgment of previous publication is herewith made.—Narrative, v. 12, January 1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by the Ohio State University. Reproduced by permission.—The Nation and The Athenaeum, v. XXXIII, May 26, 1923. Copyright 1923 New

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Statesman, Ltd. Reproduced by permission.—New York Times Book Review, March 8, 1953 for “The Macabre and the Unexpected” by John Barkham. Copyright 1953, renewed 1981 by The New York Times Company. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of John Barkham.—Papers on Language and Literature, v. 20, winter, 1984; v. 37, winter, 2001. Copyright © 1984, 2001 by The Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Both reproduced by permission.— Princeton University Library Chronicle, v. XLIV, spring, 1983 for “A Story Replete with Horror” by Williston R. Benedict. Copyright © 1983 by Princeton University Library. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, v. 9, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by the American Conference on Romanticism. Reproduced by permission.—Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1994. Copyright © 1994 The Review of Contemporary Fiction. Reproduced by permission.—Review of English Studies, v. XIX, 1968. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—The Saturday Review of Literature, v. XVIII, September 24, 1938 for “Sinister House,” by Basil Davenport. Copyright © 1938, renewed 1966 Saturday Review Magazine, © 1979 General Media International, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—Studies in American Fiction, v. 7, spring, 1979. Copyright © 1979 Northeastern University. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, v. 39, autumn, 1999. Copyright © 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in the Literary Imagination, v. VII, spring, 1974. Copyright © 1974 Department of English, Georgia State University. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in the Novel, v. IX, summer, 1977. Copyright © 1977 by North Texas State University. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in Romanticism, v. 40, spring, 2001. Copyright 2001 by the Trustees of Boston University. Reproduced by permission.— Studies in Scottish Literature, v. XXVIII, 1993. Copyright © G. Ross Roy 1993. Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Studies in Short Fiction, v. 21, fall, 1984. Copyright © 1984 by Studies in Short Fiction. Reproduced by permission.— Studies in Weird Fiction, spring, 1990; winter, 1994; v. 24, winter, 1999. Copyright © 1990, 1994, 1999 Necronomicon Press. All reproduced by permission of the author.—Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Transactions of the Eighth International Congress on the Enlightenment III, v. 305, 1992 for “The Gothic Caleb Williams” by Betty Rizzo. Copyright © 1992 University of Oxford. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Victorian Newsletter, fall, 2002 for “Who Is Heathcliff? The Shadow Knows” by Marilyn Hume. Reproduced by permission of

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Copyrighted material in Gothic Literature was reproduced from the following books: Andriano, Joseph. From Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—Atwood, Margaret. From The Animals in That Country. Atlantic-Little Brown Books, 1969. Copyright © 1968 by Oxford University Press (Canadian Branch). All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, in Canada by Oxford University Press.—Auerbach, Nina. From Our Vampires, Ourselves. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Baldick, Chris. From an Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer. Edited by Douglas Grant. Oxford University Press, 1989. © Oxford University Press 1968, Introduction and Select Biography © Chris Beldick 1989. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.— Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda. From The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. Copyright © 1982 by Associated University Presses, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Bell, Michael Davitt. From The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation. The University of Chicago Press, 1980. Copyright © 1980 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Bleiler, E. F. From “Introduction: William Beckford and Vathek,” in Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, The Vampyre. Edited by E.F. Bleiler. Dover Publications, 1966. Copyright © 1966 by Dover Publications, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Botting, Fred. From Gothic. Routledge, 1996. Copyright © 1996 Fred Botting. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Botting, Fred. From “Reflections of Excess: Frankenstein, the French Revolution, and Monstrosity,” in Reflections of Excess: Frankenstein, the French Revolution and Monstrosity. Edited by Allison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest. Routledge, 1993. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis, the editor, and author.—Botting, Fred. From Gothic. Routledge, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Fred Botting. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the pub-

lisher and the author.—Brantly, Susan C. From Understanding Isak Dinesen. University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Copyright © 2002 University of South Carolina Press. Reproduced by permission.—Brennan, Matthew C. From The Gothic Psyche: Disintegration and Growth in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. Camden House, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by the Editor and Contributors. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Brown, Jane K. and Marshall Brown. From “Faust and the Gothic Novel,” in Interpreting Goethe’s Faust Today. Edited by Jane K. Brown, Meredith Lee, and Thomas P. Saine. Camden House, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Camden House, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—BulwerLytton, Edward George. From “Glenallan,” in Gothic Tales of Terror. Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain. Taplinger Publishing Company, Inc., 1972. Copyright © 1972 selection and original material by Peter Haining. Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Burns, Sarah. From Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America. University of California Press, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by The Regents of the University of California. Reproduced by permission.— Casebeer, Edwin F. From “Stephen King’s Canon: The Art of Balance,” in A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction. Edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison. University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by the University of South Carolina. Reproduced by permission.—Clery, E. J. From “The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s,” in Reviewing Romanticism. Edited by Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis. MacMillan Academic and Professional Ltd., 1992. Editorial matter and selection Copyright © Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis, 1992. Text Copyrights © Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd, 1992. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Clery, E. J. From Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley. Northcote House Publishers, Ltd., 2000, 2004. Copyright © 2000 and 2004 by E. J. Clery. Reproduced by permission.—Clery, Emma. From “Against Gothic,” in Gothick Origins and Innovations. Edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage. Rodopi, 1994. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Conger, Syndy M. From “An Analysis of The Monk and Its German Sources,” in Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans: An Interpretive Study of the Influence of German Literature on Two Gothic Novels. Edited by Dr. James Hogg. Institut Fur Englische Sprache Und Literatur, 1977. Copyright © 1976 by Syndy M. Conger. Reproduced by permission.—Conger, Syndy McMillen. From “The Reconstruction of the Gothic Feminine

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the publisher and author.—West Virginia University Philological Papers, v. 42-43, 1997-1998. Reproduced by permission.—Wordsworth Circle, v. 31, summer, 2000; v. 34, spring, 2003. Copyright © 2000, 2003 Marilyn Gaull. Both reproduced by permission of the editor.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ideal in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights,” in The Female Gothic. Edited by Juliann E. Fleenor. Eden Press, 1983. Copyright © 1983 Eden Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the author.— Davenport-Hines, Richard. From Gothic. North Point Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Richard Davenport-Hines. Reprinted by permission of North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC. In the United Kingdom, Canada and the British Commonwealth by the author.—Dinesen, Isak. From “The Monkey,” in Seven Gothic Tales. Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Inc., 1934; The Modern Library 1939. Copyright © 1934 by Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Inc. Renewed 1961 by Isak Dinesen. Reproduced by permission of the Rungstedlund Foundation. In the United States by Random House, Inc.—du Maurier, Daphne. From Rebecca. Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1938. Copyright 1938 Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc. Renewed 1965 by Daphne du Maurier Browning. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd., London on behalf of The Chichester Partnership.—Duthie, Peter. From Plays on the Passions. Broadview Press, Ltd., 2001. Copyright © 2001 Peter Duthie. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Faulkner, William. From “A Rose for Emily,” in Collected Stories of William Faulkner. Vintage International, 1995. Copyright 1930, renewed 1958 by William Faulkner. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. In the United Kingdom by the Literary Estate of William Faulkner.—Fedorko, Kathy A. From Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton. The University of Alabama Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 The University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Fiedler, Leslie. From Love and Death in the American Novel. Revised edition. Stein and Day, 1966. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Leslie Fiedler.—Fisher, IV, Benjamin F. From “Gothic Possibilities in Moby-Dick,” in Gothick Origins and Innovations. Edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage. Rodopi, 1994. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Frank, Frederick S. From “The Gothic Vathek: The Problem of Genre Resolved,” in AMS Studies in Eighteenth Century: Vathek and the Escape from Time: Bicentenary Revaluations. Edited by Kenneth W. Graham. AMS, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by AMS Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Freud, Sigmund. From The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. Penguin, 2003. Translation and editorial matter Copyright © 2003 by David McLintock. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd. In the United States and the Philippines by the Literary Estate of David McLintock.—Frisch, Shelley L. From “Poetics of the Uncanny: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Sand-

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man,’” in The Scope of the Fantastic: Theory, Technique, Major Authors. Edited by Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearce. Greenwood Press, 1985. Copyright © 1985 by The Thomas Burnett Swann Fund. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.—Gamer, Michael. From an Introduction to The Castle of Otranto. Edited, with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Gamer. Penguin Books, 2001. Editorial matter copyright © Michael Gamer, 2001. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Geary, Robert F. From “Carmilla and the Gothic Legacy: Victorian Transformations of Supernatural Horror,” in The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in Literature. Edited by Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 Bowling Green State University Press. Reproduced by permission.—Goddu, Teresa A. From Gothic America: Narrative, History, and the Nation. Columbia University Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.—Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. From Faust: Part One. Translated by David Luke. Oxford University Press, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by Oxford University Press. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Graham, Kenneth W. From “Emily’s Demon-Lover: The Gothic Revolution and The Mysteries of Udolpho,” in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression. Edited by Kenneth W. Graham. AMS Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by AMS Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Griffith, Clark. From “Poe and the Gothic,” in Papers on Poe: Essays in Honor of John Ward Ostrom. Edited by Richard P. Veler. Chantry Music Press, Inc., 1972. Copyright © 1972 by Chantry Music Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of Clark Griffith.—Gross, Louis S. From Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland to Day of the Dead. UMI Research Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989 Louis Samuel Gross. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Hannaham, James. From “‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Either’: Goth and the Glorification of Suffering in Rock Music,” in Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art. Edited by Christoph Grunenberg. MIT Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Reproduced by permission of The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.—Haslam, Richard. From “Maturin and the ‘Calvinist Sublime,’” in Gothick Origins and Innovations. Edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage. Rodopi, 1994. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Heilman, Robert B. From “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘New’ Gothic,” in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad: Essays

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Gothic,” in The Female Gothic. Edited by Juliann E. Fleenor. Eden Press, 1983. Copyright © 1983 by Eden Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Johnson, Greg. From Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Twayne Publishers. Reproduced by permission of Thomson Gale.— Keats, John. From “A letter to Richard Woodhouse on September 21, 1819,” in Selected Letters of John Keats, Revised Edition. Edited by Grant F. Scott. Harvard University Press, 2002. Copyright © 1958 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1986 by Herschel C. Baker, the Executor of the author Hyder Edward Rollins. Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Harvard University Press.—Kerr, Elizabeth M. From “Otranto to Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner’s Gothic Heritage,” in William Faulkner’s Gothic Domain. National University Publications, Kennikat Press, 1979. Copyright © 1979 by Kennikat Press Corp. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of the author.—King, Stephen. From “The Modern American Horror Movie—Text and Subtext,” in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. Everest House, 1982, Berkeley Books, 2001. Copyright © 1981 by Stephen King. All other rights expressly reserved. Used by permission of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. In North America with permission of the author.—King, Stephen. From Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. Everest Publishing Group, 1982. Copyright © 1981 by Stephen King. All other rights expressly reserved. Used by permission of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. In North American with permission of the author.—Lamont, Claire. From “Jane Austen’s Gothic Architecture,” in Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition. Edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani and Peter Davidson, with Jane Stevenson. Rodopi, 1995. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Lanone, Catherine. From “Verging on the Gothic: Melmoth’s Journey to France,” in European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760-1960. Edited by Avril Horner. Manchester University Press, Mancheter, UK, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Manchester University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Lawler, Donald. From “The Gothic Wilde,” in Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. Edited by C. George Sandulescu. Colin Smythe, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by The Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco. Reproduced by permission.—Le Tellier, Robert Ignatius. From Sir Walter Scott and the Gothic Novel. Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 The Edwin Mellen Press.

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Collected in Memory of James T. Hillhouse. Edited by Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. University of Minnesota Press, 1958. Copyright © 1958 by the University of Minnesota. Renewed 1986 by Robert Charles Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Heller, Tamar. From Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic. Yale University Press, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Yale University. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Hoeveler, Diane Long. From “Mary Shelley and Gothic Feminism: The Case of ‘The Mortal Immortal,’” in Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein: Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley’s Birth. Edited by Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O’Dea. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Associated University Presses, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Hoffmann, E. T. A. From an Introduction to The Best Tales of Hoffmann. Edited by E. F. Bleiler. Dover Publications, Inc., 1967. Copyright © 1967 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Hoffmann, E. T. A. From “The Sand-Man,” in The Best Tales of Hoffmann. Edited and with an introduction by E. F. Bleiler. Translated by J. T. Bealby. Dover Publications, Inc., 1967. Copyright © 1967 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Hogle, Jerrold E. From “Stoker’s Counterfeit Gothic: Dracula and Theatricality at the Dawn of Simulation,” in Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis, and the Gothic. Edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith. MacMillan Press Ltd., 1998. Selection and editorial matter Copyright © William Hughes and Andrew Smith, 1998. Text Copyright © Macmillan Press Ltd., 1998. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Horner, Sue and Zlosnik, Avril. From “Daphne du Maurier and Gothic Signatures: Rebecca as Vamp(ire),” in Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality. Edited by Avril Horner and Angela Keane. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Manchester University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and authors.—Howells, Coral Ann. From Margaret Atwood. Macmillan Press Ltd., 1996. Copyright © 1996 Coral Ann Howells. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Ingebretsen, Edward J. From “Anne Rice: Raising Holy Hell, Harlequin Style,” in The Gothic World of Anne Rice. Edited by Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Reproduced by permission.—James, Sibyl. From “Gothic Transformations: Isak Dinesen and the

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All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.— Leatherdale, Clive. From Dracula: The Novel and the Legend: A Study of Bram Stoker’s Gothic Masterpiece. Third Edition. Desert Island Books, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Clive Leatherdale. Reproduced by permission.—Lougy, Robert E. From Charles Robert Maturin. Bucknell University Press, 1975. Copyright © 1975 by Associated University Presses, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Mack, Douglas S. From “Aspects of the Supernatural in the Shorter Fiction of James Hogg,” in Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition. Edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani and Peter Davidson, with Jane Stevenson. Rodopi, 1995. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.— Magistrale, Tony. From “‘More Demon than Man’: Melville’s Ahab as Gothic Villain,” in Spectrum of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Sixth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Edited by Donald Palumbo. Greenwood Press, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Donald Palumbo. Reproduced by permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.— Martindale, Andrew. From Gothic Art. Thames and Hudson, 1967. Copyright © 1967 Thames and Hudson Ltd, London. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Maturin, Charles Robert. From “Leixlip Castle,” in Gothic Tales of Terror: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain, Europe, and the United States, 1765-1840. Edited by Peter Haining. Taplinger Publishing Company, Inc., 1972. Selection and original copyright © 1972 by Peter Haining. Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Miall, David S. From “The Preceptor as Fiend: Radcliffe’s Psychology of the Gothic,” in Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and Their Sisters. Edited by Laura Dabundo. University Press of America, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by University Press of America, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Mighall, Robert. From A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford University Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 Robert Mighall. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Milbank, Alison. From “From the Sublime to the Uncanny: Victorian Gothic and Sensation Fiction,” in Gothick Origins and Innovations. Edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage. Rodopi, 1994. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Mishra, Vijay. From The Gothic Sublime. State University of New York Press, 1994. Copyright © 1994 State University of New York. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the State University of New York Press.—Morrison, Toni. From Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage Books, 1993. Copyright © 1992 by

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Toni Morrison. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.—Morrison, Toni. From Beloved. Vintage Books, 2004. Copyright © 1987, 2004 by Toni Morrison. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.—Neumeier, Beate. From “Postmodern Gothic: Desire and Reality in Angela Carter’s Writing,” in Modern Gothic: A Reader. Edited by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith. Manchester University Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Manchester University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Oates, Joyce Carol. From “Temple,” from Demon and Other Tales. Necronomicon Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by The Ontario Review, Inc. Reproduced by permission of The Ontario Review, Inc.— Oates, Joyce Carol. From The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Pennyroyal Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the University of Nebraska Press.—Oates, Joyce Carol. From “Afterword: Reflections on the Grotesque,” in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque. Dutton, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by The Ontario Review, Inc. Used by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. In the United Kingdom by John Hawkins & Associates, Inc.— Polidori, John. From “The Vampyre: A Tale,” in The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. Edited by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick. Oxford University Press, 1997. Editorial Matter Copyright © 1997 by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Prawer, S. S. From Caligari’s Children: the Film as Tale of Terror. Da Capo Press, 1989. Copyright © 1980 S. S. Prawer. Reproduced by permission of the author.— Punter, David. From The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Vol. 2. Longman, 1996. Copyright © 1996 Addison Wesley Longman, Ltd. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education Limited.—Punter, David. From The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Vol. 2. Longman, 1996. Copyright © 1996 Addison Wesley Longman Limited. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education Limited.— Punter, David. From “Narrative and Psychology in Gothic Fiction,” in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/ Transgression. Edited by Kenneth W. Graham. AMS, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by AMS Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Radcliffe, Ann. From “The Haunted Chamber,” in Gothic Tales of Terror, Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain. Edited by Peter Haining. 1972. Taplinger Publishing Company, Inc., 1972. Selection and original material copyright © Peter Hain-

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Frankenstein’s Monster,” in The Female Gothic. Edited by Juliann E. Fleenor. Eden Press, 1983. Copyright © 1983 by Eden Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of Marcia Tillotson.—Valente, Joseph. From Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. University of Illinois Press, 2002. Copyright © 2001 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.—Vincent, Sybil Korff. From “The Mirror and the Cameo: Margaret Atwood’s Comic/Gothic Novel, Lady Oracle,” in The Female Gothic. Edited by Juliann E. Fleenor. Elden Press, 1983. Copyright © 1983 Eden Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Warfel, Harry R. From Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist. 1949. University of Florida Press, 1949. Copyright © 1949 University of Florida. Renewed 1977 by Jean Dietze. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Weissberg, Liliane. From “Gothic Spaces: The Political Aspects of Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” in Modern Gothic: A Reader. Edited by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith. Manchester University Press, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Manchester University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Wharton, Edith. From The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. Scribner, Simon & Schuster, 1973. Copyright © 1973 by William R. Tyler. Reproduced by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Macmillan and the Literary Estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/Loomis Agency.—Williams, Anne. From Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Williamson, Paul. From an Introduction to Gothic Sculpture 1140-1300. Edited by Nikolaus Pevsner. Yale University Press, Pelican History of Art, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by Paul Williamson. Reproduced by permission.—Wisker, Gina. From “At Home All Was Blood and Feathers: The Werewolf in the Kitchen—Angela Carter and Horror,” in Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Clive Bloom. Pluto Press, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by Lumiere (Cooperative) Press Ltd. Reproduced by permission.— Wolfreys, Julian. From “‘I Wants to Make Your Flesh Creep’: Notes toward a Reading of the Comic-Gothic in Dickens,” in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys. Palgrave, 2000. Selection and editorial matter © Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, 2000. Preface and Chapter 3 © Julian Wolfreys, 2000. Chapter 10 © Ruth Robbins, 2000.

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ing, 1972. Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Railo, Eino. From The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. Routledge, 1927. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—Ranger, Paul. From Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast: Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750-1820. The Society for Theatre Research, 1991. Copyright © 1991 Paul Ranger. Reproduced by permission.—Rank, Otto. From “The Double as Immortal Self,” in Beyond Psychology. E, Hauser, 1941. Copyright © 1941 by Estelle B. Rank. Renewed 1969 by Estelle B. Simon. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of the author.—Robertson, Fiona. From Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction. Clarendon Press, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Fiona Robertson. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Sage, Victor. From Le Fanu’s Gothic: The Rhetoric of Darkness. Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Victor Sage. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Savoy, Eric. From “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic,” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Edited by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy. University of Iowa Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by the University of Iowa Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Senf, Carol A. From The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Reproduced by permission.—Shelley, Percy Bysshe. From “The Assassins,” in Gothic Tales of Terror. Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain. Copyright © 1972 selection and original material copyright by Peter Haining. Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Shetty, Nalini V. From “Melville’s Use of the Gothic Tradition,” Studies in American Literature: Essays in Honour of William Mulder. Edited by Jagdish Chander and Narindar S. Pradhan. Oxford University Press, 1976. Copyright © Oxford University Press 1976. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press India, New Delhi.—Showalter, Elaine. From Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Clarendon Press, 1991. Copyright © 1991 Elaine Showalter. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Summers, Montague. From The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. The Fortune Press, 1938. Reproduced by permission.—Thomas, Ronald R. From Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious. Cornell University Press, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.—Tillotson, Marcia. From “‘A Forced Solitude’: Mary Shelley and the Creation of

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Chapters 1, 2, 4-9, 11, 12 © Palgrave Publishers Ltd, 2000. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Womack, Kenneth. From “‘Withered, Wrinkled, and Loathsome of Visage’: Reading the Ethics of the Soul and the LateVictorian Gothic in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys. Palgrave, 2000. Selection and editorial matter © Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, 2000. Preface and Chapter 3 © Julian Wolfreys, 2000. Chapter 10 © Ruth Robbins, 2000. Chapters 1, 2, 4-9, 11, 12 © Palgrave Publishers Ltd, 2000. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Wood, Martin J. From “New Life for an Old Tradition: Anne Rice and Vampire Literature,” in The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in Literature. Edited by Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Reproduced by permission.—Wood, Robin. From “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Edited by Robin Wood and Richard Lippe. Festival of Festivals, 1979. Copyright © Robin Wood, Richard Lippe, and Festival of Festivals. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Wright, Angela. From “European Disruptions of the Idealized Woman: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and the Marquis de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine,” in European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760-1960. Edited by Avril Horner. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK, 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Manchester University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.

Photographs and Illustrations in Gothic Literature were received from the following sources: A Description of Strawberry Hill, by Horace Walpole, frontispiece.—Abbotsford, home of Sir Walter Scott, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.— Ainsworth, William Harrison, photograph. © Getty Images.—Allston, Washington, photograph. The Library of Congress.—American Gothic, painting by Grant Wood, 1930, photograph. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago. Reproduced by permission.—Atwood, Margaret, photograph by Christopher Felver. Copyright © Christopher Felver/Corbis.—Austen, Jane, engraving.—Baillie, Joanna, photograph. © Hulton-Deutsch/Corbis.— Balshazzar’s Feast, painting by Washington Allston, ca. 1817-1843. © The Detroit Institute of Arts/Bridgeman Art Library.—Beckford, William, photograph. © Michael Nicholson/Corbis.—Bergman, Ingrid and Heywood Morse in the 1959 film

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adaptation of Turn of the Screw by Henry James, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Bierce, Ambrose, drawing by J. J. Newbegin, 1896.—Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, engraving. © Hulton Getty/ Liaison Agency.—Brontë, Charlotte, illustration. International Portrait Gallery.—Brontë, Emily, painting by Bramwell Brontë.—Brown, Charles Brockden, print.—Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Burke, Edmund, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Capote, Truman, photograph. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis.—Carter, Angela, photograph. © Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission.—Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole, c. 1790, illustration.— Castle of Wolfenbach; a German Story, by Eliza Parsons, 1793, title page.—Christine, movie still, photograph. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—Collins, William Wilkie, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Cooper, Alice, performing on the In Concert television show on November 24, 1972, photograph. © Bettmann/ Corbis.—Dickens, Charles, photograph. Hesketh Pearson.—Dinesen, Isak, photograph. Corbis-Bettmann.—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Spencer Tracy as Dr. Jekyll, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.— Dracula, Helen Chandler, as Mina Seward, with Bela Lugosi, as Count Dracula, photograph. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.— Dracula’s Guest, written by Bram Stoker, title page.—du Maurier, Daphne, photograph. © Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.—Faulkner, William, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1831, illustration. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe, illustration. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Gargoyle of 15th Century Spanish Building, photograph. © Manuel Bellver/Corbis.—Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, c. 1890, photograph.—Godwin, William, painting by James Northcote. From Vindication of the Rights of Women, by William Godwin, 1802.— Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, illustration. © Corbis.—Hawthorne, Nathaniel, photograph.—Hoffmann, E. T. A., photograph. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—Hogg, James, photograph. © Rischgitz/ Getty Images.—Irving, Washington, photograph. The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.—James, Henry, photograph.—Jane Eyre, Orson Welles as Edward Rochester, with Joan Fontaine as Jane Eyre, photograph. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—King, Stephen, photograph. Corbis-Bettmann.—Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, photograph.—Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving, illustration. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Lewis, Matthew Gregory, photograph by H. W. Pickersgill.—Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, title page. © Getty

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poster. © A.I.P./The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents, by Ann Radcliffe, 1797 edition, title page.—The Mysteries of Udolpho, frontispieces by Ann Radcliffe.—The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, written by Edgar Allan Poe, title page. Special Collections Library, University of Michigan. Reproduced by permission.—The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story, by Clara Reeve, 1778, illustration.—The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times, by Sophia Lee, 1786, title page.—The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1980, photograph. © Warner Bros./The Kobal Collection.—The Sicilian Romance; or, The Apparition of the Cliffs, an Opera, by Henry Siddons, 1794, title page.—The Table of the Seven Deadly Sins, painting by Hieronymous Bosch, c. 1480-1490, Northern Renaissance, photograph. © Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis.—The Temptation of Ambrosio, from Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk, illustration.—The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins, title page. Special Collections Library, University of Michigan. Reproduced by permission.—Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, by William Godwin, title page.—Twin Peaks, scene from the television series by David Lynch, 1990, photograph. © Corbis Sygma.—Veidt, Conrad and Lil Dagover in the 1920 silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, photograph. © John Springer/Corbis.—von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, photograph. © Bettmann/ Corbis.—Waddy, F., satirical caricature in “Once a Week,” 1873. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—Walpole, Horace, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Wharton, Edith, 1905, photograph. The Library of Congress.— Wieland; or, The Transformation, by Charles Brockden Brown, Philadelphia, David McKay, Publisher, 1881, title page.—Wilde, Oscar, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, movie poster, photograph. © CinemaPhoto/Corbis.

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Images.—Lovecraft, H. P., photograph.—Lugosi, Bela, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Maturin, Charles Robert, photograph. © The Granger Collection, New York.—Melville, Herman, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Morrison, Toni, photograph. Copyright © Nancy Kazerman/ ZUMA/Corbis.—Nave of Basilique de Saint-Denis, June 19, 1996, photograph. © Robert Holmes/ Corbis.—Nightmare, painting by Henri Fuseli, 1791. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—Nosferatu, Max Schreck (Count Orlok) standing on deck of ship, 1922, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—O’Connor, Flannery, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Oates, Joyce Carol, photograph. © Nancy Kaszerman/Corbis.— Peck, Gregory, photograph. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—Poe, Edgar Allan, photograph.—Polidori, John William, painting by F. G. Gainsford, c. 1816, photograph. © The Granger Collection, New York.—Psycho, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) approaching the motel, photograph. © Underwood and Underwood/Corbis.—Reeve, Clara, photograph. © Getty Images.— Rice, Anne, photograph. © Mitchell Gerber/Corbis.—Roettgen Pieta, wood carving, c. 1300, photograph. © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.— Schiller, Friedrich von, engraving. The German Information Center.—Scott, Sir Walter, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, illustration.—Son of Frankenstein, with Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Bela Lugosi, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Stevenson, Robert Louis, engraving. The Library of Congress.—Stoker, Bram, photograph. © HultonDeutsch Collection/Corbis.—The Castle Spectre, by Matthew Gregory Lewis, illustration. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—The Fall of the House of Usher, directed by Roger Corman, photograph. © A.I.P./The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—The Haunting, 1963, movie still. © MGM/The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—The Island of Dr. Moreau,

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● Suger of Saint Denis is born in Saint Denis, France.

■ Construction of the Cathedral of Amiens in France.

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■ Master Elias of Dereham begins designing the Salisbury Cathedral in England.

■ Abbot Suger of Saint Denis begins redesigning the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis in France.

1151 ● Abbot Suger of Saint Denis dies on 13 January in St. Denis, France.

C. 1163 ■ Construction of the current Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris in France.

1245 ■ Construction of the current Westminster Abbey in London, England.

C. 1329 ■ Andrea Pisano begins his bronze sculptures for the Baptisery in Florence, Italy.

1485 C. 1175 ■ Construction of the current Canterbury Cathedral in England.

■ Hieronymus Bosch completes the painting Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins.

C. 1600-01 C. 1194 ■ Construction of the current Cathedral of Notre Dame at Chartres (also known as Chartres Cathedral) in France.

■ William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is staged.

C. 1606 ■ William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is staged.

C. 1211 ■ Construction of the current Cathedral of Notre Dame de Rheims (also known as Rheims Cathedral) in France.

1717 ● Horace Walpole is born on 24 September in London, England.

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1081

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1727

1762

■ Daniel Defoe’s An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions is published.

● James Boaden is born on 23 May at White Haven in Cumberland, England.

1729

● Joanna Baillie is born on 11 September in Bothwell, Lanarkshire, Scotland.

● Edmund Burke is born on 12 January in Dublin, Ireland.

1764

● Clara Reeve is born on 23 January in Ipswich, Suffolk, England.

● Ann Radcliffe is born on 9 July in London, England.

1742

■ Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is published.

■ Batty and Thomas Langley’s Ancient Architecture Restored and Improved is published.

1770 ● James Hogg is born in Ettrick, Selkirkshire, Scotland.

1749 ● Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is born on 28 August in Frankfurt, Germany.

1771 ● Charles Brockden Brown is born on 17 January in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1750 ● Sophia Lee is born in London, England. ■ Horace Walpole and Richard Bentley begin designing Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s residence in Twickenham, England.

● Sir Walter Scott is born on 15 August in Edinburgh, Scotland.

1772 1753 ■ Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom is published.

● Samuel Taylor Coleridge is born on 21 October in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England.

1773 1756 ● William Godwin is born on 3 March in Wisbeach, England.

■ John Aikin and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld’s Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, by J. and A. L. Aikin is published.

1775

1757 ● William Blake is born on 28 November in London, England.

● Matthew Gregory Lewis is born on 9 July in London, England.

■ Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is published.

● Jane Austen is born on 16 December in Steventon, Hampshire, England.

1776 1759 ● Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller is born on 10 November in Marbach, Germany.

● Ernst Theodor Wilhelm (later E. T. A.) Hoffmann is born on 24 January in Königsberg, Germany.

1760

1777

● William Beckford is born on 29 September in London, England.

■ Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue. A Gothic Story is published.

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1791

■ Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue is published as The Old English Baron.

■ Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest is published.

1779

1792

● Washington Allston is born on 5 November in South Carolina.

● Percy Bysshe Shelley is born on 4 August in Field Place, Sussex, England.

1780

■ Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects is published.

● Charles Robert Maturin is born on 25 September in Dublin, Ireland.

1793 1781 ■ Henry Fuseli completes the painting The Nightmare.

■ Mrs. Eliza Parsons’s Castle of Wolfenbach; A German Story is published.

1794 1783

■ James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest is produced.

● Washington Irving is born on 3 April in New York City.

■ J. C. Cross’s The Apparition is produced.

■ Sophia Lee’s The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times is published.

1786

■ William Godwin’s Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams is published. ■ Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance; Interspersed with some pieces of Poetry is published.

■ The unauthorized translation of William Beckford’s Vathek is published as An Arabian Tale.

■ Henry Siddons’s The Sicilian Romance; or, The Apparition of the Cliff is produced.

1787

1795

● Lewis Nockalls Cottingham is born on 24 October at Laxfield, Suffolk, England.

● John William Polidori is born on 7 September in England.

■ William Beckford’s Vathek is published.

1788 ● George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron is born on 22 January in London, England.

1789 ■ James Cobb’s The Haunted Tower is produced. ■ George Colman the Younger’s The Battle of Hexham is produced.

1790 ■ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: Ein Fragment is published. ■ Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance is published.

1796 ■ Marquis von Grosse’s Genius (Horrid Mysteries) is published. ■ Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance is published.

1797 ● Horace Walpole dies on 2 March in London, England. ● Edmund Burke dies on 9 July in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England. ● Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley) is born on 30 August in London, England. ■ Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Castle Spectre: A Drama is produced.

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1778

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1798

1806

■ Regina Maria Roche’s Children of the Abbey is published.

■ Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor is published.

■ The first volume of Joanna Baillie’s A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy is published.

1807 ● Clara Reeve dies on 3 December in Ipswich, Suffolk, England.

■ Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or, The Transformation is published.

1808

1799

■ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust—Der Tragödie erster Teil (Faust: Part One) is published.

■ Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker and the first volume of Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 are published.

1800 ■ Washington Allston completes the painting Tragic Figure in Chains. ■ The second volume of Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 is published.

1809 ● Edgar Allan Poe is born on 19 January in Boston, Massachusetts.

1810 ● Charles Brockden Brown dies on 22 February in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ■ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Zastrozzi, A Romance is published.

1802

1811

■ The second volume of Joanna Baillie’s A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy is published.

■ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance is published.

1812 ● Charles Dickens is born on 7 February in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England.

1803 ● Edward Bulwer-Lytton (Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer) is born on 25 May in London, England. ● Thomas Lovell Beddoes is born on 30 June in Clifton, Shropshire, England. ● Alexander Jackson Davis is born on 24 July in New York City.

■ The third volume of Joanna Baillie’s A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy is published. ■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt is published.

1813

1804 ● Nathaniel Hawthorne is born on 4 July in Salem, Massachusetts.

■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale is published.

1805

1814

● William Harrison Ainsworth is born on 4 February in Manchester, England.

● Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is born on 28 August in Dublin, Ireland.

● Friedrich von Schiller dies on 9 May in Weimar, Germany.

■ Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since is published.

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1821

● Charlotte Brontë is born on 21 April in Thornton, Yorkshire, England.

● John William Polidori commits suicide on 27 August in London, England.

■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto the Third is published.

■ Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater is published.

■ Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep is published.

1822

■ Jane Scott’s The Old Oak Chest is produced.

● E. T. A. Hoffmann dies on 25 June in Berlin, Germany.

1817

● Percy Bysshe Shelley drowns on 8 July in the Gulf of Spezia near Lerici, Italy.

● Jane Austen dies on 18 July in Winchester, Hampshire, England. ■ Washington Allston begins the painting Belshazzar’s Feast. ■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Manfred, A Dramatic Poem is published. ■ E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman”) is published.

1818 ● Matthew Gregory Lewis dies on 16 May during a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean from Jamaica to England. ● Emily Brontë is born on 30 July in Thornton, Yorkshire, England. ■ Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion is published. ■ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is published.

1819 ● Herman Melville is born on 1 August in New York City. ■ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci is produced. ■ Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. is published.

1823 ● Ann Radcliffe dies on 7 February in England. ■ Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein is produced.

1824 ■ William Wilkie Collins is born on 8 January in London, England. ● Sophia Lee dies on 13 March in Clifton, England. ● Lord Byron dies on 19 April in Cephalonia, Greece. ● Charles Robert Maturin dies on 30 October in Dublin, Ireland. ■ Catherine Gore’s The Bond, a Dramatic Poem is produced. ■ James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is published. ■ Washington Irving’s Tales of a Traveller is published.

1825 ■ James Fenimore Cooper’s Lionel Lincoln; or, The Leaguer of Boston is published.

■ John William Polidori’s The Vampyre; a Tale is published.

1826

1820

1827

■ John Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems is published.

● William Blake dies on 12 August in London, England.

■ Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer is published.

■ Thomas Moore’s The Epicurean. A Tale is published.

■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Glenallan is published.

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1816

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1830

1842

● Christina Rossetti is born on 5 December in London, England.

■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni is published. ● Ambrose Bierce is born on 24 June in Horse Cave Creek, Meigs County, Ohio.

1832 ● Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dies on 22 March. ● Sir Walter Scott dies on 21 September in Abbotsford, Scotland. ■ Architect Alexander Jackson Davis completes Glen Ellen, the Baltimore, Maryland residence of Robert Gilmor III.

1843 ● Henry James is born on 15 April in New York City. ● Washington Allston dies on 9 July in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ■ A. W. N. Pugin’s Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England is published.

1844

1834 ● Samuel Taylor Coleridge dies on 25 July in England.

● William Beckford dies on 2 May in England.

1845 1835 ● James Hogg dies on 21 November in Scotland.

■ Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is published. ■ Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales by Edgar A. Poe and The Raven and Other Poems are published.

1836 ● William Godwin dies on 7 April in London, England. ■ Thomas Cole completes the painting Ruined Tower.

1837 ■ Charles Dickens’s Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club is published under the pseudonym Boz. ■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales is published.

1846 ■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Lucretia; or, The Children of Night is published. ■ Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Dvoinik: Prikliucheniia gospodina Goliadkina (The Double: A Poem of St. Petersburg) is published.

1847 ● L. N. Cottingham dies on 13 October in London, England. ● Bram Stoker is born on 8 November in Clontarf, Ireland. ■ Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. An Autobiography is published under the pseudonym Currer Bell.

1838 ■ Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist is published. ■ Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is published.

1839 ● James Boaden dies on 16 February in England.

■ Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. ■ Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, written by either Thomas Peckett Prest or James Malcolm Rymer, is published.

1848

1840

● Emily Brontë dies on 19 December in Haworth, Yorkshire, England.

■ Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque is published.

■ Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man, and The Ghost’s Bargain is published.

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1857

● Thomas Lovell Beddoes commits suicide on 26 January in Basel, Switzerland.

■ Wilkie Collins’s The Dead Secret is published. ■ Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit is published.

● Edgar Allan Poe dies on 7 October in Baltimore, Maryland.

■ G. W. M. Reynolds’s Wagner the Wehr-wolf is published.

1850

1859

● Robert Louis Stevenson is born on 13 November in Edinburgh, Scotland.

● Washington Irving dies on 28 November in Irvington, New York.

■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is published.

1860

1851 ● Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley dies on 1 February in Bournemouth, England. ● Joanna Baillie dies on 23 February in Hampstead, England. ■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, a Romance is published.

● Charlotte Perkins Gilman is born on 3 July in Hartford, Connecticut. ■ Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White is published. ■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of Monte Beni is published.

1861

■ Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is published.

■ Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself is published under the pseudonym Linda Brent.

1852

1862

■ Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly is published.

1853 ■ Charlotte Brontë’s Villette is published under the pseudonym Currer Bell.

● Edith Wharton is born on 24 January in New York City. ■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story is published.

1864

■ Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is published.

● Nathaniel Hawthorne dies on 19 May in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

C. 1854

■ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh is published.

● Oscar Wilde is born on 16 October in Dublin, Ireland.

1870

1855 ● Charlotte Brontë dies on 31 March in Haworth, Yorkshire, England.

● Charles Dickens dies on 9 June in Rochester, Kent, England.

1872 ■ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly is published.

1856 ● Sigismund Solomon Freud (later Sigmund Freud) is born on 6 May in Freiberg, Moravia, Czechoslovakia.

1873

■ Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales is published.

● Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu dies on 10 February in Dublin, Ireland.

● Edward Bulwer-Lytton dies on 18 January in Torquay, Devonshire, England.

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1849

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1882

1894

● William Harrison Ainsworth dies on 3 January.

● Robert Louis Stevenson dies on 3 December in Apia, Samoa.

● Bela Lugosi is born Béla Ferenc Dezsö Blask¢ on 20 October in Lugos, Hungary.

● Christina Rossetti dies on 29 December in London, England.

1885

■ Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light is published.

● Karen Christentze Dinesen, who later wrote under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, is born on 17 April near Copenhagen, Denmark.

1896 ■ H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Possibility is published.

1886 ■ Guy de Maupassant’s “La Horla” (“The Horla”) is published Le Gil Blas.

1897

■ Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is published.

● William Faulkner is born on 25 September in New Albany, Mississippi. ■ Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published.

1887 ● William Henry Pratt (later Boris Karloff) is born on 23 November in London, England.

1888

1898 ■ Henry James’s The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End is published.

● Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe (later F. W. Murnau) is born on 28 December in Bielefeld, Westphalia, Germany.

1899

1889

● Alfred Hitchcock is born on 13 August in London, England.

■ Wilkie Collins dies on 23 September in London, England.

● Elizabeth Bowen is born on 7 June in Dublin, Ireland.

1900 1890 ● Howard Phillips Lovecraft is born on 20 August in Providence, Rhode Island. ■ Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is published.

● Oscar Wilde dies on 30 November in Paris, France.

1904 ■ Arthur Machen’s “The Garden of Avallaunius” is published.

1891 ● Herman Melville dies on 28 September in New York City. ■ Oscar Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories is published.

1906 ■ Algernon Blackwood’s The Empty House and Other Ghosts is published.

1892

1907

● Alexander Jackson Davis dies on 14 January in West Orange, New Jersey.

● Daphne du Maurier is born on 12 May in London, England.

■ Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is published.

■ George Sylvester Viereck’s The House of the Vampire is published.

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1922

■ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, produced by the Selig Polyscope Company, is released.

■ Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, directed by F. W. Murnau, is released.

1909

1924

■ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, produced by the Nordisk Company, is released.

■ Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks), directed by Paul Leni and Leo Birinsky, is released.

1910

1925

■ Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de L’Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera) is published.

● Edward Gorey is born on 22 February in Chicago, Illinois.

■ Frankenstein, directed by J. Searle Dawley, is released.

● (Mary) Flannery O’Connor is born on 25 March in Savannah, Georgia.

1911

1927

■ Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome is published.

■ Algernon Blackwood’s The Dance of Death, and Other Tales is published.

1912 ● Bram Stoker dies on 20 April in London, England.

1914 ● Ambrose Bierce disappears c. 1 January in Mexico and is presumed dead.

1916 ● Henry James dies on 28 February in London, England.

1929 ● Ursula K. Le Guin is born on 21 October in Berkeley, California.

1930 ■ William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and “A Rose for Emily” are published.

1931 ● Chloe Ardelia Wofford (later Toni Morrison) is born on 18 February in Lorain, Ohio.

1919

● F. W. Murnau dies on 11 March in Santa Barbara, California.

● Shirley Jackson is born on 14 December in San Francisco, California.

■ Dracula, directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi in the title role, is released.

■ Sigmund Freud’s “Das Unheimlich” (“The Uncanny”) is published.

■ Frankenstein, directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as the monster, is released. ■ M, directed by Fritz Lang, is released.

1920 ● Ray Bradbury is born on 22 August in Waukegan, Illinois. ■ Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World, directed by Carl Boese and Paul Wegener, is released. ■ Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), directed by Robert Wiene, is released.

■ William Faulkner’s Sanctuary is published.

1932 ■ Murders in the Rue Morgue, directed by Robert Florey, is released. ■ White Zombie, directed by Victor Halperin, is released. ■ William Faulkner’s Light in August is published.

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1908

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1933

1940

■ King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper, is released.

● Angela Carter is born on 7 May in London, England.

■ The Invisible Man, directed by James Whale, is released.

■ Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is released.

■ Island of Lost Souls, directed by Erle C. Kenton, is released.

1941

1934

● Howard Allen O’Brien (later Anne Rice) is born on 4 October in New Orleans, Louisiana.

■ Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales is published.

1943 1935 ● Charlotte Perkins Gilman commits suicide on 17 August in Pasadena, California. ■ Bride of Frankenstein, directed by James Whale, is released.

■ I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, and The Seventh Victim, all produced by Val Lewton, are released.

1945 ■ The Body Snatcher, directed by Robert Wise, is released.

1936 ■ Walter de la Mare’s Ghost Stories is published.

■ Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover, and Other Stories is published.

■ William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is published.

■ H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature is published.

■ H. P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” is published.

1947 ● Stephen King is born on 21 September in Portland, Maine.

1937 ● H. P. Lovecraft dies on 15 March in Providence, Rhode Island. ● Edith Wharton dies on 11 August in St. Bricesous-Foret, France.

1949 ■ Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris is published.

■ Edith Wharton’s Ghosts is published.

1952 1938 ● Joyce Carol Oates is born on 16 June in Lockport, New York.

● Clive Barker is born on 5 October in Liverpool, England.

■ Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is published.

1955

1939

■ Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find is published.

● Sigmund Freud dies on 23 September in London, England.

1956

● Margaret Atwood is born on 18 November in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

● Bela Lugosi dies on 16 August in Los Angeles, California.

■ Son of Frankenstein, directed by Rowland V. Lee, is released.

■ Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, is released.

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1968

■ The Curse of Frankenstein, directed by Terence Fisher, is released.

■ Margaret Atwood’s The Animals in That Country is published.

1959

■ Night of the Living Dead, directed by George A. Romero, is released.

■ Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is published.

■ Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman Polanski, is released.

■ The Mummy, directed by Terence Fisher, is released.

1969

■ The Twilight Zone is first televised.

● Boris Karloff dies on 2 February at Midhurst in Sussex, England.

1960

■ Led Zeppelin’s first two self-titled albums are released.

■ The Fall of the House of Usher, directed by Roger Corman, is released. ■ Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is released.

1962 ● William Faulkner dies on 6 July in Byhalia, Mississippi. ● Isak Dinesen dies on 7 September in Rungsted, Denmark.

1970 ■ Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut album is released. ■ Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is published. ■ Night Gallery is first televised.

1971 ■ Richard Matheson’s Hell House is published. ■ Alice Cooper’s Killer is released.

1963

■ Black Sabbath’s Paranoid is released.

■ Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is published. ■ The Birds, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is released. ■ The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise, is released.

1972 ■ Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing is published. ■ Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is published. ■ Alice Cooper’s School’s Out is released.

1964 ● Flannery O’Connor dies on 3 August in Milledgeville, Georgia. ■ The Addams Family is first televised.

1973 ● Elizabeth Bowen dies on 22 February in London, England.

■ The Munsters is first televised.

■ The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin, is released.

1965

1974

● Shirley Jackson dies on 8 August in North Bennington, Vermont.

■ Angela Carter’s Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces is published.

1966

■ The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, directed by Tobe Hooper, is released.

■ Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! is released.

■ Young Frankenstein, directed by Mel Brooks, is released.

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1957

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1975

1983

■ Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot is published.

■ Stephen King’s Pet Sematary is published.

■ They Came from Within, directed by David Cronenberg, is released.

■ New Order’s Power, Corruption, and Lies is released.

1976 ■ Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle is published. ■ Carrie, directed by Brian De Palma, is released. ■ The Omen, directed by Richard Donner, is released. ■ Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is published.

1984 ■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Mysteries of Winterthurn is published.

1986 ■ Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart is published. ■ Siouxsie and the Banshees’s Tinderbox is released.

1977 ■ Stephen King’s The Shining is published. ■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Night Side: Eighteen Tales is published.

■ Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera is produced.

1987 1978

■ Toni Morrison’s Beloved is published.

■ Dawn of the Dead, directed by George A. Romero, is released.

■ The Smiths’s Louder than Bombs is released.

1979

1988

■ Bauhaus’s 12-inch single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” is released.

■ Toni Morrison is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved.

■ Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is published.

1989

■ Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures is released. ■ ’Salem’s Lot, directed by Tobe Hooper, is televised.

● Daphne du Maurier dies on 19 April in Cornwall, England. ■ Pet Sematary, directed by Mary Lambert, is released.

1980 ● Alfred Hitchcock dies on 29 April in Los Angeles, California. ■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Bellefleur is published.

1990 ■ Twin Peaks is first televised.

■ The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, is released.

1992

1981

● Angela Carter dies on 16 February in London, England.

■ Stephen King’s Danse Macabre is published.

■ Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, is released.

■ Siouxsie and the Banshees’s Juju is released.

1982

1993

■ Joyce Carol Oates’s A Bloodsmoor Romance is published.

■ Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride is published.

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2000

■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque is published.

● Edward Gorey dies on 15 April in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

■ Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Kenneth Branagh, is released.

■ Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is published.

1996 ■ Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace is published.

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CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

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MARGARET ATWOOD (1939 -)

(Full name Margaret Eleanor Atwood) Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, critic, and author of children’s books.

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nternationally acclaimed as a novelist, poet, and short story writer, Atwood is widely considered a major figure in Canadian letters. Using such devices as irony, symbolism, and self-conscious narrators, she explores the relationship between humanity and nature, unsettling aspects of human behavior, and power as it pertains to gender and political roles. Her authorial voice has sometimes been described as formal and emotionally distant, but her talent for allegory and intense imagery informs an intellectual and sardonic style popular with both literary scholars and the reading public. Atwood has also been instrumental as a critic. She has helped define the identity and goals of contemporary Canadian literature and has earned a distinguished reputation among feminist writers for her exploration of women’s issues.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Atwood was born in Ottawa and grew up in suburban Toronto. As a child she spent her summers at her family’s cottage in the wilderness of northern Quebec, where her father, a forest

entomologist, conducted research. She began to write while in high school, contributing poetry, short stories, and cartoons to the school newspaper. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, Atwood was influenced by critic Northrop Frye, who introduced her to the poetry of William Blake. Impressed with Blake’s use of mythological imagery, Atwood wrote her first volume of poetry, Double Persephone, which was published in 1961. The following year Atwood completed her A.M. degree at Radcliffe College, Harvard University. She returned to Toronto in 1963, where she began collaborating with artist Charles Pachter, who designed and illustrated several volumes of her poetry. In 1964 Atwood moved to Vancouver, where she taught English for a year at the University of British Columbia and completed her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969). After a year of teaching literature at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, Atwood moved to Alberta to teach creative writing at the University of Alberta. Her poetry collection The Circle Game (1966) won the 1967 Governor General’s Award, Canada’s highest literary honor. Atwood’s public visibility increased significantly with the publication of her poetry collection Power Politics in 1971. Seeking an escape from increasing media attention, Atwood left her teaching position at the University of Toronto to move to a farm in Ontario with her husband. In 1986 she again received the Governor General’s Award for her novel The Handmaid’s Tale

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(1986) and was later awarded the Booker Prize for her novel The Blind Assassin (2000).

MAJOR WORKS The poems in Atwood’s first volume, Double Persephone reflect the influence of Blake’s contrasting mythological imagery. While this collection demonstrates her penchant for using metaphorical language, Atwood’s second volume of poetry, The Circle Game, garnered widespread critical recognition. Atwood explores the meaning of art and literature, as well as the Gothic, in the poetry collection The Animals in That Country (1968). Presenting the poet as both performer and creator, she questions the authenticity of the writing process and the effects of literature on both the writer and the reader. In The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) Atwood devotes her attention to what she calls the schizoid, double nature of Canada. Centered on the narratives of a Canadian pioneer woman, Journals investigates why Canadians came to develop ambivalent feelings toward their country. Atwood further develops this dichotomy in Power Politics, in which she explores the relationship between sexual roles and power structures by focusing on personal relationships and international politics. The story of an unnamed freelance artist who journeys to the wilderness of Quebec to investigate her father’s disappearance, Surfacing (1972) focuses on the dichotomous nature of family relationships, cultural heritage, and self-perception. The protagonist of Atwood’s novel Lady Oracle (1976) is Joan Foster, who writes “costume Gothics” and fakes her own death to avoid the consequences of her past mistakes. The novel depicts relations between mothers and daughters and explores twentieth-century female identity by illustrating the monstrosity of the societal roles created by and for women. Just as Atwood uses monsters (Joan’s three-way vanity mirror is a “triple-headed monster” and Joan becomes a “duplicitous monster”) to highlight the novel’s thematic concerns, so does Joan utilize her own costume Gothic characters and narratives to explore the issues that concern her, and in the end is able to begin writing in a new discipline—science fiction. In her novel Life before Man (1979) Atwood dissects the relationships between three characters: Elizabeth, a married woman who mourns the recent death of her lover; Elizabeth’s husband, Nate, who is unable to choose between his wife and his lover; and Lesje, Nate’s lover, who works with Elizabeth at a museum of natural history. All

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three characters are emotionally isolated from one another and are unable to take responsibility for their feelings as their relationships deteriorate. Atwood turned to speculative fiction with her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, depicting the dystopia of Gilead, a future America in which Fundamentalist Christians have imposed dictatorial rule. Here, in a world polluted by toxic chemicals and nuclear radiation, most women are sterile; those who are able to bear children are forced to become Handmaids, official surrogate mothers who enjoy some privileges yet remain under constant surveillance. Almost all other women have been deemed expendable. While The Handmaid’s Tale focuses on an imagined future, Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye (1990) explores how misconceptions about the past can influence people’s present lives. The story of Elaine Risley, a prominent artist who returns to her childhood home in Toronto, Cat’s Eye traces Elaine’s discovery that her childhood relationships were often manipulative and that her memories of past events have not always been accurate or honest. Considered by many an allegorical exploration of the realities confronting individuals at the approach of the twenty-first century, this work reveals the implications of evil and redemption in both a personal and social context. In Cat’s Eye, as in all her works, Atwood forgoes specific political or moral ideologies, concentrating instead on the emotional and psychological complexities that confront individuals in conflict with society. In The Robber Bride (1993) Atwood transforms the Brothers Grimm’s grisly fairy tale “The Robber Bridegroom,” about a demonic groom who lures three innocent maidens into his lair and then devours them, into a statement about women’s treatment of each other. Three middle-aged friends are relieved to reunite at the funeral of the woman who tormented them in college, stealing from them money, time, and men, and threatening their careers and lives. But the villainous Zenia turns up alive, forcing them to relive painful memories and come to terms with the connection between love and destruction. Alias Grace (1996) represents Atwood’s first venture into historical fiction. Based on a true story Atwood had explored previously in a television script titled The Servant Girl, Alias Grace centers on Grace Marks, a servant who was found guilty of murdering her employer and his mistress in northern Canada in 1843. Some people doubt Grace’s guilt, however, and she serves out her sentence of life in prison, claiming not to remember the murders. Eventually, reformers begin to agitate for clemency for Grace. In a quest for evidence to support their position,

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CRITICAL RECEPTION The winner of the 1967 Governor General’s Award, Canada’s highest literary honor, The Circle Game established the major themes of Atwood’s poetry: the inconsistencies of self-perception, the paradoxical nature of language, Canadian identity, and the conflicts between humankind and nature. In addition to her numerous collections of poetry, Atwood earned widespread attention for Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), a seminal critical analysis of Canadian literature that served as a rallying point for the country’s cultural nationalists. In Survival Atwood argues that Canadians have always viewed themselves as victims, both of the forces of nature that confronted them as they settled in wilderness territory and of the colonialist powers that dominated their culture and politics. She proposes that Canadian writers should cultivate a more positive self-image by embracing indigenous traditions, including those of Native Americans and French Canadians, rather than identifying with Great Britain or the United States. Several commentators have noted a wide range of Gothic themes, characters, devices, and stylistic elements in Atwood’s works. Her poetry collection, The Animals in That Country, has been assessed as fitting neatly into the Gothic tradition. This volume contains the poem “Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein,” in which Atwood explores dualities, dichotomies, tension between opposites, and doubling. Surfacing has been regarded as an example of modern female Gothic for its depiction of an emotionally and socially repressed

protagonist who, after learning of her father’s disappearance from his cabin, takes a harrowing trip with her lover and another couple to the wilderness. During the journey, she confronts painful memories from her past and, by moving beyond the “surface” of her emotions and allowing herself to truly explore her pain, she is able to free herself from it. Lady Oracle, which Sybil Korff Vincent calls “the most Gothic of Gothic novels, a Gothic novel about Gothic novels,” has been widely discussed as Atwood’s most overtly Gothic work. Lady Oracle has been compared to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey for its parodic elements and commentary on the relationship between reality and the representation of it in Gothic literature. Michiko Kakutani (see Further Reading) has asserted that The Blind Assassin “showcases Ms. Atwood’s narrative powers and her ardent love of the Gothic.” This novel, with its parallel narrative structure, twisted, complex plot, murders, mystery, and underlying sense of defeat, has been characterized as closely resembling classic works of Gothic fiction.

PRINCIPAL WORKS Double Persephone (poetry) 1961 The Circle Game (poetry) 1966 The Animals in That Country (poetry) 1968 The Edible Woman (novel) 1969 The Journals of Susanna Moodie (poetry) 1970 Procedures for Underground (poetry) 1970 Power Politics (poetry) 1971 Surfacing (novel) 1972 Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (criticism) 1972 You Are Happy (poetry) 1974 Lady Oracle (novel) 1976 Selected Poems (poetry) 1976 Dancing Girls, and Other Stories (short stories) 1977 Two-Headed Poems (poetry) 1978 Up in the Tree (juvenilia) 1978 Life before Man (novel) 1979 True Stories (poetry) 1981 Bodily Harm (novel) 1982 Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (criticism) 1982 Bluebeard’s Egg (short stories) 1983

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they assign a young doctor, versed in the new science of psychiatry, to evaluate her soundness of mind. Over many meetings, Grace tells the doctor the harrowing story of her life, which has been marked by extreme hardship. Much about Grace, though, remains puzzling; she is haunted by flashbacks of the supposedly forgotten murders and by the presence of a friend who had died from a mishandled abortion. The doctor, Simon Jordan, does not know what to believe in Grace’s tales. The Blind Assassin involves multiple story lines. It is the memoir of Iris, a dying woman in her eighties who retraces her past with the wealthy and conniving industrialist Richard Griffen and the deaths of her sister Laura, her husband, and her daughter, and it is also a novel-within-a-novel, as interspersed with Iris’s wry narrative threads are sections devoted to Laura’s novel, The Blind Assassin, published after her death.

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Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems (short stories and poetry) 1983 Interlunar (poetry) 1984 The Handmaid’s Tale (novel) 1986 Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New, 19761986 (poetry) 1987 Cat’s Eye (novel) 1990 Wilderness Tips (short stories) 1991 Good Bones (short stories) 1992 The Robber Bride (novel) 1993 Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (criticism) 1995 Alias Grace (novel) 1996 The Blind Assassin (novel) 2000 Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (essays) 2002 Oryx and Crake (novel) 2003

PRIMARY SOURCES

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GENERAL COMMENTARY ELI MANDEL (ESSAY DATE 1977) SOURCE: Mandel, Eli. “Atwood Gothic.” The Malahat Review 41 (1977): 165-74. In the following essay, Mandel studies Atwood’s utilization of Gothic themes and devices to express and comment upon complex social, political, and psychological issues in her works.

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tions, witch-woman figures, animal-men, and photograph-poems but also an intriguing set of “Tricks with Mirrors.” It is the mirror poems that suggest, more pointedly than usual in her work, questions about duplicity and reflexiveness— concerns quite different from apparently clear and accessible social comment. She writes: Don’t assume it is passive or easy, this clarity with which I give you yourself, Consider what restraint it takes. . . . It is not a trick either,

Margaret Atwood’s comment, in a conversation with Graeme Gibson, that Surfacing “is a ghost story” provides the point of departure for more than one commentary on her work. Less often noticed is the special form of ghost story Atwood employs, the story in Journals of Susanna Moodie, for example. Mrs. Moodie appears to Atwood, we are told, in a dream, later manifesting herself to the poet “as a mad-looking and very elderly lady”; the poems take her “through an estranged old age, into death and beyond.” (p. 63) That makes her a ghost in the last poem, “A Bus Along St. Clair: December,” where she tells us: I am the old woman sitting across from you on the bus, her shoulders drawn up like a shawl; out of her eyes come secret hatpins, destroying the walls, the ceiling.

It is a craft: mirrors are crafty. . . . . . You don’t like these metaphors All right:

(p. 61)

Perhaps I am not a mirror. Perhaps I am a pool. Think about pools. (pp. 26-27)

Quite likely the speaker of the poem is meant to be taken as a lover; certainly she speaks to a Narcissus gazing at her as if she were a mirror; and to hear in the voice the artist’s warning about craftiness may seem perverse, though the suggestion of allegory is so tempting in Atwood’s works it is difficult to resist. In any event, the mirror voice does present ambiguous possibilities that call to mind apparently contradictory qualities in Atwood’s writing: clarity and accessibility, certainly, combined with extraordinary deftness in manipulating contemporary modes of speech and image, and a compelling toughmindedness, a ruthless unsentimentality, which is somehow liberating rather than cynically enclosing. These modes and attitudes point to social concerns, but one senses that these surface qualities may be concealing quite different interests. It is not my intention to deny the obvious, that she does handle with force and insight important contemporary social metaphors: the politics of love and self, the mystification of experience, woman as prisoner of the mind police, social institutions as models of the police state, the schizophrenic journey toward health, and so on. But the oracular qualities of her work, no doubt as attractive as social commentary to her readers, deserve more extended commentary than they have received. I am thinking of the gothic elements of her novels,

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her consistent and obsessive use of reduplicating images, and her totemic animal imagery.

Her earthly life, portrayed in the earlier poems, involves a pattern not unlike the heroine’s journey into the backwoods in Surfacing: a landing on a seashore apparently occupied by dancing sandflies, a pathway into a forest, confrontation with a wolfman and other animals, men in masks, deaths of children, including a drowning, sinister plants. Gothic tale is a better name than ghost story for this form, in which the chief element is the threat to a maiden, a young girl, a woman. In a wellknown passage, Leslie Fiedler, (allegorizing like mad, incidentally), comments on the chief features of the form, its motifs: Chief of the gothic symbols is, of course, the Maiden in flight. . . . Not the violation or death which sets such a flight in motion, but the flight itself figures forth the essential meaning of the anti-bourgeois gothic, for which the girl on the run and her pursuer become only alternate versions of the same plight. Neither can come to rest before the other—for each is the projection of his opposite . . . actors in a drama which depends on both for its significance. Reinforcing the meaning . . . is the haunted countryside, and especially the haunted castle or abbey which rises in its midst, and in whose dark passages and cavernous apartments the chase reaches its climax.1

Substitute forest for haunted castle, and think of the ghosts of Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Italian, and the ghost story or gothic form of an Atwood poem or novel begins to take shape. Obviously, it is richly suggestive of a variety of dark threats, either psychological or hidden in the social structure. Atwood’s own political and social commentary on Canadian imagination employs, with superb

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A further elaboration is suggested by Ellen Moers’ comments in the chapter of Literary Women called “The Female Gothic”: Gothic, says Moers, is writing that “has to do with fear,” writing in which “fantasy predominates over reality, the strange over the commonplace, and the supernatural over the natural, with one definite auctorial intent: to scare. Not, that is, to reach down into the depths of the soul and purge it with pity and terror (as we say tragedy does), but to get to the body itself, its glands, muscles, epidermis, and circulatory system, quickly arousing and quickly allaying the physiological reactions to fear.”2 Moers’ emphasis on physiological effect seems appropriate. It points to the kind of imagination found, say, in Michael Ondaatje’s work as well as in Atwood’s that might appropriately be called a physiological imagination, whose purpose is evident.3 Fear. But fear of what? Some say sexuality, especially taboo aspects of sexuality, incest for example: the gothic threat to a young woman carries implications of sado-masochistic fantasy, the victim/victor pattern of Survival. Ellen Moers suggests that in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the real taboo is birth itself; death and birth are hideously mixed in the creation of a monster out of pieces of the human body. (The image involves, as well, the hideousness of duplication and reduplication.) In Atwood’s “Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein,” her Dr. Frankenstein addresses his creation in unmistakable language about a botched creation, a birth/death confusion: I was insane with skill: I made you perfect. I should have chosen instead to curl you small as a seed, trusted beginnings. Now I wince before this plateful of results: core and rind, the flesh between already turning rotten. I stand in the presence of the destroyed god:

A rubble of tendons, knuckles and raw sinews.

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wit and skill, a victor/victim pattern (the haunted victim, the haunted persecutor, perhaps?) to outline not only an endlessly repeated pattern, but a theory of colonialism, that is, victimization. We see the possibilities: if Surfacing presents itself as political and social criticism disguised as ghost story, could it be that Survival takes its unusual power precisely from the fact that it is a ghost story disguised as politics and criticism?

Knowing that the work is mine How can I love you? (The Animals in That Country, p. 44)

If, as he says to his monster, Dr. Frankenstein might have trusted in beginnings, in seed, the narrator of Surfacing, it seems, distrusts virtually all births. How much of the haunting proceeds from an abortion? We discern a pattern of mixed birth/ death in the book: the baby not born, the baby aborted, the baby about to be born as a furred monster, the drowned brother who didn’t drown, the baby peering out of the mother’s stomach, the embryo-like frogs, the frog-like embryo, the man-frog father in the waters, hanging from the camera with which he might have photographed the gods. Who are the ghosts of Surfacing then? In Survival, which reads like a gloss on Surfacing, Atwood tells us that the ghost or death goddess of The Double Hook represents fear, but not fear of death, fear of life. And babies? Following a rather horrendous list of miscarriages, cancers, tumours, stillbirths and worse, which she finds in Canadian novels, Atwood remarks laconically, “The Great Canadian Baby is sometimes alarmingly close to the Great Canadian Coffin.” (p. 208) Who are the ghosts of Surfacing? A mother, a father, a lost child, Indians, the animals: all symbols of vitality, life, our real humanity, that has disappeared and must be brought back. “It does not approve of me or disapprove of me,” the narrator says of the creature who is elemental, as she thinks her father has become: “it tells me it has nothing to tell me, only the fact of itself.” (p. 187) And she says of her parents after her paroxysm in the woods: “they dwindle, grow, become what they were, human. Something I never gave them credit for.” (p. 189) Ghosts: only the human body, repressed, denied; only life denied. All proceeds from the ghosts: a de-realized world: victimization, sexism, deformed sexuality, sado-masochism, tearing away at nature’s body, at our own bodies. But to say this is to accept the allegory of gothic that Atwood allows her narrator to spell out for us (it is worth noting that in the best gothic fashion, the daylight world after the horrors of the long night reveals that the ghosts are mechanical or waxwork figures). To say this is also to explain away not only the ghosts but one of the most disturbing and most characteristic of Atwood’s qualities, her sense of doubleness, of reduplication, in word and image. Even the victor/

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victim pattern recurs and the tale told once in Surfacing will be told again. At the end, nothing is resolved. The ghosts are sexual fears, repressed contents of the imagination, social rigidity. They are also literary images, book reflections, patterns from all those readings in gothic romance, perhaps even the unwritten thesis Atwood proposed for her Ph.D., on gothic romance. Reduplication. Margaret Atwood’s first book of poetry bears the title Double Persephone. The first poem of The Circle Game is called “This is a photograph of Me,” and the speaker tells us that if you look closely at the lake, you will discern her image; in parenthesis we are told: (The photograph was taken the day after I drowned. I am in the lake, in the centre of the picture, just under the surface. It is difficult to say where precisely, or to say how large or small I am: the effect of water on light is a distortion but if you look long enough, eventually you will be able to see me.) (p. 11)

End of brackets. A kind of insane phenomenology takes over that precise meticulous speech; we enter a world of reflections within reflections, totemic duplication (consider the possibilities in the simple four-part structure: man masked; man unmasked; animal masked; animal unmasked) and de-realized experience. Mirror, water and reflection, games like cards and chess, maps or models, eyes and cameras make up the major duplications, though there are more subtle ones in births and ghosts, in movies, photographs, drownings, archeology, astral travel, revenants, echoes, icons, comic books and gardens. The list, I think, could be extended—or duplicated—but its obsessive nature should be clear. It should also be clear that the list points up the literary nature of Atwood’s concerns, otherwise fairly successfully disguised by her field of reference, popular and contemporary imagery. In You Are Happy, a poem called “Gothic Letter on a Hot Night” gives, in a typically wry and throw-away manner, the reflexive pattern of story within story. Presumably this speaker faces a blank page and longs for stories again, but it is not clear whether that is bad (she ought not to live her life in stories) or good (she cannot write and therefore all the bad things the

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stories could do will remain undone). Either way, there is a sinister suggestion that the stories (like the poem one writes to drown one’s sister, or the things that go on just outside the frame of the picture, the part you cannot see) will in fact, or could in fact, write the lives of the story-teller: It was the addiction to stories, every story about herself or anyone led to the sabotage of each address and all those kidnappings Stories that could be told on nights like these to account for the losses litanies of escapes, bad novels, thrillers deficient in villains; now there is nothing to write She would have given almost anything to have them back, those destroyed houses, smashed plates, calendars. (p. 15)

An ambiguity, unresolved, is that the poem begins in first person but in the second stanza shifts to third person narrative. The three—the “I” speaking, the “you” addressed, and the “she” who tells stories—remain unidentified. Duplicity, in part, consists in trying to have it both ways. No doubt, Atwood would recoil from my reading backwards to the material from which she begins, and which often seems to form the object of her irony: don’t live in stories, you are not literature, if you think you would like it when the gods do reveal themselves try it sometime. So Surfacing moves from the world of ghosts back to the place where the narrator can be seen for what she is, a poor naked shivering wretch, scarcely human. But the ambiguity is in the power of the material. You Are Happy ends with what looks like a dismissal of “the gods and their static demands,” but leaves open the question—again—whether you can only do this if you have been there, have known them. Even in parody and irony (let alone social comments on literary forms) the problem, the puzzle about reduplication remains. A similar question arises with Robertson Davies’ World of Wonders; that is, should we read it psychologically, in Jungian terms, as Davies intends, or theatrically, as a series of beautifully structured and terribly inflated poses, or magically, as not only the charlatan’s illusions but the magician’s powers. This question is somewhere in the background of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (all the deceit, the obvious lies, as Ondaatje says of another poem) and in Kroetsch’s insistent attempt to uninvent the world he wants so desperately to be at home in. Perhaps

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Psychologically, as Borges points out in Labyrinths, the story of a world created by a written version of another world of endless reduplication, of halls of mirrors, is a horror. “Mirrors have something monstrous about them . . . because they increase the number of men.”4 In folklore, the doppleganger motif, in which one meets oneself coming back as one goes forward, signifies either death or the onset of prophetic power. In Jung’s commentary on the I Ching, synchronicity substitutes chance for cause, a randomness that plays havoc with notions of identity and opens the possibility of occult possession. The vegetable version of this pattern, in its benign form, is sacramental, and in its malign or demonic form, cannibalistic. Atwood’s ironic awareness of such patterns pervades her humanized gardens and provides a structural principle for her novel, The Edible Woman. But whatever the psychological significance, the literary seems more difficult for her; for in literary terms, as Borges argues, the device of reduplication calls attention to the poem and hence to the fictional nature of the poem’s reality. It de-realizes experience: Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? . . . The inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers and spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833, Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written.5

Borges remarks that tales of fantasy are not haphazard combinations: “They have a meaning, they make us feel that we are living in a strange world.”6 Focussing on the obvious, the map of Canada in a tourist agency, viewed by a window lady who sees her own reflection containing the mapped country, Atwood gives us a country stranger than we knew:

look, here, Saskatchewan is a flat lake, some convenient rocks where two children pose with a father and the mother is cooking something in immaculate slacks by a smokeless fire, her teeth white as detergent.

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the disclaimers are essential to the magic of repetition, a kind of Borgesian pretence that the story or poem is really an essay, or that the essay is a story. The problem is, whatever philosophic dilemmas duplication raises about time and cause, psychologically and poetically it seems far more sinister than the writer wishes to admit. Either a fraud or a magician, the crude choice would seem to be. To which we answer (and this involves the reduplication) neither: this is only a story about both.

Whose dream is this, I would like to know: . . . . . Unsuspecting window lady, I ask you: Do you see nothing watching from under the water? Was the sky ever that blue? Who really lives there? (“At the Tourist Centre in Boston”)

Borges’ temptation is solipsism (think of your life as a dream). But Atwood’s poem characteristically questions the dream. No matter that this is the American dream of Canada, “A manufactured hallucination”; the Unsuspecting Reflection, water and sky in her own head, doesn’t surface, lives with her unanswered questions. It would be possible, I suppose, to read Atwood’s career as a search for techniques to answer those questions honestly, resolve the reflecting/ reflector dilemma by demystifying experience. Certainly by the time of Power Politics she attained an impressive command of deflating ironies; a poem like “They Eat Out” sets up opposing stereotypes of magical thinking in an atmosphere of fried rice and pop culture: I raise the magic fork over the plate of beef fried rice and plunge it into your heart. There is a faint pop, a sizzle and through your own split head you rise up glowing; the ceiling opens a voice sings Love is a Many Splendoured Thing you hang suspended above the city in blue tights and red cape, your eyes flashing in unison. . . . . . As for me, I continue eating; I liked you better the way you were but you were always ambitious.

But writing has its own power, its metaphors, like mirrors in the language. No one knows what word the heroine of Surfacing will speak first. It is

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possible that she will say nothing. Silence can be the strategy of those who have endured. But if there is any sense to my argument that Atwood’s obsessive concern with mirror and reflection is an attempt to resolve an impossible dilemma about writing and experience, or about fiction and wisdom; and at the same time, a sort of playing about with the fires of magical possession, then I would guess that tormented girl would turn toward us and say: You don’t like these metaphors All right Think about pools.

Notes 1. Love and Death in The American Novel, Meridian Books, (New York, 1962), 111-112. 2. Literary Women, Doubleday and Company (New York, 1976), 90. 3. Like Atwood, Ondaatje, especially in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, and Robert Kroetsch in The Studhorse Man and Badlands, tend to bring together images of sexuality, dismemberment, and poetics, poetic and sexual obsessions leading to anatomies. 4. “Tlön Uqbar, Orbïs Tertius,” Labyrinths, New Directions (New York, 1962), 3. 5. Partial Magic in the Quixote,” Labyrinths, 196. 6. “Tales of the Fantastic” in Prism international, Volume Eight, Number One, (Summer, 1968), p. 15.

CORAL ANN HOWELLS (ESSAY DATE 1996) SOURCE: Howells, Coral Ann. “Atwoodian Gothic: From Lady Oracle to The Robber Bride.” In Margaret Atwood, pp. 62-85. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. In the following excerpt, Howells examines Atwood’s unique manipulation of Gothic themes, imagery, and narrative techniques.

Atwoodian Gothic is both sinister and jokey, rather like the scary game which Atwood describes in Murder in the Dark, a game about murderers, victims and detectives played with the lights off. The only other thing the reader needs to know is that the victim is always silent and that the murderer always lies: In any case, that’s me in the dark. I have designs on you, I’m plotting my sinister crime, my hands are reaching for your neck or perhaps, by mistake, your thigh. You can hear my footsteps approaching, I wear boots and carry a knife, or maybe it’s a pearl-handled revolver, in any case I wear boots with very soft soles, you can see the cinematic glow of my cigarette, waxing and waning in the fog of the room, the street, the room, even though I don’t smoke. Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you’ve turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie.1

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This game is emblematic of Atwoodian Gothic; its aim is to scare, yet it is a sort of fabricated fright; there are rules and conventions and we enter into a kind of complicity because we want to be frightened. Atwood suggests, ‘You can say: the murderer is the writer’ and then either the book or the reader would be the victim, which makes an interesting identification between Gothic storyteller and murderer, trickster, liar. We could take that one stage further with Atwood’s female Gothic storytellers, Joan Foster in Lady Oracle, Zenia in The Robber Bride and Atwood herself, identified as sybils, witches, supreme plotters all (‘I have designs on you’). So, what is Gothic? At the core of the Gothic sensibility is fear—fear of ghosts, women’s fear of men, fear of the dark, fear of what is hidden but might leap out unexpectedly, fear of something floating around loose which lurks behind the everyday. The emblematic fear within Gothic fantasy is that something that seemed to be dead and buried might not be dead at all. Hence the Gothic outbreaks of terror and violence as things cross forbidden barriers between dream and waking, life and death. It is easy to recognise a Gothic novel for it is characterised by a specific collection of motifs and themes, many of which come through folklore, fairytale, myth and nightmare. One of the most succinct accounts of the Gothic as a literary genre is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critical study The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, which identifies two key terms to define the Gothic: the Unspeakable and Live Burial.2 Arguably those terms might be seen as different images for the same thing for they both relate to what is hidden, secret, repressed, and which is threatening precisely because it is still alive and blocked off from consciousness though ready to spring out, transformed into some monstrous shape— like Freud’s unheimlich, both familiar and alien to us.3 It is this uncanny quality of Gothic which is embodied in its obsession with the transgression of boundaries and with transformations—‘change from one state into another, change from one thing into another’.4 On the level of the supernatural, there is the phenomenon of ghosts transgressing boundaries between life and death, while on the psychological level there is the erosion of boundaries between the self and the monstrous Other. (What does a Gothic protagonist see or fear to see when she looks in the mirror?) In the borderline territory between conscious and unconscious, a space is opened up for doubles and split selves, which are not total opposites but dependent on each other and linked by a kind of

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Not surprisingly, the Gothic romance has traditionally been a favourite genre for women writers, from Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the Brontës’ Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre (1840s), through to Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and the contemporary fiction of Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Beryl Bainbridge, Alice Munro. It is a devious literature through which to express female desires and dreads, and in Atwood it is easy to see the traditional forms surviving, updated but still retaining their original charge of menace and mystery, while balancing women’s urge toward self-discovery and self-assertiveness with selfdoubts, between celebration of new social freedoms and women’s sense of not being free of traditional assumptions and myths about femininity. It is to this territory of Gothic romance that Atwood returns again and again, using its images and motifs and its narratives of transgression. To glance briefly at the pervasiveness of Gothic in Atwood, one would need to start with her early watercolours from the late 1960s where sinister knights in armour with hidden faces peer at damsels dressed in red, or dark male figures hold unconscious purple female bodies in their giant arms.6 Surfacing might be construed as a ghost story in the Canadian wilderness, a reading suggested by Atwood in an early interview when she explained that she was writing in the tradition of the psychological ghost story:

You can have the Henry James kind, in which the ghost that one sees is in fact a fragment of one’s own self which has split off, and that to me is the most interesting kind and that is obviously the tradition I’m working in.7

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unacknowledged complicity, like Dr Frankenstein and his monster. To return to that game in Murder in the Dark: Atwood reminds players that they may take turns to be murderer or victim, for one role does not preclude the other. Gothic finds a language for representing areas of the self (like fears, anxieties, forbidden desires) which are unassimilable in terms of social conventions. In relation to fiction, the major point to consider is how these transgressions are expressed through narrative, most obviously in the shifts from realism to fantasy signalled in dreams and hallucinations, when frequently the working out of dreams is crucial to the plot. There is also the difficulty any Gothic story has in getting itself told at all: Gothic plots are characterised by enigmas, multiple stories embedded in the main story, multiple narrators and shifting points of view, and mixed genres, where fairy tale may blur into history or autobiography. At all times the Gothic narrative suggests the co-existence of the everyday alongside a shadowy nightmarish world.5

The motifs of haunted wilderness and the split self are still there 20 years later in the story ‘Death by Landscape’ in Wilderness Tips, just as the werewolf image which was there in The Journals of Susanna Moodie recurs in ‘Age of Lead’ in that same collection. The title story in Bluebeard’s Egg (1983) is a modern revision of fairy tale,8 while Bodily Harm (1981) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) exploit traditional Gothic motifs in their representation of classic female fears of sexual violence or imprisonment. In Cat’s Eye (1988) the protagonist is haunted by the past and by her doppelganger Cordelia (‘Lie down, you’re dead!’) who represents the other half of herself, her dark mad twin. There is also a poem ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ in Interlunar (1984), and it is interesting to note that ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ was considered by Atwood as a possible title for Bodily Harm. In this recirculation of images and themes, we note very repetitive patterns which are the identifying marks of a literary genre. The same stories are being retold, as the reader is constantly reminded through intertextual allusions to fairy tales and old Gothic romances, so that versions that might look contemporary and new circle around old enigmas. It is from this Gothic continuum that I wish to single out Lady Oracle (1976) and The Robber Bride (1993) in order to examine what transformations of Gothic conventions Atwood has managed in novels that are nearly 20 years apart; to see how her changing use of Gothic conventions reflects her responses to shifts in cultural mythology, especially in her thinking about women. What we find is the reworking of traditional Gothic motifs within the frames of realistic fiction, for unlike her protagonist Joan Foster in Lady Oracle, Atwood does not ‘write with her eyes closed’. On the contrary, Atwood is an attentive and often satirical critic of contemporary Canada, exposing popular myths and social ideologies for Atwood has designs on us. But then, of course, so did Joan Foster, and so did Zenia, the Robber Bride. Atwood described Lady Oracle as ‘a realistic comic novel colliding with Gothic conventions—I give you Northanger Abbey’, as she explained for a lecture in 1982.9 It is also a fictive autobiography, told by a woman who is a novelist and a poet, suggesting shadowy parallels with Atwood herself in her early days of fame when she was becoming a cultural ikon in Canada. More to the point

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because this novel is not autobiography but an autobiographical fiction, there are strong parallels with Cat’s Eye told by that other successful woman artist, Elaine Risley the painter. In both cases a woman struggles to find her voice, to define her identity through telling her life story in different versions. Lady Oracle and Cat’s Eye are curiously similar autobiographical projects because the stories the protagonists tell offer multiple versions of their lives which never quite fit together to form the image of a unified and coherent self. Who is Joan Foster, who writes popular Gothic romances under the pseudonym Louisa K. Delacourt? What is the significance of Lady Oracle, Joan’s other pseudonym when she writes poetry? The one thing the reader can be sure about with Joan is that she is a fantasist, and a trickster: ‘All my life I’d been hooked on plots’.1 0 Lady Oracle is a story about storytelling, both the stories themselves and the writing process, for Joan offers us multiple narratives figuring and refiguring herself through different narrative conventions. The novel is structured through a series of interlocking frames. First, there is the story of Joan’s real life in the present, set in Italy where she has escaped after her fake suicide in Toronto, Canada. Enclosed within this is her private memory narrative of a traumatic childhood filled with shame, pain and defiance centring on her relationship with her neurotic mother, of an adolescence when she escapes to London and becomes a writer of popular Gothics, her marriage to a Canadian, her celebrity as a poet, to be followed by the threat of blackmail and her second escape from Canada to Italy. Embedded within this narrative are snippets from Joan’s Gothic romances (‘Bodice Rippers’ as she calls them), which provide more glamorous and dangerous plots than everyday life in Toronto, or even in Italy, during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then there is a fourth narrative thread, the curiously mythic ‘Lady Oracle’ poems, produced as Joan believes by Automatic Writing when she looks into a dark mirror in her bedroom in Toronto. These shifting frames generate a series of comic collisions, confrontations and escape attempts, but there are no clear boundaries between them as borders blur between present and past, art and life. Joan’s fantasies of escape and transformation are always duplicitous and riddled with holes, so that one story infiltrates another and fantasy is under continual barrage from the claims of real life. Joan may adopt multiple disguises in the form of fancy costumes, wigs, different names and different personas, but ‘it was no good; I

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couldn’t stop time, I could shut nothing out’ (p. 277). Through this shimmer of different figures, the reader wonders if there is any chance of getting beyond the veils to the centre of the plot or to the enigma of Joan Foster herself. Do we ever get beyond the distorting funhouse mirrors? Joan is nothing if not a self-caricaturist as well as a parodist of Gothic romance conventions, as she switches between real life and fantasy roles in a continual process of double coding. All these fantasies are arguably distorted versions of herself, a process described by Paul de Man in his essay, ‘Autobiography as Defacement’: ‘Autobiography deals with the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figurations and disfiguration’ in images of the self endlessly displaced and doubled.1 1 It is arguable that Joan constructs the Gothic plots in her own life. From her point of view even her life story could be seen as a tale told by a ghost, speaking from beyond her watery grave in Lake Ontario: ‘I planned my death carefully; unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it’ (p. 7). Of course this ‘death’ is another of her contrived plots for Joan is not dead at all. One of the things that frightens her most in Italy is that people at home in Canada will think that she is really dead, and not even miss her. Having escaped from her husband Arthur in Toronto, Joan realises that the other side of her escape fantasy is isolation: The Other Side was no paradise, it was only a limbo. Now I knew why the dead came back to watch over the living: the Other Side was boring. There was no one to talk to and nothing to do. (p. 309)

Such reflection is a result of Joan’s rueful recognition of the gap between real life and fantasy, for she is haunted by memories of her visit to this same Italian village the previous year with her husband and is now filled with the longing that he will come to rescue her from her own perfect plot which begins to look ‘less like a Fellini movie than that Walt Disney film I saw when I was eight, about a whale who wanted to sing at the Metropolitan Opera . . . but the sailors harpooned him’ (p. 9). Critics have been rather fond of saying that Joan’s real-life narrative and the Gothic novel she is writing in Italy start off separate and gradually become entwined till at the end of the narrative borders blur and Joan enters the Gothic maze in Stalked by Love.1 2 That observation is true as far as it goes, but that is not far enough. Borders between realism and fantasy

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The Robber Bride could be classified as a mutant form of female Gothic romance with the return of a ‘demonic woman’ from the dead in a story about transgressions, magic mirrors, shape changers and dark doubles, betrayals and omens of disaster, until the final defeat of the demon by three women friends when her body is burned up and its ashes scattered over the deepest part of Lake Ontario. There is also a multiple homecoming and the restoration of social and family order at the end. Here we find the key Gothic elements of the unspeakable and the buried life, together with a whole range of traditional motifs like vampires, spells, soul stealing and body snatching. It could also be argued here that the traditional Gothic plot is ‘upside-down somehow’, for though there are female victims there are no rescuing heroes, just as there are no tombs, mazes or haunted houses; in this story the blood belongs to history and to metaphor. All of which highlights the fact that The Robber Bride is a postmodernist fiction which exploits the shock effects that occur when Gothic fairy tale migrates into totally different genres like the failed family romance, the detective thriller, and documentary history. Tony, the professional historian among the three friends, knows this technique and how it might be used to engage the interest of listeners and readers: She likes the faint shock on the faces of her listeners. It’s the mix of domestic image and mass bloodshed that does it to them.1 3

The novel is both like a fairy tale as its title indicates and like history, which—as Tony explains—is always ‘a construct’ (p. 6), being the combination of different kinds of textual evidence: social documentary, private memory narrative and imaginative reconstruction. History is a discontinuous text with crucial gaps, so that different interpretations of the facts are always possible. Tony’s words recall those of the American historiographer Hayden White, who suggests that the narratives of history always reconstruct the available facts of the past for readers in the present according to congenial ideological perspectives and identifiable literary patterns like the quest of the hero or fables of decline and fall.1 4 The Robber Bride is the story of Zenia, another of Atwood’s missing persons like Offred in The

Handmaid’s Tale or Cordelia in Cat’s Eye, told through the multiple narratives of her three friends, Antonia Fremont (Tony), Roz Andrews, and Charis. As each of the three tells her own life story, different overlapping frames of reference are set up through which Zenia’s character and significance are given meaning, though Zenia never exists independently of the stories of others. It is through her relationships that Zenia’s identity is constructed, but it is also transformed as it is refigured through the perspectives of a military historian (Tony), a successful businesswoman (Roz) and a New Age mystic (Charis). These women are all living in Toronto on 23 October 1990, a crucial date for the narrative as on that day they are having lunch together at a fashionable Toronto restaurant called the Toxique and ‘Zenia returns from the dead’ (p. 4). Through the swirl of contemporary history which Atwood sketches as a globalised scene of disasters the novel focuses on this one particular event, the kind of ‘definitive moment’ so useful to historians—and to novelists—after which ‘things were never the same again. They provide beginnings for us, and endings too’ (p. 4). The postmodern self-reflexivity of the narrative is signalled in the first and last sections, entitled ‘Onset’ and ‘Outcome’, told by Tony who has a ‘historian’s belief in the salutary power of explanations’ while realising the ‘impossibility of accurate reconstruction.’ Yet for all its enigmas and secrets and dark doubles—traditional Gothic elements which we are reminded are also the features of historical and psychological narratives—the novel is structured quite schematically, moving out from the crisis of Zenia’s Gothic reappearance in the restaurant five years after her memorial service, then scrolling back through the life stories of all three in an attempt to track Zenia down, only to return to the Toxique again about a week later where the final crisis occurs. Though the three friends have met to exchange stories of their confrontation with Zenia, whom they have all tracked down on the same day and to celebrate their resistance and her defeat, they discover something even more startling has happened: Zenia is dead, really dead this time. As Tony’s husband West says, ‘Again? I’m really sorry’ (p. 449), and there is a second memorial service for Zenia a year later which is a replay of the earlier one, when the friends scatter her ashes and return to Charis’s house to tell stories about Zenia all over again. Within that contemporary frame the memory narratives of Tony, Charis and Roz all occur in chronological sequence charting the history of

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are blurred from the beginning as Joan continually slides from the embarrassments of the present into fantasy scenarios and back again, for she is an escape artist who is beset by one inconvenient insight, ‘Why did every one of my fantasies turn into a trap?’ (p. 334). . . . . .

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changing cultural fashions in Toronto over the past 30 years. Tony’s section (‘Black Enamel’) recounts her memories of meeting Zenia as a student in the 1960s as it tracks back through Tony’s unhappy childhood, and recounts Zenia’s many attempts to rob Tony of her money, her professional reputation, and her beloved West. Charis’s section (‘Weasel Nights’) focuses on her memories of Zenia in the 1970s, the era of hippies and draft dodgers, her American lover Billy and their daughter August, with flashbacks to her childhood as a victim of sexual abuse; it ends with Zenia’s seduction of Billy and his disappearance. Roz’s section (‘The Robber Bride’) recounts her meetings with Zenia in the 1980s and follows a similar pattern of recall: childhood memories, marriage, motherhood and a successful business career, up to Zenia’s seduction of Roz’s husband Mitch and his eventual suicide. Only Tony survives with her man, and it is left to her to give a narrative shape to the fragments of Zenia which exist in the multiple anecdotes of these women: ‘She will only be history if Tony chooses to shape her into history’ (p. 461). For all three Zenia is the ‘Other Woman’, and her existence challenges the optimistic assertion of the early 1970s feminists which Roz recalls with some scepticism in 1990: ‘The Other Woman will soon be with us’, the feminists used to say. But how long will it take, thinks Roz, and why hasn’t it happened yet?’ (p. 392)1 5

Zenia represents a powerfully transgressive element which continues to threaten feminist attempts to transform gender relations and concepts of sexual power politics. It is the otherness of Zenia which is figured in her three avatars in this novel, identified in the different life stories told by the three friends. One avatar is from fairy tale: The Robber Bridegroom by the Brothers Grimm, which is here feminised by Roz’s twin daughters and savagely glossed by her through the parodic mode of double-coding: The Robber Bride, thinks Roz. Well, why not? Let the grooms take it in the neck for once. The Robber Bride, lurking in her mansion in the dark forest . . . The Rubber Broad is more like it—her and those pneumatic tits. (p. 295)

A second avatar is from the Bible, the figure of Jezebel in the Old Testament (1 Judges: 21). This is prefigured in Charis’s childhood when with her grandmother she used to choose revelatory passages from the Bible at random and once lit on the death of Jezebel; that ‘message’ is confirmed

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on the very day of her last confrontation with Zenia by her morning Bible reading: She realized it as soon as she got up, as soon as she stuck her daily pin into the Bible. It picked out Revelations Seventeen, the chapter about the Great Whore. (p. 420)

There is a third avatar advanced by Tony near the end, that of the medieval French Cathar woman warrior, Dame Giraude, who in the thirteenth century defended her castle against the Catholic forces of Simon de Montfort. She was finally defeated and thrown down a well. This is the most unsettling of Zenia’s avatars because it introduces a new perspective on her otherness which extends beyond the demonic. Just as Tony very much admires the reckless courage of Dame Giraude fighting for a lost cause so too she has a sneaking admiration for Zenia as a guerrilla fighter, despite her own humiliations at her hands: Zenia is dead, and although she was many other things, she was also courageous. What side she was on doesn’t matter; not to Tony, not any more. There may not even have been a side. She may have been alone. (pp. 469-70)

This is a recognition of the ‘otherness’ of Zenia, which cannot be accommodated within the parameters of the friends’ stories. Tony has always associated Zenia with war—or ‘Raw’ in terms of her own subjective life. As a result of having known Zenia, Tony contemplates writing a book about female military commanders: ‘Iron Hands, Velvet Gloves, she could call it. But there isn’t much material’ (p. 464). It is also Tony who wishes to give Zenia’s ashes a sort of military burial on Armistice Day: ‘An ending, then. November 11, 1991, at eleven o’clock in the morning, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’ (p. 465). Whichever way we look at it, the most interesting figure in the novel is Zenia, the ‘demonic woman’; she is there in the title and it is her story which defines and focuses the narrative. How is it that this traditionally Gothic figure survives as such a powerful force in Atwood’s novel about contemporary social reality in 1990s Toronto? I wish to suggest that Atwood herself has done a Dr Frankenstein performance here, reassembling parts of old legends and fairy tales in order to create her female monster who strides through three Canadian women’s stories from the 1960s to the 1990s haunting their lives and wreaking havoc. However, Atwood revises the Frankenstein ending for it is the monster who destroys herself and it is

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The Zenias of this world . . . have slipped sideways into dreams; the dreams of women too, because women are fantasies for other women, just as they are for men. But fantasies of a different kind. (p. 392)

Who is Zenia? And what kind of fantasy is she for her three contemporaries? Zenia seems to be real but she has a double existence for she belongs to two different fictional discourses, that of realism and of fantasy. She is a very transgressive figure who exists both as a character in the realistic fiction and also as the projection of three women’s imaginations. As the Other Woman, her identity is fabricated through their stories about her, which are all stories of seduction, betrayal

and humiliation. She herself is an enigma. Indeed she derives meaning only within the signifying structures of other people’s stories and then always retrospectively. Zenia is a liar, a floating signifier, possibly a void and certainly a fraud. There is no indication that she has any independent subjective life, unless it is her ‘aura’ which is savagely at variance with her glamorous appearance; it is according to Charis, ‘a turbulent muddy green . . . a deadly aureole, a visible infection’ (p. 66). At least this is how Zenia appears to one of her victims, always on the loose and ready to rob them of whatever is most precious to them. Zenia is everything they want most and everything they fear, for she represents their unfulfilled desires just as she represents their repressed pain-filled childhood selves. She is the dark double of them all, having multiple identities but no fixed identity. As Tony discovers after systematic research: Even the name Zenia may not exist . . . As for the truth about her, it lies out of reach, because—according to the records, at any rate—she was never even born. (p. 461)

Indeed, there are three different versions of Zenia’s life story which have been tailored to fit the lives of Tony, Charis, Roz. She is what they most desire and dread to be. They all think occasionally that they would like to be someone other than the persons they are; most of the time they would like to be Zenia. It is no wonder that Tony reaches this conclusion: As with any magician, you saw what she wanted you to see; or else you saw what you yourself wanted to see. She did it with mirrors. The mirror was whoever was watching, but there was nothing behind the two-dimensional image but a thin layer of mercury. (p. 461)

Why cannot the three women let Zenia go, when they believe she is dead and when they have been to her memorial service five years earlier? Having been tricked and robbed by Zenia of men, money and self confidence, they keep on meeting once a month for lunch because of her. The positive outcome is that they become fast friends, and it is worth noting that this is the first time such a group of loyal female friends has appeared in Atwood’s fiction. However, the fact remains that they meet to tell stories about Zenia, and actually it is their collective need of her which brings her back from the dead—or would do so, if she were really dead. When she commits suicide the three friends stand looking at her, still needing to believe that she is looking at them:

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the three friends who survive, though their memories of Zenia will live on. This is perhaps putting it rather melodramatically, but what Zenia represents will always exceed the bounds of decorum. Her power is the power of female sexuality, and the figure of Zenia relates directly to contemporary social myths about femininity; it also relates to male (and female) fantasies about the feminine; and in addition it challenges feminist thinking about gender relations. In her reading from The Robber Bride at the National Theatre in London in 1993 Atwood offered an important clue to an interpretation of her new novel when she said, ‘It’s a book about illusion: now you see it, now you don’t.’ Through Zenia’s story Atwood confronts the ideology of traditional female romance where ‘getting the power means getting the man, for the man is the power’ (a statement made by Atwood in Wales in 1982). In this novel Atwood is investigating the extent to which that old proposition about power still holds true in the feminist—or post-feminist—1990s. In answer to a question asked at the National Theatre, ‘Why should women now mind much about having men taken away from them by other women?’, Atwood replied, ‘This is not ideology; it’s real life.’ I would add that The Robber Bride is also fantasy, for this is a fantastic tale which examines once again the fantasies that underpin real life as well as fiction. Female sexuality has always been a problem for real women and real men, just as it is a problem for feminism: ‘Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies?’ (p. 392). Have women internalised these fantasies to such an extent that as Roz fears, ‘You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman’? Atwood answers Roz’s rhetorical questions by investigating the effects of fantasies of desirable femininity on women themselves. Zenia inhabits that fantasy territory:

pulls them inside out and then abandons them, though as Tony realises there is nothing genderspecific about this with Zenia:

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Zenia revolves slowly, and looks straight at them with her white mermaid eyes. She isn’t really looking at them though, because she can’t. Her eyes are rolled back into her head. (pp. 446-7)

The switch in narrative perspective reminds readers of whose is the active needy gaze and it is not Zenia’s. Even when they have scattered her ashes in Lake Ontario at the end, their stories will still be about Zenia. They need her, or their stories about her, in order to define themselves, for the ‘good’ women are shown to be as dependent on the ‘Other Woman’ as she is on them. Zenia is inside each one, for she represents their unfulfilled shadow selves: ‘Was she in any way like us? thinks Tony. Or, to put it the other way around: Are we in any way like her?’ (p. 470). The dark reflection in the magic mirror is still there, in that ‘infinitely receding headspace where Zenia continues to exist’ (p. 464). As Alison Light wrote of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, that story of another ‘demonic’ woman: It demarcates a feminine subjectivity which is hopelessly split within bourgeois gendered relations . . . [it] makes visible the tensions within the social construction of femininity whose definitions are never sufficient and are always reminders of what is missing, what could be.1 6

Light’s remark about a woman’s novel of the late 1930s needs very little updating in relation to The Robber Bride written nearly 60 years later where the concept of split feminine subjectivity is shared by all three of Atwood’s protagonists. Signalled in their doubled or tripled names (Tony/ Antonia Fremont/Tnomerf Ynot; Roz Andrews/ Rosalind Greenwood/Roz Grunwald; and Charis, formerly known as Karen), it is commented on explicitly in all three. Since childhood Tony has always been able to write and spell backwards: ‘It’s her seam, it’s where she’s sewn together; it’s where she could split apart’ (p. 19). Similar comments are offered about Charis, who was ‘split in two’ as a sexually abused child (p. 263) and about Roz, whose life was ‘cut in two’ when her Jewish father returned to Toronto after the Second World War (p. 332). All three have a seam, a split, which is the space of repression occupied by their ‘dark twins’ and Zenia operates on this edge of desire and lack which is the borderline territory of the marauding Gothic Other. Zenia is a threat because of her flaunting sexuality, her deceptions and betrayals, her ruthless contempt for others and her random destructiveness. With her siren song she seduces men and

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How well she did it, thinks Tony. How completely she took us in. In the war of the sexes, which is nothing like a real war but is instead a kind of confused scrimmage in which people change allegiances at a moment’s notice, Zenia was a double agent. (p. 185)

The otherness which Zenia represents has to be construed as deviant, dangerous and threatening, and it has to be annihilated again and again. Her punishment is very like Rebecca’s in the earlier novel when Rebecca suffered murder, vilification and cancer of the womb; Zenia commits suicide—or was she murdered?—she is discredited through the revelation that she was a drug dealer and possibly an arms smuggler, and she is reputed to be suffering from ovarian cancer. As Tony repeats, ‘Zenia is history’, which does not necessarily mean that she is dead and out of the way but that her story will continue to be retold in different versions and endlessly speculated upon. It is symptomatic that even her funeral urn splits in two and her ashes blow about all over her three mourners. In this Gothic fairy tale retold from a feminist perspective, Zenia is a very disruptive figure for she is the spectacle of desirable femininity, a beautiful façade which hides whatever is behind it. (Is it neurotic insecurity? or nothingness? or frigidity? or is it ruthless egoism?) The final image of Zenia is given by Tony in her ambiguous elegy: She’s like an ancient statuette dug up from a Minoan palace: there are the large breasts, the tiny waist, the dark eyes, the snaky hair. Tony picks her up and turns her over, probes and questions, but the woman with her glazed pottery face does nothing but smile. (p. 470)

Always an enigma, Zenia is still present or as present as she ever was within her shifting figurations. During the narrative she has taken on all the pains of the twentieth century as the Jewish victim of Nazi persecution and of European wars, as displaced person, as victim of violence and sexual abuse, as suffering from cancer, AIDS and drug addition—just as she has been the ikon of desirable femininity, Robber Bride, Whore of Babylon, and woman warrior. She remains un-dead, a vampiric figure desiring ‘a bowl of blood, a bowl of pain, some death’ (p. 13) for she derives her life from the insecurities and desires of the living. The ending of The Robber Bride is not an ending but merely ‘a lie in which we all agree to

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Notes 1. Margaret Atwood, Murder in the Dark (1984) (London: Virago, 1994) pp. 49-50.

14. Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artefact’, in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, Md, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) pp. 81-100. 15. As an interesting historical note which shows how attentive Atwood is to precision of contemporary detail, from 1972-77 there was a Toronto-based feminist collective newspaper called The Other Woman. This information is from M. Fulford (ed.), The Canadian Women’s Movement, 1960-1990: A Guide to Archival Resources (Toronto: ECW, 1992) p. 53. 16. Alison Light, ‘Returning to Manderley—Romance Fiction, Sexuality and Class’, Feminist Review, vol. 16 (1984) pp. 7-25.

TITLE COMMENTARY Lady Oracle

2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York and London: Methuen, 1986) pp. 4-5. 3. For a succinct discussion of the uncanny, see Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981) pp. 63-72. 4. Earl Ingersoll (ed.) Margaret Atwood: Conversations (London: Virago, 1992) p. 45. 5. See also C A Howells, Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in Goltic Fiction (London: Athlone Press, 1978); William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985) and Michelle A. Massé, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1992). 6. Sharon R. Wilson, ‘Sexual Politics in Margaret Atwood’s Visual Art (With an Eight-Page Color Supplement)’, in K. van Spanckeren and J. Garden Castro (eds) Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988) pp. 215-232.

SYBIL KORFF VINCENT (ESSAY DATE 1983) SOURCE: Vincent, Sybil Korff. “The Mirror and the Cameo: Margaret Atwood’s Comic/Gothic Novel, Lady Oracle.” In The Female Gothic, edited by Julian E. Fleenor, pp. 153-63. Montreal, Quebec, and London: Eden Press, 1983. In the following essay, Vincent illustrates how, with Lady Oracle, Atwood invents “a new sub-genre—the comic/ Gothic,” that conforms to the sensibilities of the Female Gothic tradition without the expected elements of terror and resolution, and with an updated representation of the psyche of the contemporary woman.

12. For a full account of criticism of Lady Oracle, see Margery Fee, The Fat Lady Dances: Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (Toronto: ECW, 1993).

Atwood has created a new sub-genre—the comic/Gothic—which more accurately depicts the psychological condition of the modern woman than does the traditional Gothic novel. In Lady Oracle, we find the Female Gothic novel explored from virtually every angle. It is not a true Gothic in that it does not, at any time, arouse feelings of terror and it does not leave the reader with any satisfactory sense of relief. Rather, Atwood gives us an anatomy of both the Female Gothic and the Gothic sensibility. She explores a number of possible explanations for the development of such a sensibility and demonstrates that it may find expression in various literary forms. She also shows that the familiar trappings of the Gothic— the pursuits and escapes, the sense of isolation, the cruelty, the ambivalent, persecuting/protecting males, the hostile females, the elaborate details of costume, the hints of supernatural influences—are not sufficient to guarantee a Gothic novel.

13. Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (1993) (London: Virago, 1994) p. 3.

What constitutes a Gothic novel is not so much those elements as the attitude—the feeling

7. Conversations, p. 18. 8. C. A. Howells, ‘A Question of Inheritance: Canadian Women’s Short Stories’, in J. Birkett and E. Harvey (eds.), Determined Women: Studies in the Construction of the Female Subject, 1900-90 (London: Macmillan, 1991) pp. 108-20. 9. Quoted from Atwood’s address delivered at a conference ‘Imagined Realities in Contemporary Women’s Writing’, Dyffryn House, Cardiff, October 1982. 10. Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (1976) (London: Virago, 1993) p. 310. 11. Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as Defacement’, MLN, vol. 94 (1979) pp. 931-55.

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conspire’ (p. 465). We are reminded of Atwood’s voice in Murder in the Dark whispering, ‘I have designs on you . . . by the rules of the game, I must always lie.’ Atwood takes Gothic conventions and turns them inside out, weaving her illusions ‘like any magician making us see what she wants us to see’, as she transgresses the boundaries between realism and fantasy, between what is acceptable and what is forbidden. Of course these are fictions; Lady Oracle and The Robber Bride are illusions created by Atwood’s narrative art, but they speak to readers in the present as they challenge us to confront our own desires and fears. Atwood, like the old Gothic novelists, like Joan Foster and like Zenia, ‘does it with mirrors’.

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triumph over her adversity, perhaps merely by her resignation and acceptance, or by her absurd defiance. Enjoyment is derived from the saving of psychic energy which would otherwise be expended on pity or fear. When the heroine derides herself and depicts her tribulations as comical she is saving both herself and the audience the energy needed for grief and compassion. She is also forestalling the pain which would ensue if the story were told seriously and the audience were not sympathetic. With each joke she demonstrates to the world and to herself that she has mastered her anxiety over her pain. At the same time she punishes the originator of the pain—parent, lover, the world in general, or part of her own psyche—by degrading the originator.1

FROM THE AUTHOR AN EXCERPT FROM LADY ORACLE

Arthur never found out that I wrote Costume Gothics. . . . He wouldn’t have understood. He wouldn’t have been able to understand in the least the desire, the pure quintessential need of my readers for escape, a thing I myself understood only too well. Life had been hard on them and they had not fought back, they’d collapsed like soufflés in a high wind. Escape wasn’t a luxury for them, it was a necessity. They had to get it somehow. And when they were too tired to invent escapes of their own, mine were available for them at the corner drugstore, neatly packaged like the other painkillers. They could be taken in capsule form, quickly and discreetly, during those moments when the hair-dryer was stiffening the curls around their plastic rollers or the bath oil in the bath was turning their skins to pink velvet, leaving a ring in the tub to be removed later with Ajax Cleanser, which would make their hands smell like a hospital and cause their husbands to remark that they were about as sexy as a dishcloth. Then they would mourn their lack of beauty, their departing youth. . . . I knew all about escape, I was brought up on it.

Humor releases suppressed emotions and eases frustrations. Humorists “choose grim laughter as a homeopathic protection against total disintegration.”2 The function of humor is “the expression and release of the nervous, muscular and, at base, psychic reflexes of aggression.” 3 The critical detachment of the comic speaker dispels anxiety, while the energy of the unexpressible emotion is released in harmless laughter at something trivial or absurd. In a situation where there is no apparent resolution and hence no restorative catharsis, humor helps to ease the anger and pain of both speaker and reader.

SOURCE: Atwood, Margaret. “Chapter 4.” In Lady Oracle, 1976. Reprint, pp. 31-2. New York: Anchor Books, 1998.

of fear, the concept of multiple selves or no self, the search not for a “they” but for an “I.” With the same elements and the same attitude, but in different proportions, and with a gift for the unexpected simile, Atwood produces a comic novel instead. The reader is too busy laughing at the predicaments and observations of the heroine to feel anything like terror, but she can certainly identify with her feelings and experience a distinct unease. This new sub-genre, comic/Gothic, has a sound psychological basis. Freud noted long ago that the comic situation reassures us that the victim is stronger than she appears. She will

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Atwood’s humor in Lady Oracle tends to be female humor in that it presupposes a female audience. The heroine, Joan, also uses “courting humor,” which is the humor women use towards men, and consists of adopting a childlike, “dumb Dora” posture, or teasing and thus offering a challenge which provokes a libidinous response and a desire to overpower the female. The exercise of wit requires a certain “distancing” of the audience. It is an intellectual exercise and is antithetical to the sensual and emotive relationship which the courting woman hopes will prevail. When she does use wit it is an anti-courting device, signalling that she does not want or expect an emotional relationship and that she is not to be regarded as a female. Atwood, through her narrator/heroine, Joan, more often employs female-to-female humor. She exhibits hostility towards men, anger at the female condition, personal anecdotes about the body and its functions, sexual experiences, and, of course, allusions to the Gothic novels which are being satirized. The comic devices most often employed are absurd similes and imagery, ironic understatement, and caricature or exaggeration. Such humor acts as a tension-relieving mechanism, and estab-

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Joan’s self-deprecating humor also indicates her terrible ambivalence about being female, which is the heart of the traditional Gothic novel. Her body is seen as a traitor leading her into painful situations. By joking about her body she exerts control. The humor which Joan directs towards her mother further underscores the hostility about being female. The usual psychodynamics of comedy are a reversed oedipal situation; a father figure is turned into an impotent clown while the child is free and victorious. Joan’s humor debases the all-powerful mother with whom she is competing, hopelessly and fearfully, for the love of the father, and her self-deprecating humor represents a self-imposed punishment for those longings. Atwood’s comic/Gothic novel thus carries out in a somewhat different way the functions of the traditional Gothic. The Gothic novel is a literary representation of our innermost fears. What we fear so much is ourselves. Using Pogo’s words to describe the Gothic we see that “we have met the enemy and she is us.” Or perhaps more accurately, the Gothic depicts multiple selves engaged in some endless psychic basketball game wherein the team members frequently foul each other in their anxiety to score. Those selves within us which seem to dominate our waking lives are often the victims in our dreams. The pleasure-seeking self, resenting the suppression which the conscious, achieving self has enforced in the waking hours, punishes the self in the dream. The achieving self recognizes that there is that within her that can destroy her, and the person as a whole recognizes that conflicts within are threatening her over-all well being. The Gothic novel, and the dream of pursuit and escape which it articulates, is an expression of our fears of those enemies within us. We are our own harshest critics and most severe task-masters; we are also our own mermaids who will wreathe our limbs with seaweed and draw us down into the waters of madness. These conflicts, especially prevalent in societies where considerable emphasis is placed on personal achievement and self-denial, are common to both women and men, and Gothic novels are certainly not the exclusive property of female writers and readers. The Female Gothic, however,

is a category within the genre which specifically deals with female anxieties and conflicts from a female perspective. In addition to possessing the general characteristics of pursuit and escape, loneliness, elements of the supernatural, sadism, and a sense of antiquity, it relates particularly to the female condition. For a woman, achievement has historically and universally depended upon being beautiful, desirable and fertile. Through her sexuality, every girl is taught, she will acquire the male who will protect her, provide for her, and give her an identity. At the same time, her sexuality entails the discomfort and mysterious terror of the menstrual flow, the threat of ravishment or penetration, the discomfort and innate repugnance of bearing within one’s own body an alien being, and the pain and danger of childbirth. So, while the practical daytime girl bends every effort towards enhancing her desirability and securing a mate, the nighttime girls longs to remain child or neuter. In dreams she threatens and punishes the daytime girl. Virtually every Female Gothic portrays the same dream image: the young, lovely girl fleeing through the night, bare branches tearing at her flimsy clothing, a shadowy male figure nearby, and a huge old house looming behind her. The heroine is being pursued and tormented for no very clear reason by no very clear enemy. The author may supply some superficial rationale for the pursuit, but it is apparent that it is her sexual desirability that makes the heroine a victim. The male is often both persecutor and rescuer, reflecting the ambivalent position which males occupy in relation to females, as well as the woman’s mixed emotions toward sexual intercourse. Other females also frequently menace the heroine. They are expressions of her own libidinous longings which will lead her into the perilous entrapments of marriage and childbearing. But they are also expressions of the stern conscience which exacts morality, purity, duty and self-sacrifice. Nature—the branches of the image— conspires to strip the heroine of her protection. The vast structure of knowledge, custom and order (the old house of the image) is no shelter; it is a prison, a madhouse, a charnelhouse, haunted with memories of pain, helplessness and failure. The message is as subtle as a billboard: it is not safe to be a woman. The Gothic brings the dream to consciousness and resolves its terror. Unlike a nightmare, in the novel the heroine does elude and outwit her

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lishes rapport between author and audience through common interests and problems. As the teller of a humorous tale, Joan gains a sense of power. She deliberately manipulates her audience and experiences a sense of control lacking in her actual life.

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pursuers. Eventually, through a happy combination of beauty, brains, and character, she makes the passage into womanhood, is loved and respected, and achieves status and security. The reader is permitted to live out her own terrors and desires vicariously, always secure in the knowledge that the author is in control. The author will wake her from the nightmare in time and make certain that her daytime perception of herself and her place in the world is reaffirmed. The highly formulaic and predictable structure, trite symbolism, and stereotyped characterization of most Gothics assure the reader that it is safe to proceed and enables the reader to relax her ego-protecting barriers so that her thwarted, secret selves may for a time find some conscious expression.

insistence on an autonomous identity apart from any image. For who among us has not at some time grasped the goblet, felt it cold and hard against our fingers, and felt ourselves somehow weak, soft, fluid—not quite there?

The peculiarly female perspective of the Female Gothic is demonstrated by its setting and attention to detail. The setting is usually indoors, not merely because women generally spend most of their time indoors, but also because most of their perils are internal—within the family, within their bodies, within their souls. Attention to details of costume, furnishings and customs, one of the more delightful esthetic pleasures of the Female Gothic, reflects female perception first of all because within the restricted female milieu such details are more noticeable. Furthermore, female achievement often depends on a mastery of such details. A successful woman is identified by her clothes, furniture, etc. An elaborate delineation of small details gives an illusion of power. As a little girl delights in dressing and undressing her dolls, a woman delights in decorating her home, because here she has dominion. The careful furnishing of the novel, which Atwood so ably satirizes in her novel-within-a-novel, demonstrates mastery of the situation.

The Female Gothic, then, expresses conflicts within the female regarding her own sexuality and identity, and uses a highly stylized form and elaborate detail to effect psychic catharsis. Whereas the psychological novel analyzes the roots of anxiety and its effects realistically and conquers anxiety through reason, the Gothic dramatizes anxiety and through exaggeration— playfulness, even, in the case of Lady Oracle— renders it harmless. It permits us to experiment, to play at terror, to become familiar with it and recognize it as a fact of life. Lady Oracle’s emphasis on playfulness renders it more compatible with the contemporary woman’s condition as it dramatizes and externalizes her inner conflicts.

As well, an emphasis on concrete objects assures us of reality. Women in particular are often isolated from contact with others and have comparatively few opportunities to assure themselves of their own reality through sports, say, or to gain fame and recognition through achievements. Identity is gained through things: “I am my china, my pictures, my perfume. I know I exist because I cleaned this cup.” At times this dependency on things creates an illusion that the things dominate the person. The special horror of things is a common element in Gothic novels. They seem to take on a perverse life of their own, a horror well depicted by the surrealist painters. An image familiar to all movie-goers is the hero, driven to distraction, smashing a mirror. This is an assertion of one’s mastery over the world of things, an

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In the Gothic those prosaic things assume an air of menace. Why are the jewels glittering, the candelabra gleaming, the curtains rustling? Are they really there, or do I imagine them? Am I really here or do they imagine me? Through a scrupulous attention to minor details, the author causes the novel to affect the reader on many levels at once, from an ordinary interest in the environment of the fiction providing credibility and verisimilitude, to the striking of sympathetic vibrations of horror within the reader.

Unlike the traditional Gothic, which has no humor, this novel abounds in ludicrous images and metaphors. For example, “I felt through my brain for whatever scraps of political lore might be lodged there inadvertently, like bits of spinach among my front teeth.”4 However, it follows the typical Gothic plot development, leading the reader through the suspense of trying to discover who or what is persecuting the heroine. Although the novel begins at a chronological point where the heroine has apparently achieved safety from her supposed enemies, she is, in fact, in the most critical danger from her true inner enemies. As she recalls her life, we are introduced to the various possibilities which might account for her terror—her mother, her uncertain sense of identity, the pressures of society, her sexual conflicts, her experiences with men, her fear of death, and her own warring selves. To make obvious that this is an analysis of the Gothic form, Lady Oracle is a novel-within-anovel. Joan, the heroine, writes “costume Gothics.” We are invited to compare her personal nar-

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A comparison of the openings of the true and fictive narratives provides an insight both into Joan’s nature and the Gothic sensibility. She begins her confession with “I planned my death carefully.” She has lost control of her life and must destroy her former self by making her death an artistic creation, thus gaining control of her life and mastering her fear of death. She is “feeble,” her life “flabby” and convoluted, “scrolling and festooning like the frame of a baroque mirror”—an image revealing a surrealistic and dreamlike synaesthesia which perceives a mirror frame as a living vine. Death is definite and hard, depicted through images of a Quaker church and a severe black dress. She longs for order, silence, simplicity, wishing to escape a tawdry, confusing circus world of trumpets, megaphones and spangles. She speaks of a “shadow,” of a “corpse”—Gothic symbols representing spiritual threat and material corruption. Believing the shadow will be mistaken for the reality, she will play a hoax on death. She will create her self by herself. But her image of herself as a bungler insures that she will fail, will remain the persecuted heroine of her own romances. Comparing this to the opening of the workin-progress, we find the heroine, Charlotte, is also thinking about death—the death of her mother. There is a similar concern with clothing, allusions to neatness and purity through a Quaker reference, a similar palette of black, white and gray, and reference to a frame, symbolizing entrapment. But there is also sunshine and emotion. Key words are tears, sad, darling, heart, and hopeful. The vinelike characteristics of Joan’s mirror-frame are actually the “curling tendrils” of Charlotte’s mother’s hair, like spider webs. The vine-like mirror-frame of Joan’s confession is an actual frame on a cameo brooch which is Charlotte’s only legacy from her dead mother. Joan’s life, which seems to her an empty, shifting, imageless mirror, in her novel is concentrated into the cameo—a precise, perfect, unchanging image derived from the mother, which she can wear as she chooses and hence control. What is more, Charlotte is by trade a jeweler and can refashion the cameo as she likes.

We learn from these two versions of a Female Gothic within a Gothic, contemporary vs. traditional, that the Gothic sensibility both fears and longs for death as an end to fear. It prefers a world of fantasy which it can control. It has an uncertain sense of identity, fears its own wild impulses, and has a concomitant passion for control. Bearing in mind that storytelling is a means of survival for Joan, if we can trust her confession, her problems originated with her uncertain sense of identity beginning with her own name. She was named “Joan” after Joan Crawford (whose real name was Lucille). She does not feel adequate to the movie-star image and suspects she was really named for the martyred Joan of Arc. In a seminal episode, chubby little Joan is denied the opportunity to perform as a butterfly in a ballet recital because of her appearance. She is cast as a mothball, comic relief, instead. The mothball is an instrument of death for the butterflies, and for her own fragile ego. Disguised as the mothball, Joan expresses her rage and frustration in a socially approved way, as a comedian. This dramatizes Joan’s survival techniques— disguise, comedy, and death. She symbolically destroyes her enemies, including those within her who longed to be butterflies and rebelled at her humiliation. The mothball is also a preservative, and with disguise, comedy and symbolic death, she preserves what is left of her ego. To defy her mother and the society which pressures her into being beautiful and punishes any deviation, Joan overeats and becomes grossly fat. But, more than from defiance, she “ate from panic. Sometimes I was afraid I wasn’t really there, I was an accident. . . . Did I want to become solid as a stone, so she wouldn’t be able to get rid of me. . . . What had I done?” Her tenuous sense of reality is buttressed by the material—the food she consumes and her own obvious and solid flesh. Overeating also renders Joan safe from the sexual advances which she fears. “It is not sexually titillating to observe the torture of a fat person,” she observes. Ambivalence towards sexuality is demonstrated in another passage wherein she is accosted in the park by a man who first exposes himself and then hands her a bunch of daffodils. Subsequently her female companions from her Brownie troupe blindfold her and leave her tied to a tree. A man whom she suspects is the exhibitionist rescues her. In her dreams the fleetingly glimpsed penis turns into menacing tentacles, and then into glorious flowers. Here is the mingled terror and desirability of the pending

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rative with her works in progress, which represent a sub-text to what she tells us about herself. As she works through her own inner mazes, the personal narrative and the work-in-progress begin to merge, and her various selves achieve some sort of synthesis. As readers we are often more caught up in the work-in-progress than the “true” narrative, just as Joan lives more fully in her fantasy life than in her real life.

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sexuality of the prepubescent girl. She longs for the forbidden sexual act which will deliver her from her helpless childhood state, but also feels fear, guilt, shame, and a need for punishment. Desire for sexual maturity is a desire to gain the secret knowledge and power that her mother has, and which the mother both forbids to and demands of her. Through a male she can conquer the internalized mother figure who denies her her true identity. Ambivalence towards sexuality is emphasized by the contrasts between the erotic passages of Joan’s confession and her fiction. In the latter, words such as fiery and wild animal abound: it is serious, dangerous and thrilling. In the former, erotic scenes are ludicrous. A middle-aged lover in striped pajamas seduces Joan, who has a sprained ankle. She surrenders her virginity because she is too embarrassed to admit she didn’t know he was making advances. A lover called the Royal Porcupine advances on Joan, growling softly. She protests he hasn’t washed his hands. Joan imagines making love with the produce-vendor, “surging together on a wave of plums and tangerines,” mingling her romantic nature and her earthy perceptions. Joan’s identity confusion is demonstrated by the two images of her self—a ballerina and a circus fat lady. These meld into a fat lady dressed in a ballerina costume walking a high wire over a crowd. Although Joan longs for achievement and adulation, she fears it and so invents other selves. She becomes thin and beautiful, takes an alias, and flees to England to create her own life. “I’d spent all my life learning to be one person and now I was a different one. I had been an exception, with the limitations that imposed; now I was average and I was far from used to it.” She lies about her past and denies her former self. The old photograph of herself on her bureau is identified as a fictitious aunt who “was always trying to tell me how to run my life.” But just as within the overweight body of the teenager there was a slender ballerina, so surrounding the beautiful adult woman is the wraith of the circus fat lady she still feels she is. Joan establishes a truly separate identity as Louisa Delacorte, author of Costume Gothics, successful, independent, self-sufficient—and through her writing can play out all her fantasies. Her “good” heroines can be punished and persecuted, and also achieve success. Her “bad” heroines (who resemble Joan physically) indulge in all sorts of wanton and lascivious behavior, humiliate the

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“good” heroine, and then are destroyed. Sin, guilt, shame, expiation are all worked out in the fantasy world. “As long as I could spend a certain amount of time each week as Louisa I was all right, I was patient and forbearing, warm, a sympathetic listener. But if I was cut off, if I couldn’t work at my current Costume Gothic, I would become mean and irritable, drink too much, and start to cry.” Louisa gratified Joan’s superego. As a bumbling, absent-minded housewife, Joan gratifies her id. She marries Arthur, a high-minded young man who looks “Byronic” and reminds her of the hero of her current novel. He loves her for her earnest, energetic failures in the kitchen and her obvious female attractions. She is careful to keep hidden both her success as a writer and her past as an overweight Brownie. Joan experiments with automatic writing, develops her psychic powers, and discovers still more selves. The automatic writings are published as a volume of poetry, called “Lady Oracle.” It seems to Joan an “upside-down Gothic” with all the right elements but no true love and happy ending. The poems are filled with images of pain and death, and describe a tri-partite woman— dark, redgold and blank—who must be obeyed. As she stares into her mirror and transcribes, Joan glimpses the ghost of her mother. Her mother had owned a triplicate mirror, and always appeared to the child as having three heads. The adult Joan owns a triplicate mirror, too. The poems are a huge success and still another self appears—Joan the celebrity. “My dark twin, my funhouse mirror reflection. She was taller than I, more beautiful, more threatening. She wanted to kill me and take my place.” Even for as skillful a dissembler as Joan, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep separate the strands of her real life and keep distinct the realms of fantasy and reality. She takes a lover, the Royal Porcupine, and with him lives out her fantasies. He is the romantic, dangerous hero of her novels, willing to be her playmate, to dress up in absurd costumes, and to waltz through an empty loft clad only in a lace tablecloth. But this purely libidinous life cannot last. He wants to marry her and read the morning paper together, and Joan fears the merging of the real and the phantom. She knows that every woman longs for a dashing hero in a cape who will rescue her from a balcony but she really wants a husband to help her with the dishes. She dare not lose the distinction between the two worlds, for then she will lose control. Her

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Joan’s fictions begin to take on some of her real-life traits. Humor seeps in, as for example “Redmond’s eye slid like a roving oyster over her blushing countenance.” At the same time her life becomes more like one of her fictions. She becomes involved in a terrorist plot, is blackmailed, and receives ominous threats from a neverrevealed enemy. These are the external signs of her inner conflict: “There was always that shadowy twin, thin when I was fat, fat when I was thin, myself in silvery negative. . . . It was nevernever land she wanted, that reckless twin. But not twin even, I was more than double. I was triple, multiple, and now I could see that there was more than one life to come, there were many.” To regain control, Joan fakes her own death. “Maybe I really did want to die, or I wouldn’t have pretended to do it. But that was wrong; I pretended to die so I could live, so I could have another life.” By killing her old selves, Joan punishes them for the wicked deeds she has enjoyed, and atones. But the past she has tried to bury, the old selves she has tried to destroy, rise up in her imagination as a huge featureless fat lady—“. . . my ghost, my angel, then she settled and I was absorbed into her. Within my former body I gasped for air.” She protests against the female nature which engulfs her. She knows that she does not want to spend her life in a cage as a “fat whore, a captive Earth Mother.” She wants to be female and yet create, control, take responsibility for her own life, dare to want glory for her own achievements— and this is as difficult as a fat lady crossing a high wire. “You could dance, or you could have the love of a good man. But you were afraid to dance, because you had this unnatural fear they’d cut your feet off.” At the extreme of a terror which she ascribes to male domination, Joan attacks the next man she encounters, a harmless reporter. Subsequently she aids his recovery and confesses her true story to him. Presumably the “new Joan” has found her true identity, resolved her internal conflicts, and henceforth will be brave, honest, aggressive and responsible. That she has defended herself, albeit mistakenly—after all, this is a comic novel— presupposes she has found a self worth defending.

By drawing blood from the male, rendering him helpless (she hits him over the head with a bottle) and then reviving him, Joan turns the male into the ravished and rescued, and herself into persecutor and protector. Like her father, who had been both a doctor and an assassin during the war, she can give and take life. She need no longer fear her own femaleness, nor the males who forbid her an identity. Joan decides she will no longer write Gothics; she will write a novel about real people—“less capes and more holes in stockings.” The novel thus shows the “characteristic comic movement from a lesser to a greater awareness of worldly reality.”5 Atwood’s conclusion is too reassuring to be reassuring. We suspect that Joan is once again adopting a disguise to elude the realities of her psychic conflicts—this time the militant female. It may be that the condition of women in the modern world is not so grave anymore, and such “new Joans” can indeed create themselves. In today’s more open environment, with more opportunities for personal achievement and independence, and hence less dependence on sexuality for survivial, with more comradeship between the sexes, with medical advancements and better sex education, women need not suffer the terrors and conflicts which the traditional Gothic novel psychologically dramatizes. The choices and possibilities are not so hard and fixed as a cameo; they are fluid, changeable, like the shifting images in a funhouse mirror. But this multiplicity and uncertainty produces its own psychic state. Instead of terror there is anxiety and confusion. We all know laughter is as much a response to tension as are screaming or crying, but it is a more socially acceptable response. As women move out into the crowded streets of contemporary life, the piercing scream of the terrified Gothic heroine seems to be giving way to the nervous giggle of the uncertain comic/ Gothic heroine. Insofar as the ancient fears and restrictions of women persist, the inner conflicts of women persist and the genre remains viable.

Notes 1. Martin Grotjahn, M.D., Beyond Laughter: Humor and the Sub-Conscious, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), p. 257. 2. Jesse Bier, The Rise and Fall of American Humor (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968), p. 307. 3. Ibid., p. 456.

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novels enable her to satisfy both needs, for herself as well as for her readers. Joan is always sympathetic to her reader’s needs; unlike Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a comic novel satirizing the readers of Gothic novels, Atwood’s comic novel satirizes the Gothic but understands its function.

ATWOOD

4. Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976). 5. Robert Heilman, The New Ways of the World: Comedy and Society (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1978), p. 182.

Compares Atwood’s treatment of chastity and the victimization of women to Jane Austen’s treatment of the same subjects in Northanger Abbey, and explores the authors’ sources in the Gothic tradition.

FURTHER READING Criticism Barzilai, Shuli. “‘Say That I Had a Lovely Face’: The Grimms’ ‘Rapunzel,’ Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shalott,’ and Atwood’s Lady Oracle.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 19, no. 2 (fall 2000): 231-54. Views Lady Oracle as a künstlerroman, with sources from works by the Brothers Grimm and Tennyson. Becker, Susanne. “Exceeding Even Gothic Texture: Margaret Atwood and Lady Oracle.” In Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions, pp. 151-98. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1999. Delineates the various elements of the Gothic tradition within Lady Oracle. Grace, Sherill. “More than A Very Double Life.” In Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood, edited by Ken Norris, pp. 111-28. Montreal, Quebec: Véhicule Press, 1980. Asserts that Lady Oracle is “an amusing parody of Gothic romance and realist conventions, a satiric commentary on Atwood’s own experiences as a writer and upon aspects of contemporary society, and a portrayal of ‘the perils of Gothic thinking.’” Ingersoll, Earl G. and Philip Howard, editors. Margaret Atwood: Conversations Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1978, 265 p. Collection of interviews with Atwood from the 1970s. Kakutani, Michiko. A review of The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood. The New York Times (8 September 2000): 43. Laudatory assessment of The Blind Assassin. McCombs, Judith. “‘Up in the Air So Blue’: Vampire and Victims, Great Mother Myth and Gothic Allegory in Margaret Atwood’s First, Unpublished Novel.” Centennial Review 33, no. 3 (summer 1989): 251-57. Examines the gothicism present in Atwood’s treatment of motherhood in her first, unpublished novel. McKinstry, Susan Jaret. “Living Literally by the Pen: The Self-Conceived and Self-Deceiving Heroine-Author in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle.” In Margaret Atwood: Reflection and Reality, edited by Beatrice Mendez-Egle and James M. Haule, pp. 58-70. Edinburgh: Pan American University, 1987. Assesses Atwood’s treatment of Joan Foster as the heroine of Lady Oracle as it compares to the conventional depiction of heroines in classic Gothic fiction.

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McMillan, Ann. “The Transforming Eye: Lady Oracle and Gothic Tradition.” In Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms, edited and with an introduction by Kathryn VanSpanckeren, edited by Jan Garden Castro, pp. 4864. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988.

Northey, Margot. “Sociological Gothic: Wild Geese and Surfacing.” In The Haunted Wilderness: The Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Fiction, pp. 62-9. Toronto, Ontario and Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 1976. Asserts that Atwood’s novel Surfacing utilizes the Gothic mode to comment on conditions in society, and is an example of what Northey terms “sociological Gothic” literature. Poznar, Susan. “The Totemic Image and the ‘Bodies’ of the Gothic in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 47 (1999): 81-107. Treats Cat’s Eye as a künstlerroman and compares it to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Rosowski, Susan J. “Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle: Social Mythology and the Gothic Novel.” Research Studies 49, no. 2 (June 1981): 87-98. Surveys the Gothic elements in Lady Oracle.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Atwood’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: American Writers Supplement, Vol. 13; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. 12, 47; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 1; Bestsellers, Vol. 89:2; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 49-52; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 3, 24, 33, 59, 95, 133; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 15, 25, 44, 84, 135; Contemporary Novelists, Ed. 7; Contemporary Poets, Ed. 7; Contemporary Popular Writers; Contemporary Women Poets; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 53, 251; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors: Modules, Most-studied Authors, Poets, and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Exploring Novels; Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion; Feminist Writers; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 5; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Major 21st-Century Writers; Novels for Students, Vols. 1, 14, 18, 20; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 8; Poetry for Students, Vol. 7; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 3, 13; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 2, 46; Something about the Author, Vol. 50; Twayne’s Companion to Contemporary Literature in English, Ed. 1; Twayne’s World Authors; World Literature Criticism; and World Writers in English, Vol. 1.

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JANE AUSTEN (1775 - 1817)

English novelist.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

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riginally written between 1798 and 1799, but not published until 1818, Northanger Abbey is considered Jane Austen’s first significant work of fiction, and is her only work to be widely studied as part of the Gothic literary tradition. The novel is in part a burlesque of the Gothic and sentimental fiction that was popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries particularly of Ann Radcliffe’s novels, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho. In addition to its parodic elements, Northanger Abbey also follows the maturation of Catherine Morland, a naive eighteen-year-old, ignorant of the workings of English society and prone to self-deception. Influenced by her reading of novels rife with the overblown qualities of horror fiction, Catherine concocts a skewed version of reality by infusing real people, things, and events with terrible significance. However, Catherine’s impressions, though clouded by Gothic sentiment, often hint at an insightful, if unconscious, judgment of character that cuts through the social pretensions of those around her. In this respect Austen’s novel carries on an ironic discourse which makes it not only a satire, but also a sophisticated novel of social education.

Austen began writing while she was still living at her childhood home at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire, England. Her life at Steventon, though sheltered from the world at large, gave her an intimate knowledge of a segment of English society—the landed gentry—that was to provide the material for most of her fiction, and by 1787 Austen had already begun to produce stories, dramas, and short novels. In 1795 she commenced writing Elinor and Marianne, an early version of her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811). One year later, she started First Impressions, the work that eventually evolved into Pride and Prejudice (1813). When Austen finished First Impressions in 1797, her father submitted it to a London publisher. Although rejected, the story remained a popular favorite among the circle of relations and acquaintances with whom Austen shared her writings. In 1798 and 1799 Austen wrote most of a novel that was later revised, bought by the publisher Richard Crosby, and advertised in 1803 as “In the Press, SUSAN; a novel, in 2 vols.” It remained unpublished, however, and was later revised again and published in 1818, after Austen’s death, as Northanger Abbey, along with the novel Persuasion.

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MAJOR WORKS Austen’s career is generally divided into an early and a late period, the former encompassing the juvenilia, as well as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey, the latter including Emma (1816), Mansfield Park (1814), and Persuasion. They are separated by a hiatus of eight years. There is a remarkable consistency in the work of the early and late periods, marked by a certain mellowing of tone in the later works. The plots of Austen’s novels revolve around the intricacies of courtship and marriage between members of the upper class. Austen’s detractors in more egalitarian eras find fault with what they perceive to be a rigid adherence to a repressive class system. Also, in commenting on the narrowness of her literary world and vision, some critics wonder if novels of such small scope can truly reflect the human condition. However, Austen’s talents are uniquely suited to her chosen subject. Her realm is comedy, and her sense of the comedic in human nature informs her technique, which is judged as superb for its delineation of character, control of point of view, and ironic tone. Although Austen chose as her subject the people she knew best, she illuminated in their characters the follies and failings of men and women of all times and classes. While ostensibly a burlesque of the conventional modes of Gothic horror fiction, Northanger Abbey is also a novel of education that focuses on the theme of self-deception. Austen portrays Catherine as an inversion of the typical Gothic heroine, making her neither beautiful, talented, nor particularly intelligent, but rather ordinary in most respects. In contrast, several other characters in the novel are presented as pastiches of stock Gothic characters—Isabella and General Tilney, for example, are parodies of the damsel and the domestic tyrant. These individuals seem to fit into Catherine’s deluded perspective of the world which, in the tradition of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, leaves her unable to distinguish between reality and the romanticized version of life she finds in popular novels. Other characters in the novel serve to balance the work. Henry Tilney is often regarded by critics as Austen’s mouthpiece—though he, too, is occasionally an object of irony and ridicule. For example, he fails to realize that Catherine’s delusions, though excessive, hint at the true nature of people and events. Thus, Catherine is the first to understand that General Tilney, although not a murderer, is cruel and mercenary. This ironic aspect of the novel alludes to a larger theme in the work, that of the moral

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significance of social conventions and conduct—a subject that Austen explored in greater detail in later novels. Catherine’s introduction into society begins when Mr. and Mrs. Allen, her neighbors in Fullerton, invite her to vacation with them in the English town of Bath. There she meets the somewhat pedantic clergyman Henry Tilney and the dramatic Isabella Thorpe, who encourages Catherine in her reading of Gothic fiction. Her circle of acquaintances widens with the arrival of James Morland, Catherine’s brother and a love interest for Isabella, and John Thorpe, Isabella’s rude, conniving brother. The setting shifts from Bath to Northanger Abbey, the ancestral home of the Tilneys, when John deceives General Tilney, Henry’s father, into believing that Catherine is an heiress. Austen’s satire of Gothic horror novel conventions begins as Henry and Catherine drive up to the Abbey and the former plays on the heroine’s romantic expectations of the estate. When Catherine reaches her destination she is disappointed to find a thoroughly modern building, completely lacking in hidden passageways, concealed dungeons, and the like. Later, Austen allows Catherine’s imagination to run amok, only to reveal the objects of her fears as ordinary and mundane. At the climax of the novel, General Tilney—whom Catherine suspects of having murdered or shut up his wife somewhere in the abbey—turns the heroine out after learning that she does not come from a wealthy family. At the close of the novel, the outraged Henry proposes marriage to Catherine, now divested of her delusions by Henry and his sister Eleanor. General Tilney, who proves to be not a murderer, but rather an individual of questionable moral and social character, eventually gives his consent to the marriage after learning that his daughter Eleanor is also engaged—to a wealthy Viscount.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Critics have generally regarded Northanger Abbey to be of lesser literary quality than Austen’s other mature works. Some scholars have observed occasional lapses in her narrative technique of a sort that do not appear in later novels. By far the greatest debate surrounding Northanger Abbey, however, is the question of its aesthetic unity. Critics have traditionally seen the work as part novel of society, part satire of popular Gothic fiction, and therefore not a coherent whole. Detractors, focusing on the work as a parody, have found its plot weak, its characters unimaginative and

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PRINCIPAL WORKS Sense and Sensibility (novel) 1811 Pride and Prejudice (novel) 1813 Mansfield Park (novel) 1814 Emma (novel) 1816 Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. 4 vols. (novels) 1818 Lady Susan (novel) 1871 The Watsons (unfinished novel) 1871

sembled party. With Mr. Allen to support her, she felt no dread of the event: but she would gladly be spared a contest, where victory itself was painful, and was heartily rejoiced therefore at neither seeing nor hearing anything of them. The Tilneys called for her at the appointed time; and no new difficulty arising, no sudden recollection, no unexpected summons, no impertinent intrusion to disconcert their measures, my heroine was most unnaturally able to fulfil her engagement, though it was made with the hero himself. They determined on walking around Beechen Cliff, that noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object from almost every opening in Bath. “I never look at it,” said Catherine, as they walked along the side of the river, “without thinking of the south of France.” “You have been abroad then?” said Henry, a little surprised. “Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?” “Why not?”

Love and Friendship and Other Early Works (juvenilia) 1922

“Because they are not clever enough for you— gentlemen read better books.”

[Sanditon] Fragments of a Novel (unfinished novel) 1925

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time.”

Jane Austen’s Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others (letters) 1932 Volume the First (juvenilia) 1933 Volume the Third (juvenilia) 1951 Volume the Second (juvenilia) 1963

PRIMARY SOURCES JANE AUSTEN (NOVEL DATE 1818) SOURCE: Austen, Jane. “Chapter 14.” In Northanger Abbey. 1818. Reprint edition, pp. 107-16. New York: Signet, 1996. In the following excerpt from Northanger Abbey, first published in 1818, Catherine discusses the pleasure she derives from reading Gothic fiction—Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, in particular—versus what she perceives as the drudgery of reading nonfiction works, such as histories.

The next morning was fair, and Catherine almost expected another attack from the as-

“Yes,” added Miss Tilney, “and I remember that you undertook to read it aloud to me, and that when I was called away for only five minutes to answer a note, instead of waiting for me, you took the volume into the Hermitage Walk, and I was obliged to stay till you had finished it.” “Thank you, Eleanor—a most honourable testimony. You see, Miss Morland, the injustice of your suspicions. Here was I, in my eagerness to get on, refusing to wait only five minutes for my sister, breaking the promise I had made of reading it aloud, and keeping her in suspense at a most interesting part, by running away with the volume, which, you are to observe, was her own, particularly her own. I am proud when I reflect on it, and I think it must establish me in your good opinion.”

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superficial, and its comedy anticlimactic due to its reliance on an outmoded style of fiction. Others, while conceding the lack of an easily discernible organizing principle, argue that the work is unified on the thematic level as not merely a satire of popular fiction, but also an ironic presentation of a self-deceived imagination that is quixotically wrong about reality but right about human morality. In addition, critics have considered Northanger Abbey a transitional work, one that moves away from the burlesque mode of juvenilia and toward the stylistic control of such masterpieces as Mansfield Park and Emma.

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“I am very glad to hear it indeed, and now I shall never be ashamed of liking Udolpho myself. But I really thought before, young men despised novels amazingly.” “It is amazingly; it may well suggest amazement if they do—for they read nearly as many as women. I myself have read hundreds and hundreds. Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a knowledge of Julias and Louisas. If we proceed to particulars, and engage in the never-ceasing inquiry of ‘Have you read this?’ and ‘Have you read that?’ I shall soon leave you as far behind me as—what shall I say?—I want an appropriate simile.—as far as your friend Emily herself left poor Valancourt when she went with her aunt into Italy. Consider how many years I have had the start of you. I had entered on my studies at Oxford, while you were a good little girl working your sampler at home!” “Not very good, I am afraid. But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?” “The nicest—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.” “Henry,” said Miss Tilney, “you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is forever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word ‘nicest,’ as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way.” “I am sure,” cried Catherine, “I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?” “Very true,” said Henry, “and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement— people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.” “While, in fact,” cried his sister, “it ought only to be applied to you, without any commendation at all. You are more nice than wise. Come, Miss Morland, let us leave him to meditate over our faults in the utmost propriety of diction, while we

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praise Udolpho in whatever terms we like best. It is a most interesting work. You are fond of that kind of reading?” “To say the truth, I do not much like any other.” “Indeed!” “That is, I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?” “Yes, I am fond of history.” “I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome; and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs—the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books.” “Historians, you think,” said Miss Tilney, “are not happy in their flights of fancy. They display imagination without raising interest. I am fond of history—and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under one’s own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such. If a speech be well drawn up, I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made—and probably with much greater, if the production of Mr. Hume or Mr. Robertson, than if the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola, or Alfred the Great.” “You are fond of history! And so are Mr. Allen and my father; and I have two brothers who do not dislike it. So many instances within my small circle of friends is remarkable! At this rate, I shall not pity the writers of history any longer. If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate; and though I know it is all very right

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“That little boys and girls should be tormented,” said Henry, “is what no one at all acquainted with human nature in a civilized state can deny; but in behalf of our most distinguished historians, I must observe that they might well be offended at being supposed to have no higher aim, and that by their method and style, they are perfectly well qualified to torment readers of the most advanced reason and mature time of life. I use the verb ‘to torment,’ as I observed to be your own method, instead of ‘to instruct,’ supposing them to be now admitted as synonymous.” “You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that ‘to torment’ and ‘to instruct’ might sometimes be used as synonymous words.” “Very probably. But historians are not accountable for the difficulty of learning to read; and even you yourself, who do not altogether seem particularly friendly to very severe, very intense application, may perhaps be brought to acknowledge that it is very well worth-while to be tormented for two or three years of one’s life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. Consider—if reading had not been taught, Mrs. Radcliffe would have written in vain—or perhaps might not have written at all.” Catherine assented—and a very warm panegyric from her on that lady’s merits closed the subject. The Tilneys were soon engaged in another on which she had nothing to say. They were viewing the country with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing, and decided on its capability of being formed into pictures, with all the eagerness of real taste. Here Catherine was quite lost. She knew nothing of drawing—nothing of taste: and she listened to them with an attention which brought her little profit, for they talked in phrases which conveyed scarcely any idea to her. The little which she could understand, however, appeared to contradict the very few notions she had entertained on the matter before. It seemed as if a good view were no longer to be taken from

the top of an high hill, and that a clear blue sky was no longer a proof of a fine day. She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance. A misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance. But Catherine did not know her own advantages—did not know that a goodlooking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward. In the present instance, she confessed and lamented her want of knowledge, declared that she would give anything in the world to be able to draw; and a lecture on the picturesque immediately followed, in which his instructions were so clear that she soon began to see beauty in everything admired by him, and her attention was so earnest that he became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste. He talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances— side-screens and perspectives—lights and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape. Delighted with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject to decline, and by an easy transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the enclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence. The general pause which succeeded his short disquisition on the state of the nation was put an end to by Catherine, who, in rather a solemn tone of voice, uttered these words, “I have heard that something very shocking indeed will soon come out in London.”

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and necessary, I have often wondered at the person’s courage that could sit down on purpose to do it.”

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Miss Tilney, to whom this was chiefly addressed, was startled, and hastily replied, “Indeed! And of what nature?” “That I do not know, nor who is the author. I have only heard that it is to be more horrible than anything we have met with yet.” “Good heaven! Where could you hear of such a thing?” “A particular friend of mine had an account of it in a letter from London yesterday. It is to be uncommonly dreadful. I shall expect murder and everything of the kind.” “You speak with astonishing composure! But I hope your friend’s accounts have been exaggerated; and if such a design is known beforehand, proper measures will undoubtedly be taken by government to prevent its coming to effect.” “Government,” said Henry, endeavouring not to smile, “neither desires nor dares to interfere in such matters. There must be murder; and government cares not how much.” The ladies stared. He laughed, and added, “Come, shall I make you understand each other, or leave you to puzzle out an explanation as you can? No—I will be noble. I will prove myself a man, no less by the generosity of my soul than the clearness of my head. I have no patience with such of my sex as disdain to let themselves sometimes down to the comprehension of yours. Perhaps the abilities of women are neither sound nor acute—neither vigorous nor keen. Perhaps they may want observation, discernment, judgment, fire, genius, and wit.” “Miss Morland, do not mind what he says; but have the goodness to satisfy me as to this dreadful riot.” “Riot! What riot?” “My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own brain. The confusion there is scandalous. Miss Morland has been talking of nothing more dreadful than a new publication which is shortly to come out, in three duodecimo volumes, two hundred and seventy-six pages in each, with a frontispiece to the first, of two tombstones and a lantern—do you understand? And you, Miss Morland—my stupid sister has mistaken all your clearest expressions. You talked of expected horrors in London—and instead of instantly conceiving, as any rational creature would have done, that such words could relate only to a circulating library,

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she immediately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men assembling in St. George’s Fields, the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood, a detachment of the Twelfth Light Dragoons (the hopes of the nation) called up from Northampton to quell the insurgents, and the gallant Captain Frederick Tilney, in the moment of charging at the head of his troop, knocked off his horse by a brickbat from an upper window. Forgive her stupidity. The fears of the sister have added to the weakness of the woman; but she is by no means a simpleton in general.” Catherine looked grave. “And now, Henry,” said Miss Tilney, “that you have made us understand each other, you may as well make Miss Morland understand yourself—unless you mean to have her think you intolerably rude to your sister, and a great brute in your opinion of women in general. Miss Morland is not used to your odd ways.” “I shall be most happy to make her better acquainted with them.” “No doubt; but that is no explanation of the present.” “What am I to do?” “You know what you ought to do. Clear your character handsomely before her. Tell her that you think very highly of the understanding of women.” “Miss Morland, I think very highly of the understanding of all the women in the world— especially of those—whoever they may be—with whom I happen to be in company.” “That is not enough. Be more serious.” “Miss Morland, no one can think more highly of the understanding of women than I do. In my opinion, nature has given them so much that they never find it necessary to use more than half.” “We shall get nothing more serious from him now, Miss Morland. He is not in a sober mood. But I do assure you that he must be entirely misunderstood, if he can ever appear to say an unjust thing of any woman at all, or an unkind one of me.” It was no effect to Catherine to believe that Henry Tilney could never be wrong. His manner might sometimes surprise, but his meaning must always be just: and what she did not understand, she was almost as ready to admire, as what she

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The morning had passed away so charmingly as to banish all her friendship and natural affection, for no thought of Isabella or James had crossed her during their walk. When the Tilneys were gone, she became amiable again, but she was amiable for some time to little effect; Mrs. Allen had no intelligence to give that could relieve her anxiety; she had heard nothing of any of them. Towards the end of the morning, however, Catherine, having occasion for some indispensable yard of ribbon which must be bought without a moment’s delay, walked out into the town, and in Bond Street overtook the second Miss Thorpe as she was loitering towards Edgar’s Buildings between two of the sweetest girls in the world, who had been her dear friends all the morning. From her, she soon learned that the party to Clifton had taken place. “They set off at eight this morning,” said Miss Anne, “and I am sure I do not envy them their drive. I think you and I are very well off to be out of the scrape. It must be the dullest thing in the world, for there is not a soul at Clifton at this time of year. Belle went with your brother, and John drove Maria.”

pleased that the party had not been prevented by her refusing to join it, and very heartily wishing that it might be too pleasant to allow either James or Isabella to resent her resistance any longer.

TITLE COMMENTARY Northanger Abbey

Catherine spoke the pleasure she really felt on hearing this part of the arrangement. “Oh! yes,” rejoined the other, “Maria is gone. She was quite wild to go. She thought it would be something very fine. I cannot say I admire her taste; and for my part, I was determined from the first not to go, if they pressed me ever so much.” Catherine, a little doubtful of this, could not help answering, “I wish you could have gone too. It is a pity you could not go all go.” “Thank you; but it is quite a matter of indifference to me. Indeed, I would not have gone on any account. I was saying so to Emily and Sophia when you overtook us.” Catherine was still unconvinced; but glad that Anne should have the friendship of an Emily and a Sophia to console her, she bade her adieu without much uneasiness, and returned home, G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2

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did. The whole walk was delightful, and though it ended too soon, its conclusion was delightful too; her friends attended her into the house, and Miss Tilney, before they parted, addressing herself with respectful form, as much to Mrs. Allen as to Catherine, petitioned for the pleasure of her company to dinner on the day after the next. No difficulty was made on Mrs. Allen’s side, and the only difficulty on Catherine’s was in concealing the excess of her pleasure.

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SYNDY MCMILLEN CONGER (ESSAY DATE 1987) SOURCE: Conger, Syndy McMillen. “Austen’s Sense and Radcliffe’s Sensibility.” Gothic, n.s., 2 (1987): 1624. In the following essay, Conger argues that rather than denouncing Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic “sensibility” in

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Northanger Abbey, Austen affirms its essence and expands upon its utility as both a heroic virtue and a means of achieving growth.

The intrinsic value of Northanger Abbey is still disputed, but its significance in literary history generally is not: it is viewed as a key moment in the history of the novel. Here Ann Radcliffe’s Female Gothic, the last representative of a century of literary emotionalism, is parodied to death by the novel of social realism: here Louis Bredvold’s “natural history of sensibility”1 comes to an end. Recent revisionists2 see Austen as more indebted to her predecessor but still believe that she resists Radcliffe’s endorsement of the heart. Marilyn Butler insists that Austen’s heroines “are rebuked for letting interiority guide them” (140, 145), and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar also argue that Catherine Morland, foreshadowing Austen’s later heroines, must “relinquish” her “subjectivity” to save herself (121, 129, 144).3 This vision of Austen sacrificing Radcliffe’s subjectivity on the altar of realism or propriety or common sense wants some revision itself, for it rests on cursory assumptions about Radcliffe’s achievement. The two authors are not poles apart at all on the question of sensibility; they are, on the contrary, two of the most prominent of many women writers involved in a late-century enterprise best briefly described as “saving sensibility.”4 By the time Radcliffe completed The Italian, she had also reformed the English Gothic novel, divorcing it from sensation and wedding it to sentiment. She focuses her fictions not on the supernatural and irrational forces that drive forward Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto but rather on the sensitive human psyche responding to such forces; and the effect is to establish that special form of eighteenth-century sensitivity, sensibility, as the behavioral norm. In Radcliffe’s world sensibility is not confined to a few amiable eccentrics: all her good characters have it; conversely, all her wicked characters are without it, are, instead, slaves to the brute passions. Yet she never recommends sensibility blindly. First she reconstructs it,5 then tests it for viability in the laboratory of Gothic terrors. This rehabilitation of sensibility6 was no small undertaking. A cult term that emerged midcentury but eluded precise definition, at first it referred to a bundle of loosely compatible but positive ideas: “delicate sensitiveness of taste” or “the capacity for refined emotion”; most specifically the “readiness to feel compassion for suffering,” to forgive, and to be charitable (OED, cf. Hagstrum 5-9). Especially after the appearance of

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The Sorrows of Young Werter in England in 1779, however, it began to seem suspect, to raise a number of troubling questions. Was its cultivation more apt to lead to emotional refinement or excess, sensitivity to others or egotism, morality or pathological behavior? It declined in status, mocked and abandoned by leading authors and rendered lugubrious by minor ones. Radcliffe’s guarded endorsement of it in The Mysteries of Udolpho suggests that she was well aware of this tarnished reputation. Mr. St. Aubert, the heroine’s father, is willing to defend sensibility only as the lesser of two evils: “Whatever may be the evils resulting from a too susceptible heart, nothing can be hoped from an insensible one” (1.20). For St. Aubert, sensibility is a central, even an indispensable human attribute, but not a sufficient virtue unto itself. “Sentiment is a disgrace,” says the dying man to his daughter, “instead of an ornament, unless it lead us to good actions” (1.80). Since it too easily invites selfindulgence or “the pride of fine feeling” (1.79), both of these being obstacles to fellow-feeling, its necessary companions are self-control and moderation: “I would not annihilate your feelings, my child, I would only teach you to command them”; “All excess is vicious” (1.20). Actually, his praise of sensibility, when compared to the successes of its avatars in Udolpho and The Italian, is unnecessarily faint. These characters do occasionally succumb to excessive emotionality; but, more often, the special gifts of sensibility serve them well, helping them to survive in a hostile world. First, they are acutely perceptive. They use their senses: visual, common, moral. They combine an awareness of their own hearts with a scrutiny of others’ faces to gain an intuitive knowledge or “emotional consciousness” (OED) of their situations. When left alone, they tend to scan their minds, sorting out and, if necessary, challenging their feelings or their ideas; they tend to set their inner lives in order. At other times, the same sensitivity and capacity for fine discernment turns outward—they are all skilled physiognomists: they scan eyes, study gestures, and draw accurate inferences about the emotional or moral state of persons around them (Ellena de Rosalba’s study of her jailor Spalatro’s face, for instance, saves her life). This special consciousness of inside and outside, coupled with their capacity for intense concentration, often grants them the advantage in self-control.7 They are conversant with their own hearts and this habitual rational attention to emotion sets them free from passion’s tyranny. Under stress their minds are nearly

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These characters of sensibility are clearly designed to be stronger than the creations of midcentury ironists Mackenzie and Sterne, Harleys and Yoricks who were frequently immobilized by their own or others’ emotions. Radcliffe’s sensibility is much more than passive capacity for refined emotions, even for compassion. It energizes the whole mind, heightening its ordinary powers of perception, communication, concentration, and self-control. It is a new normative, moderate, rational subjectivity; and it is worth saving because it is a saving grace. The startling fact about recent Radcliffe criticism, seen in this light, is that it sees her fictions as hypocritical and deeply subjective. Radcliffe indulges in “every excess of sensibility which she explicitly warns against” (Kahane 52); her fictions “might virtuously proclaim the merits of self-control,” but what they show is a “world governed by subjectivity.” They are pure “exploration of her heroines’ inner state of being at various levels of consciousness,” one such level being “‘inner rage and unspecified . . . guilt’” (Butler 133).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR “GOTHIC EXTRAVAGANCE” IN NORTHANGER ABBEY

The meaning of Catherine’s adventures, including her Gothic aberrations at Northanger, is indissolubly a part of the formal structure of the novel. Without the dual form in which pairs of opposites are dramatically illustrated, especially the contrast between reason and imagination, the growth of wisdom and experience in Catherine Morland would be not only incomplete but also formally chaotic and therefore aesthetically meaningless. In the penultimate chapter, where the contrast between romance and common life is repeated from Chapter ii (Vol. I), Jane Austen achieves a resolution of the antithesis between Gothic romance and the reality of everyday life in the achievement of her own novel: Gothic extravagance does have a place in literature if it serves an aesthetic rather than an empirical function. She seems to banish romantic material from the novel in the comic finality of Catherine’s humiliation, but ironically allows it a legitimate existence by the formal success with which she has employed the Gothic episode.

This preoccupation with Radcliffe’s supposed covert message at the expense of her overt one focuses attention on a single but essential fact about Gothic fiction, one amply discussed by students of the genre from Eino Railo to Tzvetan Todorov—its subrational appeal. But Gothic fiction appeals to us, such students are quick to add, because it brings some order to the chaotic subrational realm.8 The Gothic objectifies fears and desires in specific events, characters, and objects and then rationalizes them, making the latent manifest and, at the same time, usually less threatening. This objectifying process leads Todorov to suggest that Gothic fiction is ersatz psychoanalysis; and recent studies of the Female Gothic support his claim. Tania Modleski argues that the Female Gothic enables women readers to “work through profound psychic conflicts,” that it legitimizes a temporary paranoia in readers by allowing them to identify with guiltless heroines placed in a hostile environment (83). These fictions give vent to terror and hostility but without finally recommending such attitudes (Fleenor 17).

ing to see the doubleness at all, of insisting that Radcliffe, for Austen saw that doubleness, even if she responded to it with characteristic tact. She worried about Radcliffe’s affective appeal but without condemning it; and she did not let it undermine her admiration for the ethic of sensibility that Radcliffe’s texts manifestly defend. In fact, Northanger Abbey moves towards a subtle endorsement of that ethic, while Catherine acts out a confrontation with the problem of the Gothic’s special subjective appeal.

Political persuasion may determine whether critics view this textual doubleness as therapeutic or repressive, but I doubt if it justifies their refus-

Catherine’s misreadings and misadventures have been much discussed, but a few points need to be made about them for present purposes.

SOURCE: Glock, Waldo S. “Catherine Morland’s Gothic Delusions: A Defense of Northanger Abbey.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, no. 32 (1978): 33-46.

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always clear, agile and strong. Witness Emily talking to Count Morano just as he has decided to abduct her by force: “Calm, Intreat you, these transports, and listen to reason, if you will not to pity. You have equally misplaced your love, and your hatred” (2.264).

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Catherine is a naive reader, consuming Udolpho without ever activating her analytical faculty: she reads for plot and for thrills (1.25). Moreover, she allows Mrs. Radcliffe to activate her dream-making process; and that leads her to confuse fiction and reality as had her cervantick predecessor and, also as he had, to imitate the heroines of her idol. In this case, by practicing physiognomy, by reading a man’s character in his face: General Tilney’s “silent thoughtfulness,” “downcast eyes,” and “contracted brow” add up in her roused imagination to the “air and attitude of a Montoni!” (2.150). Catherine’s muddle reflects clear recognition on Austen’s part of the danger of Gothic fiction— its activation of passive-agressive fantasies and volatile emotions; but her response to that danger is neither to condemn the reader nor the author, but simply to insist on the separateness of fiction and reality (Glock 44-45) and, even more important, on the inapplicability of emotions depicted and elicited in fiction to life. As Catherine sadly notes to herself after Henry’s astonished lecture— “Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?” (2.159)—we had best confine our “craving to be frightened” (2.160) to the aesthetic realm. Northanger Abbey does not limit its evaluation of Radcliffe’s subjective appeal, however, to these few negative moments. On the contrary, it contains many suggestions that Udolpho presents Catherine with psychological benefits as well as dangers. It may not enhance her power of selfcontrol, but it nevertheless does increase her abilities to see and to converse. While she views Bath from the hills with the Tilneys, Catherine is able to compare the new scene to Radcliffe’s “the south of France” and to chat, as a result, more easily with Henry; and if it guides her aesthetic appreciation of landscape in Bath, it intensifies her moral awareness at the Abbey. On the one hand, this results in a mistaken inference about the General, but, on the other, it also provides a helpful bridge in Catherine’s education between the moral idyll of her childhood and the crasser actual world outside her home. Catherine notices herself that she feels somehow protected by Udolpho—a neglected insight of hers that anticipates Modleski’s thesis by 200 years: “While I have Udolpho to read,” she assures Isabella Thorpe, “I feel as if nobody could make me miserable” (1.25). The reviewers of Austen’s day might have insisted that such an attitude endangered Catherine’s virtue; Austen’s text, however, demonstrates that Catherine is right,

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that Udolpho shields her from graver actual dangers, a delightful reversal of the reviewers’ favorite cliche. At the Allens’, Catherine’s “raised, restless, and frightened imagination” busies itself with Udolpho while her adult chaperone worries about dressmakers (1.34). In town Catherine ponders the mystery of the black veil whenever Isabella chatters to her mindlessly about clothes or men or her brother John rattles about carriages and women’s faces (1.22-23). Upon arrival at the Tilney abbey, Catherine views the spotless well-lit, modernized interior with the eye of a disappointed Gothic addict, oblivious to the General’s struggle to impress her with his riches (1.128). Udolpho may burden Catherine temporarily with a few embarrassing fantasies, but it is often the best of the offered leisure pursuits and a positive preventive to vanity, frivolity, or materialism—a position on novel reading, incidentally, also taken by Mr. Rambler and another of his admirers, Mary Wollstonecraft.9 Implicit in Catherine’s story is at least one other tribute to Udolpho: a subtle endorsement of Radcliffe’s ethic of sensibility. Those who persist in seeing Catherine as progressing away from such an ethic may be dazzled by the parody into believing that its presence somehow magically banishes everything Radcliffe stood for from Austen’s fictive world. If Northanger Abbey moves its heroine away from one kind of subjectivity, however, it is only to move her towards another. It is not so much a progress as a process of refinement, one in which the heroine is gradually divested (Moler 36) of certain excessive traits and certain false friends until she stands before us, at the end, as an approximation of Radcliffe’s ideal (granted, that in Austen’s fiction there are only approximations of ideals) of rational sensibility (Duckworth 8). Catherine begins her story as a tomboy, a reluctant scholar, and a naif, still “ignorant and uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is” (1.5). She is also burdened, however, by excessive sensibility; she is indiscriminately goodnatured and the difficulties she has at Bath stem as much from her “too susceptible heart” as they do from her inexperience. She thinks well of nearly everyone, and refuses to pass judgment on her brother James’s new friends, the Thorpes. It seems harsh to infer from this, however, as Stuart Tave has done, that Catherine is an “amiable idiot” (60); for even in the brisk round of mindless activity she is caught up in at Bath, she shows signs of awakening sensitivity, discernment, and self-control. She doubts Henry’s playful assertions,

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Isabella presents a particular danger to Catherine in her still malleable condition, that of tempting her to become a heroine of false sensibility. Isabella’s mode of discourse, which Catherine begins to echo during her Bath period, is exaggerated and insincere, the vocabulary of sentiment without the substance to back it up that St. Aubert deplores. The Tilneys are a better influence on Catherine. Eleanor Tilney is presented as Isabella’s foil, the genuine version of what Isabella professes to be: all decorum, sensitivity, and fellow-feeling. She is very much like her analogue Emily St. Aubert, but with one important exception: she does not wear her heart on her face. Her sensibility is concealed by a quiet reserve (1.38). In contrast, Henry enters the novel in the role of a talkative antic commentator. He mocks the Bath society’s attention to surfaces so much that Catherine concludes, shortly after meeting him, that he indulges “himself a little too much with the foibles of others” (1.15). Gilbert and Gubar agree, pegging him as “his father’s son,” opinionated, condescending, even insensitive and misogynistic to a degree (140); but the fact remains that he is by far the more sympathetic of Catherine’s two suitors. John Thorpe’s remarks begina and end with himself and his own concerns; he remains blind to his weaknesses and essentially unaware of the needs of others. In contrast, Henry, even if his discerning mind is sometimes “more nice than wise” (1.84), knows himself and attends to others. He is his sister’s counterpart: a complete man of sensibility disguised in motley. He has moral sense, common sense, a keen capacity for empathy, acuteness of apprehension, refined taste, and a capacity for forgiveness too, even of a young woman who sees his father as a murderer! Henry generally keeps this sensibility under cover of his wit; but when he is pressed by his father to abandon Catherine and to consider a financially more advantageous marriage, his sentimental values emerge. He rejects the advice of his father and hastens to Catherine’s house to bring about a visibly sentimental unraveling: “He felt hemself bound as much in honour as in affection to Miss Morland” (2.202).1 0

At Northanger Abbey, then, Catherine is taught to distinguish sentimental fiction from reality, but, as might be surmised by the company she keeps, she is not stripped of her sensibility. Her abbey experiences rather refine her character than revolutionize it. Much that is affected and adolescent falls away at the abbey—the extravagance of diction, imagination, and curiosity. What remains is essentially Radcliffe’s ideal: the wellregulated, yet sensitive and charitable, mind. After the General has peremptorily ordered Catherine to leave, even though she is stunned and deeply shamed, she checks her own grief to minister to Eleanor’s. When Eleanor begs her, with a “look of sorrow,” to write her despite her father’s interdict, Catherine’s pride melts “in a moment” and she instantly says “Oh, Eleanor, I will write to you indeed” (2.185). Eleanor is equally generous in these last moments, pressing her pocket money on Catherine for the unexpected journey. Not just their tears and words on this occasion, but their acute consciousness of the moral and emotional dimensions of the crisis, their giving and forgiving natures, and their self-control for each others’ sakes, mark them as heroines of sensibility in Radcliffe’s sense. Radcliffe’s special subjectivity does not seem to me to be sacrificed in this scene or elsewhere in Northanger Abbey. What has been sacrificed, if anything, is the assumption that sensibility is necessarily on the face or in the self-consciousness of the characters. Sensibility here and elsewhere in Austen’s works has become so quiet that it is often overlooked. It has no unmistakable surface characteristics.1 1 It can underlie Henry’s teasing conversation as well as the sweet, serious discourse of his sister; Mrs. Allen’s absent-minded permissiveness but also Mrs. Morland’s gentle scrutiny and periodic lectures. In this context, it should be fairly obvious why Austen seems skeptical of the Gothic frame that Radcliffe had given to sensibility. Austen needed to divest it of the Gothic atmosphere of exaggeration to save it for her own more subtle fictional reality, one where faces more often serve as masks than as windows to the heart. One can only be sure that someone else has sensibility in an Austen novel after a lapse of time and events: only if a professed concern for others has been translated, as St. Aubert recommends, into actions, tested by adversity, and remains unshaken, is it true sensibility. Three characters in Northanger Abbey clearly fail this test of time, even though they imagine themselves in firm possession of aesthetic and moral sense: both the Thorpes’ and the General’s attentiveness to Cathe-

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she worries about the impropriety of riding in carriages and missing appointments, and she finally sees that she must, for the sake of her own and her friends’ feelings, sometimes say no to the whims of others. Her sensibility, even if it renders her gullible, at the same time makes her teachable and flexible, two valuable assets in the complex moral world of Austen’s novels.

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rine melt away with their misconceptions of the Morland fortune. In contrast, there is no special awareness in Eleanor, Henry, Mrs. Morland, or Catherine that their actions can be identified with a code called sensibility, yet they obviously can. It is as if, to survive, sensibility has gone underground. Radcliffe had declared it to be normative; Austen rather clearly but unobtrusively assumes it to be, mentioning it less often than Radcliffe but nevertheless granting it a central position in Northanger Abbey that it never after relinquishes. People with it in her novels—Catherine, Marianne Dashwood, Colonel Brandon, Anne Elliott, and Fanny Price—need never be given up for lost; and those without it (just as St. Aubert had assured Emily)—the Thorpes, the Misses Steele or Bertram—are seldom to be saved. For Austen not only is sensibility, as it is for Radcliffe, a measure of moral excellence and the key to true propriety; it has also become the leaven for growth, the secret ingredient of her Bildungsroman. Clearly, Northanger Abbey does not mark the death of Radcliffe’s sensibility but rather its fruitful transfiguration.

Notes 1. Stuart M. Tave argues persuasively for this keen distinction between Radcliffe and Austen. Others who do so include Frank W. Bradbrook, Waldo S. Glock, Kenneth Moler, and Mary Lascelles. 2. They base their arguments on Harold Bloom’s assumptions about authors and their predecessors and the “anxiety of influence.” Judith Wilt offers a similar reading but her focus is not so conspicuously feminist. My own revisionist reading is closest to Jean Hagstrum’s, who sees Austen’s novels as contemplative reconsiderations of the values of sensibility. I draw on Hans-Robert Jauss’s reception theory; particularly, on his convictions that texts are best considered in contexts, in relationship to analagous works in their time (synchronic study) and in the past (diachronic study), and that these relationships are nearly always complex ones. 3. Cf. the similar readings of David Levine, of Judith Wilt, who sees Austen’s heroines trying to “cut . . . destructive emotion down to size” (135), and of Coral Ann Howells, who emphasizes Austen’s greater attention to “balance” in matters of feeling. 4. Katharine Rogers has suggested that eighteenthcentury English women writers felt, to some degree, liberated by the literary mode of sensibility, even though they were often ambivalent about it. It authorized the expression of emotions which the culture-at-large (and their conduct books) did not. Sensibility may have appealed to women on a number of other levels as well: linguistic, social, ethical. Women at the time were encouraged to be silent, or if allowed to speak, were untrained to speak the language of pure logic. Sensibility valued the non-verbal forms of communication fostered by silence—sympathy, facial expression, gesture—and it spoke characteristi-

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cally in a language that was alogical, that blended together thought and emotion. They faced poverty, even disgrace, if they were ever judged harshly by parents or husbands. The literature of sensibility emphasized suitors, husbands, and fathers who forgave. The fascination of women writers and readers of fiction with sensibility in the eighteenth century received attention early in our century from J. M. S. Tompkins. More recently, their interest in foreign literature of sensibility has been under investigation by Grieder and Conger. 5. Gary Kelly (51) sees the importance of sensibility for Radcliffe but believes that reason constitutes for her an opposing set of values. Howells does, too, discussing feeling in various Gothic novelists, including Radcliffe, in a much more general sense. 6. Useful critics on sensibility besides Louis Bredvold are Ronald S. Crane, Jean Hagstrum, John K. Sheriff, and Ian Watt. For special attention to women, see also Carol Gilligan, Katharine Rogers, and Patricia M. Spacks. 7. Nina da Vinci Nichols (205) has recently made an important distinction between Radcliffe’s and Matthew G. Lewis’s Gothic fiction. Radcliffe’s characters are concerned about identity and “power over the self”; Lewis’s Ambrosio is motivated by a desire for “power over others.” 8. Theodore Ziolkowski reiterates the necessity of reason in the making of Gothic literature in Disenchanted Images. 9. See Samuel Johnson’s Rambler No. 4 and Mary Wollstoncraft’s Vindication (18.2). See also the works by Robert Scholes on Johnson and Austen and by Lloyd W. Brown and Margaret Kirkham on Austen and Feminism. 10. The conclusion of Northanger Abbey is a visibly sentimental unraveling. Radcliffe could hardly have done better. The heroine sits over her needlework, “sunk again, without knowing it herself, into languor and listlessness.” The hero suddenly arrives and is introduced by a “conscious daughter” to her mother; and he is doing his best to apologize for the lack of propriety in his sudden appearance “with the embarrassment of real sensibility.” The mother, too, manages a good-natured response: “He did not address himself to an uncandid judge or a resentful heart. Far from comprehending him or his sister in their father’s misconduct, Mrs. Morland . . . received him with the simple professions of unaffected benevolence . . . (2.196). 11. Spacks sheds valuable light on Austen’s interest in concealment.

Works Cited Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey Ed. John Davie. New York: Oxford UP, 1980. Bloom Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. Bradbrook, Frank W. Jane Austen and Her Predecessors. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966. Bredvold, Louis I. The Natural History of Sensibility. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1962. Brown, Lloyd W. “Jane Austen and the Feminist Tradition.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 28 (1973): 321-38.

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Conger, Syndy M. “Fellow Travellers: Englishwomen and German Literature.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 14 (1984): 143-71. Crane, Ronald S. “Suggestions towards a Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling.’” English Literary History 1 (1934): 205-30. Duckworth, Alistair. The Improvement of the Estate. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971. Fleenor, Julian E. Ed. “Introduction,” The Female Gothic. Montreal, Quebec: Eden, 1983. 3-28. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. Glock, Waldo. “Catherine Morland’s Gothic Illusions: A Defense of Northanger Abbey.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 32.1 (1978): 33-46. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werter: A German Story. Trans. Richard Graves. London: Dodsley, 1779. Grieder, Josephine. Translations of French Sentimental Prose Fiction in Late Eighteenth-Century England: The History of a Literary Vogue. Durham: Duke UP, 1975. Hagstrum, Jean. Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Howells, Coral Ann. Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction. London: Athlone, 1978. Jauss, Hans-Robert. Literaturgeschichte Als Provokation Der Literaturwissenschaft. Muenchen (Munich): Wilhelm Fink, 1979. Kahane, Claire. “Gothic Mirrors and Feminine Identity.” The Centennial Review (Winter 1980): 43-64. Kelly, Gary. “‘The Constant Vicissitude of Interesting Passions’ Ann Radcliffe’s Perplexed Narratives.” Ariel-E 10 (1979): 45-64. Kirkham, Margaret. Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983. Lascelles, Mary. Jane Austen and Her Art. New York: Oxford UP, 1939. Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1982. Moler, Kenneth. Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1968. Nichols, Nina da Vinci. “Place and Eros in Radcliffe, Lewis, and Brontë.” In The Female Gothic see under Fleenor). Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian. Ed. Frederick Garber. London: Oxford UP, 1968. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Ed. Bonomy Dobree. New York: Oxford UP, 1970. Railo, Eino. The Haunted Castle. New York: Humanities, 1964. Rogers, Katharine M. “The Liberating Effect of Sentimentalism.” Ch. 4 in Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1982.

Scholes, Robert. “Dr. Johnson and Jane Austen.” Philological Quarterly 54 (1975): 380-90. Sheriff, John K. The Good-Natured Man: The Evolution of a Moral Ideal, 1660-1800. University: U of Alabama P, 1982. Spacks, Patricia M. “Taking Care.” Ch. 3 of The Female Imagination. London: Allen and Unwin, 1976. Tave, Stuart M. Some Words of Jane Austen. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1973. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1973. Tompkins, J.M.S. The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1961. Watt, Ian. “Sense Triumphantly Introduced to Sensibility.” In Jane Austen: “Sense and Sensibility,” “Pride and Prejudice,” and “Mansfield Park”: A Casebook. Ed. B. C. Southam. New York: Macmillan, 1976. 119-29. Wilt, Judith. Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Ed. Charles W. Hagelman, Jr. New York: Norton, 1967. Ziolkowski, Theodore. Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.

CLAIRE LAMONT (ESSAY DATE 1995) SOURCE: Lamont, Claire. “Jane Austen’s Gothic Architecture.” In Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter Davidson, and Jane Stevenson, pp. 107-15. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. In the following essay, Lamont discusses the significance and symbolic use of Gothic architecture in Northanger Abbey.

When Catherine Morland is invited to visit the Tilneys at Northanger Abbey these are her reflections: She was to be their chosen visitor, she was to be for weeks under the same roof with the person whose society she mostly prized—and, in addition to all the rest, this roof was to be the roof of an abbey!—Her passion for ancient edifices was next in degree to her passion for Henry Tilney—and castles and abbies made usually the charm of those reveries which his image did not fill. To see and explore either the ramparts and keep of the one, or the cloisters of the other, had been for many weeks a darling wish, though to be more than the visitor of an hour, had seemed too nearly impossible for desire. And yet, this was to happen. With all the chances against her of house, hall, place, park, court, and cottage, Northanger turned up an abbey, and she was to be its inhabitant. Its long, damp passages, its narrow cells and ruined chapel, were to be within her daily reach, and she could not entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun.1

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Butler, Marilyn. “The Woman at the Window: Ann Radcliffe in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen.” Women and Literature 1 (1980): 128-48.

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This paper is about Jane Austen’s Gothic architecture. I have started with a quotation which expresses Catherine Morland’s view of Gothic architecture, that it is a matter of “castles and abbies”. The Gothic novels of the late-eighteenth century make frequent use of these two types of medieval building, the castle and the monastery, both of which had a domestic function but were not primarily defined by that function. As these two settings figure repeatedly in Gothic novels they come to take on features of two opposing signifying systems. The castle is associated with aggression, extroversion and the male; it dominates its landscape. The monastery is associated with repression, introversion and the female, and lies half-hidden in a valley. It is typical of early Gothic novels to be set in remote parts of continental Europe, and in an earlier century. However vestigial the historical sense of the novelists they set their novels in some sort of medieval world. In Northanger Abbey, however, the setting is in the south-west of England in Jane Austen’s present, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Medieval castles and monasteries were visible in her world but both would have lost their raison d’être, military or spiritual. They would be visible as ruined, restored or imitated. In Northanger Abbey the heroine makes her first visit from home to Bath, apparently one of the least Gothic of settings. Having been originally a Roman settlement, it was rebuilt in the eighteenth century with neo-classical architecture as the medicinal properties of its waters were exploited. From Bath Catherine Morland makes two Gothic excursions. The first is the abortive trip to Blaize Castle; the second is the visit to Northanger Abbey. Catherine imagines Blaize Castle to be “an edifice like Udolpho” (102), and before agreeing to go on the trip asks “may we go all over it? may we go up every staircase, and into every suite of rooms?” (102) She anticipates “the happiness of a progress through a long suite of lofty rooms” or “along narrow, winding vaults” (104). The party never reaches Blaize Castle, and it is never actually pointed out in the novel that it was it was not, as John Thorpe had asserted, an old castle, “the oldest in the kingdom” (101), but an eighteenth-century Gothic imitation.2 There is no doubt about the age of Northanger Abbey. Catherine learns its history from Eleanor Tilney: Many were the inquiries she was eager to make of Miss Tilney; but so active were her thoughts, that when these inquiries were answered, she was hardly more assured than before, of Northanger

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Abbey having been a richly-endowed convent at the time of the Reformation, of its having fallen into the hands of an ancestor of the Tilneys on its dissolution, of a large portion of the ancient building still making a part of the present dwelling although the rest was decayed, or of its standing low in a valley, sheltered from the north and east by rising woods of oak.

Critics of the Gothic motif of the monastery usually stress imprisonment rather than the spiritual role of such a building. A monastic building in the Gothic novel is a place where someone is kept either against their will or at least in denial of the full range of their passions. Catherine Morland shares this view; she expects to find evidence of “an injured and ill-fated nun” (150). Eleanor Tilney’s account of the history of Northanger Abbey, however, does not appear to invite that interpretation. Northanger had been “a wellendowed convent at the Reformation” which had “fallen into the hands of an ancestor of the Tilneys on its dissolution” (“fallen” implies either coming down, or chance). The word “convent” was in the late eighteenth century just acquiring its specific modern meaning of a religious house for women.3 We may read the convent as a safe and spiritual retreat for women, which has now become the personal property of one man. What was endowed as a convent has become a private house where women are oppressed by one man, and a man significantly called General Tilney. His name indicates that he would be more at home in a castle. Catherine Morland, who is not interested in history, and particularly not the “quarrels of popes and kings” (123), does not meditate on this paradox. For her a castle or an abbey would do. She does not detect that although castles may have lost their original purpose with the cessation of fighting, it is a question whether the same can be said of a convent. One thing that the English Reformation has achieved is to give the powerful male, whose attributes are reflected in the castle, ownership also of the convent. General Tilney exercises his ownership of Northanger Abbey in a way that no other man does in Jane Austen’s novels. In her other novels a woman is mistress of the house and is in charge of the domestic arrangements. This is still the case when the mistress is not a wife but an unmarried daughter. Even Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion does not deny his daughter her rights as mistress of the house. General Tilney issues invitations on behalf of his daughter and orders meals, overriding his daughter in each case (148, 171, 186). Catherine expects the domestic arrangements at Northanger to be in Eleanor’s hands: after Henry Tilney’s

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Jane Austen’s norm of village Anglicanism does not imply that society is any the better for the dissolution of a convent. Catherine Morland’s progress in the novel is from her parsonage home at Fullerton to the vicarage she will share with Henry Tilney at Woodston. Between these two havens of integrity she visits Bath and Northanger. Both of these, built as places of healing, have lost their proper function and are now given over to fashion and materialism. Catherine’s Gothic reveries are filled with “castles and abbies”: “To see and explore either the ramparts and keep of the one, or the cloisters of the other, had been for many weeks a darling wish . . .” (150). For Catherine a Gothic castle should contain, besides its defining architectural features of ramparts and keep, towers and long galleries, suites of lofty rooms, many staircases, and narrow, winding vaults (101-102, 104). An abbey should have cloisters, long, damp passages, narrow cells and a ruined chapel (150). That much she has gathered from her reading of Gothic novels, before her conversation with Henry Tilney in the curricle on the way to Northanger. He confirms her view that a Gothic house has staircases, gloomy passages and lofty rooms, not to mention “a secret subterraneous communication between your apartment and the chapel of St Anthony, scarcely two miles off” (164, 166). How are these expectations fulfilled at Northanger Abbey? Jane Austen does not usually spend much time describing a house from the outside. She is more interested in a house as a living space, and with its interior dynamics. However, the approach to a Gothic building is an important descriptive moment in the Gothic novel, and Catherine’s first sight of Northanger Abbey cannot be passed over: every bend in the road was expected with solemn awe to afford a glimpse of its massy walls of grey stone, rising amidst a grove of ancient oaks, with the last beams of the sun playing in beautiful splendour on its high Gothic windows. But so low did the building stand, that she found herself passing through the great gates of the lodge into the very grounds of Northanger, without having discerned even an antique chimney. (167)

In the Gothic that draws on architecture the façade is frequently presented as the face in front

of the labyrinthine brain behind (Poe’s House of Usher is perhaps the most famous example). Northanger Abbey will not be read from the outside, and the heroine enters with no guidance.4 Once inside, Catherine is first shown into “the common drawing-room”. The architectural feature mentioned in that room is the Gothic window: The windows, to which she looked with peculiar dependence, from having heard the General talk of his preserving them in their Gothic form with reverential care, were yet less what her fancy had portrayed. To be sure the pointed arch was preserved—the form of them was Gothic—they might be even casements—but every pane was so large, so clear, so light! To an imagination which had hoped for the smallest divisions, and the heaviest stone-work, for painted glass, dirt and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing. (168)

Catherine is obviously in a house which has undergone modern restoration. The General has preserved the pointed arches of the windows, but has made a compromise with history in not restoring painted glass, small divisions in the panes, dirt, and cobwebs. He has picked on a characteristic feature, the pointed arch, for preservation and discreetly modernized the rest. The Gothic here appears to be optional; it is not structurally necessary. Catherine may criticize this compromise, but then she has no clear sense of the implications of what she is asking for. She wants not only the original windows, but also the dirt derived, presumably, from many years of subsequent neglect. As her mother was to remark of her, “Catherine would make a sad heedless young house-keeper to be sure . . .” (245). Of all Jane Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey gives the most detailed description of a domestic interior. It is the only one of her novels to make serious use of architecture in its plot. The Gothic house with its complicated interior, its subterranean vaults, or, especially in later novels, its attics, lends itself to interpretation which sees these architectural features as representing aspects of life which have been frustrated or repressed. For all Henry Tilney’s terrifying description of the subterranean passage that leads from the heroine’s bedroom to the ruined chapel of St Anthony (166) Northanger Abbey is not described as having any subterranean passages, not even a decent cellar. Nor is it described as having an attic. The architecture, and any psychological reading of it, is not based on a vertical view of the house with “normal life” on one or two floors and the suppressed abnormal in basement or attic below or above. The important architectural feature of Northanger

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frightening account of a Gothic bedroom she takes comfort from the belief that “Miss Tilney, she was sure, would never put her into such a chamber as he had described!” (167) (She does not say that the Abbey would not have such a chamber.)

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Abbey is not its vertical dimensions, but its horizontal ones. Catherine expected an abbey to have cloisters; Northanger Abbey does; it is based on a quadrangle. On her first evening Catherine sees that the house is built on a quadrangle (168). The next day she is given a tour. The house surrounds a court (181), and it has two floors. On the ground floor are the public rooms and offices, and on the upper floor the bedrooms. The rooms on the ground floor are tall, which is why the “broad staircase of shining oak” required “many flights and many landing-places” to reach the upper floor (168). Catherine is first taken round the building on the ground floor. She is taken through a suite of rooms: the “common drawing-room”, which led into “a useless anti-chamber” which led in turn into “the real-drawing-room” which led into the library (186). Catherine had expected a Gothic building to offer “suites of rooms”, that is rooms leading off each other, rather than each going off a hall or corridor. Northanger Abbey offers such a suite, though not quite up to Catherine’s wishes (186). As she is taken round the quadrangle she is told that three sides retain the original Gothic architecture, and that of these one was more Gothic than the other two in that it retained elements of its convent origin in the remains of a cloister and cells (187). The fourth side of the building was modern. After being shown round the ground floor, Catherine is taken upstairs. There, the organization of the rooms was different. The rooms did not open off one another in a suite, but there was on the inner side of the quadrangle a corridor or gallery, whose windows looked across the quadrangle, and off this gallery were the bedrooms whose windows therefore looked outwards (168). Eleanor Tilney shows Catherine round the upper floor, but she is twice interrupted by an imperious request from her father before they can get right round. On both occasions they are stopped at a folding door, on the far side of which is the room which Eleanor’s mother had occupied (189, 194). The consequence is that Catherine has been taken round the house on the ground floor; but only round part of it on the upper floor. Catherine had glimpsed beyond the folding door on the upper floor “a narrower passage, more numerous openings, and symptoms of a winding stair-case” (189). She deduced that this was the side of the house where the remains of the original abbey were most preserved (191). She had seen that it had a staircase, and her Gothic imagination had speculated that Mrs Tilney could have

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been taken down it “in a state of well-prepared insensibility” (191). On the third attempt to see Mrs Tilney’s room Catherine goes alone.5 She walks round the gallery, through the folding door, and enters Mrs Tilney’s room (196). She is disappointed. It is a pleasant modern room, with sash windows, through which the western sun was shining. Gothic rooms, as had been established earlier, have casement windows (168). It was usually the east wing in a Gothic novel that was the most ruinous.6 Catherine had wanted to visit a Gothic house; she has done so, and has been muddled by its architecture. She realizes her mistake in interpreting the upper floor of Northanger Abbey in terms of her Gothic expectations rather than in the light of her knowledge of the ground floor. She knew that the fourth side of the quadrangle was modern; but she had not supposed Mrs Tilney’s room to be at one end of that side (196). I have suggested that an important feature of the Gothic interior is the suite of rooms, one room leading off another. In the Gothic building the room does not have have certain bounds. This is true on the ground floor of Northanger Abbey, where one room leads off another in wealthy show. It is of more threatening significance in the Gothic bedroom. As Henry Tilney points out, a Gothic heroine hoping to have safety at last in a bedroom finds that the room has no lock, or that some hidden door opens off it (165-66). The Gothic bedroom is not a place of security because its bounds are not secure; there might be a hidden opening within it leading to a succession of vaulted chambers containing who knows what horrors, most of which are not at first noticed.7 This is the parodic version of the splendid suite of rooms. The two versions of the suite of rooms may be thought of as representing public show and private neurosis. At Northanger Abbey Catherine was relieved to find that her room was decorated with wallpaper (169). The Gothic bedroom would be hung with tapestry, and there would be no knowing, until some storm of wind revealed an irregularity in the wall behind, what sort of hidden entrance it might conceal. It is an indication of the all-revealing nature of modern architecture, and the speedy collapse of her Gothic fantasies, that Catherine was so sure that the doors that she observed in Mrs Tilney’s modern room led only to dressing-closets that she did not even bother to check that that was so: “she had no inclination to open either” (196). It is a feature of recent criticism of Northanger Abbey to acknowledge but not stress Catherine’s

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Northanger Abbey is a Gothic novel which uses architecture as a way of exploring unacknowledged areas of human psychology. If one such area is patriarchal power, another is the nature of the attraction which Catherine feels for Henry Tilney. Repeatedly, Catherine’s interest in Gothic architecture is matched by her interest in Henry Tilney: “Her passion for ancient edifices was next in degree to her passion for Henry Tilney” (149). On the way to Blaize Castle she had “meditated, by turns, on broken promises and broken arches, phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys and trapdoors” (103). On the road to Northanger she had “an abbey before, and a curricle behind” (162). In deciding to explore Mrs Tilney’s room on her own she chooses a day when Henry Tilney is away. But he returns before he is expected. Catherine has just let herself out of the bedroom and closed the door: At that instant a door underneath was hastily opened; some one seemed with swift steps to ascend the stairs, by the head of which she had yet to pass before she could gain the gallery. She had no power to move. With a feeling of terror not very definable, she fixed her eyes on the staircase, and in a few moments it gave Henry to her view. “Mr Tilney!” she exclaimed in a voice of more than common astonishment. He looked astonished too. “Good God!” she continued, not attending to his address, “how came you here?— how came you up that staircase?”

“How came I up that staircase!” he replied, greatly surprised. “Because it is my nearest way from the stable-yard to my own chamber; and why should I not come up it?” (196-97)

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Gothic disappointments. Feminist critics in particular have drawn attention to the fact that while Catherine may have been mistaken in thinking that Mrs Tilney had been either murdered or imprisoned, no one believes that she had been a happy woman. The patriarchal power of General Tilney over the women in his household is the modern equivalent of the authoritarian power of the Gothic hero.8 The fact that Catherine’s three disappointments (over the chest, the ebony cabinet and Mrs Tilney’s room) all involve her expectations of Gothic evidence being followed by an extremely domestic reality (the folded counterpane, the laundry list, and the well-kept bedroom) can be read as a reproof to Catherine for her failure to realize the progress of society which has allowed a comfortable home to supersede the discomforts of the Gothic. Or, following Katherine Ferguson Ellis, her discoveries can be read as representing the tyranny of the home-ashaven ideal on the woman who inhabits it.9 In such readings Northanger Abbey is a Gothic novel in spite of itself.

Catherine had not experienced Gothic terror in the bedroom; she was feeling it now. Catherine knew that Gothic buildings had staircases, and she knew of the existence of this one. She is surprised because the only function she had had for that staircase was for Mrs Tilney to be brought down it “in a state of well-prepared insensibility”. The staircase had not delivered an unconscious woman, however, but a lover come back before he was expected. Northanger Abbey is the only novel by Jane Austen in which the heroine goes to stay in the hero’s home, and there is sexual tension in her use of its architecture. Catherine’s love of Henry Tilney and her love of the Gothic had always been confused. In her search for Mrs Tilney’s room she manages to put herself in the direct route between the stables and Henry’s bedroom. As Henry points out where she stands is in his space rather than in hers: “This passage is at least as extraordinary a road from the breakfast-parlour to your apartment, as that staircase can be from the stables to mine.” (197)

There seems to be sexual adventure in Catherine’s Gothic enquiries. Her conscious mind is exploring a Gothic bedroom; but in so doing she is suppressing knowledge she had about the house. Henry Tilney rushing up the staircase while she is frozen at the top of it is a powerful image. Her astonished question, “how came you here?” is a statement of her failure to understand the architecture which had so engrossed her imagination.

Notes 1. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818), ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis, Penguin, 1972, 149-50. 2. Andor Gomme, Michael Jenner and Bryan Little, Bristol: An Architectural History, London, 1979, 174-75. 3. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, 1989, convent, sb., 6. 4. In contrast, Emma remarks of the other abbey in Jane Austen’s novels, Donwell Abbey, home of Mr Knightley, “It was just what it ought to be, and it looked what it was” (Emma [1816], ed. Ronald Blythe, Penguin, 1966, 353). 5. Catherine’s solitary exploration of Northanger may draw on Blanche’s exploration of Chateau-le-Blanc in Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), ed. Bonamy Dobrée, Oxford, 1966, 479-80.

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6. For instance in The Mysteries of Udolpho, 377. This detail was picked up by Walter Scott in a humorous account of the types of novel popular in his day, “. . . must not every novel-reader have anticipated a castle scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the eastern wing had long been uninhabited . . .” (Waverley [1814], ed. Claire Lamont, Oxford, 1981, 3). 7. This is true of Emily’s bedroom at Udolpho (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 235) and Adeline’s in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), ed. Chloe Chard, Oxford, 1986, 144. 8. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, New Haven and London, 1979, 135. 9. Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology, 1989, x-xii.

Clarke, Stephen. “Abbeys Real and Imagined: Northanger, Fonthill, and Aspects of the Gothic Revival.” Persuasions 20 (1998): 93-105. Compares Austen’s depiction of Gothic architecture and the monastery to Gothic conventions, within the context of Gothic Revival architecture. Derry, Stephen. “Freud, the Gothic, and Coat Symbolism in Northanger Abbey.” Persuasions 18 (December 1996): 49-53. Theories of Sigmund Freud inform this assessment of the use of the coat as a symbol of Catherine Morland’s sexuality in Northanger Abbey. Dussinger, John A. “Parents against Children: General Tilney as Gothic Monster.” Persuasions 20 (1998): 165-74. Explores Austen’s gothicism in her representation of General Tilney as an example of cruelty in parent-child relations in Northanger Abbey.

FURTHER READING Bibliographies Handley, Graham. Jane Austen: A Guide Through the Critical Maze. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992, 139 p. Provides a guide to Austen criticism from early reviews through the 1980s. Roth, Barry. An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies, 1984-94, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996, 438 p. Offers a bibliography of studies on Jane Austen.

Gay, Penny. “In the Gothic Theatre.” Persuasions 20 (1998): 175-84. Offers parallels between the handling of anxiety and fear in Northanger Abbey and in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest. Hermansson, Casie. “Neither Northanger Abbey: The Reader Presupposes.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 36, no. 4 (fall 2000): 337-56. Assesses Northanger Abbey as a parody of a Gothic novel.

Biographies Austen-Leigh, James. A Memoir of Jane Austen. London: R. Bentley, 1870, 364 p. Presents an affectionate biography of Austen by her nephew. Chapman, R. W. Jane Austen: Facts and Problems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948, 224 p. Provides an early biography by one of Austen’s twentiethcentury critics. Halperin, John. The Life of Jane Austen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, 399 p. Links Austen’s life to her works. Jenkins, Elizabeth. Jane Austen: A Biography. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1948, 286 p. Offers a detailed treatment of Austen’s life and works. Nokes, David. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997, 512 p. Attempts to correct the portrait of the sweet maiden aunt painted by Austen’s family; considered by critics to be somewhat speculative in its alternative interpretation of Austen’s life. Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Knopf, 1997, 352 p. Offers a popular biography focusing on Austen’s family.

Criticism Auerbach, Nina. “Jane Austen and Romantic Imprisonment.” In Jane Austen in a Social Context, edited by David Monaghan, pp. 9-27. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1981.

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Discusses tone, satire, and Gothic elements in Northanger Abbey.

Hoeveler, Diane. “Vindicating Northanger Abbey: Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Gothic Feminism.” In Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism, edited by Devoney Looser, pp. 117-35. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Studies correlations between the feminist ideals expressed in Northanger Abbey and in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Jerinic, Maria. “In Defense of the Gothic: Rereading Northanger Abbey.” In Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism, edited by Devoney Looser, pp. 137-49. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Rejects the classification of Northanger Abbey as a parody of the Gothic novel and argues that it is “an imitation, and not a complete rejection, of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Levine, George. “Translating the Monstrous: Northanger Abbey.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30, no. 3 (December 1975): 335-50. Maintains that General Tilney’s “monstrousness is part of Jane Austen’s literary imagination,” and argues that the fact that Northanger Abbey is “to a certain extent trapped by the materials of literary gimmickry it rejects” is an intentional, integral part of parodic style and is evocative of Austen’s later novels. Mudrick, Marvin. “The Literary Pretext Continued: Irony versus Gothicism: Northanger Abbey.” In Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, pp. 37-49. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952. Regards Austen’s juxtaposition of the “Gothic and bourgeois worlds” in “ironic contrast” in Northanger Abbey as the author’s method of “invalidat[ing]” the Gothic narrative form.

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Compares Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho to Northanger Abbey, identifying elements in the latter work as parody of the former. Sears, Albert C. “Male Novel Reading of the 1790s, Gothic Literature and Northanger Abbey.” Persuasions 21 (1999): 106-12. Views Northanger Abbey in terms of its perspective on male readers of Gothic fiction at the end of the eighteenth century. Tandrup, Birthe. “Free Indirect Style and the Critique of the Gothic in Northanger Abbey.” In Romantic Heritage: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 81-92. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 1983. Highlights Austen’s use of free indirect discourse to denounce Gothic literature in Northanger Abbey. Wallace, Tara Ghoshal. “Northanger Abbey and the Limits of Parody.” Studies in the Novel 20 (1988): 262-73. Remarks on the roles of the narrator and the reader in the parodic discourse in Northanger Abbey.

Wilt, Judith. Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980, 307 p. Full-length analysis of gothicism in the works of Jane Austen, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Austen’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 19; Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 3; British Writers, Vol. 4; British Writers: The Classics, Vol. 1; British Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 2; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1789-1832; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 116; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors: Modules, Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring Novels; Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 2; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 1, 13, 19, 33, 51, 81, 95, 119, 150; Novels for Students, Vols. 1, 14, 18, 20; Twayne’s English Authors; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3; World Literature Criticism; and Writers for Young Adults Supplement, Vol. 1.

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Roberts, Bette B. “The Horrid Novels: The Mysteries of Udolpho and Northanger Abbey.” In Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, edited and with an afterword by Kenneth W. Graham, pp. 89-111. New York: AMS, 1989.

JOANNA BAILLIE (1762 - 1851)

Scottish poet, playwright, editor, and critic.

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lthough Baillie was well recognized and respected among the literati during her lifetime, her works fell into neglect soon after her death and have only resurfaced in literary scholarship within the last several decades. She is now recognized for her significant influence on such writers as William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and is considered by many critics to have served as a model for later women writers. Baillie’s works, which include twenty-six plays and several volumes of poetry, provide insight into the history of dramatic theory and criticism as well as into the history of women’s roles in theatre.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Baillie was born in 1762 in Bothwell, Lanarkshire, Scotland to James Baillie, a pastor, and his wife, Dorothea Hunter. Baillie was born a premature twin; her unnamed sister died within hours of delivery. Her parents already had two children, Agnes and Matthew. In the late 1760s, Baillie’s father was promoted to a higher position at the collegiate church at Hamilton, a country setting that allowed Baillie the opportunity to enjoy outdoor activities. Though her brother attended

school, Baillie did not, relying instead on her father for her education. James Baillie, as was typical for the time, stressed to his daughter the importance of developing her moral faculties over her intellectual skills, and emphasized that one should not give into one’s emotions. Baillie was not fond of her studies and did not learn to read until, as she stated, she was nine years old. In the early 1770s, both Baillie sisters were sent to a Glasgow boarding school, and it was there that Joanna first developed an interest in books, writing and adapting stories to entertain her classmates. Baillie also became interested and quite proficient in the study of mathematics, abstract theorizing, problem solving, and philosophy. In 1778, when James Baillie died, the family became dependent on Dorothea’s brother, William Hunter, a well-known anatomist who provided them with financial security as well as residence at his estate in Long Calderwood. Upon Hunter’s death in 1783, Matthew inherited his uncle’s medical school and London home, and the Baillie family moved to London to manage the new household. In 1790, while living in this London home, Baillie anonymously published Poems: Wherein It Is Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners. The small volume did not receive sufficient notice or circulation to satisfy Baillie, and she reprinted much of it, along with other poems written while she was in her seventies, in an expanded version entitled Fugitive Verses, in 1840. Upon Mat-

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thew’s marriage, the Baillie women moved to Hampstead, where they remained for the rest of their lives. In 1798, Baillie published, again anonymously, the first of what would eventually be three volumes of plays (the second and third volumes were published in 1802 and 1812, respectively). These volumes were entitled A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy, but were more commonly known as Plays on the Passions. The first volume contained, among others, Basil, a tragedy on love; The Tryal, a comedy on love; and possibly Baillie’s most famous play, De Monfort, a tragedy on hatred. Baillie died in 1851.

MAJOR WORKS Baillie’s first publication, Poems: Wherein It Is Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners, received little attention until after she had established a literary career. The first volume of Plays on the Passions, however, which Baillie published anonymously, quickly became the focus for discussion in literary circles, making this her first critically acclaimed work. Previously, success on the stage had been a prerequisite for the publication of a drama, but Baillie’s publication of plays that had never been performed piqued the interest of many readers. In the preface, Baillie revealed her intent to trace the passions “in their rise and progress in the heart.” She stated further that “a complete exhibition of passion, with its varieties and progress in the breast of man, has, I believe, scarcely ever been attempted in Comedy.” The prevailing assumption of critics was that the anonymous author of Plays on the Passions was a man, until it was pointed out that there were more heroines in the dramas than heroes, and speculation began that the writer might be a woman. Baillie’s authorship of the work was not revealed until 1800, when the third edition was published with her name on the title page. Sir Walter Scott, who some critics suspected had authored Plays on the Passions, became friends with Baillie and encouraged her to write more dramas. The second volume of Plays on the Passions, published in 1802, was well received by the public. Another collection entitled Miscellaneous Plays was published in 1804. In 1812, Baillie’s last volume of Plays on the Passions was published, and was assessed as representing a departure from her earlier theories. Baillie noted that the second and last volume of the series had not received as much

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praise as had the first, and she retired from active publishing for a number of years. Many of Baillie’s tragedies, De Monfort and Orra (1812; included in Volume 3 of Plays on the Passions) in particular, have been discussed as examples of Gothic fiction. The plays’ eerie settings have been compared to those of Ann Radcliffe’s novels, but Baillie’s haunting plots and tortured characters are often regarded as more direct than Radcliffe’s. In addition, her plays are noted for their strong female characters and social commentary. De Monfort centers on a love triangle devoid of romantic intentions, which leads to a murder, while Orra tells the tale of a young, independent heiress who refuses to wed and ultimately is driven mad by a fake haunting designed to trick her into marriage. The title character in Count Basil struggles to reconcile his desire for love and honor. The Tryal offers opposing perspectives on love, and Witchcraft (1836; included in Dramas) focuses on three women identified as witches, one of whom narrowly escapes being burned at the stake.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Critics comment on the depiction of the effects of the intense emotions expressed by many of Baillie’s characters, an approach that E. J. Clery refers to as “interiorized Gothic.” Clery credits Baillie’s style with inspiring later Gothic writers such as Charlotte Dacre, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe. Several critics point to Baillie’s use of the Gothic to critique the morals and values of her time, especially with regard to traditional views of women. Peter Duthis asserts that several of Baillie’s plays, Count Basil and De Monfort in particular, portray the tension wrought by upheavals in aristocratic society and the threat such upheavals posed to traditional gender roles. After Baillie’s death, her works were gradually forgotten, and it was not until the late twentieth century that Baillie’s writings again garnered scholarly interest. Drama historians and feminist commentators in particular recognize the historical importance of Baillie’s complex and pyschologically insightful portrayals and her commentary on gender dynamics and social mores.

PRINCIPAL WORKS Poems: Wherein It Is Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners [anonymous] (poetry) 1790

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Miscellaneous Plays (plays) 1804 Rayner (play) 1804 The Family Legend: A Tragedy (play) 1810 Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (poetry) 1821 A Collection of Poems. Chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors [editor] (poetry) 1823 A View of the General Tenour of the New Testament Regarding the Nature and Dignity of Jesus Christ: Including a Collection of the Various Passages in the Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles Which Relate to That Subject (essay) 1831 †Dramas. 3 vols. (plays) 1836 Fugitive Verses (poetry) 1840 Ahalya Baee: A Poem (poetry) 1849 Lines to Agnes Baillie on Her Birthday (poetry) 1849 *

†

The first volume was published anonymously in 1798, with the author identifying herself for the second and third volumes, in 1802 and 1812, respectively. Volume 1 includes De Monfort, Basil, and The Tryal. Volume 3 includes Orra: A Tragedy, in Five Acts. This collection includes the plays Witchcraft, The Separation, and Henriquez, among others.

PRIMARY SOURCES JOANNA BAILLIE (ESSAY DATE 1798) SOURCE: Baillie, Joanna. “Introductory Discourse.” In A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy. Vol. 1, 1798. Second edition, pp. 1-11. London, 1799. In the following excerpt from her “Introductory Discourse” to Volume 1 of her Plays on the Passions, first published in 1798, Baillie comments upon the universal human preoccupation with emotion, the spiritual, and the unknown.

It is natural for a writer, who is about to submit his works to the Publick, to feel a strong inclination, by some Preliminary Address, to conciliate the favour of his reader, and dispose him, if possible, to peruse them with a favourable eye. I am well aware, however, that his endeavours are generally fruitless: in his situation our hearts revolt from all appearance of confidence, and we consider his diffidence as hypocrisy. Our own word is frequently taken for what we say of

ourselves, but very rarely for what we say of our works. Were these three plays, which this small volume contains, detached pieces only, and unconnected with others that do not yet appear, I should have suppressed this inclination altogether; and have allowed my reader to begin what is before him, and to form what opinion of it his taste or his humour might direct, without any previous trespass upon his time or his patience. But they are part of an extensive design: of one which, as far as my information goes, has nothing exactly similar to it in any language: of one which a whole life’s time will be limited enough to accomplish; and which has, therefore, a considerable chance of being cut short by that hand which nothing can resist. Before I explain the plan of this work, I must make a demand upon the patience of my reader, whilst I endeavour to communicate to him those ideas regarding human nature, as they in some degree affect almost every species of moral writings, but particularly the Dramatic, that induced me to attempt it; and, as far as my judgment enabled me to apply them, has directed me in the execution of it. From that strong sympathy which most creatures, but the human above all, feel for others of their kind, nothing has become so much an object of man’s curiosity as man himself. We are all conscious of this within ourselves, and so constantly do we meet with it in others, that like every circumstance of continually repeated occurrence, it thereby escapes observation. Every person who is not deficient in intellect, is more or less occupied in tracing amongst the individuals he converses with, the varieties of understanding and temper which constitute the characters of men; and receives great pleasure from every stroke of nature that points out to him those varieties. This is, much more than we are aware of, the occupation of children, and of grown people also, whose penetration is but lightly esteemed; and that conversation which degenerates with them into trivial and mischievous tattling, takes its rise not unfrequently from the same source that supplies the rich vein of the satirist and the wit. That eagerness so universally shewn for the conversation of the latter, plainly enough indicates how many people have been occupied in the same way with themselves. Let any one, in a large company, do or say what is strongly expressive of his peculiar character, or of some passion or humour of the moment, and it will be detected by almost every person present. How often may we see a very stupid countenance animated with a smile, when

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*A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy. 3 vols. (plays) 1798, 1802, and 1812

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the learned and the wise have betrayed some native feature of their own minds! and how often will this be the case when they have supposed it to be concealed under a very sufficient disguise! From this constant employment of their minds, most people, I believe, without being conscious of it, have stored up in idea the greater part of those strong marked varieties of human character, which may be said to divide it into classes; and in one of those classes they involuntarily place every new person they become acquainted with. I will readily allow that the dress and the manners of men, rather than their characters and disposition are the subjects of our common conversation, and seem chiefly to occupy the multitude. But let it be remembered that it is much easier to express our observations upon these. It is easier to communicate to another how a man wears his wig and cane, what kind of house he inhabits, and what kind of table he keeps, than from what slight traits in his words and actions we have been led to conceive certain impressions of his character: traits that will often escape the memory, when the opinions that were founded upon them remain. Besides, in communicating our ideas of the characters of others, we are often called upon to support them with more expence of reasoning than we can well afford, but our observations on the dress and appearance of men, seldom involve us in such difficulties. For these, and other reasons too tedious to mention, the generality of people appear to us more trifling than they are: and I may venture to say that, but for this sympathetick curiosity towards others of our kind, which is so strongly implanted within us, the attention we pay to the dress and the manners of men would dwindle into an employment as insipid, as examining the varieties of plants and minerals, is to one who understands not natural history. In our ordinary intercourse with society, this sympathetick propensity of our minds is exercised upon men, under the common occurrences of life, in which we have often observed them. Here vanity and weakness put themselves forward to view, more conspicuously than the virtues: here men encounter those smaller trials, from which they are not apt to come of victorious, and here, consequently, that which is marked with the whimsical and ludicrous will strike us most forcibly, and make the strongest impression on our memory. To this sympathetick propensity of our minds, so exercised, the genuine and pure comick of every composition, whether drama, fable, story, or satire is addressed.

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If man is an object of so much attention to man, engaged in the ordinary occurrences of life, how much more does he excite his curiosity and interest when placed in extraordinary situations of difficulty and distress? It cannot be any pleasure we receive from the sufferings of a fellow-creature which attracts such multitudes of people to a publick execution, though it is the horrour we conceive for such a spectacle that keeps so many more away. To see a human being bearing himself up under such circumstances, or struggling with the terrible apprehensions which such a situation impresses, must be the powerful incentive, which makes us press forward to behold what we shrink from, and wait with trembling expectation for what we dread.1 For though few at such a spectacle can get near enough to distinguish the expression of face, or the minuter parts of a criminal’s behaviour, yet from a considerable distance will they eagerly mark whether he steps firmly; whether the motions of his body denote agitation or calmness; and if the wind does but ruffle his garment, they will, even from that change upon the outline of his distant figure, read some expression connected with his dreadful situation. Though there is a greater proportion of people in whom this strong curiosity will be overcome by other dispositions and motives; though there are many more who will stay away from such a sight than will go to it; yet there are very few who will not be eager to converse with a person who has beheld it; and to learn, very minutely, every circumstance connected with it, except the very act itself of inflicting death. To lift up the roof of his dungeon, like the Diable boiteux, and look upon a criminal the night before he suffers, in his still hours of privacy, when all that disguise, which respect for the opinion of others, the strong motive by which even the lowest and wickedest of men still continue to be moved, would present an object to the mind of every person, not withheld from it by great timidity of character, more powerfully attractive than almost any other. Revenge, no doubt, first began amongst the savages of America that dreadful custom of sacrificing their prisoners of war. But the perpetration of such hideous cruelty could never have become a permanent national custom, but for this universal desire in the human mind to behold man in every situation, putting forth his strength against the current of adversity, scorning all bodily anguish, or struggling with those feelings of nature, which, like a beating stream, will oft’times burst through the artificial barriers of pride. Before they began those terrible rites they treat their

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Amongst the many trials to which the human mind is subjected, that of holding intercourse, real or imaginary, with the world of spirits: of finding itself alone with a being terrifick and awful, whose nature and power are unknown, has been justly considered as one of the most severe. The workings of nature in this situation, we all know, have ever been the object of our most eager inquiry. No man wishes to see the Ghost himself, which would certainly procure him the best information on the subject, but every man wishes to see one who believes that he sees it, in all the agitation and wildness of that species of terrour. To gratify this curiosity how many people have dressed up hideous apparitions to frighten the timid and superstitious! and have done it at the risk of destroying their happiness or understanding for ever. For the instances of intellect being destroyed by this kind of trial are more numerous, perhaps, in proportion to the few who have undergone it, than by any other. How sensible are we of this strong propensity within us, when we behold any person under the pressure of great and uncommon calamity! Delicacy and respect for the afflicted will, indeed, make us turn ourselves aside from observing him, and cast down our eyes in his presence; but the first glance we direct to him will involuntarily be

one of the keenest observation, how hastily soever it may be checked; and often will a returning look of inquiry mix itself by stealth with our sympathy and reserve. But it is not in situations of difficulty and distress alone, that man becomes the object of this sympathetick curiosity; he is no less so when the evil he contends with arises in his own breast, and no outward circumstance connected with him either awakens our attention or our pity. What human creature is there, who can behold a being like himself under the violent agitation of those passions which all have, in some degree, experienced, without feeling himself most powerfully excited by the sight? I say, all have experienced; for the bravest man on earth knows what fear is as well as the coward; and will not refuse to be interested for one under the dominion of this passion, provided there be nothing in the circumstances attending it to create contempt. Anger is a passion that attracts less sympathy than any other, yet the unpleasing and distorted features of an angry man will be more eagerly gazed upon, by those who are no wise concerned with his fury or the objects of it, than the most amiable placid countenance in the world. Every eye is directed to him; every voice hushed to silence in his presence; even children will leave off their gambols as he passes, and gaze after him more eagerly than the gaudiest equipage. The wild tossings of despair; the gnashing of hatred and revenge; the yearnings of affection, and the softened mien of love; all the language of the agitated soul, which every age and nation understands, is never addressed to the dull nor inattentive. It is not merely under the violent agitations of passion, that man so rouses and interests us; even the smallest indications of an unquiet mind, the restless eye, the muttering lip, the half-checked exclamation, and the hasty start, will set our attention as anxiously upon the watch, as the first distant flashes of a gathering storm. When some great explosion of passion bursts forth, and some consequent catastrophe happens, if we are at all acquainted with the unhappy perpetrator, how minutely will we endeavour to remember every circumstance of his past behaviour! and with what avidity will we seize upon every recollected word or gesture, that is in the smallest degree indicative of the supposed state of his mind, at the time when they took place. If we are not acquainted with him, how eagerly will we listen to similar recollections from another! Let us understand, from observation or report, that any person harbours in his breast, concealed from the world’s

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prisoners kindly; and it cannot be supposed that men, alternately enemies and friends to so many neighbouring tribes, in manners and appearance like themselves, should so strongly be actuated by a spirit of publick revenge. This custom, therefore, must be considered as a grand and terrible game, which every tribe plays against another; where they try not the strength of the arm, the swiftness of the feet, nor the acuteness of the eye, but the fortitude of the soul. Considered in this light, the excess of cruelty exercised upon their miserable victim, in which every hand is described as ready to inflict its portion of pain, and every head ingenious in the contrivance of it, is no longer to be wondered at. To put into his measure of misery one agony less, would be, in some degree, betraying the honour of their nation, would be doing a species of injustice to every hero of their own tribe who had already sustained it, and to those who might be called upon to do so; amongst whom each of these savage tormentors has his chance of being one, and has prepared himself for it from his childhood. Nay, it would be a species of injustice to the haughty victim himself, who would scorn to purchase his place amongst the heroes of his nation, at an easier price than his undaunted predecessors.

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eye, some powerful rankling passion of what kind soever it may be, we will observe every word, every motion, every look, even the distant gait of such a man, with a constancy and attention bestowed upon no other. Nay, should we meet him unexpectedly on our way, a feeling will pass across our minds as though we found ourselves in the neighbourhood of some secret and fearful thing. If invisible, would we not follow him into his lonely haunts, into his closet, into the midnight silence of his chamber? There is, perhaps, no employment which the human mind will with so much avidity pursue, as the discovery of concealed passion, as the tracing the varieties and progress of a perturbed soul. It is to this sympathetick curiosity of our nature, exercised upon mankind in great and trying occasions, and under the influence of the stronger passions, when the grand, the generous, and the terrible attract our attention far more than the base and depraved, that the high and powerfully tragick, of every composition, is addressed.

Note 1. In confirmation of this opinion I may venture to say, that of the great numbers who go to see a publick execution, there are but very few who would not run away from, and avoid it, if they happened to meet with it unexpectedly. We find people stopping to look at a procession, or any other uncommon sight, they may have fallen in with accidentally, but almost never an execution. No one goes there who has not made up his mind for the occasion; which would not be the case, if any natural love of cruelty were the cause of such assemblies.

GENERAL COMMENTARY E. J. CLERY (ESSAY DATE 2000) SOURCE: Clery, E. J. “Joanna Baillie and Charlotte Dacre.” In Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley, pp. 85-116. Devon, United Kingdom: Northcote House in Association with the British Council, 2000. In the following excerpt, Clery surveys Baillie’s Gothic dramas, particularly De Monfort and Orra.

In 1798, the year after Radcliffe bowed out of the literary scene, a volume was published anonymously with the arresting title A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind. The contents did not disappoint. There was an ‘Introductory Discourse’ outlining not only a grandiose scheme for the analysis of each passion in a paired tragedy and comedy, but also a radical theory for regenerating dramatic writing. The three plays themselves

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were judged to be masterly; particularly the tragedies, De Monfort and Basil, focused respectively on the antithetical passions of hate and love (those posited by the philosopher Malebranche as the root passions). The plots had a simplicity and the language a poetic resonance that had long been missing from British drama. The volume soon aroused intense interest and speculation. Who was the author? The first reviews, in the New Monthly Magazine and the Critical Review, praised the strength and originality of the writing while assuming that the author was a man. Some thought it might be Walter Scott. Back in Bath, Hester Piozzi recorded that ‘a knot of Literary Characters [including Sarah Siddons] met at Miss [Sophia] Lee’s House . . . deciding— contrary to my own judgment—that a learned man must have been the author; and I, chiefly to put the Company in a good humour, maintained it was a woman. Merely, said I, because the heroines are Dames Passées, and a man has no notion of mentioning a female after she is five and twenty.’1 The dramatist Mary Berry had received the book incognito from the author, and had stayed up all night reading it, noting in her diary the following year that ‘The first question on every one’s lips is, “Have you read the series of plays?” Every body talks in the raptures I always thought they deserved of the tragedies, and of the introduction as of a new and admirable piece of criticism’.2 She too was of the opinion that the author was a woman, ‘only because, no man could or would draw such noble and dignified representations of the female mind as Countess Albini and Jane de Monfort. They often make us clever, captivating, heroic, but never rationally superior.’3 The opinion grew that Ann Radcliffe was the author, trying her powers in a new genre. Mrs Piozzi reported it as fact to one correspondent. A Mrs Jackson spread the rumour, with a detailed list of stylistic evidence; Radcliffe apparently tried and failed to contact her and put a stop to it. The play De Monfort went into production at Drury Lane, with Sarah Siddons and her brother John Philip Kemble in the lead parts, and still the author did not come forward to claim credit and payment. The playbills were silent on the matter. But some time before its theatrical unveiling, Joanna Baillie disclosed her name, and on opening night, 29 April 1800, she attended with a party of friends and relations. One critic described in retrospect the astonishment caused by the revelation of her authorship: The curiosity excited in the literary circle, which was then much more narrow and concentrated

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It is a literary Cinderella story, in which the heroine goes to the ball and lives happily ever after. In spite of recent misguided attempts by some feminist critics to represent Baillie as an oppressed and marginal writer, the fact is that she went on to a highly productive publishing career, a career met with continuous acclaim, and crowned by the appearance of her collected poems and plays in 1851, just before her death aged 88.5 She had a large circle of friends including some of the most prominent cultural figures of the day. Maria Edgeworth, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Walter Scott, Lord and Lady Byron, Wordsworth, and Southey, were among her ardent admirers. If her work came under attack from the notoriously severe pen of Francis Jeffrey at the Edinburgh Review, assassin of Lyrical Ballads, then it has to be said she was in excellent company.6 Her sex was neither a barrier to success and celebrity, nor a shield against serious criticism. Her exceptional literary status, transcending conventions of gender, rested on a tradition which by now included the outstanding examples of Siddons and Radcliffe: women who displayed genius through rulebreaking and the imaginative flights characteristic of Gothic. Joanna Baillie was born in 1762. Her father was a Presbyterian minister who became professor of divinity at the University of Glasgow before dying in 1783. The Baillies were descendants of the Scottish patriot Sir William Wallace. Her mother was the sister of the famous surgeon Dr William Hunter, who at his death left his London practice and property to Joanna’s brother, Matthew. In 1784 Joanna travelled south to join him with her mother and elder sister Agnes. When Matthew married, the Baillie women set up independently in Hampstead, where Joanna and Agnes were to remain until the end of their long lives. As a child at boarding school Joanna had excelled in music, drawing, mathematics and theatrical improvisations. A birthday poem addressed to Agnes recalls how she discovered her skill for story-telling through the pleasure of evoking fear and wonder in her sister, an eager auditor:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AN EXCERPT FROM A DEATH NOTICE IN HARPER’S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE

Joanna Baillie, the most illustrious of the female poets of England, unless that place be assigned to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, notwithstanding her many affectations and great inequalities, died at Hampstead, on the 23d of February, at the age of 90 years, within a few weeks. She is best known by her Plays on the Passions, in which she made a bold and successful attempt to delineate the stronger passions of the mind by making each of them the subject of a tragedy and a comedy. . . . Her dramas are wrought wholly out from her own conceptions, and exhibit great originality and invention. Her power of portraying the darker and sterner passions of the human heart has rarely been surpassed. Scott eulogized “Basil’s love and Montfort’s hate” as a revival of something of the old Shaksperean strain in our later and more prosaic days. But her dramas have little in common with those of Shakspeare, so full of life, action, and vivacity. Their spirit is more akin to the stern and solemn repose of the Greek dramas. They have little of the form and pressure of real life. The catastrophe springs rather from the characters themselves than from the action of the drama. The end is seen from the beginning. Over all broods a fate as gloomy as that which overhung the doomed House of Atreus. Her female characters are delineated with great elevation and purity. Jane de Montfort—with her stately form which seems gigantic, till nearer approach shows that it scarcely exceeds middle stature; her queenly bearing, and calm, solemn smile; her “weeds of high habitual state”—is one of the noblest conceptions of poetry. SOURCE: “Monthly Record of Current Events.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 2, no. 11 (April 1851): 709.

Thy love of tale and story was the stroke At which my dormant fancy first awoke, And ghosts and witches in my busy brain

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than at present; the incredulity, with which the first rumour that these vigorous and original compositions came from a female hand, was received; and the astonishment, when, after all the ladies who then enjoyed any literary celebrity had been tried and found totally wanting in the splendid faculties developed in those dramas, they were acknowledged by a gentle, quiet and retiring young woman, whose most intimate friends, we believe, had never suspected her extraordinary powers.4

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Arose in sombre show, and motley train. This new-found path attempting, proud was I, Lurking approval on thy face to spy, Or hear thee say, as grew thy roused attention, ‘What! is this story all thine own invention?’7

Her first publication was a book of poetry which appeared in 1790 but went almost unnoticed. Already, though, it showed her interest in the study of human nature and the influence on the mind of contrasting passions. The subtitle explains that the poems will illustrate ‘the Different Influence Which the Same Circumstances Produce on Different Characters’ and there is a series of ‘Addresses to the Night’ by ‘A Fearful Mind’, ‘A Discontented Mind’, ‘A Sorrowful Mind’ and ‘A Joyful Mind’.8

Passion in the Present Tense Baillie’s tragedies, particularly De Monfort and Orra, have been discussed as examples of Gothic writing in a number of critical studies.9 Some of the settings are indeed strongly reminiscent of Radcliffe: the woods by night in De Monfort, with a requiem sounding faintly from an isolated convent; the castle in Orra, the haunt of outlaws under cover of strange legends, riddled with secret passages, its chambers furnished with locks on the outside. But in terms of plot, they represent an inversion of Reeve and Radcliffe’s technique of encrypting homicidal passion in the distant past, and a decisive rejection of the tragicomic structure which permitted the redemption of evil. The contrast should perhaps even be understood as polemical. The trappings of Radcliffe-romance are included by Baillie only to emphasize their essential irrelevance: the real drama is all in the mind. Baillie refuses to buffer the tortured scenes she represents. This is passion in the present tense, as it had also appeared in Lee’s The Recess, but in Baillie it is simplified and refined to achieve the transparency of a theorum. The remarks of Joseph Donohue regarding Baillie’s conception of dramatic character are especially resonant: ‘Gothic drama, beginning with Home’s Douglas, placed special emphasis on an event that took place years before and continues to exert its effects thereafter. De Monfort internalizes this convention by redefining it as a mental process in which an evil passion inexplicably takes root in the fallow soul of man and slowly chokes away his life force.’1 0 This experiment bears some relation to Lewis’s The Monk, as an illustration of the corrosive effect of lust on the character of Ambrosio. The Plays on the Passions, as they are generally called, made an important contribution towards the opening

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up of new possibilities within Gothic writing, as a now-familiarized audience looked for everstronger sensations. Future Gothic writers— Charlotte Dacre, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe—would follow this direction of interiorized Gothic. Baillie’s ‘Introductory Discourse’ from the 1798 volume of plays provides a theoretical basis for the externalized spectacle of inner passions. Wittily, she frames the discussion in terms of the ruling passion of the reader. We are all, she claims, driven to poetry and fiction by curiosity about human nature. We want to go beyond the official accounts of history writing, penetrate the private space of the home and, further, to enter into the minds of others and rummage among their secret desires and motives. We can be diverted for a while by images of the marvellous in romance, or the artifices of sentimental fiction, or the pleasures of epic and pastoral verse, but the ‘great masterpropensity’ for authentic pictures of nature will always reassert itself. Our curiosity about ‘beings like ourselves’ must be fed if we are to lend a work of literature our ‘sympathetick interest’. Nowhere is this rule more applicable than in drama: pared down as it is to dialogue, if the characters do not speak from nature, then the author can offer no compensating distractions. The study of human nature and the persuasive depiction of character— which Baillie terms ‘characteristick truth’—are crucial to the dramatist’s art. Baillie represents the taste for tragedy as something universal and primitive. Tragedy is the ‘first-born’ of dramatic genres, for a number of reasons. In addition to catering to the ‘natural inclination’ for ‘scenes of horrour and distress, of passion and heroick exertion’, tragedy permits the maximum exercise of curiosity and sympathy. In tragedy we are permitted behind the scenes into the lives and minds of ‘heroes and great men’, normally only glimpsed from afar. And in tragedy we see those extremes of conflict and suffering which most powerfully engage our feelings. At this point Baillie introduces the ultimate purpose of tragedy (now personified as a female muse), which doubles as a sketch of her own innovative theatrical practice: to her only it belongs to unveil to us the human mind under the dominion of those strong and fixed passions, which seemingly unprovoked by outward circumstances, will from small beginnings brood within the breast, till all the better dispositions, all the fair gifts of nature are borne down before them. Those passions which conceal themselves even to the dearest friend; and can, often times, only give their fulness vent in the

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No wonder Baillie’s contemporaries were riveted by her vision. It is both alluring and intensely sinister. The passions are constructed as an inexplicable fatality, divorced from social context, unfolding with an irresistible autonomous force, pent up within an individual life which it will parasitically devour. And the audience is to be made privy to this horrible spectacle of a soul eaten alive, will eavesdrop on exclamations of isolated torture which only heaven should hear,1 1 will be initiated into the language of the unspeakable. The workings of the soul are represented as absolutely private and secret, precisely in order to enhance the pleasure of violation and absolute public exposure in the name of ‘sympathy’ and knowledge. In a study of this length, it is not possible to explore very far the social resonances of Baillie’s poetics, though it is easy enough to identify certain ideological affinities. Baillie brilliantly refashions tragedy along Gothic lines for an age of possessive individualism and state surveillance. Her theatre most closely resembles Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, the ideal prison, in which the perfect visibility of the prisoners by an unseen eye stands, according to Michel Foucault’s wellknown account, as a general model for relations of power in the modern liberal state. But the baleful cast of her ideas has been obscured in recent criticism, by a determination to take the stress on sympathetic identification as a cosy, feminine alternative to ‘patriarchal’ tragic practice. Attempting to set up Baillie as a feminist sacred cow does her no favours. There is nothing cosy about her tragedies nor the response to them demanded of the viewer. Like the other writers discussed in this book, she was determined above all to make her mark in the literary world, and was willing to use the most powerful—the most ideologically arresting—means to do so. Issues of gender play a part in this ambition. But Baillie was intent on demonstrating her ability as a woman to rival men in the display of genius, not on defining an alternative feminine aesthetic. Harriet Martineau spoke of

cherishing Baillie’s memory for the ‘invulnerable justification which she set up for intellectual superiority in women’.1 2 In the ‘Introductory Discourse’, there is an interesting shift in the gender of personal pronouns relating to dramatic writing. At first, when Baillie discusses the primary concerns of the dramatist, she refers to ‘him’ and ‘his’ works. At a later stage, as she warms to her argument, tragedy (it has already been noted) is personified as a ‘she’, who puts into effect ‘her’ various techniques, including the innovations cited above. Personification is a common enough device in aesthetic discussion of the time, but here, given the sex of the author which would be revealed in the third edition of 1800, there is a fortuitous merging of art and artist, equivalent to Sarah Siddons’s representation as the Tragic Muse. There is a subliminal message asserting women’s capacity for representing and embodying tragic passion, reinforced by a statement in a footnote: I have said nothing here with regard to female character, though in many tragedies it is brought forward as the principal one of the piece, because what I have said of the above characters is likewise applicable to it. I believe there is no man that ever lived, who has behaved in a certain manner, on a certain occasion, who has not had amongst women some corresponding spirit, who on the like occasion, and every way similarly circumstanced, would have behaved in the like manner.

But Baillie goes much further than simply claiming her place among tragedians. The overall purpose of the ‘Discourse’ is a critique of the entire dramatic inheritance in tragedy and comedy, condemnation of tired imitation in contemporary practice, and a call for bards possessing ‘strong original genius’ to point the way back to truth and nature. It goes without saying that the author herself must be numbered among this elite. While she is appropriately modest as a neophyte, she also has the courage of her convictions: ‘I am emboldened by the confidence I feel in that candour and indulgence, with which the good and enlightened do ever regard the experimental efforts of those, who wish in any degree to enlarge the sources of pleasure and instruction amongst men’. Innovation is her raison d’être. Her manifesto is not bolstered by didacticism. Indeed, she rebukes tragic poets who have been led away from analysis of the passions by ‘a desire to communicate more perfect moral instruction’. The benefit of tragedy should derive from ‘the enlargement of our ideas in regard to human nature’: a knowledge of the self, which may indirectly lead to moral improvement.

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lonely desert, or in the darkness of midnight. For who hath followed the great man into his secret closet, or stood by the side of his nightly couch, and heard those exclamations of the soul which heaven alone may hear, that the historian should be able to inform us? and what form of story, what mode of rehearsed speech will communicate to us those feelings whose irregular bursts, abrupt transitions, sudden pauses, and half-uttered suggestions, scorn all harmony of measured verse, all method and order of relation?

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The project Baillie outlined publicly at the age of 36 lasted almost a lifetime. In the course of her prolific career she produced three volumes of Plays on the Passions—ten plays in all—and thirteen other plays, not to mention numerous poems. Bertrand Evans has proposed that ten of the tragedies can be categorized as Gothic drama: Orra, The Dream, Henriquez, Romiero, Ethwald (in two parts), De Monfort, Rayner, The Family Legend, The Separation, and Witchcraft. 1 3 I will be discussing only two of them, already mentioned: De Monfort (1798), by far the best known of her works then and now, and Orra (1812), which Evans claims best illustrates ‘Miss Baillie’s “Gothicity”’.1 4 Kemble’s rapid determination to bring De Monfort to the stage of Drury Lane, in spite of the play’s anonymity, has already been mentioned. It is unsurprising, given the fact that the play might have been written as a vehicle for himself and Siddons. Baillie’s nephew suggested that the characters of De Monfort and his elder sister Jane were indeed intended as portraits of the two actors.1 5 For Kemble, the role of a man of fine qualities driven to murder by an irrational hatred presumably reflected his talents as an interpreter rather than his actual personality. But in the case of Jane De Monfort, a woman who has nobly sacrificed her life to the duty of caring for her orphaned siblings, but who is still capable of enthralling every man she meets with her beauty and bearing, the terms in which she is praised in the play unquestionably echo descriptions of Siddons.1 6 She is ‘A noble dame, who should have been a queen’ (DM I. i. 5); ‘So stately and so graceful is her form’, comments a servant, ‘I thought at first her stature was gigantic’ (DM II. i. 10-11): the awe she inspires is almost supernatural, as is her ability to turn all around her into willing slaves. It is understandable that Siddons requested Baillie to ‘write me more Jane De Monforts’. The production only lasted for eleven performances and there are mixed reports of its reception,1 7 but Siddons chose it for her benefit on 5 May 1800, acted the role again in Edinburgh in 1810 with her son Henry as De Monfort, and continued to use the play in recitations.1 8 The plot takes the novel form of a perverse love triangle, without romantic love. De Monfort is monomaniacally attached to Rezenfelt through his hatred, and there are homoerotic undercurrents in their interaction. Jane, De Monfort’s sister, who raised him after the death of their mother, attempts to draw him away from this hate by appealing to their mutual love, which itself has a

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focused intensity verging on the incestuous. The addition of a third current, an unfounded rumour mentioned in passing that Rezenfelt and Jane are secretly in love, produces a short-circuit in De Monfort’s mind that leads to murder. He waylays Rezenfelt in the woods outside the town and savagely stabs him to death. The context for the drama is deliberately vague. The initial stage direction sets the scene as simply ‘a town in Germany’. At the outset we learn that De Monfort has left his home to return to the town where he once lived. He is moody and irascible, yet his servants are loyal, and a friend, Count Freberg, who hurries to greet him, bears witness to his previously amiable nature. A first aside from De Monfort to the audience, however, signals a radical disaffection from his surroundings. The second scene develops suspense, as indications of De Monfort’s pathology emerge, through symptom (he wrecks a room at the very mention of Rezenvelt), and the image of an incommunicable interiority. He taunts Freberg for his attachment to social surfaces and inability to penetrate the depths of human nature: That man was never born whose secret soul, With all its motley treasure of dark thoughts, Foul fantasies, vain musings, and wild dreams, Was ever open’d to another’s scan. (DM I. ii. 96-8)

The play’s concern with the distance between workable social conduct and the tangled depths of selfhood is shown thematically through numerous references to clothing and masks. Flimsy, changeable garments, often inappropriately worn, metaphorize the thin layer of public seeming, a fragile membrane that if severed, would enable the passions to pass freely from subjective confinement into violent reality. The anxiety provoked by this idea finds relief only in the figure of Jane, who represents an ideal of transparent meaning, a seamless union of nature and apperance. And yet Jane is chiefly responsible for the disastrous release of De Monfort’s hatred. In a key episode in the second scene of Act II, Jane forces her brother to confess his feelings. Impervious to his attempted defence of his ‘secret troubles’, his ‘secret weakness’, she applies every weapon of emotional blackmail. De Monfort agrees at last to ‘tell thee all—but, oh! thou wilt despise me. / For in my breast a raging passion burns, / To which thy soul no sympathy will own—’ (DM II. ii. 8-10). And so it transpires: Jane is horrified and uncomprehending. Threatened with rejection, De Monfort agrees to meet Rezenfelt and be reconciled with him, an action which

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The audience is called upon to wonder as they witness the hero’s deterioration, rather than to understand it in logical terms. As a bridge, there is the more homely yet comparable spectacle of the Countess Freberg’s envy of Jane, exacerbated by the latter’s kindly condescension. But from the final scene of Act IV through the final Act, as the drama grows wilder it is shifted to the appropriate setting of a wood where ‘Foul murders have been done, and ravens scream; / And things unearthly, stalking through the night, / Have scar’d the lonely trav’ller from his wits’ (IV. ii. 223-5), and to a lonely convent which stands in it. The ‘thicklytangled boughs’ provide the obvious correlative for De Monfort’s state of mind as he stalks his victim, and the old Gothic convent where he is brought, frozen with horror, after committing the act, is a monument to isolation. Jane arrives, once again shattering his solitude, and endeavouring to fix his mind on prayer and redemption. But the failure of communication—Jane: ‘What means this heavy groan?’ De Monfort: ‘It has a meaning’—sums up the strange confusion of the scene as he, shackled by officers of justice, quickly expires of an internal haemorrhage. In Baillie’s original version the peculiar non-event of De Monfort’s death occurs off-stage, as if this reverse of a coup de théâtre were designed to taunt the audience, with its penchant for predictable shocktactics. When Edmund Kean restaged the play in 1821, at the urgent request of Byron,1 9 at least two important revisions were introduced. De Monfort’s hatred was motivated by a love rivalry with Rezenfelt, and De Monfort was brought onstage to die. These changes help to indicate the originality, the troubling strangeness, of the original version.2 0

‘A Midnight in the Breast’ De Monfort’s collapse and death are brought about partly by remorse, partly by sheer horror at the nature of the act he has committed, and specifically, superstitious fear at being left alone with the corpse of his victim. An early poem, ‘The Ghost of Edward’, dealt with the fanciful horrors that attack the mind. There is ‘a midnight in the

breast’: in this instance also, fear is exacerbated by guilt.2 1 Fear of the supernatural—in isolation from any causal factors—was the passion Baillie determined to explore at full length in a tragedy from her last volume of Plays on the Passions published in 1812, Orra. Set in the late fourteenth century in Switzerland, it concerns the machinations in the household of Count Hughobert, where his ward, the heiress Orra, is being pressured to marry Hughobert’s son, Glottenbal, while also being wooed by a young nobleman of reduced fortunes, Theobald. The plot may sound conventional but the heroine is not. She wants to marry no one and live independently (there is some slight mention of charitable works), and manages to persuade Theobold to be her friend rather than her lover. She is not especially beautiful (Theobold: ‘to speak honestly, / I’ve fairer seen’, I. i. 129-30), and her character is a composite of mirth and dread, as if Annette, Emily’s servant from The Mysteries of Udolpho, had usurped the lead role. Romantic love is displaced, as it was in De Monfort and in many of Baillie’s other plays, with the result that expectations are disrupted and it becomes possible to create more interesting and varied parts for women. Orra adores ghost stories, and this is her downfall. She is not only highly susceptible to fear but also addicted to the sensation: Yea, when the cold blood shoots through every vein: When every pore upon my shrunken skin A knotted knoll becomes, and to mine ears Strange inward sounds awake, and to mine eyes Rush stranger tears, there is a joy in fear. (II. i. 170-75)

Her chief resource to feed her passion is Cathrina, one of her attendants, who has an inexhaustible supply of supernatural legends. But Cathrina is in the power of Rudigere, an illegitimate relation of the count’s who plots to marry Orra in order to improve his fortunes. Cathrina has been his mistress and borne his child, and, to save her reputation, she enters into Rudigere’s plot to have Orra removed to an ancient castle rumoured to be haunted. There he will use Orra’s fear to blackmail her into a union with Glottenbal (he tells the count), but in fact with himself. Theobold learns of the conspiracy, and plans to rescue her by impersonating the spirit of the place, a spectre huntsman. But a message forewarning her goes astray, and terror at his ghostly appearance drives her into a state of derangement, from which, it seems, she will not recover. A repentant Hugh-

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will only result in an escalation of their animosity. The problem is that De Monfort did not—could not—‘tell all’. The intensity of his hatred is not proportionate to the identifiable cause: Rezenfelt’s habit of covertly goading him while pretending friendship. It is the nature of a ruling passion to be monstrous, autogenic, incommunicable. In De Monfort’s case it grows to overpower one of his other prime characteristics, pity.

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obert arrives on the scene with his family, and the villainous Rudigere kills both himself and his rival, the obtuse Glottenbal. As in the case of De Monfort, the relation of Orra to an emergent Gothic genre is not straightforward. The play is a medley of familiar tropes: the haunted castle with a story of murder attached to it, riddled with secret passages (cf. almost any Gothic novel from Castle of Otranto onwards); the band of outlaws who use the castle as a hide-out under cover of supernatural rumour (cf. The Mysteries of Udolpho, Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House, and many others); the noble outlaw chief (a childhood friend of Theobald, who lends his assistance; cf. Schiller, and Dacre’s Zofloya); the heroine kept in a bedchamber with locks on the outside only (Mysteries of Udolpho etc.); the ballad tradition of elopement with a phantom lover (Bürger’s ‘Lenore’, and its variants); the rescue involving impersonation of a phantom lover which ends in disaster (cf. the Bleeding Nun episode from The Monk). Indeed, the play’s generic knowingness might lead one to imagine that its purpose was solely critical, even satirical. It is worth bearing in mind that two of the best-known burlesques of Gothic were published soon after: E. Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine in 1813 and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey in 1818. Certainly it is true to say that the devices included by Baillie are more or less stripped of affect: the supernatural is explained so far in advance that the audience is in no danger of falling in with Orra’s delusions. But on the other hand, neither is the viewer permitted the security of detached criticism. Baillie maintains sympathetic identification with the heroine throughout the play by showing her insight into her own situation, her courageous resistance to oppression, and her inner struggle against fear. The catharsis of terror for the audience comes with the final scene, and the pitiful spectacle of Orra surrounded by mind-forged monsters. Orra’s passion for fear is not blamed. Like De Monfort’s hatred it is something inexplicable and irresistible, an inner sublime. Baillie clearly indicates in her characterizations that possession of a powerful ruling passion is an index of greatness of soul; but it also creates an imbalance which is ultimately self-destructive. It opens De Monfort to criminality, and Orra to victimage. The audience is not called upon to judge and condemn, but rather to lend their understanding and, at the same time, to wonder at these human meteors and derive a vicarious thrill from their disastrous fates. As in all Gothic writing, the purpose of

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instruction is a fig-leaf; the fundamental pleasure is amoral. Baillie’s methods reflected and faciliated the shift of Gothic away from the conventions which had been associated with the earlier phase of experimental supernaturalism and were thus becoming redundant, to the surer foundations of an inner landscape. Passion itself becomes the plot, but unmotivated, reified, an object of fascination in its own right. It would be inappropriate as well as anachronistic to call this psychological drama. The diseases of the mind are not submitted to logic. The increase of knowledge may be Baillie’s expressed aim, but it is knowledge of an unabashedly corrupt and disingenuous kind, combining the pleasure of unveiling with the retention of some ultimate mystery. Discussion of Baillie’s drama has almost always excluded mention of her poetry, but she was a well-regarded and frequently anthologized poet as well. Her choice of subject matter and form was wide-ranging, but includes a number of supernatural ballads which Orra would have appreciated. Her Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters was said to have brought her £1,000 from the publishers Longman,2 2 and went through two editions in the year of publication, 1821. ‘The Ghost of Fadon’, from this volume, is based on a legend concerning William Wallace, a distant ancestor of Baillie.2 3 Here, in contrast to the plays, the supernatural is manifestly public. Not only does the ghost appear to a whole company of soldiers, but he challenges Wallace to a duel, and physically blocks him when he tries to escape, eventually presiding over the burning of the castle where the company had attempted to find shelter after military defeat by the English. He is public, too, in his historical significance. He is the spectre of Fadon, a follower killed by Wallace under suspicion of spying. The haunting suggests that he was wrongfully killed, an omen of bad luck for the nation. Day rose; but silent, sad, and pale, Stood the bravest of the Scottish race; And each warrior’s heart began to quail, When he look’d in his leader’s face.

There were a variety of Gothic modes current—several forms of fiction, tragic drama, ballads, odes, prose poems in the manner of Ossian— and Baillie felt no inhibition about testing her powers in more than one. In this poem she flaunts her ability to play on the superstition of her readers, while also signalling her personal investment in nationalist politics.

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1. Cit. Margaret S. Carhart, The Life and Works of Joanna Baillie, Yale Studies in English, 64 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), 15. See also Norton, Mistress of Udolpho, 185-7. 2. Cit. Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 17. 3. Cit. Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 15. 4. Quarterly Review, cit. Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 17. 5. Ellen Donkin’s chapter on Baillie in Getting Into the Act (London: Routledge, 1995) is the prime example; she lays great emphasis on Piozzi’s statements that by revealing her identity and therefore her sex Baillie opened herself to spiteful criticism, but fails to provide any persuasive evidence. The current dominant reading of Baillie by critics such as Anne Mellor and Catherine Burroughs suggests that she was self-marginalized, that is, writing from a position of conscious subordination and gendered critique; with this interpretation, too, I would disagree. Gender politics is not the beginning and end of Baillie’s audacious challenge to theatrical orthodoxy. She was simply the most visionary and influential dramatist of her day. 6. See Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 47-52, which counters Donkin’s very partial version.

myself. Baillie returned the compliment in an ode addressed ‘To Mrs Siddons’, ‘our tragic queen’, praising especially the subtlety and variety of her depictions of the passions. 19. At the time, Byron was a member of the management committee at Drury Lane. 20. Another strategy of containment in the first performed version was the Epilogue, written by the Duchess of Devonshire. In the most conventional terms, it urges the audience to ‘bid the scene’s dread horror cease / And hail the blessing of domestic peace’. It is included in Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas, 313-14. 21. From Poems (1790), reproduced in Lonsdale, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. 22. Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 29. 23. The poem is included in Jerome M. McGann (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Abbreviations DM Joanna Baillie, De Monfort: A Tragedy, in Seven Gothic Dramas 1789-1825, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1992).

7. ‘Lines to Agnes Baillie on Her Birthday’, The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851), 811. 8. Some of the poems were later included in revised form in Fugitive Verses (1740). See Roger Lonsdale’s remarks in Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 429-30.

TITLE COMMENTARY Plays on the Passions

9. Notably Bertrand Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1947); Paul Ranger, Terror and Pity; and Jeffrey N. Cox (ed.), Seven Gothic Dramas, 17891825 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), which contains the text of De Monfort. 10. Joseph W. Donohue, Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 81. 11. A formulation repeated by Baillie in De Monfort, IV. ii. 26-7. 12. Cit. Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 64-5; Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, ed. M. W. Chapman (Beston, 1877), vol. I, p. 270. 13. Evans, Gothic Drama, 201. 14. Evans, Gothic Drama, 201. 15. Cit. Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 116. 16. See Campbell, Mrs Siddons: ‘Joanna Baillie has left a perfect picture of Mrs Siddons, in her description of Jane de Monfort’ (p. 303). 17. See Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 121-2. 18. See Carhart, Joanna Baillie (pp. 128-42), on the stage history of De Monfort after the original Drury Lane production. Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas (pp. 55-7), has an interesting discussion of Siddons as a dramatic interpreter of Gothic, but sees her acting style as typically passive, in contrast to Paula Backscheider, and

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Witchcraft MARJEAN D. PURINTON (ESSAY DATE 2001) SOURCE: Purinton, Marjean D. “Socialized and Medicalized Hysteria in Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft.” Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism 9 (2001): 139-56. In the following essay, Purinton analyzes Baillie’s portrayal of what was often medically and scientifically sanctioned persecution of women in her drama Witchcraft.

Because many Romantic-period dramas are engaged with political frenzy following the French Revolution and are shaped by psychosocial issues associated with the Gothic, it is not unusual for us to see “madness,” in various manifestations, playing a significant part on the stage. The physiology of excessive emotions had also become, by the end of the eighteenth century, a significant focus of scientific inquiry and discourse. By the early nineteenth-century, the prevailing medical opinion had gendered emotions so that women who exhibited excessive feelings and unconventional behaviors were “hysterical,” a physiological effect of their inferior biology, the symptom of their anatomical reproductive capacity.1 As I have argued elsewhere, the intertextuality of science and medicine in Romantic drama may explain the predominance of gothic and melodrama during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.2 Numerous Romantic dramas stage physicality in gothic forms that are significantly redefined by discursive and cultural interG O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR AN EARLY REVIEWER APPLAUDS BAILLIE’S TALENT

In the “Introductory Discourse,” which abounds in imagery, the author has exhibited much knowledge of the human mind, and has displayed his information and discernment in such a style, as convinces the reader, at the outset, that he is not incompetent to the arduous task he has undertaken. He treats at great length, and with much ingenuity, on the construction of the drama; in which, . . . he has not adhered to his own rules. He expresses his approbation of those styles of writing which apply more forcibly to the heart than to the fancy, and thinks the drama the most approved vehicle. . . .

Seemingly natural elements associated with science and medicine were staged as gothic and technologically designed and manipulated to create a world of illusions and phantasmagoria.7 Both gothic and science were discursive fields upon which anxieties about social identity and physicality could be displaced, and the gothic conventions of drama were particularly convenient for playwrights’ use in negotiating the influences of science and medicine upon culture. The strategy for performing the discourses of science and practices of medicine, I call the “techno-gothic,” an ideologically charged and melodramatic structure in which disturbing issues and forbidden topics are recontextualized by the intersecting fields of the supernatural and science—or gothic and technology. The techno-gothic relies upon a set of readily available and easily recognized dramatic conventions (gothic) that function as interpretation of scientific discourses (technology) within theatricalized contexts of social critiques and cultural changes. Techno-gothic drama is, in fact, a product of the Romantic revolution in science, as its forms mediate post-Enlightenment dualisms such as biochemistry and magic, romance and gothic, medicine and quackery, bodies and spirits. The techno-gothic came to be expressed in two popular and powerful performance modes: grotesques and ghosts.

The Tragedy of De Monfort is still superior to Basil. The hero is a more original character, and more forcibly drawn; but it is too diffuse. The last act might be omitted altogether with advantage, adding a little only at the end of the fourth. With these improvements it would make an excellent play, and one which, we have no doubt, would be received with the greatest pleasure by an English audience. . . . It is with great pleasure that we notice a publication, in which so much original genius for dramatic poetry is evidently displayed. May we not hope that, in the unknown author of these Dramas, exists the long wished-for talent, which is to remove the present opprobrium of our theatres, and supply them with productions of native growth, calculated not for the destruction of idle time, but, for the amusement of ages? We are willing, in some degree, to cherish the expectation. SOURCE: A review of A Series of Plays In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind, Vol. 1, by Joanna Baillie. The British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review 13 (March 1799): 284-90.

ests in science. Science did, in fact, take form in the theatre, where production strategies were

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shaped by the machinery of staging and dramatic content was manifestly and latently concerned with medical discoveries and practices.3 Conversely, the theatre was appropriated by science as the actual site for staging its experiments. Since the seventeenth century, Robert Boyle’s demonstrations for students were staged as anatomical theatres of medicine with formalized and regularized performances.4 Staged dissections functioned in spectacularly pedagogical ways in science’s institutional training. Scientific and medical interests were theatricalized in other public but non-dramatic forms, such as traveling shows, itinerant lectures with demonstrations, extravagant displays or exhibitions, and forums at the Royal College of Surgeons.5 Social controversies connected to medical sciences were also frequently staged for public display in non-dramatic settings such as courtrooms and executions.6

Techno-gothic grotesques embody discursively constructed and spectacularly displayed monsters or aberrations. Historically, monsters had been exhibited in public places, but it is the beginning of the nineteenth-century when teratology began to decipher in scientific terms the grotesque bodies theatrically displayed.8 Physicality offered a

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If the techno-gothic grotesque created a performing body that could not be easily read, the techno-gothic ghost challenged legibility in its performance of disembodiment. In their unstable and myriad forms, techno-gothic ghosts resist spatial limitations and discernable significations. Technologically designed special effects of the stage and the culture’s preoccupation with hysteria stimulated the imagination to contemplate the absence of substance, religious and pagan spirits, inchoate psychology and neurology—areas which science sought to explain with empirical evidence. By manipulating the ways light bounced from a polished and curved plane, for example, production managers could create optical effects. Spectators looking into a mirror could be terrified by the appearance floating upon its surface, a phantom signifying fictions generated by both superstition and science.1 2 By manipulating characters’ responses and plot developments, playwrights could create discursive and dramatic phantasmagoria that pricked spectators’ and readers’ imaginative participation in the culture’s craze over mental and physical matters. Ghosts were, of course, a gothic convention at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but they were also the way in which Romantic-period playwrights could theatricalize the scientific scrutiny and speculation of

mental disorders—hallucinations, hysteria, deliria, madness, mania—that were charged with new medical significations. For women playwrights, especially, technogothic grotesques and ghosts provided a way for them to participate in the scientific revolution of the early nineteenth century in a speaking position rather than as an object. For women writers, it was particularly complicated to portray a body scientifically sexed as female and culturally gendered as feminine, for, by some medical accounts, female bodies were already grotesque. It was similarly tricky for women playwrights to portray “mad” or hysterical women in their dramas, characters that seemed to confirm scientific interpretations of women as victims of their own bodies, always with the propensity for excessive and uncontrollable emotions. One way for women to challenge the biological limits placed on them by science was to stage madness as a deliberate and calculated strategy used by female characters, a “staged” guise or costume put on to deceive male characters who assume that they are truly mad. We see this strategy, for example in Sophia Lee’s 1794 tragedy Almeyda; Queen of Granada. Joanna Baillie’s drama Witchcraft (1836), however, exposes the theoretical and fictive nature of medical science in characterizing male but especially female characters as techno-gothic grotesques possessed by techno-gothic ghosts. At a metadramtic level, furthermore, Witchcraft stages a society haunted by a techno-gothic ghost in its depiction of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch hunts as conceptual analogues to early nineteenth-century medical practices intent on dominating, controlling and persecuting women by naming them as techno-gothic grotesques, witches marginalized as “others” whose diseased presence must be purged from the social body.1 3 Baillie writes her play at the apex of literary and scientific discussions about monstrosity and phantasmagoria, and these discourses, no doubt, informed her thinking about women persecuted by social conventions based on superstition and fiction but legitimized by religion and medicine. Even by the middle of the nineteenth century and following prolific scientific activity, the unknown, superstition, and spectral still created fear and terror. Charles Lamb asserts in “Witches and Other Night-Fears” (1823) that the most cruel, tormenting devil to humankind is “the simple idea of a spirit unembodied” (80). In Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), Walter Scott diagnoses those who claimed to see apparitions as “mad,” pathologically unbalanced, deceived by a “lively dream,

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way of performing scientific preoccupations with the body, its anatomy, is physiology, its potential for disease and deformity, its propensity for physical disabilities and socio-sexual transgressions. The techno-gothic grotesque makes visible the threatening “other,” simultaneously disturbing and appealing, terrifying and pleasurable.9 Science and stage engendered new perceptions of physicality, transforming the body into a text that could be read and interpreted by both the trained medical gaze and the curious theatergoer. Physiognomy and phrenology comprised scientific disciplines intent on reading the body, but reading a performing body, and one that was physically grotesque, was especially tricky as it was legitimately artificial and fictive, disguised and costumed.1 0 While the malformed, hybrid, and at times carnivalesque, monstrous, and sick body of the techno-gothic grotesque excited contradictory responses of sympathy and abomination, it also destabilized cultural norms.1 1 Its physical physicality was, on the one hand, a spectacular body of gothic terror and curiosity; and, on the other hand, a politicized text placed on display at the anatomical “clinic” where theatergoers or readers could participate in the culture’s scientific interpretations and medical diagnoses.

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a waking reverie, the excitation of a powerful imagination, or the misrepresentation of a diseased organ of sight” (344). It was also in 1830 that John Herschel offers a scientific explanation for seemingly intangible phenomena by identifying the optical necessity of something between the eye and the thing seen. What the “thing” is, he concedes, has been variously conjectured. Some imagine that “all visible objects are constantly throwing out from them, in all directions, some sort of resemblances or spectral forms of themselves, when received by the eyes, produce an impression of objects” (249-50). One of the definitions of “spectral,” Anne Williams reminds us, is “produced merely by the action of light on the eye or on a sensitive medium” (114). Optical illusions, whether reflected by the human eye, the magic lantern shows, or the theatre’s curved mirrors, generated medical and popular interest.1 4 Baillie explicitly acknowledges in her note to Witchcraft that the subject of the drama was suggested to her by her reading of Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) and its concern with witchcraft trials that she found curious but unsatisfactorily developed. In a journal entry dated 22 July 1827, Walter Scott notes Baillie’s tragedy and ponders: “Will it be real Witch craft—the Ipsissimus Diabolus [the very devil himself]—or an imposter—or the half crazed being who believes herself an ally of condemned spirits and desires to be so? That last is a sublime subject” (Journal 331). Baillie’s note to her drama reveals how the suspicion of being a witch powerfully convinces the accused that she is a witch. Baillie’s reading public would have been familiar with the powerful and electrifying influence of staged science as itinerant lecturers and “doctors” performed electrocutions of torpedo fish, intoxications by nitrous oxide as well as extravagant displays of magneticism and galvanization. At the end of the eighteenth century, Franz Anton Mesmer had made famous showy and popular demonstrations in magnetic healing, hypnosis, and somnambulism.1 5 Surgeons, such as John Hunter, maintained anatomical collections that included skulls, feral children, dissected appendages, and colonized specimens, all with a variety of physical deformities. More commercialized “freak” shows featured giants, midgets, bearded ladies, hermaphrodites, and mad women.1 6 These variously displayed techno-gothic grotesques constituted Romantic-period analogues to public trials and executions of seventeenthcentury witches—monsters, dehumanized “others” displayed and purged from a “normative” social body.

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Baillie’s thinking about witchcraft might have been influenced by a specific seventeenth-century witchcraft case involving a Scottish midwife, Margaret Lang, whose dangerous mixture of medical skill and spiritual gifts made her the perfect target of a witch hunt in Erskine, near Paisley, the setting of Baillie’s play, and whose plight was chronicled in A History of the Witches of Renfrewshire. In 1696, Christian Shaw, the eleven-year old daughter of a Scottish lord, accused Margaret and two dozen others of bewitching her and conspiring with the devil to kill her. Once “Pinched Maggie,” as she came to be called, was named, others came forward with accusations of having seen her at nocturnal “witch” gatherings at Kilmalcolm at which magic was practiced. Margaret was sentenced to be hanged and then burned.1 7 Baillie would have probably recognized the theatricality of accused witches public examinations, trials, and executions during the seventeenth century as well as the spectacle such a re-staging of witchcraft would create for early nineteenth-century spectators. In an 1827 letter to Walter Scott, Baillie proclaims: “Renfrew Witches upon a polite stage! Will such a thing ever be endorsed!” (Letters 1.441). Witch-hunts in Scotland, as Baillie’s reading would have revealed, endorsed beliefs in diabolical conspiracies—a notion dramatized in Baillie’s play—and amassed over 1,337 executions plus additional deaths from suicides, torture, and neglect. The Presbyterian Church ordered its Calvinist ministers to seek out witches, and all women, especially those who challenged patriarchal society, were potential witches.1 8 Ecclesiastical condemnation of independent women had, during the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, been replaced with an equally powerful check on female liberation—scientific and medical “discoveries” that pronounced women inferior in anatomy and in mind. Baillie, of course, grew up in a household of physicians; her uncle, Dr. William Hunter, and her brother, Dr. Matthew Baillie, were renowned anatomists whose medical theatres were, in fact, the sites of medical instruction.1 9 Baillie’s medical knowledge would have recognized the historical associations of female healers and midwives with witchery—a connection that reclassified “wise” women as “evil” and “melancholic” and helped to legitimize the male medical profession of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.2 0 It was during this time that uterine theories of hysteria were reintroduced into medical discourses. Inspired by botanical and zoological taxonomies of naturalists Carolus Lin-

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It is in the context of these cultural changes that Baillie’s drama portrays male figures of legal and ecclesiastical authority in collusion against any woman, regardless of class or circumstances, believed to be involved in witchery.2 2 From the beginning of the play, Grizeld Bane, Mary Macmurren, and Elspy Low are reputed witches whose nocturnal activities on the moor and economic hardships cast suspicion on them. The Sheriff reifies these local stereotypes in his question: “Are not witches always old and poor?” (3.2.630). These three hags routinely meet at “Warlock’s Den,” a deserted cave in the woods; during a stormy night, they have been seen dancing with a man presumed dead for three years, a technogothic ghost that figures significantly in rendering the women techno-gothic grotesques. Furthermore, Mary Macmurren’s son Wilkin is an idiot, a mental derangement popularly believed to be the result of her intercourse with the devil. By all accounts of the play’s characters, these women are techno-gothic grotesques, monsters and human aberrations to be feared and avoided or eliminated. Of course, any contact with them makes even healthy innocents guilty by association. All three witches have cleverly eluded arrest until Mary Macmurren is found in the custody of constables in Act Four, but she is saved from being burned at the stake by a decree from the King and Parliament declaring that “the law punishing what has been called the crime of witchcraft as a felonious offense be repealed. . . . Henceforth there shall no person be prosecuted at law as a wizard or witch, throughout these realms” (5.2.641). While Mary is not proven innocent of witchcraft, the law that would condemn her is unmasked as unjust. Other means of marginalizing threatening women are nonetheless devised, and the revelation about Grizeld Bane at the end of the play points to the ways in which post-

Enlightenment medicine names women insane, a techno-gothic grotesque, a strategy for containing women that will not be declared unlawful. We learn that Grizeld is “a miserable woman whose husband was hanged for murder, at Inverness, some years ago, and who thereupon became distracted . . . [and] was . . . kept in close custody. But she has, no doubt,” Fatheringham reports, “escaped from her keepers, who may not be very anxious to reclaim her” (5.2.642). Ironically, it is not witchcraft but mental illness that afflicts Grizeld, a nineteenth-century diagnosis of female behavior when it does not conform to social standards. Matthew Baillie’s own account in his third Gulstonian Lecture of 1794 medically explains Grizeld’s abilities to overpower her keepers and how her various actions throughout the play might be attributable to her nerves’ excitement of her muscles into motion: “Muscles are capable of being thrown into a much greater degree of contraction by emotions of the mind than perhaps by any other cause; and it is this circumstance which gives the astonishing strength sometimes exerted by maniacs” (147). Here physiological interpretations make legitimate observations of behaviors attributed to those with mental and emotional disorders—techno-gothic grotesques termed “witches” by the culture depicted in Baillie’s drama. While these techno-gothic grotesques have done no harm to anyone, the drama unmasks the dangerous techno-gothic grotesque of Refrewshire, a woman whose appearances and economic station betray her monstrous heart and the witchery she attempts to effect in order to realize personal revenge for unrequited love. Annablla Gordon seizes upon the cultural disposition in which suspicion of women breeds unreasonable, hysterical responses and repression. Eleven-year-old Jessie Dungarren has not been well, and the prevailing church and medical interpretation of her infirmity of sleeplessness, fever, erratic behavior—babbling and convulsions—is that she has been bewitched. Her nervous disease, as Thomas Trotter characterizes it in his 1807 A View of the Nervous Temperament, arises from the mind that, under the influence of this malady, can conjure up “blue devils, ghosts, hobgoblins” (185). While Trotter attributes nervous temperament to various female mental and bodily functions, in Baillie’s drama, it is suspected that Grizeld Bane, Mary Macmurren, and Elspy Low are somehow involved. This situation is perfect for Annabella’s own little drama of witchcraft to implicate Violet Murrey as a witch. Violet is in love with Robert Dungarren, the man

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naeus and the Comte de Buffon, physicians linked hysteria causally to female sexuality. 2 1 With shadows of the earlier religious theories about witchcraft still lingering in the social unconscious, medical discourses re-eroticized madness as a distinctly female disorder and recontextualized witches as neurotic, hysterical, psychotic, and emotionally disturbed women. What had been attributed to witchcraft was now attributed to the weaker female constitution. In short, women who did not perform the roles assigned by patriarchal culture were diagnosed as mad—techno-gothic grotesques outside the boundaries of “normative” society as classified by the period’s scientific revolution.

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Annabella believes she would have if Violet were not in her way, a fictive situation that modifies the 1696 Margaret Lang witch-hunt with elements of gothic romance. An additional ingredient to Annabella’s brew is the reporting of Rutherford, the parish minister, of having seen, or at least of having believed to have seen, Violet with the ghost of a dead man on the moor. Violet has already been discredited as a healthy member of society through the actions of her father, a man who had been convicted of murder and who was believed to have died following his escape from prison. We know that the techno-gothic ghost she meets on the moor during the stormy night is none other than her father, very much alive but in hiding until he can prove his innocence. Violet is unwilling to betray her father, who must remain apparitional to everyone else. With Violet’s character already tainted, Annabella realizes that it will not take much contrived evidence to cast her as a witch, and with the help of Black Bawldy, a gullible herdboy, Annabella seals Violet’s fate. During one of Jessie’s fits, she reportedly tears the garment of the witch with whom she wrestles. Annabella pays Bawldy to secure one of Violet’s gowns so that she may tear it, matching the tear with that Jessie has snatched from her ghostly visitor. This is the evidence that convinces even the skeptical citizens that Violet is guilty of witchcraft. Annabella has convinced herself that Violet will not be allowed to be executed, for as she assures Bawldy, “Mary Macmurren will be burnt, for an example to all other witches and warlocks, but a respite and pardon will be given to Violet Murrey; it is only her disgrace, not her death, that is intended” (4.2.633). She is, however, playing with the fire of societal ignorance and fear. We come to realize that Annabella is delusional, a state of mind, along with delirium, that was of immense interest to the medical professionals of the Romantic period. In An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement (1798), Alexander Crichton maintains: “All delirious people, no matter whether they be maniacs or hypochondriacs, or people in the delirium of fever, or of hysteria, differ from those of a sound mind in this respect, that they have certain diseased perceptions and notions in the reality of which they firmly believe, and which consequently become motives of many actions and expressions which appear unreasonable to the rest of mankind” (1.137-38). Annabella suffers from what Crichton refers to as one kind of diseased notion entertained by delirious people: “They are

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diseased abstract notions, referable to the qualities and conditions of persons and things, and [her] relation to them; as when [she] imagines that [her] friends have conspired to kill [her]” (1.141), or in Annabella’s case, imagines that Violet will rob her of the man she loves. As we have seen, however, Annabella has to persuade herself that “revenge is sweet; revenge is noble; revenge is nature” (5.1.637), as she is tormented by conflicted mental commotions. Grizeld accurately assesses Annabella’s character when she tells her that she is the “best” of Satan’s queens and princesses, for “there is both wit and wickedness in thee to perfection” (4.2.633). Grizeld alarms Annabella with a rhetoric that would brand her the very techno-gothic grotesque that Annabella would declare of others, and Grizeld emphasizes: “There is not a cloven foot, nor a horned head of them all wickeder and bolder than thou art” (5.1.638). Annabella scornfully dismisses Grizeld’s accusations: “She is but raving: the fumes of her posset have been working in her brain” (4.2.634). Although each woman characterizes the other as a techno-gothic grotesque, it is only Grizeld that is marked by religion and medicine as witch, as hysterical who must, therefore, be extracted from society. These dramatically enhanced character analyses direct our attention to the importance of perspective in perception. Just as Annabella cannot see the techno-gothic ghost to which Grizeld points in the corner of the room as the “Master” they both serve, the good people of Renfrewshire cannot see Annabella for the techno-gothic grotesque she is. It is only when Anabella’s strangled corpse is laid before the crowd gathered for the witches’ execution that she is unmasked as techno-gothic grotesque. Like the crowd in Baillie’s drama, we read the spectacular body of Annabella differently; we come to see her as a woman complicit in using the fear of witchcraft to serve her own selfish goals and to deflect attention from her own neurotic behaviors. Madness serves post-Enlightenment medicine in a similar way to that of seventeenth-century religion’s deployment of witch-hunting—as a check on female power and independence. Baillie’s play explores the roots of early nineteenth-century’s psycho-medical treatment of women and its continued perversion of the magichealer-witch into the hysteric by male physicians who linked hysteria causally with female sexuality. Medical science is exposed as interpretative and inexact as “witchcraft” itself, as the bewitching effects of cultural hysteria are staged. Metadra-

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Witchcraft offers us a theatrical illusion of social reality, a pedagogical strategy adopted from medical practices, encouraging us to reevaluate medical perceptions of hysteria offered in the scientific revolution of her day that continue to inform our perspectives on madness. In this way, Baillie’s Witchcraft anticipates twentieth-century arguments by American psychological feminists like those of Juliet Mitchell and Phyllis Chesler, who point out that female behavior is termed “mad” by a social and medical culture that requires repressed female sexuality and rejects attempts to reconnect mind and body from its postEnlightenment divisive taxonomies and as well as twentieth-century positions by American feminist spiritualists like those of Starhawk and Carol Christ who seek to reclaim witchcraft and goddess religions as enabling discourses and practices for female identity.2 3

Notes 1. In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault notes that until the end of the eighteenth century “the uterus and the womb remained present in the pathology of hysteria” (144), informing notions at the beginning of the nineteenth century identifying “hysteria and hypochondria as mental diseases” (158). Laurinda S. Dixon explains that the ancient notion of the capricious womb, capable of extensive sympathy with the rest of the body, remained a fixture of eighteenthcentury medical theory, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century, women’s susceptibility to illness was based on their “proper” function in society and their “peculiar” anatomy. According to Dixon, medical theorists used “the authority of biology to justify maintaining the cultural and political differences between the sexes that were thought to be crucial to social stability” (Perilous Chastity 236). Mark S. Micale points out that nineteenth-century notions of hysteria were defined by a set of highly negative character traits

in women: “eccentricity, impulsiveness, emotionality, coquettishness, deceitfulness, and hypersexuality” (Approaching Hysteria 24). Peter Melville Logan discusses the transition of female hysteria from a physical to a psychological ailment (Nerves and Narratives 93-107). 2. See my essays “Science Fiction and Techno-Gothic Drama: Romantic Playwrights Joanna Baillie and Jane Scott,” Romanticism on the Net 21 (February 2001); “Byron’s Disability and the Techno-Gothic Grotesque” in The Deformed Transformed, European Romantic Review, forthcoming; “Theatricalized Bodies and Spirits: Techno-Gothic as Performance in Romantic Drama,” Gothic Studies, forthcoming. 3. Barbara Marie Stafford (Body Criticism 366-75) and Paul Ranger (“Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast” 70119) delineate various scientific and stage devices popular during the Romantic period. 4. See Roy S. Porter (“Medical Science and Human Science in the Enlightenment” 64-66) for a discussion of Thomas Beddoes’s and Humphry Davy’s experiments in pneumatic medicine and their lectures on chemistry in theatres built specifically for scientific studies. According to Margaret S. Carhart, Joanna Baillie’s uncle, William Hunter, maintained the Hunter School of Anatomy on Windmill Street in London. The medical school included an anatomical theatre and museum, and Joanna’s brother, Matthew Baillie, inherited it in 1783 (The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie 9-11). Matthew Baillie was named Physician Extraordinary to King George III in 1810. 5. See Cathy Cobb and Harold Goldwhite (Creations of Fire 151-211); Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna (Nineteenth-Century Orgins of Neuroscientific Concepts 160-211); Gloria Flaherty (“The Non-Normal Sciences: Survivals of Renaissance Thought in the Eighteenth Century” 71-91); Lindsay Wilson (Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment 104-24); Ludmilla Jordanova (“Gender, Generation and Science: William Hunter’s Obstetrical Atlas” 385-412); Christopher Fox (“Introduction: How to Prepare a Noble Savage: The Spectacle of Human Science” 11-12); Robert Bogdan (Freak Show 106-11 and “The Social Construction of Freaks” 23-37); Elizabeth Grosz (“Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit” 55-66) for discussions of various non-dramatic shows and displays featuring aberrant bodies. 6. In Romantic Theatricality, Judith Pascoe characterizes the theatricality of the 1794 Treason Trials and the public spectacle of Marie Antoinette, for example (33-67 and 95-129). My essay “Women’s Sovereignty on Trial: Joanna Baillie’s Comedy ‘The Tryal’ as Metatheatrics” analyzes the public’s fascination with theatricalized litigation and ritualized courtship/marriage staged in Baillie’s 1798 comedy as a pedagogical strategy for women (132-57). In her Introductory Discourse to the 1798 Plays on the Passions, Baillie points out the pedagogical function of public processions and hangings that, like drama, can generate “sympathetic curiosity” between actor and spectator (2). Foucault notes how, in the nineteenth century, madness was a public spectacle with organized performances in which madmen sometimes played the roles of actors and sometimes played the role of spectators (Madness and Civilization 68-70). Madness was a thing to be looked at, Foucault explains, and “madmen remained monsters—that is, etymologically, beings or things to be shown” (70).

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matically, witchcraft functions as a metaphor and commentary on madness as a cultural signifier and as a kind of cultural ghost haunting the medical and scientific practices of Baillie’s day. In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault describes a pedagogical technique used to treat mad patients during the Romantic period that replicates the metadramatic cure for social madness staged in Baillie’s Witchcraft. According to Foucault, “the cure by theatrical representation” was often successful with patients who had come to see illusion as reality (187). Staged illusions and images presented an alternative reality to that created by patients, and they sometimes came to recognize that their perceptions of reality were fictions of their own making. The patients, like Baillie’s readers, are forced to confront what Foucault describes as “a crisis which is, in a very ambiguous manner, both medical and theatrical” (180).

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7. See Paul Ranger (“Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast” 19-41), Richard Leacroft (The Development of the English Playhouse 119-238), and Terry Castle (The Female Thermometer 140-67) for explanations about how science affected theatrical staging devices and special effects. 8. Robert Bogdan’s describes exotic exhibitions of “freaks” accompanied by scientific discourses and teratological taxonomies. According to Bogdan, showmen often asked scientists to authenticate monsters, for “linking freak exhibits with science made the attractions more interesting, more believable, and less frivolous . . .” (“The Social Construction of Freaks” 29; see also Freak Show 1-21). 9. Mariana Warner has shown how the grotesque paradoxically presents terror and mockery in its “parodic harshness, sick humour, shivery manipulation of fear and pleasure in the monstrous” (No Go the Bogeyman 67). See also Lucie Armitt’s distinction between grotesque and caricature (Theorising the Fantastic 68-70). 10. Deidre Lynch points out that a performer’s face provided spectacular evidence of how passions “stamped” the muscles of the face. Spectators were expected to look at the sentiment written across the performer’s body (“Overloaded Portraits: The Excess of Character and Countenance” 137). According to E. J. Clery, David Garrick’s technique of acting was dependent on the audience’s knowledge of the body, a taxonomy of the passions registered by facial expressions and bodily gestures (The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800 42-49). 11. Freddie Rokem acknowledges that a staged body functions as a “sign” of “cultural and aesthetic codes of bodily behavior” for audiences (“Slapping Women: Ibsen’s Nora, Strindberg’s Julie, and Freud’s Dora” 222). Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mucke maintain that the body stands in a multiple complex relations to culturally produced meanings. In the production of dominant cultural codes, the body “regulate[s] the excesses of signifying practice and define[s] the subjectivity of agents in the semiotic transaction” (“Introduction: Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century” 9). 12. Terry Castle points to the ways in which non-dramatic but staged science excited audiences to question the reality of optical illusions in magic lantern shows, which “developed as mock exercises in scientific demystification, complete with preliminary lectures on the fallacy of ghost-belief” (“Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie” 30). See also Terry Castle (The Female Thermometer 16889) and Barbara Marie Stafford (Body Criticism 366-75). 13. Foucault describes how the social fear, a fear formulated in medical terms but animated by a moral myth, arose throughout the Romantic period that madness was a mysterious disease, contagious and corrupting (Madness and Civilization 199-220). 14. In the Introductory Discourse to the 1798 Plays on the Passions, Baillie remarks about the compelling nature of the world of spirits, our interest in finding ourselves “alone with a being terrific and awful, whose nature and power are unknown.” Baillie adds that we prefer vicarious explorations of the supernatural as an object of inquiry: “No man wishes to see the Ghost himself,

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which would certainly procure him the best information on the subject; but every man wishes to see one who believes that he sees it, in all the agitation and wildness of that species of terror” (3). 15. Interestingly, Franz Anton Mesmer argued that medicine had ignored a majority of chronic illnesses, including epilepsy, mania, melancholy, so-called “illnesses of the nerves,” often confusing crisis with disease (“Dissertation by F. A. Mesmer, Doctor of Medicine, on His Discoveries” 105). 16. Dennis Todd details the celebrated case of Mary Toft, the illiterate wife of a poor journeyman cloth-worker, who purportedly gave birth to her first rabbit in October 1726, an incident that excited medical and public attention (Imaginary Monsters 1-37). Rosi Braidotti notes that the medical profession benefited by examining human exhibits in raree shows (Nomadic Subjects 91-92). Scientists who examined “freaks,” explains Bogdan, frequently presented their commentaries in newspapers and pamphlets, and some exhibits were presented to medical societies (Freak Show 106-111). See Also Richard D. Altick (The Shows of London 217-20). 17. A History of the Witches of Renfrewshire 151-52. The Renfrew Witches incident is discussed by Anne Llewellyn Barstow (Witchcraze 124-25). 18. Christina Larner (Enemies of God 63). Mary Daly notes that a 1563 Scottish witch-law dropped the distinction between “good” and “bad” witch (Gyn/Ecology 193), and so in the case Renfrew Witches, any witchcraft would have been persecuted. The English Parliament made accusations of witchcraft and sorcery illegal in 1736. 19. “Life of Joanna Baillie” ix. See also Margaret Carhart (Life and Work of Joanna Baillie 9-11). 20. See, for example, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English (Witches, Midwives, and Nurses 6-20); Mary Daly (Gyn/Ecology 183-213). 21. Mark S. Micale (Approaching Hysteria 22-23). For a developed analysis of the causal links of hysteria to female sexuality, see Ilza Veith’s Hysteria: The History of a Disease. 22. Elizabeth A. Fay includes a brief mention of Baillie’s Witchcraft, which, she maintains, “explores how real social restrictions on women’s behavior or their imaginations can lead them literally into lifethreatening situations that are historically plausible, such as accusations of witchcraft” (A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism 117). 23. See, for example, Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness, Starhawk’s “Witchcraft as Goddess Religion” (394-400), and Carol P. Christ’s “Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections” (345-58).

Works Cited Altick, Richard D. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978. Armitt, Lucie. Theorising the Fantastic. London: Arnold, 1996.

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Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deidre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. New York: Feminist Press, 1973.

———. Introductory Discourse to Plays on the Passions. 1798. The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie, Complete in One Volume. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1851. 1-18.

Fay, Elizabeth A. A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998.

———. Witchcraft: A Tragedy in Prose, in Five Acts in Miscellaneous Plays. 1836. The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie, Complete in One Volume. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1851. 613-43. Baillie, Matthew. “The Gulstonian Lectures, Read at the College of Physicians, May 1794: Lecture III.” Lectures and Observations on Medicine. London: Taylor, 1825. 140-60. Barstow, Anne Llewellyn. Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts. London: Pandora, 1994. Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. ———. “The Social Construction of Freaks.” Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York: New York UP, 1996. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Carhart, Margaret S. The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie. New Haven: Yale UP, 1923; rpt. Archon Books, 1970. Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: 18th-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. ———. “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie.” Critical Inquiry 15.1 (1988): 26-61. Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. New York: Doubleday, 1972. Christ, Carol P. “Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections.” All American Women: Lives that Divide, Ties that Bind. New York: Macmillan, 1986. 345-58. Clarke, Edwin, and L. S. Jacyna. Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987.

Flaherty, Gloria. “The Non-Normal Sciences: Survivals of Renaissance Thought in the Eighteenth Century.” Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains. Ed. Christopher Fox, Roy S. Porter, and Robert Wokler. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 271-91. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. 1965. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage, 1988. Fox, Christopher. “Introduction: How to Prepare a Nobel Savage: The Spectacle of Human Science.” Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains. Ed. Christopher Fox, Roy S. Porter, and Robert Wokler. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 1-30. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit.” Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York: New York UP, 1996. 55-66. Herschel, John Frederick William. A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. 1830. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1996. A History of the Witches of Renfrewshire. 1698. New ed. Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1877. Jordanova, Ludmilla. “Gender, Generation and Science: William Hunter’s Obstetrical Atlas.” William Hunter and the 18th-Century Medical World. Ed. William F. Bynum and Roy S. Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. 385-412. Kelly, Veronica, and Dorothea von Mucke. “Introduction: Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century.” Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mucke. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. 1-20. Lamb, Charles. “Witches, and Other Night-Fears.” 1823. Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia. New York: Dutton, 1978. 76-82. Larner, Christina. Enemies of God: The Witch-hunts in Scotland. London: Chatto & Windus, 1981.

Clery, E. J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Leacroft, Richard. The Development of the English Playhouse. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. “Life of Joanna Baillie.” The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie, in One Complete Volume. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1851. v-xx.

Cobb, Cathy, and Harold Goldwhite. Creations of Fire: Chemistry’s Lively History from Alchemy to the Atomic Age. New York: Plenum Press, 1995.

Logan, Peter Melville. Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in 19th-Century Prose. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.

Crichton, Alexander. An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement: Comprehending a Concise System of the Physiology and Pathology of the Human Mind, and a History of the Passions and Their Effects. 2 vols. London: Cadell and W. Davies, 1798.

Lynch, Deidre. “Overloaded Portraits: The Excess of Character and Countenance.” Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mucke. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. 112-43.

Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon, 1978. Dixon, Laurinda S. Perilous Chastity. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.

Mesmer, Franz Anton. “Dissertation by F. A. Mesmer, Doctor of Medicine, on His Discoveries.” 1799. Mesmerism: A Translation of the Original Scientific and Medical Writings of F. A. Mesmer. Trans. and compiled by George Bloch. Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann, 1980. 89130.

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Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Vol. 1. Ed. Judith Bailey Slagle. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1991.

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Micale, Mark S. Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Pascoe, Judith. Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997. Porter, Roy S. “Medical Science and Human Science in the Enlightenment.” Inventing Human Science: EighteenthCentury Domains. Ed. Christopher Fox, Roy S. Porter, and Robert Wokler. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 53-87. Purinton, Marjean D. “Bryon’s Disability and the TechnoGothic Grotesque in The Deformed Transformed.” European Romantic Review, forthcoming. ———. “Science Fiction and Techno-Gothic Drama: Romantic Playwrights Joanna Baillie and Jane Scott.” Romanticism on the Net 21 (Feb. 2001). http: www.sul.stanford .edu/mirrors/romnet. ———. “Theatricalized Bodies and Spirits: Techno-Gothic as Performance in Romantic Drama.” Gothic Studies, forthcoming. ———. “Women’s Sovereignty on Trial: Joanna Baillie’s Comedy The Tryal as Metatheatrics.” Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 17901840. Ed. Catherine Burroughs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 132-57. Ranger, Paul. “Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast”: Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750-1820. London: Society for Theatre Research, 1991. Rockem, Freddie. “Slapping Women: Ibsen’s Nora, Strindberg’s Julie, and Freud’s Dora.” Textual Bodies: Changing Boundaries of Literary Representation. Ed. Lori Hope Lefkovitz. Albany: SUNY P, 1997. 221-43. Scott, Walter, Sir. The Journal of Sir Walter Scott. Ed. W.E.K. Anderson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. ———. Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, Addressed to J. G. Lockhart, Esq. 1830. 2nd ed. London, 1831. Stafford, Barbara Marie. Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1991. Starhawk. “Witchcraft as Goddess Religion.” Women in Culture. Ed. Lucinda Joy Peach. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998. 394-400. Todd, Dennis. Imaging Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Trotter, Thomas. A View of the Nervous Temperament; being a Practical Enquiry into the Increasing Prevalence, Prevention, and Treatment of those Diseases Commonly Called Nervous, Bilious, Stomach and Liver Complaints; Indigestion, Low Spirits, Gout, & c. London: Longman, 1807.

Wilson, Lindsay. Women and Medicine in the French Enlightment: The Debate over Maladies des Femmes. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.

FURTHER READING Biography Carhart, Margaret Sprague. The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1923, 215 p. Comprehensive, authoritative biography and overview of Baillie’s works.

Criticism Brigham, Linda. “Aristocratic Monstrosity and Sublime Femininity in De Monfort.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 43, no. 3 (summer 2003): 701-18. Examines Baillie’s theories regarding the emotions, as stated in her “Introductory Discourse” to the first volume of Plays on the Passions, and compares them to the theories of Edmund Burke to illustrate how “they relate to political and feminist topics in the 1790s and early nineteenth century.” Burroughs, Catherine B. “English Romantic Women Writers and Theatre Theory: Joanna Baillie’s Prefaces to the Plays on the Passions.” In Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, edited by Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner, pp. 274-96. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Studies Baillie’s prefaces to her Plays on the Passions as examples of “theatre theory” and “locates them within a tradition of women writing about the stage.” ———. “‘Out of the Pale of Social Kindred Cast’: Conflicted Performance Styles in Joanna Baillie’s De Monfort.” In Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, edited by Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley, pp. 223-35. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1995. Argues that the “dramaturgical tension that results from” De Monfort’s “conflicting acting modes” (“statuesque stasis” vs. “emotive school”) indicates that Baillie was ambivalent “about prescribing a particular style of performance for characters navigating her fictionalized social settings.” Dowd, Maureen A. “‘By the Delicate Hand of a Female’: Melodramatic Mania and Johanna Baillie’s Spectacular Tragedies.” European Romantic Review 9, no. 4 (fall 1998): 469-500.

Veith, Ilza. Hysteria: The History of a Disease. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.

Compares Baillie’s dramatic works to those of Friedrich von Schiller and maintains that “the gaps between Baillie’s prefatory rhetoric and her dramatic productions operate as a cultural performance that usefully illuminates the intersection of commercial concerns, national interest, and gender issues in late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century British theater.”

Warner, Mariana. No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998, 1999.

Forbes, Aileen. “‘Sympathetic Curiosity’ in Joanna Baillie’s Theater of the Passions.” European Romantic Review 14, no. 1 (March 2003): 31-48.

Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Discusses Baillie’s theory of “sympathetic curiosity,” as evidenced in her plays, and asserts that “Baillie innova-

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Gamer, Michael. “National Supernaturalism: Joanna Baillie, Germany, and the Gothic Drama.” Theatre Survey 38, no. 2 (November 1997): 49-88. Discusses the debate over Gothic drama’s legitimacy and examines how Baillie produced engaging plays which managed to avoid the stigma afforded other Gothic works. Harness, William. “Celebrated Female Writers: Joanna Baillie.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 16, no. 91 (August 1824): 162-78. Highly laudatory overview of Baillie’s career. Jeffrey, Francis. A review of A Series of Plays In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind, Vol. II, by Joanna Baillie. The Edinburgh Review 11, no. 4 (July 1803): 269-86. Mixed review of the second volume of Plays on the Passions. ———. A review of A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind, Vol. III, by Joanna Baillie. The Edinburgh Review 19, no. 38 (February 1812): 261-90. Assesses the third volume of Plays on the Passions as “decidedly inferior to any of her former volumes” but declares that “at the same time . . . it contains indications of talent that ought not to be overlooked, and specimens of excellence, which make it a duty to examine into the causes of its general failure.”

Meyers, Victoria. “Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Cruelty.” In Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays, compiled by Thomas C. Crochunis, pp. 87-107. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Examines Baillie’s treatment of human psychology and morality in Plays on the Passions, particularly in terms of her presentation of violence and cruelty. Purinton, Marjean D. “Joanna Baillie’s Count Basil and De Monfort: The Unveiling of Gender Issues.” In Romantic Ideology Unmasked: The Mentally Constructed Tyrannies in Dramas of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Joanna Baillie, pp. 125-62. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1994. Places Baillie’s works within the context of works by other women writers of her time and examines the overlap of political and gender issues in Count Basil and De Monfort. Watkins, Daniel P. “Class, Gender, and Social Motion in Joanna Baillie’s De Monfort.” Wordsworth Circle 23, no. 2 (spring 1992): 109-17. Stresses the historical value of De Monfort’s depictions of social conditions and class conflicts.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Baillie’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 93; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 71, 151; and Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2.

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tively combines the two concepts [of ‘sympathy’ and ‘curiosity’] in a dramatic tension that aims to delineate the human passions.”

WILLIAM BECKFORD (1760 - 1844)

(Also wrote under the pseudonyms Lady Harnet Marlow and Jacquetta Agneta Manana Jenks) English novelist and travel writer.

B

eckford is primarily remembered for his novel Vathek (1787), which has been consistently hailed as a seminal contribution to the genre of oriental romance, and less consistently as part of the Gothic tradition. The story of an evil caliph’s journey to the underworld in pursuit of forbidden knowledge, Vathek is noted for its captivating plot and unique narrative style.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Beckford was born into one of the richest and most prominent families in England. His father, William Beckford, formerly lord mayor of London, had accumulated great wealth from investments in Jamaican sugar plantations and his mother, Maria Hamilton, was of noble ancestry. As the only child of a late marriage, Beckford was pampered by both parents, but he received a rigorous education in preparation for a political career and could speak French fluently at age four. When he was nine, “England’s wealthiest son,” as Lord Byron called Beckford, inherited his father’s estate. Afterwards, he continued to follow a rigid program of classical studies under the strict guidance of his

mother, amid a succession of tutors. Despite their efforts, an interest in oriental literature, thought to have been brought on by his reading of The Arabian Nights, became Beckford’s passionate obsession. In 1777, he left with a tutor for Geneva, Switzerland, to complete his education. There Beckford met a number of notable figures, including Voltaire, and began his first literary work, an autobiographical narrative entitled The Long Story that was never completed and remained unknown until a portion of it was published in 1930 as The Vision. Following his return from Switzerland in 1778, Beckford entered into a tumultuous period of his life. While touring England in 1779, he developed what he called a “strange wayward passion” for William Courtenay, the eleven-year-old son of Lord Courtenay of Powderham Castle. Beckford also became romantically involved with Louisa Beckford, the unhappily married wife of one of his cousins. Despite the emotional distress he suffered as a result of these relationships, Beckford published his first work in 1780, a burlesque of then-popular sketches of painters’ lives entitled Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters. Later in 1780, the restless Beckford began a European tour that his family hoped would help solve his emotional problems and prepare him for public life. Though it failed to alleviate his mental anguish, his journey resulted in Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents (1783), an epistolary travel

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book composed from notes kept during his trip. After this work had been printed, however, Beckford suppressed its distribution and burned all but a few copies; biographers have speculated that his family thought the content of Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents might damage his political prospects or add to rumors circulating about his friendship with Courtenay. In 1781, Beckford hosted a sumptuous Christmas party that he later credited with directly inspiring his exotic oriental novel, Vathek. For three days, Courtenay, Louisa Beckford, and other guests wandered through Beckford’s country home surrounded by music, dancers, and theatrical lighting effects. Shortly after this fantastical celebration, Beckford wrote the initial Frenchlanguage draft of Vathek in one sitting, though scholars believe that he revised and expanded the novel many times before its publication four years later. In this work, the caliph Vathek travels to the underworld domain ruled by Eblis, a satanic figure. There, Vathek seeks forbidden wisdom, only to face eternal damnation in the Palace of Subterranean Fire. Beckford based many of his characters upon historical figures and provided a wealth of oriental detail, including descriptions of Eastern costumes, customs, and plant and animal life. He intended to add to this story four episodic tales narrated by sufferers in the Palace of Subterranean Fire, and while composing them, he arranged for the Reverend Samuel Henley, an oriental enthusiast and former professor, to translate the entire work into English and add footnotes explaining the oriental allusions. Beckford’s completion of the episodes, however, was hindered by misfortune. At his family’s insistence, he married Lady Margaret Gordon in 1783, a match they hoped would quell rumors concerning his homosexuality. In June 1784 the couple’s first child was stillborn. Later that same year Beckford was publicly accused of sexual misconduct with Courtenay, and the resulting scandal forced Beckford and his wife to flee to Switzerland, where Margaret Beckford died in May 1786 after giving birth to their second daughter. Throughout these ordeals, Beckford instructed Henley to withhold his English translation of Vathek until the companion episodes were finished. In a betrayal of trust, however, Henley released an anonymous English translation of Vathek in June 1786. Beckford subsequently published a French edition of Vathek in order to claim authorship, and the uncompleted episodes remained unpublished until 1912. For the next ten years, Beckford spent the majority of his time abroad, traveling throughout

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Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. In 1796, he returned permanently to England. Ostracized from society, he spent much of the remainder of his life collecting books, paintings, and rare objects of art and building Fonthill Abbey, an extravagant Gothic structure. Beckford grew notorious as the creator of the increasingly popular Vathek, which had been reissued numerous times since its publication, and as the eccentric owner of Fonthill, where he lived until financial difficulties forced him to sell the estate in 1822 and move to Landsdown Crescent, Bath. Beckford’s literary output during this period was scant. In the late 1790s, he wrote two minor novels burlesquing the sentimentalism of contemporary novelists, Modern Novel Writing; or, The Elegant Enthusiast (1796) and Azemia (1797). In 1834, he published Italy: With Sketches of Spain and Portugal, a two-volume work that consists of extensive revision of Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents as the first volume and an account of his journeys through Spain and Portugal as the second. His final travel book, Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaça Batalha, appeared in 1835. After living his last years in relative seclusion, Beckford died at Landsdown in 1844.

MAJOR WORKS Apart from Vathek, Beckford’s works fall loosely into two categories: travel sketches and satirical writings. His travel sketches, including Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents, Italy: With Sketches of Spain and Portugal, and Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha, are generally commended for their balanced prose and descriptive artistry. Of Beckford’s satiric writings, Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters is praised as a witty burlesque, while Modern Novel Writing and Azemia are usually dismissed as minor works.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Though most of his writings met with favorable receptions and have continued to be praised by scholars, Beckford’s lasting critical acclaim rests upon Vathek. In discussing Vathek, critics have focused on its style, autobiographical overtones, and historical significance. While acknowledging Vathek‘s popular appeal, commentators have consistently been troubled by what early reviewer William Hazlitt (see Further Reading) termed its “mixed style.” Critics have noted a tonal shift

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PRINCIPAL WORKS Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (fictional memoirs) 1780 Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents (travel sketches) 1783 *Vathek (novel) 1787 Modern Novel Writing; or, The Elegant Enthusiast, and Interesting Emotions of Arabella Bloomville [as Lady Harriet Marlow] (novel) 1796 Azemia [as Jacquetta Agenta Mariana Jenks] (novel) 1797 Italy: With Sketches of Spain and Portugal. 2 vols. (travel sketches) 1834 Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha (travel sketches) 1835

†The Episodes of Vathek (novel fragment) 1912 ‡The Vision (novel fragment) 1930; published in The Vision. Liber Veritatis * †

‡

The unauthorized translation of Vathek was published as An Arabian Tale, 1786. This work consists of Beckford’s original Frenchlanguage episodes, dated 1783-86, and an English translation of them. The Vision is part of Beckford’s unfinished narrative, known as The Long Story, written in 1777.

PRIMARY SOURCES WILLIAM BECKFORD (NOVEL DATE 1786) SOURCE: Beckford, William. “The History of the Caliph Vathek.” In An Arabian Tale, from an Unpublished Manuscript: With Notes Critical and Explanatory, pp. 1-10. London, 1786. In the following excerpt from the unauthorized 1786 translation of Vathek, the title character is introduced and the setting for the narrative is established.

Vathek, ninth Caliph of the race of the Abassides, was the son of Motassem, and the grandson of Haroun Al Raschid. From an early accession to the throne, and the talents he possessed to adorn it; his subjects were induced to expect, that his reign would be long, and happy. His figure was pleasing, and majestick; but when he was angry, one of his eyes became so terrible, that no person could bear to behold it; and the wretch upon whom it was fixed, instantly fell backward; and, sometimes, expired. For fear, however, of depopulating his dominions, and making his palace desolate; he, but rarely, gave way to his anger. Being much addicted to women, and the pleasures of the table; he sought, by his affability, to procure agreeable companions; and he succeeded the better, as his generosity was unbounded; and his indulgences, unrestrained: for, he was, by no means, scrupulous: nor did he think, with the Caliph, Omar Ben Abdalaziz; that it was necessary to make a hell of this world, to injoy Paradise in the next. He surpassed in magnificence all his predecessors. The palace of Alkoremmi, which his father Motassem had erected, on the hill of Pied Horses; and which commanded the whole city of Samarah; was, in his idea, far too scanty: he added, therefore, five wings; or rather, other palaces: which he destined for the particular gratification of each of his senses.

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from the initially comic account of Vathek’s journey to the tragic depiction of, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges (see Further Reading), “the first truly atrocious Hell in literature.” Reviewers have ascribed this variance to authorial attributes ranging from artistic coarseness, to moral ambivalence, to a genius for irony. Beckford’s unusual life and his treatment of aberrant sexual themes, puerile innocence, and domineering mothers have also led to a profusion of biographical interpretations of Vathek, particularly during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Later twentieth-century commentators, however, generally avoided biographical critiques, emphasizing instead Beckford’s anticipation of the orientalism of such nineteenth-century poets as Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, and Robert Southey. Critics generally note that unlike the works of earlier English authors who employed oriental elements to embellish philosophical musings or to serve moralistic purposes, Vathek exhibits a fascination with exoticism for its own sake, with Beckford placing greater emphasis than previous writers upon producing an accurate depiction of the East. Commentators also point out that in Vathek Beckford combined polished Augustan prose with such characteristically Romantic concerns as human aspiration, loss of innocence, and the mysterious, thus reflecting the incipient transition in English literature from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. For its historical significance, as well as its continuing fascination for readers, Vathek is regarded as a minor masterpiece. Furthermore, as critics such as Frederick S. Frank have argued, the novel’s structure, themes, and symbolism place Vathek firmly in the tradition of Gothic fiction.

BECKFORD

In the first of these, were tables continually covered, with the most exquisite dainties; which were supplied, both by night and by day, according to their constant consumption; whilst the most delicious wines, and the choicest cordials, flowed forth from a hundred fountains, that were never exhausted. This Palace was called THE ETERNAL OR UNSATIATING BANQUET. The second, was stiled THE TEMPLE OF MELODY, OR NECTAR OF THE SOUL. It was inhabited by the most skilful musicians, and admired poets of the time; who not only displayed their talents within, but, dispersing in bands without, caused every surrounding scene to reverberate their songs; which were continually varied in the most delightful succession. THE

The palace named THE DELIGHT OF THE EYES, OR THE SUPPORT OF MEMORY; was one entire enchantment. Rarities collected from every corner of the earth, were there found in such profusion, as to dazzle and confound, but for the order in which they were arranged. One gallery exhibited the pictures of the celebrated Mani; and statues, that seemed to be alive. Here, a well-managed perspective attracted the fight; there, the magick of opticks agreeably deceived it: whilst the Naturalist, on his part, exhibited, in their several classes, the various gifts that Heaven had bestowed on our globe. In a word, Vathek omitted nothing, in this palace, that might gratify the curiosity of those who resorted to it; although he was not able to satisfy his own; for, he was, of all men, the most curious. THE PALACE OF PERFUMES, which was termed likewise, THE INCENTIVE TO PLEASURE, consisted of various halls, where the different perfumes which the earth produces, were kept perpetually burning in censers of gold. Flambeaus and aromatick lamps were here lighted, in open day. But, the too powerful effects of this agreeable delirium might be avoided, by descending into an immense garden; where an assemblage of every fragrant flower diffused through the air the purest odours. The fifth palace, denominated THE RETREAT OF JOY, OR THE DANGEROUS; was frequented by troops of young females, beautiful as the Houris, and not less seducing; who never failed to receive, with caresses, all whom the Caliph allowed to approach them: for, he was by no means disposed to be jealous, as his own women were secluded, within the palace he inhabited, himself. Notwithstanding the sensuality in which Vathek indulged, he experienced no abatement in the love of his people; who thought, that a sovereign immersed in pleasure was not less toler-

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able to his subjects, than one that employed himself in creating them foes. But, the unquiet and impetuous disposition of the Caliph, would not allow him to rest there. He had studied so much for his amusement, in the life-time of his father, as to acquire a great deal of knowledge; though not a sufficiency to satisfy himself: for, he wished to know every thing; even, sciences that did not exist. He was fond of engaging in disputes with the learned, but liked them not to push their opposition with warmth. He stopped the mouths of those, with presents, whose mouths could be stopped; whilst others, whom his liberality was unable to subdue, he sent to prison, to cool their blood: a remedy that often succeeded. Vathek discovered also a predilection for theological controversy; but, it was not with the orthodox that he usually held. By this means he induced the zealots to oppose him, and then persecuted them in return; for, he resolved, at any rate, to have reason on his side. The great prophet Mahomet, whose Vicars the Caliphs are, beheld with indignation, from his abode in the seventh heaven, the irreligious conduct of such a vicegerent. “Let us leave him to himself,” said he to the Genii, who are always ready to receive his commands: “let us see to what lengths his folly and impiety will carry him: if he run into excess, we shall know how to chastise him. Assist him, therefore, to complete the tower, which, in imitation of Nimrod, he hath begun; not, like that great warriour, to escape being drowned; but from the insolent curiosity of penetrating the secrets of Heaven:—he will not divine the fate that awaits him.” The Genii obeyed; and when the workmen had raised their structure a cubit, in the day-time; two cubits more were added, in the night. The expedition with which the fabrick arose, was not a little flattering to the vanity of Vathek. He fancied, that even insensible matter shewed a forwardness to subserve his designs; not considering that the successes of the foolish and wicked form the first rod of their chastisement. His pride arrived at its height, when having ascended, for the first time, the eleven thousand stairs of his tower, he cast his eyes below, and beheld men not larger than pismires; mountains, than shells; and cities, than bee-hives. The idea, which such an elevation inspired, of his own grandeur, completely bewildered him; he was almost ready, to adore himself; till, lifting his eyes upward, he saw the stars, as high above him, as they appeared, when he stood on the surface of

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With this view, the inquisitive Prince passed most of his nights on the summit of his tower: till he became an adept in the mysteries of astrology; and imagined that the planets had disclosed to him the most marvellous adventures, which were to be accomplished by an extraordinary personage, from a country altogether unknown. Prompted by motives of curiosity, he had always been courteous to strangers; but, from this instant, he redoubled his attention; and ordered it to be announced by sound of trumpet, through all the streets of Samarah, that no one of his subjects, on peril of his displeasure, should either lodge or detain a traveller; but, forthwith, bring him to the palace. Not long after this proclamation, there arrived in his metropolis, a man so hideous, that the very guards who arrested him, were forced to shut their eyes, as they led him along. The Caliph himself appeared startled at so horrible a visage; but, joy succeeded to this emotion of terror, when the stranger displayed to his view, such rarities as he had never before seen; and of which he had no conception. In reality, nothing was ever so extraordinary as the merchandize this stranger produced. Most of his curiosities, which were not less admirable for their workmanship, than splendor, had besides, their several virtues; described on a parchment fastened to each. There were slippers, which enabled the feet to walk; knives that cut without the motion of a hand; sabres, which dealt the blow, at the person they were wished to strike: and the whole, enriched with gems, that were, hitherto, unknown. The sabres, especially, whose blades emitted a dazzling radiance; fixed more than all, the Caliph’s attention; who promised himself to decypher, at his leisure, the uncouth characters engraven on their sides. Without, therefore, demanding their price; he ordered all the coined gold to be brought from his treasury, and commanded the merchant to take what he pleased. The stranger complied, with modesty and silence. Vathek, imagining that the merchant’s taciturnity was occasioned by the awe which his presence inspired; incouraged him to advance, and asked him, with an air of condescension: “Who

he was? whence he came? and where he obtained such beautiful commodities?” The man, or rather, monster, instead of making a reply, thrice rubbed his forehead, which, as well as his body, was blacker than ebony; four times clapped his paunch, the projection of which was enormous; opened wide his huge eyes, which glowed like firebrands; began to laugh with a hideous noise, and discovered his long, amber-coloured teeth, bestreaked with green.

WILLIAM BECKFORD (LETTER DATE 9 DECEMBER 1838) SOURCE: Beckford, William. “Extract from a note appended to a letter on December 9, 1838.” In The Life of William Beckford, edited by John Walter Oliver, pp. 8991. London: Oxford University Press, 1932. In the following excerpt from a note appended to a letter dated December 9, 1838, Beckford recounts the circumstances that inspired him to write Vathek.

Immured we were ‘au pied de la lettre’ for three days following—doors and windows so strictly closed that neither common day light nor common place visitors could get in or even peep in—care worn visages were ordered to keep aloof—no sunk-in mouths or furroughed foreheads were permitted to meet our eye. Our société was extremely youthful and lovely to look upon— for not only Louisa in all her gracefulness, but her intimate friend—the Sophia often mentioned in some of these letters—and perhaps the most beautiful woman in England, threw over it a fascinating charm. Throughout the arched Halls and vast apartments we ranged in, prevailed a soft and tempered radiance—distributed with much skill under the direction of Loutherbourg himself a mystagogue. The great mansion at Fonthill which I demolished to rear up a still more extraordinary edifice was admirably calculated for the celebration of the mysteries. The solid Egyptian Hall looked as if hewn out of a living rock—the line of apartments and apparently endless passages extending from it on either side were all vaulted—an interminable stair case, which when you looked down it—appeared as deep as the well in the pyramid—and when you looked up—was lost in vapour, led to suites of stately apartments gleaming with marble pavements—as polished as glass—and gawdy ceilings—painted by Casali with all the profligacy of pencil—for which in that evil day for the arts he was so admired. From these princely rooms—a broad flight of richly carpetted comfortable steps led to another world of decorated chambers and a gallery designed by Soane,— still above which—approached by winding stairs—

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the earth. He consoled himself, however, for this transient perception of his littleness, with the thought of being great in the eyes of others; and flattered himself, that the light of his mind would extend, beyond the reach of his sight; and transfer to the stars the decrees of his destiny.

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FROM THE AUTHOR AN EXCERPT FROM “NYMPH OF THE FOUNTAIN,” WRITTEN C. 1791

Meanwhile the Count’s servants were exerting their utmost efforts to revive the extinguished fire. They thought they could hear the sound of human voices within, whence they concluded that the Countess was still alive. But all their stirring and blowing were ineffectual. The wood would no more take fire than if they had put on a charge of snowballs. Not long afterwards Count Conrad rode up full speed, and eagerly inquired how it fared with his lady. The servants informed him that they had heated the room right hot, but that the fire went suddenly out, and they supposed that the Countess was yet alive. This intelligence rejoiced his heart. He dismounted, knocked at the door, and called out through the keyhole, ‘Art thou alive, Matilda?’ And the Countess, hearing her husband’s voice, replied, ‘Yes, my dear lord, I am alive, and my children are also alive.’ Overjoyed at this answer, the impatient Count bade his servants break open the door, the key not being at hand, he rushing into the bathing-room, fell down at the feet of his injured lady, bedewed her unpolluted hands with the tears of repentance, led her and the charming pledges of her innocence and love out of the dreary place of execution to her own apartment, and heard from her own mouth the true account of these transactions. Enraged at the foul calumny and the shameful sacrifice of his infants, he issued orders to apprehend and shut up the treacherous nurse in the bath—The fire now burned kindly,— the chimney roared,—the flames played aloft in the air,—and soon stewed out the diabolical woman’s black soul. SOURCE: Beckford, William. “Nymph of the Fountain.” In Gothic Tales of Terror, Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain, edited by Peter Haining. 1972. Reprint edition, pp. 138-75. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books Inc., 1973.

you entered another gallery,—filled with curious works of art and precious cabinets. Through all these suites—through all these galleries—did we

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roam and wander—too often hand in hand— strains of music swelling forth at intervals— sometimes the organ—sometimes concerted pieces—in which three of the greatest singers then in Europe—Pacchierotti, Tenducci, and Rauzzini— for a wonder of wonders—most amicably joined. Sometimes a chaunt was heard—issuing, no one could devine from whence—innocent affecting sounds—that stole into the heart with a bewitching languour and melted the most beloved the most susceptible of my fair companions into tears. Delightful indeed were these romantic wanderings—delightful the straying about this little interior world of exclusive happiness surrounded by lovely beings, in all the freshness of their early bloom, so fitted to enjoy it. Here, nothing was dull or vapid—here, nothing ressembled in the least the common forms and usages, the ‘traintrain’ and routine of fashionable existence—all was essence—the slightest approach to sameness was here untolerated—monotony of every kind was banished. Even the uniform splendour of gilded roofs—was partially obscured by the vapour of wood aloes ascending in wreaths from cassolettes placed low on the silken carpets in porcelain salvers of the richest japan. The delirium of delight into which our young and fervid bosoms were cast by such a combination of seductive influences may be conceived but too easily. Even at this long, sad distance from these days and nights of exquisite refinements, chilled by age, still more by the coarse unpoetic tenor of the present disenchanting period—I still feel warmed and irradiated by the recollections of that strange, necromantic light which Loutherbourg had thrown over what absolutely appeared a realm of Fairy, or rather, perhaps, a Demon Temple deep beneath the earth set apart for tremendous mysteries—and yet how soft, how genial was this quiet light. Whilst the wretched world without lay dark, and bleak, and howling, whilst the storm was raging against our massive walls and the snow drifting in clouds, the very air of summer seemed playing around us—the choir of low-toned melodious voices continued to sooth our ear, and that every sense might in turn receive its blandishment tables covered with delicious viands and fragrant flowers—glided forth, by the aid of mechanism at stated intervals, from the richly draped, and amply curtained recesses of the enchanted precincts. The glowing haze investing every object, the mystic look, the vastness, the intricacy of this vaulted labyrinth occasioned so bewildering an effect that it became impossible for any one to define—at the moment—where he stood, where

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It will be seen that the Khalifeh’s adventures were written down, not at the age of seventeen as Lord Byron has chosen to fancy, but at the age of twenty and two.

TITLE COMMENTARY Vathek THE ENGLISH REVIEW (REVIEW DATE SEPTEMBER 1786) SOURCE: A review of The History of Caliph Vathek: An Arabian Tale, by William Beckford. The English Review 8 (September 1786): 180-84. In the following excerpt, the critic offers a negative assessment of Vathek, faulting principally its morality.

We are told in the preface to [Vathek], “that it is translated from a manuscript, which, with some others of a similar kind, was collected in the East by a man of letters, and communicated to the editor above three years ago.” In an age that has abounded so much with literary impostures, we confess that we cannot see the propriety of such a palpable fiction. The general strain of the work, and the many allusions to modern authors, indicate the author to be an European. As an imitation of Arabian tales, this work possesses no in considerable merit. The characters are strongly marked, though carried beyond nature; the incidents are sufficiently wild and improbable; the magic is solemn and awful, though sometimes horrid; anachronisms and inconsistencies frequently appear; and the catastrophe is bold and shocking. The chief defect of the work arises from the moral, which is the foundation of the tale, and tinctures the whole. Indolence and childishness are represented as the source of happiness; while ambition and the desire of knowledge, so laudable and meritorious when properly directed, are painted in odious colours, and punished as crimes. The most formidable foes of princes,

especially oriental princes, are indolence and the love of pleasure; and those passions that put the powers of the soul in motion, and lead to brilliant actions, though sometimes misapplied, are always respectable. . . . The moral which is here conveyed, that ignorance, childishness, and the want of ambition, are the sources of human happiness, though agreeable to the strain of eastern fiction, is inconsistent with true philosophy, and with the nature of man. The punishments of vice, and the pains of gratified curiosity, ought never to be confounded. Although the tree of knowledge was once forbidden, in the present condition of humanity it is the tree of life. The notes which are subjoined to this history contain much oriental learning, and merit the attention of the curious reader.

E. F. BLEILER (ESSAY DATE 1966) SOURCE: Bleiler, E. F. “William Beckford and Vathek.” In Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, The Vampyre, edited by E. F. Bleiler, pp. xix-xxx. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966. In the following excerpt, Bleiler provides details from Beckford’s life and on the composition and publication of Vathek.

In October 1817, Samuel Rogers the poet happened to be not too far from Salisbury, when he received an invitation to visit Fonthill Abbey, the home of the eccentric millionaire and author William Beckford. Fonthill Abbey was surely the most remarkable building in England at the time, and a contemporary letter by Lady Bessborough describes Rogers’s impressions: He was received [at the thirty-eight-foot-high doors, which were opened] by a dwarf, who, like a crowd of servants thro’ whom he passed, was covered with gold and embroidery. Mr. Beckford received him very courteously, and led him thro’ numberless apartments all fitted up most splendidly, one with Minerals, including precious stones; another the finest pictures; another Italian bronzes, china, etc. etc., till they came to a Gallery that surpass’d all the rest from the richness and variety of its ornaments. It seem’d clos’d by a crimson drapery held by a bronze statue, but on Mr. B.’s stamping and saying, ‘Open!’ the Statue flew back, and the Gallery was seen, extending 350 feet long. At the end an open Arch with a massive balustrade opened to a vast Octagon Hall, from which a window shew’d a fine view of the Park. On approaching this it proved to be the entrance of the famous tower—higher than Salisbury Cathedral [over 285 feet]; this is not finish’d, but great part is done. The doors, of which there are many, are violet velvet covered over with

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he had been, or to whither he was wandering— such was the confusion—the perplexity so many illuminated storys of infinitely varied apartments gave rise to. It was, in short, the realization of romance in its most extravagant intensity. No wonder such scenery inspired the description of the Halls of Eblis. I composed Vathek immediately upon my return to town thoroughly embued with all that passed at Fonthill during this voluptuous festival.

BECKFORD

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AN EARLY REVIEW OF VATHEK

The editor in the Preface to [Vathek] informs us, that it is translated from an unpublished Arabian Manuscript, which was put into his hands about three years ago, with some more of the same kind, by a gentleman who had collected them during his travels in the East. How far the above assertion is founded in truth, it may not be easy, nor is it material, to determine. If it be not a translation, the author has, at least, shewn himself, generally speaking, well acquainted with the customs of the East, and has introduced a sufficient quantity of the marvellous, an absolutely necessary ingredient to enable the work to pass muster as an Arabian Tale. It however differs from the generality of them, in this, that it inculcates a moral of the greatest importance, viz. That the pursuit of unlawful pleasures, and such as are repugnant to the principles of religion and morality, unavoidably leads us to misfortunes in this life, and misery in the next; and that the enjoyment resulting from them is at best but precarious and nugatory. . . . Such is the scope of this tale, which, whether it be the produce of Arabia, or of the fertile banks of the Seine, (which a variety of circumstances induces us to believe it is) from the eagerness of mankind to admire whatever o’ersteps the limits of nature, and hurries us into the regions of fancy, bids fair to acquire that popularity which the moral it inculcates well deserves. SOURCE: A review of The History of Caliph Vathek: An Arabian Tale, by William Beckford. European Magazine and London Review 10 (August 1786): 102-04.

purple and gold embroidery. They pass’d from hence to a Chapel, where on the alter were heaped Golden Candlesticks, Vases, and Chalices studded over with jewels; and from there into a great musick room, where Mr. Beckford begg’d Mr. Rogers to rest till refreshments were ready, and began playing with such unearthly power. . . . They went on to what is called the refectory, a large room built on the model of Henry 7 Chapel, only the

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ornaments gilt, where a Verdantique table was loaded with gilt plate fill’d with every luxury invention could collect. They next went into the Park with a numerous Cortege, and Horses and Servants, etc., which he described as equally wonderful, from the beauty of the trees and shrubs, and manner of arranging them, thro’ a ride of five miles . . . and came to a beautiful Romantick lake, transparent as liquid Chrysolite (this is Mr. Rogers’s, not my expression), covered with wildfowl. . . . [On the next day Mr. Rogers] was shewn thro’ another suite of apartments fill’d with fine medals, gems, enamell’d miniatures, drawings, old and modern, curios, prints and Manuscripts, and last a fine and well-furnish’d library, all the books richly bound and the best editions, etc. etc. An Old Abbe, the Librarian, and Mr. Smith, the water-colour painter, who were there, told him there were 60 fires always kept burning, except in the hottest weather. Near every chimney in the sitting rooms there were large Gilt fillagree baskets fill’d with perfum’d coals that produc’d the brightest flame.

The creator and ruler of this almost unbelievable Gothic empire of some six thousand landscaped acres, a huge cathedral-like building with the highest tower in England, to say nothing of a fifteen-mile-long outer wall, twelve feet high and topped with spikes, was of course William Beckford (1760-1844), the author of Vathek. Beckford was the only legitimate son of William Beckford the Elder, an important political and mercantile figure of the day. Pitt’s lieutenant and John Wilkes’s friend, the elder Beckford had been Lord Mayor of London twice. Licentious, colorful, shrewd yet reckless, he was the firebrand of the Whig opposition. He was also probably the richest man in England, with a family cloth business, extensive property holdings in England, and a fortune in government bonds. A West Indian by birth, he was also one of the largest land and slave owners in Jamaica. As later events proved during the lifetime of his son, this wealth was not all honestly gained. He died in 1770, when his son was ten years old. The Lord Mayor obviously planned to mould his son into an empire builder. Young William was brought up bilingually on English and French, started Latin at six, and Greek and philosophy at ten. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, law, physics, and other sciences were added at seventeen. His tutors were selected from the best practitioners in various fields. Foremost among them was young Wolfgang Mozart, who gave him piano lessons while in England. In his old age Beckford claimed to have given the tune “Non più andrai” to Mozart in their childhood; he also claimed that Mozart had written him telling him that he planned to G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2

The senior Beckford’s plans did not work out. It was true that young William was precociously intelligent, very gifted verbally, musically and artistically, and a handsome and appealing child. He certainly had many qualities which might have carried out his father’s hopes. But he was also emotionally unbalanced, passionate, haughty, vindictive, and a thoroughgoing hedonist. He did not care about manipulating men in his father’s way; he simply bought them, as needed, with his enormous fortune. Politics meant little to him, and in later life he became an M.P. mostly to protect his own interests at Fonthill. Worst of all, from his father’s point of view, he was either not interested in business or had no aptitude at all for it; money to him was simply something that flowed in and could be used to buy pleasures. Another facet of his personality that emerged when he was very young was an escapism focused on the Near East. He devoured The Arabian Nights and its imitations, and gathered together everything that he could about the Moslem world. All through his later life, no matter where he travelled, no matter what he was doing, the magic world of medieval Islam encompassed him. While this interest may have been fostered by his Orientalist art tutor, Alexander Cozens, perhaps a deeper reason lay within his own personality; Beckford often referred to himself as a Caliph, and where better than in the whimsical, irresponsible world of the fictional Harun al-Rashid could he find his dreams made real? Beckford’s early life was scandalous, even by eighteenth-century standards. His early maturity followed a pattern: he could remain in England for only short periods of time, for scandal soon would mount so high that his family would be forced to ship “the fool of Fonthill” to the Continent until things could cool off. During this period he took his cousin’s wife as a mistress. This caused a family schism, but the situation was made worse when it was discovered that this was mostly a tactic to establish a homosexual relationship with young “Kitty” Courtenay. On the Continent, he travelled with such magnificence (including musicians and artists) that his entourage was at times taken for the Austrian Emperor’s. Such ostentation he could well afford, for during the 1780’s he had a fortune of about a million pounds and a yearly income of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, both of which figures should be multiplied by twelve, in most areas, to

indicate their present purchasing power. Attracted by the wealth, the worst adventurers from the stews of Venice became his intimates, and the shadiest circles of Paris and Naples knew him well. Around the end of 1781 Beckford became acquainted with Samuel Henley, who was to be his collaborator on Vathek. Henley, who was currently tutoring cousins of Beckford’s at Harrow, had been professor of moral philosophy at William and Mary in Virginia, but as a Tory had returned to England at the Revolution. Although his personal life was not the most reputable, he was in orders, was a very competent scholar, and had some pretensions to being an Orientalist. Beckford first employed him to edit Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, which was based on Beckford’s travels in Spain and Portugal. The book was prepared for the press, was printed, and ready to be distributed in 1783 when Beckford’s family forced the book to be suppressed. It is not known why the family took such violent measures, since the book is harmless enough, but it has been suggested that it was too frivolous for a future ruler of empire. Just what Henley contributed is also not exactly known. Some time early in 1782 Beckford began to work on his Arabian tale, Vathek. In his old age, he claimed to have written it in three days and two nights, but references in his letters indicate that the book took considerably longer, perhaps three or four months. On April 25th he referred to it as “going on prodigiously,” and by the end of May it was finished. Beckford wrote his novel in French, and then decided to translate it. He was dissatisfied with his own translation, however, considering it too Gallic. He then recruited Henley to help him. For the next couple of years, while Beckford flitted back and forth between England and the Continent, the two men worked on it desultorily. In 1783 the scandal with “Kitty” Courtenay was on the point of breaking disastrously. Beckford’s family seems to have feared a criminal prosecution, and persuaded him to marry and beget a couple of children. In this year he married Lady Margaret Gordon, by whom he had two children before her death in May 1786. In 1784 he returned to Paris, where in addition to moving in high social circles he became involved in the shabby occultism that surrounded the court. In the same year, back in England, he became a Member of Parliament, was proposed for a baronage, but was rejected, presumably because of his personal life.

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use it in The Marriage of Figaro. Unfortunately, since no trace of this correspondence has survived, the whole story is very suspect.

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By the spring of 1785 Vathek was basically finished, except for notes which Henley was to provide, and four nouvelles (the Episodes) which Beckford planned to insert in the framework of the story. These were still incomplete. In June 1785 Beckford left for Switzerland, leaving both the French and English manuscripts of Vathek with Henley, who wanted to continue work on them. In February 1786 Beckford may have begun to suspect that Henley was moving too fast, for he baldly ordered him not to publish: “The Publication of Vathec must be suspended at least another year. I would not have him on any account precede the French edition . . . the Episodes to Vathec are nearly finished, and the whole thing will be completed in eleven to twelve months.” In the first week of June 1786, however, The History of the Caliph Vathek, An Arabian Tale from an Unpublished Manuscript, with Notes Critical and Explanatory appeared on the London bookstalls. Henley had broken faith. Beckford did not learn of publication for several months, but was understandably furious at Henley’s breach of confidence. He raged at Henley, who replied disingenuously that he thought Beckford wanted the book published. He also referred adroitly to the scandal that had caused Beckford’s marriage, and hinted that his association with Beckford was really an attestation of faith in him. Henley unquestionably acted badly, but it is difficult to understand why he risked alienating a wealthy and powerful patron. Greed for money may have motivated him, or perhaps (since it is known that he felt proprietary toward the English Vathek) he feared that Vathek would follow the way of Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents and never see publication. Needless to say, his actions led to a breach with Beckford, who never forgave him. Henley spent the rest of his life in poverty, making a poor living at teaching, hack writing, and editing. Beckford even had the satisfaction of rejecting an appeal for financial help. Henley died in 1815. The further history of Vathek is confused, since soon after Henley’s English translation appeared, two French language editions were published, one at Lausanne, the other at Paris. It used to be believed that Beckford had rushed the Lausanne edition into print from his original manuscript, and then, recognizing that it needed improvement, had corrected his text and reissued it at Paris. Now, however, the situation is believed to have been more complex. According to the modern reconstruction of events, Beckford had no copy of his French manuscript, which may

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have been lost in the mails or retained by Henley. Beckford thereupon obtained a copy of the English book and hired Jean-David Levade, a hack translator, to turn it back into French. This version of Vathek was published at Lausanne; Beckford apparently did not see it until it was printed. When he saw it, he recognized that it was unworthy of him. He invoked the help of French literary friends, and set about retranslating it himself. This translation was then published at Paris. In 1815 Beckford prepared a third, revised French edition, which also appeared in Paris. The text of Vathek, too, has presented problems. Four stories, told by denizens of Hell whom Vathek met in the halls of Iblis, were to have been inserted in the framework. Beckford spoke of working on them, but after the appearance of Henley’s translation, he seems to have put them aside. They remained a legend during Beckford’s lifetime, and as the novel rose in critical estimation, many persons asked to see them, including Lord Byron. But Beckford would not show them to anyone, and after a time it came to be believed that they had never existed at all. At the turn of the present century, however, three French manuscripts were found in a document chest in the possession of one of Beckford’s collateral descendants, the Duke of Hamilton. These manuscripts turned out to be the two long stories, “The Story of Prince Alasi and the Princess Firouzkah” and “The Story of Prince Barkiarokh,” as well as a fragment entitled “The Story of the Princess Zulkaïs and the Prince Kalilah.” These three stories, which are in the same vein as Vathek, were published in French and in Sir Frank Marzials’s English translation from 1909 to 1912. . . . . .

III Beckford’s Vathek is almost universally recognized as a minor work of genius and as the best Oriental tale in English, but paradoxically there is strong doubt whether Vathek really should be placed in the stream of English literature. It was written in French, and all its major predecessors and sources were French. In English literature it stands isolated; it had no real forerunners and no worthy successors.1 The development of the Oriental tale in the eighteenth century was overwhelmingly a French phenomenon. Its manifestations in other languages, such as in the work of Gozzi and Wieland, are obviously derivative and of secondary impor-

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Many great authors contributed to the development of the Oriental tale in France. There were Voltaire’s contes philosophiques (Zadig, La Princesse de Babylone, etc.), Montesquieu’s satire on French institutions (Lettres persanes), and the humorous half-parodies of Caylus (Contes orientales) and Count Anthony Hamilton (Les quatre Facardins, etc.). There were also many collections of less distinguished stories imitating The Arabian Nights, but which were simply more or less successful thrillers. T. S. Gueullette, for example, wrote collections of Chinese tales, Moghul tales, Tartarian tales, and even Peruvian tales, all of which provided dreary imitations of Galland’s spirited translation. At one time, during the last part of the eighteenth century, a compilation of such “Arabian” material was published; entitled Cabinet des fées, it runs to several hundred volumes. In English literature the Oriental tale is far less important. It remained a half-subliminal form, sometimes used as a vehicle for criticism; sometimes as an embodiment for a moral sentiment or an allegory; sometimes as a frame for an essay, as with Addison; and sometimes even as a story for its own sake. Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World and Johnson’s Rasselas are the only members of the form that survive at all (except Vathek), and there seems little else that deserves to live, with the possible exception of certain of Dr. Hawkesworth’s stories. Most Oriental material is poverty-stricken in both idea and execution. Beckford’s contribution lies in the imagination that he brought to a basically dull genre. He was successful in regaining the sense of wonder that permeated the original Islamic stories. His was a recreation of the Gothicism of Islam, a cultural milieu as medieval as the European Gothicism of Walpole and his contemporaries. Beckford created afresh the Magic culture in its most delightful as well as its most horrific form. Vathek is a skilfully plotted, amusing story, pervaded with a strong feeling for irony and a

sense of the ludicrous that emerges from even the sinister activities of the mad caliph and his frenzied companions. The story is original with Beckford, for no Islamic sources have ever been found, although there does seem to have been a Caliph Watik. What parallels exist between Vathek and other works of literature are mostly of French origin. Yet part of his story he found very close at hand. Carathis, as his contemporaries recognized, is the image of his mother; Nouronihar is probably based on his mistress and cousin, Mrs. Peter Beckford, who shared impiety, lust and stupidity with Nouronihar; and Vathek is obviously and admittedly Beckford himself in his headlong quest for new sensation, new beauty, and peace. A forewarning of Vathek is to be found in one of the dreams reported in Beckford’s Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents: “I hurried to bed, and was soon lulled asleep by the storm. A dream bore me off to Persepolis; and led me thro’ vast subterraneous treasures to a hall, where Solomon, methought, was holding forth on their vanity.” Equally, the domains of Vathek came to be represented in Fonthill, and just as Walpole’s Castle of Otranto is the embodiment of a building, Vathek is a man, a building, and a mode of thought all remarkably hypostatized as a novel.

Note 1. M. G. Lewis, who shared with Beckford the characteristics of great wealth, West Indian possessions, moral turpitude, and a taste for the marvelous, and the young George Meredith are the only authors who seem to have produced even entertaining work in this tradition immediately after Beckford. The Oriental ethnographic novel of Thomas Hope, James Morier and Meadows Taylor was a different phenomenon, with roots in both the picaresque novel and Sir Walter Scott.

FREDERICK S. FRANK (ESSAY DATE 1990) SOURCE: Frank, Frederick S. “The Gothic Vathek: The Problem of Genre Resolved.” In Vathek and the Escape from Time: Bicentenary Revaluations, edited by Kenneth W. Graham, pp. 152-72. New York: AMS, 1990. In the following essay, Frank argues for the placement of Vathek within the Gothic tradition.

This short essay investigates the problem of genre or genres in Beckford’s Vathek.1 The paper develops an argument for a Gothic Vathek, a work that is structurally, thematically, and symbolically in harmony with the central motifs of an emergent Gothic tradition. The critical argument is built upon four propositions about the generic characteristics of Beckford’s orientalized Gothic

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tance. The genre began with Galland’s French translation of The Thousand and One Nights (17041712), which was received with delight and enthusiasm. There had been earlier Oriental material in Italian and French, it is true, but none of this had the overwhelming power that The Thousand and One Nights demonstrated. These stories appealed strongly to the Rococo mind, what with the wide range of opportunities they offered: delicacies of style, elaboracies of construction, adventure, eroticism, moralism, sensibility, fantasy, philosophy and irony.

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novel, those features of form and theme which Vathek shares in common with other Gothic examples taken from the period. The four Gothic aspects that I want to examine are: first, the pattern of the demonic quest or perverse pilgrimage, a Gothic version of the long and dark voyage of the hero; second, the physical and psychological nature of the protagonist, since I want to argue that Vathek himself is an early manifestation of the heroic villainy so characteristic of the Gothic novel’s tormented tormentor, those towering and terrifying beings who have risked all for evil or those “grand, ungodly, godlike”2 men who can slay with the eye or paralyze with the voice or immobilize their victims in other unusual ways; third, the preference of the characters for diminishing enclosures and similar forms of architectural sequestration as denoted by such Gothic locales as towers, grottos, caverns, contracting corridors, and subterranean theatres of hellish anguish; and finally, the evocation of a hypothetically malignant cosmos, an ontologically unreliable and ambiguously deceiving Gothic universe in which all moral norms are inverted or twisted, where disorder is far more likely than order, and where universal darkness can bury all without warning and at any moment. If we take the metaphoric aspects of Vathek seriously, the novel makes its statement about God, the self, and the world in a speculative manner similar to other models of high Gothic fiction. Like other Gothic writers active at the end of the eighteenth century, Beckford uses his own Gothic novel to confront the moral ambiguities of an inexplicable universe; nor can we overlook the fact that Beckford ends Vathek with an austere moral concerning nothing less than “the condition of man upon earth.”3 Vathek’s Gothic, like other varieties of Gothic within the genre, certainly does amuse and entertain us, and no one would want to overlook the role of the ludicrous in Beckford’s Gothic text. But the risible diversion of the reader is not always its sole aim or end. Gothics such as Vathek are also concerned with matters of first and final causation as well as fundamental issues of existence. Furthermore, Gothics such as Vathek project a disquieting Weltanschauung and by so doing, they engage us in final questions by displaying for the reader a world in which evil is stronger than good, instability more probable than stability, and unnatural passions closer to the true core of human behavior than the calm control of the intellect. Inquisitive characters in Gothic fiction (the inordinately curious caliph Vathek is a prime example) are forced

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to ask their questions and seek their answers in a sort of intellectual vacuum without the support of stable value systems to affirm any answers their quest might lead them to. Symbolically speaking, they must move through a landscape of collapsed ego-ideals wherein the older symbols of authority, secular and divine, lie everywhere in ruin. Beckford’s characters, like the entrapped casts of other Gothic novels, are never free, although they may delude themselves with the dream of freedom by their sensual and sadistic conduct. At issue throughout Vathek, as one pro-Gothic reader of the novel has stated it, is the “contradiction between the illusion of man’s freedom and the reality of his imprisonment in a necessitarian universe.”4 From the advantageous retrospective of literary history, Vathek can be studied as a prototype of the subjective and subversive Gothic tendencies in the late eighteenth century which were beginning to challenge and displace an exhausted classicism and a moribund rationalism in the arts. The Gothic novel attained its astounding preeminence (in the form of literally thousands of horrid titles) in the late 1790s in the maiden-centered romances of Mrs. Radcliffe and the outrageous supernaturalism of Lewis’s The Monk. Nearly four decades separate Vathek from the masterworks of Gothicism, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). But at the beginnings of the Gothic movement, Beckford’s Vathek enjoyed the unique status of being a model for the emergent energies of the Gothic. Yet, the Vathek of 1786 has no close literary equivalent, unless the irrational itself be denominated a genre. Preceding Vathek were several narrative experiments important to recognize in summarizing the rise of the Gothic genre: Thomas Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762); Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764); Clara Reeve’s Old English Baron (1777). Leland’s Longsword, an elaborately plotted romance of chivalry set in an imaginary Middle Ages, contained both the quest and a panorama of grandly gloomy architectural settings. Walpole’s Otranto supernaturalized the sinister properties of Gothic architecture and added the pursuing hero-villain and the fleeing maiden as they performed their violent minuet in “the long labyrinth of darkness,”5 the basement of the haunted castle. Clara Reeve relaxed and normalized the irrational atmosphere already associated with the new genre, but she also cleverly installed a forbidden chamber within the castle, thus donating a mandatory fixture to the Gothic

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The first reviewers of Vathek found no difficulty in assigning Gothic traits to the work. The English Review for 1786, to choose just one instance, discussed Vathek in terms of vigorous extremes and grotesque energy. “The characters,” noted the reviewer, “are strongly marked though carried beyond nature; the incidents are sufficiently wild and improbable; the magic is solemn and awful, though sometimes horrid; anachronisms and inconsistencies frequently appear; and the catastrophe is bold and shocking.” 6 The sadistic absurdities and diabolical climax aroused the moral fury of the reviewer of the 1834 edition. Writing in The Southern Literary Messenger, the reviewer denounced the novel’s Gothic qualities as “obscene and blasphemous in the highest degree. . . . We should pronounce it, without knowing anything of Mr. Beckford’s character, to be the production of a sensualist and an infidel— one who could riot in the most abhorred and depraved conceptions—and whose prolific fancy preferred as its repast all that was diabolical and monstrous, rather than what was beautiful and good.”7

connect it with contemporary ‘Gothic’ tendencies in the novel. It is not easy to see that Vathek sets out to exploit the imaginative terror, the suspense of psychological shock tactics which were entering the English novel about this time.”8 The case against a Gothic Vathek gathers additional impetus from the opinions of R. D. Hume and Frederick Garber, two sympathetic and perceptive interpreters of Gothic fiction. Garber, who has edited Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) and written many incisive commentaries on the place of the Gothic in literary history, nevertheless can find no place for Vathek in the annals of Gothicism. Writes Garber: “Vathek has been called a counterpart of the Gothic but it shows none of that calculated fuzziness through which the Gothic exposed the uncertainty of our daily perceptions of experience.”9 And R. D. Hume, whose 1969 PMLA essay, “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” is something of a landmark in the debate over the Gothic genre’s crucial importance and its growing scholarly respectability, finds Vathek to be too flippant, ironic, and burlesque in tone to merit a Gothic classification. Writes Hume: “Vathek is often treated as a Gothic novel on the grounds that it exploits horror and magic scenery in SchauerRomantik fashion. Yet I must agree with the work’s recent editor that Vathek is not centrally of the Gothic type. Its horrors reach the point of burlesque, and its continual return to a detached and even comic tone set it apart.”1 0 For Hume, and his position may be regarded as the orthodox position on Vathek’s Gothicism, the work is best comprehended within the subgenres of comedy such as farce, burlesque, and harlequinade, “a dark-tinged but high spirited comedy” and “an existential crisis defused by comic exaggeration.”1 1

Modern criticism of Vathek, however, has tended to dismiss or ignore the novel’s affinities with “the monstrous and diabolical” currents of Gothicism in order to stress Beckford’s predisposition to irony and his cynical undercutting of Vathek’s carefully built moods of terror. With the exception of the conclusion of the quest far down within the fiery Hall of Eblis, Vathek, is viewed as a work which shows so much vacillation between hilarity and horror that to call it Gothic in any sense is to misrepresent its literary essence and its generic category. The anti-Gothic view is expressed by one of the best twentieth-century editors of Vathek, who believes that any concession to Gothic responses would deny Beckford’s comic purposes. “There was nothing in Vathek,” Roger Lonsdale assures us, “which obliged reviewers to

Beckford shares with other early Gothic writers a paradoxical sense of the chaotic whereby images of former order are demonically reversed. Thus, it is Satan (or Eblis, as the archfiend is called in the Muhammadan tradition) who is the prime mover and highest authority in Vathek’s anarchic and nihilistic universe; the unspeakably repulsive becomes the attractive or the hilarious blurs into the hideous; the infernal replaces the celestial as the objective of the quester’s journey; and the desire for damnation supplants salvation as the pilgrim soul’s sharpest desire. These bizarre inversions directly connect Vathek with some major Gothic themes found in other specimens of Gothicism from Walpole’s Otranto to Maturin’s Melmoth. After consciously choosing evil, Beckford’s Satanic hero makes a first voyage of no return in his

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interior. At the climax of Vathek, we have an enlarged version of Clara Reeve’s chamber of horrors. These romances were the only available Gothic models when Beckford sat down to compose his Vathek. Beckford was very much aware of these Gothic contemporaries and conscious too of the rational malaise that had generated their Gothic endeavors. The Gothics of Leland, Walpole, and Reeve had challenged the efficacy of rationalism both as an outlook and a response to existence. In its abhorrence of limits and its repudiation of a meaningful universe, the Gothic Vathek of Beckford is an extension of the darkening vision of these first Gothics.

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profane quest for an infernal Xanadu. In the dark voyage of the hero may be seen a composite of Gothic motifs: a displacement of soul and loss of self which the hero attempts to counter by a descent to the lower depths; the hero’s mounting awareness of the futility of spiritual values and the pointlessness of human wisdom and intelligence; realization of a universe controlled by a fiendish deity devoted to man’s confusion and despair; the Faustian problem of the overreacher’s limitless desire in a limited cosmos; and the ridiculousness of suffering as symbolized by the proximity of pleasure and pain in many of Vathek’s adventures en route to hell. The mythic and philosophic elements of the Gothic outlook first converge in the physical and psychological aspects of Vathek himself, a model Gothic protagonist. Whether he be a debauched monk, rapist nobleman, cruel count, ferocious brigand, or malicious caliph, the Gothic villain is a two-sided personality, a figure of great power and latent virtue whose chosen career of evil is the result of a clash between his passionate nature and the unnatural restraints of conventions, orthodoxy, and tradition. Moreover, Vathek is the first Gothic villain whose moral and physical features are given in detail. Vathek’s predecessor, Manfred, in The Castle of Otranto, is barely described at all and one looks in vain for any lavish description of the hideous Gothic face and frame, always a landmark passage in later varieties of the Gothic. But in the makeup of Beckford’s caliph, we find the progenitor of almost every single later Gothic villain, for Vathek’s Satanic personality is inscribed in his face and single overwhelming eye. The lethal optic, like Vathek’s private tower, is an image of absolute and pernicious power. It connotes his contempt for rational and mortal limits and functions as it will in later Gothic figures as a weapon of visionary penetration. Vathek is first introduced to the reader by way of the awesome eye: “His figure was pleasing and majestic; but when he was angry, one of his eyes became so terrible, that no person could bear to behold it; and the wretch upon whom it was fixed, instantly fell backward, and sometimes expired.”1 2 Vathek’s deadly glance, the single eye that can maim or slay, is almost immediately transplanted to the Gothic features of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Montoni and Schedoni, Lewis’s Ambrosio, and attains its demonic zenith first in the blazing eyes of Melmoth the Wanderer and eventually in the ocular stimulus to madness in the “vulture eye” of the prostrate old man in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The Gothic eye which is frequently used to immobilize a

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reluctant maiden or to paralyze a rival heir to the castle originates with Beckford’s caliph. Complementing the ferocious and supernatural eye in the personage of Vathek is the character’s passionate commitment to evil, the final stage of Faustian curiosity and ungratified sensuality. Vathek’s passion for the supreme climb culminated by a haughty seclusion within a tower, or its reverse, the ultimate descent to the Palace of Subterranean Fire, are two images of perverted aspiration which give Vathek its model Gothic structure. Vathek’s toweromania, or compulsion to elevate and isolate himself in contemptuous pride at some supreme pinnacle is counterpointed throughout the narrative by his excessive grottophilia, the impulse to descend to an ultimate darkness there to dwell eternally within a fiery abyss presided over by demons. Inspired by “an insolent curiosity of penetrating the secrets of heaven,”1 3 Vathek transmits to the Gothic villains who come after him in the genre a powerful longing for absolutes in a universe devoid of such finalities. Atop one of his flaming towers, Vathek amuses himself with the mass strangulation of his subjects. In the depths of the earth at the opposite end of the novel’s axis of Gothic action he joins the vast congregation of the damned upon seeing his breast become “transparent as crystal, his heart enveloped in flames.”1 4 The Gothic Vathek is the genre’s first full-length portrait of a tormented tormentor, a metaphysical isolate and a monomaniac who thirsts to realize himself in evil. Various examples of the Vathekian traits of future Gothic villains might be cited to demonstrate Beckford’s major contribution to the making of the Gothic hero. Here, for example, is Count Rudiger of Frankheim, the hero of Monk Lewis’s little known Gothic novella, Mistrust: or, Blanche and Osbright. When we first see this titanic villain, he is standing in an open grave glaring defiantly upward in a posture of mortal defiance. Note that Count Rudiger derives both the deathdealing eye and the fatal passion from Vathek. Those powerful emotions which would certainly prove fatal to any ordinary human being become a source of malignant strength for the Vathekian character who denounces life even as he seeks to triumph over it: His heart was the seat of agony; a thousand scorpions seemed every moment to pierce it with their poisonous stings; but not one tear forced itself into his bloodshot eyeballs; not the slightest convulsion of his gigantic limbs betrayed the silent tortures of his bosom. A gloom settled and profound reigned upon his dark and high-arched eyebrows. Count Rudiger’s stature was colossal;

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If the character of the protagonist helps to identify the genre of Vathek, the hero’s destination and his progressively frustrated experiences as he approaches his journey’s end further define just how deeply Gothic the work is. Vathek’s Gothic grail is nothing less than damnation for himself and those who accompany him in the voyage downward and inward to hell. The quest is demonic because it begins in torment, proceeds through heightened degrees of self-destruction, and climaxes in the hopeless horror of body and of soul for the disappointed quester. Unlike a traditional epic hero whose descent into the underworld takes him to his heroic limits and yields him a transcendent or victorious release from the darkness of self-doubt, Vathek’s descending voyage ends in perplexity, guilt, and despair. Gifted with the power of perpendicular imagination, a necessary angle of vision for realizing the upper and lower limits of Gothic fantasy, Beckford conveys his hero along a vertical axis of exotic anguish and blue fire effects. Enroute to hell, Vathek and Nouronihar traverse an insular landscape rich in diabolical spectacle. Indeed, it is almost as if we were hearing descriptions of Dante’s inferno as Laurence Sterne might have written them. The algolagnic terrain offers stairways spiraling downward to black depths of no return, Gothic pits containing chuckling ghouls who must be fed on live children, a pyramid of skulls nearly as high as the Gizeh monument, reptiles with human faces, toxic delicacies and idolatrous banquets consisting of “roasted wolf” vultures à la daube . . . rotten truffles; boiled thistles: and such other wild plants, as must ulcerate the throat and parch up the tongue,”1 6 odd lights and bizarre beasts including an omnipresent squadron of vultures, flaming towers, and a kaleidoscopic subterranean amphitheatre in which Vathek’s sorceress mother, Carathis, performs obscene rites amidst an ornate charnel decor to the accompaniment of a shrieking chorus of oneeyed negresses and burning mummies. Across quivering plains of black sand, through swarms of curious insects, past batallions of howling cripples and cubit-high dwarfs, into blizzards of burning snowflakes Vathek makes the Gothic’s downward voyage of no return. Vathek’s precursor, the European Faust had sold his soul out of a desire for power and pleasure,

but Beckford’s Islamic Faust already possesses these and willingly renounces them to seek pain and damnation. One of the deepest and most enduring patterns of the Gothic quest which brings the ambitious character to the horror of horrors in an underground of no return is to be observed in Vathek’s perverse pilgrimage. The Gothic hero’s abhorrence for limits stimulates his Satanic vanity; his vanity expresses itself in a destructive pursuit of an ideal of horrid beauty typically depicted elsewhere throughout Gothic fiction by the maiden and villain performing their deadly duet of flight and pursuit through the subterranean passageways of a haunted building. The destructive pursuit of beauty culminates in spiritual and metaphysical frustration for Vathek thus implying an irrationally determined universe in which man is fixed as an eternal victim condemned to occupy forever some chamber of horrors. In Vathek’s case, the destination is an “immense hall . . . where a vast multitude is incessantly passing”1 7 in a never-ending parade of anguish. The transcendental or epic hero often climaxes his quest by arriving at some vision of totality, but when Gothic heroes venture into the heart of darkness their experiences at the dead center often invert the conventional romance’s pattern of achievement and self-fulfillment. From Beckford’s Vathek to Melville’s Captain Ahab, the Gothic hero is a frustrated quester whose pursuit of the absolute ends by condemning him to endless circuits ‘“round perdition’s flame.” 1 8 Gothic novels after Vathek adhere to the pattern of the ironic quest, a destructive version of the hero’s long journey to a dark place which the Gothic hero makes not in order to rescue the maiden but to rape her. The pro-Gothic reading of Beckford’s strange novel enables us to recognize the motif of the dark, inward voyage as a characteristic of the genre at large. Gothic romances like Vathek mock the very form they feed on for they “retain the structure of romance, but invert the hero’s progress. The result is a linear descent: aesthetically, from the Hill of the Pied Horses to the Hall of Eblis; psychologically, from wishfulfillment to frustration; and metaphysically, from a vision of humanity as unlimited potentiality to humanity as finite actuality in an alien world.”1 9 Other characters throughout the Gothic genre who decide to risk all for evil suffer the fate of Vathek in similar gruesome confinements of body and soul. In Gothic terms, the Eblis episode means a permanent condition of disunity between the self

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the grave in which he stood, scarcely rose above his knees. His eyes blazed; his mouth foamed; his coal-black hair stood erect, in which he twisted his hands, and tearing out whole handsful by the roots, he strewed them on the coffin, which stood beside his feet.1 5

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and nature, the self and society, and the self and God. At the end of the novel, we have entered the zone of ultimate cosmic discord intensified by the dreadful apprehension that the world is under the control of a demon and that there is “no exit.” The imagery of death-in-life or life-in-death which typifies the high Gothic through such situations as premature burial, cadaverous enclosure, and lingering impalement attains its first full development in the descriptions of Vathek and company in the Hall of Eblis. The final point to be made for a Gothic Vathek involves the way in which the work’s atmosphere goes beyond comedy, irony, and wild disorder to evoke the theme of a malignant universe in which the imagination, always striving to be free of rational bounds, is repeatedly denied its goals. Freedom of mind is perpetually at issue throughout Gothic fiction, the physical flight and pursuit through avenues of darkness and the other forms of dreadful entrapment all indicating symbolically the imagination’s containment by finite ideas and restrictive ideological structure. Beyond the buffoonery of Vathek, the theme of freedom is powerfully stated through Vathek’s continuous contact with a world that continuously disappoints his suprarational desire to liberate himself from all mortal restraints. Each of his Gothic ordeals is a perverse universe’s reminder to him of an invincible and limited reality impeding every effort of the imagination to break through rational defenses. This menace of limits which a malignant cosmos fixes upon its creatures of aspiring imagination is at the very core of Vathek’s Gothicism as well as a trait of the Gothic tradition at large, where characters constantly strive to be free but exist in bondage to some grotesque enclosure, be it a haunted castle or an arabesque Hades thronged with the damned in flaming heart postures. In her important treatise, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror,” (1792) Beckford’s contemporary, the Gothic theorist Ann Letitia Aikin Barbauld, describes the degree of terror experienced when a character is confronted and overwhelmed by an unholy or perverse “otherness,” as Vathek is each time he attempts to overreach the limits of self. Higher Gothic horror of the sort we encounter in the climactic scenes in the Hall of Eblis places Vathek in the highest category of the Gothic genre, the region of total ontological distress, where the mythology of the imaginative self as an agent of control gives way to the nightmare of a supreme and malignant “otherness” which cannot be escaped or transcended. The conditions of such an otherness are expressed by Mrs. Barbauld

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as “Solitude, darkness, low-whispered sounds, obscure glimpses of objects, flitting forms [which] tend to raise in the mind that thrilling, mysterious terror which has for its object the ‘powers unseen and mightier than we,’”2 0 precisely the conditions which prevail at the frustrated terminus of Vathek’s imaginative quest. G. R. Thompson has written that “the Gothic romance is a genre that in its historical development, as well as in individual texts, moves from a stable modality of clearly defined conventions and forms toward an unstable and deliberately indeterminate modality. Frequently, the Gothic veers toward the grotesque, a mode of inherent instability that plays on the dissolution of norms— ontological, epistemological and aesthetic.”2 1 The Gothic Vathek is just such an apocalyptic narrative where the problem of genre can only be resolved by viewing the work as part of the energetic revolt against reason spearheaded by the dominance of the tale of terror during the closing decades of the eighteenth century. In the chaotic landscape of the Gothic tradition it stands like one of Beckford’s infernal towers deep within the zone of ultimate Gothic fantasy where we find not just a destabilization of the norms cited by Thompson, but the dark universe’s mockery of all human striving.

Notes 1. William Beckford, Vathek, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970). 2. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 16 (“The Ship”). 3. Beckford, Vathek, p. 120. 4. Kenneth W. Graham, “Beckford’s ‘Vathek’: A Study in Ironic Dissonance,” Criticism, 14 (1972), 252. 5. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. E. F. Bleiler, p. 36. 6. English Review, 8 (1786), 180-184. 7. Southern Literary Messenger, 1 (1834), 188-189. 8. Roger Lonsdale, Introduction to Vathek by William Beckford, pp. vii-xxxi. 9. Frederick Garber, “Beckford, Delacroix, and Byronic Orientalism,” Comparative Literature Studies, 18 (1981), 321-332. 10. R. D. Hume, “Exuberant Gloom, Existential Agony, and Heroic Despair: Three Varieties of Negative Romanticism,” in The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, ed. G. R. Thompson, pp. 109-117. 11. R. D. Hume, “Exuberant Gloom,” p. 117. 12. Beckford, Vathek, p. 1. 13. Beckford, Vathek, p. 4. 14. Beckford, Vathek, p. 114.

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16. Beckford, Vathek, p. 49. 17. Beckford, Vathek, p. 109. 18. Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 36 (“The Quarter-Deck”). 19. Randall Craig, “Beckford’s Inversion of Romance in Vathek,” Orbis Litterarum, 39 (1984), 95-106. 20. Ann Letitia Aiken Barbauld, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror,” in The Evil Image, eds. Patricia L. Skarda and Nora Crow Jaffe, pp. 10-13. 21. G. R. Thompson, “The Form of Gothic Romance,” a paper delivered at the Modern Language Association Meeting, Washington, DC, December 1984, pp. 1-26.

R. B. GILL (ESSAY DATE JANUARY 2003) SOURCE: Gill, R. B. “The Author in the Novel: Creating Beckford in Vathek.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 15, no. 2 (January 2003): 241-54. In the following essay, Gill examines the authentic authorial persona in Vathek.

According to David Hume, “The mind is a kind of theatre where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.”1 Hume’s well-known account of personal identity aptly describes William Beckford—petulant heir to great wealth, a member of Parliament, connoisseur, architectural dilettante, fugitive from sexual scandal, and author of Vathek, one of the most enjoyable and intriguing of the eighteenth-century Oriental tales. Across the pages of Vathek and, indeed, of Beckford’s whole life pass and mingle the successive actors of his disjointed identity. Hume’s caution to the reader is especially relevant in Beckford’s case: “the comparison with theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos’d.” The spectators of Beckford’s life and the readers of his tale have wished to know the materials of which his inner self was composed in order to explain his theatrics, but they have never agreed on what they found. And Beckford himself, complaining of the mask he wore, yet intent on preserving a gentlemanly image, a man unwillingly hastened by his family and his wealth from one performance to the next, seems never to have found that inner being with which he could be at peace. The result is that there are many Beckfords, some he himself created and many created by his various critics.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR BYRON NOTES VATHEK AS A SOURCE FOR ORIENTAL ELEMENTS IN HIS THE GIAOUR

The circumstance to which the above story relates was not very uncommon in Turkey. . . . The story in the text is one told of a young Venetian many years ago, and now nearly forgotten. I heard it by accident recited by one of the coffee-house story-tellers who abound in the Levant, and sing or recite their narratives. The additions and interpolations by the translator will be easily distinguished from the rest, by the want of Eastern imagery; and I regret that my memory has retained so few fragments of the original. For the contents of some of the notes I am indebted partly to D’Herbelot, and partly to that most Eastern, and, as Mr. Weber justly entitles it, “sublime tale,” the Caliph Vathek. I do not know from what source the author of that singular volume may have drawn his materials; some of his incidents are to be found in the Bibliothèque Orientale; but for correctness of costume, beauty of description, and power of imagination, it far surpasses all European imitations; and bears such marks of originality, that those who have visited the East will find some difficulty in believing it to be more than a translation. As an Eastern tale, even Rasselas must bow before it; his “Happy Valley” will not bear a comparison with the “Hall of Eblis.” SOURCE: Byron, George Gordon, Lord. “A footnote to The Giaour.” In The Poetical Works of Lord Byron. Collected and Arranged with Illustrative Notes by Thomas Moore, Lord Jeffrey, Sir Walter Scott [and others] with a Portrait and Numerous Illustrations on Steel, p. 76. New York: G. Virtue, 1813.

But these created selves are, to use Hume’s terms for personal identity, “merely verbal” (p. 262). These verbal Beckfords are plots without a story, the texts he and we write in lieu of an anchoring identity. The problem in Beckford’s case lies not so much in this textuality as in our desire (and his) to find the originating self of that text. The ambiguities surrounding Beckford prompt a search for biographical explanations. Yet

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15. Matthew G. Lewis, Mistrust: or, Blanche and Osbright, in Seven Masterpieces of Gothic Horror, ed. R. D. Spector, pp. 237-330.

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Beckford’s personae within Vathek and his life are clearly created ones, even though they are offered as biographical fact. In this respect, Beckford’s presence in the novel is typical of other authorial personae, artistic creations that paradoxically function properly only when taken as factual biography. But when that paradox tempts critics into the impossible task of locating the true self of the author, they find only what Hume notes is a mysterious and inexplicable fiction. Vathek is a clear case of a novel especially in need of a biographical centre to resolve its ambiguities.2 Not finding that centre or authorial identity, critics (and Beckford himself) have created a number of identities to satisfy their own perceptions of the needs of the novel. A straightforward Oriental tale whose quick narrative and polished style cover no depths of complex psychological characterization, Vathek would not seem to offer special problems of interpretation. Yet critical views of this novel vary widely. It has been seen as both Gothic and nonGothic, satiric and non-satiric, realistic and fantastic, neoclassic and romantic, socially conventional and anti-bourgeois, metaphysical and messageless, as well as both unified and split in its sensibility. Vathek has been valued for its “correctness of costume,” criticized for its elaborate explanatory notes, and, notably, regarded as moral, immoral, amoral, and “anti-moral.”3 The diverse critical opinions arise in part from the intriguing mixture of opposites in Beckford’s style. Whether we consider it Oriental or Gothic or whatever, Vathek is essentially the sort of fabular parable that the eighteenth-century reader enjoyed. It is thus outside the realistic mainstream that has come to represent for us the novel’s most characteristic mode of addressing moral issues. And yet, on its surface at least, it is an explicitly moral parable. Consequently, there is difficulty for us, as there was for Beckford’s contemporaries, in reconciling the fabular, Eastern exoticism of Vathek with its moral elements. Further, we cannot say of Vathek, as we can of Candide and Rasselas, that its imaginative centre lies in the moral message, for our interest in the perverse actions of the characters frequently jars with the conventional morals, particularly the closing moral that “the condition of man upon earth is to be— humble and ignorant.” There is an additional mixing of opposites in the self-conscious playfulness of Beckford’s style. Like Sterne, Beckford watches himself write and is intrigued by the possibilities of expressing himself in guises—now moral, now perverse, now coy,

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now sublime. He cannot resist indulging himself momentarily in some ludicrous or incongruous aspect of his material. The storks, for instance, that join the morning prayers of Nouronihar and Gulchenrouz by the lake are a poke at the solemnity of religious greybeards, but their incongruity as members of the worshipping congregation is so striking that it distracts attention from the narrative, an indulgence we enjoy as part of a highly self-referential style. Beckford is not willing to suppress these moments of self-conscious fun; Vathek smiles at its sardonic incongruities from the first paragraph to its closing moralisms. Beckford uses authorial self-consciousness in the text of Vathek to remove himself from his occult material and thus to preserve, or create, an aura of sophistication and control. Here is no romantic subordination or merging of author with his outré creation, as we find in the works of Poe. Rather, Vathek is an eighteenth-century amalgam of Pope’s proud epic notes in the Dunciad (a similarity Beckford recognized) and Sterne’s sophisticated and intensely self-aware metafiction. Beckford wants us to observe him laughing at his subject, manipulating it: a gentleman engaged with compromising material but, nevertheless, in thorough control of it and able to smile knowingly at his own folly. In this mixture of opposites, Vathek, like many other neoclassical works, has a civilized sophistication that acknowledges its own role-playing. In fact, Beckford cared greatly about the image of himself created in Vathek. In this respect the novel is a literary counterpart of Fonthill, the Gothic abbey on which he later lavished his efforts and money. On occasion he claimed, somewhat misleadingly, to have written the novel in several days in a fit of inspiration, and he romanticized about the “most extravagant intensity” of the Christmas celebration at Fonthill that formed part of the inspiration of the novel. Beckford’s letters reveal that he was very much aware of the effect of his image on others—and that he enjoyed the thought. Vathek is “the only production of mine which I am not ashamed of” he wrote to Samuel Henley; and in a different letter he spoke of the “honours” with which he expected Vathek to be received. To another correspondent he wrote of “ma vanité” of the Caliph, and in the journal of his stay in Portugal he noted that he was “extremely impatient” to receive “the last monthly reviews in which I expect to read a critique on Vathek.” Cyrus Redding, his first biographer, recalled, “To abuse Vathek he deemed a personal insult. His pride took the alarm and he

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with the skill of his style and of the “magnificence” with which Vathek concludes.

The references in his letters to shame, honour, and pride reveal his characteristic concern with the relationship between his work and his reputation. Biographers often note the changes that Beckford made in his papers and letters in order that they appear most advantageous. Contemporaries of Beckford such as Mrs Thrale, William Hazlitt, and Byron understood the degree to which public appearance was involved in Beckford’s effects and enjoyed the scandal that attended his reputation. A continuing motif in the Portuguese journal, written shortly after publication of Vathek, is Beckford’s awareness that others are watching his carefully contrived self-image: “I hear there is no conversation in Lisbon but of my poetry.” “My reputation as a devotee spreads prodigiously.” Although he notes, “I am sick of forming the chief subject of conversation at all the card tables,” he also takes care to record the surprise with which “the whole herd of precentors, priests, musicians and fencing masters” listen to his playing and singing. Again, “my singing, playing and capering subdues every Portuguese that approaches me.” In preparation for a trip to a convent, he writes, “I am furbishing up a string of highly polished saintly speeches for the occasion.” And later, “for flippery in crossing myself and goosishness in poking out my head I will turn my back to no one.” Beckford, then, works carefully to create a persona; he attentively watches people react to that image; and he self-consciously distances himself from his creation through selfabnegating humour with such references as “flippery,” “goosishness,” and “capering.”5

Yet that exterior image has never seemed sufficient or trustworthy, a circumstance that accounts for the central critical dilemma of Vathek. The novel’s puzzling mixture of opposites invites the reader to seek an inner author, the “real” Beckford accessible through psychological examination. Behind the varying judgments of Beckford’s novel lie critical assessments of his inner person. There are explanations that he was impotent, homosexual, bisexual, dominated by a Calvinist mother, grieving for his dead wife, a leisurely country gentleman, bitter, mad, vile, sadistic, a “barely socialized psychopath,” and so on.7 Without question, the novel is a document in Beckford’s life, as biographically relevant as, say, his construction of Fonthill. Nor is Beckford the type of artist whose work rises self-contained and impersonal above its historical contingencies. Vathek is a minor novel, interesting in itself certainly, but also of legitimate interest as a record of the tastes of its author and age.

It is true that he grew restive with his public self. In one entry, after worrying about a possible scrape with a “young friend,” he continues with the complaint often quoted by critics, “How tired I am of keeping a mask on my countenance. How tight it sticks—it makes me sore.” Significantly, he immediately follows this complaint with selfconscious observation upon it: “There’s a metaphor for you. I have all the fancies and levity of a child.”6 The ingredients of Beckford’s dilemma are here—the concern with image, the restiveness, and the recurrent self-consciousness that flickers over his thoughts and actions. He does not remove his mask but worries, instead, about getting into a scrape. For all the restiveness, the image of himself that Beckford contrived to project was exterior: he was concerned with his public reputation, with the appurtenances of a gentlemanly and leisured class, with his adeptness in Oriental matters, and

Nevertheless, for all the care and intelligence expended on it, the search for the inner, unifying Beckford has not been successful. Mme de Staël, to whom Beckford had given a copy of his travelogue Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, wrote to him, “You dream when you have nothing to describe. Imagination, which invents or represents objects, has never been given more freedom.” Likewise, André Parreaux has noted that seeing “le vrai visage” of Beckford behind his mask is a matter of great difficulty. V.S. Pritchett claimed that “everything Beckford writes is suspect, for truth and fiction are hard to separate in this incessantly revising and play-acting autobiographer.”8 And that is the dilemma. The search for the interior Beckford seems a necessary step to reconciling the opposites in his life and work, but that search cannot lead us past the contrived and public mask it was Beckford’s fate to wear. For both practical and theoretical reasons, the inner Beckford cannot be found. First, it is important to bear in mind the well-known dangers of moving back and forth between biography and art. One need not be unduly afraid of the Intentional Fallacy or of its reverse, biography based on interpretation of the artist’s works, to recognize the difficulties and dangers and, therefore, the need of great caution. Is Fielding the compassionate observer of the ambiguities of mercy in Tom Jones or the sterner remembrancer of justice in Amelia? And to what extent can we move from

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could scarcely restrain his anger, so fierce when aroused, though evanescent.”4

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his actual experience as magistrate of the Bow Street police court to the more sombre judicial tone of that later novel? But no matter how receptive we are to the intermingling of biography and art, we must allow for the great practical difficulties that interfere with our understanding of the relevant facts of Beckford’s life. Beckford was born to a public family with the expectation and the means of creating and protecting an appropriate public image. There is evidence that the suppression of Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents came as a result of family fears that its injudicious subjectivity might endanger a public career. “Neither Orlando nor Brandimart,” he wrote of the matter, “were ever more tormented by Daemons and Spectres in an enchanted Castle than Wm. Bd. in his own Hall by his nearest relations.”9 His marriage to Lady Margaret Gordon again seems the result of a family strategy, as was his short stay in Parliament. Lady Hamilton’s vivid letter to Beckford in 1780 attempting to dissuade him from a scandalous liaison in Venice stresses the public image that Beckford’s relations valued above all. What is the struggle against temptation for, she asks. “No less than honor, reputation and all that an honest and noble Soul holds most dear, while Infamy, eternal infamy (my soul freezes while I write the word), attends the giving way to the soft alluring of a criminal passion.”1 0 For most of his life Beckford seems to have resented and struggled against these impositions on his private self, but he did not throw them off. The private Beckford remained cloistered. Unlike Byron, Parreaux notes, Beckford would not play the role of outcast but tried to maintain the fiction of having a privileged place in the society of his time.1 1 In fact, much of the pathos of Beckford’s life results from the disparity between his compromised reputation and his expectations of an aristocratic, privileged position. Beckford chose an unhappy role to play, but the important point here is that he chose the public and proper role urged on him by his family. Beckford’s sexuality has been a key concern of critics looking for the inner explanation of Vathek’s opposites. In 1785 Beckford left England temporarily in the wake of a scandal over his relationship with the young William Courtenay. The opprobrium remaining from this incident together with continuing rumours plagued him throughout his life. But our understanding of this matter is enormously complicated by the practical difficulties of determining the facts, by the differ-

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ent theoretical models used to explain the facts, by the limitations of any sort of psychological explanation, and by the divergent uses that critics make of their conclusions even when they agree on the facts. We know that Beckford was married with two daughters, that his wife maintained her faith in him, and that he grieved her death. What lies behind the protective public face must be surmised. Beckford’s letters and papers contain helpful information, but, as noted, they were revised in places with the intention of portraying a desirable image; they are often oblique, and, as Boyd Alexander observes, Beckford “dramatises and exaggerates his moods and feelings.” Beckford himself lamented in his Journal, “I have more profligacy of tongue than of character and often do my utmost to make myself appear worse than I am in reality.”1 2 Further, even where the facts seem clear, there is the theoretical difficulty of knowing how to interpret them. What do we want to say—that he was homosexual, bisexual, merely self-indulgent without a strongly marked sexual orientation? Do we want to psychoanalyse him as a case of “narcissistic paederasty”? This last diagnosis is informative, a perceptive use of psychological criticism to explain the tensions in Beckford’s style, but at bottom it illustrates the limitations of attempts to explain what lurks behind the scenes of the mind. Its diagnosis, “narcissistic paederasty,”1 3 is not defined precisely enough for use as the key to a complex man’s very difficult personality. It includes childishness as well as child-love; it is metaphorical (“a self-devouring child wishing to rape his own image”); and it is governed by the need to find a psychological unity beneath the behavioural data. Like so many explanations of sexuality, it is an imposition of a unifying concept on separate facets of behaviour. This interpretation, then, leaves us in the biographical dilemma. It is meaningful precisely because it creates a unifying matrix for separate and heterogeneous elements in Beckford’s actions. As we have seen, we need interpretation imposed on the discrete items of Beckford’s life in order to understand them in relationship with each other. Yet, equally clearly, there is no justification for believing that whatever interpretation we may impose is historically verifiable truth. What indeed does it mean to “understand” the sources of a person’s acts and ideas? One’s actions stem from the intricate causal network that is one’s whole being; therefore, no explanation can be complete. Any attempt at explanation

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Critics whose thinking is determined by one explanatory model will regard another as lacking in the requisite rigour of method and verifiability. Many types of explanations have only practical justification and, therefore, offer no a priori reasons why their results may not be duplicated by another type of explanation. Thus, psychoanalysis may in practice accomplish in contemporary society what advice from village elders or purification rituals accomplished in other ages. Because these explanatory models enable a person better to function in his or her environment and a critic to unite disparate facts under a common hypothesis, we value them highly. A model or system of beliefs with explanatory powers will come to seem self-evident, its underlying assumptions justified by the results they produce. In Beckford’s case, some sort of sexual hypothesis may unite his behaviour patterns with the ambivalent closing moral of Vathek and with what we know of human behaviour from our own experiences and studies. These are significant results. They may lead us to accept the critic’s interpretation, but they leave unanswered such questions as whether we understand Beckford’s behaviour patterns as they really were and whether the psychological aspects of the hypothesis (for instance, “narcissistic paederasty”) are empirically verifiable concepts.

Further, even satisfying explanations leave undetermined the extent to which the critic’s own interpretations are mediated by personal and social codes.1 6 The subtleties of George Haggerty’s account of Beckford’s search for a “true heart’s friend”1 7 are an advance over earlier stereotypes or what he calls “essentialist” categorizations, but his views so clearly originate in a personal thesis concerning “love” that one accepts them with the same caution necessary in reading Timothy Mowl’s more commonsensical portrait of Beckford as robust bisexual horseman. The openness with which we now discuss sexual behaviour allows honest explorations, but falls easy prey to the temptations of biographical creation, which it is the purpose of this paper to delineate. Sex is far too interesting a matter to approach dispassionately. Self-congratulation on exposing the equivocations of past critics, the wrinkled pleasure of rehearsing Beckford’s perfervid letters, and the rivalries of competing models of Beckford’s desires all increase the risks that personal zest rather than objectivity accounts for our explanations. What in the end are the truth-value and the verification procedure of a claim that Beckford died “at the age of eighty-four—unrepentant, unreformed, and immature”?1 8 I choose this remark because it comes from a respected critic of Beckford; it is both adroit and compelling. Yet its virtues are dexterity of statement (entirely a verbal virtue) and ability to bring a number of biographical strands into a single formulation (a literary and logical virtue). Neat summation is appealing in a linear, logical mode such as biography, but life itself is confused, contradictory, and illogical. What counts as a literary virtue may be in fact a liability in the search for truth. As we have seen, such a claim has its own sort of meaningfulness, but we who understand ourselves only with difficulty may remain sceptical of the biographer’s ability to reduce another human’s inner being to clear patterns.1 9 Hume’s point was similar and adds to the theoretical obstacles we face in finding a “real” Beckford. Although we have a great “propension . . . to imagine something unknown and mysterious, connecting the parts” of our personal identity, that mysterious something is a feigned support and centre rather than a “true” entity. We know only the perceptions of others and ourselves rather than their causes. Instead of the “nice and subtile questions concerning personal identity [which] can never possibly be decided,” Hume notes that the mind “gives rise to some fiction or imaginary

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must be an abstraction, a grouping or a simplification of a myriad causes. It represents the critic’s decision about where to draw the line between significance and insignificance. And that decision must necessarily be personal and subjective. What shall we make, for instance, of an opinion that Vathek may embody Beckford’s complex reaction to his “possessive and autocratic mother”?1 4 Again, I find the suggestion reasonable but am not certain that any array of biographical facts, no matter how extensive, would persuade another reader less convinced of the importance of parental influence than I am. What then of his equally dominating father, Alderman Beckford, twice Lord Mayor of London, robust heterosexual and extrovert, who seems to have been both amused and impatient with the whims of his wilful child? Do our own explanatory models hold that fathers are not as influential as mothers?1 5 Or do we see a malign conjunction in their mutual influences? The point, of course, is that each of us will delineate the boundaries between significance and insignificance in different ways, ways owing as much to our explanatory models of child development as to objectively demonstrable facts about William Beckford.

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principle of union.” Our personal identity is a “grammatical” matter, a syntax of the self created from discrete parts (pp. 254, 262-63). Hume’s scepticism springs from philosophical analysis and properly concerns the existence of personal identity rather than its characteristics, which I claim Beckford and his critics are searching for. Back of Hume’s analysis, however, lies an English—and especially an eighteenth-century English—emphasis on the social bases of personality, the self as acted role. As Lord Chesterfield writes (notoriously but not atypically) to his son, “Manner is all, in everything; it is by manner only that you can please, and consequently rise.”2 0 And in his account of himself, Hume stresses his own manners and sociability: “I was a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour. . . . Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper.”2 1 An eighteenth-century gentleman might well doubt the inner self, for the class and the age place their interests in mannerly, social roles. For Hume, Chesterfield, and Beckford, one’s identity was created, a composed grammar or syntax of the self rather than a deep structure. We can return now to Beckford with some sympathy and understanding for his lot, that of replacing personal identity with a public face. In Vathek we have a work whose mixture of opposites seems to demand an author’s personality to give it unity. Yet the very prominent personality that Beckford interjects into Vathek stands aloof from his material, for Beckford is eager that we see him laughing and manipulating the diverse attitudes of Vathek without being compromised by naïve commitment to them. That public, mannered Beckford is all we have—but not all we need if we are to depart satisfied with a unified impression of Vathek. And so we create for Beckford an inner, unifying personality, aware now that it is our own creation. We do for the novel what Beckford did for it: we write an imaginatively embellished biography of the Caliph of Fonthill just as he wrote of Vathek Billah, ninth Caliph of the Abassides.2 2 We end up with creations—an aristocratic Beckford defying middle-class morality in Vathek, or an infantile, sexually insecure Beckford projecting his interests on the novel, or a “nervous, selfconscious, shoulder-shrugging” littérateur, or even the impersonal artist whose work “might not be due so much to [his] own neuroses as to certain conventions” within an artistic tradition.2 3 Our Beckford may or may not be the “true” Beckford,

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but this construction renders the novel more meaningful. Where conflicting opposites have deconstructed author and novel, the interpretive critic has reconstructed them. Thus, we find the many different Beckfords in the critical literature. To some extent these critics are creating their own selves in the person of Beckford, shaping the work so it will pass through the network of their own adaptive and defensive strategies, as Norman Holland has put it. To some extent, no doubt, their work is a more literary attempt to supply an orderly grammar of logical relationships to their perceptions of Vathek.2 4 In each of these cases lies the reality, now often noted in biographical as well as critical studies, that every subject is changed by the discourse that embodies it. William Epstein has observed that “the decline of faith in the unmediated, ontological status of ‘events’” must influence all but the most unexamined approaches to biography.2 5 Any Beckford that we (and he) perceive is a product of the interpretive codes that govern our cognitive being. What sort of man lies behind or transcends these codes is, as Hume would put it, a “nice and subtile question” (p. 262). For, indeed, whether we take our cue from Hume or Derrida, the absolute origin of perception is inseparable from the activity that records it. Whether we look at the issue practically, theoretically, or (to use eighteenth-century terms) in the clear light of reason, the Beckford we find is a creation of cultural and interpretive codes. The insights of Enlightenment English empiricism, the twists of postmodern criticism, and the reticence of polite and experienced observers of human nature can go no further than the public Beckford. There is no alternative to accepting the dilemma of the desirability and impossibility of biographical interpretation. A critic must put together a unified interpretation of the data, knowing all along that interpreted data is meaningful creation rather than fact independent of its expression. That is the dilemma of all biography; Beckford’s case only makes it especially clear. In the end, we come to something very close to Hume’s sceptical reflections on personal identity. We (and Beckford himself) know the “successive perceptions” (p. 253) of the novel and the life but lack the most distant notion of their underlying causes or, for that matter, of their basic unity. Yet we see Beckford struggling unsuccessfully to find himself and critics struggling to create narratives to bind together their perceptions. The effort in

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Notes 1. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 253. References are to this edition. 2. Roger Lonsdale writes: the “difficulty of attaching any clear meaning or satiric purpose to Vathek has also tended to force its readers back on the author itself for enlightenment.” See introduction, William Beckford, Vathek (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1983), p. viii. 3. Summaries of critical reactions can be found in Lonsdale, pp. xix-xxii; Dan J. McNutt, The EighteenthCentury Gothic Novel: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism and Selected Texts (New York: Garland, 1985), pp. 265-310; and Brian Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), pp. 128-35. 4. Fothergill, p. 134. See also Lonsdale, pp. x-xiv; and The Journal of William Beckford in Portugal and Spain 1787-1788, ed. Boyd Alexander (New York: John Day, 1955), p. 139. 5. Beckford, Journal, pp. 38, 41, 44, 76, 86, 92, and 225. For discussion of Beckford’s revisions and his reputation, see Guy Chapman, Beckford (New York: Scribner’s, 1937), p. 323; Timothy Mowl, William Beckford: Composing for Mozart (London: John Murray, 1998), passim; James Lees-Milne, William Beckford (Montclair, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun, 1979), p. 107; and McNutt, pp. 288, 301-4. 6. Beckford, Journal, p. 41. See also André Parreaux, William Beckford: Auteur de “Vathek” (Paris: Nizet, 1960), p. 76. 7. See John T. Farrell, “A Reinterpretation of the Major Literary Works of William Beckford,” Dissertation Abstracts 45 (1984), 1758A (University of Delaware); George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 136-51; and Mowl, p. 111. 8. Mme de Staël is quoted in William Beckford, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, ed. Robert J. Gemmett (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971), p. 26; Parreaux, p. 78; V.S. Pritchett, “Vile Body,” New Statesman 63 (1962), 265-66. 9. Chapman, p. 168. 10. Beckford, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, pp. 16-17.

17. Haggerty, p. 151. 18. Alexander, p. 15. 19. See Noel Chabani Manganyi, “Psychobiography and the Truth of the Subject,” Biography 6 (1983), 44-45, 50. 20. Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to His Son by the Earl of Chesterfield (Washington: M. Walter Dunne, 1901), 2:395. 21. Ernest Campbell Mossner, “My Own Life,” The Life of David Hume (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1954), p. 615. 22. See Kenneth W. Graham, “Implications of the Grotesque: Beckford’s Vathek and the Boundaries of Fictional Reality,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 23 (1978), 64. 23. James Henry Rieger, “Au Pied de la Lettre: Stylistic Uncertainty in Vathek,” Criticism 4 (1962), 310; James K. Folsom, “Beckford’s Vathek and the Tradition of Oriental Satire,” Criticism 6 (1964), 53. 24. Norman Holland, “Unity Identity Text Self,” PMLA 90 (1975), 816-17; Peter Nagourney, “The Basic Assumptions of Literary Biography,” Biography 1 (1978), 93. 25. William Epstein, Recognizing Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), p. 36.

FURTHER READING Biographies Alexander, Boyd. England’s Wealthiest Son: A Study of William Beckford. London: Centaur Press, 1962, 308 p. A highly regarded study of Beckford’s character that incorporates material from unpublished documents. Brockman, H. A. N. The Caliph of Fonthill. London: Werner Laurie, 1956, 219 p. A study of Beckford that focuses on his life at Fonthill Abbey. Fothergill, Brian. Beckford of Fonthill. London: Faber and Faber, 1979, 387 p. A detailed examination of Beckford’s life. Oliver, J. W. The Life of William Beckford. London: Oxford University Press, 1932, 343 p. Full-length biography of Beckford.

11. Parreaux, p. 77. 12. Quoted in Boyd Alexander, Life at Fonthill, 1807-1822 (London: Rupert Hart Davies, 1957), p. 26. 13. See Magdi Wahba, “Beckford, Portugal and ‘Childish Error,’” William Beckford of Fonthill, 1760-1844: Bicentary Essays, ed. Fatma Moussa Mahmoud (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1960), p. 58. 14. Lonsdale, introduction to Vathek, p. viii. 15. For differing ideas of parental influence, see Lonsdale, introduction to Vathek, p. viii; and Mowl, p. 31. 16. For discussions of limitations imposed by “conceptual paradigms” and hypotheses, see David E. Swalm, “Locating Belief in Biography,” Biography 3 (1980), 23; and Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984), pp. 10, 209.

Criticism Borges, Jorge Luis. “About William Beckford’s Vathek.” In Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms, pp. 137-40. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1943. Offers his assessment of the Palace of Subterranean Fire in Vathek, maintaining that the novel is an early example of the “uncanny.” Conant, Martha Pike. “The Imaginative Group.” In The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 1-72. New York: Columbia University Press, 1908. Explores Vathek’s unique qualities as well as its place in the history of the oriental tale in eighteenth-century England.

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each case must be unsuccessful, but, paradoxically, it is also understandable and necessary.

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Garrett, John. “Ending in Infinity: William Beckford’s Arabian Tale.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5, no. 1 (October 1992): 15-34. Attempts “to chart the terrain of Vathek from the dual perspective of East and West, which is how Beckford himself viewed it.” Gemmett, Robert James. William Beckford. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977, 189 p. A full-length survey of Beckford’s life and works. Graham, Kenneth W. “Beckford’s Vathek: A Study in Ironic Dissonance.” Criticism 14, no. 3 (summer 1972): 24352. Maintains that Beckford’s adept use of ironic dissonance in Vathek enabled him to “achieve a successful blending of the improbable and the true.” Haggerty, George E. “Literature and Homosexuality in the Late Eighteenth Century: Walpole, Beckford, and Lewis.” In Homosexual Themes in Literary Studies, edited by Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson, pp. 16778. New York: Garland, 1992. A comparative study that focuses on recurring homosexual themes in the works of Beckford, Horace Walpole, and Matthew Gregory Lewis. Hazlitt, William. “Mr. Beckford’s Vathek,” The Complete Works of William Hazlitt: Literary And Political Criticism, Vol. 19, edited by P. P. Howe, pp. 98-104. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1933. Originally published in the Morning Chronicle on October 20, 1823. Praises Vathek as a moral work, claiming that because of Beckford’s balanced use of irony and dispassionate depiction of evil, readers “take the virtuous side in self-defence, and are invited into a sense of humanity.”

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Hume, Robert D. “Exuberant Gloom, Existential Agony, and Heroic Despair: Three Varieties of Negative Romanticism.” In The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, edited by G. R. Thompson, pp. 109-27. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1974. Uses the term “Negative Romanticism” to classify writers who “are possessed by the Romantic discontents, but entirely lack the Romantic faith in man’s ability to transcend his condition or transform it” and who often exhibit a resultant attraction to dark forces, and considers the extent to which Vathek is a Negative Romantic novel. Keegan, P. Q. “Gleanings from Anglo-Oriental Literature.” The New Monthly Magazine, no. 66 (June 1877): 674-87. Focuses on Vathek as a study of the results of extreme selfishness and excess. More, Paul Elmer. “William Beckford.” In The Drift of Romanticism: Shelburne Essays. Eighth series, pp. 1-36. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913. Evaluates Beckford’s symbolic representation of Romantic egotism in Vathek.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Beckford’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: British Writers, Vol. 3; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 39, 213; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vol. 16; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; and Supernatural Fiction Writers.

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CHARLOTTE BRONTË (1816 - 1855)

(Also wrote under the pseudonym Currer Bell) English novelist and poet.

T

he author of vivid, skillfully constructed novels, Brontë created female characters who broke the traditional, nineteenth-century fictional stereotype of a woman as submissive and dependent, beautiful but ignorant. Her highly acclaimed Jane Eyre (1847) best demonstrates these attitudes: its heroine is a plain woman who displays intelligence, self-confidence, a will of her own, and moral righteousness. With an oeuvre consisting of four novels, some poems, and other writings from her youth, Brontë is hailed as a precursor of feminist novelists, and her works, often depicting the struggles and minor victories of everyday life, are considered early examples of literary realism. Her novels, particularly Jane Eyre and Villette (1853), have been discussed as part of the Gothic literary tradition, and contain elements of mystery, heightened passions, and the supernatural.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION The eldest surviving daughter in a motherless family of six, Brontë helped to raise her remaining brother, Branwell, and two sisters, Emily and Anne. Her father, a strict Yorkshire clergyman,

believed firmly in the values of self-education and forbade his family from socializing with other children. Intellectual growth was encouraged, however, and he introduced his family to the Bible and to the works of William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. In their youths, the Brontë siblings collaborated on a series of imaginative stories, plays, and poems set in the fictional land of Angria. Charlotte’s contribution to these tales, which were collected and published posthumously as Legends of Angria (1933), served as a catalyst for her mature works and marked the beginning of her interest in writing. For many years Brontë concealed her writing from her family. After the accidental discovery that Emily, too, secretly wrote verse, and that Anne shared their interest, the three published, at their own expense, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846). The sisters assumed masculine pseudonyms both to preserve their privacy and to avoid the patronizing treatment they believed critics accorded women writers. Poems sold only two copies, but Charlotte was undeterred and continued to write. Her first novel, The Professor (1857), was rejected by six publishers, but her next work, Jane Eyre, was accepted immediately. The work received lavish attention, was praised by Queen Victoria and George Eliot, and brought Brontë into popular literary circles, where she met William Makepeace

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Thackeray (to whom she dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre), Matthew Arnold, and Harriet Martineau. Brontë went on to publish two more novels, Shirley (1849) and Villette. During the writing of Shirley, Brontë experienced a series of personal tragedies that marked the beginning of a time of intense sorrow and loneliness. Within a period of about nine months, Brontë lost her three remaining siblings, first Branwell, then Emily, and finally Anne in the spring of 1849. After their deaths, Brontë found it very trying to write in solitude. She eventually began work on her final novel, Villette, basing its plot and characters on her unpublished The Professor. The year after Villette’s publication, in 1854, Brontë married Arthur Bell Nicholls. She became pregnant early in 1855, dying in March of that year from complications related to her pregnancy. The Professor was published after her death, in 1857.

MAJOR WORKS Many who have studied Brontë’s life and works have noted connections between the two, with each of her novels reflecting autobiographical details. In Jane Eyre, the young heroine spends many years as a student, and later a teacher, at a strict girls’ boarding school, Lowood. This fictional school bears a resemblance to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, the harsh institution where Brontë and her sisters were sent during their youths. As an adult Jane Eyre becomes a governess, a job also held by Brontë. The somber tone of Brontë’s second published novel, Shirley, reflects her grief following the deaths of her brother and two sisters. The heroine of the book, modeled after Emily, is a stoic figure whose courage serves as both a tribute to Brontë’s sister and a lesson to the reader. Shirley depicts the friendship of two women, Caroline Helstone and Shirley Keeldar, in the midst of conflict and upheaval in the industrial region of Yorkshire, England. Brontë’s travels to Brussels and her passionate attachment to Constantin Héger, a married schoolmaster in whose home she lived, are recreated in the student-teacher relationships and in the male characters of The Professor and Villette.

CRITICAL RECEPTION While Jane Eyre was immediately popular, initial critical reception of the novel varied. Several commentators admired the power and

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freshness of Brontë’s prose; others, however, termed the novel superficial and vulgar. Perhaps the best known early review, by Elizabeth Rigby (see Further Reading), flatly condemned Jane Eyre as “an anti-Christian composition.” Still other critics questioned the authorship of the novel. Some doubted that a woman was capable of writing such a work, while E. P. Whipple of the North American Review contended that the book was coauthored by a man and a woman. In succeeding generations, the critical assessment of Jane Eyre improved considerably, and for many years, Charlotte was considered the outstanding literary figure of the Brontë family. However, David Cecil’s essay (see Further Reading), published in the early 1930s, proclaimed Emily the greater writer and marked a temporary end of Charlotte’s critical superiority in the eyes of some critics. Influenced by Cecil’s article, these critics compared Charlotte’s works to those of Emily, disputing the originality and intellectual quality of Charlotte’s novels. Many studies of Brontë’s works are focused more on her life than on her writing. During the nineteenth century, reviewers often addressed the nature of Jane’s character; by the turn of the century, critics tended to assess Jane as a person of courage and integrity. Critical interpretations during the twentieth and twenty-first century have tended to be more specific in their approach. The characters of Jane, Rochester, and Bertha have been the subjects of detailed analyses, and reviewers have also debated the nature and import of Rochester’s disability. Critics frequently discuss the novel’s structure, its symbolism, and its autobiographical elements. Feminist literary criticism has given new impetus to a revaluation of the significance of Brontë’s attempts to depict through her fiction some of the struggles of women in the nineteenth century. While twentieth- and twenty-first-century discussions of the novel’s single theme vary, most scholars agree that in Jane Eyre Brontë wished to stress the possibility of equality in marriage. In terms of Brontë’s novels as examples of Gothic literature, many critics have posited that Brontë broadened the definition of Gothic. While not adhering strictly to the model of traditional Gothic literature, Brontë did borrow liberally from the genre, incorporating dark, mysterious, and supernatural elements into the plots of her novels. In his influential 1958 essay, Robert B. Heilman described Brontë’s works as “new Gothic” novels that expand the Gothic tradition by exploring the place of heightened passions in routine, daily life. Her use of Gothic literary elements, Heilman

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PRINCIPAL WORKS Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell [as Currer Bell, with Ellis and Acton Bell (pseudonyms of Emily and Anne Brontë)] (poems) 1846 Jane Eyre. An Autobiography [as Currer Bell] (novel) 1847 Shirley: A Tale [as Currer Bell] (novel) 1849 Villette [as Currer Bell] (novel) 1853 The Professor: A Tale [as Currer Bell] 1857 Emma (unfinished novel) 1860 *The Brontës’ Life and Letters (letters) 1908 Legends of Angria (juvenilia) 1933 Five Novelettes: Passing Events, Julia, Mina Laury, Henry Hastings, Caroline Vernon (novellas) 1971

Well, as I was saying, the Emperor got into bed. ‘Chevalier,’ says he to his valet, ‘let down those window-curtains, and shut the casement before you leave the room.’ Chevalier did as he was told, and then, taking up his candlestick, departed. In a few minutes the Emperor felt his pillow becoming rather hard, and he got up to shake it. As he did so a slight rushing noise was heard near the bed-head. His Majesty listened, but all was silent as he lay down again. Scarcely had he settled into a peaceful attitude of repose, when he was disturbed by a sensation of thirst. Lifting himself on his elbow, he took a glass of lemonade from the small stand which was placed beside him. He refreshed himself by a deep draught. As he returned the goblet to its station a deep groan burst from a kind of closet in one corner of the apartment. ‘Who’s there?’ cried the Emperor, seizing his pistols. ‘Speak, or I’ll blow your brains out.’ This threat produced no other effect than a short, sharp laugh, and a dead silence followed. The Emperor started from his couch, and, hastily throwing on a robe-de-chambre which hung over the back of a chair, stepped courageously to the haunted closet. As he opened the door something rustled. He sprang forward sword in hand. No soul or even substance appeared, and the rustling, it was evident, proceeded from the falling of a cloak, which had been suspended by a peg from the door. Half ashamed of himself he returned to bed.

PRIMARY SOURCES

Just as he was about once more to close his eyes, the light of the three wax tapers, which burned in a silver branch over the mantelpiece, was suddenly darkened. He looked up. A black, opaque shadow obscured it. Sweating with terror, the Emperor put out his hand to seize the bellrope, but some invisible being snatched it rudely from his grasp, and at the same instant the ominous shade vanished.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË (STORY DATE 1833)

‘Pooh!’ exclaimed Napoleon, ‘it was but an ocular delusion.’

*

This work includes letters written by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë.

SOURCE: Brontë, Charlotte. “Napoleon and the Spectre.” In Great Ghost Stories: 34 Classic Tales of the Supernatural, compiled by Robin Brockman, pp. 41520. New York: Gramercy Books, 2002. The following short story originally appeared in a manuscript titled “The Green Dwarf” (dated 10 July 1833-2 September 1833) and was first published in 1919.

‘Was it?’ whispered a hollow voice, in deep mysterious tones, close to his ear. Was it a delusion, Emperor of France? No! all thou hast heard and seen is sad forewarning reality. Rise, lifter of the Eagle Standard! Awake, slayer of the Lily Sceptre! Follow me, Napoleon, and thou shalt see more.’

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wrote, “released her from the patterns of the novel of society and therefore permitted the flowering of her real talent—the talent for finding and giving dramatic form to impulses and feelings which . . . increase wonderfully the sense of reality in the novel.” A number of critics have suggested that Brontë expanded Gothic conventions through her unconventional female characters. In her 1999 essay, for example, Toni Wein categorized Villette as a departure from traditional Gothic literature because the female characters, with their manipulations and survival mechanisms, are portrayed as heroic rather than evil. In a 1979 essay, Caesarea Abartis examined the ways in which Brontë both adhered to and deviated from Gothic convention, suggesting that Jane Eyre is a precursor to the modern romance novel.

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As the voice ceased, a form dawned on his astonished sight. It was that of a tall, thin man, dressed in a blue surtout edged with gold lace. It wore a black cravat very tightly round its neck, and confined by two little sticks placed behind each ear. The countenance was livid; the tongue protruded from between the teeth, and the eyes all glazed and bloodshot started with frightful prominence from their sockets. ‘Mon Dieu!’ exclaimed the Emperor, ‘what do I see? Spectre, whence cometh thou?’ The apparition spoke not, but gliding forward beckoned Napoleon with uplifted finger to follow. Controlled by a mysterious influence, which deprived him of the capability of either thinking or acting for himself, he obeyed in silence. The solid wall of the apartment fell open as they approached, and, when both had passed through, it closed behind them with a noise like thunder. They would now have been in total darkness had it not been for a dim light which shone round the ghost and revealed the damp walls of a long, vaulted passage. Down this they proceeded with mute rapidity. Ere long a cool, refreshing breeze, which rushed wailing up the vault and caused the Emperor to wrap his loose nightdress closer round, announced their approach to the open air. This they soon reached, and Nap found himself in one of the principal streets of Paris. ‘Worthy Spirit,’ said he, shivering in the chill night air, ‘permit me to return and put on some additional clothing. I will be with you again presently.’ ‘Forward,’ replied his companion sternly. He felt compelled, in spite of the rising indignation which almost choked him, to obey. On they went through the deserted streets till they arrived at a lofty house built on the banks of the Seine. Here the Spectre stopped, the gates rolled back to receive them, and they entered a large marble hall which was part concealed by a curtain drawn across, through the half transparent folds of which a bright light might be seen burning with dazzling lustre. A row of fine female figures, richly attired, stood before this screen. They wore on their heads garlands of the most beautiful flowers, but their faces were concealed by ghastly masks representing death’s-heads. ‘What is all this mummery?’ cried the Emperor, making an effort to shake off the mental

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shackles by which he was so unwillingly restrained, ‘Where am I, and why have I been brought here?’ ‘Silence,’ said the guide, lolling out still further his black and bloody tongue. ‘Silence, if thou wouldst escape instant death.’ The Emperor would have replied, his natural courage overcoming the temporary awe to which he had at first been subjected, but just then a strain of wild, supernatural music swelled behind the huge curtain, which waved to and fro, and bellied slowly out as if agitated by some internal commotion or battle of waving winds. At the same moment an overpowering mixture of the scents of moral corruption, blent with the richest Eastern odours, stole through the haunted hall. A murmur of many voices was now heard at a distance, and something grasped his arm eagerly from behind. He turned hastily round. His eyes met the well-known countenance of Marie Louise. ‘What! are you in this infernal place, too?’ said he. ‘What has brought you here?’ ‘Will your Majesty permit me to ask the same question of yourself?’ said the Empress, smiling. He made no reply; astonishment prevented him. No curtain now intervened between him and the light. It had been removed as if by magic, and a splendid chandelier appeared suspended over his head. Throngs of ladies, richly dressed, but without death’s-head masks, stood round, and a due proportion of gay cavaliers was mingled with them. Music was still sounding, but it was seen to proceed from a band of mortal musicians stationed in an orchestra near at hand. The air was yet redolent of incense, but it was incense unblended with stench. ‘Mon Dieu!’ cried the Emperor, ‘how is all this come about? Where in the world is Piche?’ ‘Piche?’ replied the Empress. ‘What does your Majesty mean? Had you not better leave the apartment and retire to rest?’ ‘Leave the apartment? Why, where am I?’ ‘In my private drawing-room, surrounded by a few particular persons of the Court whom I had invited this evening to a ball. You entered a few minutes since in your nightdress with your eyes fixed and wide open. I suppose from the astonishment you now testify that you were walking in your sleep.’

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GENERAL COMMENTARY ROBERT B. HEILMAN (ESSAY DATE 1958) SOURCE: Heilman, Robert B. “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘New’ Gothic.” In From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad: Essays Collected in Memory of James T. Hillhouse, edited by R. C. Rathburn and Martin Steinman, pp. 118-32. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958. In the following essay, Heilman illustrates how Brontë added depth and complexity to the Gothic heroines of her works.

In that characteristic flight from cliché that may plunge him into the recherché the critic might well start from The Professor and discover in it much more than is implied by the usual dismissal of it as Charlotte Brontë’s poorest work. He might speculate about Charlotte’s singular choice of a male narrator—the value of it, or even the need of it, for her. For through William Crimsworth she lives in Héger, making love to herself as Frances Henri: in this there is a kind of ravenousness, inturning, splitting, and doubling back of feeling. Through Crimsworth she experiences a sudden, vivid, often graceless mastery. But these notes on the possible psychology of the author are critically useful only as a way into the strange tremors of feeling that are present in a formally defective story. Pelet identifies “a fathomless spring of sensibility in thy breast, Crimsworth.” If Crimsworth is not a successful character, he is the channel of emotional surges that splash over a conventional tale of love: the author’s disquieting presence in the character lends a nervous, offcenter vitality. The pathos of liberty is all but excessive (as it is later in Shirley Keeldar and Lucy Snowe): Crimsworth sneers, “. . . I sprang from my bed with other slaves,” and rejoices, “Liberty I clasped in my arms . . . her smile and embrace revived my life.” The Puritan sentiment (to be exploited partially in Jane Eyre and heavily in Lucy Snowe) becomes tense, rhetorical, fiercely censorious; the self-righteousness punitive and even faintly paranoid. Through the frenetically Protestant Crimsworth and his flair for rebuke Charlotte notes the little sensualities of girl students (“parting her lips, as full as those of a hot-blooded Maroon”) and the coquettish yet urgent sexuality of Zoraide Reuter perversely

responding to Crimsworth’s ostensible yet not total unresponsiveness to her: “When she stole about me with the soft step of a slave, I felt at once barbarous and sensual as a pasha.” Charlotte looks beyond familiar surfaces. In Yorke Hunsden she notes the “incompatibilities of the ‘physique’ with the ‘morale.’” The explosive Byronic castigator has lineaments “small, and even feminine” and “now the mien of a morose bull, and anon that of an arch and mischievous girl.” In this version of the popular archetype, “rough exterior but heart of gold,” Charlotte brilliantly finds a paradoxical union of love and hate; she sees generosity of spirit sometimes appearing directly but most often translated into antithetical terms that also accommodate opposite motives— into god-like self-indulgence in truth-telling; almost Mephistophelian cynicism; sadism and even murderousness in words. Charlotte’s story is conventional; formally she is for “reason” and “real life”; but her characters keep escaping to glorify “feeling” and “Imagination.” Feeling is there in the story—evading repression, in author or in character; ranging from nervous excitement to emotional absorption; often tense and peremptory; sexuality, hate, irrational impulse, grasped, given life, not merely named and pigeonholed. This is Charlotte’s version of Gothic: in her later novels an extraordinary thing. In that incredibly eccentric history, The Gothic Quest, Montague Summers asserts that the “Gothic novel of sensibility . . . draws its emotionalism and psychology . . . from the work of Samuel Richardson.” When this line of descent continues in the Brontës, the vital feeling moves toward an intensity, a freedom, and even an abandon virtually non-existent in historical Gothic and rarely approached in Richardson. From Angria on, Charlotte’s women vibrate with passions that the fictional conventions only partly constrict or gloss over—in the center an almost violent devotedness that has in it at once a fire of independence, a spiritual energy, a vivid sexual responsiveness, and, along with this, selfrighteousness, a sense of power, sometimes selfpity and envious competitiveness. To an extent the heroines are “unheroined,” unsweetened. Into them there has come a new sense of the dark side of feeling and personality. The Professor ventures a little into the psychic darkness on which Villette draws heavily. One night Crimsworth, a victim of hypochondria, hears a voice saying, “In the midst of life we are in death,” and he feels “a horror of great darkness.” In his boyhood this same “sorceress” drew

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The Emperor immediately fell into a fit of catalepsy, in which he continued during the whole of that night and the greater part of the next day.

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him “to the very brink of a black, sullen river” and managed to “lure me to her vaulted home of horrors.” Charlotte draws on sex images that recall the note of sexuality subtly present in other episodes: “. . . I had entertained her at bed and board . . . she lay with me, . . . taking me entirely to her death-cold bosom, and holding me with arms of bone.” The climax is: “I repulsed her as one would a dreaded and ghastly concubine coming to embitter a husband’s heart toward his young bride; . . .” This is Gothic, yet there is an integrity of feeling that greatly deepens the convention. From childhood terrors to all those mysteriously threatening sights, sounds, and injurious acts that reveal the presence of some malevolent force and that anticipate the holocaust at Thornfield, the traditional Gothic in Jane Eyre has often been noted, and as often disparaged. It need not be argued that Charlotte Brontë did not reach the heights while using hand-me-down devices, though a tendency to work through the conventions of fictional art was a strong element in her make-up. This is true of all her novels, but it is no more true than her counter-tendency to modify, most interestingly, these conventions. In both Villette and Jane Eyre Gothic is used but characteristically is undercut. Jane Eyre hears a “tragic . . . preternatural . . . laugh,” but this is at “high noon” and there is “no circumstance of ghostliness”; Grace Poole, the supposed laugher, is a plain person, than whom no “apparition less romantic or less ghostly could . . . be conceived”; Charlotte apologizes ironically to the “romantic reader” for telling “the plain truth” that Grace generally bears a “pot of porter.” Charlotte almost habitually revises “old Gothic,” the relatively crude mechanisms of fear, with an infusion of the anti-Gothic. When Mrs. Rochester first tried to destroy Rochester by fire, Jane “baptized” Rochester’s bed and heard Rochester “fulminating strange anathemas at finding himself lying in a pool of water.” The introduction of comedy as a palliative of straight Gothic occurs on a large scale when almost seventy-five pages are given to the visit of the Ingram-Eshton party to mysterious Thornfield; here Charlotte, as often in her novels, falls into the manner of the Jane Austen whom she despised. When Mrs. Rochester breaks loose again and attacks Mason, the presence of guests lets Charlotte play the nocturnal alarum for at least a touch of comedy: Rochester orders the frantic women not to “pull me down or strangle

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me”; and “the two dowagers, in vast white wrappers, were bearing down on him like ships in full sail.” The symbolic also modifies the Gothic, for it demands of the reader a more mature and complicated response than the relatively simple thrill or momentary intensity of feeling sought by primitive Gothic. When mad Mrs. Rochester, seen only as “the foul German spectre—the Vampyre,” spreads terror at night, that is one thing; when, with the malicious insight that is the paradox of her madness, she tears the wedding veil in two and thus symbolically destroys the planned marriage, that is another thing, far less elementary as art. The midnight blaze that ruins Thornfield becomes more than a shock when it is seen also as the fire of purgation; the grim, almost roadless forest surrounding Ferndean is more than a harrowing stage-set when it is also felt as a symbol of Rochester’s closed-in life. The point is that in various ways Charlotte manages to make the patently Gothic more than a stereotype. But more important is that she instinctively finds new ways to achieve the ends served by old Gothic—the discovery and release of new patterns of feeling, the intensification of feeling. Though only partly unconventional, Jane is nevertheless so portrayed as to evoke new feelings rather than merely exercise old ones. As a girl she is lonely, “passionate,” “strange,” “like nobody there”; she feels superior, rejects poverty, talks back precociously, tells truths bluntly, enjoys “the strangest sense of freedom,” tastes “vengeance”; she experiences a nervous shock which is said to have a lifelong effect, and the doctor says “nerves not in a good state”; she can be “reckless and feverish,” “bitter and truculent”; at Thornfield she is restless, given to “bright visions,” letting “imagination” picture an existence full of “life, fire, feeling.” Thus Charlotte leads away from standardized characterization toward new levels of human reality, and hence from stock responses toward a new kind of passionate engagement. Charlotte moves toward depth in various ways that have an immediate impact like that of Gothic. Jane’s strange, fearful symbolic dreams are not mere thrillers but reflect the tensions of the engagement period, the stress of the wedding-day debate with Rochester, and the longing for Rochester after she has left him. The final Thornfield dream, with its vivid image of a hand coming through a cloud in place of the expected moon, is in the surrealistic vein that appears most sharply in the extraordinary pictures that Jane draws at Thornfield: here Charlotte is plumbing the psyche,

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She does this most thoroughly in her portrayal of characters and of the relations between them. If in Rochester we see only an Angrian-Byronic hero and a Charlotte wish-fulfillment figure (the two identifications which to some readers seem entirely to place him), we miss what is more significant, the exploration of personality that opens up new areas of feeling in intersexual relationships. Beyond the “grim,” the “harsh,” the eccentric, the almost histrionically cynical that superficially distinguish Rochester from conventional heroes, there is something almost Lawrentian: Rochester is “neither tall nor graceful”; his eyes can be “dark, irate, and piercing”; his strong features “took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his.” Without using the vocabulary common to us, Charlotte is presenting maleness and physicality, to which Jane responds directly. She is “assimilated” to him by “something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves”; she “must love” and “could not unlove” him; the thought of parting from him is “agony.” Rochester’s oblique amatory maneuvers become almost punitive in the Walter-to-Griselda style and once reduce her to sobbing “convulsively”; at times the love-game borders on a power-game. Jane, who prefers “rudeness” to “flattery,” is an instinctive evoker of passion: she learns “the pleasure of vexing and soothing him by turns” and pursues a “system” of working him up “to considerable irritation” and coolly leaving him; when, as a result, his caresses become grimaces, pinches, and tweaks, she records that, sometimes at least, she “decidedly preferred these fierce favors.” She reports, “I crushed his hand . . . red with the passionate pressure”; she “could not . . . see God for his creature,” and in her devotion Rochester senses “an earnest, religious energy.” Charlotte’s remolding of stock feeling reaches a height when she sympathetically portrays Rochester’s efforts to make Jane his mistress; here the stereotyped seducer becomes a kind of lost nobleman of passion, and of specifically physical

passion: “Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own. . . .” The intensity of the pressure which he puts upon her is matched, not by the fear and revulsion of the popular heroine, but by a responsiveness which she barely masters: “The crisis was perilous; but not without its charm . . .” She is “tortured by a sense of remorse at thus hurting his feelings”; at the moment of decision “a hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals . . . blackness, burning! . . . my intolerable duty”; she leaves in “despair”; and after she has left, “I longed to be his; I panted to return . . .”—and for the victory of principle “I abhorred myself . . . I was hateful in my own eyes.” This extraordinary openness to feeling, this escape from the bondage of the trite, continues in the Rivers relationship, which is a structural parallel to the Rochester affair: as in Rochester the old sex villain is seen in a new perspective, so in Rivers the clerical hero is radically refashioned; and Jane’s almost accepting a would-be husband is given the aesthetic status of a regrettable yielding to a seducer. Without a remarkable liberation from conventional feeling Charlotte could not fathom the complexity of Rivers—the earnest and dutiful clergyman distraught by a profound inner turmoil of conflicting “drives”: sexuality, restlessness, hardness, pride, ambition (“fever in his vitals,” “inexorable as death”); the hypnotic, almost inhuman potency of his influence on Jane, who feels “a freezing spell,” “an awful charm,” an “iron shroud”; the relentlessness, almost the unscrupulousness, of his wooing, the resultant fierce struggle (like that with Rochester), Jane’s brilliantly perceptive accusation, “. . . you almost hate me . . . you would kill me. You are killing me now”; and yet her mysterious near-surrender: “I was tempted to cease struggling with him—to rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my own.” Aside from partial sterilization of banal Gothic by dry factuality and humor, Charlotte goes on to make a much more important—indeed, a radical—revision of the mode: in Jane Eyre and in the other novels, as we shall see, that discovery of passion, that rehabilitation of the extra-rational, which is the historical office of Gothic, is no longer oriented in marvelous circumstance but moves deeply into the lesser known realities of human life. This change I describe as the change from “old Gothic” to “new Gothic.” The kind of appeal is the same; the fictional method is utterly different. When Charlotte went on from Jane Eyre to Shirley, she produced a book that for the student

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not inventing a weird décor. Likewise in the telepathy scene, which Charlotte, unlike Defoe in dealing with a similar episode, does her utmost to actualize: “The feeling was not like an electric shock; but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling: . . . that inward sensation . . . with all its unspeakable strangeness . . . like an inspiration . . . wondrous shock of feeling. . . .” In her flair for the surreal, in her plunging into feeling that is without status in the ordinary world of the novel, Charlotte discovers a new dimension of Gothic.

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of the Gothic theme is interesting precisely because on the face of things it would be expected to be a barren field. It is the result of Charlotte’s one deliberate venture from private intensities into public extensities: Orders in Council, the Luddites, technological unemployment in 1811 and 1812, a social portraiture which develops Charlotte’s largest cast of characters. Yet Charlotte cannot keep it a social novel. Unlike Warren, who in the somewhat similar Night Rider chose to reflect the historical economic crisis in the private crisis of the hero, Miss Brontë loses interest in the public and slides over into the private. The formal irregularities of Shirley—the stopand-start, zig-zag movement, plunging periodically into different perspectives—light up the divergent impulses in Charlotte herself: the desire to make a story from observed outer life, and the inability to escape from inner urgencies that with centrifugal force unwind outward into story almost autonomously. Passion alters plan: the story of industrial crisis is repeatedly swarmed over by the love stories. But the ultimate complication is that Charlotte’s duality of impulse is reflected not only in the narrative material but in two different ways of telling each part of the story. On the one hand she tells a rather conventional, open, predictable tale; on the other she lets go with a highly charged private sentiency that may subvert the former or at least surround it with an atmosphere of unfamiliarity or positive strangeness: the Gothic impulse. For Charlotte it is typically the “pattern” versus the “strange.” She describes “two pattern young ladies, in pattern attire, with pattern deportment”—a “respectable society” in which “Shirley had the air of a black swan, or a white crow. . . .” When, in singing, Shirley “poured round the passion, force,” the young ladies thought this “strange” and concluded: “What was strange must be wrong; . . .” True, Charlotte’s characters live within the established “patterns” of life; but their impulse is to vitalize forms with unpatterned feeling, and Charlotte’s to give play to unpatterned feeling in all its forms. She detects the warrior in the Reverend Matthew Helstone; reports that Malone the curate “had energy enough in hate”; describes Shirley weeping without apparent reason; recounts Mrs. Yorke’s paranoid “brooding, eternal, immitigable suspicion of all men, things, creeds, and parties”; portrays Hiram Yorke as scornful, stubborn, intolerant of superiors, independent, truculent, benevolent toward inferiors, his virtues surrounding an aggressive amour propre.

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Shirley is given a vehement, sweeping, uninhibited criticalness of mind; in her highly articulate formulations of incisive thought is released a furious rush of emotional energy. Within the framework of moral principles her ideas and feelings are untrammeled. She vigorously debunks clichés against charity, but against the mob she will defend her property “like a tigress”; to Yorke’s face she does a corrosive analysis of his personality; she attacks Milton in a fiery sweeping paean to Eve, the “mother” of “Titans”; in an almost explosive defense of love she attacks ignorant, chilly, refined, embarrassed people who “blaspheme living fire, seraph-brought from a divine altar”; when she insists that she must “love” before she marries, her “worldly” Uncle Sympson retorts, “Preposterous stuff!—indecorous—unwomanly!” Beside the adults who in ways are precocious are the precocious children—the Yorkes who have their parents’ free-swinging, uninhibited style of talk; Henry Sympson, having for his older cousin Shirley an attachment that borders on sexual feeling; and most of all Martin Yorke, aged fifteen, to whose excited pursuit of Caroline, almost irrelevant to plot or theme, Charlotte devotes two and a half zestful chapters. Martin is willing to help Caroline see Robert Moore, “her confounded sweetheart,” to be near her himself, and he plans to claim a reward “displeasing to Moore”; he thinks of her physical beauties. Once he gets between Robert and Caroline at goodbye time; “he half carried Caroline down the stairs,” “wrapped her shawl round her,” and wanted to claim a kiss. At the same time he feels “power over her,” he wants her to coax him, and he would like “to put her in a passion—to make her cry.” Charlotte subtly conveys the sexuality of his quest—a rare feat in the nineteenth-century novel. In Robert Moore, the unpopular mill-owner, Charlotte finds less social rightness or wrongness than his strength, his masculine appeal; her sympathy, so to speak, is for the underside of his personality. It “agreed with Moore’s temperament . . . to be generally hated”; “he liked a silent, sombre, unsafe solitude”; against the vandals his “hate is still running in such a strong current” that he has none left for other objects; he shows “a terrible half” of himself in pursuing rioters with “indefatigable, . . . relentless assiduity”; this “excitement” pleases him; sadistically he likes to “force” magistrates to “betray a certain fear.” He is the great lover of the story; he almost breaks Caroline’s heart before he marries her, and he even has a subtle impact on Shirley, teasingly communicated, though officially denied, by Charlotte.

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True to convention, the love stories end happily. But special feelings, a new pathos of love, come through. Louis Moore demands in a woman something “to endure, . . . to reprimand”; love must involve “prickly peril,” “a sting now and then”; for him the “young lioness or leopardess” is better than the lamb. There is that peculiarly tense vivacity of talk between lovers (the JaneRochester style), who discover a heightened, at times stagey, yet highly communicative rhetoric, drawing now on fantasy, now on moral conviction, verging now on titillating revelation, now on battle; a crafty game of love, flirting with an undefined risk, betraying a withheld avowal, savoring the approach to consummation, as if the erotic energy which in another social order might find a physical outlet were forcing itself into an electric language that is decorous but intimately exploratory. Between Louis Moore, who has “a thirst for freedom,” and Shirley, to whom finding love is the Quest for the Bridle (for “a master [whom it is] impossible not to love, and very possible to fear”), there is an almost disturbingly taut struggle, a fierce intensification of the duel between Mirabel and Millamant, complex feelings translated into wit, sheer debate, abusiveness of manner, and a variety of skirmishings; Louis, the lover, adopting the stance of power and consciously playing to fright; the pursuit of an elusive prey ending in a virtual parody of “one calling, Child! / And I replied, My Lord”; over all of this a singular air of strained excitement, of the working of underlying emotional forces that at the climax leads to a new frenetic intensification of style in Louis’s notebook: “Will you let me breathe, and not bewilder me? You must not smile at present. The world swims and changes round me. The sun is a dizzying scarlet blaze, the sky a violet vortex whirling over me.” I am a strong man, but I staggered as I spoke. All creation was exaggerated: colour grew more vivid: motion more rapid; life itself more vital. I hardly saw her for a moment; but I heard her voice— pitilessly sweet. . . . Blent with torment, I experienced rapture.

Nor does Charlotte’s flair for “unpatterned feeling” stop here: Shirley, the forceful leader who has already been called “a gentleman” and “captain,” languishes under the found bridle of the

masterful lover, whom she treats chillily and subjects to “exquisitely provoking” postponements of marriage; he calls her a “pantheress” who “gnaws her chain”; she tells him, “I don’t know myself,” as if engagement had opened to her eyes a previously undetected facet of her nature. Though “these freaks” continue, she is “fettered” at last; but not before the reader is radically stirred by the felt mysteries of personality. Before Charlotte, no love story tapped such strange depths, no consummation was so like a defeat. Here Charlotte is probing psychic disturbance and is on the edge of psychosomatic illness. The theme draws her repeatedly. When Caroline thinks Robert doesn’t love her, she suffers a long physical decline, described with painful fullness. She “wasted,” had a “broken spirit,” suffered “intolerable despair,” felt the “utter sickness of longing and disappointment,” at night found “my mind darker than my hiding-place,” had “melancholy dreams,” became “what is called nervous,” had “fears I never used to have,” “an inexpressible weight on my mind,” and “strange sufferings,” believed at times “that God had turned His face from her” and sank “into the gulf of religious despair.” Charlotte divines this: “People never die of love or grief alone; though some die of inherent maladies which the tortures of those passions prematurely force into destructive action.” Caroline lingers in illness, has fancies “inscrutable to ordinary attendants,” has a hallucination of talking to Robert in the garden. Shirley, having been bitten by a dog which she believes to be mad, becomes seriously ill; psychosomatic illness springs directly from Charlotte’s special sensitivity to the neurotic potential in human nature. A complementary awareness, that of the impact of the physical on the psychic, appears when she observes the “terrible depression,” the “inexpressible—dark, barren, impotent” state of mind of Robert when he is recovering from a gunshot wound. To give so much space to a lesser work is justifiable only because some of its contents are of high historico-critical significance. Though Shirley is not pulled together formally as well as Jane Eyre or even the more sprawling Villette, and though the characters are as wholes less fully realized, still it accommodates the widest ranging of an extraordinarily free sensibility. Constantly, in many different directions, it is in flight from the ordinary rational surface of things against which old Gothic was the first rebel in fiction; it abundantly contains and evokes, to adapt Charlotte’s own metaphor, “unpatterned feeling.” It turns up

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What Caroline yields to is his “secret power,” which affects her “like a spell.” Here again Charlotte records, as directly as she can, simple sexual attractiveness. From the problem novel she veers off into “new Gothic”; in old Gothic, her hero would have been a villain.

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unexpected elements in personality: resentfulness, malice, love of power; precocities and perversities of response; the multiple tensions of love between highly individualized lovers; psychic disturbances. And in accepting a dark magnetic energy as a central virtue in personality, Charlotte simply reverses the status of men who were the villains in the sentimental and old Gothic modes.

Finally, Paul and Lucy both see the spectre and are thus brought closer together: they have had what they call “impressions,” and through sharing the ghost they assume a shared sensibility. Paul says, “I was conscious of rapport between you and myself.” The rapport is real, though the proof of it is false; the irony of this is a subtle sophistication of Gothic.

Of the four novels, Villette is most heavily saturated with Gothic—with certain of its traditional manifestations (old Gothic), with the undercutting of these that is for Charlotte no less instinctive than the use of them (anti-Gothic), and with an original, intense exploration of feeling that increases the range and depth of fiction (new Gothic).

The responsiveness, the sensitivity, is the thing; many passages place “feeling” above “seeing” as an avenue of knowledge. Reason must be respected, for it is “vindictive,” but at times imagination must be yielded to, like a sexual passion at once feared and desired. There is the summer night when the sedative given by Madame Beck has a strange effect:

As in Jane Eyre, Charlotte can be skillful in anti-Gothic. When Madame Beck, pussyfooting in espionage, “materializes” in shocking suddenness, Lucy is made matter-of-fact or indignant rather than thrilled with fright. “No ghost stood beside me . . .” is her characteristic response to a Beck surprise. Once the spy, having “stolen” upon her victims, betrays her unseen presence by a sneeze: Gothic yields to farce. Technically more complex is Charlotte’s use of the legend of the nun supposedly buried alive and of the appearances of a visitant taken to be the ghost of the nun: Charlotte coolly distances herself from this by having Lucy dismiss the legend as “romantic rubbish” and by explaining the apparitions as the playful inventions of a giddy lover. True, she keeps the secret long enough to get a few old Gothic thrills from the “ghost,” but what she is really up to is using the apparitions in an entirely new way; that is, for responses that lie beyond the simplicities of terror.

Imagination was roused from her rest, and she came forth impetuous and venturous. With scorn she looked on Matter, her mate—

First, the apparitions are explained as a product of Lucy’s own psychic state, the product, Dr. John suggests, of “long-continued mental conflict.” In the history of Gothic this is an important spot, for here we first see the shift from stock explanations and responses to the inner human reality: fiction is slowly discovering the psychic depths known to drama for centuries. Then, when Lucy next sees the nun, she responds in a way that lies entirely outside fictional convention: “I neither fled nor shrieked . . . I spoke . . . I stretched out my hand, for I meant to touch her.” Not that Lucy is not afraid, but that she is testing herself—an immense change from the expectable elementary response: the frisson disappears before the complexer action that betokens a maturing of personality.

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“Rise!” she said; “Sluggard! this night I will have my will; nor shalt thou prevail.” “Look forth and view the night!” was her cry; and when I lifted the heavy blind from the casement close at hand—with her own royal gesture, she showed me a moon supreme, in an element deep and splendid. . . . She lured me to leave this den and follow her forth into dew, coolness, and glory.

There follows the most magnificent of all Charlotte’s nocturnes: that vision of the “moonlit, midnight park,” the brilliance of the fete, the strange charm of places and people, recounted in a rhythmical, enchanted style (the “Kubla Khan” mode) which at first reading gives the air of a dream mistaken for reality to what is in fact reality made like a dream. This is a surrealistic, trancelike episode which makes available to fiction a vast new territory and idiom. The surrealistic is, despite Montague Summers, one of the new phases of Gothic, which in its role of liberator of feeling characteristically explores the nonnaturalistic: to come up, as here, with a profounder nature, or a nature freshly, even disturbingly, seen. The surrealism of Lucy’s evening is possible only to a special sensitivity, and it is really the creation of this sensitivity, in part pathological, that is at the apex of Charlotte’s Gothic. In The Professor the tensions in the author’s contemplation of her own experience come into play; in Shirley various undercurrents of personality push up into the social surfaces of life; in Jane Eyre moral feeling is subjected to the remolding pressures of a newly vivid consciousness of the diverse

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These strains prepare us for the high point in Charlotte’s new Gothic—the study of Lucy’s emotional collapse and near breakdown when vacation comes and she is left alone at the school with “a poor deformed and imbecile pupil.” “My heart almost died within me; . . . My spirits had long been gradually sinking; now that the prop of employment was withdrawn, they went down fast.” After three weeks, storms bring on “a deadlier paralysis”; and “my nervous system could hardly support” the daily strain. She wanders in the street: “A goad thrust me on, a fever forbade me to rest; . . .” She observes a “growing illusion” and says, “. . . my nerves are getting overstretched; . . .” She feels that “a malady is growing upon” her mind, and she asks herself, “How shall I keep well?” Then come “a peculiarly agonizing depression”; a nine-days storm: “a strange fever of the nerves and blood”; continuing insomnia, broken only by a terrifying nightmare of alienation. She flees the house, and then comes the climactic event of her going to a church and despite the intensity of her Protestant spirit entering the confessional to find relief. From now on, overtly or implicitly, hypochondria and anxiety keep coming into the story—the enemies from whose grip Lucy must gradually free herself. At a concert she spotted the King as a fellow-victim of “that strangest spectre, Hypochondria,” for on his face she saw its marks, whose meaning, “if I did not know, at least I felt, . . .” When, after her return to Beck’s on a rainy night, things are not going well, a letter from Dr. John is “the ransom from my terror,” and its loss drives her almost to frenzy. She describes night as “an unkindly time” when she has strange fancies,

doubts, the “horror of calamity.” She is aware of her “easily-deranged temperament.” Beyond this area of her own self-understanding we see conflicts finding dramatic expression in her almost wild acceptance of Rachel’s passionate acting of Phèdre (“a spectacle low, horrible, immoral”), which counterbalances her vehement condemnation of a fleshy nude by Rubens (one of the “materialists”). Paul identifies her, in a figure whose innocence for him is betrayed by the deep, if not wholly conscious, understanding that leads Charlotte to write it: “a young she wild creature, new caught, untamed, viewing with a mixture of fire and fear the first entrance of the breaker in.” There is not room to trace Lucy’s recovery, especially in the important phase, the love affair with Paul which is related to our theme by compelling, as do the Jane-Rochester and Louis MooreShirley relationships in quite different ways, a radical revision of the feelings exacted by stereotyped romance. What is finally noteworthy is that Charlotte, having chosen in Lucy a heroine with the least durable emotional equipment, with the most conspicuous neurotic element in her temperament, goes on through the history of Lucy’s emotional maturing to surmount the need for romantic fulfillment and to develop the aesthetic courage for a final disaster—the only one in her four novels. Some years ago Edmund Wilson complained of writers of Gothic who “fail to lay hold on the terrors that lie deep in the human soul and that cause man to fear himself” and proposed an anthology of horror stories that probe “psychological caverns” and find “disquieting obsessions.” This is precisely the direction in which Charlotte Brontë moved, especially in Lucy Snowe and somewhat also in Caroline Helstone and Shirley Keeldar; this was one aspect of her following human emotions where they took her, into many depths and intensities that as yet hardly had a place in the novel. This was the finest achievement of Gothic. Gothic is variously defined. In a recent book review Leslie Fiedler implies that Gothic is shoddy mystery-mongering, whereas F. Cudworth Flint defines the Gothic tradition, which he considers “nearly central in American literature,” as “a literary exploration of the avenues to death.” For Montague Summers, on the other hand, Gothic was the essence of romanticism, and romanticism was the literary expression of supernaturalism. Both these latter definitions, though they are impractically inclusive, have suggestive value. For originally Gothic was one of a number of aesthetic

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impulses of sexuality; and in Villette the feeling responses to existence are pursued into sufferings that edge over into disorder. The psychology of rejection and alienation, first applied to Polly, becomes the key to Lucy, who, finding no catharsis for a sense of desolation, generates a serious inner turmoil. She suffers from “a terrible oppression” and then from “anxiety lying in wait on enjoyment, like a tiger crouched in a jungle . . . his fierce heart panted close against mine; . . . I knew he waited only for sun-down to bound ravenous from his ambush.” Depression is fed by the conflict between a loveless routine of life and her longings, which she tried to put down like “Jael to Sisera, driving a nail through their temples”; but this only “transiently stunned” them and “at intervals [they] would turn on the nail with a rebellious wrench: then did the temples bleed, and the brain thrill to its core.”

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developments which served to breach the “classical” and “rational” order of life and to make possible a kind of response, and a response to a kind of thing, that among the knowing had long been taboo. In the novel it was the function of Gothic to open horizons beyond social patterns, rational decisions, and institutionally approved emotions; in a word, to enlarge the sense of reality and its impact on the human being. It became then a great liberator of feeling. It acknowledged the nonrational—in the world of things and events, occasionally in the realm of the transcendental, ultimately and most persistently in the depths of the human being. (Richardson might have started this, but his sense of inner forces was so overlaid by the moralistic that his followers all ran after him only when he ran the wrong way.) The first Gothic writers took the easy way: the excitement of mysterious scene and happening, which I call old Gothic. Of this Charlotte Brontë made some direct use, while at the same time tending toward humorous modifications (anti-Gothic); but what really counts is its indirect usefulness to her: it released her from the patterns of the novel of society and therefore permitted the flowering of her real talent—the talent for finding and giving dramatic form to impulses and feelings which, because of their depth or mysteriousness or intensity or ambiguity, or of their ignoring or transcending everyday norms of propriety or reason, increase wonderfully the sense of reality in the novel. To note the emergence of this “new Gothic” in Charlotte Brontë is not, I think, to pursue an old mode into dusty corners but rather to identify historically the distinguishing, and distinguished, element in her work.

TITLE COMMENTARY Jane Eyre E. P. WHIPPLE (ESSAY DATE OCTOBER 1848) SOURCE: Whipple, E. P. “Novels of the Season.” The North American Review 67, no. 141 (October 1848): 35470. In the following excerpt from a review of Jane Eyre, Whipple presumes the novel was written largely by Patrick Branwell Brontë—due to the novel’s “masculine tone”—with additional material supplied by the Brontë sisters. Whipple also asserts that the Brontës’ portrayal of the darker side of humanity is not representative of most people, but rather of “a sense of the depravity of human nature peculiarly their own.”

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Not many months ago, the New England States were visited by a distressing mental epidemic, passing under the name of the “Jane Eyre fever,” which defied all the usual nostrums of the established doctors of criticism. Its effects varied with different constitutions, in some producing a soft ethical sentimentality, which relaxed all the fibres of conscience, and in others exciting a general fever of moral and religious indignation. It was to no purpose that the public were solemnly assured, through the intelligent press, that the malady was not likely to have any permanent effect either on the intellectual or moral constitution. The book which caused the distemper would probably have been inoffensive, had not some sly manufacturer of mischief hinted that it was a book which no respectable man should bring into his family circle. Of course, every family soon had a copy of it, and one edition after another found eager purchasers. The hero, Mr. Rochester, (not the same person who comes to so edifying an end in the pages of Dr. Gilbert Burnet,) became a great favorite in the boarding-schools and in the worshipful society of governesses. That portion of Young America known as ladies’ men began to swagger and swear in the presence of the gentler sex, and to allude darkly to events in their lives which excused impudence and profanity. While fathers and mothers were much distressed at this strange conduct of their innocents, and with a paradonable despair were looking for the dissolution of all the bonds of society, the publishers of Jane Eyre announced Wuthering Heights, by the same author. When it came, it was purchased and read with universal eagerness; but, alas! it created disappointment almost as universal. It was a panacea for all the sufferers under the epidemic. Society returned to its old condition, parents were blessed in hearing once more their children talk common sense, and rakes and battered profligates of high and low degree fell instantly to their proper level. Thus ended the last desperate attempt to corrupt the virtue of the sturdy descendants of the Puritans. The novel of Jane Eyre, which caused this great excitement, purports to have been edited by Currer Bell, and the said Currer divides the authorship, if we are not misinformed, with a brother and sister. The work bears the marks of more than one mind and one sex, and has more variety than either of the novels which claim to have been written by Acton Bell. The family mind is strikingly peculiar, giving a strong impression of unity, but it is still male and female. From the masculine tone of Jane Eyre, it might pass altogether as the

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The popularity of Jane Eyre was doubtless due in part to the freshness, raciness, and vigor of mind it evinced; but it was obtained not so much by these qualities as by frequent dealings in moral paradox, and by the hardihood of its assaults upon the prejudices of proper people. Nothing causes more delight, at least to one third of every community, than a successful attempt to wound the delicacy of their scrupulous neighbours, and a daring peep into regions which acknowledge the authority of no conventional rules. The authors of Jane Eyre have not accomplished this end without an occasional violation of probability and considerable confusion of plot and character, and they have made the capital mistake of supposing that an artistic representation of character and manners is a literal imitation of individual life. The consequence is, that in dealing with vicious personages they confound vulgarity with truth,

and awaken too often a feeling of unmitigated disgust. The writer who colors too warmly the degrading scenes through which his immaculate hero passes is rightly held as an equivocal teacher of purity; it is not by the bold expression of blasphemy and ribaldry that a great novelist conveys the most truthful idea of the misanthropic and the dissolute. The truth is, that the whole firm of Bell & Co. seem to have a sense of the depravity of human nature peculiarly their own. It is the yahoo, not the demon, that they select for representation; their Pandemonium is of mud rather than fire.

CAESAREA ABARTIS (ESSAY DATE 1979) SOURCE: Abartis, Caesarea. “The Ugly-Pretty, DullBright, Weak-Strong Girl in the Gothic Mansion.” Journal of Popular Culture 13 (1979): 257-63. In the following essay, Abartis illustrates how Jane Eyre serves as “the prototype for the modern Gothic” or romance novel in which a female protagonist overcomes personal challenges and escapes peril to win the love of a man to whom she will remain “subordinate economically and socially.”

If you ask a reader of modern Gothic novels to describe the heroine, you are liable to get an impossible portrait: the Gothic heroine is passive, weak and virginal, but simultaneously, or under another name and in another novel, she is passionate, strong and independent. How do these apparently paradoxical types function in the Gothic formula? In the former type of plot someone else—usually the hero—wins; in the latter type she loses. These types can be seen clearly in four novels: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Victoria Holt’s Kirkland Revels (1962) and Claudette Nicole’s House at Hawk’s End (1971).1 If I may be permitted to judge a book by its cover, I can derive some of the chief elements of the Gothic novel from the artist’s cover painting. Always there is a young and beautiful woman facing front, with a high wind scattering her hair about. Often she is wearing a nightgown. Invariably she is running away from a gloomy castle or Victorian mansion which has a light in only one window. Less often there is a second figure on the cover—a man—strong, handsome, with the symbols of wealth and power. He may be riding a horse in pursuit of the heroine, or perhaps standing some distance behind her, watching her. The composition of the cover depicts, in short, the character, plot and setting of the Gothic novel: in

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composition of a man, were it not for some unconscious feminine peculiarities, which the strongest-minded woman that ever aspired after manhood cannot suppress. These peculiarities refer not only to elaborate descriptions of dress, and the minutiæ of the sick-chamber, but to various superficial refinements of feeling in regard to the external relations of the sex. It is true that the noblest and best representations of female character have been produced by men; but there are niceties of thought and emotion in a woman’s mind which no man can delineate, but which often escape unawares from a female writer. There are numerous examples of these in Jane Eyre. The leading characteristic of the novel, however, and the secret of its charm, is the clear, distinct, decisive style of its representation of character, manners, and scenery; and this continually suggests a male mind. In the earlier chapters, there is little, perhaps, to break the impression that we are reading the autobiography of a powerful and peculiar female intellect; but when the admirable Mr. Rochester appears, and the profanity, brutality, and slang of the misanthropic profligate give their torpedo shocks to the nervous system,—and especially when we are favored with more than one scene given to the exhibition of mere animal appetite, and to courtship after the manner of kangaroos and the heroes of Dryden’s plays,—we are gallant enough to detect the hand of a gentleman in the composition. There are also scenes of passion, so hot, emphatic, and condensed in expression, and so sternly masculine in feeling, that we are almost sure we observe the mind of the author of Wuthering Heights at work in the text.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS LAUDS THE TITLE CHARACTER OF JANE EYRE

[No] heroine of Thackeray’s except Becky Sharp seems to me quite so alive as the Jane Eyre of Charlotte Brontë, whom I do not class with him intellectually, any more than I class her artistically with the great novelists. . . . She was the first English novelist to present the impassioned heroine; impassioned not in man’s sense but woman’s sense, in which love purifies itself of sensuousness without losing fervor. . . . Old-fashioned, I have suggested; but now, after reading [the scene in which Rochester’s mad wife makes her first appearance], I find that hardly the word. It is old-fashioned only in the sense of being very simple, and of a quaint sincerity. The fact is presented, the tremendous means are used, with almost childlike artlessness; but the result is of high novelty. Few would have had the courage to deal so frankly with the situation, to chance its turning ludicrous, or would have had the skill to unfold its fine implications of tenderness, and keep them undamaged by the matter-of-fact details. But Charlotte Brontë did all this, and did it out of the resources of her own unique experience of life, which never presented itself in the light of common day, but came to her through strange glooms, and in alternations of native solitude and alien multitude, at Haworth and in Brussels. The whole story, so deeply of nature, is steeped in the supernatural; and just as paradoxically the character of Jane Eyre lacks that final projection from the author which is the supreme effect of art, only because she feels it so intensely that she cannot detach it from herself.

The prototype for the modern Gothic is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Brontë exploits all the motifs and themes of the Gothic novel, but in an ambiguous way. Jane is an impoverished orphan who is neglected and abused by her aunt. Jane eventually becomes a governess to a child at Thornfield Hall where the master is Edward Rochester, a moody, brusque, older man. She almost marries Rochester before the secret of the third floor is made known: Rochester has a wife— demented and bestial. Ultimately, of course, Jane and Rochester marry, but only after his first wife has died in the fire which destroys the manor and cripples and blinds Rochester in a poetic punishment for his bigamous desires.

SOURCE: Howells, William Dean. “Heroines of Nineteenth-Century Fiction.” Harper’s Bazaar 33, no. 50 (15 December 1900): 2094-100.

a rich and exotic setting the lovely heroine meets with some vague danger from which she must escape.

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The modern Gothic has its roots in the eighteenth- and nineteenth century thrillers like Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796), Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The purpose of these novels is presumably to elicit and purge feelings of fear and horror in the reader. This purgation is achieved by setting the story in castles appointed with secret passages, ghosts, corpses, spooky sounds and A Dark Secret. In the modern Gothic the supernatural has been pretty much suppressed and rationalized, while the heroine and her romantic interests have assumed the center of the novel. Thus in Kirkland Revels, what seems to be an apparition is ultimately explained logically; in House at Hawk’s End, just as important as the solution to the mystery is the choice of a lover from the three men who present themselves to the heroine. The Gothic novel has moved from ghostly horrors to love fantasies and this shift has sociological implications. This category of popular fiction is written almost, or perhaps exclusively, for women, about women and by women (the pseudonyms are nearly always female even though some of the writers are male). In the past, it has been dismissed from serious study because it is subliterary, but it is an immensely popular form, as I have discovered from casual inquiries of women and from examining bookracks in supermarkets, drugstores and bookstores.2 The Gothic novel gains significance, if not from its artistry then from its overwhelming popularity.

Jane is the picture of an outsider. She is an orphan; more, she is a poor orphan; more than that, a homely, unloved, poor orphan. Almost obsessively and from the first page, Jane emphasizes what she calls her “physical inferiority” (ch. 1, 5), that is, her unattractive face and slight

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It was not my habit to be disregardful of appearance, or careless of the impression I made: on the contrary, I ever wished to look as well as I could, and to please as much as my want of beauty would permit. I sometimes regretted that I was not handsomer. I sometimes wished to have rosy cheeks, a straight nose, and small cherry mouth; I desired to be tall, stately, and finely developed in figure; I felt it a misfortune that I was so little, so pale, and had features so irregular and marked. (ch. 11, 86)

Jane’s description of her physical appearance is a key to her personality; she has irregular features and irregular views, but she longs for “regularity.” Jane sees herself as different by temperament and education from many of the people with whom she associates. Thus, she looks down on uneducated vulgar servants like Sophie, Grace Poole and even Mrs. Fairfax, none of whom can be a companion to her soul, but Jane is also alienated from the rich and beautiful people because she is poor and homely. From childhood she has been strong, passionate and independent—when she strikes back at John Reed who is bullying her, when she rebels and denounces Mrs. Reed for her coldness, when she decides to leave Lowood to look for a position as governess, when she leaves Rochester because she cannot live with him unmarried, when she resists St. John’s proposal despite his almost hypnotic power over her. She is a restless and curious woman. At Thornfield she occasionally separates herself from the household to go to the roof of the house and to look toward the horizon and imagine the variety and adventure of the world that she can never see: . . . then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and was good in Adele; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in and wished to behold. . . . It is

in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrowminded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. (ch. 12, 96-7)

This strong feminist statement is, however, undermined by the plot. Jane exhibits heroic discontent and eccentricity—traits that the readers of the novel identify with and admit to themselves only in their fantasies where wealth and status are bequeathed upon them so that their discontent can be relieved and their eccentricity redeemed. It is ironic that even Jane, original and passionate as she avows herself, is subdued to a conventional ending. She does not travel to faraway cities and meet with vital and various people. The closest she gets to attaining this dream is to marry a well-traveled man. The master of Thornfield, Edward Rochester, falls in love with her despite the fact that she is “poor and obscure, small and plain” (ch. 23, 224). He admires her sincerity, intelligence, passion and strength and promises to be true to her: “To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts—when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break—at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent—I am ever tender and true.” (ch. 24, 228-9)

When Rochester proposes to Jane, he says she is his “equal” and his “likeness” (ch. 23, 223). Rochester perceives their relationship in terms of power. When they at last reveal their love to each other, after having held back the admission out of mingled pride and humility, Rochester says to her: “Jane, you please me, and you master me—

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figure. Years later, after Jane has grown up, she meets her nursemaid Bessie, who agrees in that evaluation, “You were no beauty as a child.” Jane reponds with a rueful smile: “I felt that it was correct, but I confess I was not quite indifferent to its import: at eighteen most people wish to please, and the conviction that they have not an exterior likely to second that desire brings anything but gratification” (ch. 10, 80). On her first day as governness, she dresses herself carefully:

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you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart” (ch. 24, 229). Jane is also aware of her power over him: It little mattered whether my curiosity irritated him; I knew the pleasure of vexing and soothing him by turns; it was one I chiefly delighted in, and a sure instinct always prevented me from going too far: beyond the verge of provocation I never ventured; on the extreme brink I like to try my skill (ch. 26, 138)

She is his subordinate economically and socially, but emotionally she enjoys power over him. Jane is an active principle in the novel, not a damsel in distress. She even performs the function of the savior—almost always reserved to the male protagonist in more recent examples of the Gothic novel. She saves Rochester’s life at least once and helps him twice. The first time she meets him, he falls off his horse and he must lean on her because he has sprained his ankle. She saves his life when she wakes in the night to smell smoke and puts out the fire that Bertha had started in Rochester’s bedroom. At the end, Jane returns to a Rochester who has been crippled and blinded in the fire that burns down Thornfield Hall. Her return lifts him out of his depression. In a sense, she is no longer physically inferior to him (because he has lost a hand and an eye), nor is she financially dependent on him (because of her inheritance). She says to him, “I love you better now, when I can really be useful to you, than I did in your state of proud independence, when you disdained every part but that of the giver and protector” (ch. 37, 392). The ending is not the ending of a typical Gothic novel. Paradoxically it is Jane’s Victorian scruples that save her from being a conventional Gothic heroine. It is not a ghost or murderer that chases Jane from Thornfield Hall but the revelation of the existence of Rochester’s first wife. The Gothic machinery grinds to a halt; what propels the rest of the book is Jane’s struggle with the immorality of her love. If the questions of guilt and religion were removed, the book could conceivably end earlier with, for example, a fire on the day after Rochester’s confession. The conflagration could remove the inconvenient first wife, but not harm Rochester. He could save Jane and thereby prove his love. This would be a more typical modern Gothic ending. Apparently, however, Rochester’s payment of a hand and an eye is essential to the scheme of retribution. When she returns to him at the end, it is not, however, as his equal. Implicit in the final chapter is the

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reversal of their roles: whereas before he was the powerful father-figure and she the child, at the end she is the mother-figure and he the helpless child. Another Gothic novel in which the heroine “saves” the hero but still submits to convention and domestic joys is Rebecca. The narrator is, like Jane Eyre, a shy and sensitive orphan. She is not a governess but she performs an analogous service— she is a companion to a wealthy woman. Like Jane, she is considerably younger than her husband—she is twenty-one, he is in his forties and very much a father-figure to her.3 The heroine is throughout the novel known only as the second Mrs. de Winter. We never learn her maiden name, nor her given name. There is a story in that omission, for it is her function to become completely the second Mrs. de Winter and to assume control of Manderley, the centuries-old ancestral home. The Great Old House is the indispensable setting of the Gothic novel and the symbol of what the Gothic heroine, typically lower class but welleducated and “different,” aspires to and deserves. As in this novel, the house is often important enough to be named, and it is symbolic of the wealth and states that the reader yearns for and the heroine achieves. The Great House is not, however, associate with political power and not the symbol of what a Lady Macbeth aspires to. It is a glorified domestic dwelling—that which will make the little woman of the house into the lady; it is a middle-class housewife’s dream. Once the heroine has possession of the house, the emphasis is on conspicuous consumption—on the magnificent parties, the dinners, the furnishings, the repartee of the guests. (We will never find a Gothic novel set in an efficiency apartment.) When Maximilian de Winter brings his young bride to Manderley, she tries to accustom herself to the elegance of the estate: I leant back in my chair, glancing about the room, trying to instil into myself some measure of confidence, some genuine realisation that I was here, at Manderly, the house of the picture postcard, the Manderley that was famous. I had to teach myself that all this was mine now, mine as much as his, the deep chair I was sitting in, that mass of books stretching to the ceiling, the pictures on the walls, the gardens, the woods, the Manderley I had read about, all of this was mine now because I was married to Maxim. (ch. 7, 69)

That is her struggle throughout the book—to achieve the true possession of Manderley, to assume her rightful place as Mrs. de Winter, lady of leisure.

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Out of her insecurity, the second Mrs. de Winter suspects that everyone, the servants and friends, admired the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca, and she believes that Maxim still loves his first wife. The heroine’s problems consist of getting society and the servants to accept her. Maxim finally confides to his wife that he killed Rebecca, that she was debauched and wanted to ruin him. The last fourth of the book, after the dark secret is revealed, is about the coroner’s inquest into the death of Rebecca and the magistrate’s investigation. Now the roles of hero and heroine are reversed. Like Jane Eyre, the second Mrs. de Winter must comfort her husband: Maxim came over to me where I was standing by the fireplace. I held out my arms to him and he came to me like a child. I put my arms around him and held him. We did not say anthing for a long time. I held him and comforted him as though he were Jasper [their pet dog] (ch. 25, 352)

In the course of their ordeal, she demonstrates her loyalty and love. When Maxim is finally free of the murder charge, she is determined to take control of the house. She has grown up, she says, and this is what she has grown into: I would go and interview the cook in the kitchen. They would like me, respect me. . . . I would learn more about the estate, too. . . . I might take to gardening myself, and in time have one or two things altered. . . . There were heaps of things that I could do, little by little. People would come and stay and I should not mind. There would be the interest of seeing to their rooms, having flowers and books put, arranging the food (ch. 27, 376)

Exactly what Jane Eyre was protesting against: making puddings and knitting stockings. She becomes the lady of the manor in this realization, the domestic achiever par excellence. At the end, the second Mrs. de Winter, like Jane Eyre, is deprived of the Great House, which in both cases burns down, but she is not deprived of the respectability that the Great House represents. Almost anthropormorphized, the house becomes the scapegoat for the sins committed in it. The death of the house allows the heroine to be preserved in spite of her dallying with a naughty man. The heroine is mildly punished; the evil past is purified by fire; wealth and love remain as the heroine’s reward. In these novels the heroine “saves” the hero and thereby demonstrates her worthiness to be the lady of the house. She is, in effect, the frog princess who becomes transformed by the love of a good-bad man, and inherits the rewards. But

Orson Welles as Edward Rochester, and Joan Fontaine as Jane Eyre, in a scene from Robert Stevenson’s 1944 film adaptation of Jane Eyre.

there is another pattern frequently found in Gothic novels in which it is the heroine who is saved by the hero, in such novels as Kirkland Revels and House at Hawk’s End. In Kirkland Revels, the heroine, Catherine Corder, will eventually marry Simon Redvers, who, in this case, is not much older, nor richer, nor classier than she is. Catherine has greater wealth and higher status than Simon—but this is a result of her first marriage to Simon’s cousin. She is spirited, sensible, charming and courageous, and despite, or perhaps, because of these qualities she must be rescued at the end by the hero. While she is not an orphan and not impoverished she does feel alienated and unloved. She meets and marries Gabriel Rockwell, heir to Kirkland Revels, a three-hundred year old mansion. One week after he has taken her to the estate, he is found dead and the family assumes he committed suicide by jumping from a parapet. Catherine learns that she is pregnant and Gothic events transpire: she awakens and sees a person at the foot of her bed; an item is missing from her room; she sees a hooded figure. Catherine assumes that her husband was killed because he was heir to the estate; if her child is a boy, he will be heir and will also be killed. Catherine, spunky and nosey, keeps

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searching for the killer of her husband. At the end the villain chloroforms Catherine and takes her to a mental institution. The hero, like “a knight of old,” saves her at the last minute (ch. 7, 250). Perhaps this is as liberated as the genre can get. Even though the heroine is active, logical and selfpossessed, she must be in the grip of the villain for a thrilling climax so that she can be saved by the hero—not a girl friend or a brother, but a lover. Every spirited heroine needs a lover—if only to save her at the end. Certainly one of the implications of such a plot is that in a husband and in love there is safety. Jean Burroughs, the heroine of House at Hawk’s End, is the most “liberated” and the most in need of saving. She is a sophisticated city-girl, a buyer for a large dress house, who comes to Nova Scotia to forget the swingers and to forget the suicide of an old boy friend. Gothic events begin to happen: she hears noises; she sees a red glow on the sea; there is a rock slide that almost kills her; someone tries to sink her boat when she is sailing. In the last two chapters she is saved twice by her hometown boy friend—once from a mob that wants to burn down her house and a second time from the villains who want to drown her. This is the simplest, barest example of the Gothic formula that emphasizes the union of love and danger. When Jean comes to the town, two men court her. One is a good guy and one is a bad guy, but she is not able to sort out the good from the evil until the very end. A mistake in her love life could be fatal. The true lover proves his love by saving the heroine, but there is another implication for the heroine. Love is what the Gothic heroine lives for, what fulfills her, what saves her in the end. The rewards and goals are the same for both kinds of heroines, for the strong and the weak, the unlovely and the lovely, the naive and the sophisticated, the proud and the humble, the saving and the saved. After a trial by danger there will be a husband, and often wealth. Historically, the Gothic novel was a way of purging horror and fear, a way of explicating and integrating the supernatural and irrational. In more recent Gothic novels the central character is female and love becomes a major interest: love solves the mystery and love is the reward for the heroine. These books are an index to the dreams of many women readers and their fantasies of adventure and love. The heroine is an underdog who finds, in her man, the Prince Charming who can make a Cinderella out of her, who validates her hidden beauty and worth. The heroine is never the shopgirl who marries the clerk. She is never a

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doctor; never the woman who seeks adventure and is able to deal with it entirely by herself. If literature is, as Kenneth Burke says, “equipment for living,” the contemporary Gothic novel equips the reader to be passive and to hanker after mansions.

Notes 1. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York: Norton & Co. 1971), Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (New York: Avon, 1938), Victoria Holt, Kirkland Revels (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1962), Claudette Nicole, House at Hawk’s end (Greenwich Conn.: Fawcett, 1971), Chapter and page citations will be given in the text. 2. I was able to find only four studies of contemporary Gothic novels, all of which I recommend: Joanna Russ, “Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The Modern Gothic,” Journal of Popular Culture, 6 (Spring, 1973), 666-691; Kay J. Mussell, “Beautiful and Damned: The Sexual Woman in Gothic Fiction,” Journal of Popular Culture, 9 (Summer, 1975), 8489; John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976); Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976). 3. Maximilian responds to his wife’s questions in this way, “Well, then. A husband is not so very different from a father after all. There is a certain type of knowledge I prefer you not to have. It’s better kept under lock and key. So that’s that. And now eat up your peaches, and don’t ask me any more questions, or I shall put you in a corner” (ch. 16, 202).

Villette W. R. GREG (ESSAY DATE APRIL 1853) SOURCE: Greg, W. R. “Recent Novels: Villette.” The Edinburgh Review 97, no. 198 (April 1853): 387-90. In the following excerpt, Greg offers a laudatory assessment of Villette.

Villette, by the author of Jane Eyre, is a most remarkable work—a production altogether sui generis. Fulness and vigour of thought mark almost every sentence, and there is a sort of easy power pervading the whole narrative, such as we have rarely met. There is little of plot or incident in the story; nearly the whole of it is confined to the four walls of a Pensionnat at Brussels; but the characters introduced are sketched with a bold and free pencil, and their individuality is sustained with a degree of consistency, which marks a master’s hand. The descriptions, too, whether the subjects of them be solemn, ludicrous, or pathetic, are wonderfully graphic and pictorial. It is clear at a glance that the groundwork and many of the

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TONI WEIN (ESSAY DATE AUTUMN 1999) SOURCE: Wein, Toni. “Gothic Desire in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 15001900 39, no. 4 (autumn 1999): 733-46. In the following essay, Wein examines Brontë’s re-working of earlier Gothic devices and imagery in Villette, particularly in terms of how she used them to depict gender roles and sexual desire.

A letter of 16 June 1854 reads as follows: “My dear Ellen, Can you come next Wednesday or Thursday? I am afraid circumstances will compel me to agree to an earlier day than I wished. I sadly wished to defer it till the 2nd week in July, but I fear it must be sooner, the 1st week in July, possibly the last week in June . . . This gives rise to much trouble and many difficulties as you may imagine, and papa’s whole anxiety now is to get the business over. Mr. Nicholls with his usual trustworthiness takes all the trouble of providing substitutes on his own shoulders.”1 Despite the language of reluctance and regret, Charlotte Brontë was facing neither surgery nor the firing squad. Rather, the “it” she refers to in this letter to her friend, Ellen Nussey, is her longdeferred marriage. Admittedly, this letter carries biographical and psychological interest. But I am more interested in the way her characterization of Arthur Nicholls as “providing substitutes” announces a theme and dominant trope crucial to

ABOUT THE AUTHOR SUSAN M. WARING PRAISES VILLETTE

The book Jane Eyre . . . was the first adequate expression of the feeling which wrestled within her, and the heart of Charlotte Brontë found in words only, uncontrolled by any rules of rhythm, the joy of expression, the right of recognition. It is therefore that Jane Eyre may not be too strictly judged, for it was an outburst, a great surging heart bursting its bounds and finding outlet for its accumulated passion. . . . Villette shows us the third style of the master-genius. In the Brontë case at all events it is the perfected development of ripened power. Patience has wrought her “perfect work,” suffering terrible and almost unremitting fulfilled her divinest mission, and calm with the repose of power, majestic almost to austerity, yet with a trembling about the mouth which tells of tears that are ended, Villette stands upon its pedestal the masterpiece of its author. . . . The wonderful tale is told, the unprecedented book, full of human nature as any play of Shakspeare’s, ended. Take it, search it thoroughly, it was meant to bear close and stern inspection. Hold it in the strongest light, try it by the severest tests, and know this Villette of Charlotte Brontë’s is, as far as human art can make it, a diamond without a flaw, one entire and perfect chrysolite. May no other woman ever write so well, may none other ever suffer so acutely! SOURCE: Waring, Susan M. “Charlotte Brontë’s Lucy Snowe.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 32, no. 160 (February 1866): 368-72.

understanding Brontë’s literary maneuverings.2 Like her future husband, Brontë works a series of substitutions in her novels. Much light has been shed by critics who have focused on these doublings, displacements, repressions, and subversions.3 Despite their varying theoretical backgrounds, consensus that Brontë

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details of the story are autobiographic; and we never read a literary production which so betrays at every line the individual character of the writer. Her life has evidently been irradiated by but scanty sunshine, and she is besides disposed to look rather pertinaciously on the shady side of every landscape. With an almost painful and unceasing consciousness of possessing few personal or circumstantial advantages; with spirits naturally the reverse of buoyant; with feelings the reverse of demonstrative; with affections strong rather than warm, and injured by too habitual repression; a keen, shrewd, sagacious, sarcastic, observer of life, rather than a genial partaker in its interests; gifted with intuitive insight into character, and reading it often with too cold and critical an eye; full of sympathy where love and admiration call it forth, but able by long discipline to dispense with it herself; always somewhat too rigidly strung up for the hard struggle of life, but fighting sternly and gallantly its gloomy battle,—the character which Lucy Snowe has here drawn of herself presents rather an interesting study than an attraction or a charm.

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employed these strategies as a critique of Victorian culture has gradually coalesced. To that end, identities, bodies, gender, and genre have all been said to migrate; and, indeed, all of these emigrants wash up on the shores of Belgium’s Villette. Yet less attention has been paid to an even more significant aspect of Brontë’s work: her reterritorialization of migratory texts. Pondering Brontë’s substitutions for possible relocations yields insights about her professionalism as well as her literary products. After all, Villette is Brontë’s reworking of her first novel, The Professor. Her initial efforts to publish it had provoked continual rebuffs from publishers; after the encouragement of George Smith had produced the success of Jane Eyre, Brontë’s repeated suggestions that he next publish The Professor prompted gentle rebukes. Part of the objection to The Professor was its size, two volumes, a distinctly anomalous commodity.4 Charlotte wrote Smith on 5 February 1851, withdrawing her offer of her “martyrized M.S.” to one “who might ‘use it to light an occasional cigar.’” In her letter, Charlotte ironically suggests that she should be locked up in prison for twelve months, at the end of which time she would come out either “with a 3 vol. M.S. in my hand, or else with a condition of intellect that would exempt me ever after from literary efforts and expectations.”5 In September, Smith placed additional pressure on her by repeating the firm’s post-Jane Eyre suggestion that she write a novel in serial form. Charlotte refused.6 Although little credit is given to Charlotte as a business-woman, we can see her awareness of literary marketing from the very beginnings of her career as a novelist, a transition motivated by financial pragmatics after the failure of the sisters’ volume of poems, for whose publication they had been forced to pay.7 When she finally revised The Professor, her remodeling entailed more than a narrative elaboration and a narratorial shift from the third into the first person. Brontë also carved emphatically Gothic features onto what had been principally a double bildungsroman. Those Gothic features bear a canny resemblance to one of the most scandalous Gothic texts of the previous century, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). A tale of substitutions and possession, The Monk’s relics in Villette speak to Brontë’s struggle to gain possession of herself as a woman, as an author, and as an heir to literary conventions. As Luce Irigaray imagines the dilemma: “How find a voice, make a choice, strong enough to cut through these layers of ornamental style, that

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decorative sepulchre, where even her breath is lost. Stifled under all those airs.”8 But the voice that Charlotte Brontë finds by tunneling out from within the tomb of the Gothic novel does more than keen a “female Gothic” or lament the “feminine carceral” of domestic space.9 In Villette, that voice cries out against institutional forces of education, of art, and of religion, a message also contained in The Monk.1 0 She thereby sounds a second alarm: that possession can be barred as effectively by business conventions of literature as by literary conventions of style or voice. At the same time that the word possession points to ownership, it also means a haunting. To form the self, whether as a private individual or as a professional author, one must strive to ensure that the self one possesses is not formed or possessed by others. Brontë’s possession by Gothic in general may have provided her with models to substitute a different structural logic of desire from that fostered by serialization,1 1 as Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund have described it: “[its] intrinsic form more closely approximates female than male models of pleasure. Rather than inviting sustained arousal of attention until the narrative climax is reached, spending the driving energy of narrative and sundering the readers from the textual experience, the installment novel offers itself as a site of pleasure that is taken up and discharged only to be taken up again (some days or weeks later), and again, and again.”1 2 Yet I do not thereby mean to imply that Brontë resorts to a male structure of desire. Instead, in true Gothic tradition, she hybridizes: she encloses her structurally deferred climaxes in a three-volume tomb, at the same time that she thwarts the serial’s (and autobiography’s) construction of intimacy between readers and characters through her (and Lucy’s) refusal to provide closure. Brontë’s structural Gothicizing reads as evidence that she consciously engaged in rewriting gender codes.1 3 But by limiting our attention to examples of so-called “female Gothic,” and by seeing Ann Radcliffe as the only precursor for Brontë, we miss seeing how her reworking of gender codes also serves her professionalism.1 4 Narratively and thematically, Brontë redefines desire. In mapping the traces of The Monk in Villette, then, I will contend that Brontë draws on The Monk because in that novel she finds an analysis of substitution’s dangers and delights. For Lewis, both dangers and delights lie in substitution’s resemblance to a pornographic economy of exchange. Lewis sees women as counters in that system of barter. Forced

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Even more than Jane Eyre, with its “madwoman in the attic,” Villette is a haunted text. Brontë possesses her literary heritage by creating a surrogate Gothic. Critics usually point to the haunting figure of the nun as the key Gothic element, although they seldom agree about its significance. To Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, the nun is a projection of Lucy’s need for nullity;1 6 for Eve Sedgwick, the nun dramatizes Lucy’s constitutive need for doubleness. Christina Crosby detects the nun as mirroring the narcissistic Lacanian Imaginary Other.1 7 To some, the nun represents Brontë’s anticlericalism;1 8 while Q. D. Leavis, who saw the nun as nothing more than a plot device for maintaining suspense and for generating sales, is not far removed from Brontë’s contemporary, the reviewer of the Literary Gazette, who recognized a Byronic prototype when identifying the nun as “a phantom of the Fitz-fulke kind.”1 9 But a covey of nuns broods over more characters than Lucy. Paul’s history with Justine-Marie forms the most obvious analogue. The prehistory of the pensionnat also suggests whole generations subject to ecclesiastic visitations whose terror— diurnal or nocturnal—may have been equal. These nuns form a sisterhood that extends beyond the borders of Villette, back to the Gothic novels half a century old. Of all the possible precursors, Lewis’s The Monk looms the largest in Brontë’s text. Our first introduction to the legend of Brontë’s nun reveals its close bonds with the story of Lewis’s Agnes. Like the pensionnat’s nun, Agnes is immured alive in the vaults of her convent “for some sin against her vow.”2 0 Agnes’s sin is fecund concupiscence; we never learn what the Belgian nun had done, although a sexual aura attaches to her by association, both because wanton nuns and monks were a cliché by that time, and because Ginevra confiscates the nun’s identity to cover her own escapades.2 1 Confiscation of identity lies at the core of Lewis’s tale as well: Agnes lands in the convent only after she has attempted to elope with her lover, Don Raymond, by assuming the guise of a bleeding nun, said to haunt the castle of her aunt. If any figure can be said to haunt the pages of Villette, it is this last unwilling nun, Beatrice de

las Cisternas. Raymond and Agnes’s concerted plan fails when the real ghostly nun appears in Agnes’s stead. Raymond cannot tell the difference; instead, he rapturously clasps the phantom to his breast and exclaims: “Agnes! Agnes! Thou art mine / Agnes! Agnes! I am thine! / In my veins while blood shall roll, / Thou art mine! / I am thine! / thine my body! thine my soul!” (p. 166). This jubilant crowing of patriarchal possession soon sticks in Raymond’s craw, however. The Bleeding Nun nightly visits Raymond’s bedchamber, not to glut him with the pleasures of the flesh, since she has none, but to rewrite his poetic will by reversing the possessive pronouns: “Mine thy body! Mine thy soul” (p. 170). Beatrice’s haunting of Raymond’s bedchamber, at the precise moment when his desire was to be realized, resembles the nun’s appearances to Lucy at moments when she, too, seems poised to find happiness beyond the walls of her confinement, especially through her growing intimacy with Dr. John. Given the resemblance, it is doubly surprising that critics of Brontë read the scene as revealing Lucy’s psychological inability to cathect with another human being or her anxieties about sex, or that critics of Lewis fail to so read his scene. Rather than evenly distribute a unilinear reading of this nature to either scene, however, we should recognize the similarity of their underlying logic. Like Lucy, Raymond has his desire stimulated by the encounter, setting off a chain reaction through which he will learn to love precisely the same kind of emaciated nun, as though the nun carries a contagion which purges the fleshly from both Raymond and Agnes. Raymond escapes the nun’s possession when the Wandering Jew miraculously arrives to shrieve her soul. Raymond, too, is enjoined to penitence: he must lay Beatrice’s bones to rest in her ancestral grave, much as Lucy can only free herself from her obsession with Dr. John by burying his letters to her. In fact, Lucy creates a second tomb, sealing her letters under a slab of slate and mortar right beside that of the Belgian nun. And she acquires the casket in which those letters will rest by journeying into the “old historical quarter of the town,” and purchasing a used glass jar from the “old Jew broker” who owns the pawn shop, as though Villette, the book, had metaphorically domesticated and domiciled the Wandering Jew in Villette, the town.2 2 This scene does not exhaust the presence of resemblances between The Monk and Villette.2 3 Nevertheless, the burial in the garden marks an apotheosis. Raymond’s scene of burial may stage his penitence, but that repentance permits him to

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to enter into an economy of exchange that demanded she relinquish autonomy while it promised her some range of mobility beyond the confines of the home, Brontë responds by making the nun the figure through which erotic desire becomes buoyantly disembodied and endlessly deferred, the possession of the self through substitution.1 5

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substitute new objects of desire. The same interpretation applies to Brontë’s reenactment of Lewis’s scenes. Like Lucy and Raymond, Brontë has her desire pointed by her Gothic encounters. Like theirs, this desire substitutes a new outlet for its original source. We can read these resemblances as a metanarrative about Brontë’s authoring of her own literary self, for, while she exhumes ancestral texts, she also buries the spirit of their letters. Brontë rejects and rewrites the perverted representations of women and/or of values that rustle through these earlier Gothic letters. It is not so much the logic of substitution to which she objects. This logic governs male Gothic from the time of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, where Theodore is rewarded with another bride to replace the innocent female destroyed by Gothic ambition.2 4 Brontë targets the locus of this substitution in Lewis. With the exception of Beatrice, women are either bartered brides, functioning to consolidate wealth and status, or battered virgins, servicing a similar passion for power now figured as sexual dominance. At first glance, Lewis may seem to critique such an instrumental attitude toward sexuality by revealing the pornographic outlook underlying it through his portrait of Ambrosio. Ambrosio, “drunk with desire,” consummates his apostasy and his ecstasy in Matilda’s arms, muttering “Thine, ever thine” (Lewis, p. 109). But just as Ambrosio’s reference to his liaison as his “commerce with Matilda” reveals the economics of desire, so his swift revulsion betrays the tendency of consummation to consume the consumer, making any such lasting fidelity impossible (pp. 230, 2367). Both Matilda and Ambrosio are victims of a gendered double bind. The more time Matilda spends with Ambrosio, the more she wants him: the more she wants him, the less he wants her. But Lewis here seems to want to have it both ways: he first blames Matilda for having caused Ambrosio’s disgust, then delineates how such generosity inaugurates an increasingly selfish reaction. The ambiguity of Lewis’s position could arise from his attempt to analyze the way Ambrosio’s entrapment in this situation, like his incarceration in the monastery, teaches him progressively to devalue other lives. Lewis shows how such induration causes Ambrosio to split Matilda in two. When Ambrosio mentally divorces Matilda from her body, emotionally discarding all but her physical shell which he refers to as “it,” Lewis brilliantly conveys the magnitude of such objectification of the feminine (p. 241). Offended, Lewis’s censors made him substitute the conventional pronoun

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“she” in the fourth and fifth editions for the blatant disregard suggested by the indefinite pronoun. But their tiny sentimentalizing gesture seems impotent against the onslaught of Ambrosio’s dehumanization of Antonia. Ambrosio may at first think that he loves Antonia chastely, but appreciation of her beauty rapidly transforms itself into appetite (p. 243): “Grown used to her modesty, it no longer commanded the same respect and awe: he still admired it, but it only made him more anxious to deprive her of that quality which formed her principal charm” (p. 255). When Ambrosio finally captures Antonia in the charnel vaults of the monastery, even his gaze can no longer hold her in a fixed image. Instead, her identity migrates, mingling first with the corrupt bodies surrounding her, then dissolving into that of her dead mother, killed by Ambrosio (p. 364). However, Lewis’s delight in describing these scenes supplements and cancels the analysis of danger. Although Ambrosio’s desire for Antonia vanishes with her rape, he still cannot let her go free; he imagines keeping her a prisoner of his new desire for an endless succession of penitent nights (p. 371). Only Matilda’s arrival, and the warning that they are surrounded by archers come to rescue Antonia, breaks the spell of irresolution in which Ambrosio seeks to hold Antonia. He takes her in the same position in which he had earlier raped her, both times prostrate with supplicating prayers, now using his poniard as the weapon of penetration. Beyond the pornographic violence of the scene lies a still more pernicious implication, one that mitigates his seeming sympathy with Matilda and Antonia’s plight. Women are trapped in a double bind. As vestal females, they are vulnerable to appropriation. But Lewis also implies that sexual desire in women unleashes in them a potential masculinity that provokes Ambrosio’s distaste: “Now [Matilda] assumed a sort of courage and manliness in her manners and discourse, but ill calculated to please him. She spoke no longer to insinuate, but command . . . Pity is a sentiment so natural, so appropriate to the female character, that it is scarcely a merit for a woman to possess it, but to be without it is a grievous crime” (pp. 233-4, my emphasis). The final words of the passage collapse the values of the omniscient narrator with those of Ambrosio. So, too, does the portrait of Beatrice, who like Matilda momentarily rises above her gendered fate and receives in consequence a narrative punishment all the more severe. Only women who mask their masculine intelligence with feminine modesty receive approba-

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If Lewis’s novel collapses the authorial and characterological perspectives, its message also merges with that articulated by Brontë’s father and Robert Southey. They warned her that women had no right to possess a literary career. Later in life, Charlotte wrote that her father had always instilled in her the view of writing and literary desires as a rebellion from her female duties.2 5 She heard the same strictures from Southey, whom she wrote for advice about how to become a professional poet. Despite his protestation of impropriety, Southey must certainly have known how many women had successfully made literature the “business” of their lives at that juncture. Brontë’s novel, then, is “new Gothic” insofar as it makes women’s authorization of substitution, demonic in Lewis, heroic.2 6 Each of the women in Villette—Madames Beck and Walravens, Mrs. Bretton, Ginevra, Lucy, and Polly— survives by a strategy of substitution. Ginevra stands as the most obvious entry here. Madame Beck fails to obtain a youthful lover, but she gains voyeuristic satisfaction from her role as surveillante. Mrs. Bretton lives in John (Brontë, p. 267); Madame Walravens becomes a death-like ringer for her granddaughter, stealing in the process the house, affection, and jewels that might otherwise have been Justine-Marie’s.2 7

Perhaps the most astute pupil of substitution is little Polly, who early learns to corral her desire precisely by displacing it. The first example of her mastery of this technique, which she will employ to such great effect with John, occurs when she is merely seven. Knowing she is about to leave the household and return to her papa, Polly longs to rush to Graham and tell him the news, hoping that his despair will match her own. Instead, she fondles Lucy Snowe: “In the evening, at the moment Graham’s entrance was heard below, I found her at my side. She began to arrange a locketribbon around my neck, she displaced and replaced the comb in my hair; while thus busied, Graham entered” (p. 40). Polly then gets Lucy to deliver the news, freeing herself to observe Graham’s reaction. In fact, alone of all the women in Villette, Lucy at first seems to be innately passive. Peter Brooks may see desire as the very spark necessary for all narrative, but Lucy seems curiously devoid of passion or need at the start of hers.2 8 But, of course, the novel reveals that calm to be fictive, the result of a momentary translation, a fact that the mature Lucy knows and signals to the reader by prefacing her momentary poise in language that underscores its artificiality: “In the autumn of the year _____, I was staying at Bretton; my godmother having come in person to claim me of the kinsfolk with whom was at that time fixed my permanent residence” (p. 6). The unnamed “kinsfolk” from whom Lucy so strenuously distances herself can be none other than the parents she loses. Although we never learn what happens, the shadow of those events and the subsequent vagrancy of Lucy’s life cast doubt on the “fixity” and “permanence” of all existence, as does the passive construction of her temporary placement there. What Lucy learns in the course of her life is to seize control of her translations. Without that lesson, her fate would have resembled that of Miss Marchmont, frozen into place by events. And it is through Polly that Lucy will first learn to activate her desires. Lucy feels compelled to intervene in Polly’s actions, to exercise vicarious restraint over the child’s emotions (p. 13); Polly’s emotions, however, seem to exercise more power over Lucy than the reverse. Stoic Lucy, “guiltless” of the “curse” of “an overheated and discursive imagination,” nonetheless imagines rooms to be “haunted” by Polly’s presence (p. 15). Polly’s proposed absence causes Lucy to break through her normal reserve. She invites Polly into her bed “wishing, yet scarcely hoping, she would comply”; when Polly

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tion. The reward to women for such complicitous compliance is to become commodified and hence substitutable. With Antonia conveniently dead, it does not take Lorenzo long to substitute Virginia. Once again, the narrator foreshadows his approval of Lorenzo’s decision, placing “not unwisely” into the mouth of Lorenzo’s uncle the maxim that “‘men have died, and worms have ate them, but not for love!’”—a proverb that failed to disturb the censors (p. 381). This unacknowledged quotation from William Shakespeare’s As You Like It also disguises the potential feminism of its original utterance. Rosalind speaks those words to Orlando while playing Ganymede playing Rosalind, in order to cure Orlando of his idealism and to incite his appreciation for her self, rather than for some Petrarchan fiction. By surreptitiously relocating those words into the mouth of the duke, Lewis makes the maxim part of the “old boy” network of truth, which is further validated by the authority of the omniscient narrator who boldly declares his status as M.P. in the third edition. In contrast to the protean authority of the men, the women are unidimensional clichés, fixated in their affections and transfixed accordingly by their circumstances.

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comes, “gliding like a small ghost over the carpet,” she is “warmed . . . soothed . . . tranquillized and cherished” in Lucy’s arms (p. 44).

but she does tell her story, her metaphorical habit of black and white a fitting emblem of the printed page.

Moreover, as far as we know, Polly is the only person ever to share Lucy’s bed. Gilbert and Gubar are right to follow Leavis in seeing Polly as Lucy’s other self. But they miss the fact that, from the beginning, Polly is described in imagery that connects her to the full-grown nuns Lucy will later encounter. If Polly is a “demure little person in a mourning frock and white chemisette,” a frock that Lucy pointedly tells us is black three pages earlier, her costume merges with her actions to turn her into a type of the bleeding nun (p. 20): doggedly hemming a handkerchief for her father, the needle “almost a skewer, pricking herself ever and anon, marking the cambric with a track of minute red dots; occasionally starting when the perverse weapon—swerving from her control— inflicted a deeper stab than usual; but still silent, diligent, womanly, absorbed” (p. 20). Far from representing a type that must be feared or renounced, the nun in Villette represents Lucy Snowe’s embrace of her provisional status.2 9 The nun blends into Lucy’s persona so that she, too, becomes a “silence artist,” defying mystery by adopting it (pp. 680-2).3 0 How fitting, then, that Ginevra bequeaths the costume of the nun to Lucy.

The unspoken fact of Paul’s fate signals how heretical Brontë’s narrator and narrative truly are.3 2 Charlotte had originally planned to end the book with a clear announcement of Paul’s death. Her father objected strenuously, declaring his dislike for books that “left a melancholy impression on the mind.”3 3 Unable or unwilling to defer completely to his wish for a “happy ending,” Charlotte left her story open, thus resigning it to the pornographic imagination that her father, Patrick Brontë, had always identified with the novelistic. In his book, The Cottage in the Wood, he had written: “The sensual novelist and his admirer, are beings of depraved appetites and sickly imaginations, who having learnt the art of selftormenting, are diligently and zealously employed in creating an imaginary world, which they can never inhabit, only to make the real world, with which they must necessarily be conversant, gloomy and insupportable.”3 4 Literary endeavor becomes masturbation in Patrick’s barely-coded epithet of “self-tormenting”; the hothouse secrecy surrounding such employment accounts for its resultant depravity and sickliness.

Once so metaphorically habited, the swelled presence of desire takes on a religious cast.3 1 For both Lucy and Polly, the handwritten word of John supplants the word of God and becomes a physical revelation (pp. 254, 326-7, 342-3). Each performs a similar ritual of dilation, going so far as to pray before she revels in the letter. But Paul’s letters do more than refresh or sustain (p. 713); they enable Lucy to incorporate her lover, so that his absence marks the summit of their love: “I thought I loved him when he went away; I love him now in another degree; he is more my own” (p. 714). Paul’s fate when clasped to Lucy’s heart must mirror Lucy’s when cradled in the “bosom of my kindred”: both types of love can be safely possessed only in the reflection of memory, while the actual bodies must endure the clammy embrace of the engulfing sea. Immured in the convent of knowledge Paul had created for her, Lucy’s life becomes one of singular, not serial, devotion. Her conventual existence appears most strongly in the collapse of her narrative into the histories of the three Catholics who had seemed her nemeses, in a final act of substitution (p. 715). She may not count her beads in a Carmelite convent,

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Southey had warned her of such danger: “The day dreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind; and, in proportion as all the ordinary uses of the world seem to you flat and unprofitable, you will be unfitted for them without becoming fitted for anything else. Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.”3 5 Southey’s reference to Charlotte’s “habitual indulgence” also characterizes her ambition as a “distempered,” diseased fixation for which the only prescription is healthy, self-abnegating work. The patronizing chauvinism of his attitude resonates through the uncredited allusion to Shakespeare. Here Southey, a male poet wielding masculine privilege through the words of another male poet, simultaneously implies that Charlotte has fallen into Hamlet’s state, and invokes Hamlet’s injunctions to Ophelia to “get thee [to] a nunn’ry.”3 6 Villette demonstrates Brontë’s acceptance of Southey’s implicit advice, as well as the perverse spin she put on it. While the pseudonymical “Currer Bell” occupied a high niche in literary opinion, her reviews harp on her “depravities” even as they praise her “Passion and Power.”3 7 The Christian Remembrancer admits that Brontë has tempered “the outrages on decorum, the moral perversity,

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Notes 1. Clement Shorter, The Brontës: Life and Letters, 2 vols. (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1969), 2:362. 2. Nicholls had to find a substitute curate for Patrick Brontë’s congregation and a priest to preside at the wedding. On the marriage day, Patrick Brontë suddenly refused to attend, and Nicholls had to find a substitute to give Charlotte away. Her friend, Miss Wooler, performed that function. On Charlotte Brontë’s arrogation of fact to fancy in Villette, see Juliet Barker, The Brontës (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 668, 704-5, 708, 713, 715. Cf. Claudia Klaver, “Homely Aesthetics: Villette’s Canny Narrator,” Genre 26, 4 (Winter 1993): 409-29. 3. A brief listing would include Robyn R. Warhol, “Double Gender, Double Genre in Jane Eyre and Villette.” SEL 36, 4 (Autumn 1996): 857-75; Patricia E. Johnson, “‘This Heretic Narrative’: The Strategy of the Split Narrative in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette,” SEL 30, 4 (Autumn 1990): 617-31; John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1987); Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 127-8; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1979); Eve Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Arno Press, 1980), especially chap. 3, “Immediacy, Doubleness, and the Unspeakable: Wuthering Heights and Villette,” pp. 104-53. 4. On the importance of length, see Shorter, 1:382, and Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith, introduc-

tion to Villette by Brontë, ed. Rosengarten and Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. xi-xlix, xv. 5. Qtd. in Rosengarten and Smith, p. xv. 6. Rosengarten and Smith, p. xviii. Brontë’s claim that “she was unwilling to release her work for publication before it had been completed” flies in the face of other evidence. According to Elizabeth Gaskell, Brontë contemplated “tales which might be published in numbers” (The Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Alan Shelstone [New York: Penguin, 1975], p. 293). I owe this information to Catherine A. Judd’s “Male Pseudonyms and Female Authority in Victorian England,” in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Pattern (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 250-68, 264-5 n. 20. Barker records in The Brontës that Brontë had originally planned “three distinct and unconnected tales which may be published either together as a work of three volumes of the ordinary novel-size, or separately as single volumes” (p. 499). 7. Judd forms one recent exception, drawing on the healthy precedent of Gaskell’s treatment of Charlotte Brontë in The Life. 8. Luce Irigaray, “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ Has Always Been Appropriated by the ‘Masculine,’” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 133-46, 143. 9. See Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976); Tamar Heller, “Jane Eyre, Bertha, and the Female Gothic,” in Approaches to Teaching Brontë’s “Jane Eyre,” ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Beth Lau (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1993), pp. 49-55. Klaver aligns the Gothic elements, especially the nun, with “typically Radcliffean devices to create suspense and speculation in her narrative, but then [Lucy], also like [Ann] Radcliffe, dismisses them all with the most banal of rational explanations” (p. 418). On the distinction between male and female Gothic, from which I wish to distance myself, see Robert Miles, Gothic Writing, 1750-1820: A Genealogy (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), especially pp. 88, 98, 103-4; and Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 18-24. She calls The Monk a pornographic narrative because sexuality is shown as the “prime motive” of all action (p. 116). Yet to her, Ambrosio’s carnality lines him up with the feminine. 10. By comparison, Bretton Hall and La Terrasse seem almost the only nonconfining spaces. 11. See Barker, pp. 160-1, 191, 500. 12. Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, “Textual/sexual pleasure and serial publication,” in Jordan and Patten, pp. 143-64, 143. 13. A position shared by Warhol, p. 858. 14. Rather than being suffocated by the present’s contradictory attitude to female authorship, Charlotte cleared space for herself by preserving the male pseudonym and simultaneously creating a very private female persona as the source for her literary output. See Judd’s very persuasive discussion, especially pp. 252-3, 257-8. 15. This essay both draws on and modulates the work of Kucich. I find Kucich’s discussion extremely attractive, especially his attention to the place of desire in

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the toleration of, nay, indifference to vice” which had “deform[ed]” her Jane Eyre, but it joins numerous other critics of Lucy who decry her for her willingness to fall in love and her ability to be in love with two men at the same time or for her “masculine” style.3 8 Even reviewers who found Villette “pleasant” criticized Lucy Snowe’s morbidity and her “tormenting self-regard.”3 9 While all uniformly praised the abundance of well-drawn characters, they nonetheless bemoaned the lack of “breathless suspense, more thrilling incidents, and a more moving story.”4 0 Conversely, the story is said to move too much: the narrative jumps and the focus wavers.4 1 Reviewers’ desires seem to be piqued and frustrated at the same time.4 2 Their complaints ironically vindicate the triumph with which Charlotte Brontë pursued her anomalous path. Eschewing simultaneously the need for closure and for the embodiment of desire in a female body, a containment that in Lewis enforces female powerlessness, Brontë frees the hallmark of the pornographic, the desire for desire,4 3 into the space of literary contingency, as generations of readers and critics who have been teased by Lucy Snowe can testify.

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Brontë’s work, but he defines her desire as repressed (pp. 38-9); see p. 30 for his definition of repression. Cf. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1964), especially p. 195. Marcus’s attention to the pornographic fantasy of endless seminal fluid finds an interesting counterpart in Brontë’s text, which increasingly spews out water imagery inextricably intertwined with eruptions of desire, whether frustrated or realized. For a small sample, see pp. 6, 152, 218-9, 221, 223, 258, 420-1 of Villette. The “lecture pieuse” of Catholic martyrs incites the same pornographic response: “it made me so burning hot, and my temples and my heart and my wrist throbbed so fast, and my sleep afterwards was so broken with excitement, that I could sit no longer” (p. 162). Obviously, The Monk fixed much of its pornographic gaze on the explicit sexuality of religious figures. Perhaps another telling resemblance between the two novels lies in The Monk’s greatest provocation to scandal: its censure of the Bible as pornographic. Though considerations of length prevent me from detailing Brontë’s biblical allusions, she heretically rewrites the Bible as much as she piously cites it. Cf. Susan VanZanten Gallagher, “Jane Eyre and Christianity,” in Hoeveler and Lau, pp. 62-8; and Keith A. Jenkins, “Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë’s New Bible,” in Hoeveler and Lau, pp. 69-75. Many of Villette’s citations are perverse applications of water, fountain, and thirst imagery originally found in the two books of “Johns”—the Gospel according to John and Revelation; see John 4:13-5, 6:35, and 7:37 and Rev. 7:16, 14:7, and 22:17. I would suggest that, in this imbricated relationship, we find Brontë’s greatest heresy, her incorporation of and twist on the pornographic imagination. 16. Gilbert and Gubar, p. 425. 17. Christina Crosby, “Charlotte Brontë’s Haunted Text,” SEL 24, 4 (Autumn 1984): 701-15. LuAnn McCracken Fletcher articulates a similar position when she claims the nun emphasizes the fictionality of identity (“Manufactured Marvels, Heretic Narratives, and the Process of Interpretation in Villette,” SEL 32, 4 [Autumn 1992]: 723-46). 18. See Robert Heilman, “Charlotte Brontë, Reason, and the Moon,” in Critical Essays on Charlotte Brontë, ed. Barbara Timm Gates (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), pp. 34-49, 36; and Harriet Martineau, “Review of Villette by Currer Bell,” in Gates, pp. 253-6, 255. Janice Carlisle considers the nun a figure of repressed desire in “The Face in the Mirror: Villette and the Conventions of Autobiography,” in Gates, pp. 264-87, 282-3, while E. D. H. Johnson sees her as equal to the unreason Lucy must renounce (“‘Daring the Dread Glance’: Charlotte Brontë’s Treatment of the Supernatural in Villette,” NCF 20, 4 [March 1966]: 325-36). 19. Q. D. Leavis, introduction to Villette (New York: Harper Colophon, 1972), p. xxiii, cited by Gilbert and Gubar, p. 683 n. 13. Review of Villette in The Literary Gazette (5 February 1853), rprt. in The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, ed. Miriam Allott (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 178-81, 180. 20. Matthew Lewis, The Monk, ed. Louis Peck (New York: Grove Press, 1952), p. 148. Citations will come from this edition and henceforth will be cited parenthetically.

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21. See Max Byrd, “The Madhouse, the Whorehouse, and the Convent,” PR 44, 2 (Summer 1977): 268-78. 22. Brontë, Villette, ed. Rosengarten and Smith, p. 423. All references to Villette will be to this edition and henceforth will be cited parenthetically in the text. 23. Cf. the descriptions of Baroness Lindenburg and Madame Beck in character (Brontë, pp. 95, 98, 100-2, 695-7; Lewis, pp. 123, 145); in habits of spying (Brontë, pp. 100, 421-2, 647; Lewis, p. 155); and in a taste for young men (Brontë, pp. 140-5; Lewis, pp. 147-50). Paul’s history after the death of Justine-Marie reads like Raymond’s fate had he not been freed from the Bleeding Nun. More importantly, when Lucy describes Paul as monitor of mores and the human heart, he suddenly resembles Satan (Brontë, pp. 486-7; Lewis, pp. 416-7). 24. As the Gothic novel reaches the end of its first phase with Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, the structural logic of substitution dominates the sexual logic. 25. Barker, p. 243. Thus, Carol Christ sees Brontë steeling herself to prefer a realist aesthetic, especially in Villette, as a means of subduing this mutinous attraction (“Imaginative Constraint, Feminine Duty, and the Form of Charlotte Brontë’s Fiction,” WS 6, 3 [1979]: 287-96). 26. The phrase is Heilman’s; see his “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘New’ Gothic,” in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad: Essays Collected in Memory of James T. Hillhouse, ed. Robert Rathburn and Martin Steinmann Jr. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1958), pp. 118-32. I interpret her “newness” very differently. 27. When the old woman emerges from the stone walls of the Rue des Mages, behind the portrait of her granddaughter, “the portrait seemed to give way” (Brontë, p. 562). 28. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). Brooks’s strictly male notion of desire and its accompaniments deforms his definition of women’s plots as resistance and endurance: “a waiting (and suffering) until the woman’s desire can be a permitted response to the expression of male desire” (p. 330). 29. Lucy is not unique among Brontë’s women in this respect: Eliza Reed in Jane Eyre and Sylvie in The Professor both enter convents. See Kucich, p. 92. Kate Millett has Lucy trying on and rejecting all of the alternative female role models (Sexual Politics [New York: Doubleday, 1970], pp. 140-7, rprt. in Gates, pp. 25664). Joseph P. Boone calls the nun the “false mirror of [Lucy’s] sexuality” (“Depolicing Villette: Surveillance, Invisibility, and the Female Erotics of ‘Heretic Narrative,’” [Novel 26. 1 (Fall 1992)]: 20-42). 30. On Lucy as a “silence artist,” see Sedgwick, pp. 130-1. Ultimately Sedgwick sees the nun as corresponding to the letters. Cf. Gilbert and Gubar’s suggestion that “Lucy is the nun who is immobilized by this internal conflict” (p. 412, my emphasis). 31. Cf. Kucich, p. 109. 32. Anne Mozley’s unsigned review for the Christian Remembrancer (April 1853) shows that the narratorial and characterological heresy fused in the public’s mind (rprt. in Allott, pp. 202-8, 202).

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Criticism

34. Qtd. in Barker, p. 243.

Alexander, Christine. “‘That Kingdom of Gloom’: Charlotte Brontë, the Annuals, and the Gothic.” NineteenthCentury Literature 47, no. 4 (March 1993): 409-36.

35. Barker, p. 262. 36. William Shakespeare. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2d edn., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), pp. 1183-1245, III.i.120. 37. G. H. Lewes in the Leader (12 February 1853), rprt. in Allott, pp. 184-6, 184. 38. Mozley, p. 203. See esp. William Makepeace Thackeray’s letters of March and April 1853, rprt. in Allott, pp. 197-8. 39. Review of Villette in The Spectator (12 February 1853), rprt. in Allott, pp. 181-4, 181. 40. Lewes, p. 184. 41. Mozley, p. 204; review of Villette in the Athenaeum (12 February 1853), rprt. in Allott, pp. 187-90, 188; and review of Villette in Revue Des Deux Mondes (15 March 1853), rprt. in Allott, p. 199-200, 199. 42. Review of Villette in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine (May 1853), rprt. in Allott, pp. 212-5, 214. 43. On the link between the specularized female body and female powerlessness, see Elaine Scarry. The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 207, 361 n. 20. Susan Faludie’s article on the Hollywood porn industry shows male porn stars in suffering acknowledgment that the “desire for desire” rules pornographic producers and consumers alike (“The Money Shot,” New Yorker [30 October 1995]. pp. 6487).

FURTHER READING Bibliographies Crump, Rebecca W. Charlotte and Emily Brontë: A Reference Guide. 3 vols. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982-1986, 194 p. Provides an annotated compilation of secondary sources from 1846 to 1983. Passel, Anne. Charlotte and Emily Brontë: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1979, 359 p. Organizes criticism by text.

Biographies Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. London: E. P. Dutton, 1908, 411 p. Offers a biography by one of Brontë’s contemporaries; includes large extracts from Brontë’s correspondence. Gérin, Winifred. Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius. London: Oxford University Press, 1967, 617 p. Biography focusing on Charlotte Brontë’s development as an author. Gordon, Lyndall. Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996, 418 p. Provides revisionist insights into Brontë’s life.

Examines the influence on Brontë’s writings of the Gothic tales included in popular nineteenth-century periodicals and annuals, gift books containing poetry, prose fiction, and illustrations. Avery, Simon. “‘Some Strange and Spectral Dream’: The Brontës’ Manipulation of the Gothic Mode.” Brontë Society Transactions 23, no. 2 (October 1998): 120-35. Explores the ways in which the Brontës each utilized and modified the traditional Gothic. Cecil, David. “Charlotte Brontë.” In Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation, pp. 119-54. New York: BobbsMerrill, 1935. Delineates Brontë’s flaws as a novelist while at the same time averring that she is a creative genius and that even her weakest passages are “pulsing with her intensity, fresh with her charm.” Chen, Chih-Ping. “‘Am I a Monster?’: Jane Eyre among the Shadows of Freaks.” Studies in the Novel 34, no. 4 (winter 2002): 367-84. Relates Brontë’s presentation of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre to the freak shows popular during the nineteenth century, suggesting parallels between Bertha’s “enfreakment” and Jane’s search for her own identity. Chesterton, G. K. “Charlotte Brontë as a Romantic.” In Charlotte Brontë, 1816-1916: A Centenary Memorial, pp. 49-54. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1917. Discusses the coexistence of romance and realism in the novels of Charlotte Brontë. Crosby, Christina. “Charlotte Brontë’s Haunted Text.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 24, no. 4 (autumn 1984): 701-15. A feminist interpretation that examines the impact of Gothic elements on Villette, a work often categorized as a realist novel. DeLamotte, Eugenia C. “Gothic Romance and Women’s Reality in Jane Eyre.” In Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic, pp. 193-228. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Explores the combination of Gothic elements and realism in Jane Eyre and the impact of that combination on Jane’s quest for her identity. Gubar, Susan. “The Buried Life of Lucy Snowe: Villette.” In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan M. Gubar, pp. 399-440. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. Suggests that Villette, with a protagonist cut off from society, family, money, and confidence, “is perhaps the most moving and terrifying account of female deprivation ever written.”

Miller, Lucasta. The Brontë Myth. New York: Knopf, 2004, 351 p.

Martin, Robert Bernard. “Jane Eyre.” In Accents of Persuasion: Charlotte Brontë’s Novels, pp. 57-108. London: Faber & Faber, 1966.

Offers a biography that retraces myth surrounding the Brontë sisters, particularly Charlotte.

An interpretation of Jane Eyre as a novel that seeks a balance between reason and passion.

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33. Barker, p. 723.

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Milbank, Alison. “‘Handling the Veil’: Charlotte Brontë.” In Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction, pp. 140-57. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992.

Woolf, Virginia. “Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.” In her Collected Essays, pp. 185-90. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966.

Delineates Brontë’s expansion of the traditional women’s role in Gothic literature.

Compares Jane Eyre with Wuthering Heights, praising the former as a vivid, absorbing, passionate, and poetic novel.

Nicoll, W. Robertson. “Charlotte Brontë and One of Her Critics.” The Bookman 10 (January 1900): 441-43. Presents a review of Villette from the Christian Remembrancer and a response by Brontë in which she protests the reviewer’s judgments of her character. Rai, Amit S. “The Black Spectre of Sympathy: The ‘Occult’ Relation in Jane Eyre.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 14, no. 3 (July-September 2003): 243-68. Asserts the importance of sympathy in Jane Eyre as a “paradoxical mode of power.” Rigby, Elizabeth. “Vanity Fair—and Jane Eyre.” The London Quarterly Review, no. 167 (December 1948): 82-99. An unsigned review attributed to Rigby. Describes Jane Eyre as a “remarkable” work, but criticizes the author for a combination of “total ignorance of the habits of society, a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion.”

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OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Brontë’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 17; Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 2; British Writers, Vol. 5; British Writers: The Classics, Vol. 2; British Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 1; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1832-1890; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 21, 159, 199; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring Novels; Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 2; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 3, 8, 33, 58, 105, 155; Novels for Students, Vol. 4; Twayne’s English Authors; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 4; and World Literature Criticism.

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EMILY BRONTË (1818 - 1848)

(Full name Emily Jane Brontë; also wrote under the pseudonym Ellis Bell) English novelist and poet.

B

rontë is considered an important yet elusive figure in nineteenth-century English literature. Although she led a brief and circumscribed life, spent in relative isolation in a parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, she left behind a literary legacy that includes some of the most passionate and inspired writing in Victorian literature. Today, Brontë’s poems are well regarded by critics, but they receive little attention, and her overall reputation rests primarily on her only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847). While Brontë incorporated into that work the horror and mystery of a Gothic novel, the remote setting and passionate characters of a Romantic novel, and the social criticism of a Victorian novel, she transformed all of these traditions. In this story of extraordinary love and revenge, Brontë demonstrated the conflict between elemental passions and civilized society, resulting in a compelling work that has been elevated to the status of a literary classic. At the same time, Brontë’s writings have raised many questions about their author’s intent. Unable to reach a consensus concerning the ultimate meaning of her works and reluctant to assign them a definitive place in the English literary tradition, critics continue to regard Brontë as a fascinating enigma in English letters.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Although Brontë’s life was outwardly uneventful, the unusual circumstances of her upbringing have prompted considerable scrutiny. One of six children born to Maria Branwell Brontë and the Reverend Patrick Brontë, she was raised in the parsonage at Haworth by her father and maternal aunt following her mother’s death in 1821. In 1825 she was sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, but returned to Haworth when her sisters Maria and Elizabeth became ill at the institution and died. A significant event in Brontë’s creative life occurred in 1826 when Patrick Brontë bought a set of wooden toy soldiers for his children. The toys opened up a rich fantasy world for Emily and her siblings Charlotte, Branwell, and Anne: Charlotte and Branwell created an imaginary African land called Angria, for which they invented characters, scenes, stories, and poems, and Emily and Anne later conceived a romantic legend centered upon the imaginary Pacific Ocean island of Gondal. The realm of Gondal became a lifelong interest for Brontë and, according to many scholars, a major imaginative source for her writings. In addition to composing prose works (now lost) concerning the history of Gondal, she wrote numerous poems that were evidently directly inspired by Gondal-related themes, characters, and situations. While Brontë was intellectually precocious and began writing poetry at an early age, she failed to establish social

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contacts outside of her family. She briefly attended a school in East Yorkshire in 1835 and worked as an assistant teacher at the Law Hill School near Halifax in about 1838, but these excursions from home were unsuccessful, ending in Brontë’s early return to Haworth. She stayed at the parsonage, continuing to write poetry and attending to household duties, until 1842, when she and Charlotte, hoping to acquire the language skills needed to establish a school of their own, took positions at a school in Brussels. Her aunt’s death later that year, however, forced Brontë to return to Haworth, where she resided for the rest of her life. In 1845, Charlotte discovered one of Emily’s private poetry notebooks. At Charlotte’s urging Emily reluctantly agreed to publish some of her poems in a volume that also included writings by her sisters. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, reflecting the masculine pseudonyms adopted by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, respectively, was published in May 1846. While only two copies of the book were sold, at least one commentator, Sydney Dobell, praised Emily’s poems, singling her out in the Athenaeum as a promising writer and the best poet among the “Bell” family. Meanwhile, Brontë had been working on Wuthering Heights, which was published in 1847 in an edition that also included Anne’s first novel, Agnes Grey. Brontë’s masterpiece was poorly received by contemporary critics who, repelled by the vivid portrayal of malice and brutality in the book, objected to the “degrading” nature of her subject. Brontë worked on revising her poetry after publishing Wuthering Heights, but her efforts were soon interrupted. Branwell Brontë died in September 1848, and Emily’s health began to decline shortly afterwards. In accordance with what Charlotte described as her sister’s strong-willed and inflexible nature, Brontë apparently refused medical attention and died of tuberculosis in December 1848.

MAJOR WORKS Although Brontë is more distinguished as a novelist than as a poet, scholars regard her poetry as a significant part of her oeuvre. In particular, lacking first-hand information concerning her life and opinions, commentators have looked to the poems as a source of insight into Brontë’s personality, philosophy, and imagination. Critics have attempted to reconstruct a coherent Gondal “epic” from Brontë’s poems and journal entries. In addition to identifying Gondal’s queen, commonly referred to as Augusta Geraldine Almeda, and her lover Julius Brenzaida as key characters in

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the Gondal story, scholars have underscored the presence of wars, assassination, treachery, and infanticide in Brontë’s fantasy realm. Critics have consequently noted many similarities between the passionate characters and violent motifs of Gondal and Wuthering Heights, and today a generous body of criticism exists supporting the contention that the Gondal poems served as a creative forerunner of the novel. In Wuthering Heights, Brontë chronicles the attachment between Heathcliff, a rough orphan taken in by the Earnshaw family of Wuthering Heights, and the family’s daughter, Catherine. The two characters are joined by a spiritual bond of preternatural strength, yet Catherine elects to marry her more refined neighbor, Edgar Linton of Thrushcross Grange; ultimately, this decision leads to Catherine’s madness and death and prompts Heathcliff to take revenge upon both the Lintons and the Earnshaws. Heathcliff eventually dies, consoled by the thought of uniting with Catherine’s spirit, and the novel ends with the suggestion that Hareton Earnshaw, the last descendant of the Earnshaw family, will marry Catherine’s daughter, Catherine Linton, and abandon Wuthering Heights for Thrushcross Grange.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Initially, critics failed to appreciate Brontë’s literary significance. While commentators acknowledged the emotional power of Wuthering Heights, they also rejected the malignant and coarse side of life that it depicted. Charlotte Brontë responded to this latter objection in 1850, defending the rough language and manners in her sister’s novel as realistic. At the same time, however, she acknowledged the dark vision of life in the book, which she attributed to Emily’s reclusive habits. This focus on Brontë’s aloofness, combined with the mystical aspects of her poetry and the supernatural overtones of Wuthering Heights, fostered an image of the writer as a reclusive mystic that dominated Brontë criticism into the twentieth century. During that century, however, a number of modern studies brought Brontë’s craftsmanship to light. Recognition of her artistry increased dramatically as scholars discovered the sophistication and complexity of her images, characterizations, themes, and techniques in Wuthering Heights. Interest in her poetry has also grown, primarily due to investigations into its Gondal background, so that today Brontë is the focus of considerable scholarly attention as both a novelist and poet.

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PRINCIPAL WORKS Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell [as Ellis Bell, with Currer and Acton Bell (pseudonyms of Charlotte and Anne Brontë)] (poems) 1846 *Wuthering Heights [as Ellis Bell] (novel) 1847 †Life and Works of the Sisters Brontë. 7 vols. [with Charlotte and Anne] (novels and poetry) 1899-1903

1801—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name. ‘Mr. Heathcliff?’ I said. A nod was the answer. ‘Mr. Lockwood, your new tenant, sir. I do myself the honour of calling as soon as possible after my arrival, to express the hope that I have not inconvenienced you by my perseverance in soliciting the occupation of Thrushcross Grange: I heard yesterday you had had some thoughts—’ ‘Thrushcross Grange is my own, sir,’ he interrupted, wincing. ‘I should not allow any one to inconvenience me, if I could hinder it—walk in!’ The ‘walk in’ was uttered with closed teeth, and expressed the sentiment, ‘Go to the Deuce’: even the gate over which he leant manifested no sympathizing movement to the words; and I think that circumstance determined me to accept the invitation: I felt interested in a man who seemed more exaggeratedly reserved than myself.

Gondal Poems (poetry) 1938

When he saw my horse’s breast fairly pushing the barrier, he did pull out his hand to unchain it, and then suddenly preceded me up the causeway, calling, as we entered the court,—

The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë (poetry) 1941

‘Joseph, take Mr. Lockwood’s horse; and bring up some wine.’

The Shakespeare Head Brontë. 19 vols. (novels, poetry, and letters) 1931-38

* †

This edition of Wuthering Heights was published with Anne Brontë’s novel Agnes Grey. This work includes letters written by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë.

PRIMARY SOURCES EMILY BRONTË (NOVEL DATE 1847) SOURCE: Brontë, Emily. “Chapter 1.” In Wuthering Heights. 1847. Reprint edition, pp. 1-6. New York: Bantam Dell, 2003. The following excerpt comprises Chapter 1 of Wuthering Heights, which was first published in 1847.

‘Here we have the whole establishment of domestics, I suppose,’ was the reflection, suggested by this compound order. ‘No wonder the grass grows up between the flags, and cattle are the only hedge-cutters.’ Joseph was an elderly, nay, an old man: very old, perhaps, though hale and sinewy. ‘The Lord help us!’ he soliloquised in an undertone of peevish displeasure, while relieving me of my horse: looking, meantime, in my face so sourly that I charitably conjectured he must have need of divine aid to digest his dinner, and his pious ejaculation had no reference to my unexpected advent.

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Many critics have noted the Gothic elements in Brontë’s novel, particularly the distinct architecture of Wuthering Heights, the characterization of Heathcliff as a dark, brooding hero, and ghostly wanderings on the moors. Syndy McMillen Conger wrote that Wuthering Heights arouses emotions “central to the Gothic experience: melancholy, desire, and terror.” Commentators observe that Brontë heightened her story as well with fierce animal imagery and scenes of raw violence. Dream motifs figure prominently in Wuthering Heights, and critics also stress the importance of windows as symbolic vehicles for spiritual entrance and escape in the novel. While the Gothic tradition influenced Brontë, she also deviated from that tradition in significant ways, notably in her characterization of Catherine Earnshaw. The typical Gothic heroine is petite, naïve, and morally virtuous, but Catherine, as Conger wrote, is “complicated, analytical, and uninhibited.” The subject of wide-ranging critical debate for generations, Wuthering Heights continues to defy categorization and endures as a literary classic.

EMILY BRONTË

Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling. ‘Wuthering’ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun. Happily, the architect had foresight to build it strong: the narrow windows are deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with large jutting stones. Before passing the threshold, I paused to admire a quantity of grotesque carving lavished over the front, and especially about the principal door; above which, among a wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys, I detected the date ‘1500,’ and the name ‘Hareton Earnshaw.’ I would have made a few comments, and requested a short history of the place from the surly owner; but his attitude at the door appeared to demand my speedy entrance, or complete departure, and I had no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting the penetralium. One step brought us into the family sittingroom, without any introductory lobby or passage: they call it here ‘the house’ preeminently. It includes kitchen and parlour, generally; but I believe at Wuthering Heights the kitchen is forced to retreat altogether into another quarter: at least I distinguished a chatter of tongues, and a clatter of culinary utensils, deep within; and I observed no signs of roasting, boiling, or baking, about the huge fire-place; nor any glitter of copper saucepans and tin cullenders on the walls. One end, indeed, reflected splendidly both light and heat from ranks of immense pewter dishes, interspersed with silver jugs and tankards, towering row after row, on a vast oak dresser, to the very roof. The latter had never been underdrawn: its entire anatomy lay bare to an inquiring eye, except where a frame of wood laden with oatcakes and clusters of legs of beef, mutton, and ham, concealed it. Above the chimney were sundry villanous old guns, and a couple of horse-pistols: and, by way of ornament, three gaudily painted canisters disposed along its ledge. The floor was of smooth, white stone; the chairs, high-backed, primitive structures, painted green: one or two heavy black ones lurking in the shade. In an arch under the dresser, reposed a huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer, surrounded by a swarm of squealing puppies; and other dogs haunted other recesses.

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The apartment and furniture would have been nothing extraordinary as belonging to a homely, northern farmer, with a stubborn countenance, and stalwart limbs set out to advantage in kneebreeches and gaiters. Such an individual seated in his armchair, his mug of ale frothing on the round table before him, is to be seen in any circuit of five or six miles among these hills, if you go at the right time after dinner. But Mr. Heathcliff forms a singular contrast to his abode and style of living. He is a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman: that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure; and rather morose. Possibly, some people might suspect him of a degree of underbred pride; I have a sympathetic chord within that tells me it is nothing of the sort: I know by instinct, his reserve springs from an aversion to showy displays of feeling—to manifestations of mutual kindliness. He’ll love and hate equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again. No. I’m running on too fast: I bestow my own attributes over liberally on him. Mr. Heathcliff may have entirely dissimilar reasons for keeping his hand out of the way when he meets a would-be acquaintance, to those which actuate me. Let me hope my constitution is almost peculiar: my dear mother used to say I should never have a comfortable home; and only last summer I proved myself perfectly unworthy of one. While enjoying a month of fine weather at the seacoast, I was thrown into the company of a most fascinating creature: a real goddess in my eyes, as long as she took no notice of me. I ‘never told my love’ vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears: she understood me at last, and looked a return—the sweetest of all imaginable looks. And what did I do? I confess it with shame—shrunk icily into myself, like a snail; at every glance retired colder and farther; till finally the poor innocent was led to doubt her own senses, and, overwhelmed with confusion at her supposed mistake, persuaded her mamma to decamp. By this curious turn of disposition I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness; how undeserved, I alone can appreciate. I took a seat at the end of the hearthstone opposite that towards which my landlord advanced, and filled up an interval of silence by attempting to caress the canine mother, who had left her

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My caress provoked a long, guttural gnarl. ‘You’d better let the dog alone,’ growled Mr. Heathcliff in unison, checking fiercer demonstrations with a punch of his foot. ‘She’s not accustomed to be spoiled—not kept for a pet.’ Then, striding to a side door, he shouted again—‘Joseph!’— Joseph mumbled indistinctly in the depths of the cellar, but gave no intimation of ascending; so his master dived down to him, leaving me vis-àvis the ruffianly bitch and a pair of grim shaggy sheep-dogs, who shared with her a jealous guardianship over all my movements. Not anxious to come in contact with their fangs, I sat still; but, imagining they would scarcely understand tacit insults, I unfortunately indulged in winking and making faces at the trio, and some turn of my physiognomy so irritated madam, that she suddenly broke into a fury, and leapt on my knees. I flung her back, and hastened to interpose the table between us. This proceeding roused the whole hive. Half-a-dozen four-footed fiends, of various sizes and ages, issued from hidden dens to the common centre. I felt my heels and coat-laps peculiar subjects of assault; and, parrying off the larger combatants as effectually as I could with the poker, I was constrained to demand, aloud, assistance from some of the household in reestablishing peace. Mr. Heathcliff and his man climbed the cellar steps with vexatious phlegm: I don’t think they moved one second faster than usual, though the hearth was an absolute tempest of worrying and yelping. Happily, an inhabitant of the kitchen made more dispatch: a lusty dame, with tucked-up gown, bare arms, and fire-flushed cheeks, rushed into the midst of us flourishing a frying-pan: and used that weapon, and her tongue, to such purpose, that the storm subsided magically, and she only remained, heaving like a sea after a high wind, when her master entered on the scene. ‘What the devil is the matter?’ he asked, eyeing me in a manner I could ill endure after this inhospitable treatment. ‘What the devil, indeed!’ I muttered. ‘The herd of possessed swine could have had no worse spirits in them than those animals of yours, sir. You might as well leave a stranger with a brood of tigers!’

‘They won’t meddle with persons who touch nothing,’ he remarked, putting the bottle before me, and restoring the displaced table. ‘The dogs do right to be vigilant. Take a glass of wine?’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘Not bitten, are you?’ ‘If I had been, I would have set my signet on the biter.’ Heathcliff’s countenance relaxed into a grin. ‘Come, come,’ he said, ‘you are flurried, Mr. Lockwood. Here, take a little wine. Guests are so exceedingly rare in this house that I and my dogs, I am willing to own, hardly know how to receive them. Your health, sir!’ I bowed and returned the pledge; beginning to perceive that it would be foolish to sit sulking for the misbehaviour of a pack of curs: besides, I felt loath to yield the fellow further amusement at my expense; since his humour took that turn. He—probably swayed by prudential considerations of the folly of offending a good tenant— relaxed a little in the laconic style of chipping off his pronouns and auxiliary verbs, and introduced what he supposed would be a subject of interest to me,—a discourse on the advantages and disadvantages of my present place of retirement. I found him very intelligent on the topics we touched; and before I went home, I was encouraged so far as to volunteer another visit tomorrow. He evidently wished no repetition of my intrusion. I shall go, notwithstanding. It is astonishing how sociable I feel myself compared with him.

TITLE COMMENTARY Wuthering Heights E. P. WHIPPLE (ESSAY DATE OCTOBER 1848) SOURCE: Whipple, E. P. “Novels of the Season.” The North American Review 67, no. 141 (October 1848): 35470. In the following excerpt, Whipple presumes that the author of Wuthering Heights is male and faults the novel as amoral and offensive.

Acton Bell, the author of Wuthering Heights, . . . when left altogether to his own imaginations,

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nursery, and was sneaking wolfishly to the back of my legs, her lip curled up, and her white teeth watering for a snatch.

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seems to take a morose satisfaction in developing a full and complete science of human brutality. In Wuthering Heights he has succeeded in reaching the summit of this laudable ambition. He appears to think that spiritual wickedness is a combination of animal ferocities, and has accordingly made a compendium of the most striking qualities of tiger, wolf, cur, and wild-cat, in the hope of framing out of such elements a suitable brutedemon to serve as the hero of his novel. Compared with Heathcliff, Squeers is considerate and Quilp humane. He is a deformed monster, whom the Mephistopheles of Goethe would have nothing to say to, whom the Satan of Milton would consider as an object of simple disgust, and to whom Dante would hesitate in awarding the honor of a place among those whom he has consigned to the burning pitch. This epitome of brutality, disavowed by man and devil, Mr. Acton Bell attempts in two whole volumes to delineate, and certainly he is to be congratulated on his success. As he is a man of uncommon talents, it is needless to say that it is to his subject and his dogged manner of handling it that we are to refer the burst of dislike with which the novel was received. His mode of delineating a bad character is to narrate every offensive act and repeat every vile expression which are characteristic. Hence, in Wuthering Heights, he details all the ingenuities of animal malignity, and exhausts the whole rhetoric of stupid blasphemy, in order that there may be no mistake as to the kind of person he intends to hold up to the popular gaze. Like all spendthrifts of malice and profanity, however, he overdoes the business. Though he scatters oaths as plentifully as sentimental writers do interjections, the comparative parsimony of the great novelists in this respect is productive of infinitely more effect. It must be confessed that this coarseness, though the prominent, is not the only characteristic of the writer. His attempt at originality does not stop with the conception of Heathcliff, but he aims further to exhibit the action of the sentiment of love on the nature of the being whom his morbid imagination has created. This is by far the ablest and most subtile portion of his labors, and indicates that strong hold upon the elements of character, and that decision of touch in the delineation of the most evanescent qualities of emotion, which distinguish the mind of the whole family. For all practical purposes, however, the power evinced in Wuthering Heights is power thrown away. Nightmares and dreams, through which devils dance and wolves howl, make bad novels.

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SYNDY MCMILLEN CONGER (ESSAY DATE 1983) SOURCE: Conger, Syndy McMillen. “The Reconstruction of the Gothic Feminine Ideal in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.” In The Female Gothic, edited by Julian Fleenor, pp. 91-106. Montreal, Quebec: Eden Press, 1983. In the following essay, Conger studies the influence of the traditional Gothic genre on Wuthering Heights as well as Brontë’s innovations within and upon the Gothic tradition, particularly in terms of her portrayal of the heroine.

In the first chapter of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë invites her readers to expect a Gothic thriller, an eighteenth-century form bound by a set of narrative conventions long established and easily recognized by 1847. She opens her tale by sketching the outline of a dwelling on a hill, which, like the Gothic castle in its age, disrepair, and isolation, is a monument to the fragility of human constructs. Next she fills in details designed to elicit the emotions central to the Gothic experience: melancholy, desire, and terror. The hilltop is bleak with the only vegetation being “a few stunted firs” and “a range of gaunt thorns.”1 Grass grows between the flagstones leading to the door, over which the narrator sees Gothic ornamentation: “grotesque carving,” “a wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys,” and a barely visible ancient date “1500” and name. Like the narrator’s name, “Lockwood,” which has the unsettling connotation of something or someone being shut out, and the name above the door, “Hareton Earnshaw,” which suggests nature’s mockery of woman’s birthright or wages (hare ⫹ earn ⫹ shaw, ‘a clump of bushes or trees; thicket; copse’), other names also evoke that sense of vague threat so pervasive in the Gothic world: “Wuthering Heights” for a house constantly buffeted by “atmospheric tumult” and “Heathcliff” for the abruptly inhospitable landlord. While Lockwood quickly recognizes the morose, darkskinned gypsy as an isolato and a misanthrope, the reader is very apt to assume, in this context, that he is a Gothic villain. Critics often take note of these Gothic characteristics but rarely linger on them, perhaps assuming that Gothic details are mere “trappings” (a favorite word, after all, of early students of the Gothic novel),2 decorative devices which could in no way touch the essence of Wuthering Heights. Such an assumption can handicap readers, condemning them to unnecessary historical shortsightedness in their interpretation of Brontë’s masterpiece. The rather obvious fact that Wuthering Heights is much more than a re-creation of Gothic formulae should not deter us from asking

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From the protagonist’s perspective, the traditional Gothic plot can be briefly described as fearful periods of pursuit and flight or confinement, persecution, and escape; brief interludes of reconciliation with loved ones; and a final, advantageous marriage and the restoration of tranquillity. Brontë’s first modification in this traditional formula is to introduce her heroine not as a marriageable young woman but as a child. Catherine will also be wooed, terrorized and pursued, and married, but Brontë first develops her into a complex and individualized character. Her second innovation is to reverse the significance attached to marital and extramarital love. Brontë’s heroine is married early in the novel, but this marriage is no resolution as it is in the traditional Gothic. It does not settle conflicts but exacerbates them, and in Brontë’s structure, replaces the period of fearful confinement found in the middle of the traditional Gothic novel. Whether or not Nelly believes the perception valid, for Catherine marriage has seemed a dungeon: “Oh! I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors—I wish I were a girl again, half savage, and hardy, and free. . . .” This second change signals nothing less than a redefinition of freedom. In the early Gothic novel freedom is associated with escape from the dark usurper into marriage. In Wuthering Heights, however, in a way which underlines Brontë’s adherence to the romantic inversion of eighteenth-century values,3 freedom is inextricably bound to a social outcast and to the lawless—even incestuous—relationship he offers her. This redefinition of freedom is rather too radical to have grown simply from Brontë’s discontent with the traditional strictures of a genre. At the hub of both structural changes stands the heroine, and this suggests that underlying Brontë’s urge to modify Gothic conventions is a dissatisfaction with contemporary fictional definitions of femininity and feminine happiness. Indeed, the portrait of the heroine which emerges from the novel makes such a conclusion ineluctable; for Catherine is a Gothic heroine quite free from the social and literary proscriptions of her forerunners. For this reason with Emily Brontë the term Female Gothic may be said to take on special significance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR H. F. CHORLEY’S NEGATIVE RESPONSE TO WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Here are two tales [Agnes Gray and Wuthering Heights] so nearly related to Jane Eyre in cast of thought, incident, and language as to excite some curiosity. All three might be the work of one hand,—but the first issued remains the best. In spite of much power and cleverness; in spite of its truth to life in the remote nooks and corners of England, Wuthering Heights is a disagreeable story. The Bells seem to affect painful and exceptional subjects:—the misdeeds and oppressions of tyranny—the eccentricities of “woman’s fantasy.” They do not turn away from dwelling upon those physical acts of cruelty which we know to have their warrant in the real annals of crime and suffering,—but the contemplation of which true taste rejects. The brutal master of the lonely house on “Wuthering Heights”—a prison which might be pictured from life—has doubtless had his prototype in those ungenial and remote districts where human beings, like the trees, grow gnarled and dwarfed and distorted by the inclement climate; but he might have been indicated with far fewer touches, in place of so entirely filling the canvas that there is hardly a scene untainted by his presence. . . . Enough of what is mean and bitterly painful and degrading gathers round every one of us during the course of his pilgrimage through this vale of tears to absolve the Artist from choosing his incidents and characters out of such a dismal catalogue; and if the Bells, singly or collectively, are contemplating future or frequent utterances in Fiction, let us hope that they will spare us further interiors so gloomy as the one here elaborated with such dismal minuteness. SOURCE: Chorley, H. F. “Our Library Table.” The Athenaeum, no. 1052 (25 December 1847): 1324-25.

It no longer simply means Gothic novels written by females for females, imitative of male forms and attitudes. With Brontë it means literature

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ourselves what Brontë did for the Gothic tradition and what the Gothic tradition did for Brontë. Her contribution to the tradition was to give it aesthetic respectability and also to introduce liberating modifications into what had become an overly rigid plot form. The tradition provided her with a unique opportunity to define for herself and for her readers a new kind of Gothic heroine.

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which deliberately reorders the Gothic experience in order to speak to women about themselves in a new way. Brontë’s departures from the conventional Gothic heroine—and the implications of those departures for her readers—will be the focus of the remainder of this essay. It begins with a review of Catherine’s foremothers. The picture of ideal femininity which emerges from early novels in the Gothic tradition is at once reductive and fragmented, a negative fictional construct born of a repressive society. The eighteenth-century Gothic heroine is made exemplary more for what she lacks than for what she has. Antonia wins praise from Lewis in The Monk (1796), for example, for lacking fullness of figure, for being “rather below than above the middle size” and “light and airy.”4 She also wins praise for lacking any distinctive physical qualities: “her eyes were not very large, nor their lashes particularly long.” Hers is not an awesome physical beauty, Lewis explains, but a beauty of temperament—of the submissive personality: “not so lovely from regularity of features, as from sweetness and sensibility of countenance. . . .” Submissiveness is a key personality trait of the persecuted Gothic maiden well into the nineteenth century.5 Insofar as it is humanly possible, she obeys the dicta of parents and society, given perhaps their most uncompromising articulation by Isidora’s mother in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820): “perfect obedience . . . and unbroken silence.”6 Only when the Gothic heroine is confronted by dastardly behavior does she offer positive resistance, but it typically takes the puerile form of empty threats, unanswered prayers, or unheard shrieks. In less life-threatening circumstances, she frets and waits but rarely makes an independent attempt to change the questionable values or behavior of those around her. Isabella’s response to Manfred’s indignities in The Castle of Otranto (1764) is paradigmatic: she flees the secular world without any attempt to expose his outrageous desires. True, Radcliffe’s Ellena Rosalba (The Italian, 1797) once refuses to accept unpleasant alternatives offered her by an unjust abbess, and Emily St. Aubert (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1792) similarly refuses to sign away her property rights despite Montoni’s threats. But this is a passive resistance, the last resort of those convinced they are powerless. Active, constructive resistance lies outside the ken or the capability of the early Gothic heroine. Submissiveness, this time coupled with total self-abnegation, is even held up as ideal by Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter in her Frankenstein (1817). Mary Shelley grants her heroine

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Elizabeth intelligence, but Victor prizes her most for her “light and airy” figure and her yielding nature: “No one could better enjoy liberty, yet no one could submit with more grace than she did to constraint and caprice.”7 She is to him most “enchanting” when she is “continually endeavouring to contribute to the happiness of others, entirely forgetful of herself.” As the above examples may already have suggested, the early Gothic heroine was not only weak-willed but also sometimes weak-minded, although in this respect she grows in stature as the nineteenth century approaches. Isabella’s mind is never assessed by Walpole and Lewis’ Antonia is not even allowed to read an unexpurgated Bible for fear her mind will be tainted. Radcliffe’s heroines, although they seem schooled most in the useful and fine arts of sewing, drawing, versifying, painting, and singing, sometimes also receive more rigorous intellectual training. Emily St. Aubert’s father insists that she study Latin, English, and science: “‘A well-informed mind,’ he would say, ‘is the best security against the contagion of folly and vice.’”8 Maturin’s Immalee-Isidora has the most formidable mind of all; her thoughts are often intelligent and boldly heterodox. She bewilders her Roman Catholic mother, for instance, by insisting on the precedence of piety over ceremony. Nor does Isidora easily accept the suppression of her naturally exuberant emotions by her mother, who brands them “violent” and “unmannerly.” Such signs of intellect, however, most not be overrated. The scanty training these girls receive cannot give them sufficient strength to cope independently with the perplexities they encounter without and within, and they are easy prey not only for fortune hunters but for themselves. Lacking constructive ways of occupying their minds, they frequently suffer from excess sensibility, a painfully exaggerated state of emotional awareness, bringing with it acute sensitivity to external stimuli and a tendency to fall victim to the paralyzing, diffuse emotions of sentiment and anxiety. Just as nameless wishes and fears will invade the idle mind, so dark imaginings often usurp the ill-informed mind. These heroines have overly vivid imaginations, a propensity to invent dangers where none exist. Emily is repeatedly warned by her father about the dangers of overly fine feelings, but when Montoni shuts her in his remote castle, she is much more the victim of the terrors she invents than she is of him. Even if these heroines survive the tests of sensibility and fancy, they are sure to capitulate intellectually dur-

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less ghost, as Beatrice becomes the “Bleeding Nun” of The Monk.; At her most extreme, the femme fatale has struck an alliance with the devil, as has Matilda in The Monk in this case her kiss damns as well as fires the soul of her lover, Ambrosio.

Physically slight, emotionally passive, and intellectually ill-trained—wherein lies such a heroine’s stature? Primarily in her moral impeccability. The Gothic heroine is morally flawless; hers is a purity of mind which becomes more pronounced as the turn of the century approaches. She never has a vindictive thought, even in the wake of abuses. She never dreams an unacceptable dream. Her innocence is so thorough in some cases that she has virtually no knowledge at all of evil. Antonia must learn only too late what the special glint in the friar Ambrosio’s eye means. Immalee listens incredulously to Melmoth’s tales of man’s cruelty to his fellow creatures: “‘In the world that thinks!’ repeated Immalee, ‘Impossible!’” These heroines are Eves before the fall, invested with mythical perfection which first becomes explicit in Maturin’s portrayal of Immalee. Of sexuality and physical passion these mythical creatures are equally ignorant, a clue to us that their creators equated passion with evil. Antonia “knows not in what consists the difference of Man and Woman.” “Of passion,” Immalee said “she knew nothing, and could propose no remedy for an evil she was unconscious of”

The woman reading this fiction in the eighteenth century is hardly to be envied. The price she paid for the privilege of emotional release was high; she was most cruelly reduced and divided against herself. She might temporarily enjoy reading of the villain’s lust or the hero’s sentimental adoration, but she was quietly being instructed at the same time to choose between two equally impossible feminine models. Did she yearn only to be virtuous? Then she must strive for a body “light and airy” and a mind equally so; she must be utterly compliant, selfless, dependent, and pure. Did she pine instead for an all-subsuming, passionate love affair? Then she must expect to be soundly punished, even damned, or become vicious, subject to criminal impulses and madness. The choice is rather obviously unsatisfactory, at the very least encouraging the female reader to repress any urges to express or please herself, and—perhaps even more dangerously in the long run—perpetuating the myth that she was fated, whether good or bad, to be a victim of passions beyond her control, if not of her own, then those of others. Little wonder that Mary Wollstonecraft repudiated such fiction in Maria, or, The Wrongs of Women (1798) and such feminine models in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792): “I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body.”1 0 In such fiction the bounds of femininity were painfully narrow.

Balancing the frail, submissive paragon in early Gothic fiction is the dark, imperious, passionridden one, the femme fatale. She has the independence of spirit, the emotional vibrancy, the ingenuity, and the moral fallibility the heroine often lacks, but she pays a price for these strengths. She is their victim. In her youth, the dark woman is often loving but of a “warm and voluptuous character” as was Beatrice de las Cisternas in The Monk. As she ages, if her wishes are in any way thwarted, and they invariably are, she grows insatiable, ungovernable, and even deliberately wicked. She becomes then an exacting and jealous competitor for a young man’s affections, as is the Baroness Lindenberg in The Monk; or a “vindictive, yet crafty and deceitful” mother, as is the Marchesa de Vivaldi in The Italian;9 or a mercilessly punitive Mother Superior as are the abbesses in The Italian and The Monk. Her last days and her death may be unquiet. Her conscience may weigh heavily enough with crimes to drive her into temporary insanity and delirium, as it does Signora Laurentini in The Mysteries of Udolpho; and just as she is a conscience-plagued woman in life, so she may be transformed after death into a rest-

In the first few episodes of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë studiously avoids recreating such stereotyped Gothic heroines. The reader meets no gentle maiden or femme fatale in these early scenes; instead Brontë offers two Catherines, one far too sullen to qualify as the angelically compliant Gothic heroine, and the other far too complex. The younger Catherine is fair and pretty but unpardonably rude to Lockwood when he comes to tea, a rudeness which is easily traceable in the personality of her mother, the elder Catherine, as it emerges from her childish scrawl and Lockwood’s dream. This elder Catherine as a child is at once naughty and loving, disobedient and loyal, and a childish specter both terrifying and pitiful. From the outset, then, she is clearly a new composite heroine, combining positive and negative attributes of earlier feminine characters of the Gothic tradition.

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ing the ordeal of love. The minds of Emily and Immalee, both relatively perceptive young women, turn to butter when they are with their lovers. They lose all ability to think or act on their own.

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This is not to deny a family resemblance between Catherine and the Gothic heroines before her. She is, for example, as easily tyrannized by emotions and unrealistic fantasies as Emily St. Aubert. She grieves at Heathcliff’s disappearance until she makes herself physically ill, even as a strong young woman. Then, when a second bout of illness proves fatal during her first pregnancy, violent emotions are again the primary underlying cause, something Nelly recognizes but cannot understand or help. Her fantasies, though a comforting refuge against a hostile environment for Catherine the child (the fantasy of her father in heaven, for example), are sadly self-defeating and delusive for Catherine the adult. She should see that her marriage to Edgar cannot “aid Heathcliff to rise” when the two men despise each other. She should see that even if her wealth could in some way aid Heathcliff, she could still never marry him so long as Edgar remained alive. She should, after Isabella’s elopement, work to reconcile herself to the inevitable rift between Edgar and Heathcliff instead of withdrawing to a world of unrecoverable childhood fantasies: “Oh, if I were but in my own bed in the old house!” Sometimes the fantasies cause positive harm. Her delusory accusations of Nelly only harden her nurse against her; and her fantasy-inspired wish to catch a breath of night air from the moors does little to cure her fever. The family resemblance is strongest between Radcliffe’s and Maturin’s heroines and Catherine. Like them, she is drawn to nature, though for her it is not an emblematic reminder of God’s Providence, as they believe, but rather is itself divine. Catherine’s heaven is the heath: “. . . heaven did not seem to be my home,” Catherine admits to Nelly as she shares a dream she’s had of dying, “and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.” Catherine also shares with Emily, Ellena, and Immalee a propensity to almost deify her lovers, to over-idealize love bonds. The passages which illustrate this are often quoted, but they are so central to this point and a number of others to follow that they are included here in their entirety: I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine

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are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire. . . . I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and, if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind. . . . (pp. 100-02)

This speech has been heralded as the articulation of a new love ethos, one with metaphysical dimensions: the identification of love as a natural, hence amoral, impulse which cannot be judged by sublunary standards.1 1 Such assumptions, viewed from the perspective of the Gothic tradition, however, are actually not new at all. Catherine’s words echo sentimental love declarations in the pages of Radcliffe and Maturin. Strikingly similar in diction and tone to the words above, for example, are Immalee’s words mourning and idealizing her love for the absent Melmoth: “The lightnings are glancing round. . . . I lived but in the light of his presence—why should I not die when that light is withdrawn?” Immalee even reaches out for the same metaphors and absolute expressions in her attempt to express what seems to her inexpressible: “Roar on, terrible ocean! thy waves . . . can never wash his image from my soul,—thou dashest a thousand waves against a rock, but the rock is unmoved—and so would be my heart.” Catherine’s uniqueness, critical opinion to the contrary, does not reside in how she loves. Catherine and Immalee have in common not only how they love but whom they love. Both prefer their demon lovers, rebels against the human and the divine, a preference which at first seems to identify both heroines as notably nonconformist. Yet Melmoth the Wanderer and Wuthering Heights exist on very different levels of abstraction, and parallels between the two must be drawn carefully. Melmoth’s rebellion is one of mind and soul; he himself is a preternatural Faustian character whose function in the novel is mythical—repeated reenactment of Satan’s temptation. The story of his temptation of Immalee, consequently, has few social implications; it is

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ries of a benevolent father, a fire and brimstone servant, and a selfish, tyrannical brother. These adult models produce in Catherine a love of gentle kindness, a well-informed aversion to cruelty, and a keen sense of injustice. At the same time they encourage in her a sympathetic admiration and love for her stoic fellow sufferer, the gypsy child Heathcliff—her father inspires her to it, Hindley drives her to it. Heathcliff becomes increasingly cruel himself as a young man, but Catherine’s love for him persists, eventually, according to Nelly, growing immoderate.

Still another important distinction between Immalee and Catherine should be drawn. Although Immalee loves a damned soul, her love for him is conventional, in terms of Gothic fiction, insofar as it is faultlessly pure. She loves him for awakening her emotionally and intellectually, and she is blinded until the very end of her life to the malicious side of his nature. Catherine’s love for Heathcliff is far less immaculate. Far from being blind to his fiendish qualities, she sees them with unerring clarity: “. . . he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.” Catherine’s attachment to this “wolfish man,” although sometimes expressing itself in terms of compassion or affection, is more often disturbing in its admixture of antagonism, pathological loyalty, arrogance, monomania, narcissism, and incest. In fact, there is a touch of the pathological about Catherine in other attitudes she shares with her prototypes: she is not simply the occasional victim of whim or imagined terror but her passions’ willing slave; she is not simply appreciative of nature but a nature worshipper, a near pagan; and she is not simply the unwitting prey of a rebel lover but embraces her lover’s anarchic values. In depicting such a rebel heroine as Catherine, Brontë not only goes beyond Gothic conventions, she hovers visibly close to the limits of the socially acceptable. Nevertheless, her readers are not quite free to reject Catherine, as they could villains like Manfred or Ambrosio, unless they are willing to reject a heroine. Instead, they must entertain the possibility that a woman need not be angelically pure to be worthy of attention. Clearly, even when Catherine seems most like her prototypes, she is very different from them. It is time to examine those differences.

Catherine’s conflict first takes form after she unexpectedly finds herself a guest in the home of the Lintons after a midnight ramble with Heathcliff on the moors. Although she at first expresses disdain for the spoiled, rich children, she returns home from her stay metamorphosed. Now Heathcliff’s angry and uncouth appearance repels her and she rebukes him. Subsequently she suffers acutely when he is banished for a fight with the haughty Edgar, and she finds her feelings reversed. She becomes impatient with the whining Edgar and longs for Heathcliff. Her unresolved feelings for the two young men cause a crisis, of course, when Edgar proposes. She isn’t certain—should she bow to the love-hate she feels for the savage but oppressed Heathcliff, or should she acquiesce to Edgar, refined and gentle like her father, but somewhat distant and cowardly? Which one does she admire the most and dislike the least? When Catherine tries to explain her indecision to the exasperated Nelly, she represents it not as a battle between head and heart but as a disturbance of soul. In reply to Nelly’s question, “Where is the obstacle?” Catherine replies “‘Here! and here!’ . . . striking one hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast. ‘In whichever place the soul lives.’” This is a conflict which engages, in a manner unprecedented in Gothic heroines, ambiguous desire against ambiguous desire, complex against complex, ego against alter-ego (“Nelly, I am Heathcliff”).

What distinguishes Catherine above all is the unique complexity and energy of her personality. Catherine’s mind is complicated, analytical, and uninhibited, all qualities never before granted a Gothic heroine. Catherine’s complexity is more than amply illustrated by her central conflict, the seeds of which lie buried in her childhood memo-

Gothic heroines were traditionally placed in a conflict situation between a dark seducer and a fair lover, but theirs was an external conflict;1 4 they never felt—or admitted they felt—a pull in two directions. Catherine is the first important exception to that pattern, for she internalizes her conflict completely. She is not simply placed between two lovers; she feels divided between two lovers. From this Brontë’s story derives at least two important advantages. First, the symbolic resonance of the traditional Gothic triad of characters is enhanced. Now both villain and lover

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primarily spiritual allegory.1 2 Heathcliff, on the other hand, is a flesh and blood landlord whose crimes are primarily social ones—alienation of a father’s affections, usurpation, seduction, tyranny over wife and child—and the story of Catherine’s love for him abounds in social and psychological implications. Seen in these terms, Catherine is by far the more radical of the two heroines, for she chooses a social outcast, one who pits himself against economic and conjugal privilege and one whose implicit democratic and romantic values could alter the fabric of society.1 3

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This is plain from the very beginning of the novel in her Testament diary (which covers, as Lockwood reports, “every morsel of blank that the printer had left.” She compares and judges Hindley incisively as a father figure: “Hindley is a detestable substitute.” Notice that she is keenly aware of injustice and expresses that insight by artfully juxtaposing the self-indulgent comfort Hindley allows himself and the pain he inflicts on others: “While Hindley and his wife basked downstairs before a comfortable fire . . . we were . . . groaning and shivering . . . ,” or, “Frances pulled his [Heathcliff’s] hair heartily; and then went and seated herself on her husband’s knee, and there they were, like two babies, kissing and talking nonsense by the hour. . . .”

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can be seen as extensions of the heroine’s mind and can represent her own conflicting social and emotional needs. Catherine wishes to marry wisely, to enhance her uncertain social status, but she has also contemplated marrying unwisely— for love alone—and living a beggarly existence with Heathcliff. She needs an environment which can shield her from emotions of ravaging intensity, and yet she isn’t content without the childhood companion who is most apt to inspire such emotions. She longs for the near pathological attachment of Heathcliff as much as for the gentle, more rational adoration of Edgar. Second, this internalization, since it obviously increases the psychological complexity of the Gothic heroine, broadens immeasurably the bounds within which femininity may move. A heroine’s mind, Brontë is insisting here, need not be a blank tablet. It may sometimes be plagued by contradictory or selfdefeating desires. Nor is Catherine’s mind passive, dependent, or inhibited. She seems to have been born with an energetic need to analyze, articulate, and conquer what she sees around and within herself.

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Catherine is also willing to subject herself publicly to unflinching analysis, although she is not entirely free of subtle self-deceptions. As a young woman, she convinces herself mistakenly that Heathcliff will not care if she marries Edgar. Later she nearly convinces herself that Edgar and Heathcliff have killed her when, as Heathcliff reminds her, she has actually broken her own heart. Despite such delusions, Catherine is vastly superior in self-understanding to the previous Gothic heroines who were, for the most part, passive and impassive receptors; and she shares her understanding without affectation or scruple. Earlier heroines had internalized the laws of propriety too fully ever to air the contents of their minds publicly, nor did they always fully know their own minds. Ellena’s response to Vivaldi’s urgent pleas to marry him rather than seek retirement is all too typical. The situation begs for honest emotional response and an intelligent reassessment of plans, but Ellena refuses to change her answer. She “gently reproached him for doubting the continuance of her regard . . . but would not listen. . . . She represented . . . that respect to the memory of her aunt demanded it.” After Vivaldi departs, Ellena is left to disperse encroaching depression, a sign of unexamined and unresolved concerns. In contrast, Catherine rarely hides or fails to scrutinize her own thoughts, sometimes with breathtaking honesty. Her character gains breadth and depth and credibility as she shares not only surface responses, but unrecoverable dreams of the past, impossible dreams for the future, sentiments from the dark, not so respectable corners of her mind, and misgivings about those sentiments. “I want to cheat my uncomfortable conscience . . .”; “Nelly, I see now, you think me a selfish wretch . . .”; “What did I say, Nelly? I’ve forgot-

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These strengths, however much they may win Catherine grudging admiration, do not make her easier to live with. Her list of human imperfections is so long one wonders that she is a heroine at all. It should come as no surprise that Brontë has created in Catherine a heroine whose faults often closely resemble those of the traditional femme fatale of Gothic fiction. She is sometimes a raving fury; and, before her, such fury is displayed only by the scheming, ambitious Signora Laurentini, Beatrice, and the Baroness Lindenberg. Also like these wicked women, Catherine is often proud, self-centered, imperious, manipulative, and cruel. She coerces those around her into obedience by command, humiliation or selfpunishment (Brontë’s depiction of the little Catherine as a girl whose heart’s desire is a riding whip is far from gratuitous). Her love is literally fatal both to her and to Heathcliff. Most important and emblematic of all these darker characteristics, however, is Catherine’s introduction into the story as a ghost. Despite her appearance as a defenseless child-specter who has lost her way on the moors, Lockwood’s response to her in his nightmare is horror, and rightly so. The experience has the earmarks of the classic ghost story: the scratching sound on the windowpane, the ice-cold hand, the melancholy voice, the seductive pleading, and the bleeding. This scene firmly allies Wuthering Heights with the Gothic tradition, of course. However, another more important alliance is also struck here—an intimate alliance between the Gothic heroine and the demonic or supernatural realm. In earlier novels, the heroine moves apart from this world, terrorized or occasionally helped by it, and indeed sometimes helping to create it in her own frightened imagination, but never actively participating in it. She is a creature of the diurnal sphere, estranged from nocturnal desires and terrors, perceiving them as outside threats, as totally “other,” and as uncanny. Only the villain-

esses ally themselves with the dark powers. Catherine, by contrast, is introduced by Brontë as an uncanny, nocturnal creature, an identity she never completely sheds. For a short time she has a promisingly happy life as Edgar’s wife in the “sunshine” at Thrushcross Grange, but she emerges from and returns to a nightmare world of “wuthering” self-destructive passions: greed, revenge, lovehate. In a most telling moment during her final illness, Catherine feels herself haunted and Nelly forces her to realize that the ghost she thinks she sees is her own mirrored reflection: “‘Myself,’ she gasped, ‘and the clock is striking twelve! It’s true, then; that’s dreadful!’” This poignant scene at once recalls the earlier scene in which Catherine is a child-ghost and refines the sense in which we should see her as an adult. She is self-tortured, haunted by her own unfulfillable, child-like desires. Since Heathcliff is equally plagued by such hopeless desires, it is only too appropriate that she should haunt him, too, after her death. Brontë has naturalized the supernatural in a most convincing way through Catherine, but beyond that she has also given her readers a heroine more complete and more truly pitiful than earlier ones. Catherine finally experiences what is the most somber insight a Gothic character can have or inspire: that the demonic springs from her own imagination. Catherine is the first Gothic heroine to acknowledge the dark side of her soul. Catherine’s dark side and her recognition of that dark side represent a change of major importance in the depiction of heroines in the Gothic. Such self-recognition—that “of the enlightened person feeling haunted by some demonic self”—is believed by Francis Russell Hart to lie at the center of the Gothic experience. His description of that experience reads like a commentary on Catherine’s mirror scene: What gives the point its full and terrifying truth in an enlightenment context is that the demonic is no myth, no superstition, but a reality in human character or relationship, a novelistic reality. . . . Are there really ghosts? asks CarlyleTeufelsdröckh. We are ghosts.1 5

What Hart says is particularly true for male characters in the Gothic, who are granted some degree of imperfection and self-awareness from the beginning. Manfred is made to see fully the wickedness of his lust for power; Ambrosio finally recognizes himself as a willing devil’s accomplice; and after William Frankenstein’s murder, Victor admits his own complicity in this diabolic deed: “Sleep fled from my eyes; I wandered like an evil spirit.” Not until Brontë, however, does the Gothic

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ten. Was he vexed at my bad humour this afternoon?”; “Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather.” Catherine may seem narcissistic and unrestrained, but she is nonetheless a valuable corrective to unreflective and unresponsive Gothic heroines that preceded her. The same concerns which impel Walpole’s heroine to flight, Lewis’ to prayer, Radcliffe’s to diversions, and Maturin’s to daydreams, compel Catherine to examine her own heart. She is the first fully introspective Gothic heroine.

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heroine come to a comparable level of wholeness and self-awareness. Catherine’s self-recognition is not without pain, but it is a pain that heals, one which allows sympathetic readers to cease utterly denying their own negative impulses. The split in the feminine psyche implicitly encouraged by earlier Gothic fiction is, through Catherine, questioned. Further, the Gothic heroine has been freed from what was always the worst of the tyrannies inflicted on her: that of the ideal of moral perfection. Although it would be an overstatement to say that Brontë has given us a completely mature heroine, it can certainly be said that she has offered us a more mature vision of woman’s character than did authors from Walpole to Maturin, one much more integrated and less restricted physically, emotionally, and intellectually.1 6 By way of final illustration and summary, I would like to focus briefly on heroines’ death scenes, partly because they have been slighted, but mostly because Catherine’s death scene is pivotal in the realigning of reader sympathies. Only if Brontë allows Catherine to face death admirably can we be sure that she is being recommended to us as a heroine. Walpole’s Matilda dies a perfectly exemplary death. Killed by her father in their chapel, she is selfless, pious, and forgiving as her life ebbs slowly away. Her only thoughts are for her parents: “. . . as soon as Hippolita was brought to herself, she [Matilda] asked for her father . . . seizing his hand and her mother’s, locked them in her own, and then clasped them to her heart. Manfred could not support this . . . pathetic piety.”1 7 Radcliffe consistently paints two pictures of female death, both in the exemplary mode, one offering a positive, the other a negative, model. Emily’s mother dies with perfect composure born of lifelong selfcontrol and piety, and she is surrounded by solicitous loved ones when she dies. Signora Laurentini and Madame Cheron, on the other hand, die disquieted and abandoned, the one tortured by memories of her wickedness, the other by the greed of her hastily-chosen husband. The final hours of Lewis’ heroine are horrific, yet she dies with as much serentiy as Emily’s mother. Antonia is drugged, then entombed, and finally raped and stabbed to death by Ambrosio in a corpse-filled vault; she nevertheless surrenders her life with gentle resignation, selflessly spending her last minutes convincing Lorenzo that he should not despair. Maturin’s angelic Isidora also dies in a dungeon, a prison of the Inquisition where she has been placed because of her liaison with Mel-

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moth, but she nonetheless dies without resentment and with his name on her lips: “Paradise! . . . Will he be there!” Catherine’s death is not nearly so exemplary and edifying. Death and suffering are not really the result of someone else’s malice but of her own headstrong refusal to relinquish Heathcliff’s friendship to save her marriage. She throws a tantrum after Edgar requires her to choose between him and Heathcliff. Then she lives for a week on nothing, in the words of Nelly, but “cold water and ill-temper,” a form of self-abuse which weakens her already fragile constitution. Nor does Catherine have much composure during the last months of her life. Rather, she suffers agonies as extreme as those of the most wicked femme fatale: melancholy, regression, temporary disorientation, helpless fury, self-pity, and the terrors of paranoia and delusion. Like other heroines, Catherine is allowed the comfort of having her loved one with her during her last conscious moments, but again these moments are markedly different from those of Matilda’s, Antonia’s or Isidora’s. Her concern is not to comfort Heathcliff but to punish him for what she believes is his heartlessness. She refuses to pity him, accuses him of being the death of her, and expresses the vindictive wish that he could be made to suffer as much as she has: “I wish I could hold you . . . till we were both dead! I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn’t you suffer? I do!” His own frenzy at being thus accused checks her anger, however, and she suddenly modifies her wish: “I only wish us never to be parted. . . .” Then she relents even more, asking him to embrace and forgive her as she has forgiven him, and his embrace conveys the love he cannot articulate. In death, as in life, Brontë allows Catherine to be a whole and credible person, one with negative and positive characteristics. The noble martyr-like stances of Matilda, Antonia, and Immalee on the edge of the grave are not to be scoffed at; but from the reader’s perspective, these saintly images are apt to create anxiety or guilt. The authors have made idols of their heroines, unattainable ideals to emulate. Women are to die selflessly, sweetly, obediently, and without any regrets or anger, even in death to be denied the privilege of swerving for a moment from the path of perfection. Catherine’s death, in contrast, is not one to recommend for imitation; much of the time Catherine is at her vindictive worse. Still, despite her childish behavior, she manages in her last moments to achieve forgiveness and an open expression of her love. Nor should we forget the “unearthly beauty”

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inquisitive, angry, confused, and even selfish or cruel, and still command respect as a human being; a woman has the right to be outstanding, to be openly intelligent and complex, and still command affection.

As no attempt was made here to prove a direct influence of specific Gothic novels on Wuthering Heights, no time was spent on works identified as important in molding either Brontë’s mind or her work. Of all the literary influences on the Brontës—and those include the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Richardson, Radcliffe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Scott, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and George Sand1 8 —Helene Moglen believes the single most important figure was Lord Byron. The rebellion that was Byron’s life, including his flagrant violations of propriety in matters of love, and especially his scandalous affair with his half-sister, apparently left a deep impression on the young Brontës. Their juvenalia include transparently Byronic values and characters.1 9 Moglen’s emphasis on Byron serves well as a reminder that a literary event just as crucial to the making of Wuthering Heights as the Gothic novel was the Romantic revolution. Its spirited affirmation of the value of individual subjective experience, and its tentative dream of woman as intellectual companion as well as lover, no doubt encouraged Brontë in her efforts to create a new, intelligent, imaginative, and passionate heroine. Brontë could also draw inspiration from the turn-of-the-century Wollstonecraft who, in fact, was more the radical, pleading for the outright rejection of the myth of romantic passion in her Vindication.2 0 Like her sister Charlotte, Emily could never quite give up this myth,2 1 but this very refusal may finally account for the extraordinary success of Wuthering Heights. Brontë was finally a more successful iconoclast than Wollstonecraft. With none of the self-conscious irritation of Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (1818) but with just as much persuasiveness, Brontë deconstructed Walpole’s feminine ideal and replaced it with her own. The alluring surface romance of Wuthering Heights and its initial evocation of Gothic convention are the sugar coating which apparently made the feminist pill quite palatable. At least for the duration of Brontë’s “Gothic thriller,” readers tacitly accept a number of irreverently non-Victorian notions about women: a woman should be assumed to have physical and intellectual as well as emotional needs and strengths; a woman has the right to physical, emotional, and intellectual autonomy both before and after marriage; a woman has the right to be imperfect—to be mistaken, passionate,

These ideas are tempered in the latter half of the novel, but the statement Brontë makes through Catherine and Heathcliff, as so many modern readers continue to acknowledge, is the one that haunts the mind. Although there are disgruntled censors of the ilk of John Beversluis, who insists that Catherine is simply a petulant, indecisive woman,2 2 the admirers drown them out. Catherine is named Brontë’s “supreme and original creation,”2 3 and her love for Heathcliff is “what . . . D. H. Lawrence called true humanity.”2 4 Through it Brontë is “positing . . . natural human values, especially, love and integrity, against a corrupt and deadened society”2 5 and “affirming . . . man and woman’s more primary needs.”2 6 Part of this praise no doubt springs from our own continuing reluctance to relinquish the myth of romantic love unto death which Brontë dramatizes, but it nevertheless demonstrates the power Catherine continues to exert on the modern imagination. Brontë’s rescue of the languishing maiden from the Gothic bastille began no revolutions; but it has unquestionably helped to save both heroine and genre from oblivion and to free the woman from the persistent fetters of the eighteenth-century ideal, which were, according to Wollstonecraft, “worse than Egyptian bondage.”2 7

Notes 1. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Hilda Marsden and Ian Jack (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). 2. Early discussion of the Gothic novel by Ernest Baker, Edith Birkhead, K.K. Mehrota, Eino Railo, Montague Summers, and Devendra Varma tend to dwell on Gothic “devices” and their sources and to slight important questions about the structure and psychological function of the novels. In the last fifteen years, however, new theoretical ground has been broken on these questions by such studies as: Gerhard Bierwirth, “Die Problematik des englischen Schauerromans: Ein kritisches Modell zur Behandlung diskriminierter Literatur,” Diss. Frankfurt/M., 1970; Peter Brooks, “Virtue and Terror: The Monk,” ELH, 40, 2 (1973), 249-63; Francis Russel Hart, “The Experience of Character in the English Gothic Novel,” in Experience in the Novel, Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1968); Robert D. Hume, “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 282-90; Ellen Moers, “Female Gothic,” in Literary Women (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1963); and Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a

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Brontë gives her dying heroine. Brontë’s implicit lesson to her female readers was clearly that they could, even if they were overwhelmed momentarily by cruel or selfish thoughts, hope to die with some dignity and some small measure of comfort.

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Literary Genre, tr. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975). Moers’ study is the best available discussion of Brontë in the context of the Female Gothic tradition. 3. I am indebted to Helene Moglen’s most lucid discussion of the Brontës and Romanticism in Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1976), pp. 19-78, 230-42, and also to her interpretation of Wuthering Heights as an “account of the development of a human personality, the specifically female personality,” in “The Double Vision of Wuthering Heights: A Clarifying View of Female Development,” The Centennial Review of Arts and Sciences, 15 (1971), 391-405. 4. Matthew Lewis, The Monk: A Romance, ed. Howard Anderson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 9.

15. Hart, pp. 94, 99. 16. Moglen, “The Double Vision,” pp. 391-93. 17. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, ed. W.S. Lewis (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), p. 106. 18. For discussion of Brontë’s possible sources, see Mary Visick, The Genesis of Wuthering Heights (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958); Ruth M. Mackay, “Irish Heaths and German Cliffs: A Study of the Foreign Sources of Wuthering Heights,” Brigham Young University Studies, 7 (1965), 28-39; Leicester Bradner, “The Growth of ‘Wuthering Heights,’” in Wuthering Heights: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Alastair Everitt (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), pp. 14-38; J.V. Arnold, “George Sand’s Mauprat and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights,” Revue de la littérature comparée, 46 (1972), 209-18; Rolf R. Nicolai, “‘Wuthering Heights’: Emily Brontë’s Kleistian Novel,” South Atlantic Bulletin, 38, 2 (1973), 23-32; and Patrick Diskin, “Some Sources of ‘Wuthering Heights,’” NQ (July/August, 1977), 354-61.

5. Patricia Meyer Spacks, “The Dangerous Age,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 11, 4 (Summer, 1978), 41738, emphasizes the importance of submissiveness (p. 432) as does Katharine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1966).

19. Moglen, Charlotte Brontë, esp. pp. 26-33.

6. Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, ed. William F. Axton (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 253.

20. Wollstonecraft, “that grand passion not proportioned to the puny enjoyments of life, is only true to the sentiment, and feeds on itself,” p. 66. Cf. pp. 121-122.

7. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (The 1818 Text), ed. with variant readings, James Rieger (Indianapolis: The BobbsMerrill Co., 1974), p. 30.

21. Moglen speaks convincingly in concluding Charlotte Brontë of “her continuing inability to break free of that circle of romantic idealism which had bound her to life,” p. 226.

8. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance Interspersed with some Pieces of Poetry, eds. Bonamy Dobrée and Frederick Garber (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 6.

22. John Beversluis, “Love and Self Knowledge: A Study of Wuthering Heights,” English, 24, 120 (Autumn, 1975), 77-82.

9. Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents: A Romance, ed. Frederick Garber (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 7. 10. Mary Wollstonecraft, “An Introduction to the First Edition,” of A Vindication of the Rights of Women with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, ed. Charles W. Hagelman, Jr. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1967), p. 34. Helen Mews, Frail Vessels: Woman’s Role in Women’s Novels from Fanny Burney to George Eliot (Univ. of London: The Athlone Press, 1969), believes that “society’s two different images of women, inherited from the long past,” caused “perplexity” and “tension” for women between 1750 and 1850 (p. 5). 11. Two recent reaffirmations of this romantic interpretation are H.P. Sucksmith’s “The Theme of Wuthering Heights Reconsidered,” Dalhousie Review, 54, 3 (Autumn, 1974), 418-28; and Peter Widdowson’s “Emily Brontë: The Romantic Novelist,” Moderna Sprak, 56, 1 (1972), 1-19. 12. “. . . a tragic allegory of Christian history,” Axton’s introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer, p. xvii. Contrasting Melmoth and Wuthering Heights reveals the weakness in Mews’ contention that Brontë’s message is “poetic,” not “social” (p. 80). 13. See Arnold Kettle, “Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights,” in Vol. I of An Introduction to the English Novel (Evanston: Harper & Row, 1960). 14. An insightful Freudian analysis of the Gothic heroine’s situational conflict has been done by Cynthia Griffin Wolff entitled “The Gothic Hero-Villain: An Attractive Nuisance.” (See Wolff’s essay in this anthology.)

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23. Leicester Bradner, p. 38. 24. F.H. Langman, “Thoughts on Wuthering Heights,” in Everitt, p. 76. 25. Widdowson, p. 17. 26. Sucksmith, p. 422. 27. Wollstonecraft, p. 179.

MARILYN HUME (ESSAY DATE FALL 2002) SOURCE: Hume, Marilyn. “Who Is Heathcliff? The Shadow Knows.” Victorian Newsletter 102 (fall 2002): 15-18. In the following essay, Hume explores how Brontë uses the character of Heathcliff to reveal and represent the will of the unconscious or “shadow” side of humanity.

Charlotte Brontë asks in the preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, “Whether it is right or advisable to create things like Heathcliff,” and goes on to say that she scarcely thinks it is. She also suggests that the author has little control over this creative process once it has been set in motion, claiming that it has a life of its own (xxxvi). What is it in Heathcliff that so concerns Charlotte Brontë that she feels a need to question the wisdom of his existence? Is it pure evil in some

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C. G. Jung sees shadow as manifesting in his own dreams and in the dreams of his analysands. Aspects of the shadow are also projected on to others: The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly—for instance, inferior traits of character and other incompatible tendencies. . . . The shadow is that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors and so comprise the whole historical aspect of the unconscious. If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of all evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc. (399)

Shadow is encountered either in our dreams or projected onto the world. In Wuthering Heights, others project their shadow side on to Heathcliff. In this essay we look specifically at how that occurs with the characters of Lockwood, Nelly Dean and Cathy. Wuthering Heights is written with a framed narrative. The first narrator is Mr. Lockwood and the second is Nelly Dean. These two narrators see Heathcliff differently. Their perception of him is

ABOUT THE AUTHOR CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S PREFACE TO THE 1850 EDITION OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur—power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot. SOURCE: Bell, Currer (psuedonym of Charlotte Brontë). “Preface to Wuthering Heights.” In The Life and Works of the Sisters Brontë: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë. Vol. 5, 1903. Reprint edition, pp. liii-lviii. AMS Press, Inc., 1973.

influenced by their own perception of themselves. In the case of Lockwood, he at first sees Heathcliff as similar to himself. This view is expressed by Lockwood in the following excerpt and is from the start a little hard for the reader to accept: “Thrushcross Grange is my own, sir,” he interrupted, wincing, “I should not allow anyone to inconvenience me, if I could hinder it—walk in!” The “walk in” was uttered with closed teeth and expressed the sentiment, “Go to the Deuce!” Even the gate over which he leant manifested no sympathising movement to the words, and I think that circumstances determined me to accept the invitation; I felt interested in a man who seemed more exaggeratedly reserved than myself. (3)

Lockwood wants to see in Heathcliff a man who is reserved, and more so than himself. He wants to see this level of reservation as admirable in Heathcliff and therefore fine in him too:

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demonic form? Is it wild unbridled passion, part of the nature of the moors? Is he more simply a tyrant, a cruel sadistic despot? Is he a romantic lover, slave to his own passions and victim of circumstance? In Heathcliff Emily Brontë gives us all of these characters and phenonena. He is not one to the exclusion of the others: he is all. In Heathcliff we have a man to stir our feelings, a man to enrage our senses, engage our passions and walk over our graves. He disturbs us so because he reflects our unconscious minds. He plays out our fantasies and our nightmares. Heathcliff is a man formed by the unconscious projections of the characters in the novel—the projection of all they find unacceptable in themselves. He is a man formed, particularly, by the unconscious projections of the narrators and Catherine Earnshaw. Everything rejected by the conscious sensibilities of Lockwood, Nelly Dean and Catherine finds unlimited freedom of expression in Heathcliff, where it surfaces to taunt and confuse its creators. These unconscious projections of unacceptable traits take the form of “The Shadow” as described by Carl G. Jung.

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I know, by instinct, his reserve springs from an aversion to showy displays of feeling—to manifestations of mutual kindness. He’ll love and hate equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again—No, I’m running on too fast—I bestow my own attributes over liberally on him. (5)

By Lockwood’s own admission, he consciously bestows his attributes on Heathcliff. Consciously he sees himself as reserved and finds this acceptable. Consciously he bestows that attribute on Heathcliff. The shadow, however, personifies everything the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself. What is it that Lockwood refuses to acknowledge about himself that he unconsciously projects onto Heathcliff? Emily Brontë soon gives us an example of Lockwood’s unconscious self. Lockwood tells of an incident in which he met a young woman to whom he was attracted. He makes it plain to her that he is attracted to her but when she responds he shuns her. She is so overwhelmed with confusion at her supposed mistake that she leaves. He confesses that because of this he has gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness, a reputation he cannot accept (6). He cannot see himself as heartless, yet clearly he is. Emily Brontë gives us another look at this true aspect of Lockwood’s character in the episode when he sees Cathy’s ghost: The intense horror of nightmare came over me; I tried to draw back my arm, but, the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, “Let me in-let me in!” “Who are you?” I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. “Catherine Linton,” it replied, shiveringly. . . . “I’m come home, I’d lost my way on the moor!” As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window—Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro until the blood ran down and soaked the bed clothes. (25)

Lockwood admits that in his dream he is cruel and deliberately heartless but these are aspects of his personality that he does not consciously accept. Lockwood cannot integrate cruelty as part of who he is, so he relegates cruelty to his shadow side. He projects this shadow onto Heathcliff. He is attracted to Heathcliff not for the reasons of his conscious mind but because Heathcliff personifies his forbidden self. Heathcliff is cruel and deliberately heartless.

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Lockwood also has a strange Biblical dream which serves to illuminate his shadow. He dreams he is travelling with Joseph to hear the famous James Branderham preach from the text “Seventy Times Seven” (22). He dreams that Joseph, the preacher or himself has committed the “First of the Seventy First,” and is to be publicly exposed and excommunicated. This refers to the story in Matthew known as “The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant.” The sin referred to is that of unforgiveness: “Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord, if my brother keeps on sinning against me, how many times do I have to forgive him? Seven times?’ ‘No, not seven times,’ answered Jesus, ‘but seventy times seven’” (Matt. 18: 21-22). In the dream Lockwood fights with the whole assembly. He has no weapon to use in self defense. Joseph and the others all have staves. In the language of symbols, the stave used as a weapon has punitive meaning (Tresidder 191). In Jungian psychology it is generally believed that when a person is in conflict with someone else in a dream that other person is a shadow figure representing qualities the dreamer refuses to admit as part of his personality (Robertson 130). Lockwood, not suprisingly, offers us no interpretation of this dream, other than to blame it on bad tea and bad temper. We are given no interpretation from any other source in the text and yet it would seem to have some meaning. Using the Jungian model, one may reasonably propose that Lockwood is repressing his desire to punish others and his inability to forgive them. In the dream he is going to be exposed and punished by the whole assembly and by Joseph, whom he refers to as his most ferocious assailant, and by Branderham. These figures all represent the repressed side of Lockwood in his dream. In his waking life Heathcliff represents this shadow side of Lockwood. Lockwood’s repressed punitive side finds free expression in Heathcliff: Heathcliff is punitive, ferocious and unforgiving. The second narrator, Nelly Dean, has a different part to play in forming Heathcliff. We have no dreams to give us a glimpse of Nelly’s unconscious mind. Nelly does, however, fantasize about Heathcliff, particularly about the circumstances of his birth: “You’re fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows, but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week’s income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors, and brought to England. Were I in your place, I would

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Heathcliff as far as we can learn from the text does not fantasize about his parentage. Nelly fantasizes about Heathcliff’s parentage. Nelly, it appears, is not content with her own humble station in life, a station determined by parentage. Nelly is a servant, but she does not like to be treated as one. When she is treated as a servant she objects. When Catherine, for example, treats her as a servant she refers to Catherine as haughty and says, “she ceased to hold any communications with me except as a mere servant” (87). Nelly finds this form of communication unacceptable. Nelly has no mysterious background to fantasize about for herself. Indeed, such fantasies on her own behalf would be incompatible with Nelly’s view of herself as, “a steady, reasonable kind of body” (62). Romantic thoughts and fancies are not part of Nelly’s conscious thinking. It would not be acceptable for a country girl to be so fanciful. She must find some other outlet for these desirable but forbidden fantasies. Nelly relegates these desires and fantasies to her unconscious mind where they manifest in the romantic persona of Heathcliff. Cathy, though not a narrator, is clearly crucial to the development of Heathcliff. Emily Brontë uses Cathy as the one character who understands Heathcliff, the only one who knows his true character. She knows him so well because he is, indeed, part of her. He is her shadow side. Heathcliff comes into Cathy’s life when they are children. They quickly become very close, recognizing in each other a common wildness, lack of convention and love of the moors: But it was one of their chief amusements to run away to the moors in the morning and remain there all day, and the after punishment grew a mere thing to laugh at. The curate might set as many chapters as he pleased for Catherine to get by heart, and Joseph might thrash Heathcliff till his arm ached; they forgot every thing the minute they were together again, at least the minute they had contrived some naughty plan of revenge; and many a time I’ve cried to myself to watch them growing more reckless daily, and I not daring to speak a syllable for fear of losing the small power I still retained over the unfriendly creatures. (46)

Nelly describes two equally truculent children. Wild and defiant of any convention or guidance, they are described by her as “unfriendly” and as “creatures.” As children they are a pair. Then,

beginning with her visit to the Lintons, Cathy starts to repress this side of her nature. She consigns it to her unconscious shadow and lives it, as projection, through Heathcliff. From this point on the boundary between Cathy and Heathcliff blurs. When she returns from Thrushcross Grange she is dressed like a lady. She adopts the airs and graces of a lady and consciously cultivates her relationship with Edgar Linton. She decides over a very short period of time that she will marry him. Cathy feels that she is repressing part of herself but is powerless to stop. She cannot accept her own wild nature as an integral part of her personality and conform to the dictates of her society to be a lady. She chooses the latter. She rejects the wild part of herself in the form of Heathcliff. She tells Nelly that it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff now that he is so low. Cathy’s inability to be true to her feelings and marry Heathcliff also serves as metaphor for her rejection of “the hatless little savage” (52) she can no longer allow herself to be. Cathy’s savage nature is relegated to her unconscious shadow side where it immediately manifests in Heathcliff. Cathy, to comfirm this, dramatically declares that she is Heathcliff: My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees—my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself—but as my own being—so, don’t talk of our separation again—it is impracticable. (82)

From this moment on, Heathcliff fully embodies Cathy’s rejected self. When Cathy returns from Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff is at first nowhere to be found. He continues to hide from Cathy and to sulk. Then, still at this point seeing himself as Cathy’s partner, he starts to question his role. He hangs around Nelly for awhile and finally summons up the courage to say, “Nelly, make me decent, I’m going to be good” (55). Nelly takes this on as her project. She washes Heathcliff and dresses him up. She encourages him to frame high notions of his birth, suggesting that perhaps he may be a prince from some foreign land. She tells him that all he needs to be handsome as he wishes is to have a good heart. Heathcliff as a young boy wants to be fair and handsome and have a chance at being rich like Edgar Linton. In fact, he wants the same things Cathy wants, and at this point is willing to try to get them by following Cathy’s lead and

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frame high notions of my birth; and the thoughts of what I was should give me courage and dignity to support the oppressions of a little farmer.” (57)

EMILY BRONTË

conforming. He is ready to be amiable. An amiable Heathcliff, however, is not acceptable to anyone. The Lintons are perfectly content to be amiable themselves. They don’t need and won’t accept that from Heathcliff. Hindley is determined to keep Heathcliff down and together they thwart Heathcliff’s attempt to “be good.” From Heathcliff’s first appearance at Wuthering Heights as “a dirty, ragged, black-haired child” (36), he has a disruptive effect on all those around him. Cathy and Hindley are upset because the gifts their father has for them are broken. The household is thrown into confusion by his arrival. They refer to him as “it” and they reject him:

Works Cited Brontë. Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. New York: Penguin Classics, 1995. Good News Bible: Today’s English Version. New York: American Bible Society, 1976. Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffe; trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Robertson, Robin. Beginners Guide to Jungian Psychology. York Bach, ME: Nicholas Hays, Inc., 1992. Tresidder, Jack. Dictionary of Symbols. San Fransisco: Chronicle Books, 1998.

They entirely refused to have it in bed with them, or even in their room, and I had no more sense, so I put it on the landing of the stairs, hoping it might be gone by the morrow. By chance, or else attracted by hearing his voice, it crept to Mr Earnshaw’s door and there he found it on quitting his chamber. Inquiries were made as to how it got there; I was obliged to confess, and in recompense for my cowardice and inhumanity was sent out of the house. (37)

FURTHER READING Bibliographies Barclay, Janet M. Emily Brontë Criticism 1900-1982: An Annotated Checklist. Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1984, 162 p. Provides an annotated list of writings on Emily Brontë.

Heathcliff has spent only one night at Wuthering Heights at this point and already there is confusion and conflict. Not only is there external conflict between the children and Heathcliff, and the children and their father, and Mr. Earnshaw and Nelly, but there is also internal conflict in Nelly. Nelly refers to her actions as cowardly and inhuman. A peaceful domestic scene becomes one of confusion, chaos and conflict. Throughout the novel, Heathcliff causes chaos, confusion and conflict among others. He also causes the same emotions within others. It is fair to say that where Heathcliff is, there is no peace. What is it in Heathcliff that so disrupts others? It is an aphorism that whatever most attracts or repels us in another is generated by something in ourselves: something of ourselves we see reflected back to us by the recipient of our attention. It is our unconscious shadow side that so disturbs and attracts us. It is this shadow that we find reflected back to us that so upsets our psyche. The characters in Wuthering Heights, especially, but not exclusively, Lockwood, Nelly Dean and Catherine, face their shadow in Heathcliff. In Heathcliff they are brought face to face with everything they refuse to acknowledge in themselves. When they are faced with this embodiment of their shadow, it is no wonder that chaos, confusion and conflict ensue. And when she is faced with this embodiment, it is no wonder that

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Charlotte Brontë questions the wisdom of the creation of Heathcliff. Heathcliff is, after all, unacceptable.

Crump, Rebecca W. Charlotte and Emily Brontë: A Reference Guide. 3 vols. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Provides critical sources from 1846-1983.

Biography Grin, Winifred. Emily Brontë. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, 290 p. Offers a scholarly biography that attempts to clarify the myths about Brontë’s personality.

Criticism Apter, T. E. “Romanticism and Romantic Love in Wuthering Heights.” In The Art of Emily Brontë, edited by Anne Smith, pp. 205-22. London: Vision Press, 1976. Discusses Brontë’s treatment of Romantic love in Wuthering Heights, noting that Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship is presented as “suffering love,” whereas Cathy and Hareton’s bond serves as “an alternative to that destructive, Romantic love.” Brennan, Matthew C. “Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.” In The Gothic Psyche: Disintegration and Growth in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, pp. 77-96. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1997. Examines the impact of Gothic convention on Wuthering Heights. Cottom, Daniel. “I Think; Therefore, I Am Heathcliff.” ELH 70, no. 4 (winter 2003): 1067-88. Examines Gothic novels, including Wuthering Heights, in light of the writings of philosopher René Descartes. Davies, Cecil W. “A Reading of Wuthering Heights.” Essays in Criticism 19, no. 3 (July 1969): 254-72. Refers to Brontë’s poetry and the Gondal stories in an examination of the mysticism of Wuthering Heights.

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Selected commentary on Wuthering Heights, including essays by Q. D. Leavis, Terry Eagleton, and Sandra Gilbert.

Assumes that Wuthering Heights was written by Currer Bell (pseudonym of Charlotte Brontë) and approaches it as that author’s first work, deeming it a novel of extraordinary power but uneven form.

Swinburne, Algernon Charles. “Emily Brontë.” The Athenaeum, no. 2903 (16 June 1883): 762-63.

“Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey.” The Eclectic Review 1 (February 1851): 222-27. Praises Brontë’s depiction of scenery in Wuthering Heights, but asserts that the novel’s characters are exaggerated and unsympathetic, and the situations unbelievable. Haggerty, George E. “The Gothic Form of Wuthering Heights.” Victorian Newsletter 74 (fall 1988): 1-6. Argues that in Wuthering Heights Brontë “looks into the heart of Gothic fiction, . . . uncovers the most deeply rooted formal problems which Gothic novelists themselves were never able to resolve, and forges a solution to those problems out of the literary smithy of her own soul.” Knoepflmacher, U. C. Wuthering Heights: A Study. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994, 138 p. An in-depth examination of Wuthering Heights that analyzes the novel’s context, structure, meaning, and critical reception. Lewes, George Henry. A review of Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. The Leader 1, no. 30 (28 December 1850): 953. Provides a qualified endorsement of Wuthering Heights, pronouncing it a powerful but coarse work. Pykett, Lyn. “Gender and Genre in Wuthering Heights: Gothic Plot and Domestic Fiction.” In Wuthering Heights: Emily Brontë, edited by Patsy Stoneman, pp. 86-99. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Examines Wuthering Heights in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, studying in particular “the relationship of the woman writer to the history and tradition of fiction.” Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Immediacy, Doubleness, and the Unspeakable: Wuthering Heights and Villette.” In The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. 1976. Reprint edition, pp. 97-139. New York: Methuen, 1986. Discusses both the direct and indirect modes of narration and communication in Wuthering Heights. Stoneman, Patsy, ed. Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 208 p.

Addresses several controversial aspects of Wuthering Heights, including the novel’s unusual structure and depiction of cruelty and brutality. Symons, Arthur. “Emily Brontë.” The Nation 23, no. 21 (24 August 1918): 546-47. Lauds the passion and intensity of Wuthering Heights, deeming it an unforgettable work. Thomas, Ronald R. “Dreams and Disorders in Wuthering Heights.” In Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious, pp. 112-35. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Explores the role of dreams in Wuthering Heights using the theories of Sigmund Freud. Twitchell, James. “Heathcliff as Vampire.” Southern Humanities Review 11 (1977): 355-62. Surveys critical reactions to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, suggesting that the character is metaphorically akin to a vampire. Vitte, Paulette. “Emily Brontë, Rimbaud, Poe and the Gothic.” Brontë Society Transactions 24, no. 2 (October 1999): 182-85. Traces the treatment and manipulation of the Gothic tradition in poetry by Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Rimbaud.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Brontë’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 17; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 1; Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 3; British Writers, Vol. 5; British Writers: The Classics, Vol. 1; British Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 1; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1832-1890; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 21, 32, 199; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors, Novelists, and Poets; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring Novels; Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 16, 35; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 8; Twayne’s English Authors; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3; and World Literature Criticism.

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Dobell, Sydney. “Sydney Dobell’s Article on Currer Bell, Contributed to the Palladium in 1850.” Brontë Society Transactions 5, no. 28 (1918): 210-36.

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN (1771 - 1810)

American novelist, essayist, and short story writer.

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rown is remembered as the author of the first Gothic novel produced by an American. Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), which draws on the traditions of both Gothic and sentimental novels, explores such issues as suicide, murder, seduction, and insanity. He also wrote three other novels dealing with horror and the supernatural, all with a peculiarly American flavor, replacing the expected tropes of European Gothic with American images, including the frontier, forests, caves, and cliffs. Many critics fault Brown’s work for what are perceived as serious stylistic and structural deficiencies, but they also express admiration for his intense artistic vision and his struggle to reconcile his Romantic imagination with the Enlightenment ideals of reason and realism. Brown is also recognized as one of the first Americans to gain a significant audience abroad and to attempt to support himself through his literary endeavors; for this reason he has been called the first professional writer in the United States. His work also reflects an interest—radical for his time—in the rights and roles of women. Hailed as a central figure in the literature of horror and the supernatural, Brown has been seen as an important influence on the masters of Ameri

can Gothic writing, including Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, and Stephen King.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Brown was born to a Quaker family in Philadelphia in 1771. The Quakers’ disdain for formal higher education resulted in the sixteen-year-old Brown’s being apprenticed to a lawyer. While employed at the law office, Brown pursued his literary interests and joined the Belles Lettres Club, where he participated in philosophical and political discussions. In 1789 he published a series of essays as “The Rhapsodist,” in which he analyzes the effectiveness of the government created after the American Revolution. His interest in radical social and political ideas was furthered by his reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and William Godwin’s An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793). Many critics have maintained that these two works heavily influenced Brown’s later thinking and writing. After abandoning his legal career in 1792, Brown completed his first novel, the now-lost SkyWalk, in 1797. During the next several years, Brown embarked upon a period of extraordinary literary activity, publishing Alcuin (1798), a fictional dialogue on women’s rights, and his first significant novel, Wieland, in 1798. Ormond, the

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first part of Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly all appeared during 1799. The proceeds from these works, however, were not sufficient for Brown to support himself, and as he grew increasingly interested in marrying and having a family, Brown joined his family’s mercantile business in 1800. During his courtship of Elizabeth Linn in the early 1800s, Brown wrote the second part of Arthur Mervyn and his last two novels, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot, which were published in 1801. At this point, Brown turned to journalistic endeavors, producing political pamphlets and essays, and editing a journal. He married in 1804 and supported his wife and children on his editorial work after the family business dissolved in 1806. Brown died in 1810, of tuberculosis.

MAJOR WORKS Brown wrote essays, short stories, and political pamphlets, and translated a work of nonfiction about the United States from the French, but modern critics have given little attention to these works, except as a means of elucidating aspects of Brown’s major novels. The dialogue Alcuin, although considered a minor work, is studied by modern critics in an effort to dissect Brown’s feminism. In this fictional exchange between a man and a woman, arguments both for and against political and educational equality of the sexes are presented. Brown continued to explore such issues in his novels, which all contain strong female characters. Like Brown’s minor works, the sentimental novels Clara Howard and Jane Talbot generate relatively little critical interest and are regarded as exhibiting Brown’s shift from radical to more conservative views. The plots of Brown’s four major novels, which combine elements of the Gothic and the sentimental novel, are often considered convoluted and episodic, though highly imaginative. What unites the novels is Brown’s focus on psychological aberrations and the reactions and development of his characters. The epistolary novel Wieland, Brown’s best-known work, is about an archetypal Gothic heroine, Clara Wieland, whose peaceful life with her brother, Theodore, and his family is destroyed by the appearance of a mysterious stranger, Carwin. Theodore begins to hear a disembodied voice, which he takes to be God’s, and thereafter he hurls himself into an obsessive religious melancholy. He hears the voice command him to kill his wife and children, which he

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does. He is about to murder his sister and the man she loves when Carwin confesses he has been responsible for the voices. But, shockingly, he was not responsible for the voice that commanded Theodore to murder his family. Wieland has been seen variously as a cautionary tale on the dangers of religious fervor, an indictment of patriarchal institutions, a critique of Puritanism, and a selfreferential allegory of the writing process itself. Edgar Huntly also explores the problems of humans’ inability to trust their sense perceptions. In the novel, the narrator follows the sleepwalking Huntly, whom he suspects is his best friend’s murderer, through a labyrinthine frontier. His journey symbolizes the moral dilemma at the core of the novel: whether criminology can begin to fathom a mind in nightmarish conflict. Ormond focuses on Brown’s ideas regarding the necessity of educational equality for women. The villainous Ormond terrorizes the beautiful Constantina Dudley after having had her father killed, holding her captive and threatening to rape her. But she defeats him (and the oppression he symbolizes) by stabbing him. In Arthur Mervyn, as a plague of yellow fever ravages Philadelphia, the narrator rescues the young waif Mervyn, whose true nature remains ambiguous to the very end. The story has been interpreted as Brown’s argument for civic responsibility toward the impoverished, the ill, and the downtrodden. Brown examines, by way of the apparently innocent narrator’s adventures, the theme of appearance versus reality. The narrator becomes implicated in several crimes, but his declarations of benevolent intentions contradict his actions.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Brown is known as being the first professional fiction writer in the United States, but he struggled to support himself through his literary efforts, turning toward journalism and editorial work in his later years to make a living. However, Brown’s writing was well received by some contemporary critics, who praised his clear and forceful style and knowledge of the human heart while maintaining that his stories were improbable and that his use of detail and his narrative technique interfered with plot movement. Many important nineteenth-century writers admired Brown’s works, including Poe, Hawthorne, John Keats, Sir Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley, who counted Brown’s four Gothic novels among her six favorite books.

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PRINCIPAL WORKS

The Novels of Charles Brockden Brown. 7 vols. (novels) 1827 The Rhapsodist, and Other Uncollected Writings (essays and novel fragment) 1943 The Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown. 6 vols. (novels and unfinished novels) 1977-87 *Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (unfinished novel) 1978 *

Carwin, the Biloquist and Memoirs of Stephen Calvert were published earlier in William Dunlap’s The Life of Charles Brockden Brown: Together with Selections from the Rarest of His Printed Works, from His Original Letters, and from His Manuscripts before Unpublished, 1815.

PRIMARY SOURCES CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN (ESSAY DATE 1798) SOURCE: Brown, Charles Brockden. “Advertisement.” In Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale, n.p. New York: T & J Swords, 1798. In the following introduction to Wieland, Brown urges the reader to consider the artistic merits of his work.

The following Work is delivered to the world as the first of a series of performances, which the favorable reception of this will induce the Writer to publish. His purpose is neither selfish nor temporary, but aims at the illustration of some important branches of the moral constitution of man. Whether this tale will be classed with the ordinary or frivolous sources of amusement, or be ranked with the few productions whose usefulness secures to them a lasting reputation, the reader must be permitted to decide.

Jane Talbot, a Novel (novel) 1801

The incidents related are extraordinary and rare. Some of them, perhaps, approach as nearly to the nature of miracles as can be done by that which is not truly miraculous. It is hoped that intelligent readers will not disapprove of the manner in which appearances are solved, but that the solution will be found to correspond with the known principles of human nature. The power which the principal person is said to possess can scarcely be denied to be real. It must be acknowledged to be extremely rare; but no fact, equally uncommon, is supported by the same strength of historical evidence.

*Carwin, the Biloquist, and Other American Tales and Pieces. 3 vols. (unfinished novel and short stories) 1822

Some readers may think the conduct of the younger Wieland impossible. In support of its possibility the Writer must appeal to Physicians and

Alcuin: A Dialogue (fictional dialogue) 1798 Wieland; or, The Transformation (novel) 1798 Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. 2 vols. (novel) 1799-1800 Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. 3 vols. (novel) 1799 Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (novel) 1799 Clara Howard (novel) 1801; also published as Philip Stanley; or, The Enthusiasm of Love, 1807

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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, critics focused on the importance of Brown’s contribution to American letters. For his use of realistic details of American life, particularly his portrayal of Native Americans and the frontier, and for his role in initiating the American literary preoccupation with psychological horror, Brown was acclaimed as a pioneer in fiction and the father of American Gothic literature. Critics who viewed his contribution as mainly historical, however, censured his overblown style, illogical plots, and unrealistic characters. From the midtwentieth century on, critics have generally acknowledged the weaknesses in Brown’s style but praised his attempts at reconciling eighteenthcentury Enlightenment ideals with nineteenthcentury Romantic principles; his exploration of the conflict between rationalism and the irrational power of the imagination; and his creation of the particularly American brand of Gothic fiction. Some critics have argued that Brown’s novels cannot be truly classified as Gothic but rather as romances of mystery and terror that are only “superficially” Gothic, using Gothic trappings to delve into the psychology of the characters. Other commentators consider Brown’s use of the Gothic as similar to that of William Godwin in its focus on the psychological and the revolutionary, while yet others have regarded Brown’s gothicism as based more on German sources and works by English authors. As the interest in the genre of Gothic literature grows, so does interest in and admiration of Brown’s works, which are widely viewed as innovations in American gothicism and the literature of psychological horror.

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to men conversant with the latent springs and occasional perversions of the human mind. It will not be objected that the instances of similar delusion are rare, because it is the business of moral painters to exhibit their subject in its most instructive and memorable forms. If history furnishes one parallel fact, it is a sufficient vindication of the Writer; but most readers will probably recollect an authentic case, remarkably similar to that of Wieland. It will be necessary to add, that this narrative is addressed, in an epistolary form, by the Lady whose story it contains, to a small number of friends, whose curiosity, with regard to it, had been greatly awakened. It may likewise be mentioned, that these events took place between the conclusion of the French and the beginning of the revolutionary war. The memoirs of Carwin, alluded to at the conclusion of the work, will be published or suppressed according to the reception which is given to the present attempt.

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has chosen his path. The decree that ascertained the condition of my life, admits of no recal. No doubt it squares with the maxims of eternal equity. That is neither to be questioned nor denied by me. It suffices that the past is exempt from mutation. The storm that tore up our happiness, and changed into dreariness and desert the blooming scene of our existence, is lulled into grim repose; but not until the victim was transfixed and mangled; till every obstacle was dissipated by its rage; till every remnant of good was wrested from our grasp and exterminated. How will your wonder, and that of your companions, be excited by my story! Every sentiment will yield to your amazement. If my testimony were without corroborations, you would reject it as incredible. The experience of no human being can furnish a parallel: That I, beyond the rest of mankind, should be reserved for a destiny without alleviation, and without example! Listen to my narrative, and then say what it is that has made me deserve to be placed on this dreadful eminence, if, indeed, every faculty be not suspended in wonder that I am still alive, and am able to relate it.

SOURCE: Brown, Charles Brockden. “Chapter 1.” In Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale, pp. 1-11. New York: T & J Swords, 1798. In the following excerpt from the first chapter of Wieland, the protagonist addresses the reader.

I feel little reluctance in complying with your request. You know not fully the cause of my sorrows. You are a stranger to the depth of my distresses. Hence your efforts at consolation must necessarily fail. Yet the tale that I am going to tell is not intended as a claim upon your sympathy. In the midst of my despair, I do not disdain to contribute what little I can to the benefit of mankind. I acknowledge your right to be informed of the events that have lately happened in my family. Make what use of the tale you shall think proper. If it be communicated to the world, it will inculcate the duty of avoiding deceit. It will exemplify the force of early impressions, and show, the immeasurable evils that flow from an erroneous or imperfect discipline. My state is not destitute of tranquillity. The sentiment that dictates my feelings is not hope. Futurity has no power over my thoughts. To all that is to come I am perfectly indifferent. With regard to myself, I have nothing more to fear. Fate has done its worst. Henceforth, I am callous to misfortune. I address no supplication to the Deity. The power that governs the course of human affairs

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GENERAL COMMENTARY LESLIE FIEDLER (ESSAY DATE 1960) SOURCE: Fiedler, Leslie. “Charles Brockden Brown and the Invention of the American Gothic.” In Love and Death in the American Novel, pp. 126-61. New York: Criterion Books, 1960. In the following excerpt from his influential analysis of American novelists, Fiedler emphasizes Brown’s importance as an innovator in the American Gothic tradition.

A dream of innocence had sent Europeans across the ocean to build a new society immune to the compounded evil of the past from which no one in Europe could ever feel himself free. But the slaughter of the Indians, who would not yield their lands to the carriers of utopia, and the abominations of the slave trade, in which the black man, rum, and money were inextricably entwined in a knot of guilt, provided new evidence that evil did not remain with the world that had been left behind—but stayed alive in the human heart, which had come the long way to America only to confront the horrifying image of itself. Finally, there was the myth of Faust and of the diabolic bargain, which, though not yet isolated from gothic themes of lesser importance

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How could one tell where the American dream ended and the Faustian nightmare began; they held in common the hope of breaking through all limits and restraints, of reaching a place of total freedom where one could with impunity deny the Fall, live as if innocence rather than guilt were the birthright of all men. In Huck’s blithe assertion, “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” is betrayed a significant undermeaning of the Faustian amor fati, at least in its “boyish” American form: the secret belief that damnation is not all it is cracked up to be. In a strange way, the naturalized Faust legend becomes in the United States a way of denying hell in the act of seeming to accept it, of suggesting that it is merely a scary word, a bugaboo, a forbidding description of freedom itself! At any rate, Americans from the beginning responded passionately to the myth itself; even in the 1680’s, before the invention of the main tradition of the novel, one Boston bookseller sold in the Colonies sixty-six copies of The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus. It was, needless to say, a record unapproached in those times by any other “light literature.” When the gothic novel appeared, then, it was greeted with great enthusiasm by Americans, who passed quite quickly from importing and reading its prototypes to attempting to emulate them. In this case, only ten years elapsed between the publication of the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis and the first American gothic romances. Yet the gothic mode—though appealing enough for various reasons—proved difficult to adapt to the demands of the American audience and the deeper meanings of American experience. By the time our own first attempts were being made, there was everywhere in the United States (aware of itself as a product of the Enlightenment) an uneasiness with darkness of all kinds, a feeling that the obsession with evil was an outgrown vice of Calvinism. Certainly the generation of Jefferson was pledged to be done with ghosts and shadows, committed to live a life of yea-saying in a sunlit, neo-classical world. From the bourgeois ladies to the Deist intellectuals, the country was united in a disavowal of the “morbid” and the “nasty.” No wonder the American pioneer in gothic fiction, despite the acclaim he won abroad, was driven first to abandon the gothic for the sentimental, then to give up novel writing completely.

If it had been only a matter of finding a reading public for the gothic, the situation would not have been really critical—only unprofitable; but there were other problems. The gothic, after all, had been invented to deal with the past and with history from a typically Protestant and enlightened point of view; but what could one do with the form in a country which, however Protestant and enlightened, had (certainly at the turn of the eighteenth century!) neither a proper past nor a history? It was easy enough for the American writer to borrow certain elements, both of cast and setting, from the tale of terror; the Maiden in flight, for instance, was readily adaptable, and the hero-villain viable at least as a visual image—his burning eyes and furrowed brow transplanted themselves without difficulty. But what was to be done about the social status of such hero-villains? With what native classes or groups could they be identified? Traditionally aristocrats, monks, servants of the Inquisition, members of secret societies like the Illuminati, how could they be convincingly introduced on the American scene? Similarly, it was not hard to provide the American equivalents of the moors, hills, and forests through which the bedeviled maidens of the gothic romances were accustomed to flee. But what of the haunted castle, the ruined abbey, the dungeons of the Inquisition? In America, such crumbling piles, architecturally and symbolically so satisfying to the eighteenth-century reader and writer, are more than a little improbable. Yet on them, not only the atmosphere, but an important part of the meaning of the tale of terror depended; what political or social implications the form possessed were inextricably bound up with such images. An early American gothicist like the I. Mitchell who published in 1811 The Asylum; or, Alonzo and Melissa was able to imagine a gothic country house on Long Island; but such a structure in such a place remains not merely unconvincing but meaningless. The haunted castle of the European gothic is an apt symbol for a particular body of attitudes toward the past which was a chief concern of the genre. The counterpart of such a castle fifty miles from New York City has lost all point. The problem of the gothic romance in this regard is analogous to that of the sentimental novel. Both had arisen out of a need of the bourgeoisie, fighting for cultural autonomy in a class society, to find archetypal characters and situations to embody their conflict with the older ruling classes. Just as the sentimental archetype had projected the struggle of the middle classes with established secular power, portrayed as a menace

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(that isolation was to be the work of American writers!), came quite soon to seem identical with the American myth itself.

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to their purity, so the gothic projected the struggle of those classes with ecclesiastical authority, portrayed as a threat to their freedom. In America, which possesses neither inherited aristocratic privilege nor an established Church, the antiaristocratic impulse of the seduction theme is, as we have said, translated into feminism and antiintellectualism; while the impatience with the past implicit in the gothic fable undergoes an even more complex metamorphosis. Charles Brockden Brown, single-handed and almost unsustained, solved the key problems of adaptation, and though by no means a popular success, determined, through his influence on Poe and Hawthorne, the future of the gothic novel in America. There is a sense in which the American novel had begun before the appearance on the literary scene of Charles Brockden Brown, and another in which it had yet to begin after his death; yet he represents the beginning of a serious tradition of fiction in the United States, at once establishing the gothic form and (it is an illuminating conjunction) founding the highbrow novel. The best-seller had been invented before any of his books appeared, and the more serious, though illfated, attempt of William Hill Brown had been made when Brockden Brown was only eighteen; but before him certainly, no writer of prose fiction had tried to live by his work. Brown himself was conscious of the audacity of his project, about which his friend and first biographer Dunlap commented later: “To become exclusively an author was at that time a novelty in the United States, and . . . no one had relied solely upon the support of his talents, and deliberately chosen this station in society.” If Brown deserved no other credit, he should be remembered at least as the inventor of the American writer, for he not only lived that role but turned it into a myth, later developed by almost everyone who wrote about his career. That he tried the impossible and that he failed; that he had disavowed his own art before his untimely death of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-nine; that he hardened from a wild disciple of the Enlightenment, a flagrant Godwinian (“Godwin came and all was light!”) into a pious conservative; that he drew his inspiration from loneliness and male companionship, and that he ceased to be a creative writer when he married; that over his whole frantic, doomed career, the blight of melancholy presides. In a sense, Brown invented Edgar Allan Poe—all, that is to say, that the American writer came to seem to the mind of Europe and the sensibility of Romanticism—before Poe had ever

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written a line. Actually the latter poet was one year old when Brown died. From the beginning, at any rate, it has been hard to describe Charles Brockden Brown without seeming to compose a poem on a symbolic subject. The portrait painter Sully, who saw him just before his death, has left the following account: It was in the month of November,—our Indian summer,—when the air is full of smoke. Passing a window one day I was caught by the sight of a man, with remarkable physiognomy, writing at a table in a dark room. The sun shone directly upon his head. I shall never forget it. The dead leaves were falling then. It was Charles Brockden Brown.

If this seems less the product of observation than of Romantic fancy, it is no more fanciful than Brown’s own description of himself to his dearest friend, Elihu Hubbard Smith, as “The child of passion and inconstancy, the slave of desires that cannot be justified . . .”; and it is considerably more restrained and faithful to fact than the account of his death, wracked by poverty and disease, imagined half a century later by his fellow Philadelphian and gothic heir, George Lippard. “The Heart Broken” is the title of Lippard’s piece, by which he hoped, apparently, to do for Brown what Baudelaire was to do for Poe; but Lippard was unable to preserve the image of Brown as the victim of American philistinism after he had ceased to seem a figure of first literary importance. To this very day, however, it is hard to rescue the man from the myth, to discover, for instance, even so simple a matter of record (one would assume) as what Brown looked like. According to one standard biography his hair was straight and “black as death,” his complexion pale, sallow, and strange, accented by the “melancholy, brokenhearted look of his eyes.” Another account describes him as “short and dumpy, with light eyes and hair inclining to be sandy, while the expression on his face reflected ill health rather than intellect. . . . Yet vividly in his countenance glowed the light of benevolence.” Which is the truer portrait, the legendary delineation of what he hoped to seem or the more scholarly account with its overtone of debunking? Which is the real Charles Brockden Brown, the Brown who proved capable of bringing the American novel to birth? The established facts of his brief career give some clues to the answer. He was born in Philadelphia in 1771 (the year in which Goethe published Götz von Berlichingen), and lived all his life in that city and in New York. He came from Quaker stock, which may have had some influence on his meditative habits, otherwise encouraged by his

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century for which the proper study of mankind was the heart of man, “l’étude profonde du coeur de l’homme, véritable dédale de la nature”—clues to which the Marquis de Sade was convinced he had discovered in Richardson. “If you tell me,” Brockden Brown once wrote, “that you are one of those who would rather travel into the mind of a ploughman than the interior of Africa, I confess myself of your way of thinking.” It is a sentiment which linked Richardson and Pope, de Sade and Diderot, and which joined them in a common enterprise with Mrs. Radcliffe, the Marquis von Grosse, and Brown himself.

What especially plagued him at the start was a conflict between the commitment to a career in the law, into which his family had urged him, and his own literary schemes, which he dreamed would distinguish both him and his country. At the age of sixteen, for example, he had already laid out plans for glorifying America (and Charles Brockden Brown!) with three epics, on Columbus, Pizzaro, and Cortez. New and radical ideas, derived ultimately from the Encyclopedists and more directly from Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, tilted the balance against his proposed career as a lawyer; and put him into even sharper opposition to the society in which he lived. To promulgate notions of social justice and to write novels, to revolutionize American life and to achieve literary fame: this double ambition he came to feel as a single impulse, not unlike certain young radical writers in the United States of the 1930’s. The literary form which eminently suited both such political allegiances and such literary aspirations was at the moment he began to write (the 1790’s were almost gone) the “new novel,” which is to say, the gothic romance in its doctrinaire Godwinian form. “To equal Caleb Williams” was the best Brown could hope for himself.

After publishing a dialogue on woman’s rights called Alcuin—a preliminary concession to his doctrinal commitments, Brown plunged into a feverish bout of creative activity which saw the publication within two years (from September of 1798 to November of 1799) of his four best novels, Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn (Part I), and Edgar Huntly; and which left him with the uncompleted fragments of as many more. Wieland, which many readers value above all the rest, he completed within a month. This frantic outburst of energy seems to have been cued by two events, one internal, one external: first, his abandonment of the law and his decision to stake everything on his talent as a writer; and second, the death of his friend Elihu Hubbard Smith, who fell victim to yellow fever just as Wieland was coming off the press.

If there was a contradiction between the dream of a rational Commonwealth and the hectic exploitation of horror in the gothic, Brown did not feel it. His friend Smith, more consistent advocate of the Enlightenment, might admonish him, “The man of Truth, Charles, the pupil of Reason has no mysteries,” but Brown could turn with equanimity from the works of Diderot to The Horrid Mysteries of the Marquis of Grosse. As a writer, he proposed both to produce books with a “moral tendency” (enlightened, of course) and to “ravish the souls” of his readers with “roaring passions.” The essential human passion to which he hoped to appeal in his examination of society, as well as by his exploration of terror, was curiosity: that curiosity of the sentimentalizing eighteenth

Brown had already lived through one epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793, but it was his second experience with the pestilence in the New York epidemic of 1798 that took possession of his imagination. Images of this disaster crept into the pages of Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, becoming for Brown symbols of all that is monstrous and inexplicable in life. Like Defoe before him and Manzoni and Camus afterward, he found in the plight of the city under a plague an archetypal representation of man’s fate. For Brown, moreover, the general calamity was given added poignancy by the death of his friend, who, being a doctor, had not been able to flee its ravages. Despite the fact that he stayed with Smith throughout, actually falling ill himself though not critically, Brown apparently felt guilt as well as dismay at his friend’s early death. He may even have suspected (who knows?) that he had infected Smith, carried the principle of infection which destroyed him. It is possible that the character of Sarsefield, who appears first in Ormond, then in Edgar Huntly, with no explanation of the duplication, and who represents in each case the protagonist’s

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frail constitution and life-long sickliness. He is reported to have been a prodigy and to have received from the start a schooling worthy of his talents; but he was, despite the praise that later came to his work, much of it from the best qualified sources, irremediably melancholy. Intellectual energy and gloom complemented each other in his personality. Though he never ceased proposing to himself the most ambitious cultural schemes, he complained (or boasted—the tone is ambiguous) that he was incapable not only of real happiness but even of the “lively apprehension of misfortune.”

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closest friend, may play in the dreamlike plots of those two books the role of Smith. In Ormond, Sarsefield is slain by Turks, and is revenged in the best Achilles-Patroclus fashion by Ormond, who gallops from the field, five bloody heads of his opponents dangling from his saddle. In Edgar Huntly, the fantasy becomes even more ambiguously sinister, with Edgar shooting once at Sarsefield, Sarsefield once at him, though they are bound to each other by mutual love and the special bond between protector and protégé. Brown’s first four completed novels, combining as they do the appeals of the gothic and the sentimental, and written with a vigor unprecedented in American fiction, might have been expected to win a substantial audience for their author; but though they were critically well received, they didn’t sell. The records show much praise, but no second editions. Partly in despair at not achieving popular success, partly out of a loss of faith in the radical principles which had been his motive force, Brown began to disengage himself from his commitment to fiction. As early as 1799, he had become the editor of a new magazine, and gradually the journalist, the man of letters took over from the poet, the mythopoeic writer. The process passed through two stages: first, a disavowal of the tale of terror, with its melancholy and pursuit of the outrageous; then a total rejection of the novel. The year 1800 saw the completion of the second part of Arthur Mervyn and the exhaustion of Brown’s first spasm of creative energy. At this point he made a public pledge to abandon “the doleful tone and assume a cheery one,” to substitute “moral causes and daily incidents in the place of the prodigious and the singular”—that is, to leave the gothic and take up the domestic sentimental. But there had already been an undeclared shift in his attitudes between Wieland and Ormond on the one hand and Edgar Huntly and Arthur Mervyn on the other. The character of Carwin in Wieland (further developed in an unfinished work called Carwin the Biloquist) combines, in the style of Goethe, qualities of Don Juan and Faust. Carwin at one point declares to Clara, the suffering heroine of Wieland whom he stalks with Lovelace-like single-mindedness through the novel, “Even if I execute my purpose, what injury is done. Your prejudices will call it by that name, but it merits it not.” He is the Richardsonian seducer, refusing even to grant that the dishonor which he threatens is real; all his formidable talents, even the mysterious gift of ventriloquism (which Brown calls “biloquism”) are devoted to

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separating Clara from her true lover, maneuvering her into a position where she will have no protection against his assault. Carwin, however, does not look like Don Juan: “His cheeks were pallid and lank, his eyes sunken, his forehead overshadowed by coarse, straggling hairs . . . his chin discoloured by a tetter. . . . And yet his forehead . . . his eyes lustrously black, and possessing, in the midst of haggardness, a radiance inexpressibly serene and potent . . . served to betoken a mind of the highest order. . . .” It is the face, of course, of the gothic hero-villain, of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Schedoni or M. G. Lewis’ Ambrosio: the ravaged aspect and hypnotic eye of one driven by a Faustian “thirst of knowledge,” which was “augmented as it was supplied with gratification.” “Curiosity,” a Godwinian term, is the name Brown prefers for the Faustian lust to know; and Carwin even pleads in selfdefense, after his activities have helped push Wieland, the brother of Clara, over the edge of religious insanity, that his “only crime was curiosity.” On this plea, Brown seems quite willing to acquit his hero-villain of any final guilt; for “curiosity” was his own reigning passion and Carwin is the projection of himself: insatiable seeker and man of many voices. “To excite and baffle curiosity,” Brown once wrote about his own purpose as a novelist, “without shocking belief, is the end to be contemplated.” In the end, Carwin is permitted to leave the pages of Wieland unpunished, though without any rewards—to take up once more his role of Wandering Jew, a tabooed figure incapable of finding rest or love. The true villain of the piece is not the doctrinaire revolutionary, the skeptical Carwin, but the religious fanatic, the believing Christian, Wieland, who ends by murdering his wife and threatening the life of his sister. Through Wieland, Brown manages to project at once his distrust of religiosity and his obsession with the destructive aspects of the brother-sister relationship. Geschwisterinzest is everywhere in our literature (from William Hill Brown to Hawthorne, from Poe to William Faulkner) associated with death; only Brockden Brown, however, is willing to portray it as naked aggression. The tender alliance of brother and sister, so beloved of the Romantics, becomes in his works a brutal conflict; his brothers rob, cheat, and harry their sisters, yet are bound to them so closely that (as in Edgar Huntly) each feels his own life and death mysteriously linked to the fate of the other. At the climax of Wieland, Clara, threatened with death by her

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In Ormond, to whose sentimental aspects we have alluded earlier, the deed that is only threatened in the earlier book occurs. The Persecuted Maiden strikes back in self-defense; Constantia, Brown’s second version of the Clarissa character he first sketched as Clara, kills her attacker, Ormond. Constantia, however, is not the sister of Ormond; and he is, therefore, permitted—the censor taken off guard—to approach her not in madness but in simple lust. Nevertheless, a point is made of Constantia’s extraordinary resemblance to the actual sister of Ormond, as if to alert us to the fact that we are being presented with a case of attempted incest and fratricide once removed, though neither of these crimes, of course, could be proved in court. It is an extraordinary piece of duplicity. Brown does not dare openly imagine even murder between characters of one blood— only the approach to it; and to portray sexual passion between them goes far beyond the limits of his audacity. Nevertheless, he manages to suggest atrocities by using the dream device of splitting a single protagonist into two apparently unrelated actors. There is, however, another significance to the murder of Ormond by Constantia, and this meaning Brown establishes with satisfactory clarity. By permitting his new Clarissa (however churchless he makes her out of respect to Godwin or Mary Wollstonecraft) to stab Lovelace-Faust, he symbolically disowns whatever in himself corresponds to the “curiosity,” dedication to passion, and contempt for ordinary morality symbolized by the latter figure. After this, neither the Seducer nor the Faustian man is permitted to occupy the center of Brown’s fiction; and even the lovecombat of brother and sister is pushed to the periphery. He abandoned Carwin the Biloquist in mid-course and turned to Arthur Mervyn with its new kind of hero. The yellow fever epidemic determines this unconfessed dividing line in his work: on the one hand, breaking up the group of New York intellectuals of which Smith had been the leading figure; and on the other hand, suggesting a new image for human misery, which cast doubt on man’s ability to cope with it successfully. “The

evils of pestilence by which this city has lately been afflicted will probably form an era in its history,” Brown writes in the preface to Arthur Mervyn. “The schemes of reformation and improvement to which they will give birth, or, if no efforts of human wisdom can avail to avert the periodical calamity, the change in manners and population . . . will be, in the highest degree, memorable.” The key phrase, of course, is “if no efforts of human wisdom can avail,” reflecting the first shadow of the doubt which will eventually black out in the heart of Brown his youthful faith in “schemes of reformation and improvement.” From this point forward, at any rate, Brown’s protagonists are dependent boys in search of motherly wives, rather than phallic aggressors in quest of virgins to sully. Victimized by cruel masters, images of the Bad Father, such protagonists wander about the world buffeted and misunderstood, until some understanding female, rich and mature and sexually experienced, provides them a haven. In them, “curiosity” still prevails, but it is no longer the fanatic passion of a Faust to know everything, only the nagging need of an ignorant boy to discover the adult secrets of the locked chamber, the forbidden room, the sealed chest. The Bluebeard myth replaces that of the Satanic bargain; and “curiosity” leads not to selling one’s soul to the Devil, but to braving the taboo imposed by a cruel and irrational master. Having peeped through the keyhole at the forbidden mysteries, the curious boy is thenceforth persecuted, not for his guilt, but because of his knowledge of another’s. This Bluebeard mythos Brown had discovered in his reading of Godwin, for whom it embodied a theory of the eternal guiltlessness of the exploited (the apprentice blacklisted and bullied), the inevitable guilt of the exploiter (the conscience-wracked master taking out his selfhatred and fear on the boy who knows too much). Not the apparent criminal, Godwin’s Caleb Williams suggested, but the system of social control which made criminals—which drove the best to seem, if not to become, the worst—was to blame! In the Bluebeard legend, however, the breaker of the taboo is the woman, the recalcitrant wife bucking the limitations of a male-controlled society; and though she lives through a moment of daring, she is portrayed finally as passive and weak—her chief weapon hope. Similarly, the later heroes of Brown seem almost feminine in their passivity and their proneness to flee rather than

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now maniacal brother, seems forced to choose between her own life and his. Brown relents a little, however, managing (through the intervention, this time beneficent, of Carwin) to contrive a resolution in which Wieland, taking up the knife Clara has dropped, stabs himself. The weapon is the sister’s, but the hand which wields it the brother’s own.

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fight; in some ways, they seem closer to the Persecuted Maiden than to any of the traditional prototypes of the hero.

utmost any American can look for, in his native country, is to be reimbursed his unavoidable expenses”).

Yet even more than they seem women, perhaps, Brown’s frightened young men seem children, little boys prowling the corridors of a nighttime house, where behind closed doors adults perform unimaginable acts of darkness. Certainly, like motherless children, those young men are adopted into marriage at the happy ending of their adventures. So Arthur Mervyn is taken in hand by Mrs. Achsa Fielding (“she is six years older than you . . . she has been a wife and a mother already”), after a final nightmare in which he imagines the dead husband-father arising to shoot him through the heart. “My heart had nothing in it but reverence and admiration,” he cries, protesting the innocence of his affection; but some guilt (some buried sense of the incest taboo broken) haunts him all the same. “Was she not the substitute of my lost mama? Would I not have clasped that beloved shade?”

With this brother and another, he went into the commission-merchant business; and, to set a final seal upon his capitulation, in 1804 married. But failure dogged his business efforts, compelling him at one point to sell “pots and pans over the counter,” and tuberculosis brought suffering to his private life. What creative energies he had left, he devoted in these final years to The Literary Magazine and American Register, a periodical pledged always to keep in mind that “Christian piety is the highest excellence of human beings” and committed to printing material “free from sensuality and voluptuousness,” which, “whether seconded or not by genius and knowledge, will . . . aim at the promotion of public and private virtues.” Of his fiction, which came to seem to him as much an error as his early political activity, he wrote in 1803:

The fact that Arthur Mervyn finally prefers the maternal widow, Mrs. Fielding, to Eliza Hadwin, a girl of fifteen, just the “age of delicate fervor, of inartificial love,” infuriated Shelley, who, for all his admiration of Brown, could never forgive him for marrying off his hero to a sedate and wealthy Jewess instead of a poor “peasantgirl.” There is, indeed, something symbolic in the choice at which Shelley, granted his point of view, had a right to rebel. For as surely as the death of Ormond had signified Brown’s rejection of the demonic, his abandonment of Eliza represented his turning away from a Romantic commitment to art to an acceptance of the responsibilities of bourgeois life. Clara Howard and Jane Talbot, those attempts at creating a sentimental novel without seduction, mark (as we have noticed) an effort at winning the great female audience; but more than that, they are further steps toward silence. In them, even the Bluebeard archetype has been surrendered and with it all desire to titillate curiosity or stir the darker passions. Brown is ready for the final disavowals, the surrender of his remaining liberal views (“From visionary schemes of Utopian systems of government and manners,” his first biographer wrote, “Mr. Brown, like many others, became a sober recorder of things as they are”) and of his career as an author (“Book-making, as you observe,” Brown commented to his brother in 1800, “is the dullest of all trades, and the

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I am far from wishing, however, that my reader should judge of my exertions by my former ones. I have written much, but take much blame to myself . . . and . . . no praise for any thing. I should enjoy a larger share of my own respect, at the present moment, if nothing had ever flowed from my pen, the production of which could be traced to me.

Myth (perhaps acted out by Brown himself as fact) has it that his last attempt at a tragedy he burned, keeping the ashes in a snuff-box on his desk until his death of tuberculosis in 1810.

TITLE COMMENTARY Wieland; or, The Transformation AMERICAN REVIEW AND LITERARY JOURNAL (REVIEW DATE JANUARY-MARCH 1802) SOURCE: A review of Wieland; or, The Transformation, by Charles Brockden Brown. American Review and Literary Journal 2, no. 1 (January-March 1802): 28-38. In the following excerpt from a mixed review of Wieland, the critic asserts that narrative style, technique, and characterization in the novel present challenges for the reader.

It will imply some commendation of the author’s powers of narration, when we say, that having begun the persual of [Wieland], we were irresistibly led on to the conclusion of the tale.

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It is impossible not to sympathize in the terror and distress of the sister of Wieland. Persons of lively sensibility and active imaginations may, probably, think that some of the scenes are too shocking and painful to be endured even in fiction. The soliloquies of some of the characters are unreasonably long, and the attention is wearied in listening to the conjectures, the reasonings, the hopes and fears which are successively formed and rejected, at a moment when expectation is already strained to its highest pitch. These intellectual conflicts and processes of the imagination show fertility of conception, and the art of the narrator; but this art is too often exercised in suspending the course of action so as to render the reader restless and impatient. The generality of readers love rather to be borne along by a rapid narrative, and to be roused to attention by the quick succession of new and unexpected incidents. The characters which are introduced are not numerous; nor are they such as may be easily found in the walks of common life. Carwin is an extraordinary being, and, in some degree, incomprehensible. If his prototype is not in nature, he must be acknowledged the creature of a vigorous fancy, fitted to excite curiosity and expectation. The author seems to have intended to exhibit him more fully to view; but not having finished the portrait, or doubtful of the effect of the exhibition, has reserved him for some future occasion, when he may be made the hero of his own story. The consequences produced by the exercise of the powers imputed to him were not foreseen, and were beyond the reach of his control. Their exertion was from the impulse of caprice, or for a momentary self-gratification. He is the author of the most dreadful calamities, without any malicious or evil intention.—The reader sees the misery and ruin of an amiable family, by ignorant and deluded beings, undeserving the severity of punishment.—The endowments of such a being as Carwin, if they can possibly exist to the extent here imagined, are without advantage to the possessor, and can be of no benefit to mankind. This seems to be the principal lesson taught by the delineation of such a character. Wieland and his family, in retirement, devoted to contemplation and study, and mixing little in the varied scenes of enlarged society, furnish few

ABOUT THE AUTHOR WILLIAM HAZLITT ASSESSES BROWN’S LITERARY TALENT

Mr. Brown, who preceded [Mr. Irving], and was the author of several novels which made some noise in this country, was a writer of a different stamp. Instead of hesitating before a scruple, and aspiring to avoid a fault, he braved criticism, and aimed only at effect. He was an inventor, but without materials. His strength and his efforts are convulsive throes—his works are a banquet of horrors. The hint of some of them is taken from Caleb Williams and St. Leon, but infinitely exaggerated, and carried to disgust and outrage. They are full (to disease) of imagination,— but it is forced, violent, and shocking. This is to be expected, we apprehend, in attempts of this kind in a country like America, where there is, generally speaking, no natural imagination. The mind must be excited by overstraining, by pulleys and levers. Mr. Brown was a man of genius, of strong passion, and active fancy; but his genius was not seconded by early habit, or by surrounding sympathy. His story and his interests are not wrought out, therefore, in the ordinary course of nature; but are, like the monster in Frankenstein, a man made by art and determined will. SOURCE: Hazlitt, William. “American Literature— Dr. Channing.” In The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Vol. 16, edited by P. P. Howe, pp. 318-38. New York: AMS Press, 1829.

of those instructive facts and situations which may be supposed to occur in the usual progress of life. The even tenor of their existence is not broken by the stronger impulses of social feeling, or agitated by the conflict of violent passions. Their repose is disturbed, and their imaginations excited, by unknown and invisible agents. Comparisons, therefore, with the actual or probable situation of the reader, are not often suggested, nor are many precepts of instruction to be derived from examples too rare for general application. Against the freaks of a ventriloquist, or the illusions of a madman, no rules can be prescribed for our

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The style is clear, forcible and correct. Passages of great elegance might be selected, and others which breathe a strain of lively and impassioned eloquence.

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protection. No prudence or foresight can guard us against evils which are to flow from such causes. The example of Wieland may teach us, indeed, the necessity of placing due restraints on the imagination; the folly of that presumptuous desire which seeks for gratifications inconsistent with the laws of existence and the ordinary course of nature; and to be content with the light which is set before us in the path of our moral and religious duties, without seeking for new illuminations. From the exhibition, however, of an infatuated being, deluded by the suggestions of a disturbed intellect, into the commission of acts the most unnatural and horrid, it is doubtful whether any real good is to be derived. But whether benefit or harm, or how much of either is to be received from tales of this kind, we are not prepared to decide, and they are questions not easily solved. The good or ill effect of a book, in most cases, depends on the previous disposition and character of the reader. The author has certainly contrived a narration deeply interesting; and whatever may be its faults, and some we have ventured to remark, Wieland, as a work of imagination, may be ranked high among the productions of the age.

HARRY R. WARFEL (ESSAY DATE 1949) SOURCE: Warfel, Harry R. “Wieland; or, The Transformation.” In Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist, pp. 96-115. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1949. In the following essay, Warfel surveys the context surrounding the compilation and critical reception of Wieland.

During the autumn and winter of 1797-1798 Brown fell in love with Miss Susan A. Potts, a young Philadelphian about whom no information survives. On March 29, 1798, Smith showed Dunlap a letter in which Brown described himself as assiduously writing novels and in love. Late in April Miss Potts visited New York City. After calling to pay his respects, Smith reported: “Without being beautiful, she is very interesting. Our talk was on common topics, as there was a third person present, but it evinced good sense. All that I see is in her favor.” Parental objection to their marriage, possibly because Miss Potts was not a Quaker, caused relations to be broken off forcibly. On occasion the novelist made light of his lovelorn state, but without doubt his feelings had been rudely shocked by the attitude of his family, particularly that of his mother whose intervention finally forced the issue.

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On July 3, 1798, Brown arrived in New York City for another of his extended visits. His health was pretty well restored, although his spirits flagged at thoughts of the unkind tactics of his family. For nine days he resided with Dunlap; then on July 12 he moved into the quarters of Smith and Johnson at 45 Pine Street. Johnson’s law practice had increased extensively because of the rage for speculation in Western lands, the purchase of foreign notes, and litigation relating to contracts. Smith’s medical practice had grown, partly because of connections made at the hospital and partly because of favorable public interest in the Medical Repository. Physicians recognized his attainments by calling him as a consultant. Brown, alone during much of the day, was free to concentrate upon the completion of his projects. At leisurely breakfasts and dinners the three men ran over the ground of their many interests; each day brought new schemes for doing good. They worried over Seth and Horace Johnson, whose business was on the verge of bankruptcy. In Philadelphia, Joseph Bringhurst, Jr., had suffered imprisonment for debt as a result of unfortunate business commitments. Knowing the integrity of these friends, the three roommates worried less about them than about laws which permitted egregious wrongs. The ground of their religious beliefs was retraced, but Johnson refused to go the whole road in renouncing orthodox Christianity. Brown was testing theological ideas in Wieland; the more he wrote the less certain he was of the attainment of a simple solution of complicated psychological and social problems. The triumvirate moved about the city as a unit in social visits to the homes of Roulet, Seth and Horace Johnson, the two Millers, Dr. Mitchill, Boyd, Templeton, Riley, Lovegrove, Charles Adams, Moses Rogers, General Hughes, and William and Gurdon Woolsey. Almost daily the three friends visited Dunlap or he visited them. At these houses as guests were some of the most distinguished men of the day. Timothy Dwight, Yale’s president, stopped by frequently. General Bloomfield crossed the river from New Jersey to meet New York friends. Albert Gallatin occasionally came to the city to look after political interests as well as to complete business matters concerned with his manufacturing activities in the Monongahela River Valley. Noah Webster on a research tour requested critical comments upon the first chapter of A Brief History of Epidemic Diseases. Jedidiah Morse, preacher and geographer, was carrying on a crusade against the Illuminati, a European subversive order with some few adherents in

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Into one other organization Brown was drawn on July 16, 1798. In company with Smith, William Johnson, and Samuel Miles Hopkins, he went to Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill’s rooms at Columbia College, where, in addition to the host, they found Dr. Edward Miller and the Reverend Samuel Miller. After some discussion the group founded the American Mineralogical Society. In addition to those present at the meeting, the following were admitted as charter members: William Dunlap; Solomon Simpson, a Jewish merchant; and George J. Warner, a watchmaker. At breakfast on August 7, Smith, Johnson, Dunlap, and Brown talked over the project of bringing out through T. and J. Swords a weekly magazine. The success of the Medical Repository, issued by the same printers, augured well for a literary paper, especially if the novelist were to take charge. Before active work could be begun, yellow fever again terrified the city, and the dynamic leader of the group had fallen victim. The Friendly Club had discontinued meeting after the normal attendance in May dwindled to one or two members besides the three roommates. In a sense the American Mineralogical Society replaced the earlier club, although Mitchill held the new group quite rigorously to a discussion of scientific matters. Brown trailed Smith to these meetings; there is no evidence that the busy novelist devoted himself seriously to a study of the classification or chemical analysis of rocks. Recognizing the need for companionship, Brown merely went along with Smith and Johnson; at this time he did not strike out for himself to create friends of his own. Brown brought to New York, as evidence of enthusiasm for novel writing, the first pages of a new book. In Philadelphia on April 12, 1798, he had read to Dunlap “the beginning to a novel undertaken since Sky-Walk; he calls it Wieland; or, The Transformation. This must make a very

fine book.” On July 3 Dunlap noted further: “C. B. Brown arrives from Philadelphia—last from Princeton—and takes up his abode with me. He has brought his second novel but not completed.” The little circle of intimates passed the manuscript around. Smith found it “no way inferior to SkyWalk.” By July 10 eighty-four pages of manuscript had been completed. Smith took this packet to Hocquet Caritat, bookseller and owner of New York’s fashionable circulating library, who purchased the rights to the novel. On July 23 copy was sent to the printer, T. and J. Swords. Having received fifty dollars as an initial payment, Brown hurried to a conclusion to keep pace with the typesetters. On August 5 the novel was completely written, although some additions and alterations in the proof were made as late as August 24. The book was published on September 14, 1798, and put on sale at a dollar a copy. Wieland; or, The Transformation is a terror story in which the narrator, the beautiful Clara Wieland, is driven toward madness by a series of shivering experiences, is rescued at the end, and is allowed to complete her gloom-clouded life in marriage. She is the daughter of a German-born religious fanatic who has come to America as a missionary and who has foretold his death by strange, unannounced means of retribution for supposed lax service to God. With trembling joints and chattering teeth he goes one sultry August midnight, in customary solitude, to worship in a private chapel on his estate. Half an hour later his wife notices a gleam of light in the chapel. There follows a loud report like the explosion of an undersea bomb. Piercing shrieks seem to be a call for help. The blaze resembles a cloud impregnated with light, but the building is not on fire. Brought to his bed, the fanatic states that while engaged in silent prayers he was disturbed by a faint gleam of light in the chapel as if someone carried a lamp. On turning to look at the supposed intruder, he was struck on the right arm by a club. A bright spark fell on him, and in a moment his clothes were burned to ashes. Wieland dies by spontaneous combustion, exactly in the manner of the priest Don G. Maria Bertholi, as described in the London Literary Magazine of May, 1790. But the question is raised by Clara whether this event is “fresh proof that the Divine Ruler interferes in human affairs” or is the natural consequence of “the irregular expansion of the fluid that imparts warmth to our heart and blood, caused by the fatigue of the preceding day, or flowing by established laws from the condition of his thoughts.”

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America. Hints for Ormond were derived from this pugnacious fundamentalist. Statesmen from New England lingered a day or two in New York in passing to and from the capitol in Philadelphia; Senator Uriah Tracy of Connecticut had been especially friendly in introducing political leaders. Yet no other event seemed quite so notable this summer as the appearance, on July 27, of President John Adams. A military company paraded its maneuvers from early morning until his arrival at five P.M. The three friends waited at the Battery all day to meet the national leader who was the father of their intimate companion.

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It is against this background of religious mania and of imagined supernatural intervention in the affairs of men that the main story is related. Clara and her brother Theodore, who are about seven and ten years old, respectively, when their father dies, are reared by a maiden aunt under circumstances of affluence. Wieland’s studious habits and musical interests arise from a humorless, melancholy disposition. The history of religion and the textual accuracy of Cicero are his favorite studies. Neither child has been able to forget the terrifying childhood experience, and almost every significant incident clangs the bell of memory to renew the indelible impact of that tragic occurrence. The story proper begins six years after Theodore has married Catharine Pleyel and after four children have been born to this union. Like his father, Theodore is a religious enthusiast who imagines that he can have direct communication with God. The ardent Clara sees in almost every unmarried man a potential suitor; secretly she has nourished affection for Henry Pleyel, Catharine’s brother, a rationalist engaged to the German baroness Theresa von Stolberg. One evening, as the four are conversing, Wieland goes to his father’s chapel, now converted to a study and music hall, to find a letter. A mysterious voice warns him to return to the house. Seven times in the course of a few weeks the voice is heard under varying and increasingly mystifying circumstances. Wieland is certain of the supernatural origin of the voice, Clara thinks the voice is supernatural but not malevolent in intention, and Pleyel, who has been told of the death of his sweetheart in one of the voice’s statements, wavers momentarily until his rationalistic tendency reasserts itself. A stranger named Carwin, an escaped convict from Ireland with eyes and voice suggesting powers of witchcraft, comes into the family circle. On one occasion he appears in Clara’s bedroom at midnight after the voice has been heard. He assures her that but for the supernatural protection afforded by the voice he would have seduced her. Pleyel, whose affection has centered on Clara, witnesses Carwin’s departure from her room and turns angrily against her because of her seemingly profligate conduct. Wieland goes mad under the strain of the circumstances and, because he thinks he hears a divine command, strangles his wife and children and bashes in the head of Louisa Stuart, a young girl living with the Wielands. His attempt on Pleyel’s life fails. Carwin suddenly appears and explains his ventriloquial powers just as Wieland

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menaces Clara. Aware of his error, Wieland grasps her penknife, with which she intended to slay him, and plunges the blade to the hilt in his own neck. Three years later Clara resumes the narrative. Theresa is dead in childbirth. Pleyel, having learned the truth about Clara’s innocence, marries her. The story of Louisa Stuart’s parents is briefly concluded as a parallel narrative leading to an identical moralized conclusion. Stuart had wounded Maxwell in a duel, and in revenge Maxwell had seduced Stuart’s wife. When Stuart learns of his wife’s self-exile in shame, he pursues Maxwell to secure revenge. A challenge is issued, but at night Stuart is murdered by an unknown swarthy assassin. This briefly narrated secondary story is designed to give point to the lesson that “the evils of which Carwin and Maxwell were the authors owed their existence to the errors of the sufferers.” If Mrs. Stuart had crushed her disastrous passion, and if Stuart had not sought an “absurd revenge,” the catastrophe would not have occurred. If Wieland had framed juster notions of moral duty and if Clara had been gifted with ordinary equanimity or foresight, the doubletongued Carwin would not have ensnared them. This conclusion has an anticlimactic force, since the scene shifts from the Wieland family to the Stuart family. Though esthetically the episode cannot be justified today, to the story-telling moralist in 1798 it helped to give a ring of truth, for dueling and seduction were frowned upon. The parallel between common and uncommon experiences heightens the necessity for a rationalistic examination of evidence before one draws conclusions or engages in actions likely to destroy life or happiness. The novel has other defects. Conversation occurs too seldom, and then chiefly in Wieland’s confession. Most of the episodes are summarized too briefly. Description tends to be general and expository rather than pictorial. Opportunities for magnificent scenes are not exploited; a notable example is the comment following the discovery of the bodies of the five murdered children: “Why should I protract a tale which I already begin to feel is too long?” This episode of a religious maniac’s murder of his family expands an account, as related in the New York Weekly Magazine of July 20, 1796, of James Yates’ murder of his whole family in Tomhanick, New York, in December, 1791. The virtues of the novel are numerous. The main story moves with steady crescendo to a

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The plot unfolds skillfully. The initial chapters set the somber, tragic mood of the tale; ever present in the minds of Clara and Theodore, and used advantageously by Carwin, are the events of the elder Wieland’s fiery death; that episode chimes in the memory like a knell, horrifyingly symbolical of a dread, inevitable catastrophe. The small cast of characters, closely interknit through marriage and affection, as well as through the proximity of their residences to each other and to the city of Philadelphia, makes plausible each turn of the action. Clara’s penknife appears early as a weapon of defense, and at last serves its tragic purpose in Theodore’s hand. Every detail of the main story is adequately motivated. The unfolding of the tale from three angles evinces masterly command of plot structure. After Clara has narrated the events from her point of view, Theodore confesses to the court, and finally Carwin unravels the mystery. Each flickering light and each of the seven appearances of the ventriloquial voice is accounted for. If Brown managed the dovetailing of these three reports less artfully than recent writers of detective fiction have done, it should be remembered that he was pioneering in a field where Poe, thirty years later, is credited with originality. Brown anticipated Hawthorne in the use of multiple explanation of seemingly supernatural events. It is often erroneously assumed that Theodore is the central character in the novel. The story revolves about the narrator, Clara, a young woman of exceptional mentality, fortitude, loyalty, and frankness. She begins by asking attention to her

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powerful climax. It is, as Thomas Love Peacock said, “one of the few tales in which the final explanation of the apparently supernatural does not destroy or diminish the original effect.” The reader is so engrossed in the plight of the narrator, Clara, since she is under threat throughout, that the explanation by Carwin of his cunning serves but to increase the danger to Clara’s mental balance and life. Brown organized his story, unlike most Gothic tales, around the theme of mental balance and the ease with which that balance is destroyed. The pseudo-supernatural materials, spontaneous combustion and ventriloquism, serve to make credible Theodore’s insanity. Clara is prostrated at two periods, and in the presence of Carwin she faints twice. She possesses a hereditary dread of water. Her education, she says, did not fit her for perils such as she encounters. In the moralizing conclusion, therefore, she advises the necessity for maintaining one’s balance through a rationalistic attitude towards all phenomena.

Title page of Weiland; or, The Transformation, 1798.

own plight, “a destiny without alleviation.” She worries over the supernatural agency of the voices; she sighs for a lover and unhesitatingly reveals her hopes; she who had spurned Dashwood on an earlier occasion feels the menace of a practiced seducer in a series of midnight actions, the unhappy result of which is the temporary loss of her hoped-for husband, Pleyel; she dreams of threats to her life and meditates upon their meaning; she stumbles upon the murdered Catharine and children; Theodore twice is within an inch of murdering her; and in the end she becomes the bride of Pleyel. The subtitle of the novel, “The Transformation,” occurs thrice in the text. It first describes Carwin’s alteration from an Englishman into an Irishman. Clara next uses the term in relation to herself: “Was I not likewise transformed from rational and human into a creature of nameless and fearless attributes?” Finally it describes Theodore: “Wieland was transformed at once into a man of sorrows.” Although the word is not used directly about Pleyel, the description of his ineffable anguish on berating Clara for her alleged lapse from virtue indicates a similar “transforma-

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tion.” At the very beginning of the novel, in the third paragraph, Clara describes the transformation of the status of the whole family: “The storm that tore up our happiness and changed into dreariness and desert the blooming scene of our existence is lulled into grim repose, but not until the victim was transfixed and mangled, till every obstacle was dissipated by its rage, till every remnant of good was wrested from our grasp and exterminated.” The title, which refers as much to the family as to Theodore, certainly must not be interpreted as excluding Clara from the central position. Brown endowed his main characters with a sufficient variety of traits to make their friendship plausible and their actions credible. Although he drew his incidents and persons as much from books as from life, his emphasis upon psychopathic traits adds depth to characters whose range of action is narrow in the physical world. This intense intellectuality in Wieland gives it precedence in importance over almost all other early American novels. Quite apparent is Brown’s indebtedness to contemporary sensationalist psychology, to Erasmus Darwin’s chapter on “Mania Mutabilis” in Zoönomia, and to other writings on insanity. Dr. Cambridge’s lecture to Clara echoes Dr. Benjamin Rush. Not until the advent of Poe and Hawthorne does another fictionist create characters tormented by brooding minds. Not only in the psychological passages is Wieland a vehicle of intellectuality. Everywhere are evidences of learning. There has been research in religion, in old books, in encyclopedias. A problem in emending Cicero occupies some time of Theodore, who is an accomplished Latin textual scholar and a student of the history of religion. These characters are children of the Enlightenment. Each possesses utopian dreams. Clara muses on methods to end the alliance between the practice of agriculture and ignorance; she hopes that “this trade might be made conducive to or at least consistent with acquisition of wisdom and eloquence.” Her heart is readily “touched with sympathy for the children of misfortune.” Pleyel, a possessor of a skeptical mind in most matters, urges Theodore to claim estates in Germany because wealth would “afford so large a field for benevolence.” Theodore refuses, however, on the ground that wealth and power are two great sources of depravity. Brown’s style emphasizes the intellectuality of the novel. The vocabulary is large; the words are not notably learned; although the tendency to employ polysyllables of Latin derivation is appar-

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ent: “My calmness was the torpor of despair, and not the tranquillity of fortitude.” Circumlocution replaces direct description: “he fell in love” becomes “he had not escaped the amorous contagion.” The uniqueness of Brown’s style lies in the short, rapid-fire sentences which cannonade the reader’s mind with ideas faster than they can be absorbed. Fiction should proceed pictorially; Brown’s story marches steadily forward under sententious garb as if he were vying with Rochefoucauld or Pascal in the writing of the following aphorisms: As a consolation in calamity religion is dear. Some agitation and concussion is requisite to the due exercise of human understanding. This scene of existence is, in all its parts, calamitous. Ideas exist in our minds that can be accounted for by no established laws. Surprise is an emotion that enfeebles, not invigorates. Mankind are more easily enticed to virtue by example than by precept. Terror enables us to perform incredible feats. Time will obliterate the deepest impressions.

These sentences parallel similar ones in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and An Enquiry into Political Justice. But they also parallel statements in Robert Bage’s Hermsprong and in other fiction of a liberal tendency. Although Brown had been reading Godwin and had despaired of surpassing this master in the first pages of Arthur Mervyn, he was not merely copying plot or ideas or style in Wieland. There are more similarities with Bage’s novel than with Godwin’s, for in Bage are the German characters, an octagonal pleasure house, a thirty-thousand-acre plantation of the type mentioned by Ludloe and Carwin, a nature-setting with a perpendicular descent, and a generally radical intellectual tendency. Brown also was familiar with Anne Radcliffe’s novels of suspense wherein seemingly supernatural occurrences were explained away as natural phenomena. His descriptions and his use of the sex motif follow the pattern of her novels. Of considerable interest in the history of fiction are the references to German characters and the use of German Gothic formulæ. The end of the eighteenth century saw a shift of British intellectual interests away from France because of the declaration of war in 1793. German exiles and men like Matthew Lewis and Henry MacKenzie turned attention to the hitherto unexploited liter-

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Despite its publication at the very height of the plague on September 15, 1798, the book received favorable attention. With the resumption of normal city life, the New York Spectator of November 10, 1798, extolled the book in a review nearly a column in length: “The style is correct and energetic, and we may venture to assert the writer has established his reputation as a man of genius.” The reviewer called upon his fellow citizens to support the author: “On the reception of this volume depends the future exertions of this ingenious man. Shall it be said that America, whose citizens have been famed for their superior knowledge and love of letters, is so destitute of liberality as to refuse or neglect patronizing an attempt like the present? And shall this stigma in a particular manner rest upon our city? . . . Forbid it, patriotism; forbid it, all that has any connection with science [that is, learning] and the Amor Patriæ.” On January 2, 1799, another reviewer in the same newspaper stated: “Wieland; or, The Transformation . . . is certainly the best novel this country has produced. It is a work which no one can read with inattention, and is peculiarly engaging to well-cultivated and refined understandings. Every person, however well informed he may be, must find his curiosity gratified and his mind enlarged after a candid and judicious perusal of this ingenious performance. This is not the flimsy production of a wretched hireling or a mercenary garreteer, but the well-finished composition of one who may be truly called ‘a man of genius.’ In a word, I think we may with propriety assert that the writer of Wieland was desirous of producing a work from the perusal of which no one could rise without being strengthened in habits of sincerity, fortitude, and justice.” In The American Review and Literary Journal of July-September, 1801, this state-

ment was made: “The author of Wieland is almost the first American who has adventured in this path of literature, and this production is the first of the kind which has attracted much public attention.” Caritat took copies with him to England, and brief critiques there were favorable. Evidently the sale was not sufficient to call for a second edition immediately. Samuel Griswold Goodrich reprinted it in 1829 in a collected edition of the novels, and in 1841 W. Coquebert issued a French translation, Wieland, ou la voix mystérieux. Meantime, Hawthorne, Poe, and other critics praised Brown and Wieland; and since its first publication the book has been acclaimed a minor classic in American literature. Something of Brown’s tremulous concern over the fate of Wieland appears in a letter of December 25, 1798, to Thomas Jefferson: “In thus transmitting my book to you, I tacitly acknowledge my belief that it is capable of affording you pleasure and of entitling the writer to some portion of your good opinion. I . . . hope that an artful display of incidents, the powerful delineation of characters and the train of eloquent and judicious reasoning which may be combined in a fictitious work will be regarded by Thomas Jefferson with as much respect as they are regarded by me.” As soon as Wieland was completed, Brown resumed work on Carwin, The Biloquist which, he had announced in his preface to Wieland, would “be published or suppressed according to the reception which is given to the present attempt.” Carwin never was completed; the surviving fragment was first printed in The Literary Magazine and American Register between 1803 and 1805. Carwin, The Biloquist forms a preliminary volume to Wieland, much as the first part of Godwin’s Caleb Williams describes the villain’s career before the hero is introduced. Carwin, son of a western Pennsylvania farmer, possesses a curiosity like Caleb Williams’. At fourteen he becomes interested in ventriloquism through the operation of a five-fold echo in a glen. He succeeds in mimicking every species of sound, human and animal. Sent to live with an aunt in Philadelphia, he meets Ludloe, a wealthy Irishman and agrees to go to Europe. Ludloe enunciates a strange code of conduct: he seems to be an anarchist; his talk savors of the subversive ideas of the Illuminati. He echoes Alcuin on the subject of the perverting nature of all professions, on the evils of cohabitation, and on the misguided thinking of women as a result of

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ary production of Prussia. Christoph Martin Wieland (1773-1813) was being mentioned in the magazines with fulsome praise for his epic Oberon (1780), a work which Brown read in 1793. Here in the public eye was a man whose sensitivity gave plausibility to Theodore’s possession of religious mania. Dunlap had translated Schiller’s and Kotzebue’s dramas, and the New York Weekly Magazine had serialized Schiller’s The Ghostseer and Cajetan Tschink’s The Victim of Magical Delusion. Brown had read these two novels, and possibly the initial creative impulse and rationalistic theme of Wieland came from the latter. Other German and English novels doubtless influenced Brown, but by and large Wieland is an original work in subject, theme, plot, and execution.

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false principles of education. He believes that “the absurd and unequal distribution of property gave birth to poverty and riches” and that the evils which infest society are caused by the errors of opinion. A perfectionist, he believes further “that man is the creature of circumstances; that he is capable of endless improvement; that his progress has been stopped by the artificial impediment of government; that by the removal of this, the fondest dreams of imagination will be realized.” Ludloe also has “a scheme of utopian felicity, where the empire of reason should supplant that of force; where justice should be universally understood and practiced; where the interest of the whole and of the individual should be seen by all to be the same; where the public good should be the scope of all activity; where the tasks of all should be the same, and the means of subsistence equally distributed.” Carwin while studying in Spain embraces Roman Catholicism. His correspondence with Ludloe leads to the exposition of a plan for a new nation to be established on the colonization principle of the manumission societies; he believes that men persist in retaining error because they are creatures of habit, and that in a new land “a new race, tutored in truth, may in a few centuries overflow the habitable world.” Not until he arrives in Dublin does Carwin discover Ludloe’s secret, but the novel breaks off before the two men come to open conflict. The sequel in Wieland accuses Carwin of murdering Lady Jane Conway and of robbing Ludloe—charges which Carwin claims are false. Brown felt that his narrative was following too closely the pattern of Caleb Williams and of the beginning of Arthur Mervyn, already published in the Philadelphia Weekly Magazine. In abandoning his plan, he laid aside a swift-paced tale involving only a single strand of action. Carwin possesses little distinctiveness in character, and the conflict between him and Ludloe would have been difficult to manage on ideological or psychological grounds because both have similar utopian notions. No ideas are in conflict, and Carwin develops no theme of importance equal to that of Wieland. But where Wieland is almost wholly original, Carwin seems wholly derivative in pattern and character from Godwin. Though the verbal power remains, Brown correctly diagnosed the chief weakness of the novel when he wrote in 1805 that “the narrative [is] of too grave and argumentative a cast.” On September 4, 1798, Brown wrote to Dunlap: “I have written something in the history of

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Carwin, which I will send. I have deserted for the present from the prosecution of this plan, and betook myself to another which I mean to extend to the size of Wieland and to finish by the end of this month, provided no yellow fever disconcerts my plan.” On the 24th, while he and Dunlap were together in Perth Amboy to escape the ravages of yellow fever, Dunlap noted in his diary: “Read the beginning of Charles’ last novel called Calvert (proposed to be changed to Caillemour) or The Lost Brothers.” This work, the first volume of an uncompleted pentalogy, was entitled Memoirs of Stephen Calvert and was first published serially in Brown’s Monthly Magazine and American Review from June, 1799, to June, 1800; Dunlap reprinted it in his biography of Brown.

MICHAEL T. GILMORE (ESSAY DATE SUMMER 1977) SOURCE: Gilmore, Michael T. “Calvinism and Gothicism: The Example of Brown’s Wieland.” Studies in the Novel 9, no. 2 (summer 1977): 107-18. In the following essay, Gilmore analyzes the influence of Milton’s Biblical epic Paradise Lost on Wieland.

Charles Brockden Brown’s “Gothic” novel Wieland; or The Transformation (1798) was long read as an expression of Enlightenment rationality. The author’s purpose, according to this view, was to caution readers “against credulity and religious fanaticism.”1 But the rationalist interpretation has come under spirited attack in recent years, partly as a result of a reassessment of le genre noir in general, and the Calvinist underpinning of Brown’s tale has begun to gain the recognition it deserves.2 Nevertheless, the misreadings persist in one form or another, and even Larzer Ziff, who properly insists that “Brown ends his journey through the mind by approaching the outskirts of Edwards’ camp,” misconstrues the novel’s denouement as a conventional happy ending. Further, Ziff’s analysis of the sentimental seduction theme is a source of confusion, the effect of which is to trivialize Brown’s principal concern.3 For the Carwin-Clara-Pleyel triangle has little to do with sentimental love: rather it is Brown’s version of the temptation in the garden, and Wieland itself is his retelling of the biblical fable of the Fall of Man. It is well known that William Godwin’s Caleb Williams had a major impact on Brown and that its publication in 1794 prompted the American to turn to the writing of fiction. Much stressed by critics, the Godwinian influence is usually cited as proof of Brown’s radicalism and hostility to

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And yet the conclusion of Godwin’s novel would seem to suggest that the author did in fact have a scheme of salvation, a scheme which is unmistakably Calvinist and may even have derived from his reading of Jonathan Edwards.5 Caleb Williams, which Godwin wrote, as he claimed in the preface, in order to expose “Things as They Are,” is profoundly antilaw in outlook and expounds the view that the English legal system is a tool of class oppression. On a different or deeper level, however, the book is addressed to the issue of salvation by works or faith. Mr. Raymond, captain of a band of thieves patterned after Robin Hood’s mythical crew, declares to Caleb that “either . . . we all of us deserve the vengeance of the law, or law is not the proper instrument of correcting the misdeeds of mankind.” As Old Testament God, Falkland uses the “remorseless fangs of the law” to hound Caleb with the threat of extinction; but once the wretched victim is imprisoned and arraigned for judgment, the pursuer declines to appear to press charges. Jehovah becomes Christ in an unexpected volteface; and Caleb, who has doggedly protested his innocence, thereby denying his need for grace, is transformed into Cain or the Wandering Jew. In the novel’s postscript, he goes to a magistrate and turns the law against Falkland himself, who is convicted and dies after three days. He will not rise again for Caleb Williams. For the latter, having figuratively slain Christ—“A nobler spirit lived not among the sons of men,” he now says of Falkland—awakens too late to his corrupt nature and participation in the primal crime. He might have secured himself from damnation, he realizes, if “I had opened my heart to Mr. Falkland, if I had told to him privately the tale I have now been telling . . .”—if, in short, he had thrown himself upon the mercy of the Redeemer and made a confession of sin.6 What Godwin’s residual Calvinism reduces down to is the conviction that only

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religion. As Joel Porte has recently shown, however, Caleb Williams possesses an “exacerbated Calvinist framework” and breathes the spirit of Paradise Lost. With Falkland in the role of the harsh Divinity and Caleb as the sinful Adam, it charts a course of guilt, suffering, and relentless persecution, ending with a reversal in which the eponymous hero, having succeeded in vindicating himself in a court of law, is overcome by remorse and acknowledges that “he is precisely the ‘monster of depravity’ whom he had been represented as being all along.” In the ruined Gothic world of Caleb Williams, argues Porte, there is no hope, no prospect of grace or redemption.4

through Christ and the covenant of grace can mankind be saved; given human depravity, there is no salvation through law or good works. Crane Brinton, in his work on the French Revolution, has commented on the resemblance between Protestant and Robespierrean theology, arguing that “the men who made the Terror were compeers of the first Crusaders, of Savonarola, of Calvin.”7 Brinton’s thesis is perfectly illustrated by Godwin, whose radicalism bears the indelible stamp of his orthodox upbringing. In the case of Brown, who was raised as a Quaker, the Calvinist mood informing both Wieland and the fragment Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist probably stems as much from the eighteenth-century American background as from his immersion in Enlightenment literature. The Memoirs of Carwin, which was composed at roughly the same time as Wieland but not published until 1803, strongly evinces the traces of both Godwin and native religious thought. Brown’s closest friend, Elihu Hubbard Smith, was a graduate of Yale who introduced the novelist to Timothy Dwight, the grandson of Jonathan Edwards; and it is not impossible that Brown was familiar with the great theologian’s writings. But Brown himself hinted at another source of influence, a source conned by Edwards and Godwin alike: John Milton. While Carwin perfects his ventriloquism, for example, he peruses Milton’s Comus (p. 281);8 and although Paradise Lost is not actually mentioned by name

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in the fragment, its theme is crucial and pervasive. Carwin is consumed by a perverse lust for knowledge which his father denounces as “incorrigible depravity” (pp. 275-76). After an almost supernatural fire that burns down his father’s barn—a reminder, perhaps, of the fiery sword that the Angel Michael waved behind Adam and Eve as he drove them from Paradise—Carwin leaves the pastoral setting where he was born, wanders to the city, and catches the eye of the mysterious Ludloe, who proposes to finance him on a voyage to Europe. A Utopian schemer and apparent Illuminatus, Ludloe plays Falkland to Carwin’s Caleb Williams. He seems to possess preternatural powers of which his protégé stands in awe. Like Milton’s God, he projects a new Eden, and like Edwards’s Christ, he demands a full and sincere confession from those seeking membership in the exalted order to which he belongs. “Perdition or felicity will hang upon that moment” (p. 344), says Ludloe in reference to the confession, adding that “concealment is impossible” and that every secret must be divulged (p. 350). Carwin, however, resolves to withhold the knowledge of his biloquism from his confessor; and shortly thereafter Brown abandoned the manuscript, leaving unanswered the question of his protagonist’s fate. It is in Wieland, of course, that he furnishes the answer, an answer that has been foreshadowed by Carwin’s insatiable curiosity, his unwillingness to confess all, and his transformation into a Spanish Catholic: This last detail is especially significant in light of the conventional Gothic technique of displacing the action to a Catholic setting, with its ubiquitous decaying abbeys, monasteries, and catacombs. To embrace Catholicism, as Protestant authors indoctrinated with the theology of John Calvin knew in their bones, was to ensure perdition, since Catholics clung to the misguided belief that salvation could be won by spurning the world or performing good works within it. This was to deny the need for divine election and to gloss over the universal depravity of mankind, which rendered truly virtuous actions impossible without an infusion of the Holy Spirit. On the issue of salvation by works Catholics and Protestant Armenians locked arms, and what has passed as the anticlericalism of the Gothic school might more properly be viewed as a veiled protest against the waning of Calvinist dogma around the turn of the eighteenth century. That the Gothicists themselves frequently shared in the general disquietude of the age is true, but at the same time they were too thoroughly steeped in Puritanism to find the Catholic or Armenian alternative a meaningful

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one. William Godwin, after all, went from Calvinism to atheism but was never tempted by the Church of England, and his hunger for innerworldly sainthood surely accounts at least in part for his attraction to the French Revolution. Carwin’s adoption of Catholicism, to which Brown alluded again in Wieland, is not, therefore, simply a convenient device for endowing the villain with an aura of exoticism. Instead it is an outgrowth of the explicitly Calvinistic bias of the Gothic school and stamps Carwin as one of the damned, an unrepentant sinner who counts upon the false security of the legal covenant to preserve him from the vengeance of a righteous God. It is altogether consistent with his repudiation of Christ-Ludloe and his subsequent protests of innocence throughout the novel. Despite having set in motion the train of events that culminates in the younger Wieland’s suicide, he will defend himself against Clara’s accusations of depravity, allowing that his morals are “far from rigid” but insisting that he is not the “desperate or sordid criminal” that she charges him with being (p. 230). And yet the almost oppressive theological temper of Brown’s tale is barely sensed at the outset, the participants themselves confidently consigning it to the past. Although Clara concedes that the history of her father’s strange death, which she recounts in the introductory chapters, has left an impression on her that “can never be effaced” (p. 21), the idyllic middle-class landscape inhabited by herself, her brother, Catherine, and Pleyel retains few traces of the morbid spirituality to which the elder Wieland fell prey. Brown’s subtitle “An American Tale” suggests that he saw in his central foursome a microcosm of the bourgeois American society that by 1798 stood in defiant opposition to the Puritan past. Surely it is no coincidence that at one point in the narrative Pleyel refers to a Ciceronian oration that makes “the picture of a single family a model from which to sketch the condition of a nation” (p. 34). Unruffled rationality, moderation, and middleclass ease are the distinguishing marks of the Mettingen setting; the temple that the senior Wieland kept bare—“without seat, table, or ornament of any kind” (p. 12)—and consecrated to the worship of the Deity has been cluttered with a harpsichord, pedestal, and bust of Cicero, Enlightenment trappings that symbolize a rejection of the austere Protestantism of an earlier day. The Godcharged universe of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards has narrowed to a common sense world that would have gladdened the heart of Benjamin

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the narrative the figure of Carwin, and his implicit criticism of American life begins to move in the direction of epic, as it becomes increasingly clear that the fable underlying his novel is Milton’s Paradise Lost. Clara is utterly captivated by the appearance of Carwin, who begs at her door for water dressed in virtual rags. That a stranger who reminds her of a rustic clown should exert so powerful a hold on her imagination would seem absurd were it not for the fact that her portrait of him so strikingly resembles the fallen Angel Lucifer or the Wandering Jew Ahasuerus:

If the Wielands have renounced the past, however, Theodore has not succeeded in exorcising the ghost of his father, which continues to haunt him in the form of an inchoate longing for what the Puritans would have called a conversion experience. “Moral necessity, and calvinistic inspiration,” according to Clara, “were the props on which my brother thought proper to repose” (p. 28). She further describes him as grave, thoughtful, and given to melancholy. But Brown has taken pains to distinguish Wieland from authentic Calvinists and to spell out the dangers inherent in his background and sensibility. While apprenticed to a merchant in England, the senior Wieland had come into contact with the doctrines of the Camissards, a Huguenot sect notorious for its antinomian excesses. Having emigrated to America with the intention of preaching to the Indians, he had connected himself to no established church and abjured all forms of social worship. A separatist and enthusiast, he had lived in daily expectation of a direct message from the Almighty. Even the mother of Clara and Theodore, although not a fanatic like their father, did not belong to any congregation and was a devout disciple of the mystical Count von Zinzendorf, whose separatist impulses were a thorn in the side of Gilbert Tennent. The aunt who reared the younger Wielands was a separatist of a different order, but a separatist nonetheless. She preserved her charges, in Clara’s words, “from the corruption and tyranny of colleges and boardingschools” (p. 22); and Theodore and his sister have carried on the family tradition in their own enlightened fashion. Fortunate enough to find their temperaments duplicated in Catherine and Pleyel, they have gradually withdrawn from “the society of others, and found every moment irksome that was not devoted to each other” (p. 23).

yet his forehead, so far as shaggy locks would allow it to be seen, his eyes lustrously black, and possessing, in the midst of haggardness, a radiance inexpressibly serene and potent, and something in the rest of his features, which it would be vain to describe, but which betoken a mind of the highest order, were essential ingredients in the portrait. (p. 61)

Thus Brown has carefully sketched in the flaws of upbringing and character that will eventually issue in Wieland’s antinomian mania and Clara’s fits of madness. Whereupon he introduces into

The faded grandeur that Clara detects in Carwin’s countenance plunges her into a maze of mournful associations which call into question the Edenic bliss of her present life, and for the first time since the tragedy of her father she is troubled by intimations of mortality: “Death must happen to all” (pp. 62-63). Although she argues that her infatuation with the mysterious wanderer should not be mistaken for love, there is good reason to believe that Clara is sexually drawn to him, and that the storm which rages outside her window while she studies his picture is both an omen of future disaster and an emblem of the tumultuous passions aroused by his presence. Indeed, it is a Miltonic storm such as accompanied the transgression in Eden, a circumstance which is entirely appropriate in view of the fact that Carwin will bring death and sin into the garden of Wieland. For he is Brown’s Gothic tempter, and Clara has become the novelist’s American Eve. It is worth noting, for example, that the biloquist has but a single name. The absence of a surname or Christian name—for the reader never knows which one it is that Carwin lacks—implies an estrangement from society that brands him as an outcast and misfit. In spite of the apparent ease with which he insinuates himself into the Mettingen setting, Carwin’s ultimate failure to shed his solitude places him in the company of archetypes such as Lucifer, Cain, and Ahasuerus. Bumbler that he proves to be, the biloquist is nevertheless modeled on Milton’s conception of Satan. So extensive, in fact, are the parallels between Wieland and Paradise Lost that it is hard to imagine how they have been overlooked. Carwin’s eloquence is an

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Franklin. Even the childhood environment of the younger Wielands has been scrupulously based on enlightened principles, with special emphasis on the golden mean: “our education,” comments Clara, “had been modeled by no religious standard” (p. 24), the aunt who raised her and her brother seldom deviating “into either extreme of rigor or lenity” (p. 22). Once a guide for personal conduct, religion has become merely a subject for casual debate, and assembled at their “fane” on the Schuylkill, the circle of intimates whiles away the hours in aimless cultural pursuits.

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obvious case in point. Overhearing him converse with her servant, Clara is forcibly struck by the sweetness of his voice; and his uncanny powers of speech occasion the numerous misunderstandings that shatter the novel’s surface tranquillity. Repeatedly Clara is under the misapprehension that he is speaking directly into her ear; in Milton’s classic, Satan is discovered squatting like a toad, “close at the ear of Eve” (4.800). Envious of Eve’s love for Adam, the Arch-Fiend is filled with wonder when he first beholds the primal parents, and the sight of their beauty, refulgent with the image of God, almost swerves him from his sinister purpose. Similarly, Carwin is jealous of Clara’s passion for Pleyel, although he also expresses admiration for the latter’s “exquisite sagacity” (p. 236), and he hesitates to employ his verbal skills against them. Clara in particular captures his fancy, Judith having told him that her mistress’s “perfections were little less than divine” (p. 227). In Paradise Lost, Satan addresses Eve as scarcely inferior to the angels, and entering the sleeping form of the serpent, he literally licks the ground on which she treads (9.526). There are, moreover, striking affinities between the dream in which Lucifer appears to Eve and entices her to the tree of knowledge, and that in which Wieland beckons Clara to the edge of an abyss. Clara’s dream has generated a host of conflicting interpretations. To critics who favor the sentimental seduction reading, for example, the chasm evokes a latent fear of incest; to William H. Manly, it stands for the insanity that runs in the Wieland family.9 Another interpretation, one based on Brown’s indebtedness to Milton, seems more probable, however. In both the novel and the epic, the dreams eventually come true; beguiled by Satan, Eve eats of the forbidden fruit, and Clara is physically menaced by Theodore, who believes himself under a divine injunction to slay her. But the physical threat is less important, ultimately, than the fact that her brother compels Clara to confront the evil within herself. We will return later to this decisive turning point in her narrative; for the present, it is enough to suggest that the pit toward which she hastens is hell—the hell that awaits those who taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. There are several hints to this effect. Clara is stopped short in her progress by a voice crying “Hold,” by which Brown may have wished to recall the heavenly prohibition imposed on Adam and Eve. Further, the mysterious voice summons Clara to “Remember your father, and be faithful”; and she shud-

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ders with fright, as if she beheld “suspended over me, the exterminating sword” (pp. 72-73). But the portent of the dream is temporarily lost sight of, even by Clara herself, after the scene in which she approaches the closet door and is again arrested by the command to “Hold!” Imagining because of her dream that Theodore is her enemy, she leaps to the conclusion that he is the person hiding within the closet and calls to him to come out, exclaiming “I know you well.” But the person who steals forth is Carwin, not Theodore, and the focus of danger is thus shifted to the biloquist (pp. 96-102). The brother becomes the other in a dramatic turnabout which has the effect of seeming to isolate evil in an external agent. The importance of this scene for Clara’s development cannot be overstressed, since she will continue almost to the end of her narrative to regard the intruder as the sole cause of the sufferings that destroy her family’s happiness. As Milton’s God was careful to explain to the angels, however, He created man able to withstand temptation, thereby rendering him inexcusable for having sinned. Clara will only grasp this truth at the last. This is not to say, of course, that Carwin is guiltless. Although her brother will eventually undermine Clara’s conviction of her own innocence, it is the “double-tongued” wanderer who brings about her fall in the eyes of Pleyel. This is what the controversial seduction episode is really about: deceived by Carwin’s ventriloquism, and convinced that Clara has succumbed to the villain’s wiles, Pleyel charges her—in accents unmistakably Miltonic—with having committed the primal sin: “O wretch!—thus exquisitely fashioned—on whom nature seemed to have exhausted all her graces; with charms so awful and pure! how art thou fallen! From what height fallen! A ruin so complete—so unheard of!” (p. 117). Pleyel goes on to accuse Clara of consummate depravity, despairing that “In thy ruin, how will the felicity and honor of multitudes be involved” (pp. 117-18). He describes Carwin as the blackest of criminals, a Satanic schemer whose devices “no human intelligence is able to unravel” and who has leagued with infernal spirits in order to wage “a perpetual war against the happiness of mankind” (pp. 148-49). Clara herself now says of the biloquist that “this a foe from whose grasp no power of divinity can save me” (p. 126). As her words indicate, Carwin has completely replaced her brother as the source of her fears. And indeed Pleyel pictures Clara, in what appears to be a deliberate allusion to her dream, as “rushing to

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Thus they in mutual accusation spent The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning, And of their vain contest appeared no end. [9. 1187-89]

“Neither self-condemning”—Milton’s words go to the core of the novel’s concern, and underline the mutual failure of Clara and Pleyel to assume responsibility for their transgressions. What is more, as the confrontation at Pleyel’s house demonstrates, both are unwilling to go beyond reliance on the legal covenant. Pleyel takes upon himself the office of unforgiving judge—Clara calls him “inexorable” (p. 129)—and he denies her the Christian charity that might have repaired the misunderstandings engendered by Carwin’s duplicity. He holds her to the relentless letter of the law: An inscrutable providence has fashioned thee for some end. Thou wilt live, no doubt, to fulfil the purposes of thy maker, if he repent not of his workmanship, and send not his vengeance to exterminate thee, ere the measure of thy days be full. Surely nothing in the shape of man can vie with thee! (p. 135)

Clara likewise spurns the message of Christ and demands justice instead of mercy. “I come hither not to confess,” she informs her accuser, “but to vindicate” (p. 133). Here the Godwinian aspect of Brown’s tale comes to the fore, and here too the true meaning of the secrecy theme is cast into bold relief. The issue for Brown is manifestly the reluctance of sinful man to lay bare his heart—an ordeal that Poe, for one, considered impossible, and that Edwards regarded as essential for salvation. Although Clara hears out Pleyel in silence and persists in believing herself blameless, she has been guilty of concealing her true feelings from him, and her concealment has contributed to their estrangement as much as Carwin’s officiousness. She has also kept secret the interview with the would-be murderer whose summons interrupted her dream at the summerhouse—an interview, as Pleyel rightly surmises, that took place with the Satanic biloquist, albeit that Clara was then ignorant of his identity. The reader knows, however, from Clara’s own words, words written after the fact but inserted into her narrative prior to the climactic scene with Pleyel, that her “scruples were preposterous and criminal. . . . My errors have taught me thus much wisdom;

that those sentiments which we ought not to disclose, it is criminal to harbour” (p. 90). Clara’s fall, like that of the primal couple, ushers sin and death into the Edenic world of Wieland. Having left Pleyel’s house—significantly, he has announced his intention of setting out on a long journey—she returns to a Mettingen despoiled by her brother’s murderous rampage. Overcome by what she sees, she casts the entire burden of guilt on Carwin. She assumes that he is the murderer of her brother’s family; and even Theodore’s confession does not shake her belief that the author of woe is the biloquist, to whom she attributes supernatural powers. This is to deny man’s complicity in the Fall and to reject—in Edwards’s words—“The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin.” To Clara’s disordered mind, evil is extrinsic, not integral to human nature: O brother! spare me, spare thyself: There is thy betrayer. He counterfeited the voice and face of an angel, for the purpose of destroying thee and me. He has this moment confessed it. He is able to speak where he is not. He is leagued with hell, but will not avow it; yet he confesses that the agency was his (p. 245)

In this speech, Clara is implicitly proclaiming her own innocence as well as Theodore’s and taking refuge in the legal covenant—the covenant predicated on the mistaken notion that fallen man is essentially unfallen, and that Lucifer alone is responsible for sin. Moments later, however, she is brought up sharply by the discovery that she is prepared to defend herself against Wieland’s attack by plunging her penknife into his heart, a weapon that she has all along insisted that she will use only against herself. This realization sets off a reversal of sentiment that recalls Caleb Williams’s despair after the trial of Falkland: I estimate my own deserving; a hatred, immortal and inexorable, is my due, I listen to my own pleas, and find them empty and false: yes, I acknowledge that my guilt surpasses that of all mankind: I confess that the curses of a world, and the frowns of a deity, are inadequate to my demerits. Is there a thing in the world worthy of infinite abhorrence? It is I (pp. 249-50)

Admittedly, the act that Clara contemplates is one of self-defense—but that is precisely Brown’s point. For although any court of law would deliver a verdict of justifiable homicide (just as Caleb Williams is vindicated in a court of law), Clara—finding herself capable of slaying her own brother— has ceased to think in terms of the law. She has

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the verge of a dizzy precipice,” led on by the cunning seducer (p. 147). The denunciations that he hurls at her, and her indignant protests of purity, recall the bickering between Adam and Eve after the Fall:

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finally accepted the fact of human corruption: the “adders” of sin are now lodged in her own breast (p. 256). Clara is prostrated with grief and self-loathing after the death of her brother. Much like Milton’s Eve, she craves “quick deliverance from life and all the ills that attend it” (p. 261), and she revolts against the inevitable decree that she must quit the scene of her former bliss: O unexpected stroke, worse than of Death! Must I thus leave thee, Paradise: thus leave Thee, native soil, these happy walks and shades, Fit haunt of gods? [9.268-71]

Clara has accepted her culpability, but she still shrinks from its consequences. It is not until her home is consumed by flames—as in the Memoirs of Carwin, the conflagration recalls Michael’s fiery sword—that she resigns herself to banishment from the garden and agrees to accompany her uncle on a voyage to Europe. The last chapter of the novel is therefore dated at Montpellier in France, and is written, significantly enough, three years after the narrative proper. It finds Clara chastened but “not destitute of happiness” (p. 262), for her sanity has been restored and she has been reunited with her American Adam. She now admits that “no human virtue is secure from degeneracy” (p. 270), and she has made a full confession of her former sentiments to Pleyel. Inevitably one is reminded of Eve’s moving speech to Adam in Paradise Lost: “Living or dying, from thee I will not hide / What thoughts in my unquiet breast are risen . . .” (9.974-75). In Calvinist terms, Clara has been reborn through the agency of Christ: she has bared her soul and given her assent to the doctrine of original sin. “It will not escape your notice,” she writes, “that the evils of which Carwin and Maxwell were the authors, owed their existence to the errors of the sufferers” (p. 273). Man is partner with Satan in the Fall. In the last book of Paradise Lost, Adam almost rejoices over his sin because of Michael’s prophecy of the coming of Christ; by the concluding pages of Brown’s novel, Clara has grown to a measure of self-awareness that was beyond her when she dwelt in the Mettingen Eden. The transformation of Brown’s title refers, then, both to the Fall and the promise of redemption; and it is altogether fitting that Hawthorne’s Marble Faun (1860) was published in England under the title Transformation, its subject being the Fortunate Fall. As for Carwin, the ventriloquist acknowledges his misconduct, but, as he correctly insists, he has com-

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mitted no crime punishable by human law. “I cannot justify my conduct,” he tells Clara, “yet my only crime was curiosity” (p. 231). Caleb Williams’s crime was no different: curiosity, after all, is the primal sin. Escaping the clutches of Ludloe, Carwin makes his way into a remote district of Pennsylvania, where he engages “in the harmless pursuits of agriculture” (p. 268). Blind to his own depravity, ignorant of his need for grace, the villain returns to the garden from which Clara and Pleyel have been expelled and becomes an “innocent” American yeoman. This is Brown’s devastating judgment on Franklin’s America: it no longer has any place for those who penetrate to the truth of the human heart. Clara is doomed to permanent exile from a land which has lost the sense of sin. The apologetic tone of Brown’s “advertisement,” and his apprehensions concerning his tale’s reception, are reminiscent of the somewhat defensive posture adopted by Edwards in the preface to The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1757). Barely forty years separate the publication of the two works, both of which deal, as Brown announced in his “advertisement,” with “the moral constitution of man” (p. 3). Edwards, writing in the aftermath of the Great Awakening, still retained some hope of restoring his countrymen to “the principles and scheme of religion maintained by our pious and excellent forefathers.”1 0 No such hope animates Brown’s “veiled sermon,” as Fred Lewis Pattee once called it.1 1 And so it is fitting that Wieland is built on the fable of Paradise Lost. For in going back to Milton for his inspiration, Brown was doing more than paying tribute to the greatest of Puritan authors. He was also addressing a theme that was to engage a host of later American novelists: the promise of America, he strongly suggests, is the “paradise lost” in Wieland.

Notes 1. David Lee Clark, Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 16869. See also Harry R. Warfel, Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist (Gainesville, Fla.: Univ. of Florida Press, 1949), pp. 104-5. 2. For important reassessments of the Gothic novel, see Lowry Nelson, Jr., “Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel,” The Yale Review, 52 (Winter 1963), 236-57; Robert D. Hume, “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 282-90: and the essays in G. R. Thompson, ed., The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism (Pullman, Wash.: Washington State Univ. Press, 1974), particularly Joel Porte’s “In the Hands of an Angry God: Religious Terror in Gothic Fiction,” pp. 42-64. The religious theme in Brown has been noted by Larzer

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3. See Ziff, pp. 51-57. 4. Porte, pp. 52-55. 5. On Edwards’s influence on Godwin, see Alfred Owen Aldridge, “Jonathan Edwards and William Godwin on Virtue,” American Literature, 18 (1947), 308-18. 6. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 233, 273, 278-79, 296, 323, 325-26.

Christophersen, Bill. “Picking Up the Knife: A PsychoHistorical Reading of Wieland.” American Studies 27, no. 1 (spring 1986): 115-26. Focuses on Clara’s transformation as a metaphor for the transformation of America from British colony to young nation. Goddu, Teresa A. “Diseased Discourse: Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn.” In Gothic America: Narrative, History, and the Nation, pp. 31-51. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Delineates how Brown utilizes the Gothic to depict both the causes of and possible solutions to societal ills in Arthur Mervyn.

7. Crane Brinton, A Decade of Revolution: 1789-1799 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), pp. 158-61. The similarity between the Puritan and French Revolutions has been examined in detail by Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965).

Grabo, Norman S. The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981, 209 p.

8. I will be referring to Fred Lewis Pattee’s edition of Wieland; or The Transformation, which includes the fragment Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1926). Page references will appear in the text.

Krause, Sydney J. “Penn’s Elm and Edgar Huntly: ‘Dark Instruction to the Heart.’” American Literature 66, no. 3 (September 1994): 463-84.

9. Ziff, p. 54; also see Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Dell, 1966), pp. 74-104, 126-61; and William M. Manly, “The Importance of Point of View in Brockden Brown’s Wieland,” American Literature, 35 (1963), 317-18. 10. Jonathan Edwards, The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, ed. Clyde C. Holbrook (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), p. 102. 11. Introduction to Wieland, p. xxviii.

FURTHER READING Bibliography Witherington, Paul. “Charles Brockden Brown: A Bibliographical Essay.” Early American Literature 9 (1974): 16487. Bibliography of critical assessments of Brown’s works, arranged chronologically.

Biography Clark, David Lee. Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America, Durham: Duke University Press, 1952, 363 p. Important critical biography emphasizing Brown’s radical political and social thought.

Criticism Baym, Nina. “A Minority Reading of Wieland.” In Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown, edited by Bernard Rosenthal, pp. 87-103. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Takes issue with other scholars’ opinions of Brown’s writing, and praises Brown’s literary achievements and genius; focuses on Wieland. Bradshaw, Charles C. “The New England Illuminati: Conspiracy and Causality in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland.” The New England Quarterly 76, no. 3 (September 2003): 356-77. Examines Brown’s depiction of contemporary events and circumstances in late-eighteenth-century New England in Wieland.

Maintains that coincidental occurrences in Brown’s fiction are part of a conscious, discernible artistic pattern.

Analyzes some of the historical details in Edgar Huntly and comments on Brown’s appropriation of history in his gloomy fictional depiction of the American experience. Lee, A. Robert. “A Darkness Visible: The Case of Charles Brockden Brown.” In American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, pp. 13-32. London: Macmillan, 1990. Examines the characteristics of Brown’s novels that contain elements of the genre of horror. Levine, Paul. “The American Novel Begins.” American Scholar 35 (1966): 134-48. Postulates that Brown’s works anticipate rather than begin the tradition of the American novel. Loshe, Lillie Deming. “The Gothic and the Revolutionary.” In The Early American Novel, pp. 29-58. New York: Columbia University Press, 1907. Claims that the importance of the Gothic novel in early American fiction evidences Brown’s importance as an author. Pattee, Fred Lewis. Introduction to Wieland; or, The Transformation, by Charles Brockden Brown, pp. ix-xlvi. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1926. Identifies rational, sentimental, and Gothic strains in Wieland. Pribek, Thomas. “A Note on Depravity in Wieland.” Philological Quarterly 64, no. 2 (spring 1985): 273-79. Refutes the notion that the characters in Wieland are inherently evil, suggesting instead that they should be read as rational characters who are undone by the villainy of an outsider. Ringe, Donald A. “Charles Brockden Brown.” In American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, pp. 36-57. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982. Discusses how Brown developed the Gothic in his writing by adapting a European mode of fiction to the very different conditions of American life. ———. Charles Brockden Brown. Revised edition. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991, 141 p.

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Ziff, “A Reading of Wieland,” PMLA, 67 (1962), 51-57; and Donald A. Ringe, Charles Brockden Brown (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966), pp. 25-48.

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Provides a detailed analysis and critical evaluation of Brown’s life and works. Rombes, Nicholas, Jr. “‘All Was Lonely, Darksome, and Waste’: Wieland and the Construction of the New Republic.” Studies in American Fiction 22 (1994): 37-46. Asserts that through the characters of Carwin and Clara, Brown was recommending that America embrace a democracy that would allow different viewpoints to be heard. Scheiber, Andrew J. “‘The Arm Lifted Against Me’: Love, Terror, and the Construction of Gender in Wieland.” Early American Literature 26, no. 2 (1991): 173-94. Explores the ambiguity of Clara’s characterization, attributing it to her status within masculine and patriarchal institutions of the time. Schneck, Peter. “Wieland’s Testimony: Charles Brockden Brown and the Rhetoric of Evidence.” REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 18 (2002): 167-213. Discusses the treatment of evidence and testimony and their relationship to rhetoric and moral judgment in Wieland.

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Sickels, Eleanor. “Shelley and Charles Brockden Brown.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 45, no. 4 (December 1930): 1116-28. Attempts to define the extent to which Percy Shelley was influenced by Brown. Vilas, Martin S. Charles Brockden Brown; A Study of Early American Fiction. Burlington, Vt.: Free Press Association, 1904, 66 p. Examines Brown’s life and works and evaluates his lasting influence on American literature.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Brown’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: American Writers Supplement, Vol. 1; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography 1640-1865; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 37, 59, 73; Feminist Writers; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 22, 74, 122; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; and Twayne’s United States Authors.

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ANGELA CARTER (1940 - 1992)

(Full name Angela Olive Carter) English novelist, short story writer, nonfiction writer, scriptwriter, and author of children’s books.

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arter is best remembered for her science fiction and fantasy writings in which she undertakes a feminist critique of Western history and culture. Combining components of Gothicism, surrealism, eroticism, pornography, myth, and fairy tales, Carter explores such themes as violence, the distribution of power in contemporary society, and female sexuality. Carter’s work is distinguished by its display of unrestrained imagination, colorful imagery, and sensuous prose. Equally notable are the Dickensian eccentricities of her characters and her talent, as one critic has noted, for seamlessly infusing realistic narratives with elements of the macabre and fantastic. Although alternately praised and faulted for her extravagant Gothic approach, Carter is highly regarded as a writer of unique and imaginative fiction and sharply political and insightful feminist nonfiction.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Carter was born in London, England, on May 7, 1940. Her journalist father, Hugh Stalker, came

from Scotland, and her mother, Olive, from a mining district in South Yorkshire. During World War II, Carter’s grandmother took her grandchildren to the village of Wath-upon-Deare. A workingclass suffragist and radical, this grandmother may have served as a model for Carter’s later narrative and public persona. After leaving school, Carter worked briefly as a junior reporter for a London local newspaper and then married. From 1962 to 1965 she attended the University of Bristol, where she studied traditional canonical works of literature as well as subjects ranging from psychology and anthropology to science fiction and horror comics. After graduating, Carter began writing cultural criticism and observation for New Society and the Guardian. In 1969, after divorcing her husband, she went to live in Japan for two years. This marked a turning point for Carter both professionally and personally, as she went on to draw from the experience in her writing and found her voice as a woman and a social radical. In the 1980s Carter moved to South London with her partner and began traveling around the world to teach writing and present public readings of her works, which she came to appreciate as a means of dramatizing the power of the narrator and providing an added dimension to the written word. In 1983 Carter gave birth to a son, and for the remainder of her life she divided her time between living in South London and traveling. She served as a judge for literary contests, edited

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collections, compiled anthologies, and wrote introductions and essays. Carter died of cancer on February 16, 1992.

MAJOR WORKS Carter described herself as a Gothic writer, and early on in her works she displayed a fondness for decadent opulence, squalor, darkness, and sexual violence, elements that she intertwined with feminist and philosophical concerns. Carter’s vivid descriptions of Britain’s counterculture create a surreal atmosphere in which strange incidents are commonplace. The protagonist of Shadow Dance (1966) is portrayed as the embodiment of the apathy and amorality of his generation. Acting on impulse, he disfigures his beautiful girlfriend and eventually commits murder. The Magic Toyshop (1967) depicts the sexual comingof-age of a young woman who loses her parents and must live in a household of eccentric relatives. Several Perceptions (1968) concerns a suicidal young man and his encounters with various strange individuals. Heroes and Villains (1969) is a futuristic tale of Earth a century after atomic devastation has splintered its population into antagonistic factions. Love (1971), a bleak story of the obsessive nature of love, centers on a young man whose suicidal wife and drug-abusing brother are dependent upon him. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) recounts the efforts of the protagonist to restore reality in a world where machines give unconscious images concrete form. In The Passion of New Eve (1977), a fervent denunciation of sexism and machismo, a man experiences rape and other brutalizations after being surgically transformed into a beautiful woman. A number of the characters in Nights at the Circus (1984), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, are archetypes of female oppression and liberation. In this novel Carter offers a symbolic portrait of the female condition, populating her story with the bizarre characters of a traveling circus and focusing on the personal liberation of a six-foot-tall winged woman. Carter’s numerous stories, which, like her novels, are derived from fables, fairy tales, and mythology, have been collected in three volumes: Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), and Black Venus (1985). In the oft-cited “Afterword” from Fireworks, which many critics have cited as her literary manifesto, Carter argued that the tale, unlike the short story, “interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subter-

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ranean areas behind everyday experience.” In that essay, Carter also defines the gothicism that informs her work, stating that the tradition “grandly ignores the value systems of our institutions; it deals entirely with the profane.” She notes too its themes of cannibalism and incest, its exaggeration of reality, its ornate and unnatural style, and black humor—all of which seek to provoke unease. The sense of unease in Carter’s tales is derived from her use of violence and eroticism and the startling images she presents of female sexuality. The image of blood, for example, as a symbol of female menstruation and defloration is featured prominently in her short fiction. In a story from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Carter describes a necklace as a “bloody bandage of rubies,” thus emphasizing the violence of sexual intercourse and the loss of virginity through the image of a slit throat while at the same time pointing out the economic value society attaches to chastity. Carter also wrote a fictionalized reconstruction of parts of the life of Edgar Allan Poe, entitled “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe,” which was published in the magazine Interzone in 1982. In her most often discussed nonfiction work, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979), Carter examines the two feminine stereotypes of pornographic literature: the dangerous temptress and the innocent victim. Carter argues that the writing of the Marquis de Sade, whose characters Justine and Juliette embodied these stereotypes, can be read as feminist satire of the sexual roles men create for women. Ultimately, however, Carter finds de Sade’s quest for the limits of acceptable behavior a failure, believing that he succumbed to an acceptance of traditional sexual roles. Nothing Sacred (1982) is an anthology of Carter’s feminist and political articles. Carter’s nonfiction illuminates many of the themes and ideas about the dark side of human nature and society that she sets forth in her fiction.

CRITICAL RECEPTION While writers as diverse as Anthony Burgess, Salman Rushdie, and John Hawkes have expressed great admiration for Carter’s writing, other reviewers have responded with incomprehension or revulsion. The elements of the fantastic upon which Carter focuses her narratives have been assessed as confusing and unbelievable by many critics. Her extravagant Gothic approach has been alternately praised and faulted by commentators. Additionally, while Carter’s revisions of traditional

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The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (nonfiction) 1979; also published as The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, 1979

Today Carter’s stories are widely anthologized and she is studied in schools and universities as the most important English fantasist of her generation. Those who admire her works point to their humor, wit, and pathos even in presentations of horrific situations and depictions of disturbing characters. Carter is regarded too as the most subversive and radical proponent of a modern neo-Gothic movement, as she celebrates the imminent collapse of traditional notions of order. Carter uses gothicism to provoke unease in the hopes that misguided patriarchal assumptions about women and sexuality might be overturned. Thus she uses horror, violence, pornography, surrealism, and dark humor to criticize and dismantle patriarchal cultural conventions, offering a uniquely vivid feminist critique of Western history and culture.

Come unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays (broadcasts) 1985

Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (essays) 1982; revised edition, 1992 Nights at the Circus (novel) 1984 Black Venus (short stories) 1985; also published as Saints and Strangers, 1986

The Virago Book of Fairy Tales [editor] (fairy tales) 1990; also published as The Old Wives’ Tale Book, 1990 Wise Children (novel) 1991 Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (essays) 1992 The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales [editor] (fairy tales) 1992; also published as Sometimes Strange Things Still Happen, 1993 American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (short stories) 1993 Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories (short stories) 1995 The Curious Room: Plays, Film Scripts and an Opera (plays, scripts, and libretto) 1996 Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings (nonfiction) 1997

PRINCIPAL WORKS Shadow Dance (novel) 1966; also published as Honeybuzzard, 1967 Unicorn (poetry) 1966 The Magic Toyshop (novel) 1967 Several Perceptions (novel) 1968 Heroes and Villains (novel) 1969 The Donkey Prince (juvenilia) 1970 Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady (juvenilia) 1970 Love (novel) 1971; revised edition, 1987 The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (novel) 1972; also published as The War of Dreams, 1974 Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (short stories) 1974; revised as Fireworks: Nine Stories in Various Disguises, 1981 The Passion of New Eve (novel) 1977 The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (short stories) 1979

PRIMARY SOURCES ANGELA CARTER AND ANNA KATSAVOS (INTERVIEW DATE 1988) SOURCE: Carter, Angela, and Anna Katsavos. “An Interview with Angela Carter.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 14, no. 3 (fall 1994): 11-18. In the following excerpt from an interview conducted in New York City in 1988, Carter comments on some of her works.

The stories in The Bloody Chamber are very firmly grounded in the Indo-European popular tradition, even in the way they look. A friend of mine has just done a collection of literary fairy tales from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, things like the original “Beauty and the Beast,” which is in fact from the oral tradition. There’s this long history in Europe of taking elements from the oral tradition and making them

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fairy tales have been lauded overall, some commentators have lamented the absence of concrete alternatives for her heroines. Such critics argue that because Carter rewrote the tales within their original structures, she robbed her protagonists of any real sense of choice and actually perpetuated patriarchal precepts. Feminist critics, however, have embraced what they characterize as Carter’s unwavering honesty and commitment to her social and political standards in her works.

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into very elaborate literary conventions, but all the elements in that particular piece, The Bloody Chamber, are very lush. I was looking at it again last week. I read from it for the first time in ages the other night, and I thought, this is pretty cholesterol-rich because of the fact that they all take place in invented landscapes. Some of the landscapes are reinvented ones. “The Bloody Chamber” story itself is set quite firmly in the Mont Saint Michel, which is this castle on an island off the coast of Brittany; and a lot of the most exotic landscapes in it, the Italian landscapes, were quite legit. “The Tiger’s Bride” landscape, admittedly, is touristic, but it’s one of the palaces in Mantua that has the most wonderful jewels, and that city is set in the Po Valley, which is very flat and very far out, so in the summer you can imagine the mist rolling over. The landscapes there [The Bloody Chamber] are quite real. Even the werewolf stories are set in some horror-filled invented landscapes, but there’s more a kind of down-to-earthness in those stories. . . . . . I was reading “The Company of Wolves” the other day, and there are a whole lot of verbal games in that that I really enjoy doing, “the deer departed,” for example. . . . There was one thing in the movie The Company of Wolves, when the werewolf-husband says he’s just going out to answer a call of nature, and one of the critics wrote to me and said, “I didn’t even notice this the first time.” That’s the sort of thing I like doing. These are sort of private jokes with myself and with whoever notices, and I used to enjoy doing that very much. There are lots of them in Nights at the Circus, which was intended as a comic novel. I’ve always thought that my stories were quite loaded with jokes, but the first story that I wrote that was supposed to be really funny, out and out funny, was a “Puss-in-Boots” story in The Bloody Chamber. I mailed that to a radio place, and they censored it. (It was done on what we call Radio Three, an art channel, which uses a lot of material from BBC Radio and World Service that you don’t get here.) They cut it! They removed, according to the producer, about half a spool of bed springs! . . . . . There’s a story in The Bloody Chamber called “The Lady and the House of Love,” part of which derives from a movie version that I saw of a story by Dostoyevsky. And in the movie, which is very good, the woman, who is a very passive person and is very much in distress, asks herself

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the question, “Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?” Have we got the capacity at all of singing new songs? It’s very important that if we haven’t, we might as well stop now. Can the marionette in that story behave in a way that she’s not programmed to behave? Is it possible?

GENERAL COMMENTARY GINA WISKER (ESSAY DATE 1993) SOURCE: Wisker, Gina. “At Home All Was Blood and Feathers: The Werewolf in the Kitchen—Angela Carter and Horror.” In Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, pp. 16175. Boulder, Colo.: Pluto Press, 1993. In the following essay, Wisker surveys Carter’s use of horror, fantasy, and the Gothic. A house full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors, for, upstairs and downstairs, all the rooms lead in and out of one another like a maze in a bad dream. ‘The Fall River Axe Murders’1

Angela Carter’s sense of horror is based on the grotesque, the bizarre and excessive, a kind of baroquely overlaid nightmare which has uneasy echoes for us. She investigates the stuff of myth and dreams and in doing so unearths rather unpleasant, perverse sexual fantasies, digging further behind the suburban mind to identify the interest in the werewolf tale, the fairytales of Bluebeard and his wives and Beauty and the Beast. In investigating our subconscious horrors, Carter brings a chill to the domestic and the everyday. Opening a kitchen drawer in the Carter kitchens of our minds, we are always like Melanie in The Magic Toyshop likely to meet something horrid: Melanie hummed to herself as she hung cups from their hooks and propped the plates. She opened the dresser drawer to put away the knives and spoons. In the dresser drawer was a freshly severed hand, all bloody at the roots.

The details are domestic and realistic, the episode and object monstrous, inexplicable, though Uncle Philip is a sort of urban Bluebeard in his own way, and Melanie has been thinking of Poe. In Carter’s horror, the mazes of the ordinary mind in the ordinary house are entered to reveal gothic torture chambers and spiral staircases leading down to dungeons. In ‘The Fall River Axe Murders’ Carter looks at the catalysts, the events and moments which made murder inevitable in the claustrophobic

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Horror in much of Angela Carter’s writing captures a sense of a potion containing the monstrous and the everyday. Lizzie Borden is a figure for this, and we are reminded that given the right circumstances and the appropriate kind of suburban claustrophobia, we might all erupt and give our family 40 whacks with an axe. Carter explores those locked rooms. The mazes and corridors and doors of conformity and normality which we use to confuse and hide away our destructive drives, and our nightmares are replicated in the twists and turns of the fiction’s realistic artifice, while networks of imagery hint, suggest and occasionally dramatically reveal the sources of the terror, the disgust and the horror. There are blood, feathers and much worse, in all of Angela Carter’s kitchens. ‘The structure of fantastic narratives is one founded upon contradictions.’2 There are many recognisable realistic details, dates, times, typical clothing and furniture in the text. The places are familiar, and at the same time the surreal and the symbolic provide another layer of meaning. Metaphor combines with metonymy and the oxymoronic mixture is the fabric of her language. Carter’s fiction disinters and utilises the stuff of dreams. The fiction proves dreams palpably ‘real’, and so shows itself as psychologically based horror which owes much to Freud, Jung and to Melanie Klein. Her dream—and magic-based landscapes are rendered tangible because, she insists, dreams are part of our lives, and related to the myths we use to describe and direct our lives, ‘There is certainly confusion about the nature of

dreams which are in fact perfectly real: they are real as dreams and they’re full of real meaning as dreams.’3 Like Bruno Bettelheim, whose work influenced The Bloody Chamber, Carter uses dream and fantasy material to reflect inner experiences and processes, ways of rendering and coping with the palpable conscious world and the reactions of the unconscious. The break with the notion of a straightjacket of the real releases energies leading to a fuller understanding of how meanings are created, values constructed and versions of worth and of reality validated over other versions. Fantasy is a useful mode ‘Because it is a narrative structured upon contraries, fantasy tells of limits, and it is particularly revealing in pointing to the edge of the “real”.’4 And as Jackson says, ‘breaking single, reductive “truths”, the fantastic traces a space within a society’s cognitive frame. It introduces multiple, contradictory “truths”: it becomes polysemic.’5 Horror, gothic and the use of fantasy combine in Carter’s work. The collapse of boundaries and divisions, between the animate and the inanimate is a regular element of fantasy, while one chief tool of terror is the reduction of man to an object, a machine, a doll or an automaton. This is a frequent characteristic in an Angela Carter story or novel. In her examination of sexual politics and their psychological motivation and their social representations, she repeatedly presents scenarios where women are manipulated as marionettes (The Magic Toyshop), or preferred as tableaux vivants: disempowered objects of desire, as in the hideous living-sex museum of Madame Schreck in Nights at the Circus, or preferred dead and kept as mementoes in Bluebeard’s castle. She allies her examination of the basis of terror and horror with an interest in sexual power and perversion, and so it is that the ones rendered immobile and automated are usually women in the hands of men, manipulated by power or for money; it is a logical enactment of the ‘living doll’ image. The most consistently developed example of the recurring automaton, puppet or doll image in Carter’s fiction can be found in the early ‘The Loves of the Lady Purple’ (Fireworks) where the doll who enacts the quiet circus professor’s violent erotic fantasies, comes to life and finally repeats them in reality, draining him in an act of vampirism.

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middle-class normality of the Fall River, Massachusetts Borden household. She does not linger on the blood. Threat permeates the descriptions: of ties which ‘garotte’ their virtuous wearers and the oppressive constricting clothes the women wear in this sweating, constrained household. Carter investigates. Her probing of details reveals gaps and silences, ‘what the girls do on their own is unimaginable to me’ and of Emma, Lizzie’s sister that, ‘she is a blank space’. (Black Venus) The iron-backed, capital-accumulating father, the repressed, stifled sisters, the air of suppurating normality; these permeate Carter’s descriptions of this fated family, our knowledge of whose violent fate lurks and drips over every restrained comment, calm as the clichéd ‘still waters’ of Lizzie’s nature as she drives hatpins into her hat or weighs the axe which slaughtered her pigeons to make a pie for her stepmother.

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The Asiatic professor reminds us of Carter the author.

interest, the drive, the fears do not disappear. Indeed, Carter suggests they return nightly.

The puppet master is always dusted with a little darkness. In direct relation to his skill he propagates the most bewildering enigmas for, the more lifelike his marionettes, the more godlike his marionettes and the more radical the symbiosis between inarticulate doll and articulating fingers.

Modern horror tales emerged as a genre with the secularisation of society and the leaking away of religious explanations of the odd and inexplicable.6 Science also could not explain all that was unusual and strange, so a space for these expressions was found in the genre of horror which itself was enabled to ask questions about the power of religious controls as well as the dangers of science. Things ‘out of control’ and objects ‘come to life’ emerge as the main example of these expressions. As Martin Barker puts it looking at the lobby surrounding the horror comic censorship of the 1950s in A Haunt of Fears.

He acts as intermediary between audience and the dolls, the ‘undead’, here deliberately described in the language used to describe vampires. The puppet master’s dolls are a mixture of magic and realism; the stories they enact speak to the audience of a certain repressed and unspeakable reality and the more extreme, bizarre or perverse the incidents in which they are involved, the closer the recognition of those selves and secrets the readership keep behind their own locked doors. The professor has no language which can be understood and his apprentice is deaf, his other foundling helper dumb, but the Lady Purple blazons her messages in her actions accompanied by the appropriately weird but untranslatable stories of the professor. As Queen of the Night, the Lady Purple, object of all the professor’s sexual fantasies, is ‘filled with necromantic vigour’ with the vitality of the professor passing directly through into her, draining him while she embodies that traditional perverse twinning of sex and pain, the erotic and power. She is ‘a distillation of those of a born woman . . . the quintessence of eroticism’. Nightly she acts out the story invented of her llfe, lusts and eventual reduction to a marionette. The stylised, symbolic puppet characters and sexual scenarios are equally figures ‘in a rhetoric’ where the abstract essence of erotic woman can be bought, used, manipulated and later shelved. The constant oscillation between the language of artifice and the language of the real, tells the story Lady Purple enacts, as if it were a true record. Ironically her power is emphasised as one who encourages the acting out of fantasies which then reduce her lovers to objects. ‘She, the sole perpetrator of desire, proliferated malign fantasies all around her and used her lovers as the canvas on which she executed boudoir masterpieces of destruction. Skins melted in the electricity she generated.’ For those watching the show she embodies the object of their desire as well as their fears, rendering them ultimately safe because of the awareness of artifice. This mimics the activity of horror fiction: embodiment, audience enjoyment, and a sense of release and security. The

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It is the sense of helplessness in the face of unpredictable objects and processes that make such narratives work as horror. In this . . . they come closest to film horror, where the classic motifs—dark nights, unknown threats, and ritual incantations to control the forces of evil—are just what leave us deliciously shuddering when they are well manipulated.7

Lady Purple is a thing come to life, and a thing out of control. She is more than that though, for she is the embodiment of the perverse and lustful thoughts and dreams both of her creator the professor and the audiences who enjoy watching a doll act out sado-masochistic fantasies. Her coming to life is ironically the downfall of those who have thus positioned her (the professor and future male victims in the brothel). She also embodies the frighteningly circular and inevitable reenactment of myth. Lady Purple is a vengeful fetishistic object, sado-masochistic and horror fantasy combined. Fetishism is the stuff on which pornography thrives and Carter takes further into social critique her manipulation of fantasy and horror’s technique of confusing the boundaries between animate and inanimate, objects of desire and object to be controlled and destroyed. In The Magic Toyshop is a palimpsest of popular fictional forms, fairytales, myths, girls’ own paper stories. Through examination of Melanie’s adolescent construction of herself in the semi-pornographic art modes in which woman is represented by great painters and writers, Carter examines how the myths of our femininity, our sexual being come to be fashioned upon us and come to be that part of us with which we willingly collude, blind to their reifying implications. These implications: rape, violation, pregnancy, are indicated in the positioning of Edward Bear ‘swollen stomach concealing striped pyjamas’ and Lorna Doone, ‘splayed out, face

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Her mother exploded in a pyrotechnic display of satin and lace, dressed as for a medieval banquet. . . . A wreath of artificial roses was pressed low down on her forehead. . . . She carried a bunch of white roses in her arms, cradled like a baby.

She is a meal to be devoured, a firework display, and when Melanie tries on her mother’s dress it acts as a malevolent object, drowning and capturing her. Bunty, Judy, Schoolfriend and Girl stories often concentrate on the ‘little mother’ who stands as a surrogate for her siblings when their parents are, as are Melanie’s, killed in a plane crash. Plucky tomboys also abound. Melanie pictures herself in all these roles, and rejects them, but still awaits the kiss of a prince charming to awaken her from herself into a role he designs. In the working-class East London toyshop there is a wicked uncle, no stepmother or wicked aunt, and it is his designs on Melanie which cast her in the role of the traditional female victim, manipulated into a rape victim through his control. Uncle Philip is a child’s nightmare figure, a character from a fairytale by the Brothers Grimm. Uncle Philip never talked to his wife except to bark brusque commands. He gave her a necklace that choked her. He beat her younger brother. He chilled the air through which he moved. His towering, blank-eyed presence at the head of the table drew the sayour from the good food she cooked.

His menace is both physical and psychological and the spell he casts over the household renders them mute and powerless. The moment in which Melanie, reified by her role as Leda in Uncle Philip’s puppet version of that high art pornographic favourtte, Leda and the Swan, is overwhelmed by the monstrous wooden and feathered swan, which is both horror and pure farce. In her mixture of the horrific and the humorous, Carter resembles Roald Dahl, whose short stories have similar twists to hers, and who similarly re-writes ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Dahl comments, ‘What’s horrible is basically funny . . . in fiction I mean.’ 8 Angela Carter’s delicate mixture of slapstick, irony and the machinations of Sadeian horror typifies her stylistic strategies; an ornate overlay of Western myths and representations, funny, fantastic and frightening. It is deeply revelatory about the forms

and intentions of Western art from the National Gallery and Sadlers Wells to the toyshop. Melanie last recalls ‘Swan Lake’ when her father took her to see it. The embrace of the plywood and feathered swan is a mock up of the many languorous godlike embraces between a loving Leda and an elegant swan found in the world’s great art galleries, celebrated in hauntingly beautiful tones by Yeats in ‘Leda and the Swan’ where phrases such as ‘terrified vague fingers’ and ‘feathered glory’ suggest that the aesthetic enjoyment overcomes the sense of the strange and horrific; a version of a grotesque, power myth rape many women readers find bizarre. Carter’s version emphasises the otherness, the disempowering and the horror. All her laughter was snuffed out. She was hallucinated. She felt herself not herself, wrenched from her own personality, watching this whole fantasy from another place; and in this staged fantasy, anything was possible. Even that the swan, mocked up swan, might assume reality itself and rape this girl in a blizzard of white feathers.

Horror here is a direct effect of the dramatic embodiment of despotic patriarchal power writ large and backed up by the collusion of that other patriarchal power base—high art. Carter’s debunking of this high art, patriarchy’s dubiously intellectually tarted up sadistic power games, empowers us all to reveal the unpleasantnesses, the potential sick violence, underlying everyday mythic representations of sexual relations. The dangers are no less real despite the slapstick rendering of events, but Carter’s irony and slapstick humour provide themselves with a liberating vehicle to expose and defuse such powers. ‘Like fate or the clock, on came the swan, its feet going splat, splat, splat.’ In Nights at the Circus, male fear, horror and fascination at female sexual parts are figured in the geography of Madame Schreck’s brothel, where the girls work in the basement. Madame Schreck organised her museum, thus: downstairs, in what had used to be the wine cellar, she’d had a sort of vault or crypt constructed, with wormy beams overhead and nasty damp flagstones underfoot, and this place was known as ‘Down Below’, or else, ‘The Abyss’. The girls was all made to stand in stone niches cut out of the slimy walls, except for the Sleeping Beauty, who remained prone, since proneness was her speciality. And there were little curtains in front and, in front of the curtains, a little lamp burning. These were her ‘profane altars’ as she used to call them.

The offhand, everyday Cockney tones of the winged, iconic aerialiste Fevvers renders these

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down in the dust under the bed’—remnants of childhood. Moreover, we are also presented with the sacrificial tone of the virginally white bridal pictures of Melanie’s mother.

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traditionally gothic horrors almost domestic, but visions of a visiting judge who ejaculates when black hooded and when a noose is placed round his neck, and of clients who revel in the gothic nightmare of clanking chains, who are turned on only by recumbent, seemingly dead women, and all the trappings of a mixture of Poe and de Sade illuminate the dubious interrelationship between a love of horror and a perverse sexuality: a desire to brutalise women. Women, of course, collude in their own dehumanisation. Fevvers’s avarice leads her into the clutches of the determinedly male, sadistic Duke, whose own brand of mastery consists of reducing his objects of desire to just that, a miniaturised, gilded objet d’art. The Grand Duke represents sterile power. His house was the realm of minerals, of metals of vitrification—of gold, marble and crystal; pale halls and endless mirrors and glittering chandeliers that clanged like wind-bells In the draught from the front door . . . and a sense of frigidity, of sterility, almost palpable.

It is a gothic horror threat of potential disempowerment and reification since all therein is artifice and glitter. Murderous histories, sexual mutilations of women, and the frisson of total control of the human by rendering it entirely useless, pure art ornament and entertainment: the Duke’s collection embodies his vile proclivities. Fevvers’s earlier encounter with Christian Rosencreutz, whose sexual perversity was related to his wish to gain new powers by sacrificing what he feared, is an echo of a familiar gothic encounter with Rosicrucianism. Carter replicates the seductive powers, the frissons of horror, and exposes a basis of horror in desires to dehumanise, to control, to fix, pin, collect and, perhaps, destroy the adored object. Humour, irony and slapstick undercut and disempower the perpetrators of torture, terror and death in her work and female victims soar above what could destroy them, using for their own ends the very images and forms which could otherwise represent them in a constrained sense. Fevvers’s own canny common sense enables her to turn the Duke’s lust against him and she escapes into the Fabergé model of the transSiberian railway: a celebratory moment when magic and realism confusingly and amusingly unite. Fevvers escapes, a feathered intacta, icon of dreams, ‘bird’ woman and yet her own person. The last laugh is on the loving journalist Walser who wishes to pin her down with facts, and on the readers who want her metaphors explained, but

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who are left instead realising that the best thing to do with myths and metaphors is to reclaim them for our own variety of interpretations, rather than accepting any fobbed off on us by a patriarchal culture. Reclamation is the key also for Rosaleen, the Red Riding Hood figure in ‘Company of Wolves.’ The grotesque horror of being eaten alive by a lascivious wolf is replaced by the turning of the tables, as she celebrates her own sexual powers, burns her own clothing, becomes a werewolf herself and so tames the beast, thus proving her mother’s comment, ‘if there’s a beast in man it meets its match in women too’. It might seem trite, or even dangerous as some have suggested that Carter merely repeats much of the sexist psychology of eroticism, but it is a way of suggesting reversal, using irony and the technique of ‘the pulling of the plug’ on a socially constructed version of horror based on a pornography which always renders the woman as victim. Slow mental and physical torture, claustrophobia, a living death . . . this is the stuff of her horror and recalls Poe as it does the Jacobean. But her vision is more ironic and amused. Her aims are related to reversal, there is a consistent drive towards celebration and carnival. In the midst of being almost eaten by the big bad wolf, Red Riding Hood/Rosaleen is empowered by her awareness of the strength of her own virginity, as well as that of her emergent sexuality. This is a reclamation of the body as a site for woman’s empowerment. Virginity in myth ‘normally’ renders a woman both magically safe and ideally fitted to be a sacrificial victim, in a system which sees virginity as a commodity. Here Rosaleen celebrates, her clothes burned by choice in her granny’s fire, a werewolf herself? Fires such as that in The Magic Toyshop are purgatorial: the evil die, the good are doubtless rescued. This is in the true tone of Shakespearean late Romance which suggests tragedy and horror but ultimately avoids or overcomes it. There are hints of death by drowning, of tragedy entering our living rooms when Tiffany, the Ophelia-like spurned innocent stripper in Wise Children disappears, but she escapes and lives again. Twins are produced from pockets, dead uncles reappear twice as large and filled with largesse. Reunions and unifications replace the open endings of some of the earlier works. Carnival towards which all Carter’s work has long leant, triumphs over horror in her most recent work Wise Children.

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at night, the eyes of wolves shine like candle flames yellowish, reddish, but that is because the pupils of their eyes fatten on darkness and catch the light from your lantern and flash it back at you—red for danger; if a wolf’s eyes reflect only moonlight, then they gleam a cold and unnatural green, a mineral, a piercing colour.

The movement of nightmare is enacted with a rich mixture of visual and psychologically threatening imagery: If the benighted traveller spies those luminous, terrible sequins stitched suddenly on the black thickets, then he knows he must run, if fear has not struck him stock still. But those eyes are all you will be able to glimpse of the forest assassins as they cluster inevitably around your smell of meat.

And her language draws the reader in and implicates them as it reproduces a fascinating and compelling mixture of terror and the frisson of joy at such terror. The title story of The Bloody Chamber is one such perfect gothic tale in which we are seduced and drawn in as slowly as the victim, the virginal wife of this art collecting Bluebeard. The language of food consumption, aesthetic pleasure and avaricious cruelty dominates her descriptions of him, his wooing and her collusion. Threat drips slowly from every crevice. His is ‘possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable life, like one of those cobra-headed funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum.’ His desire she perceives but does not understand though the ‘choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily slit throat’ presages the total ownership he has in mind while his ‘sheer carnal avarice’ watching her in gilded mirrors positions her both as consumable meat, and art object. Mirrors, billowing gauze curtains, indecipherable imprecations from (traditional, gothic) menials,

huge beds and lilies: these gothic familiars draw in and thrill the reader, who wants yet to cry out a warning. Carter’s intertextuality provides a smile of recognition, ‘All the better to see you’ says the lupine, leonine, vampirish, art/wife collecting descendant of Browning’s Duke who keeps pictures and relics of previously, mysteriously, dead wives. The ravishment is surreal, particularly as he removes all her clothes except the choker, and mirrors reflect every move: Rapt, he intoned: ‘Of her apparel she retains/Only her sonorous jewellery’. A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside.

Carter investigates also the notion of the ‘pleasures of the flesh’ and here reveals a link between pornography and horror: man as flesh, skin covering meat, the source of the horror of cannibal tales and movies like The Silence of the Lambs. ‘The strong abuse, exploit and meatify the weak, says Sade’ (The Sadeian Woman). ‘She knew she was nobody’s meat’ is a challenge Rosaleen holds up to the wolf, though necrophagy (exposition of the meatiness of human flesh) and cannibalism lurk behind Bluebeard’s delights at his new wife. ‘I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab.’ This terrifies but attracts her, as she recognises her own potential for corruption. His sexual ‘appetite’ and then his ‘taste’ for her she mistakenly feels will protect her when she investigates the locked rooms of his house in his absence. We know versions of the story, know she will find the remains of dead ex wives. As with many gothic horror tales of castles, locked doors, horrid secrets, threatening husbands and marital violence, walled up wives, spiders, jewelled daggers and necklaces, the very familiarity produces a frisson for the reader, and the familiarity here of the old tale captures and captivates us. Languoroushess, inevitability, these entrap the reader as they entrap the bride about to be turned into a ‘meal’ for her murderous husband who swings a cruel sword, and forces her to dress in white as the sacrificial victim, to his lustful power. The warrior mother rescues the bride with the aid of the new servant. The story becomes a romp, but its horror has a sexual and social basis we won’t forget, and which returns in many another of her tales. In The Sadeian Woman Carter notes, ‘Sexuality, stripped of the idea of free exchange, is not in

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Carter’s best horror writing is more suited to the art of the short story than to longer fiction. Like Poe she goes for ‘unity of effect’, telling individual, perfectly controlled tales which retell and often revalue a myth or legend, which develop and embody a particular lurking perversity or nightmare, and which explore the horrific sources of real events. As in traditional gothic tales, we are terrified because the atmosphere threatens us, the familiar is our familiar nightmare. Beautifully, fatally, realistic, encyclopedic details combine with the immediate, mythic, nightmarish and surreal. In ‘The Company of Wolves,’ we are told that,

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any way humane; it is nothing but pure cruelty. Carnal knowledge is the infernal knowledge of the flesh as meat.’ The potential of devouring lurks behind ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ but the proud voyeuristic beast is tamed with the girl’s love and her recognition of her own tigerishness. In ‘The Lady of the House of Love’, a female vampire strikes a familiar terror, her necessary plan involving the capture of male morsels. Her room is funerary, pungent with smoke and elaborate, and in true vampire fashion her seemingly virginal beauty is evidence of her desires as, ‘In her white lace negligee stained a little with blood, the Countess climbs up on her catafalque at dawn each morning and lies down in an open coffin.’ Metamorphosis takes place as she turns into a nocturnal creature sniffing out lesser prey. Change and the question of what it means to be human, that fearsome ingredient of Victorian horror of the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde type, but with its roots further back in the Jacobean horror of wolfish brothers carrying legs of corpses over their shoulders in The Duchess of Malfi—these crowd many of Carter’s short stories. Here the rococo strangely juxtaposes images and descriptions which conjure up a night world of horror. the voracious margin of huntress’s nights in the gloomy garden, crouch and pounce, surrounds her habitual tortured somnambulism, her life or imitation of life. The eyes of this nocturnal creature enlarge and glow. All claws and teeth, she strokes, she gorges; but nothing can console her for the ghastliness of her condition, nothing.

Employing what David Punter calls ‘the dialectic of persecution’, Carter’s gothic investigates the extremes of terror, leading the audience gradually into realms which are nightmarish and horribly familiar.9 * * * Influences on Carter’s work include lsak Dinesen, who continued gothic interest in decayed aristocracy, and as a feminist writer, filtered society’s problems ‘through a pervading and ironic self-consciousness’ much as does Fevvers, and the protagonist of The Bloody Chamber.1 0 Another main influence is in the nightmarish, surrealist and psychologically fired night wanderings of transvestite characters in Djuna Barnes, particularly the highly Jacobean Nightwood (1937). Nightwood belongs to a tradition of lesbian gothic writing, which highlights the sexuality implicit in such horror figures as vampires, werewolves and zombies. Richard Dyer comments that, a number of . . . writers on the horror film have suggested, adapting Freudian ideas, that all

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‘monsters’ in some measure represent the hideous and terrifying form that sexual energies take when they ‘return’ from being socially and culturally repressed. Yet the vampire seems especially to represent sexuality . . . s/he bites them, with a bite that is just as often described as a kiss.1 1

Werewolves are favourites in The Bloody Chamber collection, their sexuality emphasised as handsome young men who leap in front of girls, men with eyebrows meeting suspiciously in the middle; men who want to eat you up and devour you sexually. The main vampire is a woman in ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ who lures in wandering men who, ‘led by the hand to her bedroom . . . can scarcely believe their luck’. Investigating her relationship to other postmodernist writers we find many parallels with the American gothic of Purdy, Pynchon and Coover. Recognition of this appears in her epigraph to Heroes and Villains which comes from Leslie Fiedler’s exploration of the American gothic, Love and Death in the American Novel.1 2 The epigraph runs: ‘The Gothic mode is essentially a form of parody, a way of assailing clichés by exaggerating them to the limit of grotesqueness.’1 3 One of Carter’s main stated aims is demythologising, unpicking and unpacking the myths and legends (those fictions) which shape and control our lives, whether safely contained in a fairytale or shaped around us in newspaper articles, adverts or television stereotypes. The human mind forces experience into familiar shapes so that it can comprehend it, but in so doing it simplifies into stereotype and myth, which themselves seem then to us to have safely embodied the less pleasant of those experiences, mental or physical, by objectifying and fictionalising them in this way. Stereotypes, myths and fictions are shorthand, but they exercise a control on the expressions and forms of the everyday world. Carter particularly intends to demythologise the fictions related to sexuality, and horror is one of her means. She exposes the relationship between sex and power, the erotic, the perverse; she digs behind the ostensibly comfortable and safe surfaces and shows up oppressions, reification, torture and dehumanisation lurking in the everyday. One way she does this is by re-examining and rewriting fairytales and myths, and another is to explore incidents in which the everyday explodes, revealing the horrors which lurk behind it. Violence against women has long been a characteristic of much horror writing, as well as pornography. The essential powerlessness of the virginal, entrapped, victimised girl is a stock

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Moral and more importantly physical persecution predominate, and the reader is encouraged to wallow in the guilt and fear, and to imagine themselves as a victim, while in romantic developments of gothic fiction, persecution is ‘experienced as half-pleasurable’. Romantic heroines turn their ‘victimization into a triumph’. If we explore the novels which combine the gothic and the romantic there is a (for a feminist reader) tremendous disempowering celebration of this victimisation as satisfying and ultimately productive of reward. Paulina Palmer, examining Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm makes comments as appropriate for Carter as for Atwood, about the reappropriation of a genre, the gothic romantic, designed very much for women, the Gothic genre, traditionally noted for its representation of woman as victim, becomes in Atwood’s hands the perfect medium for depicting contemporary woman caught unaware in the ‘rape culture’ which pervades society. Motifs associated with the genre . . . include: the ingenuous heroine as the victim of male manipulation and attack; an intrigue plot in which the male protagonists compete for power; the collapsing of conventional boundaries between external/ internal and animate/inanimate; and the reference to certain socially taboo topics—in this case cancer, and sado-masochistic sexual practice.1 6

The resurgence in interest in horror writing by women which has produced The Virago Book of Ghost Stories1 7 and the fiercer, more radical Skin of Our Soul1 8 enables us to ask questions about where Angela Carter relates to other women horror writers and what might be said to be any specifically female characteristics in the horror genre. The very latest of the popular fictional forms to be reclaimed by feminist critics, investigating the operation of popular fictional characteristics in the work of women writers within the genre, hor-

ror writing might very properly be said to have originated with women, with the work of Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho or with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Great women writers throughout the centuries have produced ghost stories and horror stories, but perhaps one of the problems of reclaiming horror as a genre for women is this very equation of the female victim, the edge of the pornographic, with horror. Lisa Tuttle argues that men and women’s perceptions of fear are to some extent similar, but in others different because of their social positioning: Territory which to a man is emotionally neutral may for a woman be mined with fear, and viceversa, for example: the short walk home from the bus-stop of an evening. And how to understand the awesome depths of loathing some men feel for the ordinary (female) body? We all understand the language of fear, but men and women are raised speaking different dialects of that language.1 9

Women’s contemporary horror fiction explores sexual license, alternative sexual relationships, and the power in ‘normal’ relationships. There are many tales which feature fear of Incest, of patriarchal rape, of life-draining mother, hatred of devious, bitchy, beautiful women. There are hidden cruelties in what are ‘normally’ perceived as loving or nurturing relationships, and there are forbidden fantasies of lesbian partnerships or incestuous partnerships. Taboos are explored. Angela Carter’s gothic horror reappropriates women’s powers. The thrills and spills of the romantic gothics are there, but the terroriser turned faithful lover is not. The main gains are self respect, liberty and equal relationships. Red Riding Hood ends up happy with the wolf, Bluebeard’s wife is liberated, Fevvers settles for Walser, and retains her secret, her magic. Glittering, contradictory, intertextually familiar and playful, Angela Carter’s horror brings into the clear light of the semirealistic domestic kitchen, the nasty thoughts, fears and nightmares lurking in the cellars of our minds. And she gives us something magical too. Hers is not the horror of the abyss: it is not ultimately a black vision, it’s too Rabelaisian for that, too funny and celebratory.

Notes 1. Books by Angela Carter referred to in the text: The Magic Toyshop (London 1967); Heroes and Villains (London: 1969); Fireworks (London: 1974); The Bloody Chamber (London: 1979); The Sadeian Woman (London: 1979); Nights at the Circus (London: 1984); Black Venus (London: 1985); Wise Children (1991).

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feature of pornography as it is of gothic horror which deals with taboos: ‘Incest, rape, various kinds of transgressions of the boundaries between the natural and the human’.1 4 Angela Carter is a clever manipulator of the techniques of horror, terror and the gothic. She takes the impetus and the structure of gothic-based romance tales for women and reappropriates them for a sexual politics which demythologises myths of the sexual powerlessness and victim role for women. She uses their structure to turn their usual denouements on their heads. As Tania Modleski argues in Loving with a Vengeance, gothics are ‘expressions of the “normal” feminine paranoid personality’ which incorporates guilt and fear, ‘the paranoid individual faces physical persecution (as in dreams of being attacked by murderous figures)’.1 5

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2. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion (London: 1981) p. 41. 3. Angela Carter in conversation with John Haffenden, The Literary Review no. v (1984) p. 37. 4. Iris le Bessiere, Le Récit Fantastique: La Poétique de l’lncertain (Paris: 1974) p. 62. 5. Jackson, p. 23. 6. Lee Daniells, Fear: a History of Horror in the Mass Media (London: 1977). 7. Martin Barker, A Haunt of Fears: the Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (London: 1984) p. 129. 8. Roald Dahl interviewed in Twilight Zone (Jan-Feb. 1983). 9. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: a History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: 1980) p. 130. 10. Ibid., p. 379. 11. Richard Dyer, ‘Children of the Night. Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism’ in Susanna Radstone ed., Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction (London: 1988) p. 54. 12. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: 1960). 13. Angela Carter, Heroes and Villains (London: 1981). 14. Punter, p. 19. 15. Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance (New York: 1984) pp. 81 and 83. 16. Paulina Palmer, Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Brighton: 1989) p. 91. 17. Richard Dalby ed., The Virago Book of Ghost Stories (London: 1990). 18. Lisa Tuttle ed., The Skin of Our Soul: New Horror Stories by Women (London: 1990) Introduction. 19. Ibid., p. 5.

HEATHER JOHNSON (ESSAY DATE 1994) SOURCE: Johnson, Heather. “Textualising the DoubleGendered Body: Forms of the Grotesque in The Passion of New Eve.” In Angela Carter, edited by Alison Easton, pp. 127-35. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. In the following essay, originally published in Contemporary Review in 1994, Johnson examines Carter’s treatment of “two characters of compound identity in The Passion of New Eve” to illuminate the nature of the grotesque.

The world of Angela Carter’s fiction is inhabited by fabulous, monstrous creations: she-wolves, bird women, drag queens. The composite nature of these mythic figures often becomes the point of textual fascination in several of her novels and short stories. In order to examine the treatment of such composite images more closely, this article

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will focus on two characters of compound identity in The Passion of New Eve: Eve(lyn) and Tristessa. Specifically, I wish to argue that Carter’s text reclaims the figure of the double-gendered body through the shifting values of the term grotesque that can be charted in the development of the narrative. This use of the grotesque also intersects and informs the parody of gender norms in the novel. In a reading of these figures as grotesque, one can discover here the two distinctive forms of this term as proposed by Bakhtin and the corresponding values generally associated with the term itself. It is possible to recognise one of these as positive and the other as negative. A definition of the term grotesque realism is located in Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais and is dependent on a set of images that describe a transgressive body—one which emphasises the lower stratum, which takes pleasure in bodily functions, and which embraces an interrelation of death and birth. He describes this grotesque body as open, protruding, secreting, a body of becoming: ‘In grotesque realism . . . the bodily element is deeply positive.’ The material body is shown to be ‘festive’ and ‘utopian’.1 Bakhtin also delineates a second meaning of the term grotesque as ‘postRomantic’. This refers to the grotesque in its modern sense as it furnishes descriptions of alienation, hostility, and inhumanity. To this form it is possible to assign a negative value since its meaning is preoccupied with issues of rejection and revulsion. Its use in common speech is clearly derogatory. Both these forms of the grotesque are inscribed in the bodies of the two central figures. Carter’s protagonist begins the novel as the male Evelyn but is transformed physically and then mentally into a woman—Eve. Captured in the desert by the women of Beulah, Evelyn is taken to meet the selfdesigned goddess ‘Mother’, whose body seems to fill the captive’s visual frame: ‘She was so big she seemed, almost, to fill the round, red-painted, over-heated, red-lit cell.’ 2 Her arms are ‘like girders’, her vagina is ‘like the crater of a volcano’, and Evelyn imagines ‘the sun in her mouth’ (p. 64). In the manner of Artemis, Mother has required the sacrifice of one breast from each of her followers and has ‘flung a patchwork quilt stitched from her daughters’ breasts over the cathedral of her interior’ (p. 60). Thus she presents an imposing figure of physical amplitude and abundant fertility. Here we can see some aspects of the Rabelaisian grotesque—the bodily form exaggerated to excess, the symbol of fertility, and the focus on the lower stratum. This focus is obviously empha-

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Carter uses the figure of Mother to disrupt patriarchal conceptions of the female body, as the grotesque body irrupts into the conventional presentation of that body. The description of Mother is filtered through the male sensibility of Evelyn as narrator and as such enacts a parody of the conventional maternal image through physical exaggeration, excess, and distortion. Evelyn responds to Mother as a monster: ‘the bull-like pillar of her neck, . . . false beard of crisp, black curls’, and the obvious result of the programme of grafting fill him with ‘squeamish horror’ (p. 59). In the context of Carter’s novel this reaction is significant since Evelyn is responding as a male to an exaggerated female body. The figure of Mother can be regarded as pivotal here in accounting for the shift in meaning of the grotesque. Evelyn’s interpretation of her body as disgusting rather than life-affirming is soon transferred onto his own new body. Evelyn is castrated and then transformed by two months of plastic surgery into a biological woman. Once completed, the new Eve finds that she is ‘as mythic and monstrous as Mother herself’ (p. 83). This neatly illustrates Mary Russo’s criticism of Bakhtin’s definition of the bodily grotesque. Russo notes that he ‘fails to acknowledge or incorporate the social relations of gender in his semiotic model of the body politic, and thus his notion of the Female Grotesque remains . . . repressed and undeveloped’.3 Her point is that the female body is already displaced and marginalised within social relations since it is often a body which must either conform to a set of regulated norms or be dismissed as Other. Therefore, the body which is female and grotesque must be recovered from a place of double exile. The post-Romantic definition of the grotesque as the described experience of alienation, isolation, and marginalised irregularity corresponds to the kind of physical difference featured in Carter’s novel.4 This difference is dependent on the composite nature of Eve and her counterpart, Tristessa—both acquire the identity of the hermaphrodite. A hint of Evelyn’s future shape comes early in the novel, when he is browsing through the attic of his neighbour the alchemist: ‘There was a

ABOUT THE AUTHOR JAMES BROCKWAY ON CARTER’S “GOTHIC PYROTECHNICS” IN FIREWORKS

It would be possible almost to give an account of the contents and nature of Fireworks by quoting from Angela Carter’s own words in these tales. From the magnificent story “The Loves of Lady Purple,” to my taste the finest in the book and one which harps back happily to the puppets in “The Magic Toyshop,” one could take ‘freedom from actuality’ and ‘immune to the drab world of here and now’ and ‘bewildering entertainment’ and ‘Here the grotesque is the order of the day’ and ‘Everything in the play was entirely exotic’ and, best of all, I think: ‘a thick, lascivious murmur like fur soaked in honey which sent unwilling shudders of pleasure down the spines of the watchers’, except that I also think Angela Carter will find plenty of readers who shudder most willingly. One could also quote some of her idiosyncratic adjectives to say all: appalling, ghastly, violet, violent, perverse, torrid, desolate, vicious, viscous, cavernous, subaqueous, indecent, lewd, fernal, leprous, lycanthropic, stagnant, demented. But this would be to suggest a gothic orgy, whereas for all the highly deliberate, deliberately ornamental embroidery of this laden prose, it is the intelligence at work beneath it all which raises almost everything here to the level of art. For intelligence is another attribute of genuine art, and intelligence here is both active and unusual. SOURCE: Brockway, James. “Gothic Pyrotechnics.” Books and Bookmen (February 1975): 55-6.

seventeenth century print, tinted by hand, of a hermaphrodite carrying a golden egg that exercised a curious fascination upon me’ (p. 13). Any sense of fascination that might have been occasioned by a real androgynous body is expressed as revulsion and derision when the hermaphroditic nature of Tristessa is brutally revealed. The reclusive film star’s glamour is world renowned

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sised further by the subsequent construction of Eve’s womb and the location of Beulah’s uterine rooms beneath the desert floor. The image is not without humour, of course—‘Her nipples leaped about like the bobbles on the fringe of an oldfashioned, red plush curtain’ (p. 64)—and here it coincides, in its celebration of excess, with the notion of carnivalesque laughter, a significant feature of the Rabelaisian mode.

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and based on the construction of her femininity. So when it is discovered that under her gowns and fragile appearance she is actually a man, the very basis of the constitution of femininity is brought into question. The group which captures Tristessa subjects her to various forms of torture, treating her as a grotesque because of her dual nature: ‘They made ropes from twisted strips of his own négligé and tied him by his wrists from a steel beam, so there he dangled, naked, revealed’ (p. 129). The image of Tristessa’s exposed body suggests a reading of the grotesque as wholly negative—this androgyne is a ‘freak’ to its captors and is spared no form of ridicule or humiliation. When Eve is seen to be sympathetic towards their victim, she is treated with the same cruelty. This interpretation of the grotesque body is also confirmed by the experience of the abject, which we can read across the bodies of Eve(lyn) and Tristessa. Kristeva’s category of the abject locates the source of alienation in the subject’s body and in the moment when one being emerges from or merges into another. This corresponds to Evelyn’s repulsion at the sight of Mother whose likeness is then stamped onto his own body. In Kristeva’s definition of the abject it is possible to comprehend fully its traumatic effects: it is ‘what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’5 In Carter’s novel experience of the abject occurs when each body is forced to transgress socially established boundaries of gender as written on the body. We have seen that Evelyn reacts with horror at the moment of her biological transformation, the form of her own body provoking a sense of disgust. When his own transformation into a biological woman is complete, the sense of disgust is articulated through a direct comparison to Mother’s: ‘I would wince a little at such gross modulation of a flesh that had once been the . . . twin of my new flesh’ (p. 77). The rearrangement of the body’s borders means that Evelyn responds to himself as if he had been modelled after a monster as hideously devised as Frankenstein’s. Similarly, a transgressive act is inscribed in the removal of Tristessa’s gown. This marks a significant textual shift in meaning that is enacted in the violently forced reconsideration of her sexual status. Made to acknowledge the presence of her hidden genitalia, Tristessa experiences a shift in identity to which he responds with ‘wailing [which] echoed round the gallery of glass’ (p. 128). Both characters are forced to recognise their own formation, and it is at the moment of change in

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ontological certainty that they too participate in the abjection of their bodies. Beyond this subjective view of the grotesque body, the image of a composite being, unnatural and constructed out of seemingly disparate parts, is clearly the body experienced as grotesque by the other characters. The Gothic setting of Tristessa’s glass house, where she is abused by the intruders, contains bodily images that further accentuate the theme of selfinvention and physical reconstitution. In Tristessa’s waxwork mausoleum, ‘The Hall of the Immortals’, exquisitely fashioned corpses are dismembered by Tristessa’s attackers, and when they decide that a mock wedding is to take place between Eve and Tristessa, they gather the scattered limbs together in order to construct witnesses for the event. Yet in doing this, ‘they put the figures together haphazardly, so Ramon Navarro’s head was perched on Jean Harlow’s torso and had one arm from John Barrymore Junior, the other from Marilyn Monroe and legs from yet other donors—all assembled in haste, so they looked like picture-puzzles’ (p. 134). This simile of the picture-puzzle brings us to the heart of our understanding of the modern or post-Romantic grotesque. This composite image has the appearance of something that is unresolved and provokes a reaction in the viewer that strives to unify the obvious disparities, thereby rescuing it for the realm of the normal, the familiar. Through ridicule and objectification of the Other, people attempt to reassure themselves of their own normality, their regularity. In his introduction to the memoirs of a nineteenthcentury French hermaphrodite, Michel Foucault has shown that from the Middle Ages through to the last century, anyone whose sexual status was open to question was required to choose one sexual identity for life and usually it was a doctor’s task to decipher which was the ‘true’ sex of the body. And now, in the twentieth century, the idea of one sex being close to ‘the truth’ has not been completely dispelled. It is still widely believed that homosexuality and the swapping of gender characteristics are somehow ‘errors’—that is, Foucault says, ‘a manner of acting that is not adequate to reality’ and, further, that ‘sexual irregularity is seen as belonging more or less to the realm of chimera’.6 As we have seen, the image of the chimera, that fabulous mythical creature of mixed forms, is at the centre of Carter’s novel. The fantastic element in her fiction is often treated by the narrative voice with the banal tone of acceptance characteristic of writing in the vein of magical

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I would go to the desert, to the waste heart of that vast country, the desert on which they turned their backs for fear it would remind them of emptiness—the desert, the arid zone, there to find, chimera of chimeras, there, in the ocean of sand, among the bleached rocks of the untenanted part of the world, I thought I might find that most elusive of all chimeras, myself. (p. 38)

In our reading of the bodies of this central character and its companion, it is possible to discover more than one meaning of the grotesque. When Eve and Tristeassa embrace, once they are alone, Eve is aware that ‘we had made the great Platonic hermaphrodite together’ (p. 148). In Plato the hermaphrodite is the original human form which was then split into two, thus accounting for the two sexes and the human desire to rejoin with an original mate. In The Passion of New Eve, the reaction to the hermaphroditic subject first appears to belong to a reading of the grotesque similar to the image of the grotesque often found in southern American writing—Carson McCullers, for example, has used this image to explore the lives of those regarded as freakish and marginalised by society. However, if we return to Rabelais, we may discover an interesting connection between that bodily grotesque of carnival, which Bakhtin finds in his work, and the post-Romantic grotesque in which the irregular body reflects a modern condition of alienation. These two possible renderings of the grotesque meet in the central character of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. For here is the description of the emblem on the hat that Gargantua wears: ‘Against a base of gold weighing over forty pounds was an enamel figure very much in keeping. It portrayed a man’s body with two heads facing one another, four arms, four feet, a pair of arses and a brace of sexual organs male and female. Such, according to Plato’s Symposium, was human nature in its mystical origins’ (qtd in Bakhtin, p. 323). So what do we make of this image of the epitomic form of the positive grotesque wearing an emblem of the negative grotesque? They are

both situated outside the official culture, but the first is celebratory, disruptive, redemptive. The grotesque of the modern period, as our use of the word as a term of derision attests, represents rejection, exile, and abnormality. When Gargantua champions the hermaphrodite as the symbol of the grotesque, he celebrates the fact that all humans once had that form, that we all share the origins of the grotesque. The fact that the hermaphroditic figure is rejected as alien in modern times suggests a denial of this condition, not out of respect for scientific fact but due to the social pressures towards visual conformity. And this sense of denial is applied to any body which displays chimerical characteristics. Thus it is significant that New Eve is ultimately reconciled to her changed body. New Eve’s body has been designed by Mother to reflect an ideal of perfect femininity as determined by social norms. Yet it is clear that Eve herself regards the process by which this appearance of normality has been achieved as grotesque in itself. She cannot forget that her present body is a manufactured one: ‘I had been born out of discarded flesh, induced to a new life by means of cunning hypodermics, . . . my pretty face had been constructed out of a painful fabric of skin from my old inner thighs’ (p. 143). When Eve looks into the face of Tristessa she is instantly reminded that they are ‘mysteriously twinned by [their] synthetic life’ (p. 125). In transcending this view of her body, overcoming the resistant feelings about her condition, Eve(lyn) participates in a celebration of her chimerical nature when she is united with Tristessa after the destruction of the glass house. The moment of sexual congress between the two hermaphroditic figures may be dismissed by some as a heterosexual fantasy of recaptured unity. Yet the celebration of the body and its transgression of gender boundaries is, I think, intended to espouse a positive reading of this image. The relocation of the chimerical, the hermaphroditic, within the realm of possibility, as a source of origin and a site for pleasure, is written in the bodies of these two characters. Carter playfully recentres the figure of chimerical form in this novel. In her use of the grotesque Carter parodies those characters, such as Mother and Zero, who impose a myopic perspective on the constitution of gender identity, while challenging traditional perspectives on gender and its boundaries. As Eve(lyn) and Tristessa embrace, they form a single bodily image in which these boundaries are temporarily lost. It is tempting to read this image as an example of Bakhtin’s positive grotesque

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realism. And here, any scenario or person that might at first seem unusual, including the figures of Eve, Tristessa, and even Mother, are treated in the text as factual, not as frightening aberrations. And so it is that the central figure of this novel sets out on a journey of discovery and, through the reading of his/her own body, embraces the full spectrum of gender identities, some of which were once alien to him—most notably those of the female. Evelyn, then, begins his trip with this intent:

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in which the death of one and the birth of another can be seen in the one body: ‘two bodies in one, the budding and the division of the cell’ (Bakhtin, p. 52). As Eve begins to grow into her newly grafted identity and Tristessa enters into the final hours of his life, they share this climactic dissolution of identity, making the shape of this one fabulous, mythic creature together.

Notes [Heather Johnson’s essay is the first of three essays included in this collection (Angela Carter, edited by Alison Easton. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994) which draw on aspects of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on carnival and the grotesque to explore relations of social power and their historical contexts in Carter’s work. (Carter herself did not read Bakhtin’s work until after the publication of Nights at the Circus, a novel for which his ideas also provide a useful lens.) The Passion of New Eve, the subject of Johnson’s essay, charts the journey of the male, English narrator, Evelyn, through a futuristic United States where by surgical means he is forced to become female (his/her body made the patriarchal idealisation of woman). Renamed Eve, she eventually meets with and makes love with the ageing film star, Tristessa, revealed to be biologically male. These two transgressive bodies thus demonstrate, indeed recognise the constructiveness of the gendered body; normality in Eve is made to seem grotesque. Bakhtin’s ideas of the grotesque, based on his reading on Rabelais, are central to an understanding of the literature of the body in political terms— the grotesque body is excessive, monstrous and revolting, with the power to disrupt limits fixed by present powers. Mary Russo reads the grotesque specifically as a female form—woman’s existence, and in particular her body, as monstrous in patriarchal eyes. Johnson also refers to Foucault (whose work on sexuality and the power of social institutions was important to Carter) to establish how normality and abnormality in gender roles are constructed by those who police sexuality in society. Kristeva’s psychoanalytic but politically charged ideas of abjection—a horror at and attempted expulsion of things which disturb established identity, system, order—are also used to describe the characters’ subjectitivity in recognising their own formation. The essay finally asks whether the grotesque can still be read positively. Ed.] 1. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, 1984), p. 19; hereafter cited parenthetically. 2. Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (London, 1986), p. 63; hereafter cited parenthetically.

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3. Mary Russo, ‘Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory’, in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Basingstoke, 1988), p. 219. 4. My use of the term post-Romantic is taken from Bakhtin who has chosen it to distinguish between a modern understanding of the term grotesque and the much earlier meaning grounded in the social reality of the Middle Ages. I realise that this distinction is by no means an absolute one and exceptions do exist in the post-Romantic period. 5. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York, 1982), p. 4. 6. Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall, introd. Michel Foucault (Brighton, 1980), p. x.

BEATE NEUMEIER (ESSAY DATE 1996) SOURCE: Neumeier, Beate. “Postmodern Gothic: Desire and Reality in Angela Carter’s Writing.” In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited and with an introduction by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, pp. 141-51. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. In the following essay, Neumeier explains how Carter employs the Gothic in her fiction to explore “the nature of desire and of reality.”

According to Angela Carter ‘we live in Gothic times’,1 where the marginalised subgenres of the past have necessarily become the appropriate and dominant modes of our present discourse. This view corresponds with the more general recent discussions of the development of the literary fantastic from the emergence of the Gothic mode in the eighteenth century to the contemporary practice of postmodernism. Neil Cornwell, among others, claims that ‘the fantastic has itself become the dominant mode in the modern novel’. It is part of what he terms the ‘“portmanteau novel” . . . to designate the complex, multilevelled or multi-layered novel’, characterised by irony, parody, intertextuality, and metafiction.2 Leslie Fiedler, quoted by Angela Carter in an epigraph to her novel Heroes and Villains, sees the Gothic mode as ‘a form of parody, assailing clichés by exaggerating them to the limit of grotesqueness’.3 Emphasising the importance of this tradition for her own writing, Angela Carter characterises Gothicism as a genre ignoring ‘the value systems of our institutions’, and dealing ‘entirely with the profane’. Its ‘characters and events are exaggerated beyond reality, to become symbols, ideas, passions . . . style will tend to be ornate, unnatural—and thus operate against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact . . . [The Gothic] retains a singular moral function—that of provoking unease.’4 Gothicism in

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Images and symbols of ‘infernal desire’ which trace the forbidden paths of cultural taboos are the particular domain of fantastic literature, the acknowledged literature of the unreal, in which the questions discussed in this essay by necessity arise: namely the questions of the nature of desire and of reality. Angela Carter’s novels and tales provide superb examples of a literary and theoretical exploration of these features.5

Eros and Thanatos: the subject as battle-ground In her novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, Angela Carter engages the hero/ narrator and her readers in what she makes him call a veritable ‘Reality War’ (27). In this war reality is linked to order, reason, and rationality as opposed to fantasy, imagination, chaos, and desire. The unnamed Minister of State and Dr Hoffman respectively figure as representatives of Super Ego and Id, reality principle and pleasure principle, as the narrator informs us. So we are presented with what seems to be a paradigmatic Freudian drama by its own definition, a text which writes its own interpretation as it goes along. Whereas earlier Gothic/fantastic texts had to be interpreted in psychoanalytic terms by readers and critics, this text provides its own reading. But, of course, there is more to it than meets the eye/I of the hero/narrator whose vision is questioned and whose I-dentity is at stake. First of all, the figurehead of reality and rationality, the Minister, remains conspicuously absent throughout the novel (apart from a recorded conversation between the Minister and Dr Hoffman’s ambassador at the outset of the novel). Likewise, his counterpart Dr Hoffman, the representative of infernal desire, appears only at the very end, although he (and possibly the Minister?) seems to have been present throughout the novel in various disguises (e.g. as peep show proprietor, as Sadeian Count). Hence Carter’s ‘Reality War’ seems to be displaced onto the level of actions involving the narrator/hero, Desiderio, and Hoffman’s daughter, Albertina. Desiderio, working for the Minister, is sent on a quest to save mankind, a mission which can only be accomplished by destroying Dr Hoffman. Appointed to the position of an ‘Inspector of Veracity’ (40) Desiderio visits a town fair, meets a peep show proprietor in

whose tent he is supposed to marvel at wax models of the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’ (42)—a veritable catalogue of the fragmented human body (womb, eyes, breasts, head, penis, mutilated body, culminating in the representation of copulating bodies) and its interpretation in images of desire (and fear). Another tent reveals a series of pictures of ‘A Young Girl’s Most Significant Experience’ (58), which turns out to be the proverbial Sleeping Beauty being kissed by a Prince who is transformed into Death. These images (wax models, pictures) bear strange resemblances to persons and events in Desiderio’s past and future: one of the women depicted in the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’ resembles the beautiful and enigmatic Albertina, who had earlier appeared in the shapes of a black swan and that of Dr Hoffman’s male ambassador. The castle represented inside the wax model womb reappears at the end of the novel as Hoffman’s Gothic abode. The paintings of the Sleeping Beauty resemble Desiderio’s past amorous encounter with the town mayor’s daughter Mary Anne (the night before) and her future death (the next morning). After this fatal event Desiderio has to flee from the Police who charge him with seduction, murder, and necrophily performed on a minor as well as with impersonation of a government inspector (62). During the course of the novel he lives as an Indian among the River People, travels as nephew of the peep show proprietor from fair to fair, accompanies a Sadeian Count to the perversions of the ‘House of Anonymity’ (128), falls into the hands of a cannibalistic tribe, is received in the land of the Centaurs, until he finally reaches the castle of his opponent Dr Hoffman. The dialectic and reversibility of the pattern of flight and persecution, of the figures of victim and persecutor as known from classical Gothic/ fantastic novels like Frankenstein and Dracula is thematised throughout in association with the quest motif. Desiderio’s mission is death: the destruction of Dr Hoffman. Yet almost from the start this mortal mission is accompanied and sometimes replaced by the quest for love of Albertina, Hoffman’s daughter, an unmistakable hint at the Freudian tenet of the inseparability of Eros and Thanatos. Desiderio pursues and saves Albertina who in turn rescues him and in fact is his constant companion, most significantly in the disguise of Lafleur, the servant of the notorious Sadeian Count. Here the link between the ambivalence of the structural pattern and the figural pattern in Gothic/fantastic literature is made obvious. The technique of using various disguises, of

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this sense is placed in opposition to mimetic art, to realism, and situated within the realm of nonmimetic art, of fantasy and the fantastic, areas which have always been associated with imagination and desire.

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changing identities, of splitting/multiplying personalities is taken to an ironic extreme. It seems only logical that after having been presented consecutively as a government inspector, an Indian, a nephew of a peepshow proprietor, and a guest of a Sadeian count, Desiderio finally realises himself in a mirror in Hoffman’s castle as ‘entirely Albertina in the male aspect’ (199). If Albertina, as she claims, has been ‘maintained in [her] various appearances only by the power of [Desiderio’s] desire’ (204), then the identification of the Minister and Dr Hoffman with rationality and desire respectively, also has to be questioned. All ‘the roles are interchangeable’ (39), as the doctor’s ambassador explicitly points out. The neat borderline between reality and pleasure principle has become more and more blurred. The described pattern of similarities between the images presented at the travelling fair and the experiences of the hero recurs throughout the novel. Image and experience constantly reflect each other, or rather appear as inseparable. Aptly, the peep show proprietor lectures the hero that the models and slides shown at the fair once belonged to Hoffman’s museum of ‘symbolic constituents of representations of the basic constituents of the universe’ from which all possible situations of the world can be deduced. Consequently the symbols can be interpreted as ‘patterns from which real events may be evolved’ (95). So the novel identifies this set of samples as what could be called the constituents of a grammar of desire ‘derived from Freud’ (108). Furthermore, the constituents of this grammar, as they are translated into Desiderio’s experiences, can be directly connected to Todorov’s distinction between themes of perception (e.g. metamorphoses) and themes of discourse (desire) in fantastic literature: in Carter’s novel themes of perception appear as metamorphoses between the human and the animal aspect (Centaurs), between animate and inanimate (animal furniture in the ‘House of Anonymity’), between object and subject (acrobats dissolving, transformations of personalities). Among the catalogue of themes of desire figure allusions to necrophily (Sleeping Beauty, embalmed Mrs Hoffman) and incest (River People), homosexual rape (Acrobats of Desire), rape by Centaurs (Albertina), torture (tattooing), sadism and blasphemy (‘House of Anonymity’), and cannibalism (River people, Black tribe, Centaurs). Moreover the ancestry of the Doctor himself is firmly rooted in the Gothic tradition of Dracula, whereas the Count is explicitly linked to

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de Sade: names representing perceptions of the world governed by infernal desires. Throughout the novel Desiderio is confronted with Gothic transformations of self and desire without ever reaching the consummation of his own single desire, Albertina. When their union finally is about to take place, he kills her in order to escape from being literally reduced to a—in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s terms—‘desiring machine’.6 For the fate prepared for him and Albertina by the Doctor is to permanently become part of ‘a pictorial lexicon of all the things a man and a woman might do together within the confines of a bed of wire six feet long by three feet wide’ (214). In recent criticism this murder has received diverse readings. On the one hand, David Punter reads it as an example of ‘the defeat of the political aspirations of the 1960s, and in particular of the father-figures of liberation, Reich and Marcuse’ as well as a result of Desiderio’s having been ‘formed by the Minister’s society, by the society of apparent institutional order and totalitarian conformism’.7 On the other hand, Ricarda Schmidt sees it as a result of Carter’s attempt to show ‘that the absolute rule of desire would make life just as repressive, sterile and static as the absolute rule of reason’, and argues that the author supposedly ‘examines the promise of desire completely and always fulfilled and finds that it does not guarantee happiness and freedom’.8 Both readings seem to presuppose the attainability of a realm of desire without its vocabulary and grammar, presenting desire mostly in the Gothic forms of the return of the repressed, mixed with pain. The course of the whole novel, however, reveals the inseparability of desire from the projectionist’s sample of images. Images, symbols, and myths are structuring the unconscious as much as the conscious. Pleasure principle and reality principle cannot be kept apart. In this sense Carter’s novel can also be read as a parody on psychoanalytic attempts to pen ‘desire in a cage’ (208), to define it as the Other of rationality and reason. Carter’s Dr Hoffman thus aptly appears to combine aspects of the father-figures of psychoanalysis (Freud) and of Gothicism (namely E. T. A. Hoffmann, E. A. Poe, and de Sade) respectively, thus reminding the reader in various ways of the inseparability of the fantastic and its Freudian interpretations: first, the reader, of course, remembers the fact that Freud developed his theory of the uncanny in relation to a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Secondly, the appearance of the doctor in the novel is presented as a mock analytic situation, where the doctor is sitting on a stool holding the hand of a woman on a

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Reality and fantasy: the confusion of image and object This notion of the inseparability of desire (and death) from its representations, its cultural constructions (images, symbols, myths), has decisive consequences for the notions of reality and fantasy/the fantastic with regard to their fictional representations. Most definitions of the fantastic and its related areas have centred on its correlative opposition to the real. This implies a definition of the real as governed by the principles of order and rationality. The fantastic then—as its counterpart—is viewed as an expression of reality’s constraints, giving space to the unreal, the unseen, and unsaid. The representational forms of the fantastic are by necessity historically bound and thus vary according to the changing value systems (and thus reality concepts) of the society to which they relate. Following Todorov’s familiar and often applied terminology,9 the unreal or the Other is explained as supernatural within religious societies and is thus contained within the realm of the marvellous, the unhistoric; within secular societies the unreal is naturalised, e.g. in terms of a subjective perception, and thus can be contained as uncanny within the realm of the mimetic. The historical development of naming the unaccountable other as evil has consequently been traced as a gradual process of internalisation ranging from the devil (Lewis, The Monk; Maturin, Melmoth), to demons (villain/heroes of Ann Radcliffe and the Brontës) to the self as Other (Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Hitchcock, Psycho). Today, critics like Rosemary Jackson see the fantastic as ‘confound-

ing the marvellous and the mimetic’, as an aspect of instability and uncertainty, as that which lies beyond interpretation. Thus the fantastic in her words fundamentally ‘traces the limits of [culture’s] epistemological and ontological frame’ by problematising vision (eye) and language (I) as reliable constituents of reality.1 0 The fantastic, Rosemary Jackson goes on to explain, ‘plays upon difficulties of interpreting events/things as objects or as images, thus disorienting the reader’s categorisation of the “real” to such an extent that reason and reality appear as arbitrary shifting constructs’.1 1 Applying these ideas to the tradition of Gothic literature, the decisive difference between earlier examples and contemporary texts of the fantastic becomes clear. While Frankenstein’s monster and Stoker’s vampires materialise as product of self and invasion of self respectively and become real, Angela Carter’s creatures never become real in that sense. Angela Carter actualises images as objects and events, just as Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker did in the nineteenth century, but she insists on the process of actualisation rather than on the actualisation itself, creating a constant limbo between object as image, and image as object. Her fictions express Rosemary Jackson’s theoretical persuasion that ‘things slide away from the powerful eye/I which seeks to possess them’.1 2 The travelling heroes of several of her novels, particularly those of The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman and Nights at the Circus, are confronted with recurring clusters of images commonly identified as representations of the relational/oppositional other: namely, the unknown country, the travelling fair or circus, and—of course—the Gothic mansion and its inhabitants. The unknown country recalls the fictional tradition of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels respectively as two complementary ways of naturalisation (familiarisation as appropriation) of the unknown on the one hand and estrangement (defamiliarisation as satire) of the known on the other hand. Carter explicitly and ironically takes up both traditions by referring to Yahoos and Houyhnhnms in The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman and in Nights at the Circus, and to Friday in the story ‘Master’ in Fireworks. Her heroes’ experiences in unknown countries among unknown people provide ample opportunities to ridicule Western civilisation and its attempts at defining the Other in its own terms. Thus their wonder at the absurd nature of unknown mores, magic rituals, and languages only refers back to their/our own societies: in Nights at the Circus

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couch, who, however, in a Poe-like Gothic twist of the scene, turns out to be the embalmed corpse of the doctor’s dead wife. Desire remains a zero unit, a pure absence like death. So Desiderio’s erotic quest necessarily implies at the same time an entropic pull. Desire as a vacant term, defined as a lack, has to be given an object and thereby filled with meaning. Death by necessity remains an imaginary space, a space of non-reality, which gains its meaning solely in relation to reality as difference, as other, as realm after life. In that respect the (nondescript) space of death and the (non-directional) movement of desire both point towards a void or an absolute zero point. But because absence cannot be represented, we are ironically left with embalmed corpses and the futile killing of desire (as represented by Albertina’s death) and its inevitable return as a narrative of memory—in yet another kind of representation.

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Jack Walser’s explanation of the way the Siberian natives deal with foreigners can thus be related directly to the above-mentioned explanation of the history of Gothic/fantastic literature: ‘Since they did not have a word for “foreigner”, they used the word for “devil” instead and began to get used to it’ (253). Similarly Walser’s observation of the natives’ tendency to confound object and image only reflects his and our own: ‘The Siberian natives cannot distinguish between a bear as a household pet and as a “minor deity,” “a transcendental kind of meta-bear” in the narrator’s diction’ (257). Furthermore, Walser himself (and the reader) cannot distinguish between the heroine Fevvers as a bird woman and Fevvers as a symbol of Victory, Death, Freedom or whatever other associations are evoked throughout the novel. In comparison and contrast to Swiftian satire Angela Carter not only uses the motif of the unknown country to criticise contemporary society, but eventually rather to represent ironically the process of signification and its arbitrariness and thus unreliability, a process which is allencompassing and thus without conceivable alternative. The travelling fair and the circus recall literary traditions associated with aspects of inversion and/or imitation of the known world. The world of the fair and the circus is the everyday world upside down: the abnormal becomes the norm within its confines, yet it always remains exotic with regard to the outside world. Angela Carter is interested in precisely this ambivalence: the other as a norm and as a monstrosity on display. In The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman the observer/hero is tempted to explain the art of the Acrobats of Desire, such as juggling their own eyes or dismembering themselves, as that of tricksters who play with the human perception (perhaps using mirrors to create their effects). But this reassuring interpretation of the unreal as real (uncanny) is destroyed later on: the acrobats clearly do transcend the possible; (thus they seem to belong to the realm of the marvellous). But at the same time, the narrator reminds us of the fact that ‘often, the whole fair seemed only another kind of set of samples’ (110), of images displayed in the tent of the peep show proprietor. The fantastic double vision or rather oscillation between the different interpretations remains unresolved. In Nights at the Circus the heroine Fevvers, the bird woman, is celebrated as the world’s ‘Greatest Aerialiste’. But eventually her admirer and biographer Walser hits upon the paradox of meaning when he ponders: ‘if she were indeed a

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lusus naturae, a prodigy, then—she was no longer a wonder . . . but—a freak . . . As a symbolic woman, she has a meaning, as an anomaly, none’ (161). This not only applies to the attitude of others towards her, but also to her vision of self. The threat of being ‘no Venus, or Helen, or Angel of the Apocalypse, not Izrael or Isfahel . . . [but] only a poor freak’, throws her into a crisis which, however, is prevented by the gaze of her onlookers: ‘the eyes fixed upon her with astonishment, with awe, the eyes that told her who she was’ (290). In order to signify the birdwoman has to believe in herself as an image and a symbol. Meaning and representation are by necessity symbolic constructions, artefacts.

The issue of gender: ontology v. iconography The analysis so far has shown that Angela Carter’s fictional exercises in Gothicism are very effective renditions of her theoretical statements on the nature of the genre which deals in exaggeration, distortion, in cliché images and symbols. An additional attraction of the Gothic genre for Carter is its potential of integration insofar as it allows her to link fairy tale and pornography in her novels and many of her short stories. Since, according to Carter, both are derived from myth, both exhibit ‘a fantasy relation to reality’, depicting wo/man as ‘invariable’ and denying his/her ‘social context’.1 3 Thus in The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman the vampiric Sadeian Count is described in utterly theatrical terms as ‘connoisseur of catastrophe’ (122) whose ‘rigorous discipline of stylisation’ (123) forces him to remain ‘iconoclast, even when the icons were already cast down’: ‘As if from habit he pissed on the altar [of a ruined chapel] while the valet set out the meal’ (125). During their visit to the ‘House of Anonymity’ the Count and Desiderio change into hooded costumes which according to the narrator ‘were unaesthetic, priapic and totally obliterated our faces and our self-respect; the garb grossly emphasised our manhoods while utterly denying our humanity. And the costumes were of no time or place’ (130). Consequently they are confronted not with women, but with variations of ‘ideational femaleness’, which turn out to be ‘sinister, abominable, inverted mutations, part clockwork, part vegetable and part brute’ (132). In a climactic scene the Count as ‘the Pope of the Profane, officiating at an ultimate sacrament . . . snatched a candle . . . and used it to ignite the rosy plumage of a winged girl’ (133), who, however,—as the reader is informed subsequently—far

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The artificiality of Gothicism and its machinery is further revealed in Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ (from her collection The Bloody Chamber),1 4 where the vampire queen is likened by the hero to a doll, to a clockwork wound up years ago, to an automaton (102), and her mythical midnight mansion is stripped of all horror and fascination by the morning light: ‘now you could see how tawdry it all was, how thin and cheap the satin, the catafalque not ebony at all but blackpainted paper stretched on ruts of wood, as in the theatre’ (106). Similarly, when Desiderio reaches Dr Hoffman’s castle, he realises: ‘I was not in the domain of the marvellous at all. I had gone far beyond that and at last I had reached the power house of the marvellous, where all its clanking, dull, stage machinery was kept’ (Infernal Desire Machines, 201). A final twist in Carter’s use of Gothicism is thus related to the idea of gender. Whereas earlier Gothic fiction shows the materialisation of ideas (Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula), Angela Carter uses Gothicism to reveal the process of transformation of human beings, particularly women into symbols and ideas by the process of gender construction. Gothicism as a blend of fairy tale and pornography most obviously shows the replacement of the ontological by the iconographic. In her analysis of de Sade, The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter links pornography to the stylisation of graffiti: In the stylisation of graffiti, the prick is always presented as erect, in an alert attitude of enquiry or curiosity or affirmation; it points upwards, it asserts. The hole is open, an inert space, like a mouth waiting to be filled. From this elementary iconography may be derived the whole metaphysic of sexual differences—man aspires; woman has no other function but to exist, waiting. The male is positive, an exclamation mark. Woman is

negative. Between her legs lies nothing but zero, the sign for nothing, that only becomes something when the male principle fills it with meaning.1 5

In her novel The Passion of New Eve Angela Carter uses Gothicism (among other genres) in this sense to reveal the process of gender construction as a process which places the hero turned heroine Eve/lyn ‘outside history’ (125), because it is a process of being transformed by ‘the false universals of myth’ (136). But how can wo/man be situated in history, in the real world, if this world, too, is a symbolic construction? The answer to this question given by the narrator/hero(ine) of the novel, ‘a critique of these symbols is a critique of our lives’ (6), indicates that Carter intends to move from the symbolic level of her texts to the symbolic representation of our reality.

Conclusion As pointed out above, Angela Carter’s fantastic creatures never become real in the way Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula do. They necessarily must stop short, because the real only exists as absence, as vanishing zero point in a world constructed by images, symbols, and myths. If the fantastic is defined as tracing the limits of our cultural frame, as that which lies beyond interpretation, then the real as that which cannot be represented has become the ‘real’ topic of the postmodern fantastic. Yet this topic can never be grasped but can only be encircled (via parody, intertextuality, metafiction, and irony) in an endless process of de-mystification which, however, always acknowledges its own futility. The fantastic has not been replaced by Freud’s psychoanalysis, as Todorov suggested, but has rather been reinvigorated by Lacan’s revision of Freud. Rather than rendering the reader/critic unnecessary, Angela Carter provides him with the concrete textual illustrations of current literary theory.

Notes 1. A. Carter, Afterword to Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (London: Quartet Books, 1974), p. 122. 2. N. Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism (Hempstead: Harvester, 1990), pp. 145, 154. 3. A. Carter, Heroes and Villains (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1969) 1981). 4. Afterword to Fireworks. 5. The following texts are used: The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1972) 1982); Nights at the Circus (London: Picador (1984) 1984); The Bloody Chamber (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1979) 1987); The Passion of New Eve (London: Virago Press (1977) 1982).

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from being real ‘had only been a life-like construction of papier mâché on a wicker frame’ (134). In Nights at the Circus the winged girl has materialised, and after having been displayed in Mme Schreck’s museum of woman monsters, has to escape first from being bled to death by the quasivampiric Christian Rosencreutz and later from being diminished to a miniature artefact by a demonic collector of toys and other rarities. The airs of omnipotence displayed by these Gothic villains are, however, counteracted not only by their theatricality, but also by their ‘quivering pusillanimity’ (Infernal Desire Machines, 145) which shows itself as soon as they are faced with resistance.

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6. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (New York: Viking, (1972) 1977), Chapter 1. 7. D. Punter, ‘Angela Carter: Supersessions of the Masculine’, Critique 25:4 (1984), pp. 209-22; 211, 213. 8. R. Schmidt, ‘The Journey of the Subject in Angela Carter’s Fiction’, Textual Practice 3:1 (1989), pp. 56-7; 61. 9. See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ittace, NY: Cronell University Press (1970) 1973). 10. R. Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 12, 30.

Lokke, Kari E. “Bluebeard and The Bloody Chamber: The Grotesque of Self-Parody and Self-Assertion.” Frontiers 10, no. 1 (1988): 7-12. Compares Carter’s version of the Bluebeard legend with Max Frisch’s, noting that both authors use the grotesque as a method for exposing the brutality that informs traditional patriarchal views of women. McLaughlin, Becky. “Perverse Pleasure and Fetishized Text: The Deathly Erotics of Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber.’” Style 29, no. 3 (1995): 404-22. Shows how Carter’s story “The Bloody Chamber” explores the connection between the eroticism of life and the sensuality of death. Peach, Linden. “Euro-American Gothic and the 1960s: Shadow Dance (1966), Several Perceptions (1968) and Love (1970).” In Angela Carter, pp. 26-70. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

11. Ibid., pp. 20, 21. 12. Ibid., p. 46. 13. A. Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago Press, 1979), pp. 6, 16. 14. On Gothicism in Angela Carter’s tales see Patricia Duncker, ‘Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter’s Bloody Chambers’, Literature and History 10:1 (spring 1984), pp. 3-14. 15. The Sadeian Woman, p. 4.

Traces Carter’s indebtedness to the Euro-American Gothic tradition; notes how through a combination of Gothic and psychological fantasy Carter pursues themes and motifs from nineteenth-century American writers, notably Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville. Sceats, Sarah. “Oral Sex: Vampiric Transgression and the Writing of Angela Carter.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 20, no. 1 (2001): 107-21. Examines Carter’s use of vampire tropes to explore gendered behavior and heterosexual power relations.

FURTHER READING Criticism Ducornet, Rikki. “A Scatological and Cannibal Clock: Angela Carter’s ‘The Fall River Axe Murders.’” Review of Contemporary Fiction 14, no. 3 (fall 1994): 37-43. Shows how Carter uses the symbolism of clocks and time to transform the story of Lizzie Borden’s murder of her father and stepmother into what the critic sees as an overblown representation of human tragedy in her novel The Fall River Axe Murders. Duncker, Patricia. “Queer Gothic: Angela Carter and the Lost Narratives of Sexual Subversion.” Critical Survey 8, no. 1 (January 1996): 58-68. Examines gothicism, homosexuality, and heterosexuality in Carter’s fiction. Fowl, Melinda G. “Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber Revisited.” Critical Survey 3, no. 1 (January 1991): 71-9. Traces the sources of tales in The Bloody Chamber. Lee, Alison. Angela Carter. New York: Twayne, 1997, 146 p. Book-length study of Carter’s life and works.

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Stoddart, Helen. “The Passion of New Eve and the Cinema: Hysteria, Spectacle, Masquerade.” In The Gothic, edited by Fred Botting, pp. 111-31. Suffolk, England, and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2001. Discusses questions about the depiction—in Gothic terms—of Tristessa in The Passion of New Eve and explores notions of spectacle, gender identity, and psychoanalysis.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Carter’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: British Writers Supplement, Vol. 3; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 53-56, 136; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 12, 36, 61, 106; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 5, 41, 76; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 14, 207, 261; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring Short Stories; Feminist Writers; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Major 21st-Century Writers; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers; St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, Ed. 4; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 4, 12; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 13; Something about the Author, Vols. 66, 70; Supernatural Fiction Writers; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 139; and World Literature and Its Times.

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WILKIE COLLINS (1824 - 1889)

(Full name William Wilkie Collins) English novelist, short story writer, travel writer, and playwright.

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onsidered a skillful manipulator of intricate plots, Collins is remembered as a principal founder of English detective fiction. His novels of intrigue and suspense, although as popular in Collins’s day as the works of such Victorian luminaries as Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and William Thackeray, were frequently dismissed by critics as sensationalist fiction. By the twentieth century, Collins began to receive recognition for his innovations in the detective genre, for his unconventional representation of female characters, and for his emphasis on careful plotting and revision, a practice that foreshadowed modern methods.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Collins was named for his father, William, a landscape painter, and his godfather, the artist Sir David Wilkie. Raised among artists and writers in England, Collins rebelled against the routine at the tea-broker’s firm where, at the age of seventeen, he’d been placed by his father. He subsequently studied at Lincoln’s Inn and was called to the Bar in 1851, but was to use his legal expertise

only when writing fiction. After his father’s death in 1847, Collins wrote Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R. A. (1848) and two years later a lengthy novel, Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome (1850). Soon after the publication of his first novel, Collins made the acquaintance of Charles Dickens, and the two became close friends, working together on Dickens’s magazines, traveling together, and occasionally collaborating on stories. He achieved immense popularity after the publication of his sensation novel The Woman in White in 1860, which spawned a literary vogue for such fiction that peaked in 1868 with the appearance of his highly successful The Moonstone. Always a frustrated playwright, Collins made dramatic adaptations of these and several of his other works of fiction, which were produced in England and the United States with fair success. After rising to fame, Collins became the subject of considerable scrutiny due to his unconventional personal life. Collins lived with his mistress—said to have been the model for the “woman in white”—and supported, in addition, another woman by whom he had three illegitimate children. Although Collins was accepted by literary friends, he was often ostracized by society at large for his unorthodox way of life. His rage at hypocritical morals and perhaps his desire to emulate Dickens inspired Collins to compose the didactic novels of his later years. He died in London in September of 1889.

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MAJOR WORKS Collins’s first novel, Antonina was an imitative, historical romance in the style of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii. It focuses on the siege of patriarchal Rome by a Gothic army. At the center of the tale is Antonina, a young girl who, after being wrongly cast out of her home by her father, falls in love with a Gothic soldier. Featuring an intricate plot and told through a series of monologues, The Woman in White is framed as a Gothic romance and offers two very different heroines: the strong and passionate Marian Holcombe and her half-sister, the beautiful and passive Laura Fairlie. The latter is manipulated by the novel’s villain, Count Fosco, agrees to marry Fosco’s henchman, and is subsequently robbed of her identity and forced into an asylum. Aided by her half-sister. she escapes and, along the way, uncovers numerous family secrets, including the story of the ghostly “woman in white” whom she has encountered in the past. Mysterious characters and vestiges like those used in The Woman in White also appear in “The Yellow Mask” (1856) and The Black Robe (1881).

from the traditions of popular fiction to create an insightful and subtly critical portrait of Victorian society.

PRINCIPAL WORKS Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R. A. (biography) 1848 Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome (novel) 1850 Rambles Beyond Railways (travelogue) 1851 Basil: A Story of Modern Life (novel) 1852 Hide and Seek (novel) 1854 After Dark (short stories) 1856 The Dead Secret (novel) 1857 *The New Magdalen (novel) 1857 The Queen of Hearts (short stories) 1859 The Woman in White (novel) 1860 No Name (novel) 1862 Armadale (novel) 1866 The Moonstone (novel) 1868 Man and Wife (novel) 1870 Poor Miss Finch (novel) 1872

CRITICAL RECEPTION Although Collins has been called “the father of the English detective novel,” critics have begun to give his Gothic tales increased attention. In Antonina, several critics note that he provides a strong portrayal of the “female Gothic” through the title character and her nemesis (and, some commentators argue, double), Goisvintha. Critics have also noted Collins’s use of the Gothic to recast history in this tale. Collins turned to social criticsm in The Woman in White, again utilizing the Gothic to frame his commentary on certain behaviors. Although this tale also introduced a less traditional, soon-to-be much-emulated character, the amateur detective, Fred Botting has noted that Collins cast this personage against a classicly passive Gothic heroine who represents loss and suffering. In addition, Botting notes Collins’s introduction of the spectral title character as well as his employment of doubling and family secrets. Susan M. Griffin has posited that the Gothic elements of The Woman in White, as well as those in “The Yellow Mask” and The Black Robe, convey a particularly anti-Catholic sentiment. Critics have also noted in Collins’s Gothic works a departure

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The Frozen Deep and Other Stories (short stories) 1874 The Law and the Lady (novel) 1875 The Two Destinies (novel) 1876 The Fallen Leaves (novel) 1879 The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice (novella) 1879 A Rogue’s Life: From His Birth to His Marriage (novel) 1879 Jezebel’s Daughter (novel) 1880 The Black Robe (novel) 1881 Heart and Science (novel) 1883 I Say No (novel) 1884 The Evil Genius (novel) 1886 The Guilty River (novel) 1886 Little Novels (novellas) 1887 The Legacy of Cain (novel) 1889 Blind Love (unfinished novel) 1890 *

This novel was rewritten as a play, The New Magdalen, in 1873.

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WILKIE COLLINS (STORY DATE AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1875) SOURCE: Collins, Wilkie. “Miss Jéromette and the Clergyman.” In Great Ghost Stories: 34 Classic Tales of the Supernatural, compiled by Robin Brockman, pp. 351-74. New York: Gramercy Books, 2002. The following excerpt is from a short story originally published as “The Clergyman’s Confession” in the 1875 August-September issue of The Canadian Monthly; it was retitled “Miss Jéromette and the Clergyman” and collected in Little Novels in 1887.

IX I had sent the housekeeper out of my study. I was alone, with the photograph of the Frenchwoman on my desk. There could surely be little doubt about the discovery that had burst upon me. The man who had stolen his way into my house, driven by the terror of a temptation that he dared not reveal, and the man who had been my unknown rival in the by-gone time, were one and the same! Recovering self-possession enough to realize this plain truth, the inferences that followed forced their way into my mind as a matter of course. The unnamed person who was the obstacle to my pupil’s prospects in life, the unnamed person in whose company he was assailed by temptations which made him tremble for himself, stood revealed to me now as being, in all human probability, no other than Jéromette. Had she bound him in the fetters of the marriage which he had himself proposed? Had she discovered his place of refuge in my house? And was the letter that had been delivered to him of her writing? Assuming these questions to be answered in the affirmative, what, in that case, was his ‘business in London’? I remembered how he had spoken to me of his temptations, I recalled the expression that had crossed his face when he recognized the handwriting on the letter—and the conclusion that followed literally shook me to the soul. Ordering my horse to be saddled, I rode instantly to the railway-station. The train by which he had travelled to London had reached the terminus nearly an hour since. The one useful course that I could take, by way of quieting the dreadful misgivings crowding one after another on my mind, was to telegraph to Jéromette at the address at which I had last seen her. I sent the subjoined message—prepaying the reply:

‘If you are in any trouble, telegraph to me. I will be with you by the first train. Answer, in any case.’

There was nothing in the way of the immediate dispatch of my message. And yet the hours passed, and no answer was received. By the advice of the clerk, I sent a second telegram to the London office, requesting an explanation. The reply came back in these terms: ‘Improvements in street. House pulled down. No trace of person named in telegram.’

I mounted my horse, and rode back slowly to the rectory. ‘The day of his return to me will bring with it the darkest days of my life.’ . . . ‘I shall die young, and die miserably. Have you interest enough still left in me to wish to hear of it?’ . . . ‘You shall hear of it.’ Those words were in my memory while I rode home in the cloudless moonlight night. They were so vividly present to me that I could hear again her pretty foreign accent, her quiet clear tones, as she spoke them. For the rest, the emotion of that memorable day had worn me out. The answer from the telegraph-office had struck me with a strange and stony despair. My mind was a blank. I had no thoughts. I had no tears. I was about half-way on my road home, and I had just heard the clock of a village church strike ten, when I became conscious, little by little, of a chilly sensation slowly creeping through and through me to the bones. The warm balmy air of a summer night was abroad. It was the month of July. In the month of July, was it possible that any living creature (in good health) could feel cold? It was not possible—and yet, the chilly sensation still crept through and through me to the bones. I looked up. I looked all round me. My horse was walking along an open highroad. Neither trees nor waters were near me. On either side, the flat fields stretched away bright and broad in the moonlight. I stopped my horse, and looked round me again. Yes: I saw it. With my own eyes I saw it. A pillar of white mist—between five and six feet high, as well as I could judge—was moving beside me at the edge of the road, on my left hand. When I stopped, the white mist stopped. When I went on, the white mist went on. I pushed my horse to a trot—the pillar of mist was with me. I urged him to a gallop—the pillar of mist was with me. I stopped him again—the pillar of mist stood still.

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The white colour of it was the white colour of the fog which I had seen over the river—on the night when I had gone to bid her farewell. And the chill which had then crept through me to the bones was the chill that was creeping through me now. I went on again slowly. The white mist went on again slowly—with the clear bright night all round it. I was awed rather than frightened. There was one moment, and one only, when the fear came to me that my reason might be shaken. I caught myself keeping time to the slow tramp of the horse’s feet with the slow utterance of these words, repeated over and over again: ‘Jéromette is dead. Jéromette is dead.’ But my will was still my own: I was able to control myself, to impose silence on my own muttering lips. And I rode on quietly. And the pillar of mist went quietly with me. My groom was waiting for my return at the rectory gate. I pointed to the mist, passing through the gate with me. ‘Do you see anything there?’ I said. The man looked at me in astonishment. I entered the rectory. The housekeeper met me in the hall. I pointed to the mist, entering with me. ‘Do you see anything at my side?’ I asked. The housekeeper looked at me as the groom had looked at me. ‘I am afraid you are not well, sir,’ she said. ‘Your colour is all gone—you are shivering. Let me get you a glass of wine.’ I went into my study, on the ground-floor, and took the chair at my desk. The photograph still lay where I had left it. The pillar of mist floated round the table, and stopped opposite to me, behind the photograph. The housekeeper brought in the wine. I put the glass to my lips, and sat it down again. The chill of the mist was in the wine. There was no taste, no reviving spirit in it. The presence of the housekeeper oppressed me. My dog had followed her into the room. The presence of the animal oppressed me. I said to the woman, ‘Leave me by myself, and take the dog with you.’ They went out, and left me alone in the room. I sat looking at the pillar of mist, hovering opposite to me.

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It lengthened slowly, until it reached to the ceiling. As it lengthened, it grew bright and luminous. A time passed, and a shadowy appearance showed itself in the centre of the light. Little by little, the shadowy appearance took the outline of a human form. Soft brown eyes, tender and melancholy, looked at me through the unearthly light in the mist. The head and the rest of the face broke next slowly on my view. Then the figure gradually revealed itself, moment by moment, downward and downward to the feet. She stood before me as I had last seen her, in her purplemerino dress, with the black-silk apron, with the white handkerchief tied loosely round her neck. She stood before me, in the gentle beauty that I remembered so well; and looked at me as she had looked when she gave me her last kiss—when her tears had dropped on my cheek. I fell on my knees at the table. I stretched out my hands to her imploringly. I said, ‘Speak to me—O, once again speak to me, Jéromette.’ Her eyes rested on me with a divine compassion in them. She lifted her hand, and pointed to the photograph on my desk, with a gesture which bade me turn the card. I turned it. The name of the man who had left my house that morning was inscribed on it, in her own handwriting. I looked up at her again, when I had read it. She lifted her hand once more, and pointed to the handkerchief round her neck. As I looked at it, the fair white silk changed horribly in colour— the fair white silk became darkened and drenched in blood. A moment more—and the vision of her began to grow dim. By slow degrees, the figure, then the face, faded back into the shadowy appearance that I had first seen. The luminous inner light died out in the white mist. The mist itself dropped slowly downwards—floated a moment in airy circles on the floor—vanished. Nothing was before me but the familiar wall of the room, and the photograph lying face downwards on my desk.

X The next day, the newspapers reported the discovery of a murder in London. A Frenchwoman was the victim. She had been killed by a wound in the throat. The crime had been discovered between ten and eleven o’clock on the previous night.

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TAMAR HELLER (ESSAY DATE 1992) SOURCE: Heller, Tamar. “Becoming an Author in 1848: History and the Gothic in the Early Works of Wilkie Collins.” In Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, pp. 38-57. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. In the following excerpt, Heller asserts that Collins developed his later Gothic style in his earlier, non-Gothic, works.

Wilkie Collins’ first work, published in 1848 when he was twenty-four, was a biography of his father, the respected painter and Royal Academician William Collins. In contrast to the matrilineal tradition of the female Gothic, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins is a monument to the male artist that celebrates the bond between father and son. Chronicling William’s Franklinesque rise from poverty to prosperity through unrelenting industry, Collins eulogizes his father as an exemplary family man and, above all, an empowering predecessor. The Memoirs were, however, an anomaly in the career their publication launched. Not only was Collins to turn from writing biography to writing fiction, but the filial piety of the Memoirs was to be replaced by a melodramatic Gothicism that would have shocked the father who reportedly avoided in his painting all that was “coarse, violent, revolting, fearful” 1 — everything, in other words, that came to be associated with his son’s art. The Memoirs, then, can be seen as a generic dead end for Collins, as can his first novel, Antonina (1850), a bustling historical epic in the style of Scott and Bulwer-Lytton. Yet these often neglected early works have an important place in Collins’ oeuvre as fictions of origins in which he interrogates the sources of his art and experiments with representational strategies. Most significant, the Memoirs and Antonina draft the kind of plot that was to become characteristic of Collins’ later and more mature work from Basil onward, in which a narrative about literary authority is cast as a story about gender and, in particular, as a family romance in which the father is invested with the social and artistic power from which the mother is excluded. In Basil, the son who is the figure for the emergent bourgeois artist defies the authority of his father and is subsequently disinherited. The plot concerning rebellion against the father is already embedded in the early works that are the focus of this chapter, but it is complicated by a

nostalgia for the patriarchal power beginning to decline in the Memoirs and dramatically waning in the novel about the Fall of Rome, home of the paterfamilias. As I suggested above, the figure of William Collins looms large in the Memoirs as an image for masculine authority and as the Romantic predecessor, since he not only was a friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge, but also practiced in his landscapes a Romantic fidelity to Nature. Yet the father’s Romanticism (like that of Wordsworth and Coleridge in their later years) was of a conservative variety that eschewed political radicalism in favor of “Toryism” (II, 55). If the Memoirs were a dead end for Collins, it was because the work suggested the end of the (paternal) line for this Romanticism as a form of art worthy of the son’s emulation, not only because he was more liberal than his father but also because William’s conservative philosophy no longer had validity in the politically stormy world of the 1830s and 1840s. Collins declared in a brief autobiographical sketch written in the early 1860s, “An author I became in the year 1848,”2 and his early works are about what it meant to launch an artistic career in the period culminating in the European revolutions of that year, but beginning in England with the movement for Chartist reform that Collins refers to in the Memoirs and represents in his historical narrative in Antonina. Becoming an author in 1848 suggests an oedipal narrative in which the son can produce only once he has acknowledged, through the publication of the Memoirs, the death of his Tory father. Yet even as the Memoirs, and particularly Antonina, which is more explicitly about defying the father’s rules, show how Collins departs from William’s example, they are also pervaded by a sense of the newfound absence of paternal authority—a loss figured in his first novel as a crisis of male power that will become pronounced rather than diminished in the later fictions. This narrative about a crisis of male power is really about a crisis of definition, in which the post-Romantic and bourgeois male writer attempts to define his own authority in the absence of the father’s. The fall of the father’s authority is connected in turn with the rise of a hitherto repressed maternal or feminine power that, in a way similar to the fictions discussed in [chapter one of Dead Secrets] is associated both with revolution and with the Gothic. It is in fact Collins’ uneasy relation to the Gothic, which comes to inspire his art, that forms the major generic and ideological tension of Antonina, a novel in which patriarchal Rome is besieged by the Gothic army that is embodied in

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2a monstrous female figure of ressentiment. In this narrative, as would become more evident in such later novels as Basil and The Woman in White, Collins is simultaneously attracted to the rebellion associated with the feminine and repulsed by it, as he seeks to constitute an aesthetic authority structured by the ideology of bourgeois manliness. . . . . .

Antonina: The Invasion of the Gothic After he had finished eulogizing his father as patriarch and predecessor, Collins returned to the “classical romance”3 he had interrupted to write the Memoirs. In doing so, he turned from a narrative in praise of the father to one about rebellion against fathers. In Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome, published in 1850, the Roman paterfamilias Numerian, an ascetic bent on reforming the corruptions of the early Church, discovers his daughter Antonina hiding a lute, which she has been playing despite his commands that she avoid sensual pleasures. Smashing the instrument to pieces, he orders her to her room, where she is visited that night by Vetranio, the dissolute young aristocrat who gave her the lute and who forces this clandestine entrance in order to seduce her. In the midst of this scene, Antonina is again discovered by her puritanical father, who incorrectly assumes that she has been succumbing to temptation rather than virtuously resisting it. Dramatically disinheriting her, he exiles her from his house, thus thrusting her into the events surrounding the Fall of Rome and, figuratively, into the tumultuous history that lurks behind the stately facade of the Memoirs. Collins himself drew the parallel between the events of antiquity in Antonina and the type of contemporary “fierce political contention” he alludes to at the end of the Memoirs. In a letter to Richard Bentley, the editor who accepted Antonina, he referred to the revolutionary events of 1848, and especially to the siege of Rome that followed: “I have thought it probable that such a work might not inappropriately be offered for your inspection, while recent occurrences continue to direct public attention particularly on Roman affairs.”4 In making such analogies between his own world and that of the past, Collins had many antecedents. The nineteenth-century historical novel, developed most influentially by Scott, was often a vehicle for encoding responses to contemporary events. Moreover, the subgenre of historical fiction to which Antonina belongs— the novel about the decline of empire—was a

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particularly popular way of representing, as Lee Sterrenburg argues, “anatomies of failed revolutions” in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.5 The details of the siege of Rome in Antonina could have been influenced by accounts of the events of 1848-49, but the novel is more generally inspired by the idea of revolution itself, since Collins had started it prior to 1848. In particular, the portrait of Roman society in Antonina recalls how the class-stratified British society of the 1830s was startled by the emergence of the Chartist movement, which suggested the possibility of a new English revolution. The setting of the novel, indeed, illustrates the scene Collins described in the Memoirs where, during the “social and political convulsions” accompanying Reform Bill agitation in the 1830s, the “noble and wealthy,” threatened by the “popular revolution” symbolically mirrored by the “mysterious pestilence” of cholera, had “little time . . . to attend to the remoter importance of the progress of national Art” (I, 344-45). Antonina begins with the Roman aristocracy, an Epicurean and “effeminate” lot,6 reluctantly but rapidly engulfed by the famine and plague overwhelming the city during the blockade of Rome by the Goths. The artist-figure Vetranio, the brilliant but debauched poet who gives Antonina her lute, is an image for the artistic and social decadence precipitating the Fall of Rome. Collins’ diagnosis of the excesses of the Roman elite is reminiscent of the portraits in such other Victorian narratives of the corrupt ancien régime before the French Revolution as Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837) and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859). The Goths at the gate in Antonina externalize the forces within Roman society that resist the venal tyranny of rulers called “the oppressors of the world” (375). Upper-class luxury and cruelty are juxtaposed with hints of covert lower-class mutiny and ressentiment, and the narrator claims that the “dangerous and artificial” position of the “poorer classes” was “one of the most important of the internal causes of the downfall of Rome” (76). In the context of this political allegory, Collins’ portrayal of the Fall of Rome tells a different story from the Memoirs of what it means to become an author in 1848. The biography clings to the image of the father as predecessor, even as it suggests that his art is no longer viable in 1848. Antonina, however, is a novel about how, amid a “world-wide revolution” (341), the power of fathers has come to lack meaning for the emergent artist, who is now aligned with the forces of rebel-

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This oedipal narrative, however, is complicated by the sex change that transforms the portrait of the artist as a young man into the portrait of the artist as a young girl. Making the artist into a daughter revises the patrilineal plot of the Memoirs, in which the son inherits the father’s artistic power. To feminize the figure for the son, in fact, hyperbolically underscores his alienation from the father’s art; when Antonina is expelled from her father’s house, she is cast out from the entire patriarchal tradition represented by the Fathers of the early Church who are Numerian’s inspiration. In the absence of a masculine tradition, the artist is aligned with a feminine one that resurrects the figure of the mother repressed in the Memoirs, even if only to associate her with illegitimacy and exclusion from authority. By playing the lute, Antonina becomes connected in her father’s eyes with her dead mother (a Spaniard, a foreigner), whom she dimly remembers singing to her “hour after hour, in her cradle” (122). Since Antonina’s mother was unfaithful to her father, this feminine tradition is linked not only to art but also to adultery; as Numerian says when he discovers Vetranio in his daughter’s room, “her mother was a harlot before her!” (195). This association of feminine art with actual or presumed sexual fall implies that the feminine tradition is a renegade one that represents rebellion against the father’s law. Such feminine rebellion, although it switches the sex of the child protagonist in the oedipal plot, retains that plot’s emphasis on a struggle with the father. Still, Antonina’s rebellion, unlike her mother’s, is of the most mild-mannered kind, since she is neither a harlot nor defiant after her brutal treatment by her father; her greatest desire, in fact, is to be reconciled with him. In this case, then, femininity

ABOUT THE AUTHOR GERALDINE JEWSBURY ON THE BEAUTY OF THE MOONSTONE

[When readers of The Moonstone] have read to the end, we recommend them to read the book over again from the beginning, and they will see, what on a first perusal they were too engrossed to observe, the carefully elaborate workmanship, and the wonderful construction of the story; the admirable manner in which every circumstance and incident is fitted together, and the skill with which the secret is kept to the last; so that even when all seems to have been discovered there is a final light thrown upon people and things which give them a significance they had not before. The “epilogue” of The Moonstone is beautiful. It redeems the somewhat sordid detective element, by a strain of solemn and pathetic human interest. Few will read of the final destiny of The Moonstone without feeling the tears rise in their eyes. SOURCE: Jewsbury, Geraldine. “New Novels: The Moonstone: A Romance.” The Athenaeum, no. 2126 (25 July 1868): 106.

represents not so much an alternative form of artistic power to the father’s as it does powerlessness and vulnerability. Not only does Antonina become an icon of terrified passivity (she spends vast portions of the novel either frightened or asleep), but she soon ceases to be a figure for the artist, preserving a fragment of her smashed lute but never again playing it. In this sense, transforming the artist into a daughter minimizes the extent of the rebellion against the father, since she leaves his house only to be immediately transferred to the protection of another male figure. Wandering accidentally into the Gothic camp, Antonina is shielded by Hermanric, a young warrior, who swiftly falls in love with her. Antonina and “Her Man” are then exemplars of an embryonic domesticity that provides a private haven in a heartless world: “While a world-wide revolution was concentrating its hurricane forces around them . . . they could . . . completely forget the stormy outward

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lion against established hierarchies. The expulsion of Antonina from her father’s house for insubordination (her presumed sexual fall figures her fall into art) is the darker narrative of familial conflict that the filial piety of the Memoirs papers over. With Numerian recalling, as Nuel Pharr Davis points out, the harsher and more intolerant qualities of William Collins,7 Antonina spells out the oedipal narrative, hinted at in the father’s biography, in which the transgressive child becomes an artist by being thrust out of the father’s house into an atmosphere of turbulent historical change. Such a narrative associates the father with the outmoded aristocracy the revolution replaces, not inappropriately since, although William Collins is portrayed as the heroic bourgeois in the Memoirs, his patrons were largely aristocratic.

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world, in themselves” (341). This domestic ideal represents the new bourgeois ideology that rises, phoenix-like, from the fall of the aristocracy.8 Hermanric in particular emerges as a figure for the bourgeois manhood who, by controlling women within domesticity, is an alternative to the other classes, which are either too emasculated (the effeminate aristocracy) or too emasculating (the lower classes who revolt against those above them). Early in the novel, Collins ecstatically prophesies the rise of the middle classes following a vignette in which a stalwart Roman farmer vehemently denounces the aristocratic “tyrants” whose “rank had triumphed over my industry” (83): By this time he had lashed himself into fury. His eyes glared, his cheeks flushed, his voice rose. Could he then have seen the faintest vision of the destiny that future ages had in store for the posterity of the race that now suffered throughout civilized Europe, like him—could he have imagined how, in after years, the “middle class,” despised in his day, was to rise to privilege and power; to hold in its just hands the balance of the prosperity of nations; to crush oppression and regulate rule; to soar in its mighty flight above thrones, and principalities, and ranks and riches, apparently obedient, but really commanding— could he but have foreboded this, what a light must have burst upon his gloom, what a hope must have soothed him in his despair! (83-84)

This paean to the messianic middle class accumulates clauses with a rhetorical feverishness that echoes the farmer’s outburst. The bourgeois man thus seems to be allowed the rebellion against the ancien régime (“apparently obedient, but really commanding”) denied to both the daughter Antonina and the insolent lower classes. Yet Hermanric, the novel’s principal figure for this emergent bourgeois manhood, is rendered singularly powerless. Although in the passage following the farmer’s speech Collins synecdochically compares the bourgeoisie to “just hands,” Hermanric’s hands become immobilized. To punish him for his transgression in protecting his Roman enemy Antonina rather than killing her, Hermanric’s angry sister Goisvintha severs the tendons in his hand with a knife. That he is shortly afterward slain as a deserter by a posse of vengeful Huns adds an appropriate finale to this symbolic castration. The eruption of the sister into the scene of proto-domesticity between Antonina and Hermanric points both to Goisvintha’s importance in the novel and to the energy with which she disrupts its conventions. Literally female Gothic,

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she also figuratively signals the invasion of the Gothic genre into Collins’ art. In the most obvious sense, her crazed desire to revenge her family, massacred by the Romans, recalls the obsessed melodramatic figures in the Gothic tradition. Goisvintha evokes Gothic conventions in a general way, but through her the genre also is associated more specifically with images of feminine power and violence. To explain her “mysterious and powerful influence” over her brother (217), Collins emphasizes how Gothic culture is structured around women’s position as priests and seers, a “remarkable ascendency of the woman over the man” (215). In her first scene with Hermanric in the novel, indeed, it appears as if she had “changed sexes” (20) with her brother; the phallic woman, she seizes the knives and swords he will not wield against Antonina in an attempt to use them herself. Throughout the novel, the narrative voice disapprovingly comments on Goisvintha’s usurpation of the male role: she is “harsh and unwomanly” (213), the “unappeasable and unwomanly Goisvintha” (381), who speaks in a “broken, hoarse, and unfeminine” voice (23). This emphasis on Goisvintha’s rebellion against gender roles links her to her Roman enemy Antonina (whom at one point she stabs with her ever-ready knife) as an embodiment of the daughter’s covert rebellion against her father. In this position as doppelgänger, Goisvintha recalls the prominence of such doubles in the Gothic tradition, while also, more importantly, evoking the genre’s representation of revolution. In Antonina, the Gothic gives Collins a language for figuring revolution, even as it aligns that language with the feminine. Goisvintha is the novel’s figure for revolution; an early version of Dickens’ Madame Defarge (for whom she may have been a model),9 she seethes with ressentiment against Roman tyrants. Her iconic embodiment of the monstrous mother (it is the death of her children that fuels her outrage) recalls Carlyle’s image of the “insurrection of women” during the French Revolution as an uprising of mothers, “Judiths” and “Menads” defined by their power to mutilate and disempower men, as Goisvintha does to Hermanric.1 0 Goisvintha’s feminine “insurrection” again ties her to Antonina, for if the female Goth is a rebellious mother, Antonina is connected through her mother with a tradition of feminine revolt against the father’s law. Whereas the rise of the feminine rebellious energy that Goisvintha represents precipitates the waning of patriarchal

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This exclusion of history has the paradoxical effect of making the novel subtitled “The Fall of Rome” elide that event. Concluding the story after the first blockade of Rome by the Goths, the narrator turns from the image of Antonina and her father mourning over Hermanric’s grave to ask: Shall we longer delay in the farmhouse garden? No! For us, as for Vetranio, it is now time to depart! While peace still watches round the walls of Rome; while the hearts of the father and daughter still repose together in security after the trials that have wrung them, let us quit the scene! Here, at last, the narrative that we have followed over a dark and stormy tract, reposes on a tranquil field; and here let us cease to pursue it! So the traveler who traces the course of a river, wanders through the day among the rocks and precipices that lead onward from its troubled source; and, when the evening is at hand, pauses and rests where the banks are grassy and the stream is smooth. (656)

The transitory nature of this final scene (“while peace still watches round the walls of Rome”) reminds the reader that this domestic sunniness is soon to be interrupted, and perhaps destroyed, by the “dark and stormy” history it holds only imperfectly at bay. In terms of Antonina’s representation of 1848, such an ending is in one sense appropriate. By

concluding the novel after the Goths’ first blockade, the “world-wide revolution” of Rome’s fall is still in the process of happening, just as, presumably, social conditions were ripe for revolutionary movements, even though the 1848 revolution did not travel to England. Still, the narrator’s “No!” after he asks if he should linger in Rome recalls what Georg Lukács referred to as the “denial of history” in bourgeois literature following 1848. Surveying the historical novel after Scott, Lukács examines how the bourgeoisie, who had portrayed themselves prior to 1848 as revolutionary heroes in a drama of historical “progress,” react to the threat of proletarian uprisings that contest their power as much as that of the upper classes. The form that this bourgeois reaction takes after 1848, Lukács argues, is to elide the representation of history as a type of rebellion of one class against another, dwelling instead on narratives that suggest the inevitability of bourgeois hegemony.1 1 Some recent critics have adopted and elaborated on Lukács’ theory to trace how literature uses domestic ideology as a particularly powerful means of naturalizing bourgeois authority in the 1848 period. In his study of the English historical novel, Nicholas Rance locates 1848 as the moment of a shift from the historical fiction of Scott and Bulwer-Lytton to domestic fiction that normalizes bourgeois ideology.1 2 A more detailed history of this shift is provided by Nancy Armstrong, who underscores the separation between political themes and domestic ones that became pronounced in English fiction by the 1840s. As Armstrong argues, novels of the 1840s imply that the world of politics should be isolated from domesticity, even as they suggest that struggles between classes can be regulated in the same way as rebellions within families.1 3 By moving, at the end of Antonina, beyond history to take refuge in a patently fragile domesticity, Collins both participates in this narrative economy and points to its inherent weakness. Although Antonina embodies the energy of revolution and rebellion in female characters and then silences them, this maneuver does not restore male authority over the family, history, or the narrative itself: Numerian is senescent and powerless, and Hermanric is dead. Moreover, the conclusion of Antonina does not solve the problem of Collins’ own literary authority, of his becoming an author in 1848. The novel that rejects the law of the father imagines art and rebellion as the provenance of female figures, who are in turn contained and circumscribed. In this novel

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power—during the course of the novel the rigidly ascetic Numerian becomes weak and senile—it poses an even more significant threat to the new bourgeois order signified by the domesticity of Hermanric and Antonina. In this bourgeois ideology, woman is not a rebellious but a submissive partner, a solace amid the storms of history (surely it is appropriate that Goisvintha stabs Antonina in the throat, as if to emblematize this type of silencing). Goisvintha, however, is sacrificed— quite literally—to restore domesticity. Captured by the demented Ulpius, who is obsessed with reviving the cult of the pagan gods, she is offered to them, as if in parody of her own phallic energy, by being impaled on a large sword. Yet Goisvintha’s violent chastisement, which excises both feminine power and the Gothic energy that figures it, ultimately excludes history itself from the novel. After the deaths of both the female Goth and her crazed assailant, the energy of the historical narrative dissipates, allowing for the reconciliation of Antonina with her repentant father and the reestablishment of domesticity, albeit (since Hermanric is dead) in an impotent and desexualized form.

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about the invasion of the Gothic, the power concentrated in the figure of Goisvintha represents the narrative energy of the Gothic that invades Collins’ art even as, in this revolutionary moment, he turns farther away from the father’s example. The attempt to exorcise the Gothic or to hold it at bay anticipates the narrative pattern that would become more pronounced in the novels that follow Antonina, in which a crisis of power for the male artist is linked with the rise of a female power associated with or figured by the Gothic. The male artist’s efforts to ally himself with or to contain the power of these female and Gothic figures form the major narrative tension of Collins’ later fictions. In Antonina, however, these tensions are resolved only by an evasion of closure that suggests an inability to tell the narrative of 1848. Although the novel figures the waning of the patriarchal power eulogized in the Memoirs, at this early moment in his career Collins could not imagine an alternative image of either male or female authority.

Notes 1. W. Wilkie Collins, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A., With Selections from His Journals and Correspondence (1848; reprint, Wakefield, W. Yorkshire: EP Publishing, 1978), II, 311. All references will be to this edition, a facsimile of the original two-volume edition, and are cited by both volume and page. Since Collins dropped the initial “W.” in most of the books he published after the Memoirs, I refer to him in all subsequent citations of his works as Wilkie Collins. 2. Wilkie Collins, “Memorandum, Relating to the Life and Writings of Wilkie Collins” (1862), in Morris L. Parrish and Elizabeth V. Miller, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade: First Editions (with a Few Exceptions) in the Library at Dormy House, Pine Valley, New Jersey (London, 1940; reprint, New York; Franklin, 1968), 4. This brief autobiographical sketch is printed in its entirety on pp. 4-5. 3. The phrase is Collins’, from his “Memorandum,” in Parrish and Miller, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, 4. 4. Wilkie Collins to Richard Bentley, 30 August 1849, quoted in Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and His Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship (New York: AMS Press, 1982), 68-69. 5. See Lee Sterrenburg, “Mary Shelley’s The Last Man: Anatomies of Failed Revolutions,” in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Monster, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 326-27, where he discusses the numerous “post-Napoleonic works of literature and painting which shared analogous themes of the end of the race or the end of empire.” An early pre-Napoleonic example of this type of work is Volney’s Ruins of Empire (1791), which the monster hears Felix and Safie reading in Frankenstein; a later example is Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), probably a source for Antonina.

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6. Wilkie Collins, Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome, vol. 17 of The Works of Wilkie Collins (New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, [1900]), 38. All references will be to this edition and are cited by page in the text. 7. Davis, Life of Wilkie Collins, 44. 8. There is one quite bizarre scene that underscores the importance of domestic ideology in Antonina while simultaneously pushing it into the realm of Gothic horror. When the decadent Vetranio holds his “Banquet of Famine,” during which selected aristocrats and their lackies propose to commit mass suicide by drinking themselves to death, he places in a curtained alcove the body of a woman he found on the street, “propped up on a high black throne” with her arms “artifically supported” and “stretched out as if in denunciation over the banqueting-table” (501). This black humor is meant to emphasize, with Vetranio’s characteristic cynical satire, the presence of mortality and the Roman’s impending doom. When one of the plebeian guests, the hunchbacked and sinister Reburrus, rises to toast the figure Vetranio calls the “mighty mother” of “mystic revelations” (501), he realizes with horror that she is in fact his mother, whom he had spurned when she reproached him for his neglect. Overwhelmed with repentance, Reburrus collapses, repeating hypnotically “MY MOTHER! MY MOTHER!” (504). Thus although the figure of the mother here is indeed “mighty,” an icon of violated domesticity that enforces that ideology, she is also a Gothic image that terrorizes men, much as does that emasculating female Goth, Goisvintha, whose role I discuss later in this chapter. 9. Dickens’ portrait of Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities may have been influenced by Collins’ Goisvintha, since he could have read Antonina either when it first appeared (he had subscribed to the Memoirs on their publication) or later, when he and Collins were more closely associated. Although Dickens’ portrait of the revolutionary woman, like Collins’, was surely also influenced by Carlyle’s revision of Burke in The French Revolution, there are many specific similarities between Madame Defarge and Goisvintha. Both women are consumed by the desire to revenge their families (Madame Defarge even comes with her own sidekick, the Vengeance), and both egg on vacillating men (Hermanric, Ernest Defarge) who shrink from killing their female enemies. 10. See Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, in Works (Boston: Centennial Memorial Edition, [1904]), vol. I, chap. 4 (“The Menads”), 243: “descend, O mothers; descend, ye Judiths, to food and revenge!” 11. See Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (1937), trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, with an introduction by Fredric Jameson (1963; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), especially 171-250. 12. See Rance, The Historical Novel and Popular Politics (New York: Barnes, 1975), chap. 1, “The Historical Novel after Scott,” 37-62. 13. In general, her Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) charts the rise of this representational strategy; see in particular the chapter “History in the House of Culture,” 161-202.

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TITLE COMMENTARY The Woman in White DUBLIN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE (REVIEW DATE FEBRUARY 1861) SOURCE: “Recent Popular Novels: The Woman in White.” Dublin University Magazine 57, no. 338 (February 1861): 200-04. In the following excerpt, the critic offers a negative assessment of The Woman in White.

[In The Woman in White] the spirit of modern realism has woven a tissue of scenes more wildly improbable than the fancy of an average idealist would have ventured to inflict on readers beyond their teens. Mr. W. Collins has for some years been favourably known to the general reader as a painstaking manufacturer of stories, short or long, whose chief merit lies in the skilful elaboration of a startling mystery traceable to some natural cause, but baffling all attempts to solve it until the author himself has given us the right clue. Some praise is also due to him for the care with which these literary puzzles are set off by a correct if not very natural style, a pleasing purity of moral tone, and a certain knack of hitting the more superficial traits of character. When we have said all we can for him, we have said nothing that would entitle him to a higher place among English novelists, than the compiler of an average schoolhistory would enjoy among English historians. . . . [Take the plot away from The Woman in White,] and there is nothing left to examine. There is not one lifelike character: not one natural dialogue in the whole book. Both hero and heroine are wooden, commonplace, uninteresting in any way apart from the story itself. . . . What character his personages have, the author prides himself on bringing out in a way which other novelists will do well not to imitate. If they neither say nor do aught characteristic on their own account, yet in connexion with the story most of them have a good deal to write about themselves or about each other. This, indeed, forms the main peculiarity of the book. . . . [As Collins claims in his preface:] “The story of the book is told throughout by the characters of the book,” each of them in turn taking up the wondrous tale at the point where his or her shadow falls most invitingly across the scene. . . . What movement the story has could have been imparted by much simpler means; and

Title page of The Woman in White, 1860.

we would rather have seen the characters developed in the usual way, than by a process about as credible and straightforward as that employed by the spirits who are supposed to move our drawingroom tables. . . . But the attempt to combine newness of form and substance with reality of treatment has led to failure of a still more glaring kind. Throughout the book circumstances grotesque or improbable meet you at every turn. You are bidden to look at scenes of real modern life, described by the very persons who figured therein, and you find yourself, instead, wandering in a world as mythical as that portrayed on the boards of a penny theatre or in the pages of a nursery tale.

MARGARET OLIPHANT (ESSAY DATE MAY 1862) SOURCE: Oliphant, Margaret. “Sensation Novels.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 91, no. 559 (May 1862): 564-84. In the following excerpt, Oliphant discusses sensation novels and praises The Woman in White as an outstanding effort in the genre.

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Ten years ago the world in general had come to a singular crisis in its existence. The age was lost in self-admiration. We had done so many things that nobody could have expected a century before—we were on the way to do so many more, if common report was to be trusted. We were about inaugurating the reign of universal peace in a world too deeply connected by links of universal interest ever to commit the folly of war again—we had invented everything that was most unlikely, and had nothing before us but to go on perfecting our inventions, and, securing all the powers of nature in harness, to do all manner of peaceable work for us like the giants in the children’s story. What a wonderful difference in ten years! Instead of linking peaceful hands, and vowing to study war no more, we have turned Industry away from her vaunted work of putting a girdle round the world, and set her to forge thunderbolts in volcanic din and passion. In that momentous interval great wars have begun and ended, and fighting has come into fashion throughout the palpitating earth. We who once did, and made, and declared ourselves masters of all things, have relapsed into the natural size of humanity before the great events which have given a new character to the age. Though we return with characteristic obstinacy and iteration to the grand display of wealth and skill which in 1851 was a Festival of Peace, we repeat the celebration with very different thoughts. It is a changed world in which we are now standing. If no distant sound of guns echoes across seas and continents upon our ears as we wander under the South Kensington domes, the lack of the familiar sound will be rather disappointing than satisfactory. That distant roar has come to form a thrilling accompaniment to the safe life we lead at home. On the other side of the Atlantic, a race blasée and lost in universal ennui has bethought itself of the grandest expedient for procuring a new sensation; and albeit we follow at a humble distance, we too begin to feel the need of a supply of new shocks and wonders. Those fell Merrimacs and Monitors, stealing forth with a certain devilish invulnerability and composure upon the human ships and men to be made fire and carnage of, are excitement too high pitched for comfort; but it is only natural that art and literature should, in an age which has turned to be one of events, attempt a kindred depth of effect and shock of incident. In the little reflected worlds of the novel and the drama the stimulant has acted strongly, and the result in both has been a significant and remarkable quickening of public interest. Shakespeare, even in the excitement of a

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new interpretation, has not crowded the waning playhouse, as has the sensation drama with its mock catastrophes; and Sir Walter himself never deprived his readers of their lawful rest to a greater extent with one novel than Mr Wilkie Collins has succeeded in doing with his Woman in White. We will not attempt to decide whether the distance between the two novelists is less than that which separates the skirts of Shakespeare’s regal mantle from the loftiest stretch of Mr Bourcicault. But it is a fact that the well-known old stories of readers sitting up all night over a novel had begun to grow faint in the public recollection. Domestic histories, however virtuous and charming, do not often attain that result—nor, indeed, would an occurrence so irregular and destructive of all domestic proprieties be at all a fitting homage to the virtuous chronicles which have lately furnished the larger part of our light literature. Now a new fashion has been set to English novel-writers. Whether it can be followed extensively, or whether it would be well if that were possible, are very distinct questions; but it cannot be denied that a most striking and original effort, sufficiently individual to be capable of originating a new school in fiction, has been made, and that the universal verdict has crowned it with success. Mr Wilkie Collins is not the first man who has produced a sensation novel. By fierce expedients of crime and violence, by diablerie of divers kinds, and by the wild devices of a romance which smiled at probabilities, the thing has been done before now. The higher class of American fiction, as represented by Hawthorne, attempts little else. In that strange hybrid between French excitement and New England homeliness, we recognise the influence of a social system which has paralysed all the wholesome wonders and nobler mysteries of human existence. Hectic rebellion against nature—frantic attempts by any kind of black art or mad psychology to get some grandeur and sacredness restored to life—or if not sacredness and grandeur, at least horror and mystery, there being nothing better in earth or heaven; Mesmerism possibly for a make-shift, or Socialism, if perhaps it might be more worth while to turn ploughmen and milkmaids than ladies and gentlemen; or, if none of these would do, best to undermine life altogether, and find what creeping honours might be underground: here a Scarlet Letter and impish child of shame, there a snake-girl, horrible junction of reptile and woman. The result is no doubt a class of books abounding in sensation; but the effect is invariably attained by violent and illegitimate means, as fantastic in themselves

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tive personal shocks of surprise and excitement, has accomplished a far greater success than he who effects the same result through supernatural agencies, or by means of the fantastic creations of lawless genius or violent horrors of crime. When we are to see a murder visibly done before our eyes, the performers must be feeble indeed if some shudder of natural feeling does not give force to their exertions; and the same thing is still more emphatically the case when the spiritual and invisible powers, to which we all more or less do secret and unwilling homage, are actors in the drama. The distinguishing feature of Mr Wilkie Collins’ success is, that he ignores all these arbitrary sensations, and has boldly undertaken to produce effects as startling by the simplest expedients of life. It is this which gives to his book the qualities of a new beginning in fiction. There is neither murder, nor seduction, nor despair— neither startling eccentrics nor fantastic monsters in this remarkable story. A much more delicate and subtle power inspires its action. We cannot object to the means by which he startles and thrills his readers; everything is legitimate, natural, and possible; all the exaggerations of excitement are carefully eschewed, and there is almost as little that is objectionable in this highly-wrought sensation-novel, as if it had been a domestic history of the most gentle and unexciting kind. . . . The ordinary belief of the public, backed by recent experience, seems to be that there are few trades more easy than the writing of novels. Any man who entertains this opinion, would do well to take a backward glance over the early works of Mr Wilkie Collins. These productions, all of which have come into existence with elaborate prefaces, and expositions of a “purpose,” will prove to the reader that the Woman in White is not a chance success or caprice of genius, but that the author has been long engaged in preparatory studies, and that the work in question is really the elaborate result of years of labour. Academical sketches and studies from the life are not always interesting to the general spectator; nor are painters apt to exhibit them, by way of showing how much pains were necessary before the picture could be composed, and the figures duly set and draped; yet when the great work is complete, there is an unquestionable interest in the fragments of suggestion from which, one by one, the perfect composition grew. We will not inquire whether the Woman in White is a sufficiently great work to merit such an exposition; but every reader who thinks so has it in his power to study the portfolio of sketches by which the author measured his

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as they are contradictory to actual life. The Master of English fiction, Sir E. B. Lytton, has accomplished the same end, by magic and supernaturalism, as in the wild and beautiful romance of Zanoni. We will not attempt to discuss his last wonderful effort of this class, which is a species by itself, and to be judged only by special rules, which space debars us from considering. Of all the productions of the supernatural school, there is none more perfect in its power of sensation, or more entirely effective in its working out, than the short story of the ‘Haunted House,’ most thrilling of ghostly tales; but we cannot enter upon this school of fiction, which is distinct from our present subject. Mr Dickens rarely writes a book without an attempt at a similar effect by means of some utterly fantastic creation, set before his readers with all that detail of circumstance in which he is so successful. Amid all these predecessors in the field, Mr Wilkie Collins takes up an entirely original position. Not so much as a single occult agency is employed in the structure of his tale. Its power arises from no overstraining of nature:—the artist shows no love of mystery for mystery’s sake; he wastes neither wickedness nor passion. His plot is astute and deeply-laid, but never weird or ghastly; he shows no desire to tinge the daylight with any morbid shadows. His effects are produced by common human acts, performed by recognisable human agents, whose motives are never inscrutable, and whose line of conduct is always more or less consistent. The moderation and reserve which he exhibits; his avoidance of extremes; his determination, in conducting the mysterious struggle, to trust to the reasonable resources of the combatants, who have consciously set all upon the stake for which they play, but whom he assists with no weapons save those of quick wit, craft, courage, patience, and villany— tools common to all men—make the lights and shadows of the picture doubly effective. The more we perceive the perfectly legitimate nature of the means used to produce the sensation, the more striking does that sensation become. The machinery of miracle, on the contrary, is troublesome and expensive, and never satisfactory; a miraculous issue ought to come out of it to justify the miraculous means; and miraculous issues are at war with all the economy of nature, not to say that they are difficult of invention and hard to get credit for. A writer who boldly takes in hand the common mechanism of life, and by means of persons who might all be living in society for anything we can tell to the contrary, thrills us into wonder, terror, and breathless interest, with posi-

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strength. We confess that it has, up to a recent time, been a marvel to us what possible interest any human creature could be supposed to take in the motives which induced a rational man and tolerable writer to weave such a dreary web as the Dead Secret, or to commit to print and publicity such a revolting story as Basil. It appears, however, that the author knew what he was about; his last successful work has thrown a gleam of intelligibility even upon his prefaces, and it is with the respect due to persevering labour and difficulties overcome that we approach the book which shows how much he has profited by his probation. Let us not neglect such an opportunity for a moral. To judge this author by the portfolio of imperfect sketches which he liberally confided to the world before uncovering the picture for which they were made, nobody would have concluded him likely to open a new path for himself, or to produce a remarkable and thrilling effect by the most modest and subtle means. The sketches are often diffuse and washy—sometimes coarsely horrible—scarcely at all betraying that fine faculty of perception which can divine and seize upon the critical instant, neither too early nor too late, in which lies the whole pictorial force and interest of a lengthened scene. Mr Wilkie Collins has profited in the very highest degree by his preparatory labours. He has improved upon all his early works to an extent which proves in only too edifying and complete a way the benefits of perseverance and painstaking. The very excellence of the result tempts us to an ungracious regret. Would that those memoranda by which future generations may trace “the steps by which he did ascend,” had but been less confidingly intrusted to the public! Such a disclosure of all the beginnings and early essays of a successful career is possible only to literature. Other crafts keep their experiments out of sight. Authors alone have that ingenuous confidence in the world, and belief in its candour and kindness, which emboldens them to submit the first utterances of the muse to its great ear, and confide to it all the particulars of their progress. Fortunately, the confidence is rarely misplaced. When the hour arrives, and the man becomes famous, the indulgent world applauds his success without pausing to remind him of his failures. Let us follow the charitable example. Mr Wilkie Collins has made many a stumble on the laborious ascent; his progress upward has been jolting and unharmonious by time; but now that he has reached a height upon which he can pause and receive the congratulations of his friends, let not ours be the hand to throw his earlier imperfec-

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tions in his face. If he makes as much progress in time to come as he has done in the past, there is no predicting what future altitude may await the author of the Woman in White. The novel itself is too well known to call for anything like a critical review at our hands. We need not discuss over again so familiar a tale, or dwell upon the characters which are, all but Fosco, undeniably subordinate to the story, and to the delicate succession of sensations by which that story is set forth. Mr Wilkie Collins insists upon the fact that readers have written to him expressing their interest in “Laura,” and “Miss Halcombe,” and “Anne Catherick;” a fact, indeed, which it is very easy to account for, seeing that there could be no story but by means of these figures. But in reality the truth is, that one cares very little for these characters on their own account, and that Mr Hartright and Sir Percival Glyde and the rest are persons whom we regard with but the mildest interest so far as themselves are concerned. The distinguishing characteristic of the book (always excepting Fosco) is the power and delicacy of its sensation incidents; the simple manner in which they are brought out; generally the perfect naturalness of the fact, and always the extremely effective manner in which the critical moment and event strike into the tale, giving it a precision and distinctness which no other expedient could supply so well.

HENRY JAMES (ESSAY DATE 9 NOVEMBER 1865) SOURCE: James, Henry. “Miss Braddon.” The Nation 1, no. 19 (9 November 1865): 593-94. In the following excerpt, James lauds the realism in The Woman in White and maintains that Collins’s skill as an author sets the novel apart from ordinary sensation fiction.

[The Woman in White,] with its diaries and letters and its general ponderosity, was a kind of nineteenth century version of Clarissa Harlowe. Mind, we say a nineteenth century version. To Mr. Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors. This innovation gave a new impetus to the literature of horrors. . . . A good ghost-story, to be half as terrible as a good murder-story, must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life. . . . Less delicately terrible, perhaps, than the vagaries of departed spirits, but to the full as interesting, as the modern novel reader understands the word, are the numberless pos-

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Mr. Collins’s productions deserve a more respectable name [than sensation novel]. They are massive and elaborate constructions—monuments of mosaic work, for the proper mastery of which it would seem, at first, that an index and notebook were required. They are not so much works of art as works of science.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR T. S. ELIOT ON COLLINS AND CHARLES DICKENS

Dickens’s characters are real because there is no one like them; Collins’s because they are so painstakingly coherent and lifelike. Whereas Dickens often introduces a great character carelessly, so that we do not realize, until the story is far advanced, with what a powerful personage we have to do, Collins, at least in these two figures in The Woman in White, employs every advantage of dramatic effect. . . . And even if we refused to take Collins very seriously by himself, we can hardly fail to treat him with seriousness if we recognize that the art of which he was a master was an art which neither Charles Reade nor Dickens despised. You cannot define Drama and Melodrama so that they shall be reciprocally exclusive; great drama has something melodramatic in it, and the best melodrama partakes of the greatness of drama. The Moonstone is very near to Bleak House. . . . Collins’s novels suggest questions which no student of “the art of fiction” can afford to neglect. It is possible that the artist can be too conscious of his “art.” . . . We cannot afford to forget that the first— and not one of the least difficult—requirements of either prose or verse is that it should be interesting. SOURCE: Eliot, T. S. “Wilkie Collins and Dickens.” Times Literary Supplement (4 August 1927): 52526.

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sible forms of human malignity. Crime, indeed, has always been a theme for dramatic poets; but with the old poets its dramatic interest lay in the fact that it compromised the criminal’s moral repose. Whence else is the interest of Orestes and Macbeth? With Mr. Collins . . . the interest of crime is in the fact that it compromises the criminal’s personal safety. The play is a tragedy, not in virtue of an avenging deity, but in virtue of a preventive system of law; not through the presence of a company of fairies, but through that of an admirable organization of police detectives. Of course, the nearer the criminal and the detective are brought home to the reader, the more lively his “sensation.” They are brought home to the reader by a happy choice of probable circumstances; and it is through [his] skill in the choice of these circumstances—[his] thoroughgoing realism—that Mr. Collins . . . [has] become famous. . . .

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SUSAN M. GRIFFIN (ESSAY DATE JANUARY 2004) SOURCE: Griffin, Susan M. “The Yellow Mask, the Black Robe, and the Woman in White: Wilkie Collins, Anti-Catholic Discourse, and the Sensation Novel.” Narrative 12, no. 1 (January 2004): 55-73. In the following essay, Griffin analyzes Collins’s antiCatholic discourse in “The Yellow Mask” and The Black Robe, and argues that Collins transforms this pattern of rhetoric into sensational Gothic narrative in The Woman in White.

Summarizing the Gothic history of sensationalism, Patrick Brantlinger traces a movement from the religious to the secular: “By a kind of metaphoric sleight of hand, the Gothic romance has managed to make secular mystery seem like a version of religious mystery.” By the time of sensationalism, Brantlinger argues, there is “not even a quasi-religious content” (32). Without claiming that sensation novels are, as such, religious, I nonetheless want to suggest that anti-Catholicism can provide those masks, cloaks, and mysteries, ready-made, as it were.1 One way to achieve the sleight of hand by which the secular takes on a religious aura is by brandishing the narrative vestments and vestiges inherited from the Gothic. The secularized mysteries of sensationalism replaced religion in another sense as well. In an 1863 Quarterly Review article deploring sensationalism, John Murray complained that “A class of literature has grown up around us, usurping in many respects, intentionally or unintentionally, a portion of the preacher’s office, playing no inconsiderable part in moulding the minds and forming the habits and tastes of its generation; and doing so principally, we had almost said exclusively, by ‘preaching to the nerves’” instead of to judgment, as preachers should do (252). “To think of pointing a moral by stimulants of this kind,” Murray pronounces, “is like holding a religious service in a gin-palace” (262). While Murray mentions a few sensation novels that deal directly with religious subjects (e.g., Charles Maurice Davies’s Philip Paternoster: A Tractarian Love Story), his larger

The phrase “preaching to the nerves” not only captures sensationalism’s secularizing of religious rhetorical forms, but also indicates how sensationalism physicalizes ideology. Ann Cvetkovich has argued persuasively that sensationalism’s embodiment of social structures, its naturalizing of representations and their meanings, is importantly political (25).2 The techniques of sensationalism underscore narrative’s intimate and intricate dependence upon readerly affect. (“Think of her as you thought of the first woman who quickened your pulses within you that the rest of her sex has no art to stir. Let the kind, candid blue eyes meet yours, as they met mine, with the one matchless look that we both remember so well. . . . Take as her as the visionary nursling of your own fancy, and she will grow upon you, all the more clearly, as the living woman who dwells in mine,” Walter Hartright famously asserts, instructing Collins’s readers in the uses of sensory memory and association [50].) Individual Victorian reading experiences were, of course, diverse,3 but the majority of those readers who consumed Collins’s narratives would have shared a history of experience with anti-Catholic discourse. Reinforcing a set of polemical Protestant prejudices in their audience and presenting the Papacy as a cultural, political, and economic force in nineteenth-century Britain, fictions that borrow from anti-Catholic discourse play on readers’ fears, arousing their suspense and subsequent speculation. My argument, then, is not simply that the motifs of no-Popery found their way into sensation fiction (although they did), but that sensationalism’s narrative structures, forming and formed by the learned associations of its audience, are borrowed in part from antiCatholicism. Wilkie Collins, that most secular and sensational of nineteenth-century writers, is rarely thought of as a novelist of religious polemic. Yet in 1855 and again in 1881, Collins published two fictions that conform closely to the patterns of anti-Catholic narrative: “The Yellow Mask” (appearing first in Dickens’s Household Words and then in the 1856 collection After Dark) and The Black Robe (serialized in the Sheffield Independent

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point is that religious discourse informs the sensation novel less as content and more as form. The rhetorical persuasions of the pulpit are now displaced onto the pages of the sensation novel, and, counterintuitively, reading is more bodily than listening. These sensational sermons are exercises in repeated—eventually habitual— stimulation, “moulding minds, forming tastes and habits.”

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in England, Frank Leslie’s Magazine in the United States, and Canadian Monthly in Canada; published in three volumes by Chatto & Windus). Collins’s other writings on religion are sparse: a piece on the Carmelite convent in Cornwall titled “The Nuns of Magwan,” in Rambles Beyond Railways; “A Plea for Sunday Reform” for the left-wing Leader; a translation of Balzac’s story of priests and nuns, “The Midnight Mass,” published in Bentley’s Miscellany; and comments on Rome and “Romanism” in his letters. William Collins, Wilkie’s father, was a Tractarian who despised the Italian Catholicism that he encountered in Rome. He had hoped that Wilkie would attend Oxford and enter the Church—an astonishing instance of misplaced parental ambitions given the relentless unconventionality of his son. Yet, I want to argue that the conventions of religious polemic are at work in what we now perceive as Collins’s fictional innovations, particularly in his strategies for readerly engagement. Anti-Catholicism, which had been allied to the novel from its eighteenth-century beginnings in the work of Ann Radcliffe and other Gothic writers,4 persisted throughout most of the nineteenth century and manifested itself in characteristic fictional form.5 Its rhetoric, plots, imagery, and characters would have been familiar to Collins’s popular readership. Harriet Martineau, for one, recognized the formulae: she stopped writing for Household Words because of what she perceived as its anti-Catholic bias, manifested specifically in “The Yellow Mask.” In a letter to Charles Dickens, Martineau indignantly quoted from an advertisement for an American magazine’s reprint of the story: “‘the story is ingenious and fraught with considerable interest. The despicable course of “Father Rocco” pursued so stealthily for the pecuniary benefit of “holy mother church”; shows what stuff priestcraft is made.’” Martineau, like the American audience at which the advertisement was aimed, recognized standardized language of Protestant polemic—the quotation marks around “holy mother church,” the term “priestcraft.” She expostulated, “The last thing I am likely to do is to write for an anti-catholic publication; and least of all when it is anti-catholic on the sly” (422).6 Punch, always astute at spotting genres and types, identifies Collins as the writer of a “NoPopery” in a cartoon from January 1882: Collins is portrayed in Linley Sambourne’s caricature “As the Man in White doing Ink-and-Penance for Having Written The Black Robe.” What both the American advertisement and the Punch cartoon assume is precisely what Collins himself counted

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on: a set of audience expectations and recognitions regarding Roman Catholicism. Such trained audience reactions would have been particularly useful to a writer of sensation fiction, so named in part because of its insistent manipulation of readerly emotions. This essay looks at the functions of anti-Catholicism in two little-known Collins fictions and describes briefly the way that he reworks its standard elements in his most-read novel, The Woman in White. I suggest that in creating the genre of sensation fiction, Collins turns to what are already well-worn formulae. Tamar Heller’s Dead Secrets has shown how much Collins’s major works owe to the “female gothic” tradition that he draws on and distances himself from. Building on that insight, my study reads these three fictions as participating in and revising genres of anti-Catholicism. The yellow masks and black robes—the clichéd images that Henry James characterizes elsewhere as a “Scarlet Woman” who is “dressed out terribly in a table-cloth, and holds in her hands the drawing-room candlesticks” (Essays 862)7 —are transformed in Collins’s brilliant creation of a woman in white. Woman in white, black robe, yellow mask. With the exception of The Wreck of the Golden Mary, a Dickens Christmas tale to which Collins contributed, Collins never again used a color in a title. Primarily what the colors point to is that these texts are in some sense costume dramas. All three garments—dress, robe, and mask—serve as identifying covers: signals that the figure is both in disguise and playing a standard role. For example, “black robe” stands for “Jesuit”; the book’s first edition stressed the narrative’s use of associative iconography by filling the cover frame with a stylized black robe marked with the words “The Black Robe.” Two Punch cartoons for 1850 and 1851 display the polemical uses of costume, showing as well how the character types of antiCatholic discourse had become near-folkloric. Foregrounded in Collins’s titles, then, is his debt to generic plots and characters. In his 1863 critique Murray explains (and complains about) how such visual cues position sensation novels as interchangeable commodities.8 In the railway stalls, consumers are enticed by book covers showing A pale young lady in a white dress, with a dagger in her hand, evidently prepared for some desperate deed; or a couple of ruffians engaged in a deadly struggle; or a Red Indian in his war-paint; or, if the plot turns on smooth instead of violent villainy, a priest persuading a dying man to sign a

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In other words, the packaging of these goods relies on a now-familiar mechanism of consumer commodification: immediately recognizable “branding,” here by means of genre-specific depictions (think of the studies of dime novels by Bill Brown and romance fiction by Janice Radway). Genre is made visible. The reader knows what she is buying. At the same time, of course, variation must ensure that this is not a product previously purchased. (In the preface to the 1860 edition of The Woman in White, Collins himself maintained that the “two main elements in the attraction of all stories” are “the interest of curiosity, and the excitement of surprise” [646].) The secular sermon that is the sensation novel is, finally, a matter of economics; as Murray puts it, “No divine influence can be imagined as presiding over the birth of his [the sensation novelist’s] world, beyond the market-law of demand and supply” (252). The specific market uses of anti-Catholic discourse are suggested by the way it informs Collins’s travel piece “The Nuns of Magwan.” Rambles from Railways is, as its title implies, a trip back in time, away from modern technology and timetables, exploring “one of the remotest and most interesting corners of our old English soil” (2). Cornwall, with its “primitive population” and ancient legends, is at once an exoticized destination and the space of England’s past. Collins begins his visit to Magwan among the churchyard graves, proceeding to the “ancient” manor house, now converted to a convent, in which a group of twenty Carmelite nuns are immured. Cloistered nuns, and in particular the Carmelite order, held a particular fascination for nineteenthcentury Protestants. Paintings like Charles Allston Collins’s Convent Thoughts and John Everett Millais’s The Vale of Rest portrayed the cloistered nun cryptically as a figure of sublimated passion, claustration, and death (Casteras). And in both Benjamin Disraeli’s Lothair and Henry James’s The American, the female character who turns away from life and marriage to the death-in-life of the convent does so by joining the Carmelites.

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paper; or a disappointed heir burning a will; or a treacherous lover telling his flattering tale to some deluded maid or wife. The exigencies of railway traveling do not allow much time for examining the merits of a book before purchasing it; and the keepers of bookstalls as well as refreshment-rooms, find an advantage in offering their customers something hot and strong, something that may catch the eye of the hurried passenger, and promise temporary excitement to relieve the dulness of the journey. (253 emphasis mine)

Caricature published in Once a Week in 1873, of Wilkie Collins erecting a poster advertising his The Woman in White.

For Wilkie Collins, the Carmelite convent provides “a romance which we may still study, of a mystery which is of our own time” (144). Sounding like Nathaniel Hawthorne in the preface to The Marble Faun (“Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers need Ruin to make them grow” [3]), Collins seeks a means of infusing the present with mystery and finds it in the aura of ancient Rome: “Even to this little hidden nook, even to this quiet bower of Nature’s building, that vigilant and indestructible Papal religion, which defies alike hidden conspiracy and open persecution, has stretched its stealthy and far-spreading influence. Even in this remote corner of the remote west of England, among the homely cottages of a few Cornish peasants, the imperial Christianity of Rome has set up its sanctuary in triumph—a sanctuary not thrown open to dazzle and awe the beholder, but veiled in deep mystery behind gates that only open, like the fatal gates of the grace, to receive, but never to dismiss again to the world without” (144). This brief characterization of Roman Catholicism indicates its usefulness for sensationalism. With the phrase “Papal religion,” Collins seeks to trigger the British Protestant paranoia that sees Catholic conspiracies everywhere.9

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Like the Italian secret society that tracks Count Fosco across England and France, the Papacy represents an international power that is, importantly for Collins’s writerly strategies, both omnipresent and secret, thus inviting investigation. The sanctuary at Magwan, like the convent and the confessional in anti-Catholic polemic, provides a space for the audience’s “knowing” projection, allowing for the participatory reading that was to become so essential to sensation fiction, especially in its serial form. Collins’s emphasis throughout “The Nuns of Magwan” is on the nuns’ hidden status, on how their faces, forms, and even voices are concealed from the outside world. Dwelling on the nuns’ burial grounds and funeral rites, Collins analogizes the secrecy of convent life to that of the grave: “This is all—all of the lives, all of the deaths of the sisterhood at Lanhearne that we can ever know! The remainder must be conjecture. We have but the bare stern outline that has been already drawn—who shall venture, even in imagination, to colour and complete the picture which it darkly, yet plainly, indicates?” (149). Although Collins continues to argue that we should not attempt to imagine, and consequently to judge, the emotions of the nuns, his repeated use of rhetorical questions invites just such speculation. That is, his audience’s familiarity with the forms of antiCatholicism allows it to “colour and complete” the picture that the dark outlines of Roman Catholicism “plainly indicat[e].” “The Yellow Mask” also depends upon Collins’s audience’s recognition of standard formulae: “of what stuff priestcraft is made,” as the story’s American publishers promised. “The Yellow Mask” tells of a poor, virtuous Italian maid, Nanina, who is accompanied through the streets of Pisa by her big, ugly, mongrel dog, the comically named Scarammuccia. Nanina becomes the beloved of a wealthy Pisan nobleman, Fabio d’Ascoli. Interfering with their love is Father Rocco, a priest convinced that a large part of the d’Ascoli fortune rightfully belongs to the Church. When we first meet Father Rocco, he is using a mirror to spy on Nanina and Fabio; later he manages to separate the lovers, secreting the young girl in a house where she is watched continually. Father Rocco’s power comes not just from his secret network of operatives but also from the fact that he has trained his young parishioners in obedience. As part of his plan to enrich the Church, the priest manages to marry Fabio off to his niece. When she dies unexpectedly, Father Rocco’s plotting becomes more elaborate: among his machinations are the manufacture of the

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ghostly “Yellow Mask,” a figure dressed in the yellow fabric that decorated Fabio’s first wife’s apartments and whose mask conceals what looks to be the face of her corpse. In short, the priest attempts to scare the superstitious Fabio into submission to his will. The scheme fails, Father Rocco disappears, and Nanina and Fabio happily marry. The standard features of this story—the priest who plots to “return” riches to the Church through a combination of trickery and guilt, a Catholic system of spies, religious training in unquestioning obedience, the beloved young woman held incommunicado, the living corpse, the alliance of Roman Catholicism and superstition—are mitigated here by the relative mildness of Catholicism’s crimes. Unlike the sinister Jesuits who glide throughout much anti-Catholic fiction, this Italian priest is presented as generally virtuous and fair-minded, though willing to practice deception, not to mention enlisting the aid of a scheming, mercenary female prostitute in what he sees as the Church’s best interests. While Collins relies on Protestant preconceptions in this story, he is not yet “preaching to the nerves” of his audience. If, in Margaret Oliphant’s famous characterization of the woman in white’s hand, “Few readers will be able to resist the mysterious thrill of this sudden touch. The sensation is distinct and indisputable. The silent woman lays her hand upon our shoulder as well as upon that of Mr Walter Hartright” (118), the sight of the yellow mask raises scarcely a shudder.1 0 “The Yellow Mask,” set “about a century ago” in “the ancient city of Pisa” and narrated with an arch irony, positions its readers at a historical and cultural distance. The comic tone that Collins flirts with throughout the narrative can be seen in the lengthy description of the nearly insurmountable problem of finding thirty virtuous young women to serve as shepherdesses at the fancy-dress ball at which the Yellow Mask eventually appears. And that terrifying vision is, we should remember, clad, not unlike Henry James’s tablecloth-shrouded Scarlet Woman, in the bedroom curtains (setting the style for Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara). Indeed, when he republished the story in After Dark, a collection in which each tale is introduced by a framing story of origination, Collins attributed it to a wizened Italian professor who is writing, Casaubon-like, an unfinished multivolume work on “The Vital Principle.” Amidst the papers and books that overflow the professor’s study, is a mangy stuffed dog—Scarammuccia had been lovingly preserved by his mistress, and it is his history that turns out to be the tale of “The

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Unlike the half-mocking Gothic tale of “The Yellow Mask,” The Black Robe is both an astute psychological study and Collins’s most sustained attack on the Catholic Church. Like After Dark and The Woman in White, The Black Robe is a documentary narrative, incorporating manuscripts (diaries, letters, etc.) supposedly by several hands. The good and evil sides of “The Yellow Mask”’s Father Rocco are divided in this later novel. We get not one but two Jesuits—two Black Robes: the sincere young Father Penrose (who nonetheless falsely presents himself as the layman “Arthur Penrose”) and the cynical older Father Benwell, both of whom disguise their affiliations and intentions, a combination familiar to Victorian readers from, among other sources, Frances Trollope’s anti-Catholic Father Eustace, a Tale of the Jesuits. Collins’s narrative revolves around the conflict between Stella Eyrecourt and Father Benwell for, in her case, the love and, in his, the fortune of Lewis Romayne—the characters’ names hinting at their stereotypical narrative functions. “Would the priest or the woman win the day?” Collins’s narrator asks (124). Would Romayne be a faithful husband and father or would he “restore” his riches to the Catholic Church? Finally, at the behest of the Jesuit Superior, Romayne renounces his wife and enters the Catholic clergy. He becomes a powerful, indeed “fanatical,” preacher and an ambitious rising star in the Church hierarchy—a favorite of the Pope and selected for a cardinalship. However, he falls ill and, dying, realizes the wrongness of his retreat into the Catholic priesthood. He speaks three last “sacred” words: “Wife and Child” (446)—Collins countering Christ’s last words of renunciation and what Protestants saw as Catholic preoccupation with the Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell).1 1 Deathbed scenes in anti-Catholic fiction inevitably stage struggles over inheritance (church or family?) and test the truth of religion (the Protestant confident acceptance of death or terrified Catholic uncertainty?).1 2 Recognizing at last the “unnatural” wasted life of celibacy, Romayne affirms normative Victorian domesticity. The Black Robe can, in fact, be read as one of a specific group of sensational fictions published during the 1860s-1880s that depicted a triangulated relationship between husband, wife, and

priest. Writers like Eliza Lynn Linton, Robert Buchanan, and Emma Worboise describe Anglican clergymen who have become so entranced with High Church Ritualism that they are in danger of crossing over, with their spellbound flocks, to Rome. These novels become a site for discussion of the contemporary state of marriage in Britain.1 3 Like these fictions, The Black Robe attacks Catholic celibacy as deeply misogynist, as antipathetic to domesticity and family. Father Benwell cynically remarks that he has learned all about women in the confessional, a claim that would have resonated for Collins’s readers. The British public, clergy, and Parliament had reacted vociferously to the attempted reintroduction of auricular confession as a Church of England practice in the 1860s and 1870s, a scandal that peaked with the publication of a secret manual for confessors, The Priest in Absolution, in 1866 and 1870. In her study of Victorian women as “confessional subjects,” Susan Bernstein quotes W. J. Brockman’s midnineteenth-century Letter to the Women of England on the Confessional: “I know not another reptile in all animal nature so filthy, so much to be shunned and loathed, and dreaded by females, both married and single, as a Roman Catholic priest or bishop who practices the degrading and demoralizing office of Auricular Confession” (41). Father Benwell’s disgust for women marks him as just such a reptile: “I felt grateful to the famous Council which definitely forbade the priests of the Catholic Church to marry,” Father Benwell muses. “We might otherwise have been morally enervated by the weakness which degrades Romayne—and priests might have become instruments in the hands of women” (133-34 emphasis mine). Operative in what Collins sees as Catholic misogyny is also what he depicts as the homosocial, indeed, at times homoerotic, relations between men that comprise the Church hierarchy. The traditional Protestant critique of Catholic celibacy as fostering “unnatural” sexual attachments was intensified in nineteenth-century Britain by the seemingly “Papist” Oxford movement in the 1840s and Ritualism in the 1860s and 1870s—both of which proved attractive to the nation’s elite young men. “UnEnglish and unmanly,” these religious practices were thought to foster a hothouse homosexuality foreign to real Englishmen.1 4 What Collins represents in The Black Robe is the Jesuit Provincial’s cynical manipulation of such a system—his scheme to have the innocent but desirable Penrose attach Romayne to himself and thus Catholicism. “Why do you want him so much—when you have got

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Yellow Mask.” With this frame, Collins glances slyly at the hoary props that sustain his tale. Like the character from commedia del arte for whom he is named, Scarammuccia is a stock comic character whose exploits are knowingly expected by his audience.

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Me?” Stella asks vainly regarding Penrose (260), the intimate who addresses Romayne as “my more than friend—my brother in love—!” (312). “UnEnglish” too is the “Retreat” to which Father Benwell sends Romayne to separate him from his wife. Like the convent at Magwan, the Retreat is represented as a foreign enclave hidden in Protestant England. Entering this deliberately unassuming building, protected by a “high brick wall,” “The convert privileged to pass the gate left Protestant England outside, and found himself, as it were, in a new country” (335). Again, Collins echoes the polemical rhetoric of the day. In 1870, a Parliamentary Inquiry into Catholic “Conventual and Monastic Institutions” was instituted. Charles Newdegate, the inquiry’s primary sponsor, argued that inspections of these Catholic clerical enclaves were necessary because “There is a growing feeling that the Conventual and Monastic Institutions are being treated by the House of Commons as if they were exempt jurisdictions, subject to Papal Authority, but . . . exempt from the authority of Parliament” (qtd. in Arnstein 146). Newdegate had proposed such an inquiry repeatedly in the past, arguing that, by making themselves not only immune but actually invisible to English law, convents constituted foreign sovereign territories situated within Great Britain. By 1870, his colleagues agreed that these imported, extrajuridical institutions needed to come under government control. If The Black Robe reflects the religious and political controversies of its time, it also reveals how far Collins had come as a writer since “The Yellow Mask.”1 5 The haunting of Fabio by his wife’s ghost in the earlier fiction is reworked in The Black Robe into Romayne’s persecution by a mysterious voice blaming him as an “assassin” for his killing of a man in a duel. Collins moves beyond the crude, preliminary manipulation of Fabio’s guilt in “The Yellow Mask” and depicts the slow breaking down and remaking of Romayne’s sanity: Father Benwell “wound his way deeper and deeper into Romayne’s mind, with the delicate ingenuity of penetration, of which the practice of years had made him master” (351).1 6 The Jesuit’s infamous ability to control minds, depicted in novels ranging from Trollope’s Father Eustace to Eugene Sue’s Wandering Jew, is detailed step by step, helping to structure Collins’s plot. Here Collins’s personal interest in the mesmerism that finds its way into novels like The Woman in White and The Moonstone is expressed through the machinations of “the Catholic system [that] . . . showed to perfection its masterly knowledge

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of the weakness of human nature, and its inexhaustible dexterity in adapting the means to the end” (336-37).1 7 In an 1854 letter regarding the Immaculate Conception, Collins describes what he saw as the readiness of Catholics to abandon their individual judgment and give themselves over to priestly control: “Does any Papist make use of his reason when he lets his Church give him his religion? Does not his Church expressly tell him he must give up his reason, and accept mysteries which outrage it, implicitly as matters of faith. Does not every good Papist who will not let his butcher, baker, wife, or children, rob him of one particle of his common sense if he can help it, voluntarily hand that common sense over altogether to the keeping of his Priest whenever his Priest asks for it?” (1:130). The Collins character who most intrigued his nineteenth-century readers wields just such a priestly power1 8 —The Woman in White’s Count Fosco, whose wife obeys him unquestioningly, who overrides Percival’s every personal judgment, and who mesmerizes even the independent Marion: “They are the most unfathomable gray eyes I ever saw: and they have at times a cold, clear, beautiful, irresistible glitter in them, which forces me to look at him, and yet causes me sensations, when I do look, which I would rather not feel” (221). Margaret Oliphant’s description of Fosco underscores the racial and nationalist assumptions that Collins’s readership brought to the tale: “No villain of the century, so far as we are aware, comes within a hundred miles of him: he is more real, more genuine, more Italian even, in his fatness and size, in his love of pets and pastry, than the whole array of conventional Italian villains, elegant and subtle, whom we are accustomed to meet in literature” (566-67). Fosco spells out those assumptions to Marion, “You know the character which is given to my countrymen by the English? We Italians are all wily and suspicious by nature, in the estimation of the good John Bull” (245). Written in 1859, when Neapolitan exiles were flocking to London, and set in 1851, when the Great Exhibition seemed to have provided the perfect pretext for spies to enter the country, The Woman in White was guaranteed an audience who knew what to except from such foreigners (Peters 215; Sutherland ix). Fosco himself lightly suggests, “I am a Jesuit, if you please to think so—a splitter of straws—a man of trifles and crotchets and scruples” (246), but the catalogue of Jesuitical characteristics that Collins’s audience would recognize is less benign: a learned member of a secret society, clever at

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The story of Anne Catherick’s and then Laura Fairlie’s enforced immurement in and subsequent escape from an institution echoed popular nineteenth-century tales of escaped nuns, especially given the resemblance between their white clothing and a nun’s habit and veil, and the frequent analogy that Protestant polemicists made between convents and lunatic asylums. (“If lunatic asylums are bound to admit a Government inspector, why should a nunnery, which is but another sort of lunatic asylum, be left altogether uncared for and unwatched?” asked a Morning Advertiser editorial [qtd. in Arnstein 135].) Escaped nuns were much on the English mind in the 1860s, a period in which seventy-one convents were founded in Great Britain, which saw hundreds of petitions calling for government inspection of convents, and, in 1869, a spectacular legal case regarding convent life, Saurin v. Star. All of these events led to Newdegate’s success in finally passing the Convent Inspections Act.1 9 If convent stories are echoed in The Woman in White’s confinement plot, they may also provide a less obvious structural model for the novel’s sensationalism. From the beginning, what has most compelled The Woman in White’s audience is its narrative construction: “As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now,” Walter Hartright announces (5). Collins claimed to be the first to write a novel in which the narrative is presented by a series of documents by diverse hands from which the reader constructs the full story. Victorian critics, however, were quick to point out precedents (Wuthering Heights is a favorite example), and later scholars have fol-

ABOUT THE AUTHOR CHARLES DICKENS REMARKS TO WILKIE COLLINS ON COLLINS’S TALENT

I have gone through . . . [No Name] at a sitting, and I find it wonderfully fine. It goes on with an ever-rising power and force in it that fills me with admiration. It is as far before and beyond The Woman in White as that was beyond the wretched common level of fiction-writing. There are some touches in the Captain which no one but a born (and cultivated) writer could get near—could draw within hail of. And the originality of Mrs. Wragge, without compromise of her probability, involves a really great achievement. But they are all admirable; Mr. Noel Vanstone and the housekeeper, both in their way as meritorious as the rest; Magdalen wrought out with truth, energy, sentiment, and passion, of the very first water. I cannot tell you with what a strange dash of pride as well as pleasure I read the great results of your hard work. Because, as you know, I was certain from the Basil days that you were the Writer who would come ahead of all the Field—being the only one who combined invention and power, both humorous and pathetic, with that invincible determination to work, and that profound conviction that nothing of worth is to be done without work, of which triflers and feigners have no conception. SOURCE: Dickens, Charles. “Letter to Wilkie Collins on September 20, 1862.” In Letters of Charles Dickens to Wilkie Collins: 1851-1870, edited by Georgina Hogarth and Laurence Hutton, pp. 112-15. London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1892.

lowed suit, tracing the sensation novel’s architectonics to trial records and newspaper reports. AntiCatholic literature, specifically the renegades’ tales told by escaped nuns and former priests that proliferated in Victorian America and Great Britain, suggests another compelling model. The most famous of these narratives was Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, an international bestseller first published in 1836 and

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disguise, part of an international system of spies based in Rome, confessor-like in his knowledge of others’ secret sins and failings, engaged in a voluminous foreign correspondence even as he intercepts others’ missives, an Italian with ties to France. Fosco walks with the Jesuit’s silent tread, and looks with his penetrating, mesmerizing stare. He even shares a trait commonly attributed to Catholic priests and nuns—a childlike greed for sweets—a trope that typically points to thwarted sexuality. And of course there is the eminently jesuitical plot he concocts: a marriage triangle, a contested inheritance, a kidnapping, blackmail, a deathbed defrauding of a fortune. Laura’s warning about the man who has come between her and her husband—“Do not make an enemy of Count Fosco!”—reverberates with the frightened cries of heroines whose homes and marriages are invaded by priests: “God help me!” Stella Eyrecourt cries, “the priest has gotten between us already!” (274).

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never since out of print, but Monk’s is only one of many such tales. These “factual” accounts are narratively constructed so as to confirm their status as evidence. The renegade is granted a privileged position as participatory witness—“I alone am escaped to tell you”—in books that stress the incontrovertibility of first-person experience and narration, claims to truth-telling echoed in Walter Hartright’s insistence that “No circumstance of importance, from the beginning to the end of the disclosure, shall be related on hearsay evidence” (5). Escaped nuns’ narratives are framed by and interspersed with authenticating documentation of multiple kinds and by diverse hands: affidavits, signed letters of introduction, confirmatory accounts, excerpts from newspaper reports, footnotes, maps, drawings.2 0 The publishers of Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent assert that “the labor of seeing so many individuals, collecting such a mass of facts and testimony, and putting it together correctly . . . mak[e this narrative] . . . complete and unanswerable” (264). (Visible in these structures is, of course, the interpenetration of the Gothic—sensation fiction’s other point of origin—and the anti-Catholic.) When Wilkie Collins includes “The Narrative of the Doctor” and “The Narrative of the Tombstone” in The Woman in White (indeed, when he frames the story of The Black Robe with an “eye-witness” account, an unfinished diary, and an order for a wedding dress), he draws on the popular generic forms of anti-Catholic discourse and on a readership who had learned from them how to assemble and judge a story. The cultural training in anti-Catholic characters, plots, and narrative structures shared by The Woman in White’s audience had been heightened by specific historical events at mid-century. Yet the patterns of anti-Catholic polemic that undergird The Woman in White do not make it an antiCatholic fiction. Unlike The Black Robe or even the playful “Yellow Mask,” Collins’s greatest sensation novel is markedly secular. Symptomatic is the fact that, while a church contains the novel’s long-kept secret and serves as the primary scene of violence and punishment, it is only the vestry that is of importance; the mystery uncovered there is legal and moral rather than religious. (Henry James alluded to such secularism when, after calling Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon “our modern Euripides and Shakespeare,” he explained that in the sensation novel “The play is a tragedy, not in virtue of an avenging deity, but in virtue of a preventive system of law” [“Miss Braddon” 123]). In neither visit to the church does

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Walter Hartright encounter a clergyman, only the lay clerk along with a row of empty vestments, described in the All-the-Year-Round and threevolume versions of the novel as a “bundle of limp drapery and wanting nothing but legs under them to suggest the idea of a cluster of neglected curates who had committed suicide, by companionably hanging themselves all together” (695).2 1 Like these priestly shrouds, the church itself, “an ancient, weather-beaten building, with heavy buttresses at its sides”—dating back, no doubt, to preReformation England—figures the role of “Romanism” in the novel (506). Surrounded by an abandoned village, “worm-eaten” and “crumbling,” littered with scraps of “old wood carvings from the pulpit, and panels from the chancel, and images from the organ loft,” the building is, in effect, a ruin (508-509). In contrast to the organic cultural meaning that John Ruskin read in ancient Catholic cathedrals, this shrine is reduced to fragments that foster associative affect, not theology. My point is not that the Catholic Church serves as a mere setting—The Woman in White is not, like Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia, Or Old Foes with New Faces, an allegory for contemporary society set in antiquity. Instead, as in Collins’s ruined church, the structures of anti-Catholicism allow sensationalism to intermix ancient forms and contemporary scandals. It is precisely this mixture that readers of sensation novels have, from the beginning, seen as constitutive of the genre, faulting or praising these fictions’ claim to reveal the dark truths behind the facade of the ordinary. As the archbishop of York complained, “They want to persuade people that in almost every one of the well-ordered houses of their neighbours there [is] a skeleton shut up in some cupboard.” Murray defined “proximity” as “one great element of sensation” (255). Describing what is “sensational” about the “sensation novel,” Brantlinger states, “peace masks violence; innocent appearances cloak evil intentions; reality itself functions as a mystery until the sudden revelation of guilt which is always lurking in the shadows” (41). The discourse of anti-Catholic polemic readily served the sensation novelist’s technique of balancing the known and the unknown, inviting the reader’s forward plot projection, providing recognizable figures of mystery, clothing them in typifying disguises. Jenny Bourne Taylor contends that: Sensation fiction certainly shared a common pool of narrative tropes, but these were not stable, they drew on and broke down distinct methods of

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Summarizing Collins’s career for Temple Bar in 1890, Edmund Yates captures the balancing act between the expected and the unexpected, the realistic and the outrageous, that is sensationalism. Characterizing Collins as a “manufacturer of plots,” Yates explains, “Nobody imagines the misfortunes of Poor Miss Finch, and her bluecomplexioned lover, the masquerades of Magdalen Vanstone, the machinations of the Romish Church in The Black Robe, the remarkable coincidences of Hide and Seek, or the melodramatic farrago of The Frozen Deep, to be precisely scenes from real life. But, truth being stranger than fiction, possibly they might be” (274-75). Known and unknown, heimlich and unheimlich. Understanding the nature of anti-Catholic rhetoric allows us to recognize how this productive tension is both central to sensationalism’s marketing success and generative of the epistemological uncertainty that Brantlinger, among others, sees as foundational to the genre. For modern, nineteenth-century Protestants in Britain and America, the Catholic Church was positioned as the uncanny.2 2 The teleology of Protestant history meant that “Romanism” was the primitivism that Protestantism left behind. But, maddeningly, the Church of Rome refused to be bypassed, refused to die. Within nineteenth-century polemical narrative, the Catholic is often analogized to the Jew—stubborn and unregenerate. What makes this (failed) story of religious progress particularly problematic is the fact that Protestantism needs to be able to trace its authority and authenticity back to Catholicism. This imperfectly repressed scene of origination makes Romanists what Catherine Sinclair, in her virulently anti-Catholic novel of 1852 Beatrice, calls “the unknown relative.” Winifred Hughes’s comment on the role of masks in sensation fiction is suggestive here: “In sensation fiction masks are rarely stripped off to reveal an inner truth, for the mask is both the transformed expression of the ‘true’ self and the means of disclosing its incoherence. In the process, identity itself emerges as a set of elements that are

actively constructed within a dominant framework of social interests, perceptions, and values. These novels thus focused on the ambiguity of social and psychological codes to insinuate that seeming, too, is not always what it seems to be” (8).2 3 Behind the yellow mask lies another—in this case a death mask. Wearing that death mask is the woman, once known as Teresa, now calling herself Brigida, with a hidden, disreputable past about which we never learn the details. Father Benwell presents himself as a lowly clergyman, “elderly, fat, and cheerful” (42), rather than revealing his true rank as the provincial of the Society of Jesus. He instructs Father Penrose, a Jesuit of lower rank, to appear as the layman Arthur Penrose. “Arthur Penrose”’s secular clothing covers his black robe, which itself cloaks the fundamentally decent man who is Arthur Penrose. Marion suspects Fosco of wearing a wig, and it turns out that his most distinctive—and unsettling—physical attribute, his size, is itself a mask, a fat suit.2 4 Even when he is displayed naked at the novel’s end, he remains disguised: viewed through “a glass screen,” Fosco has the costume of “a French artisan” hung above him, and the mark of the Brotherhood that he bears has been “obliterated” by a covering wound (the letter “T” for traitor)—this writing on the body vividly figuring Collins’s authorial work (640). Epistemological ambiguity is imaged in these visible layers of “seeming.” But is the fact that the Woman in White and Count Fosco have secret identities ever really a secret? Recognizing that these two creations wear, among their other costumes, those of the stock polemical characters of nun and priest helps us to go a step further than Taylor. It is a signaled secrecy, an advertised disguise that are operative in sensationalism’s readerly engagement, as when Count Fosco teases, “I am a Jesuit if you choose to think so” (246). Writing in the North British Review in February 1863, Alexander Smith characterized the experience of reading Collins: “If a young lady goes into the garden a moment before dinner, you know that some one is waiting for her behind the laurels. If two people talk together in a room in a hot summer day, and one raises the window a little, you know that a third is crouching on the gravel below, listening to every word, and who will be prepared to act upon it at the proper time” (141). Smith deplored the feverish excitement, “the passion of curiosity,” that Collins, “the master of mystery,” incites in his audience, but his description of the charged engagement of readers who rapidly turned the pages of The Woman in White is relevant here. Like the lurid covers

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generating strangeness within familiarity, of creating the sense of a weird and different world within the ordinary, everyday one. . . . And it was through these intricate interactions that its appeal to sensation, to “nerves,” had both such psychological resonance and social complexity, providing it with the means that enabled it to explore “those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors” by bringing into play the possibilities offered by its central narrative feature—secrecy and disguise. (7)

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that entice purchasers at railway stalls, robes and masks, when recognized as such, awake audience expectations—expectations based on prior experience—and direct reading modes. The figures and stories of anti-Catholic discourse, easily discerned by experienced Victorian readers, serve Collins well in developing his sensationalist style. As so often, Punch gets it right in Sambourne’s depiction of Collins in a transparent disguise, costumed absurdly for a role in a way that signals precisely that he is costumed. He is, ludicrously, a man (beard pointedly intact) dressed up in a bedsheet and a woman’s bowed cap, adopting a distinctly feminine stance (notice the little-girl position of his slipper-shod feet). Surrounded by emblems of his fictions (the moonstone, the athlete and supplicant female of Man and Wife, stacked books and floor covering marked with other titles), Collins holds a “Roman candle.” His penitent’s robe, along with his abashed stance, are clearly put on for the occasion. Is he being put to bed early for his naughtiness? Is his guise a corrective humiliation meted out by an angry Catholic confessor? Is he ineptly veiling his identity to escape punishment? In any case, Collins’s repentance is nothing if not superficial (not even “skin deep”), for we are told that he does “Ink-AndPenance” for writing The Black Robe—that is, his penance for writing is writing. The implication is that he will give Punch’s readership more of the same, that he will add to the stacks of books that surround him. The caricature models as well the workings of anti-Catholic discourse in Collins’s sensational writing. Caricature is an art form intimately tied to its audience’s knowledge—a fact well-known to anyone who has ever shown Punch to a group of bewildered college freshman or, for that matter, puzzled over a Victorian political cartoon herself. Sambourne’s wit is wholly dependent upon its viewers’ history as experienced readers not only of Punch but also of Collins’s own narratives.2 5 In fact, Wilkie Collins did not again take up the props and plots of anti-Catholic polemic, a tradition that was considerably weakened by the end of the century. Nonetheless, in a formulaic early fiction, a genre-defining novel at the height of his career, and one of his late didactic fictions, Collins made pragmatic use of habits both clerical and readerly. Anti-Catholic discourse offered Collins narrative forms (the multiple, evidentiary narratives of the renegade’s tale), plot patterns (female escape from an institution), recognizable character types (the Jesuit), and iconography (a woman in white). It afforded him as well an audi-

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ence already schooled in the participatory reading strategies so definitive of sensationalism. The open secrets of “Romanism” provided a configuration conducive to the play between known and unknown that mark both sensation fiction’s epistemology and its marketability. Part of what made this new mode of writing and reading so “hot and strong” was that it borrowed from an old recipe in brewing the latest news. Sensation fiction was, as Murray says, “refreshment”—a reanimation of both traditional forms and the well-trained palates of its consumers.

Notes 1. While religious content is obviously not a generic requirement of sensationalism, there are sensation novels that center on religion; for example, Charles Reade’s Griffith Gaunt, as well as those by Buchanan, Linton, and Worboise mentioned below. Although they are not speaking about polemical anti-Catholic literature, Helsinger, Sheets, and Veeder interestingly suggest that “America’s most shocking fiction may in fact be women’s religious novels” (123). 2. See also Loesberg and Miller for important discussions of the ideologies of sensationalism. 3. For example, see Altick’s (in Common Reader), Brantlinger’s, and Flint’s explorations of the differences that class and gender make in reading. 4. On the anti-Catholicism of the eighteenth-century Gothic, see Tarr. 5. On anti-Catholicism and nineteenth-century fiction, see Franchot, Griffin, Maison, and Wolff. 6. Martineau’s indignation was further fueled by the fact that she had had a story of her own, “The Missionary,” turned down by Dickens for Household Words on the grounds that it presented a Jesuit priest positively. “I have had little hope of ‘Household Words’ since the proprietors refused to print a historical fact (otherwise approved of) on the ground that the hero was a Jesuit: and now that they follow up this suppression of an honourable truth by the insertion of a dishonouring fiction (or fact,—no matter which) they can expect no support from advocates of religious liberty or lovers of fair-play: and so fond are English people of fair-play, that if they knew this fact, you would soon find your course in this matter ruinous to your publication” (422). Martineau’s 1861-1862 novella “Sister Anna’s Probation” depicts Catholicism less positively. Perhaps Martineau’s most famous statement on Roman Catholicism was her critique of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette as anti-Catholic. 7. James’s quip comes from a review of Benjamin Disraeli’s Lothair. Given Disraeli’s positive depictions of Roman Catholicism in his earlier novels, Lothair provides another surprising example of anti-Catholic fiction’s pervasiveness. 8. On sensation novels themselves, and the sensations associated with them, as constructed commodities, see Cvetkovich. 9. On nineteenth-century British anti-Catholicism, see Arnstein, Best, Griffin, Norman, Paz, and Wolffe. 10. Swinburne, however, found “The Yellow Mask” an “admirable story” (263).

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Bernstein, Susan David. Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997.

12. See, for example, Catherine Sinclair’s Beatrice.

Best, G. F. A. “Popular Protestantism in Victorian Britain.” In Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain, edited by Robert Robson, 115-42. London: Bell, 1967.

13. I am referring to Linton’s Under Which Lord?, Buchanan’s Foxglove Manor, and Worboise’s Overdale; or, The Story of a Pervert: A Tale for the Times. See Griffin, AntiCatholicism. 14. On the perceived connection between Romanism and homosexuality, see Hanson and Hilliard. 15. In making this statement, I dispute the standard chronology that sees Collins’s writing as going only downhill after The Moonstone. Swinburne is probably the first and the most famous critic to make this claim: “What brought good Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition? / Some demon whispered—‘Wilkie! Have a mission’” (qtd. in Peters 313). While The Black Robe cannot be ranked with the masterpieces of the 1860s, it is an interesting psychological study that sold well in three countries (Peters 398).

Brantlinger, Patrick. “What is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensational Novel’?” Nineteenth Century Fiction 37 (1982): 1-28. Brown, Bill. Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns. Boston: Bedford, 1997. Buchanan, Robert. Foxgolove Manor. 1884. New York: Garland, 1975. Casteras, Susan P. “Virgin Vows: the Early Victorian Artists’ Portrayal of Nuns and Novices.” Victorian Studies 24 (1981): 157-84. Collins, Wilkie. After Dark. 1856. Freeport: Books for Libraries, 1973. ———. The Black Robe. New York: Fenelon Collier, 1881.

16. There are other aspects to this novel that I slight here, including an earlier secret marriage on Stella’s part and her eventual marriage to her first love, a missionary exile and rescue for Penrose, etc.

———. The Letters of Wilkie Collins. Edited by William Baker and William M. Clarke. 2 vols. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

17. On Collins and mesmerism, see especially Taylor.

———. Rambles from Railways. 1851. London: Westaway Books, 1948.

18. For nineteenth-century reactions to Fosco, see the reviews of The Woman in White collected in Page. 19. For the fullest discussion of these events, see Arnstein. 20. See Griffin, “Awful”; and Franchot. 21. On Dickens’s revisions, see John Sutherland’s note to the Oxford edition of The Woman in White (Collins 695). He notes that Kathleen Tillotson argued that Collins revised to avoid the similarity to Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. 22. On the role of the uncanny in sensationalism, see Taylor. 23. See also Peters on “The Yellow Mask”: “The characteristic device of a mask concealing a face which is in fact another mask, behind which lurks the face of the wrong woman, has the suggestive quality of layered deceit which intrigued him, and which was to be more fully developed in the novels he wrote in the 1860s” (150). For the Dublin University Magazine, this layering of masks and types represented a weakness in Collins’s writing: “Sir Percival Glyde is made up of, at least, two utterly different beings: a two-fronted mask on top of a stage-cloak” (Review 105). 24. The clergy are not the only ones who conceal their pasts in Collins’s novel: everyone from Stella’s mother, who paints over her age and illness in order to sustain her social position, to Stella herself, who conceals a prior marriage. 25. On Punch and anti-Catholicism, see Altick’s Punch.

Works Cited Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957. ———. Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 18411851. Columbus: The Ohio State Univ. Press, 1997. Arnstein, Walter. Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1982.

———. The Woman in White. 1860. Edited by John Sutherland. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996. ———. The Yellow Mask. New York: Lupton, n.d. Cvetkovich, Ann. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992. Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader, 1837-1914. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993. Franchot, Jenny. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Encounter with Catholicism. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994. Griffin, Susan M. Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, in press. ———. “Awful Disclosures: Female Evidence in the Escaped Nun’s Tale.” PMLA 111 (1996): 93-107. Hanson, Ellis. Decadence and Catholicism. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun; Or, the Romance of Monte Beni. Vol. 4, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Edited by William Charvat et al. Columbus: The Ohio State Univ. Press, 1968. Heller, Tamar. Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992. Helsinger, Elizabeth, Robin Lauterbach Sheets, and William Veeder. The Woman Question. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989. Hilliard, David. “UnEnglish and Unmanly: AngloCatholicism and Homosexuality.” Victorian Studies 25 (1982): 181-210. James, Henry. Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. New York: Library of America, 1984. ———. “Miss Braddon.” In Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, edited by Norman Page, 122-24. London: Routledge, 1974. First published in The Nation, 9 November 1865, 593-95.

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11. For another depiction of this Catholic meditative practice as a rejection of life, love, and domesticity, see Mary Ward’s Helbeck of Bannisdale.

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Kingsley, Charles. Hypatia, Or Old Foes with New Faces. London: Parker, 1853.

Tarr, Sister Mary Muriel. Catholicism in Gothic Fiction. New York: Garland, 1979.

Linton, Eliza Lynn. Under Which Lord? 1879. New York: Garland, 1976.

Taylor, Jenny Bourne. In the Secret Theater of the Home. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Loesberg, Jonathan. “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction.” Representations 13 (Winter 1986): 115-37.

Trollope, Frances Milton. Father Eustace: A Tale of the Jesuits. 3 vols. 1847. London: Garland, 1975.

Maison, Margaret. Search Your Soul, Eustace: A Survey of the Religious Novel in the Victorian Age. London: Sheed and Ward, 1961. Mansel, Henry. “Sensation Novels.” Quarterly Review 113 (April 1863): 252-68. Martineau, Harriet. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography. Vol. 2. London: Smith, 1877. Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988. Monk, Maria. Awful Disclosures of The Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, Revised, with an Appendix. 1836. New York: Arno, 1977.

Ward, Mary. Helbeck of Bannisdale. 1898. New York: Penguin, 1983. Wolff, Robert Lee. Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England. New York: Garland, 1977. Wolffe, John. The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 18291860. Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford Univ. Press, 1991. Worboise, Emma Jane. Overdale: or, the Story of a Pervert: A Tale for the Times. London: Clack, 1869. Yates, Edmund. “The Novels of Wilkie Collins.” In Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, edited by Norman Page, 273-77. London: Routledge, 1974.

Norman, E. R. Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968.

FURTHER READING

Oliphant, Margaret. “Sensation Novels.” Blackwood’s 91 (May 1862): 564-84.

Biographies

Page, Norman, ed. Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1974.

Peters, Catherine. The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, 500 p. Provides a portrait of Collins’s life.

Paz, D. G. Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992.

Criticism

Peters, Catherine. The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991.

Bernstein, Stephen. “Reading Blackwater Park: Gothicism, Narrative, and Ideology in The Woman in White.” Studies in the Novel 25, no. 3 (fall 1993): 291-305.

Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Considers the relationship between the Gothic setting of The Woman in White and representations of class, gender, and genre in the novel.

Reade, Charles. Griffith Gaunt, or, Jealousy. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866.

Booth, Bradford A. “Wilkie Collins and the Art of Fiction.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 6, no. 2 (September 1951): 131-43.

Reed, Rebecca Theresa. Six Months in a Convent, or, The Narrative of Rebecca Theresa Reed, Who was Under the Influence of the Roman Catholics about Two Years, and an Inmate of the Ursuline Convent on Mount Benedict, Charlestown, Mass., Nearly Six Months, in the Years 1831-32 With Some Preliminary Suggestions by the Committee of Publication. 1835. New York: Arno, 1977. Review of The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins. In Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, edited by Norman Page, 104-108. London: Routledge, 1974. First published in Dublin University Magazine, February 1861, 200-203.

Discusses the effect of Collins’s love of melodrama on his novels. Cvetkovich, Ann. “Ghostlier Determinations: The Economy of Sensation and The Woman in White.” In Wilkie Collins, edited and with an introduction by Lyn Pykett, pp. 109-35. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Argues that the most sensational moments in The Woman in White enable the character Walter Hartwright’s ascent to power to appear to be the result of chance occurrences.

Sinclair, Catherine. Beatrice; or, the Unknown Relatives. 1852. New York: Garland, 1975. Smith, Alexander. Review of No Name, by Wilkie Collins. In Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, edited by Norman Page, 136-38. London: Routledge, 1974. First published in Saturday Review, 17 January 1863, 84-85. Sue, Eugene. The Wandering Jew. [London]: Chapman & Hall, 1844-45. Swinburne, A. C. “Wilkie Collins.” In Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, edited by Norman Page, 253-64. London: Routledge, 1974. First published in Fortnightly Review, 1 November 1889, 589-99.

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OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Collins’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: British Writers Supplement, Vol. 6; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1832-1890; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 18, 70, 159; Literature Resource Center; Mystery and Suspense Writers; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 1, 18, 93; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, Vol. 4; Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 1; and World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 4.

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CHARLES DICKENS (1812 - 1870)

(Also wrote under the pseudonym of Boz) English novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, and essayist.

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ince the publication of his first novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837; better known as The Pickwick Papers), Dickens has achieved popular and critical recognition of a level rarely equaled in English letters. Almost all of his novels display, to varying degrees, his comic gift, his deep social concerns, and his extraordinary talent for creating unforgettable characters. Many of his creations, most notably Scrooge from the ghost story A Christmas Carol (1843), have become familiar English literary stereotypes. Some of his characters are grotesques; Dickens loved the style of eighteenth-century Gothic romance, even though the popularity of those novels was on the wane, and his fiction features many elements of that genre. Dickens was thus a late contributor to the development of Gothic English literature. However, he played a major role in establishing the “Christmas ghost story” as an institution, and many eminent Victorian writers dabbled in the production of ghost stories only because he championed the form. Novels by Dickens that owe a debt to the Gothic tradition include The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Bleak House (1853), Little Dorrit (1857), Great Expectations (1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1865). In these works Dickens

combines social realism with exaggeration, surrealism, fantasy, and the picaresque to tackle important questions about the poor and disadvantaged in English society and to dramatize the consequences of rapid industrialization on its victims. He used the devices of literary horror to arouse public consciousness about terrible social conditions and to explore themes of greed, corruption, individual and institutional evil, reality versus unreality, imprisonment, and death. Although Dickens’s Gothic-inspired fiction is highly entertaining, he also used it as a vehicle to express his moral outrage at the state of the social order and as a platform to reform what he saw as the worst excesses and injustices in English society.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Dickens was the son of John Dickens, a minor government official who constantly lived beyond his means and was eventually sent to debtor’s prison. This humiliation deeply troubled young Dickens, and even as an adult he was rarely able to speak of it. As a boy, he was forced to work in a factory for meager wages until his father was released from prison. Although he was an excellent student, he left school at fifteen, as was the norm, and did not attend university. What he lacked in formal education, however, he made up for by spending long hours at the British Museum Library, reading works of English history and

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literature, especially Shakespeare. Late in his teens, Dickens learned shorthand and became a court reporter, which introduced him to journalism and aroused his contempt for politics. His early short stories and sketches, first published in newspapers and magazines, were later collected as Sketches by Boz (1836). The book sold well and received generally favorable notices. That year he married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of his friend George Hogarth, who edited the newly established Evening Chronicle; Dickens was to have ten children with her. His next literary venture was The Pickwick Papers. By the time the fourth monthly installment was published, Dickens was the most popular author in England. His fame soon spread throughout the rest of the English-speaking world, and eventually to the Continent. Success followed upon success for Dickens, and the number of his readers continued to grow. In 1842 he traveled to the United States, hoping to find an embodiment of his liberal political ideals. He returned to England deeply disappointed, dismayed by America’s lack of support for an international copyright law, acceptance of the inhumane practice of slavery, and what he judged as the vulgarity of the American people. He then spent much time traveling and campaigning against social evils with his pamphlets and other writings. He also founded and edited several periodicals and wrote scores of essays. From 1844 to 1845 Dickens lived in Italy, Switzerland, and Paris. He continued to publish prolifically and became an extremely wealthy man. In 1858 Dickens separated from his wife and formed a close relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan. He also gave a great number of public readings from his works in both England and America, which left him exhausted. Many believe that increasing physical and mental strain led to the stroke Dickens suffered while working on The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), left unfinished at his death. When he died in 1870, England mourned the death of one of its favorite authors. His tombstone reads: “He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England’s greatest writers is lost to the world.”

MAJOR WORKS Many of Dickens’s novels are clearly inspired by the Gothic tradition: Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist (1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), Hard Times (1854), The Old Curiosity Shop, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Dombey and Son (1848), A

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Tale of Two Cities (1859), Our Mutual Friend and The Mystery of Edwin Drood all contain Gothic elements within their humorous, picaresque structure, employing melodrama, hyperbole, and horror to drive home their themes. Of the novels, only Edwin Drood—a whodunit in which the prime suspect is John Jasper, uncle of the missing Edwin, who frequents opium dens and conceals a secret passion beneath his seeming respectability— has a plot that one traditionally associates with Gothic literature. The rest, from Oliver Twist, about the life of an orphan who escapes from a workhouse only to endure the horrors of life on the London streets, to A Tale of Two Cities, which chronicles the lives of the aristocracy and lower classes through the times leading up to and during the French Revolution, use Gothic-inspired characters, atmosphere, melodramatic moments, and sensational situations within a more conventional frame to underscore the horrors of modern industrial life as the author saw them. Dickens’s ghost stories are mostly light comedies sharpened with a spice of terror. A Christmas Carol is the most famous of all nineteenth-century ghost stories. It is about the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge from a miser to a generous being, and is a moral allegory as well, but one that makes judicious use of horror. Dickens’s other Christmas ghost tales include The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1846), and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848). His two best non-Christmas ghost stories are considered “The Trial for Murder,” in which the ghost of a murdered man becomes a thirteenth juror in order to make certain that justice is done, and “The Signalman,” a tale of premonitory apparitions in which a luckless signalman fails to make advantageous use of his warnings and their ultimate betrayal of his confidence.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Few authors have achieved the critical and popular success Dickens enjoyed both during his lifetime and after. Before he was thirty he had become one of the most successful writers England had known, and by the time he was forty he was an international celebrity. Dickens’s critical and popular appeal continues unabated to this day; his works have been made into motion pictures and have generated more critical commentary than any other English author save Shakespeare. Scholarship on Dickens’s writing is extensive, but those interested in the Gothic elements of his fiction have concentrated on several

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areas. They have noted how Dickens modifies the devices found in Gothic romance for his own purposes, using elements of surrealism and humor to paint portraits of darkly comic characters who become representatives of moral decay, corruption, greed, and evil in the modern world. Critics have also discussed Dickens’s Gothic settings, attempted to trace the Gothic influences on his work, explored the use of Gothic touches in various works, and admired his skillful use of horror to offer sharp social critiques. They acknowledge, though, that Dickens’s ultimate interest was not in the supernatural and thus he was not a pioneer or key figure in Gothic fiction. Rather, the general consensus is that Dickens used the Gothic in his own work as a genre that he enjoyed in order to entertain as well as edify, modifying and reworking the Gothic mode to make it his own and to create a fictional universe that would highlight for his readers what Dickens viewed as many of the most pressing social issues of his time.

Hard Times for These Times (novel) 1854 Little Dorrit (novel) 1857 A Tale of Two Cities (novel) 1859 Great Expectations (novel) 1861 The Uncommercial Traveller (sketches and short stories) 1861 Our Mutual Friend (novel) 1865 No Thoroughfare [with Wilkie Collins] (play) 1867 The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished novel) 1870 *

All of Dickens’s novels were originally published serially in magazines, usually over periods of one to two years.

PRIMARY SOURCES PRINCIPAL WORKS Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People [as Boz] (sketches and short stories) 1836 *Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club [as Boz] (novel) 1837 Oliver Twist (novel) 1838 The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (novel) 1839 Barnaby Rudge (novel) 1841 The Old Curiosity Shop (novel) 1841 American Notes for General Circulation (travel essay) 1842 A Christmas Carol in Prose (short story) 1843 The Chimes (short story) 1844 The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (novel) 1844 The Cricket on the Hearth (short story) 1846 Pictures from Italy (travel essay) 1846 Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son (novel) 1848 The Haunted Man, and The Ghost’s Bargain (short stories) 1848 The Personal History of David Copperfield (novel) 1850

CHARLES DICKENS (STORY DATE 1836-1837) SOURCE: Dickens, Charles. “The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton.” In Great Ghost Stories: 34 Classic Tales of the Supernatural, compiled by Robin Brockman, pp. 25161. New York: Gramercy Books, 2002. The following excerpt is from a short story originally published in The Pickwick Papers, 1836-1837.

Gabriel started up, and stood rooted to the spot with astonishment and terror; for his eyes rested on a form that made his blood run cold. Seated on an upright tombstone, close to him, was a strange unearthly figure, whom Gabriel felt at once, was no being of this world. His long fantastic legs which might have reached the ground, were cocked up, and crossed after a quaint, fantastic fashion; his sinewy arms were bare; and his hands rested on his knees. On his short round body, he wore a close covering, ornamented with small slashes; a short cloak dangled at his back; the collar was cut into curious peaks, which served the goblin in lieu of ruff or neckerchief; and his shoes curled at his toes into long points. On his head, he wore a broadrimmed sugar-loaf hat, garnished with a single feather. The hat was covered with the white frost; and the goblin looked as if he had sat on the same tombstone very comfortably, for two or three hundred years. He was sitting perfectly still; his tongue was put out, as if in derision; and he was grinning at Gabriel Grub with such a grin as only a goblin could call up.

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‘It was not the echoes,’ said the goblin. Gabriel Grub was paralysed, and could make no reply. ‘What do you do here on Christmas Eve?’ said the goblin sternly. ‘I came to dig a grave, sir,’ stammered Gabriel Grub. ‘What man wanders among graves and churchyards on such a night as this?’ cried the goblin. ‘Gabriel Grub! Gabriel Grub!’ screamed a wild chorus of voices that seemed to fill the churchyard. Gabriel looked fearfully round—nothing was to be seen. ‘What have you got in that bottle?’ said the goblin. ‘Hollands, sir,’ replied the sexton, trembling more than ever; for he had bought it of the smugglers, and he thought that perhaps his questioner might be in the excise department of the goblins. ‘Who drinks Hollands alone, and in a churchyard, on such a night as this?’ said the goblin. ‘Gabriel Grub! Gabriel Grub!’ exclaimed the wild voices again. The goblin leered maliciously at the terrified sexton, and then raising his voice, exclaimed: ‘And who, then, is our fair and lawful prize?’ To this inquiry the invisible chorus replied, in a strain that sounded like the voices of many choristers singing to the mighty swell of the old church organ—a strain that seemed borne to the sexton’s ears upon a wild wind, and to die away as it passed onward; but the burden of the reply was still the same, ‘Gabriel Grub! Gabriel Grub!’ The goblin grinned a broader grin than before, as he said, ‘Well Gabriel, what do you say to this?’ The sexton gasped for breath. ‘What do you think of this, Gabriel?’ said the goblin, kicking up his feet in the air on either side of the tombstone, and looking at the turned-up points with as much complacency as if he had been contemplating the most fashionable pair of Wellingtons in all Bond Street. ‘It’s—it’s—very curious sir,’ replied the sexton, half dead with fright; ‘very curious, and very pretty, but I think I’ll go back and finish my work, sir, if you please.’ ‘Work!’ said the goblin, ‘what work?’ ‘The grave, sir; making the grave,’ stammered the sexton.

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‘Oh, the grave, eh?’ said the goblin. ‘Who makes graves at a time when all other men are merry, and takes a pleasure in it?’ Again the mysterious voices replied, ‘Gabriel Grub! Gabriel Grub!’ ‘I’m afraid my friends want you Gabriel,’ said the goblin, thrusting his tongue further into his cheek than ever—and a most astonishing tongue it was—‘I’m afraid my friends want you, Gabriel,’ said the goblin. ‘Under favour, sir,’ replied the horror-stricken sexton, ‘I don’t think they can, sir; they don’t know me, sir; I don’t think the gentlemen have ever seen me, sir.’ ‘Oh yes they have,’ replied the goblin; ‘we know the man with the sulky face and grim scowl, that came down the street tonight, throwing his evil looks at the children, and grasping his burying spade the tighter. We know the man who struck the boy in the envious malice of his heart, because the boy could be merry, and he could not. We know him, we know him.’ Here, the goblin gave a loud shrill laugh, which the echoes returned twenty-fold: and throwing his legs up in the air, stood upon his head, or rather upon the very point of his sugarloaf hat, on the narrow edge of the tombstone: whence he threw a somerset with extraordinary agility, right to the sexton’s feet, at which he planted himself in the attitude in which tailors generally sit upon the shop-board. ‘I—I—am afraid I must leave you, sir,’ said the sexton, making an effort to move. ‘Leave us!’ said the goblin, ‘Gabriel Grub going to leave us. Ho! ho! ho!’ As the goblin laughed, the sexton observed, for one instant, a brilliant illumination within the windows of the church, as if the whole building were lighted up; it disappeared, the organ pealed forth a lively air, and whole troops of goblins, the very counterpart of the first one, poured into the churchyard, and began playing at leap-frog with the tombstones: never stopping for an instant to take break, but ‘overing’ the highest among them, one after the other, with the most marvellous dexterity. The first goblin was a most astonishing leaper, and none of the others could come near him; even in the extremity of his terror the sexton could not help observing, that while his friends were content to leap over the common-sized gravestones, the first one took the family vaults, iron railing and all, with as much ease as if they had been so many street-posts.

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When Gabriel Grub had had time to fetch his breath, which the rapidity of his descent had for the moment taken away, he found himself in what appeared to be a large cavern, surrounded on all sides by crowds of goblins, ugly and grim; in the centre of the room, on an elevated seat, was stationed his friend of the churchyard; and close beside him stood Gabriel Grub himself, without power of motion. ‘Cold tonight,’ said the king of the goblins, ‘very cold. A glass of something warm, here!’ At this command, half a dozen officious goblins, with a perpetual smile upon their faces, whom Gabriel Grub imagined to be courtiers, on that account, hastily disappeared, and presently returned with a goblet of liquid fire, which they presented to the king. ‘Ah!’ cried the goblin, whose cheeks and throat were transparent, as he tossed down the flame, ‘This warms one, indeed! Bring a bumper of the same, for Mr Grub.’ It was in vain for the unfortunate sexton to protest that he was not in the habit of taking anything warm at night; one of the goblins held him while another poured the blazing liquid down his throat; the whole assembled screeched with laughter as he coughed and choked, and wiped away the tears which gushed plentifully from his eyes, after swallowing the burning draught. ‘And now,’ said the king, fantastically poking the taper corner of his sugar-loaf hat into the sexton’s eye, and thereby occasioning him the most exquisite pain: ‘And now, show the man of misery and gloom, a few of the pictures from our own great storehouse!’ As the goblin said this, a thick cloud which obscured the remoter end of the cavern, rolled gradually away, and disclosed, apparently at a great distance, a small and scantily furnished, but neat and clean apartment. A crowd of little children were gathered round a bright fire, cling-

ing to their mother’s gown, and gambolling around her chair. The mother occasionally rose, and drew aside the window-curtain, as if to look for some expected object: a frugal meal was placed near the fire. A knock was heard at the door: the mother opened it, and the children crowded round her, and clapped their hands for joy, as their father entered. He was wet and weary, and shook the snow from his garments, as the children crowded round him, and seizing his cloak, hat, stick and gloves, with busy zeal, ran with them from the room. Then, as he sat down to his meal before the fire, the children climbed about his knee, and the mother sat by his side, and all seemed happiness and comfort. But a change came upon the view, almost imperceptibly. The scene was altered to a small bedroom, where the fairest and youngest child lay dying; the roses had fled from his cheek, and the light from his eye; and even as the sexton looked upon him with an interest he had never felt or known before, he died. His young brothers and sisters crowded round his little bed, and seized his tiny hand, so cold and heavy; but they shrunk back from its touch, and looked with awe on his infant face; for calm and tranquil as it was, and sleeping in rest and peace as the beautiful child seemed to be, they saw that he was dead, and they knew that he was an Angel looking down upon, and blessing them, from a bright and happy Heaven. Again the light cloud passed across the picture, and again the subject changed. The father and mother were old and helpless now, and the number of those about them was diminished more than half; but content and cheerfulness sat on every face, and beamed in every eye, as they crowded round the fireside, and told and listened to old stories of earlier and bygone days. Slowly and peacefully, the father sank into the grave, and soon after, the sharer of all his cares and troubles followed him to a place of rest. The few, who yet survived them, knelt by their tomb, and watered the green turf which covered it, with their tears; then rose, and turned away; sadly and mournfully, but not with bitter cries, or despairing lamentations, for they knew that they should one day meet again; and once more they mixed with the busy world, and their content and cheerfulness was restored. The cloud settled upon the picture and concealed it from the sexton’s view. ‘What do you think of that?’ said the goblin, turning his large face towards Gabriel Grub.

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At last the game reached to a most exciting pitch; the organ played quicker and quicker; and the goblins leaped faster and faster: coiling themselves up, rolling head over heels upon the ground, and bounding over the tombstones like footballs. The sexton’s brain whirled round with the rapidity of the motion he beheld, and his legs reeled beneath him, as the spirits flew before his eyes: when the goblin king, suddenly darting towards him, laid his hand upon his collar, and sank with him through the earth.

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Gabriel murmured out something about its being very pretty, and looked somewhat ashamed, as the goblin bent his fiery eyes upon him. ‘You a miserable man!’ said the goblin, in a tone of excessive contempt. ‘You!’ He appeared disposed to add more, but indignation choked his utterance, so he lifted up one of his very pliable legs, and flourishing it above his head a little, to insure his aim, administered a good sound kick to Gabriel Grub; immediately after which, all the goblins in waiting crowded round the wretched sexton, and kicked him without mercy: according to the established and invariable custom of courtiers upon earth, who kick whom royalty kicks, and hug whom royalty hugs.

GENERAL COMMENTARY JULIAN WOLFREYS (ESSAY DATE 2000) SOURCE: Wolfreys, Julian. “‘I Wants to Make Your Flesh Creep’: Notes toward a Reading of the ComicGothic in Dickens.” In Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, pp. 31-59. New York: Palgrave, 2000. In the following excerpt, Wolfreys examines the complementary use of comedy and the Gothic in Dickens’s works. It is the fear one needs: the price one pays for coming contentedly to terms with a social body based on irrationality and menace. Franco Moretti Gothic novels are technologies that produce the monster as a remarkably mobile, permeable, and infinitely interpretable body. Judith Halberstam A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of a man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast. Charles Dickens, The Haunted Man

Love your other The gothic is always with us. Certainly, it was always with the Victorians. All that black, all that crêpe. All that jet. All that swirling fog. If there is a transition in the nature of the gothic from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle years of the nineteenth century, it is marked by an inward turn perhaps. There is an internalization to be considered not so much as a denial of the gothic as it is a form of intimacy. In writing of the nineteenth century which manifests a gothic turn, there is an embrace of the uncanny within our-

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selves rather than a displacement or projection on to some foreign or distant other. In part, the turn inward and the interest in the otherness within is signalled in part during what is termed the high Victorian period by the intense fascination, obsession even, with English manners, with Englishness and all that is the most alien to the definition of Englishness, not in some foreign field, but in England, the heart of darkness itself. It is through what James Twitchell describes as the sober English concern with darkness, mesmerism and Satanism (1981, 33), that the gothic aspect of Englishness is revealed. Far from disappearing, it may be argued, the gothic, ingested and consumed, becomes appropriate, ‘a legitimate subject of literature’, to employ Twitchell’s phrase (1981, 33). It is not so much that the vampire is sought out. Rather, vampiric feeding on otherness constitutes a significant aspect of English letters. In particular, that which is fed on are images of children and the idea(l) of the feminine. The mid-nineteenth century interest in children, adolescents and women represents a transitional moment in the gothic, for, as is well known, the gothic of the latter years of the eighteenth century focused its terror of the other on foreigners, on Catholics, on distant lands and long-ago days, on creepy castles and even creepier foreigners, most of whom were explicitly Mediterranean ‘of a certain sort’, if not out-and-out ‘Oriental’, in the well-known sense given that word by Edward Said. After the moment to which I refer—a moment admittedly forty years or so in length—the Victorian gothic turned once again to the foreigner, to the outsider, to the otherness of colonized lands and imperial subjectivities, as essays at the close of this volume discuss.1 But for that double moment traced, as it were, parabolically, from the moment at which Victoria came to the throne to that other moment when many of the Victorian writers thought of specifically as Victorian were either dead, dying, or consigned to writing mostly poor poetry on the Isle of Wight, the gothic mode of representation was turned on the British by the British. If there is, as James Kincaid says in Chapter 1 of [Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century], a turn from the castle to the nursery, there is also a turn from some foreign field that is most decidedly not forever England, to the playing fields and private gardens of the English, to domestic interiors and to the streets of England’s capital. The gothic is thus found among the hedgerows, in the rosebushes, along country lanes. It is to be found on the Yorkshire moors and through-

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“The Fat Boy” The title of this essay is well known. It comes from that most famous of narcoleptics (literary or otherwise), the ‘Fat Boy’, AKA ‘young opium eater’ (1988, 345)—no doubt in deference to Thomas De Quincey—from The Pickwick Papers. The scene is equally well-known, but no less comical and worth repeating for all that. It was the old lady’s habit on the fine summer mornings to repair to the arbour in which Mr. Tupman had already signalised himself, in form and manner following:—first, the fat boy fetched from a peg behind the old lady’s bed-room door, a close black satin bonnet, a warm cotton shawl, and a thick stick with a capacious handle; and the old lady having put on the bonnet and shawl at her leisure, would lean one hand on the stick and the other on the fat boy’s shoulder, and walk leisurely to the arbour, where the fat boy would leave her to enjoy the fresh air for the space of half an hour; at the expiration of which time he would return and reconduct her back to the house.

The old lady was very precise and very particular; and as this ceremony had been observed for three successive summers without the slightest deviation from the accustomed form, she was not a little surprised on this particular morning, to see the fat boy, instead of leaving the arbour, walk a few paces out of it, look carefully around him in every direction, and return towards her with great stealth and an air of the most profound mystery. The old lady was timorous—most old ladies are— and her first impression was that the bloated lad was about to do her some grievous bodily harm with the view of possessing himself of her loose coin. She would have cried for assistance, but age and infirmity had long ago deprived her of the power of screaming; she, therefore, watched his motions with feelings of intense terror, which were in no degree diminished by his coming up close to her, and shouting in her ear in an agitated, and as it seemed to her, a threatening tone,— ‘Missus!’ Now it so happened that Mr. Jingle was walking in the garden close to the arbour at this moment. He too heard the shout of ‘Missus,’ and stopped to hear more. There were three reasons for his doing so. In the first place, he was idle and curious; secondly, he was by no means scrupulous, thirdly, and lastly, he was concealed from view by some flowering shrubs. So there he stood, and there he listened. ‘Missus’, shouted the fat boy. ‘Well Joe’, said the trembling old lady. ‘I’m sure I have been a very good mistress to you Joe. You have invariably been treated very kindly. You have never had too much to do; and you have always had enough to eat.’ This last was an appeal to the fat boy’s most sensitive feelings. He seemed touched as he replied, emphatically,— ‘I knows I has.’ ‘Then what do you want now?’ said the old lady, gaining courage. ‘I wants to make your flesh creep’, replied the boy. This sounded like a very blood-thirsty mode of showing one’s gratitude; and as the old lady did not precisely understand the process by which such a result was to be attained, all her former horrors returned. (Dickens 1988, 92-3)

The scene is stage-comic, and, in its stage management, provides the would-be gothic writer—or scourge of timid old ladies everywhere—with a textbook example of how to bring a scene off that is at once both gothic, potentially terrifying in its eventual outcome, as all good scenes of gothic tension should be, and, simultaneously, unremittingly comic. Although all is soon revealed after the last moment described above, as is usually the case in the novels of, for example,

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out the exotic Babylon of the Empire’s capital, London, particularly in the back passages of the metropolis. It is to be found equally in boarding houses and amongst the houses of quiet squares. This is true at least of the literary, between the years 1840 and 1870. Most especially and insistently, the gothic is always to be found in the texts of Charles Dickens, from The Pickwick Papers in 1836-37, to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in 1870. That escape from the uncanny is impossible, we acknowledge, at least since Freud. That the return of the repressed is inescapable and inevitable, we acknowledge equally. These qualities are our own, they inhabit our being in its most intimate recesses, even, and especially, when we project them as though they were being projected from elsewhere, from some other place, other than the other within. But what if we seek to embrace this alterity? What if we revel in its haunting quality, as, I argue, did the Victorians? What if we play Oprah Winfrey, Sally Jesse Raphael, Montel Williams or even—nightmare of nightmares—Jerry Springer, to that gothic aspect of ourselves, always already lurking in the moments of anxiety and the fearful perception of imminent terror which our daytime selves simultaneously deny, yet secretly anticipate? As all good, or even mediocre therapists will tell you, you’ll never get rid of the uncanny, the other. So give it a good hug, love your other as you loathe yourself. Perhaps even tickle it, solicit a little laughter. Like a visitor who has overstayed their welcome, the uncanny may not take the hint when you begin to clear the coffee table, but at least you can amuse yourself at its expense.

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Anne Radcliffe, when the rational explanation arrives to calm down the unbearable agitation of being (for both the reader and the principal subject), nonetheless, Dickens works the scene in at least two different directions at once. The scene relies for both its gothic tension and its knowing comic solicitation of that tension on producing the simultaneity of feeling, while, also, providing the reader with a Hitchcock-like view from above down onto the terror-stricken old lady, rather similar to the elevation permitted the reader over Catherine Morland by Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey. We know, because we have been told repeatedly, that the old lady is deaf. This is why the Fat Boy bellows. Nonetheless, this does nothing to allay the old lady’s fears. If anything, they are increased. Furthermore, his bellowing in anticipation of the revelation of a secret goes directly contrary to the laws of gothic. He shouts when he should be whispering, and it is a summer’s day at a country cottage, and not the dead of night or dead of winter in some far-off chateau, castle or monastery. We might even suggest that the scene is knowingly anti-gothic, that Dickens is just having a laugh at the expense of tired form, a form he loved as a child and continues to embrace throughout his career, were it not for the fact that the deaf old lady is genuinely terrified. She is made even more an abject figure by her being unable to scream. The comedy of the scene only works because there is such a departure from routine, as Dickens makes quite clear, and because the force of the old lady’s emotions is not to be denied. It is in part the cruelty of this scene which makes us laugh, whether or not we choose to admit it. The moment in the garden is, then, exemplary of the comic-gothic. The reader works—and is expected to work—in a number of ways at once here, not least in accommodating the ludic oscillation between comedy and cruelty, the latter as the necessity for the former, the former the outcome of what happens when you get close enough to the gothic to see how the special effects work (which is precisely what Dickens does). At the same time, the scene sets for us all sorts of normal patterns of behaviour, which we are asked to take for granted, solely for the purpose of departing from them so excessively. Yet something remains unsettling in this scene, two things to be precise, moments when the gothic never quite resolves itself away. The first is the Fat Boy’s own agitation, that nervousness of demeanour as he prepares himself for his greatest performance (walking in and out of the arbour is merely for the purposes of warming up). The second is the

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Fat Boy’s outburst, which serves as the title for this essay: ‘I wants to make your flesh creep’. Why the Fat Boy should wish to do this is a mystery, unless he is merely relishing the effect, like all good stage villains. Also, the news he has to impart is hardly the sort to make the flesh creep. The gothic is quite exploded, though the uncanny remains, thereby intimating the return, if not of the repressed, then, at least, of that which cannot be described. Quite. To make someone’s flesh creep is, we might say, Young Opium Eater’s desire. Anyone less like Thomas De Quincey, the man who made even Wordsworth gothic, is hard to imagine. But the desire of the Fat Boy’s finds its target in the terrified old lady. The Fat Boy understands that creeping flesh is a necessity if the narrative he wishes to unfold is to be deemed successful. He relishes his role, his performative status in the whole event. It is participation that is important. The Fat Boy is thus exemplary of the domestic gothic. He no longer is content, like so many good British subjects, with sitting back and enjoying being scared. He wants to take part. The English, no longer afraid—temporarily—of Catholics and foreigners (the Irish of course are always an exception, but that has to with proximity to home, as all good cultural historians will acknowledge) need to scare themselves, to cut a caper at home, put on a sheet and run around going ‘hoo, hoo’, for their own delight and terror. There are no bogeymen abroad, so why not pretend to be a little spooky in one’s own back yard? As Sam Weller’s knowing sobriquet for the Fat Boy attests, the other is within us, in this case in the form of the drug possible addict. And of course, it doesn’t really matter if the Fat Boy is addicted, what matters is that he might be. The perceived drug addict as the most gothic of figures, then, haunted from within, tremulous without. Right in our own gardens. This is what we are witness to, and the Fat Boy plays it up unmercifully. As James Kincaid notes in his essay in [Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century], the Fat Boy is double, both ‘harmless toy and raging demon’. Doubleness is, of course, a feature of the uncanny, as Freud acknowledged (1953-1974 v.17, 233). It is this doubleness which Dickens remarks through the ambivalence of the comicgothic. Kincaid also raises the issue of the boy’s appetite, his constant desire to consume flesh, and to turn whatever he consumes into flesh. It is interesting to speculate, in the light of Kincaid’s remarks, on a possible connection between the

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The scenes with the Fat Boy and other scenes in Dickens’ writing clearly revel in the comicgothic as it pertains particularly to children, where the young become the source of sustenance and comedy. There is the grimly comic moment in Great Expectations when Magwitch begins to eye hungrily Pip’s fat cheeks, saying ‘Darn Me if I couldn’t eat ’em . . . and if I han’t half a mind to’t!’ (1994, 5). Eating young boys is much on Magwitch’s mind, for he conjures the spectral young man who, Pip is promised, will find a way to Pip’s heart and liver, in order that they may be torn out and roasted (1994, 6). As fascinating as such moments of potential cannibalism are, and departing from Malchow’s study, Dickens is, we

ABOUT THE AUTHOR ARCHIBALD C. COOLIDGE JR. ON DICKENS’S CHILDHOOD MEMORIES AND THE GOTHIC

Dickens had loved Gothic stories from Childhood. The inserted stories in Pickwick Papers and the terrifying passages of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby show that the taste was strong even at the start of his career. The Gothic elements in Dickens’s first few books may have been influenced by childhood memories, by the continued, though lessening public interest in Gothic stories, and by contemporary crime novels which used some Gothic elements. Doubtless also they were much influenced by the melodrama of the time. SOURCE: Coolidge, Archibald C., Jr. “Charles Dickens and Mrs. Radcliffe: A Farewell to Wilkie Collins.” The Dickensian 58 (1962): 112-16.

would suggest, not so much interested in bringing the foreign, gothic other home, as finding it already at home, at the dinner table, locating the gothic within English humour. The grotesque is a necessary component of such comedy. In turn, comedy devours, it feeds off the other, often to hilariously ghoulish effect. The Fat Boy is, in a figurative, if not literal sense, the embodiment of comic cannibalism (again, see Stone’s argument). Consuming flesh and fowl, he also has digested the gothic sensibility, to regurgitate it in a particularly stagey and English manner.

Written on the Body The Fat Boy impresses us, of course, because, not to put it too coyly, he is fat.3 His excessive, grotesque, quivering corporeality names him. This mountain of flesh, who consumes more flesh and sleeps, is known by his body, by the excessiveness he embodies. Were he not fat, could we laugh at him, could he provide us with comic and gothic moments? Probably not. The flesh is everything, it makes the act believable, and it is his size, as well as his creepy proximity, which terrifies the old lady. Dickens knows this, no doubt, and relishes the blubbery monstrousness of the boy, seeing in it not only a good turn but also a sure-

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Fat Boy and the contemporary concern with cannibalism, in relation to the distrust of medical science’s advocacy of anatomy, as H.L. Malchow discusses (1996, 110ff).2 As Malchow suggests, there were growing worries about ‘domestic, if metaphoric, cannibalism’ as a manifestation of the gothic in the form of anatomical dissections in the 1830s, given voice in places both high and low, in The Lancet and in popular songs of the day (Malchow 1996, 110). Perhaps from a fear of the anatomist’s knife and its implied relation to ‘barbaric’ practices, a grim humour, a ‘[d]issectionroom humor’ arose during the period, and ‘Dickens made much use of this kind of humor’ from Pickwick to Our Mutual Friend, as Malchow acknowledges (114-15). Malchow cites the dinner scene between the medical students Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen, who joke about the ‘source’ of their meat (a child’s leg), terrifying Mr Pickwick. He also recalls the meal consumed by Wegg and Mr Venus in Our Mutual Friend, in the taxidermist’s shop, where the two men are surrounded by jars containing the pickled remains of ‘Indian and African infants’, along with scenes from Bleak House (1996, 115). Harry Stone also notes the frequency of the ‘comic mode’ in relation to the theme of cannibalism, citing the example of the Fat Boy (1994, 77-9). As Stone makes clear, Young Opium Eater makes little if any distinction between animal and human flesh (78). Such comedic business succeeds, argues Stone, in banishing the gothic quality of such moments. However, I would argue that the gothic element remains potent precisely because it is never banished absolutely. Instead, it operates as gothic because of its immanence and its promise, laying below the surface and getting under our skins, waiting suggestively to make our flesh creep. As with many instances of alterity, the comic-gothic operates through proximity and intimacy.

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fire commercial winner, guaranteed to keep us coming back for more. It is almost as if one can imagine Dickens advertising the Fat Boy in the words reserved for Mr Whackford Squeers, speaking of his son: ‘“Here’s flesh!” cried Squeers, turning the boy about, and indenting the plumpest parts of his figure with divers pokes and punches. . . . “Here’s firmness, here’s solidness”’ (1986, 517). There is a slight difference between the boys however, it should be noted. While the Fat Boy provides comedy by inflicting (metaphorical and psychological) pain, here it is the almost equally rotund Master Squeers who feels the pain while being part of the comedy. Fatness is not the bodily articulation of comic pain and gothic, grotesque excess so much as it is the medium through which such discourses may be expressed, and onto which they may be inscribed. What we as readers comprehend from one fat boy to another is the use to which the child’s corpulence may be put, the abuse which it endures for the sake of the joke, at a moment where pain and pleasure are inextricably linked. The experience of both and their simultaneity is, for the reader, of the flesh made word and the word fleshed out, embodied. It is, as with so many gothic narratives, an ‘experience rooted in the body’, as Steven Bruhm puts it (1994, xv). And for all the comedy, both the Fat Boy and young Whackford perform for us as gothic bodies, in Bruhm’s definition of this corporeal and textual phenomenon, for it is principally their bodies which are ‘put on display’ in all their ‘violent, vulnerable immediacy’ (1994, xvii). It is through the figure of the figure that Dickens, by such examples, draws upon the discourse of the gothic, a form of writing which ‘needs to be regarded’, as Robert Miles argues, ‘as a series of contemporaneously understood forms, devices, codes, figurations, for the expression of the “fragmented subject”’ (1993, 3). Young Opium Eater and Young Whackford overflow their limits, their identities breaking down to become excessive and grotesque articulations. They are exploited and made to work. Dickens understands therefore, in the words of José Gil, that the body ‘carries the symbolic exchanges and correspondences between the different codes that are in play’. He continues: ‘[t]he body is the exchanger of codes . . . on its own the body signifies nothing, says nothing. It always speaks only the language of the other (codes) that comes and inscribe themselves on it’ (1998, 99). This seems particularly true of the Fat Boy, who, despite his corpulence, his idleness and gluttony, is, as James

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Kincaid puts it, hollow, this hollowness in all its gothic splendour being ‘the mysterious hollowness of fascinating caverns’ (1992, 95). Dickens writes the boy as hollow in order to fill him from other places; he writes him as fat in order to write large the conjunction of the comic and gothic discourses which find their meeting place in the particular scene already considered. It is not that the Fat Boy is always in gothic mode, although, arguably, his constant state of being-narcoleptic is suggestive of zombies or the undead, albeit of a carnivalesque order. We might even suggest, given his often death-like state—extending the performative aspect further—that the Fat Boy’s performance is analogous to an act of mesmerism on Dickens’ part,4 as well as an act of ventriloquism through the mesmerized boy by the author. Dickens puts on a theatrical turn by having the Fat Boy adopt a gothic mode of discourse, arriving with the promise of a tale to harrow the old woman, in a low, comic parody of Hamlet’s father (both, after all, involve gardens in one way or another). But is it possible to find the conjunction of the comic and the gothic in bodies which are decidedly not obese? One possible example of this is worked through in the scene leading up to Oliver asking for more food, as Harry Stone discusses (1994, 81; for more concerning Stone’s discussion, see below). Another example comes from The Uncommercial Traveller. In the article entitled ‘Wapping Workhouse’, the narrator, on his way to that institution, encounters a rather strange boy who is referred to four times in two pages as an apparition (1987, 19-20). The ghastly and grotesquely comic come together in the bodily form and voice, whose most noticeable features are ‘a ghastly grin and a [voice] like gurgling water’ (1987, 19). The unnerved narrator remarks of the locks by which they are standing ‘“A common place for suicide”’, to which the uncanny figure, returns in a possible jest (which may just be a misheard response), ‘“Sue?” returned the ghost with a stare’ (19). With music-hall timing, not missing a beat, the proper name of one of the dead comes back, with that gallows humour to be found everywhere in Dickens’ writing. Yet it is not merely the pun which is important, the joke at the expense of self-slaughter. Importantly, the scene is set up through the body of this ghostly creature, especially in that humorous rictus and in the voice of the drowned. The body of the apparition is, once more, expressly written as an empty figure on which are traced the comic and the uncanny. Everything about the young man is

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Thus Dickens, again, abusing identity in order to entertain, raising a laugh as well as raising the dead. . . . . .

Scaring children is fun If children are, from certain perspectives, constructed socially and through various cultural narratives as different from adult, rational human beings, this is no doubt a self-sustaining process which, in fearing the otherness of the child, the adolescent, the teenager, rewrites the narrative of childhood being in order to maintain its alterity, precisely for the purpose of punishment. The child’s world is, as James Kincaid says, ‘unnecessary, useless’; strictly speaking, it is a made-up world, creative rather than mimetic (Kincaid 1992, 221). In recognizing this, the adult may recognize a certain lost world, and seek to punish its other for the loss of that which we failed to keep within our grasp. So, we might say, what we want is facts, not fantasy. And what better way at getting back at the childlike delight in the gothic—that which scares us because we have grown ever so sensible, rational—than to punish it with that mode of representation by which the child can create laughter? Even while children may triumph occasionally in the text of Dickens, it remains a fact nonetheless that, at some point, they are punished in some fashion for their difference. All too frequently, the writing of punishment in Dickens’ novels takes a gothic turn (which is never comical), as in the process of ‘education’ at Dotheboys Hall, in the death of Paul Dombey, or in the manifestation of a school master named Bradley Headstone. There are, however, other ways of punishing the child whereby the gothic mode may be maintained and in which Dickens indulges, while comedy is reintroduced for the amusement of the (no doubt) adult reader, who may, like any number of Dickens’ adult characters, tend to understand children as ‘naturally wicious’. Because at some level the child, adolescent or teenager is perceived in all his or her (frequently gothic) otherness, so fun may be made through the gothic mode. Not all children get to have the last laugh, as does Bailey Jr.5 Oliver Twist provides one example of comedy—albeit of a very dark variety—at the expense of the child, as Oliver progresses from the workhouse, to the undertaker’s, to Fagin’s den (all

gothic structures), where other children enjoy themselves but not Oliver. (No doubt there is something of the morality tale here; all children, being naturally wicious, have criminal propensities, Oliver’s plight is a warning to us all, my dears, concerning the inevitable recidivism of childhood.) Harry Stone offers a fascinating discussion of the well-known moment when Oliver asks for more (Stone 1994, 79-81). This moment, argues Stone, is equally laughable and fearful: the scene in which Oliver asks for more . . . is generated by a bizarre and laughable fear. Everyone is familiar with the scene itself, but how many remember the fear that generates the scene? That fear flows directly from a terrifying cannibalistic threat, but this threat—a threat made by one workhouse boy that he will devour another—is cauterized by its outlandishness and its humour: we chuckle rather than shudder, and we dismiss the threat as a bit of humorous Dickensian grotesquerie; the threat, we feel, has no abiding importance. But Dickens does not dismiss the threat, nor does he discount it or forget it. (1994, 81)

This is an admirable reading of the comicgothic event, though I would argue that it is not a question of dismissing the threat so much as seeking to domesticate it, making it manageable through emphasizing the comic register. This is a precarious moment for, in the potential effect of making manageable, the economy of the workhouse—that which seeks to make children manageable—may become reproduced in and by the textual satire. Dickens will not let us do this, however, for his text maintains the fearful and the comic, the gothic and the humorous, in a precarious balance where the seemingly opposing discursive and psychic poles in question here open between them an uncanny aporia into which either mode threatens constantly to overflow and commingle. The other well-known Dickensian scared child is Pip who, like Oliver, spends much of his early life in gothic surroundings—whether the marshes, his parents’ gravestones, or Miss Havisham’s—or in proximity to gothic moments, such as that of the soldiers’ arrival at Joe’s door, in search of Magwitch, described as an ‘apparition’ (1994, 30). Of such moments, the most comical for the reader, though not for Pip, is the following: It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief. Now, I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of spiders’

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uncanny, uncomfortable, especially his wit, which insists on disrupting the meaning of words.

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once more the obsession with children eating), these being the ‘horrible requirements’ with which ‘he haunted my existence’ (1994, 216; emphases added). Furthermore, Pip refers to the boy as an ‘avenging phantom’. Whether or not Pip intends to be humorous, his description of the boy in boots is comical even while it is indebted to gothic discourse; more to the point, we can read that the gothic child is inescapable. It is always present, and always hungry—for something. . . . . .

webs. . . . The marsh-mist was so thick, that the wooden finger on the post . . . was invisible to me until I was quite close under it. Then, as I looked up at it, while it dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a phantom devoting me to the Hulks. The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me. This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and dykes and banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly as could be, ‘A boy with Somebody-else’s pork pie! Stop him!’ The cattle came upon me with a suddenness, staring out of their eyes, and steaming out of their nostrils, ‘Holloa, young thief!’ One black ox, with a white cravat on—who had to my awakened conscience something of a clerical air—fixed me so obstinately with his eyes, and moved his blunt head round in such an accusatory manner that I blubbered out to him, ‘I couldn’t help it sir! It wasn’t for myself I took it!’ Upon which he put down his head, blew a cloud of smoke out of his nose, and vanished with a kick-up of his hind legs and a flourish of his tail. (1994, 16-17)

Between the pie and the cattle, there is more of gravy than of grave about this scene,6 even if, despite its clerical air, the black ox bears more than a passing resemblance to the devil rather than any clergyman, while Pip’s behaviour recalls in parodic fashion Hamlet’s words concerning the reaction of guilty creatures, given certain stimuli. There is a subtle distance between Pip’s older, narrating self, and his younger, other identity. While the elder Pip may well be able to construct the narrative comically at his other’s expense, his younger self clearly is not in on the joke, and is terrified by the spectral cattle and the animated features of the landscape. The goblins, spiders’ webs and the dripping phantom finger-post operate within a gothic mode, as the supernatural scene displaces the real world in leading to the comedy of frightened childhood. That there is a discernible gap between the older and the younger Pip suggests to what extent the child as other has to be punished by its older manifestation. There is a double movement here, in imagination and memory, for while the elder Pip remembers the scene, he is also shaping its narration in a particular gothic fashion. His younger self’s terror is transformed into a medium for entertainment. And this is not the only example of Pip’s comic-gothic abilities at the expense of the young. His manipulation of gothic discourse is presented when, in London, he hires a ‘boy in boots’ (1994, 216). Invoking Frankenstein, Pip remarks that he makes a ‘monster’ of the boy, who has ‘little to do and a great deal to eat’ (notice

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Gothic narrative at the end of the eighteenth and, again, at the end of the nineteenth century sought to assert a sense of national identity in response to fears of the foreign. Such irrational fears sought to identify and marginalize the other and all that was not-English, as is well known. Perhaps closest to home in the nineteenth century is the equally well-known representation of the Irish as monstrous.7 What we may come to understand from Dickens, however, is that the gothic, the monstrous, the other, is a lot closer than we are comfortable in acknowledging. Taking the gothic and exploring it comically is one method of assuming proximity, if not intimacy, with the subject. Comic discourse and performance brings down the defences of the psyche. It allows the connection to be made between high and low, self and other. In so doing, it seeks to make us face the ‘monstrous’ within ourselves, so to make our flesh creep, making us tremble, simultaneously with laughter and fear, just enough so as to allow us a view of ourselves we had always striven to deny and to project onto others.

Notes 1. On gothic images of race, see H.L. Malchow (1996), who discusses the literary representation of the foreign as gothic other from the Napoleonic period to the finde-siècle, addressing usefully questions of monstrosity, cannibalism, vampirism and homoeroticism to the figure of ‘half-breed’ as a gothic form. 2. See also Chris Baldick (1987, 106-20), on the monstrous and Dickens’ gallows humour. Baldick discusses the comic references to galvanism, from Sawyer and Allen forward, and to the ‘animation of the apparently inanimate’ (107). He also considers how the comedic effect is achieved through a dark exuberance on the author’s part, discussing as well the question of dismemberment and dissection. Baldick argues that there is ‘more to all this ghoulishness than a gratuitous frisson; it is of a piece with Dickens’ synecdochal, Carlylean representation of character and of the fragmented body’ (110). Furthermore, for Baldick, Dickens maps monstrosity onto the body as a product of ‘crushing social pressures’ (112). This may be true in part, but there is a certain distortion in Baldick’s argument inasmuch as he takes the issue of fragmentation as directly Carlylean—Dickens’ productions being a manifestation akin to the anxiety of influence per-

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3. On flesh, fatness, and their carnivalesque relation to the erotic in Pickwick, with particular attention to the Fat Boy, see James R. Kincaid’s essay ‘Fattening up on Pickwick’ (1995, 21-35). Elsewhere, Kincaid argues that the stories we tell today concerning child abuse are, in their structures and circuitry, essentially gothic narratives, filled with so much terror that we become paralysed by them, unable to act (1998, 10-13). From this perspective, what is perhaps particularly terrifying in Dickens’ gothic reinventions is that he is able to invest the gothic with humour. Of course, there are many children in Dickens who are neither fat nor funny, who inhabit the realm of the gothic and who are systematically abused, as is the case of the children of the workhouse in Oliver Twist or the boys of that other gothic pile, Dotheboys Hall, in Nicholas Nickleby as mentioned in the essay. Dickens’ sense of the gothic in his depiction of such institutions works on the reader to appal at the recurring institutional abuse which occurs through the lack of nourishment, whether literal or metaphorical. Where children are comical in Dickens, and not merely the subjects of humour (and this is the distinction between the Fat Boy and Whackford, between Bailey Jr. and Oliver Twist; see the section ‘Scaring children is fun’, above) the gothic mode can be read as being put to use as a revenge, rather than a return of the repressed. Precariously enough, the comic-gothic, coming from some other place within, promises to effect destabilization of normative social relations and the circuitry of power which such relations maintain. 4. On questions of mesmeric agency, see Chapter 6 by Alison Chapman and Chapter 8 by Roger Luckhurst [, both in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century]. For a full-length study of mesmerism and its popularity as a form of entertainment, see Alison Winter’s excellent study, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (1998). 5. If the difference between the child who causes laughter and who is laughed at in Dickens can be described briefly, perhaps the question is one of class, and of the child’s class position. Both Bailey and the Fat Boy are working class, their ‘low’ position indicated through their speech, through non-standard spelling and the emphasis by Dickens on idiomatic expression. Neither boy speaks the standard English of the middleclasses or of the narrator. Oliver Twist and Pip on the other hand, always speak standard English, without the trace of idiom or accent peculiar to the working class. They are thus implicitly given ‘universal’ voices. Within the narrative logic of Great Expectations Pip’s ‘voice’ may of course be explained away: he is the adult narrator, recalling his own boyhood, and he has undergone education which has erased any signs of local accent which he may have had as a child. Oliver, on the other hand, always speaks English ‘correctly’, thereby signalling that, even as a child, in the workhouse or in Fagin’s hideout, he has always already transcended both class and locale. It would seem then,

as a provisional thesis by which to explain the difference between those who generate humour and those who are its objects, that the comic-gothic is, for Dickens, a working class mode of articulation, which shares certain proletarian affinities with the grotesque, the carnivalesque, the melodramatic, and the music hall; in short, with all forms of popular entertainment. 6. The words are of course those of Ebenezer Scrooge in response to Marley’s ghost (1988, 19). Although not a child, Dickens has Scrooge respond in a manner which is instructive with regard to the comic-gothic. Following the well-known retort, Dickens remarks, ‘Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre’s voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones’ (19). Despite Dickens’ protestations, the line is, of course, funny, whether it was intended or not. However, the inadvertent recourse to humour in opposition to terror provides the reader with one more comic-gothic moment, which is, again, connected to consumption, to what is inside us. This is expressed both in Scrooge’s remark, and those preceding the gravy pun, but also, importantly in Dickens’ own expression of spectral disturbance in ‘the very marrow in [Scrooge’s] bones’. The ghost makes Scrooge’s flesh creep, while the text moves spectrally across the boundary of the character’s remarks to those of the narrator. 7. See, for example, the well-known cartoon by John Tenniel, ‘The Irish Frankenstein’, published in Punch (20 May 1882), where in a typical conflation between the name of the creator and his creature, the Irish are represented as a monstrous, bloodthirsty, masked creature. H.L. Malchow’s Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1996), provides what is to date the most sustained consideration of the relation between the aesthetics and politics of representation, from Frankenstein to the fin-de-siècle. On related matters of race and the connections made between ‘foreigners’ and women, see Meyer (1996); also on the issue of race and degeneration, see Greenslade (1994).

Bibliography Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Bruhm, Steven. Gothic Bodies: the Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Dickens, Charles. ‘A Christmas Carol’. In Christmas Books. Ed. Ruth Glancy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 1-90. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Eds George Ford and Sylvere Monod. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Ed. Margaret Cardwell. Int. Kate Flint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Dickens, Charles. Martin Chuzzlewit. Ed. P.N. Furbank. London: Penguin, 1986. Dickens, Charles. Nicholas Nickleby. Ed. Michael Slater. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Ed. Adrian Poole. London: Penguin, 1997.

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haps—rather than seeing Carlyle’s writing as similarly produced, and not the original source as Baldick seems to assume implicitly. Arguably, the ‘contamination’ of fictive discourse with traces of scientific, anatomical and gothic textuality, speaks of the general historicity and materiality of Dickens’ text, in which materiality Carlyle is also enfolded. The gothic as genre provides Dickens with a recognizable form of bourgeois entertainment which misshapes and in turn is distorted by contemporaneous discourses of the period.

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Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Ed. Michael Costell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Dickens, Charles. The Pickwick Papers. Ed. James Kinsley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces. Int. Leslie C. Staples. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Freud, Sigmund. ‘On the Uncanny’. In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17. Ed. and Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psychoanalysis, 1953-1974. 233-8. Gil, José. Metamorphoses of the Body. Trans. Stephen Muecke. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kincaid, James R. Annoying the Victorians. New York: Routledge, 1995. Kincaid, James R. Child-Loving: the Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Kincaid, James R. Erotic Innocence: the Culture of Child Molesting. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Malchow, H.L. Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Meyer, Susan. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell, 1996. Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing 1750-1820: a Genealogy. London: Routledge, 1993. Stone, Harry. The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994. Twitchell, James B. The Living Dead: a Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 1981. Winter, Alison. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Wolfreys, Julian. Writing London: the Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998.

TITLE COMMENTARY Bleak House ANN RONALD (ESSAY DATE SEPTEMBER 1975) SOURCE: Ronald, Ann. “Dickens’ Gloomiest Gothic Castle.” Dickens Studies Newsletter 6, no. 3 (September 1975): 71-5. In the following essay, Ronald traces Dickens’s use of the Gothic in Bleak House.

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In most eighteenth-century Gothic novels the physical setting was key. The enormous, often ruined medieval castle, filled with gloomy, mysterious interiors, internally connected by labyrinthine passageways and externally obscured by mists and fog, fascinated readers of Mrs. Radcliffe’s age. When following generations lost interest in the Gothic novel, the Gothic castle per se began disappearing, but the imagery used to describe such buildings remained useful. Nineteenthcentury novelists often borrowed the ruined building, the twisting passages, the darkened interiors, the obscuring powers of fog, and transformed them to suit their own purposes. In Bleak House particularly, Charles Dickens incorporated the structural imagery of the Gothic castle in important and original ways. He hardly intended us to picture Bleak House itself as a Gothic castle. Yet before John Jarndyce took possession it looked ruined—“dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to the rotting door” (viii)— almost Gothic. In her descriptions of Bleak House refurbished, Esther communicates little sense of ruin but conveys an impression of Gothic intricacy by noting the “bountiful provision of halls and passages” and “cottage-rooms in unexpected places, with lattice windows and green growth pressing through them” (vi). Surely, though, Dickens envisioned the building more complexly than the slightly-Gothic piece of eccentric stage setting seen by Esther. Alice van Buren Kelly, in her essay in NCF [Nineteenth-Century Fiction] (December 1970), “The Bleak Houses of Bleak House,” correctly calls the Jarndyce residence a metaphor for the entire novel. Bleak House possesses a labyrinthine structure that echoes the twisting complexity of the plot and innumerable rooms that suggest the multiplicity of settings found throughout the book, while the fog “everywhere” swirls around both. Bleak House is Bleak House. But Kelley does not see Bleak House as a pseudo-semi-Gothic castle, and as a result she interprets the Jarndyce home as a somewhat positive symbol—and the final Woodcourt residence, similarly named, as even sunnier. If we accept the fact that Dickens is working from the Gothic mode, we cannot agree with her conclusions. Certain negative psychological states—fear, terror, horror—traditionally arise from Gothicism, and Gothic castles appear in novels to help evoke those moods. I view Bleak House, then, as but an emblem for the kind of transformation Dickens makes throughout the

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The Dedlock mansion in Lincolnshire more closely resembles the conventional castle, although Esther sees it first as only “a picturesque old house.” She naively tells the reader that “on everything, house, garden, terrace, green slopes, water, old oaks, fern, moss, woods again, and far away across the openings in the prospect, to the distance lying wide before us with a purple bloom upon it, there seemed to be such undisturbed repose” (xviii). But after she learns the identity of her mother, Esther’s perceptions change. Then Chesney Wold becomes “the obdurate and unpitying watcher” of Lady Dedlock’s misery, and, terrified, Esther rushes past “long lines of dark windows, diversified by turreted towers, and porches, of eccentric shapes, where old stone lions and grotesque monsters bristled outside dens of shadow, and snarled at the evening gloom over the escutcheons they helt in their grip” (xxxvi). Dickens heightens her imagination momentarily to perceive Chesney Wold in terms of evil, but has her, quite characteristically, drop the subject before it becomes to intense. The omniscient narrator, the voice speaking in the historical present with a sense of continuing and relentless action, conveys more of the real Gothic horror of Chesney Wold. He describes the decayed country estate, surrounded by “a general smell and taste of the ancient Dedlocks in their graves” (ii), like a ruin. And sometimes, in true Gothic fashion, that ruin is haunted: “Mists hide in the avenues, veil the points of view, and move in funeral-wise across the rising grounds. On all the house there is a cold, blank smell, like the smell of a little church, though something dryer: suggesting that the dead and buried Dedlocks walk there, in the long nights, and leave the flavour of their graves behind them” (xxxix). It seems to me that with these two views of Chesney Wold—Esther’s and the omniscient narrator’s—Dickens echoes the two points of view conventionally found in Gothic novels.1 TerrorGothic—Esther’s brand—titillates and then closes the reader’s mind to further perceptions while horror-Gothic—the omniscient narrator’s—opens and expands it toward new horizons. Of course the reader responds more intensely and more intelligently to the latter. But Dickens is not

through with the Dedlock estate yet; he has only been preparing us for an even more complex reaction. He wants to terrify us not with grotesque statues, not with aristocratic ghosts, not with Gothic trappings, but with reality. His ultimate presentation of Chesney Wold occurs in the turret-room during the moonlit conversation between Lady Dedlock and Mr. Tulkinghorn. There the setting, an almost-Gothic tower with mysterious footsteps sounding on the nearby Ghost’s Walk, recedes into the background while the characters talk. Since the reader already has assimilated a total awareness of Chesney Wold from Esther and the omniscient narrator, Dickens need not describe the turret-room in more detail. For background he can expect the previous Gothic connotations of fear and horror to merge with the present, very real, horror and fear. Together, the psychological and the real fuse into an intellectual environment for the terrible conversation. We cannot help but shift uncomfortably in our chairs while we read more quickly to reach the climax of the scene because Mr. Tulkinghorn, in that place, terrifies us just as much as he terrifies Lady Dedlock. And our response to what we are reading, far more intense than we would ever have to something by Mrs. Radcliffe of Monk Lewis, has been triggered by fairly conventional Gothic imagery. But there is an even more important way that Dickens uses those conventions, a way that is at once more creative and more terrifying. He borrows the elements of a Gothic castle to describe not a single building but an entire city, London itself. Of course the fog is “everywhere,” obscuring the city both literally and figuratively from the very beginning, and those mists intertwine among an extraordinary number of buildings and streets that the author has chosen to picture in terms of their Gothic components. The result is a Gothic-inspired but Dickens-created terror even more gripping than that imposed by Chesney Wold. Before we examine that final result, however, we need to look specifically at certain descriptions of Dickens’ London, for he achieves a subsidiary end along the way. Many of Dickens’ London-dwellers live in gloomy, mysterious buildings or rooms. Mr. Tulkinghorn’s permanent residence sets the tone, for he lives in a large house, once a house of state, with a variety of “roomy staircases, passages, and ante-chambers,” in whose “shrunken fragments” of greatness “lawyers lie like maggots in nuts” (x). Guarded by the pointing figure of Allegory on his ceiling—suggesting the terror of mute pursuit— Mr. Tulkinghorn lives in a place that intimates

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book. If it is an emblem rather than a symbol, it serves principally to intimate the richer atmospheric and deeper psychological constructs communicated by his more vivid transformations. For example, his technique in presenting Bleak House simply foreshadows the more powerfully-Gothic drawing of Chesney Wold.

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ruin, just as he himself embodies ruin wherever he goes. Mr. Vholes, another creature of prey, also frightens the reader with his continual blackness and his powerful hold over Richard Carstone, and Mr. Vholes operates from an office that is almost a replica of himself. The omiscient narrator explains that “three feet of knotty floored dark passage brings the client to [his] jet black door, in an angle profoundly dark on the brightest midsummer morning, and encumbered by a black bulk-head of cellarage staircase,” and then shows us the interior, with its “smell of must and dust” blended with that “of unwholesome sheep” and its greasy and gloomy corners, “last painted or whitewashed beyond the memory of man” (xxxix). Richard, Mr. Vholes’s victim, lives in “a dull room, fadedly furnished” (li). Their abodes, described in terms of Gothic imagery, reflect and reinforce our perceptions of the characters, just as they do when Dickens shows us the residence of Mrs. Jellyby, or of Harold Skimpole, or even the country estate of Lady Dedlock. Thus we see that Dickens uses his images in still another specialized way—to aid characterization. Several times throughout the novel he overtly states that this is his intention. As Mr. Tulkinghorn “is to look at, so is his apartment” (x) in the afternoon dusk. The inhabitants of the Smallweed apartment dwell “in a little narrow street, always solitary, shady, and sad, closely bricked in on all sides like a tomb” (xxi). The dark little parlour itself stands “certain feet below the level of the street—a grim, hard, uncouth parlour, only ornamented with the coarsest of baize table-covers, and the hardest of sheet-iron tea-trays, and offering in its decorative character no bad allegorical representation of Grandfather Smallweed’s mind” (xxi). Such an apartment reminds us of a dungeon in the depths of an abandoned castle, and the Gothic mysteriousness of the interior reinforces the puzzling uneasiness we feel whenever Grandfather Smallweed is present. Many of the characters in Bleak House—Grandfather Smallweed, Mr. Tulkinghorn, Mr. Vholes, for example—substantiate the reader’s sense of terror at unknown pursuit, and their complementary residences emphasize that feeling. Our overwhelming sense of London, though, is one of ruin, particularly when we react to the slum of Tom-all-Alone’s, with its “crazy houses” and tumbling tenements” and “ruined shelters” on “a black, dilapidated street” (xvi), or when we look into “the room with the dark door” at Mr. Krook’s: “a sad and desolate place it was; a gloomy,

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sorrowful place, that gave . . . a strange sensation of mournfulness and even dread” (xiv). Dickens underscores that sense of ruin by describing the streets on which these shells sit. Tom-all-Alone’s “is a street of perishing blind houses, with their eyes stoned out; without a pane of glass, without so much as a window-frame, with the bare blank shutters tumbling from their hinges and falling asunder; the iron rails peeling away in flakes of rust; the chimneys sinking in; the stone steps to every door (and every door might be Death’s Door) turning stagnant green; the very crutches on which the ruins are propped, decaying” (viii). And such a description is only one of many. Sometimes the author chooses to emphasize the labyrinthine windings of the streets connecting those grim, stark ruins. When Esther first arrives in the city, she comments on “the dirtiest and darkest streets that ever were seen in the world” (iii), and at one point she comes to “a narrow street of high houses, like an oblong cistern to hold the fog” (vi). The omniscient narrator also remarks “the great wilderness of London” (xlviii). In particular, when Esther joins Inspector Bucket in the search for Lady Dedlock, our sense of the mysterious complexity of the city is reinforced. Esther tells us: “We rattled with great rapidity through such a labyrinth of streets, that I soon lost all idea where we were; except that we had crossed and re-crossed the river, and still seemed to be traversing a low-lying, water-side, dense neighbourhood of narrow throughfares, chequered by docks and basins, high piles of warehouses, swing-bridges, and masts of ships” (lvii). Dickens further emphasizes the impression of a maze after the two searchers turn to descend “into a deeper complication of such Streets” (lix). Finally, Esther describes the last few blocks of her journey to the gloomy burial ground; her impressions are confused, a haze of street-lamps, of dark, of dawn, of driving sleet. She recollects “the wet house-tops, the clogged and bursting gutters and water-spouts, the mounds of blackened ice and snow over which we passed, the narrowness of the courts by which we went” (lix). And then she stands “under a dark and miserable covered way, where one lamp was burning over an iron gate, and where the morning faintly struggled in. The gate was closed. Beyond it, was a burial ground—a dreadful spot in which the night was very slowly stirring; but where I could dimly see heaps of dishonoured graves and stones, hemmed in by filthy houses, with a few dull lights in their windows, and on whose walls a thick humidity broke out

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However, the real intellectual terror of Dickens’ London again comes through the words of the omniscient narrator. He expresses, not the superficial terror of the malleable Esther, but the terror of an expanding mind, one who sees the reality of a nineteenth-century English city with its murky industrialization and grim complexity leading into a maze of anonymity. Pherhaps the reader’s emotions extend even beyond the range of terror; perhaps he begins to feel a sense of horror at modernity, as Dickens indeed did. This is not a horror caused by supernatural devices, a horror that circumscribes the souls of fictional heroines and closes their minds, but a horror caused by an expansion of man’s view of reality. And even Esther can learn to see, as we do, the awesome horror of the modern city: It was a cold, wild night, and the trees shuddered in the wind. The rain had been thick and heavy all day, and with little intermission for many days. None was falling just then, however. The sky had partly cleared, but was very gloomy—even above us, where a few stars were shining. In the north and north-west, where the sun had set three hours before, there was a pale dead light both beautiful and awful; and into it long sullen lines of cloud waved up, like a sea stricken immovable as it was heaving. Towards London, a lurid glare overhung the whole dark waste: and the contrast between these two lights, and the fancy which the redder light engendered of an unearthly fire, gleaming on all the unseen buildings of the city, and on all the faces of its many thousands of wondering inhabitants, was as solemn as might be. (xxxi)

London, an environment of horror burning in the fires of Hell, stands as the central structure in Bleak House. Its multitude of streets, winding between shadowy dwelling places, parallel the passageways of an old abandoned ruin, while its great number of murky, dingy, darkened interiors suggest the multiple suites and chambers of a Gothic castle, each with its own mysterious and shadowy corners. Ultimately, then, obscured by fog and portrayed in terms of ruin, London becomes Dickens’ Gothic castle. As such it conveys a total sense of mystery, terror, and even horror, not found in previous novels of Gothic heritage, and as such it opens the mind of the reader to a new perception of reality. The ruined eyeless buildings of Tom-allAlone’s, the dirty dark interiors of Mr. Vholes and Grandfather Smallweed, the twisting maze of London streets, and the grim fog of Chancery all

combine into a single Gothic image to promote the reader’s involvement with the horror of an urban environment. It is this involvement that is new; no longer can the reader sit back and enjoy the flighty fancies of a mechanical heroine. Instead, he himself must participate in the emotions suggested by otherwise rather conventional Gothic imagery. Dickens’ London in Bleak House is indeed a Gothic ruin, but it is a Gothic ruin of a new generation, and as such it functions to open the mind of perceptions never imagined by novelists of the previous century.

Note 1. See Robert D. Hume, “Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” PMLA 84 (March 1969) 292-90, for a full discussion of the distinctions between terror-Gothic and horror-Gothic.

Great Expectations THOMAS LOE (ESSAY DATE SEPTEMBER 1989) SOURCE: Loe, Thomas. “Gothic Plot in Great Expectations.” Dickens Quarterly 6, no. 3 (September 1989): 10210. In the following essay, Loe explores the origins of the Gothic plot devices used in Great Expectations.

In spite of the enormous amount of critical attention the plot of Great Expectations has received in the last two decades, there has been a reluctance on the part of critics to identify its structure in terms of traditional genres. The novel’s length, number of characters, and elaborate texture make plot identification a subtle issue, especially since the sense of progression of the story is skillfully interwoven with the development of Pip’s character. With few exceptions, critics looking at structure tend to synthesize all these elements into one main plot. Such syntheses demonstrate that Great Expectations is probably the most unified of Dickens’s novels, but in unraveling the elaborate tissue of its unifying elements they invariably fail to account for its diversity of action. My thesis is that there are three main lines to the concrete experiences and literal actions of Great Expectations, and that these can be described by using traditional genre designations: the Bildungsroman, the novel of manners, and the Gothic novel. My primary concern is with the Gothic plot because its particular structural significance has been virtually ignored. One could argue

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like a disease” (lix). What eighteenth-century Gothic novel possesses a more chilling pursuit through its castle?

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that this is only because Great Expectations is such a successful work: its generally acknowledged superior plot construction conceals the overlapping patterns of its different genres in a way that one would expect in a work of deeply resonant unity. K. J. Fielding, for example, claims that in Great Expectations Dickens “completely mastered the skill of construction” (221), and Lionel Stevenson says that it “was his masterpiece of form and structure” (351). Yet Dickens’s own ambivalence about the conclusion and the ongoing critical debate about the meaning and appropriateness of the two endings suggest that the various plots do not coalesce as neatly at the end of the novel as they are synthesized during its development. Examining the plot lines through the terms afforded by genre may not resolve interpretive debate, but it will allow insight into the structures that knit the book together, help reveal what the interpretive issues are, and establish parallels for comparing novels. Viewing Great Expectations as Bildungsroman is the most popular approach through genre. George Worth’s invaluable Great Expectations: An Annotated Bibliography published in 1986 reveals about two dozen studies that employ the concept as a significant way of reading the novel. G. B. Tennyson, for example, writes “To my mind the most complete expression of the Bildungsroman is Great Expectations” (143). Critics who view the novel as a Bildungsroman tend to find the same patterns and reveal that there is nothing particularly sequential to those patterns because they consist more of thematic elements than structural ones. G. Robert Strange’s remark, “Great Expectations is not more profound than other development-novels, but it is more mysterious” (111) locates its chief distinction. The reason it is more mysterious is that the Bildungsroman plot in Great Expectations, unlike most other novels of the genre, is given a sense of sequential progression and heightened action through a combination with other plots. My contention is that the story of Pip’s story of psychological and moral formation and his social progress is supported and directed by the simpler and more tightly knit plot derived from the Gothic novel. The fictional biographical or autobiographical impulses of the nineteenth-century novel could easily become the “large loose and baggy monsters” Henry James describes without a more definite shaping force (84). Students of the Bildungsroman generally agree that it was left to Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf to perfect the techniques of point of view and pat-

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terned motifs necessary to structure that complex genre. In terms of his Bildungsroman plot, Pip’s journey is the metaphor of his development, and Joe is emblematic of the standard which Pip has left and to which he must eventually return in order to make accurate judgments about himself. Joe does not change, although he progresses in time, and the Bildungsroman plot he represents is not so much static as circular for Pip, which Meyer Abrams suggests is typical of the genre which has a “dialectical organization—it must have reached the Wissenschaft at the end of its journey before it can set out upon that journey from its beginning” (235). Any remaining questions about the suitability of the term as applied to Great Expectations are answered by Marianne Hirsch’s conclusive “The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions.” Pip’s maturation progress, which includes his mistakes, may be judged against that standard to which he repeatedly returns from London, a circling progress of the coming together of younger and older self (Halperin 110): “ostensibly to make reparation to the neglected Joe, an intention never realized” (Brooks 125). Most critics are naturally interested in describing the development of Pip’s character, for it is in Pip’s personality and the evolution of that personality that the salient literary merit of the book resides. The movement is a process in which Pip’s ability to perceive his fall becomes an essential part of the discovery of self, as well as providing a venue for him to discover what he must do to redeem himself. In this way Great Expectations can move from rudimentary meanings to more complex ones in its powerfully harmonious fashion. But these are not systematic or casual movements, and they reflect meaning, not action; theme, not structure. Even with modern techniques for interior dramatization, the shape of the Bildungsroman plot generally described by critics remains a loosely chronological one, a fluid movement of gradually increasing self-consciousness punctuated by epiphanies. A sharper sense of progression is provided for Great Expectations by its novel of manners plot. An enormously popular genre in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century, the novel of manners had expended much of its raison d’être by midcentury. Although it had provided a guide for the newly emerging middle class into the mysteries of an increasingly complex bourgeois society, it was soon too limited by its subject to meet the demands of a better educated and more sophisticated

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The plot of this genre is best exemplified by the basic situation of Jane Austen’s novels: a female protected by her unmarried domestic situation becomes involved in a romance which leads her away from her family and toward an integration with society. Part of the appeal of these actions has been that they are unremittingly realistic; its courtships were treated in the mimetic manner of the novel rather than that of the romance. Marriage, as a confirmation of society’s values, usually takes place, but whether it does or not, marriage provides closure. The mainspring for the pacing of the events in the story, however, is the love story itself, a major difference between the novel of manners and the Bildungsroman. If Pip were female, the importance of the romance to his story and the effect it has on the development of his character would be much more evident since his situation is a typical one for many eighteenth and nineteenth-century novelof-manners heroines. The romance provides a reasonably casual sequence with a logical progressive series of developing successes and failures and separations and reunions. It has, then, a greater fixed pattern to its actions than the Bildungsroman. The waning interest in the novel of manners had much to do with the evolution of a confidence by middle-class Victorians in their social practices. Yet the novel of manners still proved to be a powerful source for satire: by exposing the hypocrisy and self-interest of upwardly mobile aspirations, the novel of manners could offer an amusing corrective. This latent power is a potent force in all established genres. The generally acknowledged expectations of Pip consist of his aspirations to fulfill a superficial and limited no-

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audience. Distinguished by its focus on piloting an individual through the nuances of society’s rituals, the novel of manner plot does have a more orderly structure than the Bildungsroman, but because its concern is primarily with social practice rather than with growth of an individual, it generally lacks any substantial development in depicting its protagonists. In fact, the novel of manners could be regarded as the obverse of the Bildungsroman: instead of offering the teasing subtleties of growing self-knowledge, it offers situations where an individual must compromise or give up claims to individuality in order to succeed. Although many important Bildungsromane stop short of the protagonist’s “accommodation to the modern world” (Buckley 18), this same “accommodation” is one of the distinguishing features of the novel of manners. Illustration from Great Expectations.

tion of what it meant to become a “gentleman”; the novel of manners plot which structures these expectations inverts the progress of events and the obligatory romance included with them, so that they become a parody for revealing humbler expectations characterized by the work ethic so central to the Victorian middle class. Dickens thereby afforded his readers some luxury of seeing Pip’s middle-class aspirations distinct from their own and disarmed much of the threat of an uncomfortable identification with Pip’s aspirations. Yet, the plot of social progress orders events as it deconstructs and mocks them; like most parodies it depends upon the original plot of a work while mocking its theme. Much of the vitality provided by the novel of manners plot derives from its familiar situations and simple casual progress; it is easy to trace the distinct logic of Pip’s social movements even though they coalesce with formation of his character: Pip is motivated to leave his apprenticeship to Joe because of his infatuation with Estella. He accepts the opportunity to go to London in order to become a gentleman so that he might win her favor. In London he accepts the unsavory lodgings, friendships, and cultural opportunities as those appropriate to the style of a gentleman when they are, in fact, parodies of real culture. His comic experiences with fashionable education at the hands of the Pockets or his travails with the Finches of the Grove provide only caricatures of what should be available to him, yet Pip feels these experiences promote his desirability. His

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feeling for Estella is ridiculed by her and by her eventual acceptance of his rival, Bentley Drummle, who possesses the veneer of social accomplishment Pip is striving to attain for himself. His increasing talent for wasting time and money, going “from bad to worse” (309; ch. 36) is documented by the cycle of his visits to Jaggers and his returns to his marsh village. His lack of industry is countered by Herbert’s energy when the latter eventually begins to plan for his own life. While we are shown that Pip is not “naterally vicious” (33; ch. 4) by the parallel with Orlick who seems to be, we also know his accomplishments are limited to those superficial attainments that define a gentleman for Magwitch and Jaggers. We know that Pip reads, attends plays, and can speak foreign languages, but these never become dramatized as an integral part of his personality. His social attainments are, apparently, only for show. Eventually Pip’s fashionable accomplishments are revealed to him in all their essential hollowness, and his actions turn to rebuilding his values on a secure personal basis. He realizes he is as much a monster as Frankenstein’s (363; ch. 40). “Pip’s acquired ‘culture’ was an entirely bourgeois thing;” writes Humphry House, “it came to little more than accent, table manners, and clothes” (159). If Joe can be regarded as the emblem of the Bildungsroman plot, Estella can be regarded as the emblem of the novel of manners plot and marriage or the possibility of marriage as its metaphor. The romance involving Estella also gives an initial motivation and a continuing rationale for Pip’s actions in the social world, even though the scenes from that social world often resemble parodies or exposés. Significant changes in Pip’s social behavior are demarcated by his reaction to Estella, like his decision to ask Biddy, who is in many ways Estella’s counter, to marry him. At least partially because the novel of manners plot in Great Expectations is essentially a satiric inversion of the genre, Dickens is prevented from concluding the novel with Pip’s unequivocal union with Estella, which would thereby appear to embrace the very mode of plot he has been caricaturing. Nevertheless, this frequently interrupted but uncomplicated plot provides a solid medium for carrying the novel’s convincing social texture. Even so, compared to the plots of other popular mid-nineteenth century novels that could be regarded as candidates for the novel of manners genre, Great Expectations’ structural rhythms are much more logically tightened than simple romance and social situation allow, espe-

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cially in its final stage. The plot that combines with the novel of manners plot and the Bildungsroman plot to accomplish this tightness derives from the Gothic novel. The resurgence of critical interest in the Gothic novel and its influence on the English novel from the 1970s onward parallels the interest in the Bildungsroman. A connection between the two genres in Great Expectations has been observed by several literary historians such as Walter Reed who sees them as “counterfictions”: “a novel of Bildung unable to free itself from Gothic schauer” (171-2). Even though the presence of the general effect of the Gothic novel has been observed in Dickens’s novel, little has been written about the Gothic plot of Great Expectations, perhaps because the greatest obvious effect of the Gothic novel is its affective atmosphere. Extended studies of such Gothic qualities range from Walter Phillips’s early Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists of 1917 to ones like A. C. Coolidge Jr.’s which have shown how Dickens utilized Gothic techniques to establish pacing and arouse heightened responses. Above all else, it is a genre dominated by its setting. The major effect of this setting is to establish a sense of isolation for its protagonists and create situations beyond the social norms of generally accepted practices and behavior. Since the Gothic novel offers experiences that call ordinary modes of perception into question, it seems ideal as a medium for developing the Bildungsroman’s emerging selfconsciousness. Yet the Gothic novel also possesses an equally distinct plot. In Great Expectations this plot has usually been identified as its “mystery” plot, and its presence has been decribed or praised by critics from the time of its publication to the present. The Gothic plot is the highest energy plot of all three plots. Its deliberate causal progress, excitement, and suspense are so evident, in fact, that it is usually seen only as another element of sensationalism. In the hands of a skilled novelist like Dickens, however, the clear-cut pacing and causality become a vehicle for structuring the much less energetic plots of character development and social progress in Great Expectations. Barbara Hardy writes that “Pip’s progress in Great Expectations is probably the only instance of a moral action where the events precipitate change and growth as they do in George Eliot or Henry James” (51). Great Expectations need only be compared to the very similar “biographical” story of David Copperfield, or to the dominance of melodrama and sensationalism in Oliver Twist, in

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What distinguishes the Gothic novel plot from a simple mystery plot and what are the dynamics of such a plot? The “suspense” plots or plot sequences identified by Phillip Marcus appear to have strong Gothic plot characteristics. Peter Wolfe also is surely writing about Gothic plot as well when he asserts that the “. . . melodrama ignores complexity and subtlety. It simplifies reality into ready categories of good and evil, and it aims at evoking a simple response—like horror, sympathy, or loathing” (337). Yet the actual terms of the Gothic plot could be defined more specifically, and its relationship with the other plots clarified. It is perhaps best seen in terms of the structure perfected by Ann Radcliffe and still a puissant force for structuring types of popular narrative today. The essential ingredient of this plot derives from an element defined by Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published about 1757. Burke’s Enquiry became a virtual handbook of narrative principles for novelists and painters trying to achieve the sublime effect. The preeminent quality Burke locates that can be successfully applied to plot is that of obscurity. In Anne Radcliffe’s most accomplished novel, The Italian, and in many of the novels that follow it, this principle takes the form of “layering” mystery upon mystery within a powerfully affective atmosphere so that the original motivation for the novel’s action is greatly obscured. The original motivation is most often a crime, frequently involving an inheritance and heir, and its effects are visited upon a subsequent generation—usually represented by the character of an innocent and passive young female—who must seek assistance from a more powerful and experienced donor in order to resolve the mysteries of her origin and thereby reestablish a sense of order. In this type of natural or “explained” Gothic novel, what seems to be supernatural forces acting for a pervasive threatening evil always have some eventual rational explanation. A romance is present in such novels as well, but its story is made up of a series of separations and reunions which are distinctly secondary to the action precipitated by the persecutions of an unidentified villain, just as the romance plot is secondary in the Bildungsroman. Above all else, the Gothic plot provides a logic for the actions of the story which seem to have no apparent connections, and they need to be followed backwards in order to recreate the primal crime. In this regard the Gothic novel is the

forerunner of the detective story; it is no accident that Dickens introduced the first detective, Inspector Bucket of Bleak House, to the English novel and that Dickens himself was a friend, colleague, and sometime collaborator of Wilkie Collins, who wrote the first English detective novel, The Moonstone. The Gothic novel plot of The Italian fits the literal circumstances of the action of Great Expectations very closely, and, even though subdued by the Bildungsroman and novel of manners plots that dominate the first two stages of Pip’s story, this plot initiates the action of the novel and emerges in the final stage to unify and conclude the novel. Some specific parallels could even be argued to exist between the two novels if not pressed too far: Pip resembles both the persecuted Ellena and Vivaldi in his passivity and innocence; Miss Havisham, in her dedication to revenge, resembles the plotting Marchesa; Magwitch and Schedoni have similar roles as accomplices to Compeyson and Nicola, and their ultimate exposures of one another and their deaths are also similar; both books have henchmen like Orlick and Spalatro, who figure in the final explanations about the suspicions of persecution that permeate the novels; and Estella’s relationship as daughter to Magwitch is very much like the father-daughter relationship thought to exist between Ellena and Schedoni. The most important structural similarity, though, is the way crime and two shadowy criminals, Nicola and Compeyson, lurk in the backgrounds of the plots in both novels. In Great Expectations these archvillains function as they do for the Gothic novel in general: they provide memorable, smoothly coherent actions by allowing the malignant effect of an original evil to be traced through cliff-hanging interruptions. Crime, the manifestation of this evil, is the major metaphor of this plot for all Gothic novels. “That evil genius” (437; ch. 50) Compeyson, despite his only occasional, furtive presence, is the emblematic character for crime and the prime mover of the Gothic plot which eventually ties together all the major lines of action in Great Expectations. So, although Compeyson and his crimes have been taken to task by critics because they are obscure in the first two thirds of the novel and then blatant and melodramatic, it is from their very obscurity that they derive their forcefulness and eventual dominance in the structure of the novel. Dickens begins the action with the intrusion of Magwitch and Compeyson into the formative starting point of Pip’s life, his “first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things”

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order to recognize the thoroughly synergetic relationship of the plots that involve Pip.

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(9; ch. 1), which becomes interwoven with the images of crime, convicts, guilt, and terror which characterize his narrative. Magwitch and Miss Havisham, as well as Estella, Pip, and Jaggers, are important participants in this hidden Gothic plot, and even Orlick’s mysterious behind-the-scenes actions are enveloped in his associations of Compeyson. The effect of Pip’s imagination working on the associations he has with Orlick, for example, heighten his reaction to the glimpses and reports of a “lurker” he gets (352; ch. 40; 384; ch. 43) prowling around his lodgings. This response parallels and presages the move awful “terror” generated later by the presence of Compeyson, who is revealed by Mr. Wopsle to have sat behind Pip in the theater: “I cannot exaggerate the enhanced disquiet into which this conversation threw me, or the special and peculiar terror I felt as Compeyson’s having been behind me ‘like a ghost’” (414; ch. 47). The “special and peculiar” effect is created largely because it is a secret and internalized one. It is an interior effect, a psychological one, created by an imaginative reaction to events, rather than the actual events themselves. Robert Heilman has shown how the similar Gothic accountrements of Jane Eyre create an internalized heightened response in that novel. This same principle of obscurity, so skillfully utilized by Ann Radcliffe, employs Pip’s internatlized fears to create links between the various plots in Great Expectations. Compeyson’s crimes against Miss Havisham and Magwich are created before the time that the novel opens (Notes 321), and the consequences that are visited upon Pip and Estella by their distorted donors are greatly removed from the times and scenes of the crime itself. It is these removed actions that have to be sorted out retrospectively, making the gothic plot resemble a detective plot. From a retrospective perspective the Gothic plot appears straight-forward, like the evil behind it. It consists of Pip’s initial help to Magwitch and Magwitch’s subsequent attempt to play patron to Pip. Magwitch tries to revenge himself against the society he feels is responsible for his criminal fall and subsequent prosecution, linked in his mind with Compeyson. The parallel plot for Estella is created by Miss Havisham in revenge against men for being deserted by Compeyson. Both plot motivations are bound tightly with Compeyson’s evil. Although overlaid in the first two thirds of the novel by the Bildungsroman plot and the novel of manners plot, the Gothic plot is kept active by interspersed, brief, but important, reminders of its presence, such as the man stirring his rum-and-

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water with a file (89; ch. 10) or the later indirect encounter with this same emissary on a stage coach (246; ch. 28). Fear-inspiring Gothic imagery connected with death, decay, violence, and mental distortions support such actions, and foreshadow the eruption of the Gothic plot with Magwitch’s appearance in Chapter Thirty-nine, in what Pip calls “the turning point of my life” (324; ch. 37). Locating the stories and motivations and sorting out the connections between Compeyson, Magwitch, Miss Havisham, Arthur Havisham, and Jaggers make up the rest of the Gothic plot. These correspond generally with the separate plot lines that are played off against one another by creating expectations for the reader, and then interrupted with another story. Even though the plotting and actions leading up to the final river flight and its aftermath are often regarded as “one of the highest achievements of the sensation novel” (Stevenson 352), they are integrally bound with the deliberate obscurity of the main Gothic plot that flows, subdued or dominant, throughout the novel. What has been deliberately concealed is finally revealed for maximum effect. This third type of plot is also bound closely with the change of heart that Pip has towards Magwitch, the last important development of his Bildungsroman plot, and with the concurrent collapse of his social aspirations inspired by his idealization of Estella, the motivation behind the novel of manners plot. Seeing the variety of plots that makes up the actions and series of intricate connections between characters in Great Expectations leads one to conclude with Peter Brooks that the novel’s “central meanings depend on the workingsout of its plot” (114). With the revelations that come about through the manipulation his life and the deliberate withholding of information that has let him misconstrue events so that he fails to plot his own life knowingly, Pip does indeed seem “cured” (138) of plot, or very nearly so, as Brooks asserts. The subdued Pip at the end of the novel accepts a plot option he unwittingly created for himself earlier in the action when he generously bought Herbert a partnership in Clarriker & Co., and he joins Herbert and Clara where, by dint of hard work over a long period, he moves from clerk to partner. Pip’s secretly playing patron to Herbert was, as Dickens himself wrote, “The one good thing he did in his prosperity; the only thing that endures and bears good fruit” (Notes 323). Pip’s eleven years’ work in Cairo is recounted in two short paragraphs and seems far removed from his earlier energetic plots. The confirmation of the

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Yet the continuing appeal of the plots we do get in Great Expectations is in understanding the general truth of all their selfishness, guilt, misinterpretations, extravagent feelings, egotism, and violent actions. Sorting out the three main plots that carry these truths helps to do this, even though the net result of the mixture of plots in Great Expectations is clearly greater than the mere sum of its separate parts, and such sorting must necessarily ignore other essential ingredients. What the identification of various plots reveals especially well, however, is the authentic drama of nightmarish quality of an individual’s life when others have manipulated it, and the consequent need for moral self-determination. The amalgam of plots in Great Expectations created by Dickens’s mature, resourceful, and highly imaginative understanding of reality resembles the mixed texture of life itself, and the reader of Great Expectations must understand and actively reconstruct its plots and their relative importance, just as life’s patterns must be understood and evaluated in the constant process of reappraising our own versions of reality.

Works Cited

Hirsch, Marianne. “The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions.” Genre 12 (1979): 293-311. House, Humphry. The Dickens World. 2nd. Ed. 1942. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. James, Henry. “Preface to the Tragic Muse.” The Art of the Novel. Ed. R. P. Blackmur. New York: Scribners, 1934. 79-97. Marcus, Phillip. “Theme and Suspense in the Plot of Great Expectations.” Dickens Studies 2 (1966): 57-73. Phillips, Walter C. Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists. New York: Columbia UP, 1917. Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian, or The Confessional of the Black Penitents: a Romance. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1968. Reed, Walter. An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic Versus the Picaresque. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. Stange, G. Robert. “Expectations Well Lost: Dickens’ Fable for His Time.” College English 16 (1954-5): 9-17. Rpt in The Victorian Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Ian Watt. London: Oxford UP, 1971. 110-22. Stevenson, Lionel. The English Novel: A Panorama. Boston: Houghton, 1960. Tennyson, G. B. “The Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century English Literature.” Medieval Epic to the ‘Epic Theatre’ of Brecht: Essays in Comparative Literature. Ed. Rosario P. Armato and John M. Spalek. Los Angeles: U of Southern California Press, 1968. 135-46. Wolfe, Peter. “The Fictional Crux and the Double Structure of Great Expectations.” South Atlantic Quarterly 73 (Summer 1974): 335-47.

Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism. London: Oxford UP, 1971. Buckley, Jerome H. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage-Random, 1985. Coolidge, A. C. Charles Dickens as Serial Novelist. Ames, IA: Iowa State UP, 1967. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. New York: Signet-NAL, 1963. ———. Dickens’ Working Notes for His Novels. Ed. Harry Stone. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Fielding, K. J. Charles Dickens: A Critical Introduction. 2nd Ed. Enlarged. London: Longmans, 1965. Hardy, Barbara. “The Change of Heart in Dickens’ Novels.” Victorian Studies 5 (1961-2), 49-67. Rpt. in Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Martin Price. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1967. 39-57. Halperin, John. Egoism and Self-Discovery in the Victorian Novel: Studies in the Ordeal of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Burt Franklin, 1974. Heilman, Robert B. “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘New’ Gothic.” From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad. Ed. Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1958. 71-85. Rpt. in The Victorian Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Ian Watt. London: Oxford UP, 1971. 165-80.

Little Dorrit DAVID JARRETT (ESSAY DATE SEPTEMBER 1977) SOURCE: Jarrett, David. “The Fall of the House of Clennam: Gothic Conventions in Little Dorrit.” Dickensian 73, no. 383 (September 1977): 155-61. In the following essay, Jarrett analyzes Dickens’s use of the Gothic in Little Dorrit.

Charles Dickens had no time for the kind of romance of history celebrated by the garish Mrs Skewton in Dombey and Son (1847-8). ‘Those darling bygone times,’ she exclaims to Mr Carker in Warwick Castle, ‘with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated!’1 To write a Gothic romance would be as foreign to Dickens as to idealise the Middle Ages, and Mrs Skewton herself supplies a suitable image to represent his attitude towards some aspects of the

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work ethic in this final plot would be endorsed by Victorians, but it does not make a story worth telling.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR MICHAEL HOLLINGTON ON “DICKENSIAN GOTHIC”

Judging by some of the allusions to Gothic writing in Sketches by Boz and other early works, readers can readily conclude that Dickens carved out for himself at an early stage a clear program for its transformation and modernization. Dickensian Gothic, his early writings seem to announce, will be contemporary and urban rather than medieval and exotic, its wonders and horrors presented through paradoxical, plural combinations and juxtapositions of tragedy and comedy rather than through conventional melodramatic formulae aimed at achieving single, concentrated terror effects. The apparent common purpose, for instance, of three references to Mrs. Radcliffe and one to Sir Walter Scott, authors whom Dickens as a young man clearly sought to emulate, seems to be to suggest that such ‘real’ horrors may rank with or indeed surpass the imaginary horrors for which his predecessors had become famous. Their related rhetorical strategies, in fact, can be seen as a sequence of progressive humorous ‘turns of the screw,’ a ratcheting up of more and more hyperbolic claims on behalf of a ‘new Gothic’ against an old.

In chapter three of Little Dorrit Arthur Clennam, returning to London on a Sunday evening, sees the city in the grip of an archaic oppressive religious tyranny which centres, for him, on his mother and her house. The Clennam house is the grim architectural core of the novel, containing a guilty secret and offering a vague parental threat. Arthur

SOURCE: Hollington, Michael. “Boz’s Gothic Gargoyles.” Dickens Quarterly 16, no. 3 (September 1999): 160-77.

Gothic mode. He was certainly familiar with the Gothic conventions, not least from his experience of the theatre, where Gothic melodrama, deriving directly from Gothic romance, ‘flowered on the English stage in the 1790’s, [and] bloomed luxuriantly for fifty years or so’.2 And the Gothic has made a positive contribution to Dickens’s novels, so that it is commonplace to talk of the Gothicism of The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Barnaby Rudge (1841), and Great Expectations (1860-1).3 The use of Gothic elements in Little Dorrit (18557), however, has not been treated, and it is to this novel that I shall turn after brief reference to the relevant Gothic conventions.

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In Gothic fiction the central element is always the gloomy Gothic building which is inextricably associated with the villain, usually a persecuting and usurping parent-figure. The symbolic significance of the building can vary as much as the visible shape of its various transformations which we encounter in Gothic Otranto, in Miss Havisham’s decayed Satis House, and in Randolph’s uncanny house in Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). It generally appears endued with a sinister life of its own, is in a ruinous state, and is often destroyed at the climax. There are many stock devices in Gothic fiction, including the animated portrait of The Castle of Otranto (1764), but perhaps the most important after the castle are the dream and the old manuscript. They are as versatile as the archetype of the Gothic castle, though they can be best observed in their most straightforward form in Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791). The hero or heroine in Gothic fiction confronts the Gothic castle and descends into it as into a dream; in this deathly enclosure comes a revelation, which may be accomplished through an old manuscript, a prophetic dream, or some equivalent, and which probably concerns the hero’s search for the secret of his birth and the necessity of setting right the wrongs passed from one generation to another.

. . . came at last to the house he sought. An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black, standing by itself within a gateway. Before it, a square court-yard where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank (which is saying much) as the iron railings enclosing them were rusty; behind it, a jumble of roots. It was a double house, with long, narrow, heavily-framed windows. Many years ago, it had had it in its mind to slide down sideways; it had been propped up, however, and was leaning on some half-dozen gigantic crutches: which gymnasium for the neighbouring cats, weather-stained, smoke-blackened, and overgrown with weeds, appeared in these latter days to be no very sure reliance.4

Though reduced in scale and not literally Gothic in architectural style. Mrs Clennam’s house is the equivalent of the castle of Gothic romance, for it has an antique gloomy life of its own (‘it had had it in its mind to slide down sideways’),

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In the chapter which follows our introduction to the Clennam house there is a frightening variation of the prophetic or revelatory dream of Gothic fiction: When Mrs Flintwinch dreamed, she usually dreamed, unlike the son of her old mistress, with her eyes shut. She had a curiously vivid dream that night, and before she had left the son of her old mistress many hours. In fact it was not at all like a dream, it was so real in every respect. (I, iv, 41)

Indeed, what is so horrible about Affery’s dream is that it is no dream at all. Affery in her ‘dream’ sees the unaccountable multiplication of her husband, ‘Mr Flintwinch awake . . . watching Mr Flintwinch asleep’ (I, ii, 42), and she almost witnesses a murder too. It is a dangerous knowledge that she is beginning to acquire, in best Gothic fashion, through ‘dream’. By bringing the Gothic archetype of the ruin, inhabited by a threatening parental or ancestral power, from the forest of romance and into the world of the novel and nineteenth century London, Dickens brings the horror of what was to him an unreal romantic world into the real, and thus makes it more affecting. Similarly, by removing from the dream device of Gothic romance the actual dream, and yet still describing the events witnessed by the befuddled Affery in terms of dream, he renders the device more truly haunting and powerful than it had been in, say, The Old English Baron. When Affery determines at length to tell her dreams (II, xxx, 763-786) her contribution to revealing the guilt concealed in the Clennam house works in conjunction with Dickens’s equivalent to the Gothic old manuscript device. For it is here that Blandois recounts his ugly ‘history of this house’, a ‘history of strange marriage, and a strange mother, and a revenge, and a suppression’ (II, xxx, 771). His story is drawn from old papers—a codicil to Gilbert Clennam’s will and the letters of Arthur’s barbarously treated real mother—which Flintwinch had double-locked in an iron box and given to his twin brother, witnessed by Affery in her ‘dream’. These papers, of course, reveal the secret of the hero’s birth and show what restitution must be made in this generation.

Mrs Clennam’s religion is characterised through an architectural metaphor when Dickens attributes to her the following religious sentiments: Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them; do Thou as I would do, and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the impious tower of stone she built up to scale Heaven. (I, iv, 47)

And though the image primarily suggests the tower of Babel, yet, because of the way in which Dickens has been using the conventions of Gothic romance in Little Dorrit, it merges with that of the central archetype of Gothic fiction. For there is no doubt that in some ways Mrs Clennam belongs to the grisly romance of history represented by Mrs Skewton’s sentiments in Warwick Castle quoted above. When Flintwinch leads Arthur to his mother it is a progress as to the ancestral tomb that belongs to ‘those darling bygone times’ of torture and tyranny: Arthur followed him up the staircase, which was panelled off into spaces, like so many mourning tablets, into a dim bed-chamber, the floor of which had gradually so sunk and settled, that the fireplace was in a dell. On a black bier-like sofa in this hollow, propped up behind with one great angular black bolster, like the block at a state execution in the good old times [italics mine], sat his mother in a widow’s dress. (I, iii, 33)

At the core of the decaying family house is the heavy atmosphere of mortality, guilt, and threat. As Arthur quickly perceives, it is Little Dorrit who is obscurely threatened, and she, in her modesty, her vulnerability, her quiet generosity, and, of course, in her littleness, is clearly a reworking of the ‘orphan-of-the-castle’ Gothic heroine. She even has a choice of castles to contain her quietness in their gloom—Mrs Clennam’s house and the Marshalsea. Dickens, even if somewhat ironically, early suggests the violent possibilities implied in the Clennam household’s menacing of the orphan Little Dorrit. For what he could learn about Little Dorrit in the first instance . . . Arthur was indebted in the course of the day to his own eyes and to Mrs Affery’s tongue. If Mrs Affery had had any will or way of her own, it would probably have been unfavourable to Little Dorrit. But as ‘them two clever ones’—Mrs Affery’s perpetual reference, in whom her personality was swallowed up—were agreed to accept Little Dorrit as a matter of course, she had nothing for it but to follow suit. Similarly, if the two cleaver ones had agreed to murder Little Dorrit by candle-light,

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and in its decay and mystery it matches its inhabitants. And, of course, as Arthur suspects, it contains the secret of a guilty deed which the heir must identify and expose before he can be given his true heritage. Dickens himself likens the house ironically to ‘a castle of romance’, wretched and hopeless (I, iii, 40).

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Mrs Affery, being required to hold the candle, would no doubt have done it. (I, v, 53)

An edge of ironic humour there might be to this, but we have already seen Flintwinch on the brink of murdering his own brother by candlelight, and the sinister power of the ‘two clever ones’ over Affery is made clear by the enormity of the crime in which she would ‘no doubt’ have participated. When Arthur Clennam talks to his mother of ‘our House’ he means neither the building in which the mother has shut herself away, nor a line of titled ancestors in a family vault. But we have seen Dickens suggesting such a vault when describing Mrs Clennam in her room. In the awkward interview with his mother in which he refuses to take over the family business Arthur is leading up to the enquiry about the possibility of his dead father’s secret guilt: ‘If reparation can be made to any one, if restitution can be made to any one, let us know it and make it’ (I, v, 49), he says. A little before, he has said: ‘Mother, our House has done less and less for some years past, and our dealings have been progressively on the decline. We have never shown much confidence, or invited much; we have attached no people to us; the track we have kept is not the track of time; and we have been left far behind.’ (I, v, 46)

Although it is a House of Business that is the subject of this speech the emotional atmosphere would equally suit an old, run-down aristocratic line retreating into Gothic obscurity. And it is plain, when a little later Arthur visits his father’s room of business, that we are meant to see this suggestion in the above passage. The room Arthur Clennam’s deceased father had occupied for business purposes . . . was so unaltered that he might have been imagined still to keep it invisibly, as his visible relict kept her room up-stairs. . . . His picture, dark and gloomy, earnestly speechless on the wall, with the eyes intently looking at his son as they had looked when life departed from them, seemed to urge him awfully to the task he had attempted. . . . (I, v, 54)

If he had imitated Mrs Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790) Dickens would have immured the true mother of Arthur for years in the seemingly haunted Clennam house. He avoids this romantic cliché, but develops a nonetheless sensational situation. The guilty secret of the Clennam household turns out to be the suppression of the circumstances of his birth, and its unfolding reveals to him his true parentage. And such a revelation forms part of much Gothic fiction, where the search for the parent or the secret of birth amounts to an obsession. It is not simply that the true identity of Arthur’s mother has been kept from him; she had been put in the nightmare situation of being given to the charge of a lunatic-keeper—a situation such as Maturin frenziedly portrays in Melmoth the Wanderer.6 The horror of her plight is grotesquely understated and implied by Flintwinch’s remark: ‘My brother, Ephraim, the lunatic-keeper . . . speculated unsuccessfully in lunatics, he got into difficulty about over-roasting a patient to bring him to reason’ (II, xx, 783). The pretended translator of the first edition of The Castle of Otranto apologises in his preface for what becomes an obsessive fear in Gothic fiction, the passing on of the family curse, usually bound up with the passing on of the ancestral castle. In his translator persona Walpole says:

The portrait does not quite step out of its frame, like that in The Castle of Otranto, or as Charles Maturin seems to make the seventeenth century depiction of Melmoth in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).5 But Dickens does animate the portrait for Arthur and it does seem to be having a significant effect in prompting him to do something about the mysterious wrong that its subject

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perpetrated or knew. If one were to say that the father’s portrait ‘speaks’ to Arthur in the ‘haunted’ house, this would not misrepresent Dickens’s meaning. For Arthur it is a house haunted by memories and guilty secrets, and, right up until its destruction, there is the possibility that it is more literally haunted by ghostly persons unseen. Affery, driven to the fringes of insanity, is conscious of noises that are not ‘rats, cats, water, drains’, of ‘a rustle and a sort of trembling touch behind’ her (I, xiv, 185). It is only the prediction of her becoming otherwise ‘sensible of a rustle and touch that’ll send [her] . . . flying to the other end of the kitchen’ that stops Affery pursuing the matter. But for the reader there remains the possibility that a mysterious Flintwinch twin is secreted somewhere about the house.

. . . I am not blind to my author’s defects. I could wish he had grounded his plan on a more useful moral than this; that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation.7

Mrs Clennam belongs to the world of Gothic horror in this matter of inherited punishment. When she finally unbends before Little Dorrit and offers some justification of her past life Mrs Clennam says of her behavior toward Arthur:

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It is no accident that Dickens uses in Little Dorrit the climactic destruction of the building that Otranto had established as the Gothic convention.8 When Mrs Clennam is returning to her house with Little Dorrit, after her all-important experience of being ‘broken by emotion’, they hear ‘a sudden noise like thunder’: In one swift instant, the old house was before them, with the man [Blandois] lying smoking in the window; another thundering sound, and it heaved, surged outward, opened asunder in fifty places, collapsed, and fell. Deafened by the noise, stifled, choked, and blinded by the dust, they hid their faces and stood rooted to the spot. The dust storm, driving between them and the placid sky, parted for a moment and showed them the stars. As they looked up, wildly crying for help, the great pile of chimneys which was then alone left standing, like a tower in a whirlwind, rocked, broke, and hailed itself down upon the heap of ruin, as if every tumbling fragment were intent on burying the crushed wretch deeper. (II, xxxi, 793-4)

Again the house is endued with life: it seems to will the extermination of Blandois. And again we see how close is the connection between house and owner. The house completes a victory over Blandois which Mrs Clennam had begun, and, after she has been ‘broken by emotion as unfamiliar to her eyes as action to her frozen limbs’ (II, xxxi, 790), then the house itself is broken. Further, with the destruction of the house Mrs Clennam’s life is effectively over, for afterwards, ‘except that she could move her eyes and faintly express a negative and affirmative with her head, she lived and died a statue’ (II, xxi, 794). After the fall of the house of Dorrit the ‘mystery of the noises’ is explained; they were the groans of a failing structure. ‘Affrey, like greater people, had always been right in her facts, and always wrong in the theories she deduced from them’ (II, xxxi, 794). So we have a rational explanation of the apparently ghostly noises, and its ingenuity rivals that of Ann Radcliffe, a past master at such eventual explanations of seemingly supernatural terrors. In relation to his presentation of the Clennam household Dickens, then, appears to adapt the following Gothic conventions: the sinister old castle that harbours mystery, gloom and guilty

secrets; the hero’s search for the secret of his birth; the setting right of wrongs passed from one generation to another; the use of dreams; the ancestral portrait motif; the old manuscript; and the climactic destruction of the castle. Of course, not all these features would seem Gothic-inspired if they occurred in isolation, and there are further possibilities. For example, Blandois has many of the features of the Gothic villain, and the view of Little Dorrit as an ‘orphan-of-the-castle’ Gothic heroine might bear development. But enough has been said to indicate that Dickens was able to adapt Gothic conventions not to undermine, but to intensify his portrayal of reality.

Notes 1. Dickens, Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation, New Oxford Illustrated Dickens, 1950, p. 387. 2. Michael Booth, English Melodrama, 1965, p. 67. 3. See e.g. the reference to Great Expectations under ‘Gothic Novel’ in S. Barnet et al., A Dictionary of Literary Terms (1964), p. 78; also Anthony O’Brien, ‘Benevolence and Insurrection: The Conflicts of Form and Purpose in Barnaby Rudge’, Dickens Studies, v (May 1969), 29. 4. Dickens, Little Dorrit, New Oxford Illustrated Dickens, 1953, Bk.I, ch.iii, 31. 5. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, ed. Douglas Grant, 1953, I,i,20. 6. Melmoth I, iii, 28-60. 7. Walpole, Preface to the First Edition, The Castle of Otranto, ed. W. S. Lewis, 1964, p. 5. 8. For confirmation that ‘the catastrophe of [Little Dorrit] . . . formed part of his original plan, and was not suggested by a contemporary occurrence’, see the Introduction of Charles Dickens the Younger to Little Dorrit (Macmillan, 1953), pp. xxvii-xx; it is not included in the Oxford Illustrated edition.

FURTHER READING Criticism Cordery, Gareth. “The Cathedral as Setting and Symbol in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” Dickens Studies Newsletter 10, no. 4 (December 1979): 97-103. Explores the symbolic function of the cathedral in Edwin Drood as it functions as a backdrop to the story. Duncan, Ian. Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 295 p. Examines the relationship between the revival of the romance form and the ascendancy of the novel in British literary culture, from 1760 to 1850; begins with the first identification of modern prose fiction in the lateeighteenth-century Gothic novel before discussing the work of Sir Walter Scott and Dickens.

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‘I kept over him in the days of his first remembrance, my restraining and correcting hand. I was stern with him, knowing that the transgressions of the parents are visited on their offspring, and that there was an angry mark upon him at his birth.’ (II, xxix, 754)

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Frank, Lawrence. “News From the Dead: Archaeology, Detection, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” Dickens Studies Annual 28 (1999): 65-102.

Robson, John M. “Crime in Our Mutual Friend.” In Rough Justice: Essays on Crime in Literature, pp. 114-40. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

Argues that The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a meditation on the nature of historical knowledge as well as the act of knowing or detection.

Studies the many and various instances of criminal activity and violent acts in Our Mutual Friend.

Harris, Jean. “‘But He Was His Father’: The Gothic and the Impostorious in Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers.” In Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature and Film, edited by Maurice Charney and Joseph Reppen, pp. 69-79. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987. Shows how Dickens modifies the Gothic convention in The Pickwick Papers. Hodgell, Pat. “Charles Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop: The Gothic Novel in Transition.” Riverside Quarterly 8, no. 3 (July 1990): 152-69. Contends that Dickens’s use of Gothic elements even after the genre’s heyday freed gothicism from its stereotypes, enabled it to be adapted to address new social pressures, and affirmed the potential of its motifs in psychological terms. Jackson, Rosemary. “The Silenced Text: Shades of Gothic in Victorian Fiction.” Minnesota Review 13 (1979): 98-112. Includes a detailed analysis of Dickens’s appropriation of the Gothic for his own thematic purposes. Kirkpatrick, Larry. “The Gothic Flame of Charles Dickens.” Victorian Newsletter 31 (1967): 20-4. Illustrates how The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend are related to the Gothic literary tradition. Kostelnick, Charles. “Dickens’s Quarrel with the Gothic: Ruskin, Durdles and Edwin Drood.” Dickens Studies Newsletter 8 (1977): 104-9. Claims that the character of Durdles in The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a caricature of John Ruskin’s Gothic workman. McMaster, R. D. “Dickens and the Horrific.” Dalhousie Review 38 (1958): 18-28. Discusses Dickens’s reading of pulp horror fiction and its influence on his work. Pritchard, Allan. “The Urban Gothic of Bleak House.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 45, no. 4 (March 1991): 432-52. Maintains that Bleak House is Dickens’s supreme achievement in the Gothic mode and a crucially important novel for the nineteenth-century transformation of Gothic fiction. Ragussis, Michael. “The Ghostly Signs of Bleak House.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 34, no. 3 (December 1979): 253-80. Examines the motif of nomenclature and the mystery of language in Bleak House.

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Showalter, Elaine. “Guilt, Authority, and the Shadows of Little Dorrit.” In Rough Justice: Essays on Crime in Literature, pp. 114-40. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Characterizes the shadow motif in Little Dorrit as emblematic of the spiritual darkness of Victorian society. Sucksmith, Harvey P. “The Secret of Immediacy: Dickens’s Debt to the Tale of Terror in Blackwood’s.” NineteenthCentury Fiction 26, no. 2 (September 1971): 145-57. Analyzes the influence of the realistic tales of terror that Dickens read in Blackwood’s magazine on his development as a writer. Thiele, David. “The ‘Transcendent and Immortal . . . HEEP!’: Class Consciousness, Narrative Authority and the Gothic in David Copperfield.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 42, no. 3 (fall 2000): 201-22. Discusses the characterization of the dastardly Uriah Heep in David Copperfield and explores the significance of the Gothic on the novel’s narrative mode. Tracy, Robert. “Clock Work: The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge.” Dickens Studies Annual 30 (2001): 2343. Examines the antique settings and other elements that invoke the atmosphere of Gothic fiction in The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Dickens’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 23; Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vols. 1, 2, 3, 13, 14; British Writers, Vol. 5; British Writers: The Classics, Vols. 1, 2; Children’s Literature Review, Vol. 95; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1832-1890; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 21, 55, 70, 159, 166; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring Novels; Junior DISCovering Authors; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature and Its Times, Vols. 1, 2; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, Eds. 1, 2; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 3, 8, 18, 26, 37, 50, 86, 105, 113; Novels for Students, Vols. 4, 5, 10, 14, 20; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 17, 49; Something about the Author, Vol. 15; Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 1; Twayne’s English Authors; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 4; World Literature Criticism; Writers for Children; and Writers for Young Adults.

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ISAK DINESEN (1885 - 1962)

(Born Karen Christentze Dinesen; also known by her married name Karen Blixen; also wrote under the pseudonyms Tania Blixen, Osceola, and Pierre Andrézel) Danish short story writer, autobiographer, novelist, playwright, and translator.

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inesen is best known for Seven Gothic Tales (1934) and the autobiographical novel Out of Africa (1937; Den afrikanske farm). Acclaimed for her poetic prose style, complex characters, and intricate plots, Dinesen explored such themes as the lives and values of aristocrats, the nature of fate and destiny, God and the supernatural, the artist, and the place of women in society. Her works defy easy categorization, though she incorporated elements of Gothic and horror as well as humor in her stories. Hailed as a proto-feminist by some critics, scorned as a colonialist by others, Dinesen is chiefly regarded as a masterful storyteller. Ernest Hemingway remarked that the Nobel Prize for Literature he received in 1954 should have been awarded to her.

about his experiences as a fur trapper among the Indians of the northern United States. Dinesen studied English at Oxford University and painting at the Royal Academies in Copenhagen, Paris, and Rome. Following her marriage to her cousin Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke in 1914, Dinesen moved to East Africa as the owner and manager of a coffee plantation near present-day Nairobi, Kenya. Following the death of her lover Denys Finch-Hatton and the eventual sale of her farm in 1931—events that are dramatized in Out of Africa—Dinesen returned to Denmark, where she completed her first book, Seven Gothic Tales. Subsequent works included several more short story collections and numerous essays and novels in both Danish and English. Although she suffered from chronic spinal syphilis, emaciation, and the physical frailty attendant to these conditions, Dinesen continued to lecture and give interviews in her final years. She became a founding member of the Danish Academy in 1960 and died in Rungsted in 1962.

MAJOR WORKS BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Born in Rungsted, Denmark, Dinesen was the daughter of an army officer who was a friend of Hans Christian Andersen and who wrote a book

Seven Gothic Tales is a collection of short stories written in a romantic style, employing fantasy to explore aristocratic sensibilities and values. In “The Deluge at Norderney,” a Cardinal directs his high-born companions to give up their places on

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a boat to save peasants during a flood. “The Dreamers,” one of Dinesen’s most traditionally Gothic stories, tells of a mysterious, beautiful singer who lost her voice due to an accident. Devastated by her loss, she travels through Europe, constantly changing her identity and taking on a series of lovers. Out of Africa presents Dinesen’s experiences as a British coffee plantation owner in East Africa, documenting her relationship with the Africans who lived and worked on and around her plantation, her divorce from Baron Blixen, her affair with Denys Finch-Hatton, and the failure of her coffee enterprise. The short stories in Winter’s Tales (1942), with their simpler narrative style and attention to landscape, history, and life of Denmark, solidified Dinesen’s standing in the Danish literary community. “Sorrow-Acre” is based on a medieval Danish folktale and is set in eighteenthcentury Denmark. The story examines the inevitable social consequences of the master-servant relationship: how aristocratic values and traditions govern the attitudes and actions of a landlord toward a thieving serf and his mother. During the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Dinesen wrote The Angelic Avengers (1946), a mystery-thriller about two orphaned girls. The manuscript was smuggled out of Denmark and published under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel. Dinesen continually denied authorship of the book, however, because she was unsatisfied with its literary quality. Last Tales (1957) is a collection of short stories divided into three sections—New Gothic Tales, New Winter’s Tales, and Tales from Albondocani. These works represent a return to her earlier literary style, themes, and characters. In “Echoes,” for instance, Pellegrina Leoni, who first appears in Seven Gothic Tales, is an ex-opera star, devastated by the loss of her voice. Consequently, a disgruntled Pellegrina uses elaborate disguises to ensure her anonymity. She remarks that when it comes to fate and life, God can be both a charlatan and “jokester” with his human creations. Skygger paa Græsset (1960; Shadows on the Grass) recalls Dinesen’s African experiences. In this nonfiction work she focuses on the lives of several of the African servants and friends about whom she first wrote in Out of Africa. The novel Ehrengard (1963) was published posthumously and was Dinesen’s last work. Its themes include the notion of the artist as creator and interpreter of life. The story follows the artist Cazotte’s lust for Ehrengard, while she sits for a portrait. Cazotte’s objective is to humiliate her and in the process diabolically usurp God’s role as the defining artist of creation and master of life.

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Among Dinesen’s other posthumously published works are Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales (1977); Breve fra Afrika 1914-31 (1978; Letters from Africa: 1914-1931), which contains her correspondence with family and friends during her years in Africa; and Daguerreotypes, and Other Essays (1979), containing the well-known “Bonfire Speech,” which presents her thoughts on many feminist issues.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Dinesen’s writings have been widely praised and enthusiastically received. Seven Gothic Tales, her first collection, was released in the United States during the Great Depression, and audiences gravitated to Dinesen’s mysterious, exotic, fantastical stories as a pleasurable escape from the dreariness of everyday life. In addition to noting her vivid imagination, critics have applauded her prose style, her facility with complicated plots and characters, and her natural gift for storytelling. While many scholars have claimed that her picture of Africa in Out of Africa is romanticized, they note that the story is engaging, wellstructured, and presents a detailed picture of life among British expatriates in Africa. Several commentators have noted similarities between Dinesen’s views on identity, spirituality, and meaning and those of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard; others have detected the influence of Aldous Huxley and Sigmund Freud on the development of Dinesen’s themes and characters, particularly in such works as “Carnival.” Critics have noted that a number of Dinesen’s stories reflect her admiration of the Gothic literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dinesen borrowed several elements of the Gothic tradition, writing fanciful tales of mysterious, suspenseful, supernatural happenings. Writing a century after the height of Gothic literature’s popularity, she also modified Gothic conventions, informing her stories with a more liberal moral code than the earlier works. Critics have also noted a feminist sensibility in Dinesen’s tales that was not evident in Gothic works of preceding centuries. Another difference between traditional Gothic literature and the works of Dinesen is the earlier authors’ intent to frighten readers; Susan C. Brantly pointed out that “the supernatural for Dinesen simply represents freedom of the imagination.”

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PRINCIPAL WORKS Seven Gothic Tales (short stories) 1934 Sanhedens Haevn [The Revenge of Truth] (play) 1936 Out of Africa [Den afrikanske farm] (autobiography) 1937 Winter’s Tales (short stories) 1942 Farah (novel) 1950 En Baaltale med 14 Aars Forsinkelse [Bonfire Speech Fourteen Years Delayed] (essay) 1953 Last Tales [Sidste Fortaellinger] (short stories) 1957 Anecdotes of Destiny [Skaebne-Anekdoter] (short stories) 1958 Skygger paa Græsset [Shadows on the Grass] (autobiography) 1960 Osceola (short stories and poetry) 1962 Ehrengard (novel) 1963 Essays (essays) 1965; enlarged edition published as Mit livs mottoer og andre essays, 1978 Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales (short stories) 1977 Breve fra Afrika 1914-31 [Letters from Africa: 19141931] (letters) 1978 Daguerreotypes, and Other Essays (essays) 1979 Samlede (essays) 1985

PRIMARY SOURCES

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One wonders if she would have painted in a quite so determinedly pastel and “feminine” style if she had not felt pushed into it by the need to differentiate herself from such strong influences as Pablo Picasso and Braque. She made a place for herself by her very separateness and received that approval that seems to come to those women who do not try to compete with male artists on their own ground.1

Isak Dinesen, entering the literary scene with a book called Seven Gothic Tales, may at first glance appear to have opted for a minor and even out-moded genre by choosing, in the midst of the twentieth century, to write tales that draw on the Gothic tradition. Indeed, Dinesen did not believe in competition between women and men, feeling that the sexes should be equal but different. However, there was no element of evasion in her decision to work in a minor fictional form. There was nothing humble or self-effacing about either her choice or her handling of this genre; there was, in fact, as Howard Green notes, a quality of arrogant confidence: Now to take such a musty and flyblown genre, to transform it into an elegant embodiment of her own philosophical convictions, and to make of it a popular success as well as a succès d’estime—that was literary daring of a high order. And there was arrogance to match it both in the substance of those convictions, so antagonistic to our own, and in the way she inveigled us into swallowing them under the guise of innocent entertainment.2

TITLE COMMENTARY Seven Gothic Tales SIBYL JAMES (ESSAY DATE 1983) SOURCE: James, Sibyl. “Gothic Transformations: Isak Dinesen and the Gothic.” In The Female Gothic, edited by Julian E. Fleenor, pp. 138-52. Montreal, Quebec: Eden Press, 1983. In the following essay, James studies Dinesen’s unique approach to writing in the Gothic tradition.

In Women Artists, Karen Petersen and J. J. Wilson suggest that in their struggle to work as

Dinesen’s treatment of the Gothic is, like her treatment of everything in her tales, particularly Dinesenian, treading a twisty line, reaching back to transform certain aspects of the past that she considers valuable into modes operable in the present. Among those philosophic convictions of which Green speaks is a particular insistence on an aristocratic, artistic, and most importantly, imaginative understanding of one’s self and the world. The Gothic provided her with a useful tool in the illustration of this belief: “When I used the word ‘Gothic,’” she told The Atlantic Monthly editor Curtis Cate, “I didn’t mean the real Gothic, but the imitation of the Gothic, the Romantic age of Byron, the age of that man— what was his name?—who built Strawberry Hill, the age of the Gothic revival.”3

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artists women have sometimes adopted an offthe-mainstream style which keeps them out of competition with the men in their field. Petersen and Wilson point to Marie Laurencin’s choice of painting style as an example of this tactic, and note the reaction to women artists who opt for such a solution:

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That imitation, of course, is what we generally think of as the Gothic. It was particularly suited to Dinesen’s purposes since part of the original impetus behind the earlier Gothic revival was the need for an outlet for the imagination in an age of reason, and an allied interest in the oriental tale and stories of imaginary voyages, to which the popularity of the Arabian Nights, first translated into English in the early eighteenth century, testified.4 For Dinesen the imagination is all important, not just as an aesthetic dictum, but as a philosophical tenet and psychological necessity— indeed, as a moral/spiritual guide. She was seen as, and saw herself as, a modern Scheherezade; like Scheherezade, the magic of her tales deters the listeners from action until they have understood, through the tales, the larger pattern of the universe and can act within it wisely. Dinesen described herself thus: I belong to an ancient, idle, wild and useless tribe, perhaps I am even one of the last members of it, who, for many thousands of years, in all countries and parts of the world, has, now and again, stayed for a time among the hard-working honest people in real life, and sometimes has thus been fortunate enough to create another sort of reality for them, which in some way or another, has satisfied them. I am a storyteller.5

In part, her work was directed at satisfying the need for magic which she felt “the little man, the simple man” [sic] experienced in the same way as the natives on her African farm “who could never get enough of her telling of fanciful tales.”6 Ultimately, it was the world’s need for magic which she addressed. Her tales were meant not only to fulfill a yen for the fantastical, but to affect the reader’s understanding of reality itself. Dinesen had turned to writing to put her own life in perspective, to explain her personal tragedies to herself.7 What that writing most often dealt with was the understanding of life by means of the imagination. As Robert Langbaum puts it: The point is that you don’t get at the truth about the world or yourself by going straight to it. You get at it by seeming to move away to an esthetic distance. You get at it through artifice and tradition—by assimilating your particular event to a recurring pattern, your particular self to an archetype. (p. 20)

Dinesen advocated imaginative truth over the sort of plain truth that, as one of her characters says, tailors and shoemakers need. This was not meant as an escape from reality, but as something to be kept in a proper relation with reality. That is, we are not to get lost in dreams, not to live

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only in the imaginative world or try to play the artist in life with too heavy a hand (in which case, because our imaginations are not great enough, things will always get out of control). Instead, the imagination serves as a way into the reality of things, a reality we can grasp only through an imaginative apprehension. At its extreme, says Donald Hannah, the imagination functions in Dinesen’s work as a kind of aesthetic equivalent for an abandoned Christian tradition. Dinesen, he maintains, believes that Job’s questioning of God’s purpose stems from a failure of imagination. The kind of answer Job gets from God demands an imaginative response, and it is only by this that we can “comprehend the design, understand the purpose of our existence—and be reconciled to our lot.”8 Given Dinesen’s attitude toward the imagination, it is not surprising to find that she replaces the Gothic emphasis on moral sentiment—that which enables us to “distinguish right from wrong” and propels us “toward a realization of the good, the beautiful, and the true”9 —with an emphasis on the imagination which works for her as a kind of moral sentiment. She also replaces the direct authorial Gothic preachiness, the selfimportant solemnity that we find, for example, in Radcliffe’s passages on St. Aubert’s efforts to train Emily in the proper brand and degree of sensibility. Instead, Dinesen makes a more indirect presentation of her message through in-set tales; through a more symbolic use of events; and, in most typically Dinesenian fashion, through witty conversation. This last method relates to her speaking of the Gothic she drew on as imitation or artificial Gothic. The very modernness of her treatment lies to a great extent in just this awareness of the artificiality of the Gothic trappings, in a selfconsciousness that is part of the wit yet does not mock or parody the Gothic. Within, Dinesen often “creates an intensity . . . sets the story in the atmosphere of the imagination where life can be explored in depth.”1 0 Her use of wit operates like her use of the fantastic tale, the Arabian Nights, a form which Glenway Wescott refers to as “so primitive a type of fiction—intended to amuse, to amaze, and to allure the imagination”—much like the Gothic itself. He suggests she found support for her approach in certain tenets of the ancients: “Aristotle said: ‘Impossibilities are justified if they serve the purpose of the poetry.’ Longinus said: ‘The effect of genius is not to persuade or to convince but rather to transport the audience out of its usual frame of mind.’”1 1 Dinesen translates Longinus’ concept of the sublime into the powers

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These same considerations extend to her treatment of the supernatural—the scare element of the Gothic: “In Gothic writings fantasy predominates over reality, the strange over the commonplace, and the supernatural over the natural, with one definite auctorial intent: to scare.”1 2 This intent certainly was and is a primary factor in the general appeal of the Gothic. However, the thrill of being frightened is not enough to account for our constant interest in this genre. Gothic writers also had serious purposes, as Ellen Moers points out in her discussion of female Gothic writers, indicating the relevance of their work to so much of women’s situation.1 3 Rather than scariness itself, it is the satisfaction of the need for imagination and the component of psychological reality (on which the best of the Gothic writers such as Radcliffe based their scariness) which accounts for the continuing power and popularity of the form. Lionel Stevenson describes the process: In departing from realism Mrs. Radcliffe stumbled upon the whole realm of the unconscious. The standard situations in her stories are those which recur in everyone’s nightmares. . . . [S]he had the knack of stimulating the reader’s own dreammaking function, which then took over and supplied the private horrors of each individual imagination.1 4

Radcliffe, says Andrew Wright, supplied us with a means by which every one of her mysteries was “ultimately explicable as natural rather than supernatural phenomena”1 5 and gave us, if not an explanation, at least a basis in psychological reality. Dinesen’s tales are fantastical, but never scary. She had a poor opinion of Poe’s tales: “‘He scares you but that’s all.’”1 6 Like Radcliffe, the supernaturalism in her tales is grounded in psychological reality; but unlike Radcliffe, she is not concerned with providing rational explanations in natural terms. The supernatural elements are viewed almost matter-of-factly, with a willing suspension of belief or with that extraordinary state of mind which the imaginative tale creates for us. Robert Langbaum notes that in some of her tales: . . . the supernatural situation is so embedded in a symbolic framework as to leave little of the unrationalized aura that gives the effect of weirdness. . . . Her stories are fantastic in the way wit is—in the jubilant freedom with which possibilities are stretched and ideas combined. (p. 89)

Dinesen moves beyond the psychological into explanations founded on symbolic and mythic

reality. Her tales teach us wisdom through an imaginative apprehension. The Gothic supplies the imaginative landscape, atmosphere, and episodes. The form also gives her the necessary distance to lead us into a state of mind in which we can make that imaginative realization. Her use of the Gothic is like her use of so many other older values and myth systems, bringing out what is important in them while transforming them into a mode workable in the twentieth century. She does not suggest, says Langbaum, that we return to these old values, but that we find modern equivalents for them. We can do this as she does, by creating new values and myths, by returning to an even earlier time in which they were manifest in a better spirit, or by translating them, arriving at “traditional values only through the most strikingly modern transvaluations.”1 7 Dinesen’s most traditionally Gothic story in terms of its characterizations and psychological atmosphere is The Angelic Avengers. However, this novel is not typical, either of her work or of her general handling of the Gothic, and must be regarded as she herself categorized it, an illegitimate child, published under another pseudonym. More typical of her work and, in that category, the most Gothic of her tales, is “The Monkey” which appeared in her first volume, Seven Gothic Tales. “The Monkey” is filled with Gothic elements: a convent, a ruined castle, an interminable lawsuit, a magic potion, strange forebodings, the good and tyrannical parents, seduction threats, monsters, and of course, heroines and villains. But most of these acquire special twists. The convent is a secular retreat “for unmarried ladies and widows of noble birth who here pass the autumn and winter days of their lives in a dignified and comfortable routine. . . .”1 8 Although it is secluded from the world, the place is far from otherworldly; the women may be out of the game, but they are extremely interested in its goings on. The lawsuit has a happy outcome, but this plays no real part in the events of the plot and functions primarily in a psychological sense, illustrating in the Count’s manner of accepting his good fortune one aspect of behaving in a properly aristocratic spirit. The ruined castle is not frightening in a properly Gothic sense; it is a place of love, spiritual aristocracy, and a certain freedom. Langbaum places it in the realm of the pastoral: “. . . [it] is removed from time, and thus contrasts with that other retreat, Cloister Seven, which by its very pretension to be a convent, shows its worldliness and involvement in time.”1 9 Its chaos contrasts

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of wit, the fantastic and the imaginative that take us out of more ordinary states of mind.

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with the convent’s routine and duty. Unlike the closeness to nature and animals that life at the castle represents, at the convent even the animals are domesticated—all except the Prioress’ monkey, which plays a major role in the story’s resolution. The tale has a marriage plot at its heart, but it is one that arises from rather unique motives. Boris, about whom some scandal has arisen concerning alleged homosexual activities, decides to marry in order to squelch the rumors. He journeys to the convent to ask his aunt, the Prioress, to name a suitable bride. She chooses Athena Hopballehus, Boris’ childhood friend, who lives in the neighboring ruined castle. Athena will be the pawn in this game of convention and duty; she will clear his honor. Athena leads us into Dinesen’s transformation of a truly major Gothic element—the heroine. Radcliffe, says Moers, “. . . firmly set the Gothic in one of the ways it would go ever after: a novel in which the central figure is a young woman who is simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine.”2 0 Now this is certainly true of Athena, but in Dinesen’s presentation we see how far the type has advanced beyond Radcliffe’s Emily. Athena is one of a long line of women characters in Dinesen whom we might call the militant innocent or young warrior woman. A more mundane or less insightful writer than Dinesen might have referred to her as a “tomboy,” and she follows that stereotype in much of her behavior, fierceness and independence. She may even harbor a wish to be a boy, since she can see that the things she values in life seem to be reserved for the male roles. But, and here is where Dinesen really departs from the conventional stereotype, she does not really wish to be a boy; she desires to be a girl and still retain her freedom of action. As “tomboy” she relates to that tradition of tomboys in women’s literature which Moers attributes to the prohibitions on outdoor activities for females: “For in every age, whatever the social rules, there has always been one time of a woman’s life, the years before puberty, when walking, running, climbing, battling, and tumbling are as normal female as they are male activities.”2 1 As a tomboy who wants to retain her powers and freedom, while still being female, she connects with the tradition of Gothic heroines who “in the power of villains . . . are forced to do what they could never do alone, whatever their ambitions: scurry up the top of pasteboard Alps, spy out exotic vistas, penetrate bandit-infested forests.”2 2 While remaining extremely “feminine” and within the

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“proprieties,” says Moers, they prove themselves through courage and self-control in the face of physical danger. All that taken into consideration, a simple descriptive comparison of Emily with Athena shows immediately how far Dinesen has extended the definition of Gothic heroine: In person, Emily resembled her mother; having the same elegant symmetry of form, the same delicacy of features, and the same blue eyes, full of tender sweetness. But, lovely as was her person, it was the varied expression of her countenance, as conversation awakened the nicer emotions of her mind, that threw such a captivating grace around her.2 3

Emily, says Andrew Wright, is a “credible heroine of sensibility” and a Gothic heroine par excellence who has education in the sciences and “elegant literature,” who plays the flute and writes poetry, and who is an only child with an undying affection for her father.2 4 Athena is also an innocent and a motherless only child who prefers to remain with her father. There the similarities end. Athena is a strong young woman, “six feet high and broad in proportion,” whose beauty has nothing to do with delicacy or elegant symmetry: “Beneath her flaming hair her noble forehead was white as milk; lower down her face was, like her broad wrists, covered with freckles. Still she was so fair and clear of skin that she seemed to lighten up the hall on entering it. . . .” Like most of Dinesen’s women, she is surrounded by bird imagery; she is also symbolically linked to a great she-bear who killed five men and she embodies both the peaceful and the dangerous aspects of wild animals. She may not be so well-read as Emily, at least not in the same subjects, but she has read much about the French revolution; she is a revolutionary who wishes she had met Danton and who would like to see where the guillotine stood and wear the Phrygian bonnet. Athena is in some ways close to Catherine of Wuthering Heights who represents clearly the young woman’s desire to retain her freedom, a desire Moers notes in Catherine’s delirious outcry against her adult state as Mrs. Linton: “‘I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free. . . .’” Dinesen’s young warrior women harbor the not particularly unrealistic belief that in losing their innocence and becoming adult women, especially wives and mothers, they will lose their freedom; consequently they fight against entering the experience. Childerique in “The Caryatids” typifies this female warrior innocent:

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Luring such a young woman into “her element” can be an arduous struggle and at times the forces trying to make her enter experience find themselves curiously defeated in the very attainment of their goal. The Gothic heroines created by female writers have often put up just such resistance with just these results; in Dinesen the process becomes even more graphic. The Prioress does not doubt that Athena will accept Boris’ proposal, for she has lived an isolated life with her father in his castle, has heard the women of the convent speak of other brilliant marriages in society, and has never before had a proposal of marriage. She is the supreme innocent whom Boris doubts has ever heard of love or even looked at herself in the mirror. During a conversation at the castle, Athena, according to Langbaum: . . . demonstrates her innocence by the question she asks regarding the old Wendish idol of the goddess of love, which “had the face and façade of a beautiful woman” but “presented at the back the image of a monkey.” How did they know, she asks, “which was the front and which the back?” (p. 83)

The Prioress considers her easy prey; Boris sets off for her castle. Athena’s father is delighted with the proposed marriage and prospects look good for a conventional “happy ending.” But no one has realized that Athena is as fiercely independent and virginal as her name, that she loves her solitude and has chosen to spend her life unmarried, caring for her aging father, and that she is prepared to fight for this choice. The Prioress will not be so easily denied and thus invites Athena to a seduction supper at the convent. During this scene the whys of Athena’s refusal become clearer and we see how Dinesen has also transformed the idea of Gothic villainry. Here the threat lies not in forced marriage to the wrong man or even, at this point, in seduction, but in conventional marriage itself. During the supper, Boris, who likes to cast himself as an actor upon the stage of life, begins to understand Athena, now seeing the two of them as participants in a drama. He realizes that she is probably afraid for the first time in her life: “Of what is she afraid?” he thought. “Of being made happy by my aunt and me? This is this tragic maiden’s prayer: From being a success at

court, a happy, congratulated bride, a mother of a promising family, good Lord, deliver me.” As a tragic actor of a high standard himself, he applauded her. (p. 142)

Boris sympathizes with Athena, for he, too, Langbaum suggests, is something of an innocent despite his surface worldliness and would like to hang onto that innocence he equates with freedom. Still, he has more to gain from this marriage and agrees, however reluctantly, with the Prioress’ plans. Even though Dinesen validates the necessity of experience, she is opposed to the effects of conventional marriage upon both sexes. Gothic villainry here becomes not so much the province of males as the province of the conventionally minded. However, the consequences are much worse for women, and there is the implication that Dinesen’s women, especially her young warrior girls, are aware of this. Athena holds up well during the supper until the Prioress tells a story about a wild elephant that was caged. The symbolism is clear to Athena: she will be caged in marriage to Boris. She rather abruptly excuses herself from the scene and goes to bed. As a final resort the Prioress gives Boris an aphrodisiac and sends him off to Athena’s chamber to seduce—or rather—rape her. The ensuing scene, when compared with Count Morano’s sudden appearance in Emily’s chamber, shows just how much Dinesen has tampered with the Gothic. In doing so she has added a marvelous element of humor. Whereas Emily’s bedroom is enveloped in thick gloomy shadows, Athena’s assigned chamber is a tour de force of eroticism with only the barest hint of Gothic terrors: The whole room was hung with rose silks, and in the depths of it the crimson draperies of the fourposter bed glowed in the shade. There were two pink-globed lamps, solicitously lighted by the Prioress’s maid. The floor had a wine-colored carpet with roses in it, which, near the lamps, seemed to be drinking in the light, and farther from them looked like pools of dark crimson into which one would not like to walk. The room was filled with the scent of incense and flowers. (p. 151)

Just as this rose and crimson chamber is a world away from that of Radcliffe’s Emily, so is Athena’s response to the would-be seducer. Instead of battling the villain with strength of character and virtuous argument, teetering all the while on the edge of a terrified faint, Athena strikes Boris, knocking out two of his teeth. They engage in a physical battle with erotic overtones, rather like those Moers suggests in the nursery battles be-

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She had no desire to be desired, and her woman’s kingdom of longing, rapture and jealousy seemed to her all too vast; she did not want to take up the scepter at all. Like a young stork which considers that it runs very well, and does not care to fly, she had to be lured into her element.2 5

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tween brother and sister. Indeed, there has been an earlier hint of incest, though it appears that Boris and Athena are not physically brother and sister. Instead they share something of that relation in a spiritual sense—one fairly typical in Dinesen and which seems to appeal to her on the grounds of her belief in the different but equal status of women and men, a concept underlying the comradely nature of the brother/sister relation. Athena holds her own against Boris until he manages to force a kiss upon her. This is simply too much for her to take. “She, surely, had never been kissed in her life, she had not even heard or read of a kiss. The force used against her made her whole being rise in mortal disgust.” Athena collapses as if she were dead. This is hardly the kiss that awakens the innocent sleeping beauty, and Athena’s collapse is no weak-kneed faint. Her response comments both humorously and effectively on the more traditional outcomes of such female-male encounters. Boris, all interest in and capacity for seduction gone, lifts her on the bed and leaves her unconscious and untouched. Dinesen’s changes in the heroines, in the nature of the villain, and in what the heroines fear point up an important difference from the early Female Gothic. In Dinesen it is obvious that the fear is not related to the supernatural or even to a loss of virginity, itself not always particularly important to Dinesen’s women. In clearing away the ostensible fears made so much of in early Gothic—the fear for the loss of one’s physical virginity and, by extension, one’s honor—Dinesen’s presentation reveals a much more serious underlying meaning, the knowledge that this loss can bring a far greater one, and an enslavement. The heroine battles against this loss; if she, like Emily and Athena in their different ways, can retain her self-possession, in both senses of the term, then she defeats the villains. “[Emily] opposed his turbulence and indignation,” writes Mrs. Radcliffe in a sentence that is my choice for Emily’s epitaph, “only by the mild dignity of a superior mind, but the gentle firmness of her conduct served to exasperate still more his resentment, since it compelled him to feel his own inferiority.” (p. 210)

Athena also withstands the villains by her supreme innocence. Boris felt she was like the old martyrs who drew everything, even their tortures, into themselves in a harmonious beauty but left the torturer outside: “No matter what efforts he made to possess them, they stood in no relation to him, and in fact deprived him of existence.” The Prioress endeavors to convince Athena that

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she has indeed been seduced, counting on trapping the young woman with the ignorance of her innocence and a feeling of guilt and concern for the supposedly lost honor of herself and her family. In so doing the Prioress plays on some of those very real fears and “grim realities” that Moers notes in women writers generally: “. . . the terrible need always to appear, as well as always to be, virtuous; and, over all, the terrible danger of slippage from the respectable to the unrespectable class of womanhood.”2 6 Athena does not seem to care what the world or the Prioress think of her, so the Prioress plays her last card, suggesting that Athena might be pregnant. Although Athena finds this hard to believe, she rises to the occasion in her own unque way: “‘If I have a child,’ said Athena, from her quaking earth thrusting at the heavens, ‘my father will teach him astronomy.’” The conflict seems never to be satisfactorily resolved for either side until the Prioress’ pet monkey bursts suddenly into the room and in the ensuing scramble what we thought was the Prioress turns into the monkey and the invading monkey materializes as the true Prioress. Early in the tale we had been told of the Prioress’ close relation to her monkey and her restlessness whenever it disappeared on extended sojourns into the woods. Later, clues had been dropped about certain of the Prioress’ behaviors linking her with the monkey. All of this seemed explicable in the rational psychological terms of Radcliffe. But now we must understand the incident in purely symbolic terms and through these make an imaginative grasp of the wisdom of experience that Athena, Boris, and we ourselves are set to learn in the tale’s end. Here is the answe to that question about the old Wendish idol of love— properly understood it is not a question of front and back, but of duality. Love and life contain dual forces, the civilized and the animal, the Apolonian, says Langbaum, of young virgins and the Dionysian of the monkey: “Isak Dinesen said in regard to this story: ‘When men by way of their conventions have got themselves into difficulties, then let the monkey in, he will find the unattainable solution.’”2 7 Dinesen’s statement associates the monkey with that imaginative response which jars us out of our limited perspective and lets us see the intersection of life’s dualities. Neither the young warrior woman nor the young man must be forced into a sham experience by the iron hand of convention. Instead, they must enter it through an understanding of the complex nature of existence which takes them out of their innocent egoism into an awareness of

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The monkey and the monkey-as-Prioress (or Prioress-as-monkey) relate to the use of monsters in Gothic fiction: “creatures who scare because they look different, wrong, non-human.” Moers notes that Gothic monsters were originally created through some distortion of scale, particularly gigantism, and later by a crossing of species resulting in animaloid people like the goblins in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. Women writers in the twentieth century make monsters that are “not so often giants or animaloid humans as aberrant creatures with hideous deformities or double sex: hermaphrodites.”2 8 In the modern usage the physical aspect of the monster is often translated into characters who are in some way psychological or sociological misfits and outcasts. These are the sort of characters we find in Carson McCullers’ “haunting monsters of ambivalence” or in Djuna Barnes with her cast of “lesbians, lunatics, Jews, spoiled priests, artists, nobleman, transvestites, and other masqueraders”—many of whom also appear in Dinesen’s work. In “The Monkey” the monstrosity lies not in the animaloid human per se but in qualities carried to the extreme, in this case an Apollonian attention to duty that is too strict and conventional versus an overly chaotic and animalistic Dionysian mode. These extremes, both of which are out of control throughout most of the tale, create the negative “monster” aspect as opposed to the positive balance of such dualities already achieved by the true Prioress. Most specifically, that old monster—the conventionally proper—is outwitted by the imaginative response. The physical Gothic monster is here transformed into psychological and sociological terms and the wild animal which we might ordinarily have seen as a probable monster figure, and which is certainly scary to the “domestic animal” (the conventionally minded), becomes the very opposite of monster. It becomes the means by which we can break convention’s limits and find the “unattainable solution.” Dinesen expressed her position in a slightly less symbolic fashion in her series of memoirs

called Shadows on the Grass. She and her friend Berkeley Cole made a distinction between “respectability” and “decency” and divided human and animal acquaintances according to this doctrine: We put down domestic animals as respectable and wild animals as decent, and held that, while the existence and prestige of the first were decided by their relation to the community, the others stood in direct contact with God.2 9

Dinesen aligned herself with the wild animals. Moers sees the monster phenomenon as taking on a special significance in women’s hands and connects it with themes of self-hatred, selfdisgust and the impetus to self-destruction. She notes that these are increasingly prominent themes in twentieth-century women writers and suggests that they partially account for the persistence of the Gothic mode: Despair is hardly the exclusive province of any one sex or class in our age, but to give visual form to the fear of self, to hold anxiety up to the Gothic mirror of the imagination, may well be more common in the writings of women than of men. While I cannot prove this statistically, I can offer a reason: that nothing separates female experience from male experience more sharply, and more early in life, than the compulsion to visualize the self. (p. 163)

The horrors in the visualization are created by the gaps (real or imagined) between the self a woman finds and the self she is told woman is supposed to be. In Dinesen’s tales such selfloathing and the consequent tendency to view oneself in the character of a monster can sometimes result from the imposition of conventional attitudes; often it appears to be a male-imposed syndrome. In its gentler manifestations, it occurs because of some failure of appreciation or understanding by men. In the most direct and devastating examples—Calypso in “The Deluge at Norderney” and Lady Flora in “The Cardinal’s Third Tale”—it results from a perversely egoistic and self-serving desire by some men to see all or certain women in degrading light and to persuade the women to see themselves accordingly. The women view their bodies, and by extension, their selves, negatively until they learn to see themselves and the world by other standards. Calypso had begun to accept the assessment of her worth made by her uncle (who is a bad kind of homosexual in Dinesen’s terms because he refuses even to acknowledge the existence of women and has foisted such devaluation and self-

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their relation to others and to the world with all its dualities. Athena gives Boris a look with which she recognizes both him as a being outside herself and the bond that ties them together against the rest of the world. Whether or not they will actually marry becomes irrelevant. They move into experience linked by a spiritual understanding because of what they have witnessed together. The young warrior woman can be won over by nothing less than the imagination and powers of life itself.

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loathing on his niece). Calypso is about to cut off her long hair and her breasts in an effort to look masculine and achieve some right to existence. Then she notices in the mirror not only her reflection, but also that of an old picture depicting satyrs adoring the charms of nymphs who look, of course, as purely female as she. Once she discovers this and a wardrobe full of her greatgrandmother’s old clothes, she changes her plans as well as her evaluation of herself and her uncle. She spends the night trying on her greatgrandmother’s finery, turning back and forth between the approval of the mirror and that of her newly discovered “friends” in the old painting. Calypso decides to leave the castle but takes one last look at her sleeping uncle: “‘Had she been afraid of this creature—she, who was the sister of the nymphs and had centaurs for playmates? She was a hundred times as strong as he.’”3 0 The Gothic writer’s use of gigantism as equivalent to monstrosity is seen in Lady Flora who is, like her mother, something of a giant of a woman. The two of them are subject to all manner of insulting variations by the father/husband on the subject of Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians. Lady Flora learns to loathe the very mention of flesh or sexuality but by the tale’s end she, too, achieves a new self-evaluation (although her path is a great deal longer and more circuitous than Calypso’s). In Athena and her equally large Dinesenian counterpart, Ehrengard—in the tale of the same name—there is just the hint of this gigantic woman/monster possibility, but neither suffers from any kind of self-loathing, and their giantism is played upon more in terms of its implications of power than in terms of monstrousness. In “The Monkey,” Dinesen’s dislike of forced obedience to one’s conventional duty is also embodied in her variation upon the Gothic elements of the good and the tyrannical parent. In Udolpho, Moers notes that these roles are played primarily by Emily’s father and her uncle Montoni. Athena’s father is the good parent; the Prioress, at least in the character she plays through most of the tale, functions as tyrant. The tale posits a need for an imaginative resolution of these dualities. Athena’s resistance links Dinesen’s stance with that of the last lines of Jane Austen’s Gothic parody, Northanger Abbey: “‘I leave it to be settled . . . by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.’”3 1 The emphasis at the end of “The Monkey” falls not on marriage but on the mutual under-

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standing gained by Athena and Boris, on their “spiritual” marriage. In terms of plot at least, this marks another of Dinesen’s shifts in the use of the Gothic, since no marriage actually takes place. However, Moers show us that, despite the actuality of the marriage, even in Radcliffe’s Udolpho, the main concern is really an overwhelming interest in property, which is all bound up, of course, with a woman’s independence. Dinesen, however, is rarely interested in such practicalities and never interested in respectability. She is passionately interested in freedom. For her, freedom comes not through such tangible means as property, but through the kind of understanding gained at the end of “The Monkey,” an understanding available to both sexes. Dinesen is not alone in her reliance upon the imagination, especially with regard to her women characters, to achieve freedom from restrictions. She is, however, unique in her insistence upon it, and in the extremes to which she employs this “solution” in her tales. Her women characters rarely rebel directly. They employ an imaginative response in order, as her character Matteo remarks about women’s dancing, to move “‘with such perfect freedom in such severely regulated figures.’”3 2

Notes 1. Karen Petersen and J.J. Wilson, Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal from the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Colophon— Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 106-07. 2. Howard Green, “Isak Dinesen,” The Hudson Review, 17 (1964-65), 526-27. 3. Robert Langbaum, Isak Dinesen’s Art: The Gayety of Vision, Phoenix Edition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 74. 4. Andrew Wright, Introd., The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole; The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Anne Radcliffe; Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen (San Francisco: Rinehart Press, 1963), pp. viii-ix. 5. Karen Blixen fortoeller . . . (Louisiana Grammofonplader) as quoted in Donald Hannah, Isak Dinesen and Karen Blixen: The Mask and the Reality (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 60. 6. Parmenia Migel, Titania: The Biography of Isak Dinesen (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 11. 7. Dinesen’s personal tragedies included her father’s suicide; the death of her close friend, Denys FinchHatton; her short, unhappy marriage; and the syphilis, contracted from her husband, which was never fully cured and which occasioned much of the illness she experienced in later years. In particular, she also turned to writing in order to help herself deal with the troubles on her farm—drought and an invasion of grasshoppers—that eventually led to the loss of her beloved African coffee plantation.

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9. Wright, p. ix. 10. Langbaum, p. 89. 11. Glenway Wescott, “Isak Dinesen, The Storyteller,” in Images of Truth (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 156. 12. Ellen Moers, Literary Women, Anchor Books Edition (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press-Doubleday, 1977), p. 138. 13. See Moers’ discussion in Literary Women: “Female Gothic” and “Traveling Heroinism: Gothic for Heroines.” 14. Lionel Stevenson, English Novel: A Panorama, as quoted in Wright, p. xiv. 15. Wright, p. xvi. 16. Langbaum, p. 89. 17. Ibid., p. 31. 18. Isak Dinesen, “The Monkey,” in Seven Gothic Tales, Vintage Books Edition (1934; rpt. of 1939 ed., New York: Random House, 1972), p. 109. All further references to this work appear in the text. 19. Langbaum, p. 83. 20. Moers, p. 139. 21. Ibid., p. 198. 22. Ibid., p. 191. 23. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Great Britain: Billing & Sons, Ltd., n.d.), p. 7. 24. Wright, p. xv. 25. Isak Dinesen, “The Caryatids, an Unfinished Tale,” in Last Tales, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 122. 26. Moers, pp. 206-07. 27. Langbaum, p. 88. 28. Moers, pp. 155, 164. 29. Isak Dinesen, Shadows on the Grass, First Vintage Books Edition (1961; rpt., New York: Random House, 1974), p. 17. 30. Isak Dinesen, “The Deluge at Norderney” in Seven Gothic Tales, Vintage Books Edition (1934; rpt. of 1939 ed., New York: Random House, 1972), p. 49. 31. Wright, p. xxi. 32. Isak Dinesen, “Tales of Two Old Gentlemen,” in Last Tales, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 66.

SUSAN C. BRANTLY (ESSAY DATE 2002) SOURCE: Brantly, Susan C. “Seven Gothic Tales.” In Understanding Isak Dinesen, pp. 12-71. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. In the following excerpt, Brantly surveys the themes in and critical response to Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales.

Isak Dinesen was forty-nine when Seven Gothic Tales appeared in 1934. She had a wealth of life experience behind her, and the sophistication and maturity of her English-language debut is striking. Dinesen often said that if she had not lost the farm in Africa, she would never have become a writer. She had published a few tales in Danish journals under the name Osceola, but for many, Seven Gothic Tales represents the beginning of Isak Dinesen’s literary career. When Isak Dinesen left Africa in 1931, she had already completed “The Roads Round Pisa” and “The Monkey.” The other five tales were finished in Denmark. Originally, Dinesen intended to publish nine tales under the title Tales of Nozdref’s Cook. Nozdref’s Cook is a character out of Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842). In the Danish edition of Seven Gothic Tales, Baron von Brackel notes that the modern world appears to be created the way “Nozdref’s Cook made soup—a little pepper, salt, and herbs, whatever was around—and ‘some flavor or another will come out of it’” (MU, 1:99). Evidently, Dinesen decided against comparing her collection to a culinary hodgepodge. The original nine tales would have included “The Caryatids, an Unfinished Tale,” and “Carnival,” but Dinesen felt that the contemporary references in “Carnival” would disturb the tone of the volume. “The Caryatids” was saved for later publication. . . . In part, Dinesen wrote Seven Gothic Tales in English for economic reasons, since the Englishlanguage book market is much larger than the Danish. Dinesen also said she chose to write in English because she felt comfortable expressing herself in that language after seventeen years in Kenya. In addition, Dinesen felt that the English public would be more sympathetic to her tales, since, in her view, the English-speaking countries possessed a stronger tradition of fantastic literature than Denmark. In 1923, Dinesen wrote to her mother about the American writer James Branch Cabell and his novels Jurgen (1919) and The Cream of the Jest (1917) which she characterized as “full of fantasy, and all this has made me wonder whether a new direction in literature is about to develop, making use of fantasy” (LA, 164). In England, she pointed to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1923) as examples of fantastic literature.1 As far as her Danish audience was concerned, Dinesen felt, “We have few or no fantastic books here at home. We have Ingemann’s The Sphinx and Heiberg’s Christmas Jests and New Year’s Fun, but who remembers them? I was afraid that people, after reading my book, would ask: ‘What

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8. Hannah, p. 102.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR JOHN UPDIKE ON DINESEN’S “DIVINE SWANK” IN SEVEN GOTHIC TALES

Though Isak Dinesen’s leisurely and ornate anecdotes, which she furnishes with just enough historical touches to make the stage firm, have something in them of the visionary and the artificial, they are not escapist. From the sweeping flood of the first story to the casual and savage murder of the last, they face pain and loss with the brisk familiarity of one who has amply known both, and force us to face them, too. Far from hollow and devoid of a moral, the tales insistently strive to inculcate a moral stance; in this her fiction especially suggests that of Hemingway, who thought well enough of her to interrupt his Nobel Prize acceptance speech with a regret that she had not received it. Both authors urge upon us a certain style of courage, courage whose stoic acceptances are plumed with what the old Cardinal, in the first Gothic Tale, calls “divine swank.” Dinesen even called this quality “chic,” ascribing it to the costumed Masai warriors who, “daring, and wildly fantastical as they seem, are unswervingly true to their own nature, and to an immanent ideal.” She also admired, in Africa, the Moslems, whose “moral code consists of hygiene and ideas of honor—for instance they put discretion among their first commandments.” SOURCE: Updike, John. “Seven Gothic Tales: The Divine Swank of Isak Dinesen.” New York Times Book Review (23 February 1986): 3, 37.

is the meaning of what you write?’ There is no meaning, and there should not be a meaning. It is dream. Fantasy!”2 . . . Dinesen’s reception in the United States was enthusiastic beyond all expectation. The United States was in the grip of the Great Depression, and one American reviewer began by quoting Dinesen’s “The Poet”: “When one is tied down heavily enough to an existence of care, it becomes pleasant to think of careless times and people” (SGT, 359).3 The American reviewers embraced the

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imaginative qualities of the book: “Seven Gothic Tales has burst upon us from a gray literary sky.”4 It may be worthy of note that 1934 was also the year King Kong was released in theaters. Other films released in the 1930s include Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and Lost Horizons (1937). Exotic locations and strange happenings were welcome because they could remove the reader from the harsh realities of the everyday. British reviews were also warm, “This belongs to the company of the world’s great books.”5 Even so, one English reviewer found the style “pompous.”6 Dinesen’s misgivings about how the Danish audience would receive her book proved to be well founded. The predominant literary mode in Denmark was social realism. The public debate of contemporary social issues had not raged as strongly since the days when Georg Brandes called the Modern Breakthrough into being in the 1870’s. Dinesen’s imaginative tales set in the previous century were quite different from what most Danes were reading. Svend Borberg described Dinesen as a flamingo-red orchid in a cabbage patch, and Swedish reviewer Mario Grut compared her to “a crane in a dance with sparrows.”7 The most notorious of the Danish reviews accused Dinesen of “snobbism, the fantastic, and perversity.”8 The negative Danish reviews upset Dinesen. Svend Borberg, with a good dose of irony, suggested one reason for Dinesen’s being subjected to such a beating by the Danish critics: “It was naturally very cheeky, not to say brash, of Isak Dinesen—alias Baroness Karen Blixen—to conquer the world first with her book Seven Gothic Tales and then come to Denmark with it. As a Danish author she should have felt obligated to ask her at home first if she was worth anything.”9 This was simply the beginning of an uneasy relationship between Dinesen and her Danish public that would last throughout her career. Even so, in 1999, the readers of the large Danish daily newspaper Politiken voted Seven Gothic Tales to be the third most important Danish work of the twentieth century. The choice of Seven Gothic Tales as the title for the English work and Syv fantastiske Fortællinger (Seven fantastic tales) as that of the Danish is the result of a canny assessment of her potential audiences and the literary traditions with which they might be familiar. “Gothic” appeals, of course, to the English Gothic and “fantastic” is a word that draws one’s thoughts towards the German romantic, as in Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (1814-15, Fantasy pieces in the manner

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In English, the term “Gothic” has several associations, and Dinesen’s critics have found a use for a number of them from time to time. The Goths were Germanic barbarians who attacked the Roman Empire. With reference to the sometimes subversive qualities of Dinesen’s texts, Susan Hardy Aiken playfully suggests that Dinesen might be considered “a ‘barbarous’ marginal force that continually imperils the [traditional] center.”1 2 The Gothic also refers to an elaborate type of medieval architecture, and some critics have found similarities between the architecture of a Gothic cathedral and the complex construction of Dinesen’s narratives: “The architecture of the . . . stories permitted the author to stop, at any moment, and add on a flying buttress or a whole new wing.”1 3 Dinesen herself specified, however: “I didn’t mean the real Gothic, but the imitation of the Gothic, the Romantic age of Byron, the age of that man—what was his name?—who built Strawberry Hill, the age of the Gothic revival.”1 4 The period of the English Gothic, roughly located between 1790 and 1830, came close on the heels of the Age of Reason. Many of the notable contributors to the Gothic were women: Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and the Brontë sisters. Dangerous and irrational forces seem to be at large in the Gothic, no doubt as a protest against the rationality of the era that preceded it. The Gothic is characterized by an interest in the past and exotic locations. Eric Johannesson has speculated, along with others, that the motive behind such a change in scene is to “liberate the imagination from the fetters which too familiar an environment imposes upon it.”1 5 The typical

Gothic hero is a man with a secret past who rejects the moral claims of society—a Byronic rebel. All of these features are familiar elements in Dinesen’s writing. Sibyl James has written an important essay on Dinesen’s relationship to the Gothic, in which she notes some significant points upon which Dinesen differs from the traditional English Gothic.1 6 Gothic narrators often resort to preachiness. Evil villains assault the innocent heroine’s virtue, but society’s conventional morality is ultimately affirmed. Dinesen, on the contrary, is anything but preachy, and her villains are likely to be the conventionally minded. The Gothic usually resolves the supernatural into the natural: there is not a ghost, but a madwoman in Rochester’s attic; Frankenstein animates his monster with galvanic energy, a scientifically acceptable principle at the time. Dinesen does not worry about confining herself to the plausible: prioresses turn into monkeys and vice versa. Dinesen does not use her supernatural effects to scare her readers, which was one of the main projects of the Gothic. The supernatural for Dinesen simply represents freedom of the imagination. The styles of the English Gothic and German romanticism overlap a great deal. Both relish the fantastic. The Gothic ruin that engages the spectator’s imagination finds its counterpart in the romantic textual fragment. The English Gothic and German romanticism share a common source of inspiration in The Arabian Nights and Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353). German romantic authors spent a good deal of time theorizing about a shortstory art form they called the Novelle (novella), developed on the model of Boccaccio’s tales. According to Goethe, the novella should describe an extraordinary event, and August Schlegel thought the story should contain a distinct turning point. In general, plot in the novella is more important than character. E. T. A. Hoffmann and Adelbert von Chamisso, two writers deeply admired by Dinesen, are among the foremost creators of German novellas. Dinesen has learned a few tricks from her favorites. Peter Schlehmihl, a character from a famous tale by Chamisso, makes a brief appearance in Hoffmann’s “A New Year’s Eve Adventure.” In much the same way, the fictional Augustus von Schimmelman would surface in Dinesen’s Out of Africa, or Henrik Ibsen would make a cameo appearance in “The Pearls.” “Real” and “imaginary” worlds become linked, and the dividing line is blurred.

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of Callot) by E. T. A. Hoffmann. In a Danish interview, Dinesen called Seven Gothic Tales a nonsense book: “I don’t know another word for books in which all sorts of fantastic things happen. You probably know Hoffmann’s Tales? It is something of the same sort, but not really the same.”1 0 With some reason, Dinesen felt her Danish interviewer would be more familiar with a reference to German romanticism, rather than the English Gothic. When asked why she chose the phrase “Gothic Tales,” Dinesen answered, “Because in England it places the stories in time and implies something that both has an elevated tone and can erupt into jests and mockery, into devilry and mystery.”1 1 Both English and German traditions left their mark on Dinesen’s writing, as she explained to her friend Bent Mohn: “I know more about the English ‘Gothic’ than German romanticism, but there are also works in that [tradition] which have meant a lot to me” (KBD, 1:500).

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German romantic writers were also fond of irony and literary masks. Hoffmann’s “Don Juan” is allegedly written by a traveling music enthusiast. Adopting a literary mask enables the author to relinquish narrative authority and forces the reader to assess the bias of the narrative. The narrative says one thing but may imply another, and the reader must be attentive to catch the nuances. This effect, which engages the participation of the reader in deciphering the text, is known as romantic irony. Few authors do romantic irony better than Dinesen’s countryman, Søren Kierkegaard. In Either/Or (1843), Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym of Victor Eremita, claims to have found two manuscripts in a desk, and he deduces they are written by two different people, whom he calls “A” and “B.” Among “A’s” papers there is another text called “The Diary of a Seducer;” which may or may not be written by “A” under the name Johannes. Similarly, Karen Blixen, writing under her pseudonym Isak Dinesen, nestles tales within tales within tales. The reader is consistently thwarted in her or his attempt to locate an ultimate voice of authority. Dinesen took such great pains to distance herself from the events in her tales that she was annoyed by the prospect of readers asking, “Did you really mean it? . . . Have you experienced this yourself?”1 7 These narrative connections between Kierkegaard and Dinesen have been examined at length in an essay by Eric Johannesson.1 8 . . . . .

“The Monkey” In the case of “The Monkey,” some of the most ingenious readings of the text have been performed by scholars publishing in academic journals or other venues not easily accessible to the general public. Annelies van Hees and William Mishler have exposed a number of the tale’s secrets, inspired by the analytical tools of psychoanalysis, and Dag Heede has thrown fresh light on some of the troubling gender issues the story evokes. The following treatment of the tale draws on the work of all three of these scholars as well as others, but is especially indebted to Annelies van Hees’s sensitive literary detective work. The ending of “The Monkey” contains a startling revelation. The Virgin Prioress, whom we think we have known throughout the tale, turns out to have a double nature. She is able to exchange shapes with her monkey. The majority of Dinesen’s tales, although they suggest fantastic possibilities, remain within the realm of the

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plausible and do not resort to such overtly supernatural devices. The scene is shocking, and we are forced to reevaluate everything we thought we knew about the events preceding the metamorphosis. This narrative twist is similar to, though even more spectacular than, the Cardinal revealing himself to be Kasparson at the end of “The Deluge at Norderney.” Eric Johannesson has pointed out that the theme of doubles is common to Gothic literature, listing the examples of “Menardus in Die Elixire des Teufels, or Ambrosio in Lewis’s The Monk, or Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or the jeweler in Hoffmann’s Mademoiselle de Scudery.”1 9 In each of these stories, the person with a double nature is male, and one side is most certainly bad, while the other is good. Conventional morality prevails when the evil side of the character is destroyed. In David Garnett’s “Lady into Fox” (1922), a story Dinesen once mentioned in an interview as a good example of the fantastic, a Victorian woman is inexplicably transformed into a vixen.2 0 Her husband tries to adjust but grows increasingly distressed as more and more of her animal nature takes over, and the ex-Victorian angel goes so far as to run away, mate, and have a litter. The transgressions of the wife are ultimately punished when she is torn apart by hounds. In typical fashion, Dinesen has reinscribed the traditions of the Gothic. The Prioress and her monkey are not destroyed at the end of tale; conventional morality has not been confirmed, and it is not at all certain that one side is better than the other. The emblem of this doubleness is the Wendish idol described by the Count, “the goddess of love had the face and facade of a beautiful woman, while, if you turned her around, she presented at the back the image of a monkey” (SGT, 130-31). Athena raises the question, “But how . . . did they know, in the case of that goddess of love, which was the front and which was the back?” (SGT, 131). Athena’s remark, which questions the hierarchy of such dualisms, is much in keeping with the theme of the harmony of contrasts so prevalent in Dinesen’s tales in general. As Hans Brix pointed out, Dinesen could have learned about this Wendish idol, called “Sieba” or “Siwa,” from Bernhard Severin Ingemann’s Grundtræk til en Nord-Slavisk og Vendisk Gudelære (1824, Fundamentals of a North-Slavic and Wendish mythology).2 1 Ingemann was one of Dinesen’s favorite authors, and the double aspect of “Siwa” is described in a footnote to his Valdemar den Store og hans Mænd (1824, Waldemar the great and his men), a copy of which, much used, is in Dines-

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Looking back over the tale, it is difficult to tell at any given time with whom one has been dealing. When Boris first arrives, it is stated that the monkey had been missing for a few weeks, usually a sign that the Prioress has transformed herself and left the convent in charge of her monkey familiar while she enjoys a freer life. The same Prioress who greets Boris with the pears and grapes of the “front” of the idol, speaks with passionate feeling of forests and trees. Athena has seen the monkey in the place where Cupid stood just a few days earlier, and the monkey crosses Boris’s path on the way back from his proposal visit. Is this the “real” Prioress, or not? The Prioress’s private dining room has “just lately” been redecorated in a style that would appeal to a creature from Zanzibar. A heavy incense is being burned, perhaps to mask the scent of the monkey. When Boris is refused by Athena, the Prioress goes “up to the window, as if she meant to throw herself out” (SGT, 138). When the Prioress turns around again, “She was all changed” (SGT, 138). Marianne Juhl and Bo Hakon Jørgensen construe this transformation as the moment when the monkey takes over, but this “change” is nothing like the metamorphosis that occurs in the final scene of the story.2 6 The monkey certainly seems to have the upper hand during the seduction supper, as body language would indicate: “From time to time she made use of a little gesture peculiar to her, of daintily scratching herself here and there with her delicately pointed little finger” (SGT, 144). The Prioress also savors the cloves from Zanzibar, which is another hint at who is in control. In the

final scene, after the metamorphosis, we are presented with “the true Prioress of Closter Seven” (SGT, 162). William Mishler has noted that when assessing an appropriate translation of this phrase into Danish, Dinesen rejected Valdemar Rørdam’s suggestion “den rigtige” (the correct, rightful) and chose instead “den virkelige” (the real, true).2 7 Rørdam’s term would have implied a hierarchy, a moral judgment on which side of the Prioress was the right side. Even if presented with the “true” Prioress, some readers may still be in doubt as to what that means. Dag Heede has made the amusing suggestion that in the light of the Prioress’s metamorphosis, if we consider “the cornucopia of pets present in the enclosed building, the uncanny suspicion arises that perhaps all the women from time to time change into their pets and vice versa.”2 8 The menagerie includes parrots, cockatoos, dogs, cats, a deer, and “a white Angora goat, like that of Esmeralda” (SGT, 109). The reference is to Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), in which Esmeralda is suspected of being a witch and her goat, an animal familiar. The hint does point to strange powers that may dwell in these “superfluous” women who have been set aside in a cloister. Closter Seven is more coven than convent. The event that instigates the intrigue of the tale is Boris von Schreckenstein’s need to escape a scandal. Although not stated explicitly, it is clear that Boris has been accused of homosexuality and needs to get married in order to repair his social reputation. In this society such matters are not discussed unless in euphemisms. The old librarian, when pressed as to the nature of the scandal, begins to talk about Greece. The connection lies in such texts as Plato’s Symposium, in which love between men is treated as natural and positive. The cloistered women, however, associate Greece with coiffures and fashions from their youth, creating some delightfully comic confusion. The point of the scandal does seem to sink in eventually and disrupts the entire worldview of the women of the convent. They have been raised to consider women objects of desire to all men, and their entire social existence has been based upon it. Dinesen includes the almost wistful line: “Had they known that it might ever be called into question, all these lives, which were now so nearly finished, might have come to look very different” (SGT, 112). Dag Heede has suggested that Dinesen uses Boris’s homosexuality as “a way of representing the normal, not as natural, but as a construction, one single, possible version of reality among a

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en’s library at Rungstedlund.2 2 According to Ingemann, all Wendish gods possessed a double nature, one dark and one light. Siwa was traditionally depicted as a woman with long hair holding an apple in one hand and grapes in the other. (Note that the Prioress serves Boris pears and grapes when he first arrives at the convent.) The other side of the idol depicts “a brash triumphant monkey.”2 3 Whereas Ingemann sees the woman as a representative of innocence, he says of the monkey, “Just as the monkey on the whole is mankind’s most disgusting distortion, so it is especially, as is known, the natural image of lust and unchaste indecency.” 2 4 Like his other romantic/Gothic compatriots, Ingemann is certain that one side is good and one side is bad. Dinesen takes a different view. To Robert Langbaum, Dinesen said, “When men by way of their conventions have got themselves into difficulties, then let the monkey in, he will find the unattainable solution.”2 5

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multitude of others. . . . Boris is not only the most ‘normal’ person in the text, but as the focus of the story, the person whose thoughts and views . . . the reader follows, and who is the most obvious person for the reader to identify with.”2 9 The very existence of the idea of homosexuality creates a disruption in the minds of the convent women, which could also be described as the realization that what they had taken for normal and natural may instead be a mere social construction. This realization opens up limitless possibilities for living. The text of “The Monkey” does not express much sympathy with Boris’s accusers, described as being “sanctimonious” and acting “under the pretense of moral indignation” (SGT, 111). Heede goes so far as to state: “Homosexuality is used here more than anything else as a positive anti-bourgeois metaphor, a way of rejecting the dull, settled life of ‘supporters, fathers-in-law, authorities on food and morals.’”3 0 The Prioress decides on a match between Boris and Athena upon the receipt of a mysterious letter. The message no doubt contains the news that the Count has won his lawsuit, making Athena a particularly wealthy young heiress. Moreover, the Count’s lawyer also has a monkey from Zanzibar, so perhaps the jungle telegraph has been at work. The choice of Athena surprises Boris since from his childhood both his mother and his aunt “had been joining forces to keep him and Athena apart” (SGT, 118). Why? Mishler argues convincingly that the possibility exists that Athena and Boris are brother and sister. The Count was a special admirer of Boris’s mother in days gone by. When he greets Boris it is with the words: “Boris, my child . . .” (SGT, 124). Dinesen specifically rejected Rørdam’s translation of “Boris, min Dreng . . .” (Boris, my boy) in lieu of “Boris, mit Barn!” (Boris, my child), perhaps in order to underline the suggestion that the Count might be Boris’s father.3 1 When the Count writes that he had hoped to see Boris’s features in the unborn generations to follow, the Count might at the same time be seeing his own genotype through Boris as well as Athena. Incest, along with homosexuality, is yet another socially disruptive force brought into play in this tale. No wonder Pastor Rosenquist, the spokesperson for conventional morality, seems completely at a loss. According to van Hees’s analysis, Boris’s homosexuality is the result of his Oedipus complex.3 2 He has become so bonded to his mother that sexual relations with another woman would constitute a betrayal. Boris has just come from his mother and “a row of wild scenes which his

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mother’s love and jealousy had caused” (SGT, 114). The Count comes to represent the father in this Oedipal triangle. Upon first sight of the Count, Boris thinks, “This old man knows all, and is going to kill me” (SGT, 124). After proposing, Boris feels like Don Giovanni waiting for the Commendatore. Don Giovanni is the notorious seducer of Mozart’s opera, who is punished at the end by the stone replica of one of his victims’ fathers. This, then, is another image of paternal retribution. Boris is repeatedly afflicted with the sense that something is wrong. He prefers to think of Athena as a skeleton, a desexualized being, and not a threat to his relationship to his mother. On his way to seduce Athena, Boris recalls some lines from Aeschylus’s Eumenides in which Orestes asks for Athena’s help as he is being brought to trial for the murder of his mother. He is thus expressing his fear of what this encounter will mean for him. Sex with another woman is tantamount to the murder of his mother and betrayal. After the botched seduction, Boris again invokes lines from Aeschylus, which are erroneously attributed to Euripides in the English text, but correctly identified in the Danish. This time, Boris quotes Orestes’ words thanking Athena for helping him be acquitted of the crime of matricide. Boris no longer needs to feel guilt about becoming involved with another woman. If Boris is unnaturally bound to his mother, more than one interpreter has felt that Athena is unnaturally bound to her father.3 3 This may be what the Prioress implies with her scandalous anecdote about the Holy Family visiting Paris. The Duchess of Berri is rumored to be pregnant by her father, and even though she expostulates to the Virgin, “You would never have done it,” in some sense the Virgin has been impregnated by her Father in heaven (SGT, 144). Athena takes her name from the virgin goddess of wisdom, but she is more specifically a Diana, and as the Prioress tells us, Boris would make a fine Actaeon. According to the legend, Diana had Actaeon torn apart by his own hounds for daring to spy upon her taking a bath. Athena is six feet tall, able to do a chin-up on a hunting horn—lifting both herself and her horse off the ground—and defiantly virginal. She is compared to carnivora: a lioness and an eagle. When she stands on one leg like a stork, she is emulating the Masai warriors Dinesen knew in Africa. Athena is the typical adolescent heroine identified by Robin Lyndenberg, one who perceives marriage and maturity as equivalent to a loss of freedom.3 4 “From being a success at court, a happy, congratu-

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During the first chat Athena has with Boris, they look up and see the constellation of the Great Bear. The story of the Great Bear can be found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Callisto, a nymph in Artemis’s (Diana’s) hunting party, is loved by Zeus, and so the jealous Hera transforms her into a bear. When Callisto’s son, Arcas, is about to kill her, Zeus turns them into constellations. Being transformed into a constellation is a common means of escaping physical jeopardy in Greek mythology. The very name of Closter Seven, which alludes to the constellation of the Pleiades, invokes another such tale. Zeus turns the seven daughters of Atlas into the Pleiades in order to save them from the amorous pursuit of Orion. Sexual attention is another form of physical jeopardy, and the image is a suitable one for a cloister. Later, when Athena is told she will have a child, she stubbornly announces, “My father will teach him astronomy” (SGT, 158). For both Athena and Agnese in the “Roads Round Pisa,” the study of the stars takes them away from earthly cares and becomes a metaphor for escaping amorous attention. Athena is a partisan of the French Revolution and she recites for Boris some lines from a French song by Auguste Barbier. The text describes a horse that eludes its masters, originally a metaphor for the French Revolution. Annelies van Hees notes that Athena no doubt sees herself as the mare, “which no hand has touched and no one has managed to saddle.”3 5 She no doubt also identifies with the bear who kills five men before she is taken. Athena identifies with wild, powerful animals and is distressed to hear the story of the African elephant that dies in a cage. She is afraid, with reason, that the Prioress wants to subdue her and put her into a cage, which is why the tale is the main faux pas of the evening. Long before Boris appears on her doorstep Athena has made it abundantly clear she will not relinquish her virginity without a fight. The scene in which Boris and Athena engage in combat is riddled with symbolic import. Boris approaches through a hall with a black and white tiled floor, and he emerges into a pink and crimson bower: “Of all the memories which afterward Boris carried with him from this night, the memory of the transition from the coloring and light of the corridor to that of the room was the longest lasting” (SGT, 151). This event will signal a transfor-

mation for Boris, a type of rebirth. He moves from a space where black is black and white is white to a very feminine space where such clear distinctions are absent. Dag Heede reads this space as a womb: The whole room was hung with rose silks, and in the depths of it the crimson draperies of the fourposter bed glowed in the shade. There were two pink-globed lamps, solicitously lighted by the Prioress’ maid. The floor had a wine-colored carpet with roses in it, which, near the lamps, seemed to be drinking in the light, and farther from them looked like pools of dark crimson into which one would not like to walk. (SGT, 151)

The room is being viewed through Boris’s eyes, and of course he is the “one” who does not feel comfortable walking into this space. The only unfeminine object in the room is Athena, who looks like “a sturdy young sailor boy about to swab the deck” (SGT, 152). Athena defends her virtue with considerable vigor. Annelies van Hees, Bill Mishler, Anders Westenholz, and Grethe Rostbøll all agree that when Athena knocks out Boris’s two teeth it is a symbol of castration.3 6 Curiously, this seems to make Boris happy. According to van Hees, his castration obviates the necessity for Boris to be unfaithful to his mother. The struggle goes on and ends with a kiss that disgusts them both. There is something out of proportion in Athena’s reaction to the kiss. It is “as if he had run a rapier straight through her” (SGT, 154). The kiss is a symbolic consummation that saps the virgin warrior of her strength in an almost magical way, not altogether unlike the way in which Samson is deprived of his strength by having his hair cut off. Athena is later compared to Samson, but a Samson who has regained his strength again (SGT, 159). The discussion the morning after is quite comic. The Prioress takes it for granted that the rape has been committed, and Athena is too ignorant of the birds and the bees to know whether one can get pregnant from a kiss or not. Even though the Prioress extorts from Athena the promise to marry Boris, Athena still remains true to her Diana nature and promises to kill Boris at the first opportunity. At this juncture there is a tapping at the window, and shortly thereafter the remarkable metamorphosis of the Prioress and the monkey takes place. Boris, Athena, and the reader are all quite startled, and Dinesen has her little joke by having the monkey sit on the bust of Immanuel Kant, author of The Critique of Pure Reason (1781). What has just happened exists beyond the limits of reason, and Kant can’t help us. Interpre-

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lated bride, a mother of a promising family, good Lord, deliver me” (SGT, 142). She is perfectly happy with her tomboy existence and does not want anyone to take it from her.

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tations of what this scene means for the two young people vary widely. Hans Brix seems to feel that the Prioress’s subjugation of the monkey has instructed Athena that she must subject herself to Boris.3 7 Langbaum feels the scene makes Boris and Athena “ready for human love,” by which he must mean that they have in some sense been “cured.”3 8 Juhl and Jørgensen believe that the two have learned that the relationship between men and women must be sexual, and thus, these critics also endorse the notion of a cure, as does Vibeke Schröder.3 9 Mishler also seems to subscribe to the couple’s experiencing a psychological liberation from their respective complexes.4 0 Van Hees feels that the scene has caused Boris and Athena to accept their sexuality as it is and also to realize that they can marry in any case.4 1 Dag Heede sees a happy ending, “in an 18th century view, that the two combine in a reasonable, sensible union, where they probably will do little damage to another.”4 2 Indeed, Boris’s homosexuality and Athena’s desire to remain chaste are not in conflict, as the Prioress has already noted: “She will have nothing . . . and you will give nothing. It seems to me, in all modesty, that you are well paired” (SGT, 137). Athena and Boris can keep up appearances and enjoy a certain sort of freedom within the circle of their marriage. Closter Seven is the namesake of Kloster-Zeven, which is famous in history as the site for the signing of a treaty between England and France in 1757, in which England capitulated to France and agreed to remain neutral in the European arena for the rest of the Seven Years War. Thus, Closter Seven seems a suitable spot for generating peaceful agreements. Athena does not need to kill Boris, and they can probably get along in the future. A fan wrote to Dinesen requesting clarification of “The Monkey,” and Dinesen’s response is worth quoting at length: With regard to the tale “The Monkey,” I am, as always when a reader asks me what a story means, quite uncomfortable, since I feel the only honest answer would be: “There is no meaning.” I think it would be a shame if an author could explain a story better with outside information than it explains itself! I believe that when I wrote “The Monkey,” I thought of the situation as follows: The Prioress has a monkey that is very close to her and in whose company she needs to take refuge from her limited life in the cloister. Every now and then she feels such an attraction and need for a free life in nature that she changes shape with the monkey and for a while is absent from the cloister, where the monkey takes charge. As a young girl, I myself had a beloved dog about

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which I had a similar fantasy. If one is looking for a deeper meaning to the story, it would probably be this: When human relations become unusually complicated or completely mixed up, let the monkey come. It is monkey-advice and monkeyhelp that Boris gets in the cloister; only when, through these methods, a way out can be glimpsed and darkness begins to lighten, does the Prioress come back and resume her place. The monkey has plainly chosen a criminal path upon which the Prioress would not have set foot, but in its solution there is salvation for Boris and, it should be understood, also a promise of a more human happiness for Athena. This is not a good explanation, but you are free to come up with a better one. (KBD, 2:433)

Dinesen’s words about salvation for Boris and a more human happiness for Athena are sufficiently vague, so that interpreters are free to continue to speculate. At the beginning of the tale, Boris fantasized about how his aunt would take the news of the scandal, and he weighs possible reactions in the form of Latin phrases. “Et tu Brute” (You too, Brutus!), which is an exclamation that marks betrayal: “How could you!” “Ad sanitatem gradus est novisse morbum” (It is a step towards health to recognize sickness) anticipates the Prioress’s perception of Boris as a deviant who needs to be healed. “Discite justitiam moniti, et non temnere divos” (Be warned, learn justice and learn not to despise the divine) is an important phrase since it appears again, without the warning note, as the last line of the story. Since at the beginning of the tale, Boris and the reader both think of the Prioress as a defender of moral rectitude, the admonition Boris anticipates would be something like “Follow the rules of Christian behavior.” By the end of the story, our understanding of the Prioress has changed and we realize that the divine forces at play have been pagan. The original “Discite . . .” quote is from Virgil’s Aeneid, not a Christian text at all. The divine in “The Monkey” embraces the two-sided, double nature of Siwa. The second time the phrase is invoked, it might be construed: “Learn justice and embrace both sides of the divine.” The revelation at the end of the story forces us to reevaluate not only this phrase, but the entire story. Repeating a phrase whose significance has changed is a technique that Dinesen will use again in “Alkmene.” It is a device that makes the reader reexamine her or his assumptions. The sentence has not changed, but after experiencing the story, the reader has. The reader’s expectations and understanding of this fictional

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25. Robert Langbaum, Isak Dinesen’s Art: The Gayety of Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 88.

Notes

27. William Mishler, “Parents and Children, Brothers and Sisters in Isak Dinesen’s ‘The Monkey,’” Scandinavian Studies 57, no. 4 (autumn 1985): 425.

1. Valdemar Rørdam, interview, Berlingske Tidende, 16 May 1934. 2. Ibid. 3. Lewis Gannett, “Books and Things,” New York Herald Tribune, 9 April 1934: 13.

26. Marianne Juhl and Bo Hakon Jørgensen, Dianas Hævn (Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1981), 49.

28. Dag Heede, “Gender Trouble in Isak Dinesen’s ‘The Monkey,’” in Karen Blixen—Out of Denmark: Papers from a Colloquium at the Karen Blixen Museum, April 1997 (Copenhagen, 1998), 116.

4. Jenny Ballou, “These Magic Tales Have an Air of Genius,” New York Herald Tribune Books, 8 April 1934, VII: 3.

29. Ibid., 110.

5. Howard Spring, Evening Standard, 6 Sept. 1934.

31. Mishler, “Parents and Children,” 426.

6. Gerald Gould, Observer, 9 Sept. 1934.

32. Annelies van Hees, “Hemmeligheder i Karen Blixens ‘Aben,’” Edda, 1984, no. 1: 9-24.

7. Scap, “Hyldest til Isak Dinesen,” Politiken, 3 Dec. 1935; and Mario Grut, “Trana i sparvedansen,” Aftonbladet, 13 Oct. 1958. 8. Frederik Schyberg, “Isak Dinesens, alias, Baronesse Blixen-Fineckes Syv fantastiske Fortællinger,” Berlingske Tidende, 25 Nov. 1935. 9. Svend Borberg, “Isak Dinesen-Karen Blixen,” Politiken, 9 March 1936.

30. Ibid., 112.

33. Mishler, “Parents and Children,” 433; Robert S. Phillips, “Dinesen’s ‘Monkey’ and McCuller’s ‘Ballad’: A Study in Literary Affinity,” Studies in Short Fiction 1 (1963-64): 73. 34. Robin Lyndenberg, “Against the Law of Gravity: Female Adolescence in Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales,” Modern Fiction Studies 24, no. 4 (winter 197879): 523.

10. Vidi, interview, Politiken, 1 May 1934.

35. Van Hees, “Hemmeligheder,” 16.

11. Ibid.

36. Grethe F. Rostbøll, Længslens vingeslag (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1996), 55; Anders Westenholz, Den glemte abe (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1985), 109.

12. Susan Hardy Aiken, Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 70.

37. Brix, Eventyr, 69.

13. William Maxwell, “Suffused with a Melancholy Light,” New York Times Book Review, 9 May 1943: 2.

38. Langbaum, Gayety of Vision, 88.

14. Curtis Cate, “Isak Dinesen,” Atlantic Monthly, December 1959, 153.

39. Juhl and Jørgensen, Dianas Hævn, 51; Vibeke Schröder, Selvrealisation og selvfortolkning i Karen Blixens forfatterskab (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1979), 82.

15. Eric O. Johannesson, The World of Isak Dinesen (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1961), 28.

40. Mishler, “Parents and Children,” 449.

16. Sibyl James, “Gothic Transformations: Isak Dinesen and the Gothic,” in The Female Gothic, ed. Juliann E. Fleenor (Montreal: Eden Press, 1983), 138-52. 17. Vidi, interview, Politiken, 1 May 1934. 18. Eric O. Johannesson, “Isak Dinesen, Søren Kierkegaard, and the Present Age,” Books Abroad, winter 1962, 20-24.

41. Van Hees, “Hemmeligheder,” 22. 42. Heede, “Parents and Children,” 121.

Abbreviations for Editions Used AD

Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

CV

Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

20. George C. Schoolfield pointed out to me that another text along similar lines is Aino Kallas’s (1878-1956) Sudenmorsian (1928), which was translated into English as The Wolf’s Bride (1930), and was widely reviewed. In that tale, a forester’s wife turns into a wolf.

DG

Daguerreotypes and Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

KBD

Karen Blixen i Danmark: Breve, 1931-1962. 2 vols. Edited by Frans Lasson and Tom Engelbrecht. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1996.

21. Hans Brix, Karen Blixens Eventyr (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1949), 65.

LA

Letters from Africa, 1914-1931. Translated by Anne Born; Edited by Frans Lasson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

LT

Last Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

MU

Karen Blixen Mindeudgave. 7 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1964.

19. Johannesson, The World of Isak Dinesen, 29.

22. Pointed out to me by George C. Schoolfield. 23. Bernhard Severin Ingemann, Samlede Skrifter, vol. 12 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Forlag, 1872), 208. 24. Ibid.

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world have altered—another metamorphosis has taken place. Now everything must be reexamined and reinterpreted.

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OA

Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

OC

Osceola. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962.

OMM

On Modern Marriage and Other Observations. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.

SGT

Seven Gothic Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

WT

Winter’s Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Discusses Dinesen’s ease in depicting mysterious characters and distant worlds in her fiction, as evidenced in the collection Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales. Stoddart, Helen. “Isak Dinesen and the Fiction of Gothic Gravity.” In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited and with an introduction by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, pp. 81-8. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Explores the themes of storytelling as well as weightlessness and gravity in Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales.

FURTHER READING Biographies Migel, Parmenia. Titania: The Biography of Isak Dinesen. New York: Random House, 1967, 325 p. Offers a balanced view of Dinesen’s life. Thurman, Judith. Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller. New York: Picador USA, 1995, 512 p. Provides a detailed study of Dinesen’s life.

Criticism Aiken, Susan Hardy. “Gothic Cryptographies.” In Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative, pp. 67-83. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Examines the ways in which Dinesen uses Gothic conventions to explore “the notions of writing and sexual difference” in her works. Palevsky, Joan. “Tales of the Past.” Books West 1, no. 7 (1977): 20-36.

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OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Dinesen’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Contemporary Authors, Vols. 25-28; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 22, 50; Contemporary Authors Permanent Series, Vol. 2; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 10, 29, 95; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 214; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; European Writers, Vol. 10; Exploring Short Stories; Feminist Writers; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Nonfiction Classics for Students, Vol. 2; Novels for Students, Vol. 9; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; Reference Guide to World Literature, Eds. 2, 3; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 3, 6, 13, 20; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 7, 75; Something about the Author, Vol. 44; and World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 2.

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DAPHNE DU MAURIER (1907 - 1989)

egarded by many critics as a natural storyteller who made effective use of melodrama, du Maurier is best known for her Gothic novels and short stories. Unaffected by the literary fashions of her day, she wrote simple narratives that appealed to the average reader’s love of adventure, fantasy, sensuality, and mystery. Perhaps best known for the Gothic novel Rebecca (1938), her writings have been extremely popular, and many have been adapted for film and television.

and rocky coastline, its mists and moors, answered some deep longing inside her.” She eventually settled there, and it became the setting of some her best-known stories. Much of her time was spent in Menabilly, a manor house in Cornwall that was the inspiration for Manderley, the location of her most famous novel, Rebecca. Du Maurier’s earliest published works, articles and short stories, appeared primarily in women’s magazines. She published her first novel, The Loving Spirit, in 1931. That work was followed by a number of novels and several collections of short stories, the first of which, The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories, appeared in 1952. She died in 1989 at the age of eighty-one.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

MAJOR WORKS

Du Maurier was born in London to a family whose members had been successful in arts and entertainment. Her father was a matinee idol and theater manager, and her grandfather was an artist for Punch and the author of several novels. Du Maurier was privately educated, and her youth was a swirl of yachting and skiing parties and trips abroad with wealthy friends. Her career as a novelist began on a visit to Cornwall when she was twenty. According to Margaret Forster (see Further Reading), du Maurier “was one of those writers in whom the right place releases a certain sort of psychic energy. . . . Cornwall, with its wild seas

In her long career as a writer du Maurier produced nineteen novels, five volumes of short stories, two plays, and other writings. According to critics, most of her fiction can be classified as either cloak-and-dagger romances or Gothic novels. Like her acknowledged master, Robert Louis Stevenson, du Maurier wrote fantasies involving pirates, smuggling, and ladies in distress. Yet du Maurier preferred to be thought of as an author of mystery and suspense. Rebecca is the story of a woman who feels a sense of competition with her husband’s first wife, who died under mysterious circumstances. In the opinion of many

English novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, and editor.

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reviewers, it is an interesting psychological study of a young woman married to an older man, as well as a gripping Gothic novel that includes murder, violence, and a mysterious, haunted mansion. In her short story “The Birds” (1959) du Maurier creates a nightmare world in which great flocks of birds inexplicably attack and kill humans. The work was made into a popular motion picture directed by Alfred Hitchcock. “Don’t Look Now” (1971), a macabre tale about an English couple in Venice who receive visions of the future, has been described as compelling and suspenseful; it was adapted as a film that, in the words of Pauline Kael (see Further Reading), “is the fanciest, most carefully assembled Gothic enigma yet put on the screen.”

The Progress of Julius (novel) 1933 Gerald: A Portrait (biography) 1934 Jamaica Inn (novel) 1936 The du Mauriers (family history and biography) 1937 Rebecca (novel) 1938 Come Wind, Come Weather (short stories) 1940 Rebecca [adaptor; from her novel] (play) 1940 Frenchman’s Creek (novel) 1941 Hungry Hill (novel) 1943 The Years Between (play) 1944 The King’s General (novel) 1946 September Tide (play) 1948 The Parasites (novel) 1949

CRITICAL RECEPTION In spite of her popularity, du Maurier has never won the full approval of the literary establishment. Many critics find her prose clear but uninteresting and deplore what they perceive as a lack of symbolism or imagery in her books. According to some, du Maurier wrote mostly on the surface, only rarely probing the psychological depths of her characters, and her plots seem conventional or contrived. Other commentators, however, have praised her works as imaginative and evocative, lauding her ability to create suspense and atmosphere. Richard Kelly (see Further Reading) described Rebecca as “the first major Gothic romance in the twentieth century and perhaps the finest written to this day.” He pointed out that Rebecca includes many key components of Gothic romances, including “a mysterious and haunting mansion, violence, murder, a sinister villain, sexual passion, a spectacular fire, brooding landscapes, and a version of the madwoman in the attic.” Sylvia Berkman assessed du Maurier as a “specialist in horror,” noting that “her creative intelligence is resourceful, her command of eerie atmosphere persuasive and precise, her sense of shock-timing exceptionally skilled.” Even du Maurier’s detractors acknowledge her ability to create fantasy worlds that transport readers out of their daily existence and into places of romance and adventure.

My Cousin Rachel (novel) 1951 The Apple Tree: A Short Novel, and Some Stories (novella and short stories) 1952; also published as Kiss Me Again, Stranger: A Collection of Eight Stories, Long and Short, 1953; and as The Birds, and Other Stories, 1977 Mary Anne (fictionalized biography) 1954 The Scapegoat (novel) 1957 The Breaking Point (short stories) 1959; also published as The Blue Lenses, and Other Stories, 1970 Early Stories (short stories) 1959 The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (biography) 1960 Castle d’Or [with Arthur Quiller-Couch] (novel) 1962 The Glass-Blowers (novel) 1963 The Flight of the Falcon (novel) 1965 The House on the Strand (novel) 1969 Don’t Look Now (short stories) 1971; also published as Not after Midnight, 1971 Rule Britannia (novel) 1972 Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories (short stories) 1976 Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer (autobiography) 1977; also published as Growing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer, 1977

PRINCIPAL WORKS

The Rendezvous, and Other Stories (short stories) 1980

The Loving Spirit (novel) 1931

Letters from Menabilly: Portrait of a Friendship (letters) 1994

I’ll Never Be Young Again (novel) 1932

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DAPHNE DU MAURIER (NOVEL DATE 1938) SOURCE: du Maurier, Daphne. “Chapter 1.” In Rebecca. 1938. Reissue edition, pp. 1-4. New York: Avon Books, 1994. The following excerpt comprises the first chapter of Rebecca, which was first published in 1938.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited. No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gaped forlorn. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me. The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done, but as I advanced I was aware that a change had come upon it; it was narrow and unkept, not the drive that we had known. At first I was puzzled and did not understand, and it was only when I bent my head to avoid the low swinging branch of a tree that I realised what had happened. Nature had come into her own again and, little by, little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long tenacious fingers. The woods, always a menace even in the past, had triumphed in the end. They crowded, dark and uncontrolled, to the borders of the drive. The beeches with white, naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace, making a vault above my head like the archway of a church. And there were other trees as well, trees that I did not recognise, squat oaks and tortured elms that straggled cheek by jowl with the beeches, and had thrust themselves out of the quiet earth, along with monster shrubs and plants, none of which I remembered. The drive was a ribbon now, a thread of its former self, with gravel surface gone, and choked with grass and moss. The trees had thrown out low branches, making an impediment to progress; the gnarled roots looked like skeleton claws. Scattered here and again amongst this jungle growth I would recognise shrubs that had been land-marks in our time, things of culture and of grace, hydrangeas whose blue heads had been famous. No hand had checked their progress, and they had gone

native now, rearing to monster height without a bloom, black and ugly as the nameless parasites that grew beside them. On and on, now east, now west, wound the poor thread that once had been our drive. Sometimes I thought it lost, but it appeared again, beneath a fallen tree perhaps or struggling on the other side of a muddied ditch created by the winter rains. I had not thought the way so long. Surely the miles had multiplied, even as the trees had done, and this path led but to a labyrinth, some choked wilderness, and not to the house at all. I came upon it suddenly; the approach masked by the unnatural growth of a vast shrub that spread in all directions, and I stood, my heart thumping in my breast, the strange prick of tears behind my eyes. There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, not the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand. The terrace sloped to the lawns, and the lawns stretched to the sea, and turning I could see the sheet of silver, placid under the moon, like a lake undisturbed by wind or storm. No waves would come to ruffle this dream water, and no bulk of cloud, wind-driven from the west, obscure the clarity of this pale sky. I turned again to the house, and though it stood inviolate, untouched, as though we ourselves had left but yesterday, I saw that the garden had obeyed the jungle law, even as the woods had done. The rhododendrons stood fifty feet high, twisted and entwined with bracken, and they had entered into alien marriage with a host of nameless shrubs, poor, bastard things that clung about their roots as though conscious of their spurious origin. A lilac had mated with a copper beech, and to bind them yet more closely to one another the malevolent ivy, always an enemy to grace, had thrown her tendrils about the pair and made them prisoners. Ivy held prior place in this lost garden, the long strands crept across the lawns, and soon would encroach upon the house itself. There was another plant too, some halfbreed from the woods, whose seed had been scattered long ago beneath the trees and then forgotten, and now, marching in unison with the ivy, thrust its ugly form like a giant rhubarb towards the soft grass where the daffodils had blown.

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Nettles were everywhere, the van-guard of the army. They choked the terrace, they sprawled about the paths, they leant, vulgar and lanky, against the very windows of the house. They made indifferent sentinels, for in many places their ranks had been broken by the rhubarb plant, and they lay with crumpled heads and listless stems, making a pathway for the rabbits. I left the drive and went on to the terrace, for the nettles were no barrier to me, a dreamer, I walked enchanted, and nothing held me back. Moonlight can play odd tricks upon the fancy, even upon a dreamer’s fancy. As I stood there, hushed and still, I could swear that the house was not an empty shell but lived and breathed as it had lived before. Light came from the windows, the curtains blew softly in the night air, and there, in the library, the door would stand half open as we had left it, with my handkerchief on the table beside the bowl of autumn roses. The room would bear witness to our presence. The little heap of library books marked ready to return, and the discarded copy of The Times. Ashtrays, with the stub of a cigarette; cushions, with the imprint of our heads upon them, lolling in the chairs; the charred embers of our log fire still smouldering against the morning. And Jasper, dear Jasper, with his soulful eyes and great, sagging jowl, would be stretched upon the floor, his tail a-thump when he heard his master’s footsteps. A cloud, hitherto unseen, came upon the moon, and hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face. The illusion went with it, and the lights in the windows were extinguished. I looked upon a desolate shell, soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls. The house was a sepulchre, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection. When I thought of Manderley in my waking hours I would not be bitter. I should think of it as it might have been, could I have lived there without fear. I should remember the rose-garden in summer, and the birds that sang at dawn. Tea under the chestnut tree, and the murmur of the sea coming up to us from the lawns below. I would think of the blown lilac, and the Happy Valley. These things were permanent, they could not be dissolved. They were memories that cannot hurt. All this I resolved in my dream, while the clouds lay across the face of the moon, for like most sleepers I knew that I dreamed. In reality I lay many hundred miles away in an alien land, and would wake, before many seconds had passed,

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in the bare little hotel bedroom, comforting in its very lack of atmosphere. I would sigh a moment, stretch myself and turn, and opening my eyes, be bewildered at that glittering sun, that hard, clean sky, so different from the soft moonlight of my dream. The day would lie before us both, long no doubt, and uneventful, but fraught with a certain stillness, a dear tranquility we had not known before. We would not talk of Manderley, I would not tell my dream. For Manderley was ours no longer. Manderley was no more.

TITLE COMMENTARY Kiss Me Again, Stranger JOHN BARKHAM (REVIEW DATE 8 MARCH 1953) SOURCE: Barkham, John. “The Macabre and the Unexpected.” New York Times Book Review (8 March 1953): 5. In the following review, Barkham praises du Maurier’s storytelling ability in Kiss Me Again, Stranger.

In her short stories, as in her novels, Daphne du Maurier is a firm believer in keeping her readers on tenterhooks. She cannot dazzle them with her prose or excite them with her imagination, but at least she baffles them with her mysteries. And baffle them she does, over and over again in this book [Kiss Me Again, Stranger]. Guessing the identity of du Maurier murderers is still likely to remain a favorite indoor sport this spring. These eight tales are the mixture as before. All lean to the macabre, the strange, the unexplained. None of them is bad, and several are very good indeed. No wraiths or clanking ghosts, you understand, but subtle emanations, like a dying tree that bursts ominously into bloom, or a wife who falls under the spell of the mountains. In every case Miss du Maurier painstakingly creates her atmosphere before she begins spinning her web. No fleeting moods or impressions here: the style is deliberate, the pace leisurely, and the stories hold up as stories. One is a masterpiece of horror. Twenty years ago an Australian named Carl Stephenson wrote a superb short story, “Leningen and the Ants,” in which he described a South American planter’s epic struggle against a column of jungle ants. It was an adventure you could not forget. Miss du Maurier has matched it with a story in the same

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Two of the tales are straight studies in crime. There is the elegant marquise who dallies with a young photographer and pushes him over a cliff, only to find herself trapped through a revealing portrait, a piece of very neat plotting. Better still is “The Motive,” a skillful unraveling of a seemingly purposeless suicide. Here Miss du Maurier does what J. B. Priestley did so well in his “Dangerous Corner.” She opens with a motiveless death, then gradually leads the reader deeper and deeper into the mystery, until at last all the jigsaw pieces fall into place. This kind of progressive revelation requires real craftsmanship. Have you noticed how often the agent of mystery or evil in a du Maurier story is a woman? Du Maurier women have been bewitching and bewildering their simple-minded menfolk for years, and in these stories they are still at it. The girl who lures a youth into a cemetery, the marquise who kills her lover, the nagging wife who haunts by way of a tree—these are femmes fatales who toy with their men and then get them, one way or another. They also leave this reviewer with some interesting theories as to the author’s artistic motivations. In these days of shiny-knobbed science fiction, the old-fashioned story of the supernatural, which used to chill the kids and keep old men from the chimney corner, is becoming somthing of a rarity. More’s the pity. Miss du Maurier can still write them in the grand tradition. Try these tales and see how they dwarf those rockets and bug-eyed monsters.

SYLVIA BERKMAN (REVIEW DATE 15 MARCH 1953) SOURCE: Berkman, Sylvia. “A Skilled Hand Weaves a Net of Horror.” New York Herald Tribune Book Review 29, no. 31 (15 March 1953): 4. In the following review of Kiss Me Again, Stranger, Berkman lauds du Maurier as a “seasoned” and “skilled” author of horror and suspense literature.

Daphne du Maurier is a specialist in horror. Her creative intelligence is resourceful, her command of eerie atmosphere persuasive and precise,

her sense of shock-timing exceptionally skilled. In this collection of eight stories (of which all but two are very long) she explores horror in a variety of forms; in the macabre, in the psychologically deranged, in the supernatural, in the fantastic, most painfully of all, in the sheer cruelty of human beings in interrelationship. Yet on the whole the volume offers absorbing rather than oppressive reading because chiefly one’s intellect is engaged; the emotional content remains subordinate. Broadly speaking, for the most part these are stories of detection as well, with the contributing elements of excitation, suspense, and climax manipulated with a seasoned hand. Miss du Maurier is most successful. I believe (as most of us are) when her intentions are unmixed. Kiss Me Again, Stranger, the title story, adaptly marshals the ingredients best suited to her abilities. Here in a trim, fluently moving narrative she developed an incident in war-torn London, with no purpose beyond the immediate recounting of a sad and grisly tale. A young mechanic, a simple, sensitive, likable good chap, attracted by a pretty usherette at a cinema palace, joins her on her bus ride home, to be led, bewildered, into a cemetery, where her conduct baffles him, to say the least. The girl, so gentle, wisful, languorous, and sleepy, turns out to be psychopathically obsessed, with a vindicative animus against members of the R. A. F. The summary is unjust, for Miss du Maurier forcibly anchors her story in a strange lonely graveyard atmosphere, with night rain falling cold and dreary on the flat tombs, which both reflects and reinforces the mortal impairment of the young girl’s nature and the destruction of the young man’s hopes, in a charnel world dislocated by the larger horror of war. In Kiss Me Again, Stranger, all separate aspects of the narrative fuse. “The Birds,” however, essentially a far more powerful story, is marred by unresolved duality of intent. Slowly, with intensifying accurate detail, Miss du Maurier builds up her account of the massed attack of the starving winter birds on humankind, the familiar little land birds, the battalions of gulls bearing in rank upon rank from the sea, the murderous predatory birds of prey descending with ferocious beaks and talons to rip, rend, batter and kill. The struggle involved is the ancient struggle of man against the forces of nature, Robinson Crusoe’s struggle to overcome an elemental adversary through cunning, logic, and wit. The turning of this material also into a political fable, with the overt references

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genre. “The Birds” is set on a peaceful English farm. Its theme? The birds of the world have suddenly and inexplicably turned predatory, and all over the earth have begun to peck, scratch and tear human beings to death. We watch the attack on the farm. Like Leningen, farmer Nat Hocken fights a hair-raising battle against the winged warriors that darken the sky.

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to control from Russia and aid from America, to my mind dissipates the full impact of a stark and terrifying tale. “Monte Verità” also clothes parable in an outer aspect of realism, this time for the statement of philosophical axiom: that the residence of truth is harsh, lonely and austere, by an ascent granted only to few, but its attainment the attainment of richest beatitude, even though in the general community below the few spirits who achieve the lofty summit are persecuted through hatred and fear. Again Miss du Maurier is most successful in the establishment of other-worldly atmosphere, the creation of impressive scene, particularly of the clear symbolic peaks of Monte Verità rising pure and unadorned against the sky. Perhaps this kind of story requires a special attitude on the part of the author—E. M. Forster’s confident assumption that the dryad is in the tree, if only one looks hard enough; too heavy a grounding in realistic detail can arouse realistic questioning. Here the factual narration of events, in which Anna, forsaking worldly attachments enters the citadel on the heights of Monte Verità, and the subsequent development of the two men who love her, again imposes disunity. Yet “Monte Verità” contains an abundance of integrated incident to sustain the interest; one surely wants to know the end. Equally, each of the stories exerts that claim: one surely wants to know the end. “The Split Second,” with its investigation of the intertemporal in the instant of death, represents the author at her most skillful, weaving a logical, firm, constantly tautening web of mystification and suspense. “The Little Photographer,” recounting the divertissement of a bored, vain, beautiful marquise with a crippled shopkeeper, in part recalls Thomas Mann’s “Little Herr Friedemann”; but Miss du Maurier has given the denouement a characteristic turn (M. Paul is not idly cast as a photographer; he had a way of snapping pictures of his lady after their dalliance in the bracken), and the story ends with a sinister good chill. Miss du Maurier is not primarily concerned with character. Her figures are presented with swift unhesitating strokes; through them a fairly complicated history unfolds. Yet every account of human action contains its residue of human experience; and Miss du Maurier’s main themes, if seriously regarded, are neither haphazard nor trivial: again and again she returns to the consideration of our human predicament, to frustration, destruction, loss, betrayal, and needless suffering, Joyce’s themes of the “Dubliners,” conveyed through the obverse method of a decided empha-

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sis on plot. In general in this volume complexities of plot disinfect horror to a pungent and provocative spice.

Rebecca AVRIL HORNER AND SUE ZLOSNIK (ESSAY DATE 2000) SOURCE: Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. “Daphne du Maurier and Gothic Signatures: Rebecca as Vamp(ire).” In Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality, edited and with an introduction by Avril Horner and Angela Keane, pp. 209-22. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. In the following essay, Horner and Zlosnik examine the Gothic and symbolic significance of du Maurier’s representation of the title character in Rebecca.

Gothic fiction over the last two hundred years has given us characters such as Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster who have passed into popular culture and taken on an almost mythic dimension (Day 1985: 3). Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier’s most famous novel, has given us one such character. This essay will attempt to retrieve Rebecca’s textual Gothic ancestry and relate it to a discussion of the destabilising nature of her absent/present body and its status as ghostly yet corporeal trace. In particular, it will explore the significance of signature as bodily trace in relation to the writing identities of both Rebecca and her creator, Daphne du Maurier. In what is still probably the most memorable representation of Rebecca (published in 1938), Hitchock’s film (made in 1940) retains the novel’s Gothic emphasis. However, Alison Light’s influential reading of the novel has resulted in an argument centred on the class dynamics of the text; this sees the narrator’s bourgeois feminine subjectivity as both inflected and threatened by that of a wayward, aristocratic Rebecca who enjoys a freedom of self-expression and lifestyle denied the timid second wife of Maxim de Winter (Light 1984). Whilst providing some invaluable insights, this reading has necessitated a fairly free, and sometimes inaccurate, portrayal of the social class of both Rebecca and her creator.1 In fact, Rebecca’s social class is not entirely clear from the novel. Indeed, Michelle A. Massé, in speculating that Rebecca was married for her money, opens up the possibility that her marriage to Maximilian de Winter combined his aristocratic status with her nouveau riche wealth and was thus a marriage of expediency for both parties (as she points out, ‘Manderley’s splendor is very recent’ (Massé 1992:

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Yet the term ‘femme fatale’ is not simply a sign of aristocratic femininity; there are racial and gendered positions embedded in the term which are brought to light when we examine the close but distinct etymological and cultural relationship between the words ‘femme fatale’, ‘vamp’ and ‘vampire’. The first phrase, imported from the French in 1912, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, linguistically ‘otherises’ a particular type of woman as a source of threat. The femme fatale has, of course, a long cultural history which goes back to Jezebel, Salome and Cleopatra, but she does not become prominent in art and literature until the late nineteenth century when she emerges, according to Mary Ann Doane, as a response to an industrialised and rapidly changing society in which women were resisting Victorian models of femininity (Doane 1991: 1-2). She is associated, according to Doane, with distinct characteristics. She is never really what she seems to be; her rather morbid sexuality connects her beauty with barrenness, lack of production, death and obliteration; because her power situates the femme fatale as evil, she is invariably punished or killed (often by a man); finally, she is often associated with a sexually ambiguous identity, in so far as she is frequently linked with androgyny, bisexuality and/or lesbianism. Rebecca manifests all of these characteristics. She is not what she seems to be: the outward conformity of the sophisticated chatelaine figure, adored by the Cornish community, hides a secret self who behaves differently in London and within the privacy of her boat house. Her beauty is certainly associated with barrenness and death. She is indeed perceived as evil by Maxim and is punished accordingly by him. Finally, her sexual identity is ambiguous; the text makes it clear that she has committed adultery but also hints that she and Mrs Danvers have been lesbian lovers. More broadly, she destabilises cur-

ABOUT THE AUTHOR BASIL DAVENPORT ON REBECCA AS A MELODRAMA

For this is a melodrama, unashamed, glorying in its own quality, such as we have hardly had since that other dependant, Jane Eyre, found that her house too had a first wife. It has the weaknesses of melodrama; in particular, the heroine is at times quite unbelievably stupid, as when she takes the advice of the housekeeper whom she knows to hate her. But if the second Mrs. de Winter had consulted with any one before trusting the housekeeper, we should miss one of the best scenes in the book. There is also, as is almost inseparable from a melodrama, a forced heightening of the emotional values; the tragedy announced in the opening chapter is out of proportion to the final outcome of the long battle of wits that ends the book. But it is as absorbing a tale as the season is likely to bring. SOURCE: Davenport, Basil. “Sinister House.” Saturday Review of Literature 18, no. 22 (24 September 1938): 5.

rent notions of gender: seen through Mrs Danvers’s eyes, Rebecca signifies both femininity and masculinity. On the one hand, the housekeeper emphasises her beauty, sensuality and femininity by endowing her fine clothes with a metonymic significance. On the other hand, she stresses Rebecca’s power and masculinity: what she loved in Rebecca, it seems, was her strength, her courage and her ‘spirit’, which she associates with masculinity: ‘She ought to have been a boy, I often told her that’ (du Maurier [1938] 1992: 253). At the level of plot, then, Rebecca is presented, it would seem, as a classic femme fatale figure. The discourses of film and literature invariably use the phrase ‘femme fatale’ interchangeably with the word ‘vamp’.2 Yet ‘vamp’ is defined by the OED as a Jezebel figure who is deliberately destructive, whereas the femme fatale is often perceived as having ‘power despite herself’ (Doane 1991: 2). A few critics, however, do perceive this distinction. Pierre Leprohon, for example, in his

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181)). Nor is it accurate to describe du Maurier herself as ‘aristocratic’: her father’s title came with a knighthood earned in 1922 and her own title of ‘Lady Browning’ derived from her marriage to Major ‘Boy’ Browning. Moreover, such an approach tends to shift du Maurier’s novel out of the Gothic paradigm: for example, relating the writing of Rebecca to the rise of the love-story during the inter-war period, Light describes the novel as ‘a thriller or murder story . . . as well as a love-story’ (Light 1991: 163). A subsidiary effect of such categorisations has been to define Rebecca as a vamp or a femme fatale; indeed Light refers to du Maurier as finding ‘her scarlet woman irresistible’ (Light 1991: 157).

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book The Italian Cinema, suggests that the femme fatale and the vamp are quite different, the latter being connected with a conscious desire to destroy: she is, he argues, ‘deliberately devastating, the woman who lives off her victims’ misfortunes, a kind of vampire’. In contrast, ‘the fate of the femme fatale is often as dreadful as that of her lovers, and this makes her even more appealing’ (cited in Doane 1991: 127). Interestingly, the OED suggests that the word ‘vamp’ (first used in this sense in 1918 and quite distinct from to ‘vamp’ on a piano, which has a different etymology) does indeed derive from the word ‘vampire’. This slippage between the words ‘vampire’ and ‘vamp’ is attributed by several critics to a fin-de-siècle anxiety concerning the shifting status of women. For example, Bram Dijkstra has noted that ‘[b]y 1900 the vampire had come to represent woman as the personification of everything negative that linked sex, ownership, and money’ (Dijkstra 1986: 351); according to Alexandra Warwick, the changing representation of the female vampire in late nineteenth-century texts reflected a growing anxiety about the ‘masculinisation’ of women in their transition from angels of the hearth to ‘wandering’ New Women (Warwick 1995: 20220).3 The actual threats embodied in real women, then, resulted in the female vampire being culturally transmuted into the vamp; by the early twentieth century the sinister polyvalency of the former had become translated into the sexual threat of the latter. The corporeal code of the vamp is, of course, immediately recognisable: invariably her direct gaze emanates from a slender, nubile body; she usually has dark hair, either in abundance or cut very short, so that it sits like a cap on her head; above all, her presence is strongly erotic. Lulu, in G.W. Pabst’s famous 1929 film Pandora’s Box, played by Louise Brooks, was portrayed in just such a way. Du Maurier’s Rebecca, when she is made visible in film or television adaptations, is often rendered as the classic vamp.4 We are not claiming that this is a misrepresentation: du Maurier’s famous novel, set in the mid-twenties according to its author (du Maurier [1981] 1993: 10), certainly draws on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century constructions of the independent and sexually active woman as vamp. Yet the corporeal charisma so important in portrayals of the ‘vamp’ is communicated in the novel only through traces of Rebecca’s body and the things connected with her: her scent, her clothes, the rhododendrons, her signature, her script. In du Maurier’s text, it is, paradoxically, the very absence

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of Rebecca that is used to denote so powerfully the presence of adult female sexuality. Rebecca, then, is ghost as well as vamp. Du Maurier’s work is, after all, a Gothic novel, not a film noir; the threatening woman is ‘otherised’ not only through physical difference, but also through the supernatural. Not surprisingly, then, we find du Maurier subtly drawing on the vampiric tradition in her creation of Rebecca and this, we suggest, contributes much to the evocation of the uncanny in the novel. However, we shall argue that the cultural slippages between the terms ‘vamp’, ‘vampire’ and ‘femme fatale’ are reflected not only in the unstable status of Rebecca’s body but also by Maurier’s construction of a writing persona which, in flight from the feminine and the corporeal, embraces the masculine and the disembodied. Like those of the vampiric body, the status and whereabouts of Rebecca’s corpse are problematic. When her boat is raised and a body is found in it, doubt is cast upon the identity of the body in the crypt. Rebecca’s body—to use Tania Modleski’s words—‘becomes the site of a bizarre fort/da game’5 (Modleski 1988: 49). What Anne Williams describes as ‘that intensely Gothic phenomenon, the sight of a worm-eaten corpse’ (Williams 1995: 73), is denied the reader: instead, various characters present us with vivid but different narratives of watery disintegration. So Rebecca’s corpse is ‘absent’ for much of the novel yet remains insistently and disturbingly present in the imaginations of these characters—just as her absent body remains insistently ‘alive’ for the narrator, whose continual association of Rebecca with the bloodred rhododendrons and headily scented azaleas of the Manderley estate evokes a charismatic female sexual presence for both herself and the reader. Yet the narrator’s final thoughts on Rebecca’s body link it not with water, but with dust: Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. It seemed to me that Rebecca had no reality any more. She had crumbled away when they had found her on the cabin floor. It was not Rebecca who was lying in the crypt, it was dust. Only dust. (du Maurier [1938] 1992: 334)

Thus Rebecca’s ‘second’ burial (which seeks literally to encrypt her ungovernable force) is associated with the end of Dracula, whose body crumbles to dust at the moment of death: ‘It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight’ (Stoker [1897] 1993: 484). The apparent finality of Rebecca’s burial, however, is undercut by an earlier

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Rebecca is also associated throughout the novel with several characteristics which, according to Ernest Jones, traditionally denote the vampiric body: facial pallor, plentiful hair and voracious sexual appetite (Jones [1991] 1992: 409). And like the vampire, she has to be ‘killed’ more than once: the plot’s excessive, triple killing of Rebecca (she was shot; she had cancer; she drowned) echoes the folk belief that vampires must be ‘killed’ three times. Although Rebecca lacks the requisite fangs and only metaphorically sucks men dry, she can none the less be placed within Christopher Frayling’s second category of vampires, that of the Fatal Woman who, according to Frayling, ‘altered the whole direction of the vampire tale’ from the mid-nineteenth century onwards: ‘sexually aware, and sexually dominant . . . attractive and repellent at the same time’, she is clearly symptomatic of a cultural anxiety concerning adult female sexuality (Frayling [1991] 1992: 68, 71-2). Seen in this light, Rebecca’s literary lineage includes Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, Poe’s Berenice, Gauthier’s Clarimonde and Le Fanu’s Countess Carmilla—not forgetting, of course, Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason, described in Chapter 25 of Jane Eyre as ‘the foul German spectre—the Vampyre’. Rebecca may, then, be read not only as vamp but also as vampire: she is a clear descendant of the female demon lover who transmuted into the female vampire in mid- to late Victorian Gothic texts and into the vamp in twentieth-century cinema. Like all vampire figures, Rebecca is associated with a transgressive, polymorphous sexuality. She is also, like all vampire figures, a figure of abjection. Recent critics of the Gothic have used Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection ([1980] 1982) to explore how representations of the abject in certain texts relate to certain discourses and cultural values at a particular historical moment.6 Kristeva’s concept of the abject thereby becomes a concept which enables them to define how shared constructions of ‘otherness’ are predicated upon shared cultural values at

specific times: by this logic, you may know a culture by what it ‘throws off’ or ‘abjects’. But the figure of abjection in a Gothic text may, of course, be presented as simultaneously repellent and charismatic, thus allowing the reader to indulge in a transgressive redefinition of ‘self’. This ‘other’ is also invariably the focus of more than one cultural anxiety and may therefore act as a vehicle of abjection in several ways. It is not surprising, then, to find that the sexual threat represented by Rebecca as ‘vamp’ is further inflected by the text’s association of her with vampirism and ‘Jewishness’. Rebecca was supposedly based on Jan Ricardo who was engaged to Major ‘Boy’ Browning before his marriage to du Maurier; she was a ‘dark-haired, rather exotic young woman, beautiful but highly-strung’, according to Margaret Forster (Forster 1993: 91). However, du Maurier’s presentation of Maxim’s first wife as a dangerous and beautiful dark-haired woman with an Hebraic name might well have been unconsciously influenced by the air of anti-semitisim prevalent in Europe during the 1930s. In this context, it is perhaps worth nothing that David Selznick, the producer of Hitchcock’s film version of Rebecca, is reputed to have had misgivings about the film’s title, commenting that it would not do ‘unless it was made for the Palestine market’ (Shallcross [1991] 1993: 69-70). As both Ken Gelder and Judith Halberstam have noted, the nineteenthcentury vampire was often portrayed as having Jewish characteristics—the physical appearance, the often perverse desires and the unrooted, wandering nature of ‘the Jew’ (as then constructed) all being projected onto the vampire (Gelder 1994: 13-17; Halberstam 1995a: 86-106). Indeed, Judith Halberstam argues that ‘the nineteenth-century discourse of anti-Semitism and the myth of the vampire share a kind of Gothic economy in their ability to condense many monstrous traits into one body’ (Halberstam 1995a: 88). Many anxieties are written on the body of Rebecca, including that of the woman author whose social identity is transgressively inflected by her writing identity. For it is Rebecca’s signature and handwriting which constitute the metonymic representation of her body throughout the text, indelibly inscribing her presence. Certainly the semiotic of her script complicates our perception of her function in the novel. On the one hand, her writing—as we see it, for example, in the loving dedication to ‘Max’ and in the contents of the morning-room desk—is proof of her ability, during her life, to play an allotted role within the realm of ‘everyday

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incident in which the narrator thought she had ‘finally’ destroyed Rebecca’s writing (the inscription in the book of poems), only to find it resurfacing again and again at Manderley. The ‘dust’ that is Rebecca’s body is no more final than the ‘feathers of dust’ of the burned fly-leaf or the ash scattered by the ‘salt wind’ of the novel’s final line. Like the vampire, Rebecca seems able to reconstitute herself endlessly and, like the vampire, her corporeal status is unstable: she is neither visibly a body nor visibly a corpse.

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legality’ and to masquerade effectively as a country-house hostess. Rebecca’s writing initially appears to tell the tale of an ideal wife, loving towards her husband and the perfect hostess for his elegant country mansion. However, the script itself, which continually irrupts into the text, tells a different story, since it is also associated with a masculine strength and an indelible authority; as such it indicates a wayward, wilful quality that runs counter to Maxim’s idea of the good wife. Moreover, it is sharply differentiated from that of the narrator who describes her own handwriting as ‘cramped and unformed’ (du Maurier [1938] 1992: 93) with all the intimations of immaturity and social inhibition that this suggests. This narrator connects Rebecca’s ‘curious’, ‘sloping’ or ‘slanting’ script with a vibrant vitality: ‘How alive her writing though, how full of force’ (62). Always Rebecca’s handwriting suggests supreme confidence and knowledge. In particular, the capital letter ‘R’, embroidered on the handkerchief the narrator finds in Rebecca’s mackintosh and on Rebecca’s nightdress case, takes on a runic force which derives from its powerful visual impact and its refusal to be destroyed. In this novel Rebecca surfaces most clearly through her signature, which uncannily inscribes the body’s presence despite its absence through death. Above all, it is her autonomous energy, implicit in Rebecca’s handwriting, which impresses itself on both the narrator and the reader. Thus, there is a duality in Rebecca’s script, which seems to tell one story but which gives the lie to it in the actual appearance of the writing itself. The activity of writing is thereby seen to be implicated in the production of sexual subjectivity. Yet, despite her accentuated difference from Rebecca, it is the timid and nameless young second wife who has been transformed into the older, wiser narrator of Rebecca’s story. She has become empowered to do this, however, only by modifying her perception of Rebecca as ‘other’ and assimilating her autonomy. Her initial attempts to exorcise Rebecca’s presence, through, for example, burning the fly-leaf in Maxim’s book which contains her signature, are doomed to failure. Instead, what we see in the novel is a gradual identification between the narrator and Rebecca, quite literally enacted in the Manderley Ball scene when the narrator’s appearance as Maxim’s ancestress, Caroline de Winter, seems to raise Rebecca from the dead (even Maxim’s sister, sensible Beatrice, says ‘You stood there on the stairs, and for one ghastly moment I thought . . .’ (225). Indeed, we learn at the beginning of the

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novel that the (now older) narrator has finally acquired the confidence for which she envied Rebecca as a young woman: ‘and confidence is a quality I prize, although it has come to me a little late in the day’ (13). The conclusion must be that only with Rebecca ‘really’ dead can she write Rebecca’s story, although it is only through Rebecca that she can write. Significantly, then, in the final dream of a novel haunted by disturbing dreams the narrator finds herself writing as Rebecca: I was writing letters in the morning-room. I was sending out invitations. I wrote them all myself with a thick black pen. But when I looked down to see what I had written it was not my small square handwriting at all, it was long, and slanting, with curious pointed strokes. I pushed the cards away from the blotter and hid them. I got up and went to the looking-glass. A face stared back at me that was not my own. It was very pale, very lovely, framed in a cloud of dark hair. The eyes narrowed and smiled. The lips parted. The face in the glass stared back at me and laughed. And I saw then that she was sitting on a chair before the dressing-table in her bedroom and Maxim was brushing her hair. He held her hair in his hands, and as he brushed it he wound it slowly into a thick rope. It twisted like a snake, and he took hold of it with both hands and smiled at Rebecca and put it round his neck. ‘No’, I screamed. ‘No. no . . .’ . (395-6)

Whereas the firing of Manderley reminds us of the burning of Thornfield and of a work which finally eliminates the ‘other’ woman, this dream perpetuates the psychic disruption which Rebecca signifies. Although the narrator harbours a distrust and fear of Rebecca’s sexuality, communicated by the snake image,7 the dream also reveals her unconscious identification with it. For much of the novel she has consciously wished to be the model wife and hostess she believed Rebecca to have been; yet the mirror image of the dream signals a further desire for identification with Rebecca’s sexual and textual charisma. This is because Rebecca, despite—or because of—her corporeal absence, embodies a dynamic multivalent alterity for the nameless narrator: she is adulteress, lesbian, bisexual, vampire, Jew. The fact that Rebecca’s body shows traces of both Jewishness and vampirism indicates the essentially Gothic quality of the novel; for in the Gothic text perverse sexuality, as Judith Halberstam (citing Sander Gilman) notes, is inevitably ‘ascribed to the sexuality of the Other’ (Halberstam 1995: 68). In assimilating both psychological and corporeal aspects of Rebecca, the narrator implicitly rejects the social categorisations which separate the ‘bad’

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However, that phrase we have just used, ‘disembodied spirit’, is taken not from the novel, but from letters written by du Maurier in the 1940s. Here we wish to link the issue of Rebecca’s signature and corporeal identity within the text with that of du Maurier as author of the text. As Margaret Forster’s biography has revealed, Daphne du Maurier seemed to follow the lifestyle expected of women of her class, yet such conformity hid several unconventional relationships and a complex and conflicted sense of identity (Forster 1993). Furthermore, in spite of living an apparently happy life as wife, mother and successful novelist, du Maurier experienced a great deal of anxiety and ambivalence concerning her identity as a woman writer. For much of the time she felt that part of herself was a ‘disembodied spirit’, a phrase she uses in two separate letters to Ellen Doubleday, wife of her American publisher, Nelson Doubleday. She uses it first in a letter dated December 1947, which is written in a parodic fairy-tale manner, to describe what we would now call a sense of split subjectivity: And then the boy realised he had to grow up and not be a boy any longer, so he turned into a girl, and not an unattractive one at that, and the boy was locked in a box forever. D. du M. wrote her books, and had young men, and later a husband, and children, and a lover, and life was sometimes lovely and sometimes rather sad, but when she found Menabilly and lived in it alone, she opened up the box sometimes and let the phantom, who was neither girl nor boy but disembodied spirit, dance in the evening when there was no one to see. (Forster 1993: 222)

In a letter written to Ellen almost a year later in September 1948, reflecting on her husband’s reliance on her money-earning capacity as a bestselling novelist, she uses the phrase in a slightly different way: I mean, really, women should not have careers. It’s people like me who have careers who really have bitched up the old relationship between men and women. Women ought to be soft and gentle and dependent. Disembodied spirits like myself are all wrong. (Forster 1993: 235)

In the first letter, she describes a masculine dimension of her being which, while ‘locked’ away, undergoes a metamorphosis into the ‘disembodied spirit’ which is androgynous and suggestive (to her) of a more authentic ‘self’. Such a creative spirit, associated as it is in this letter with her life at Menabilly, is intrinsic to her life as a writer. However, the second letter suggests that while acknowledging her career as that of author, she felt ill at ease as a successful woman writer in the wider world; this is confirmed by another letter to Ellen Doubleday written in October 1948, in which she confesses to seeing her work as having given her a ‘masculine approach to life’ (Forster 1993: 232). Later, having become intrigued by the work of Jung and Adler during the winter of 1954, she explains her ‘disembodied’ self by reference to Jung’s vocabulary of duality and identifies her writing persona as having sprung from a repressed ‘No. 2’ masculine side. In a letter to her seventeen-year-old daughter in the same year she explains, ‘When I get madly boyish No. 2 is in charge, and then, after a bit, the situation is reversed . . . No. 2 can come to the surface and be helpful . . . he certainly has a lot to do with my writing’ (Forster 1993: 276). Thus du Maurier came to perceive her writing identity as masculine. While such a ‘disembodied spirit’ was containable, while it could be put back in the box, it could do no harm; when, however, du Maurier perceived it as taking over—when she referred to herself as the ‘disembodied spirit’—then she believed it to be socially destructive. Arguably, it was this anxiety concerning the ‘Other’ contained within the ‘self’ which gave Jung’s work particular resonance for her. Du Maurier’s creation of Rebecca as the narrator’s transgressive double can also be seen, then, as a manifestation of an anxiety concerning writing, identity and gender.8 Interestingly, Forster’s biography and Oriel Malet’s Letters from Menabilly (1993) provide evidence that in letters to friends du Maurier identified, at different points in her life, with both Rebecca and the narrator. For example, in a letter to Maureen Baker-Munton, written in 1957, du Maurier comments: ‘I wrote as the second Mrs. de W. twenty-one years ago, with Rebecca a symbol of Jan. It could also be that . . . I—in Moper’s dark mind—can be the symbol of Rebecca. The cottage on the beach could be my hut. Rebecca’s lovers could be my books’ (Forster 1993: 424). In these letters quoted by Forster, the narrator tends to be linked with du Maurier’s social, ‘feminine’ identity and Rebecca with her creative writing persona, that ‘No. 2’ masculine ‘self’. As we have estab-

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from the ‘good’ woman. Furthermore, in absorbing the ‘disembodied spirit’ of Maxim’s first wife, the narrator comes to embody aspects of Rebecca’s power and self-confidence. Above all, she writes, and with the maturity and adult sexual identity implied by Rebecca’s ‘bold, slanting hand’ rather than with the childish ingenuousness of her former self. Her signature and her text are thus haunted by that of another.

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lished, this sense of the writing self as masculine ‘Other’ can be seen in the inscription of Rebecca’s ‘masculine’ energy through ‘those curious, sloping letters’ that continually surface in du Maurier’s most famous novel, a text in which the transgressions of the ‘Other’ are both written on the body and embodied in the writing process itself. Du Maurier’s letters suggest that, as she grew older, she moved towards seeing identity as something multiform and fissured, rather than unitary and coherent. Arguably, the writing process itself provided du Maurier with a way of manipulating such multiplicity and of harnessing the potentially destructive aspect of the ‘Other’—as it does for the narrator of Rebecca. Rebecca’s death within the plot suggests the containment of transgressive desire but her ‘disembodied spirit’, with all its divergent energies, continues to inform the writing process. We suggest, then, that Rebecca’s power to haunt the modern imagination has much to do with her textual and culture lineage. In creating her, du Maurier drew both on the Gothic tradition and on a broad cultural anxiety concerning the changing status of women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For du Maurier, that anxiety was further inflected by the association of the writing woman with a transgressive female identity and this, too, finds expression in her most famous novel. Such anxieties manifest themselves in the way Rebecca’s character dissolves some important boundary lines. Neither visibly a body nor visibly a corpse, she upsets the line between life and death; between eros and thanatos; between absence and presence; and between the two stereotypes—that of the asexual virgin-mother and that of the prostitute-vamp—which Andreas Huyssen sees as sustaining ‘the myth of the dualistic nature of woman’ (Huyssen 1986: 73). Rebecca also disrupts the dividing lines which separate the femme fatale from the vamp and the vamp from the female vampire. This instability of meaning is emphasised by the Gothic nature of Rebecca’s body. In addition, the suspended ‘R’ of her name and the quasiillegible ‘M’ in her engagement diary, by constituting a semiotic of fragmentation and incompleteness within the text, indicate metonymically the mysterious uncertainty of her absence/presence. The materiality of Rebecca’s signature further signals an anxiety concerning the relation between writing, autonomy and sexual identity. This can be seen as a textual trace of du Maurier’s own anxiety about the relation between the ‘sexed’

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body and the cultural construction of authorial identity as ‘masculine’. There are, as Elizabeth Grosz has noted: ways in which the sexuality and corporeality of the subject leave their traces or marks on the texts produced . . . The signature not only signs the text by a mark of authorial propriety, but also signs the subject as the product of writing itself, of textuality. (Grosz 1995: 23)

Just as du Maurier’s use of the phrase ‘disembodied spirit’ in her letters indicates a bodily unease in occupying the authorial position, so Rebecca’s uneasy status as both too fleshly (vamp) and too uncanny (vampire) reflects a cultural ambivalence towards the sexually expressive and autonomous woman. Such anxieties are condensed in the way that Rebecca’s signature haunts the text; in this sense, writing itself is Gothic.

Notes 1. Even more recent essays on Rebecca continue to be heavily infuenced by Light’s approach. See, for example, Janet Harbord 1996. 2. See, for example, Linda Ruth Williams’s use of the terms as interchangeable (Williams 1993: 53, 56). 3. In this connection, see also Rebecca Stott 1992, especially Chapter 3 on Dracula. 4. The Carleton Television adaptation of the novel, shown in January 1997, portrayed Rebecca in this way, for example. 5. Modleski uses this phrase to describe the manner in which representations are played out on the narrator’s body, but it is just as appropriate to describe the absence/presence of Rebecca’s (dead) body. 6. For example, Gelder 1994 and Halberstam 1995 relate Gothic presentations of the abject to cultural constructions of ‘Jewishness’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whilst Warwick 1995 explores it in relation to the changing status of women during that period. See also Jerrold E. Hogle (1996) for an example of how textual representations of the abject reflect anxiety concerning changing class structures in early twentieth-century France. 7. The snake image is often associated with female vampires as in, for instance, Tieck’s Wake Not the Dead, Coleridge’s Christabel, Baudelaire’s Les Métamorphoses du Vampire and (obliquely) Keats’s Lamia. 8. For a fuller exploration of the connection between writing, identity, gender and du Maurier’s use of the Gothic genre, see Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik 1998.

References Day, W. P. (1985) In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press. Dijkstra, B. (1986) Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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Williams, A. (1995) Art of Darkness: A Poetics of the Gothic, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press.

du Maurier, D. ([1938] 1992) Rebecca, London, Arrow.

Williams, L. R. (1993) Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D.H. Lawrence, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf.

———. ([1981] 1993) The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories, London, Arrow. Forster, M. (1993) Daphne du Maurier, London, Chatto and Windus. Frayling, C. ([1991] 1992) Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, London, Faber and Faber. Gelder, K. (1994) Reading the Vampire, London and New York, Routledge. Grosz, E. (1995) Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, New York and London, Routledge. Halberstam, J. (1995) Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Durham and London, Durham University Press. Harbord, J. (1996) ‘Between Identification and Desire: Rereading Rebecca’, Feminist Review, 53, 95-106. Hogle, J. E. (1996) ‘The Gothic and the “Otherings” of Ascendant Culture: The Original Phantom of the Opera’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 95 (3), 821-46. Horner, A. and S. Zlosnik (1998) Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination, London, Macmillan. Huyssen, A. (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press. Jones, E. ([1991] 1992) ‘On the Vampire’, in C. Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, London, Faber and Faber. Kristeva, J. ([1980] 1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez, New York, Columbia University Press. Ledger, S. and S. McCracken, (eds) (1995) Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Light, A. (1984) ‘“Returning to Manderley”: Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class’, Feminist Review, 16. ———(1991) Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, London and New York, Routledge.

FURTHER READING Biography Auerbach, Nina. Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, 180 p. Biography of du Maurier that also focuses on her lesserknown writings, which Auerbach contends are du Maurier’s most compelling. Forster, Margaret. Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller. New York: Doubleday, 1993. Detailed account of du Maurier’s life and career, including critical analysis and biographical interpretation of her works.

Criticism Bakerman, Jane S. “Daphne du Maurier.” In And Then There Were Nine . . . More Women of Mystery, edited by Jane S. Bakerman, pp. 12-29. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1985. Discusses six of du Maurier’s novels, including Rebecca and Jamaica Inn, as accomplished examples of romantic suspense fiction. Butterly Nigro, Kathleen. “Rebecca as Desdemona: ‘A Maid that Paragons Description and Wild Fame.’” College Literature 27, no. 3 (fall 2000): 144-57. Compares du Maurier’s Rebecca to William Shakespeare’s play Othello as a means of reexamining the character of Rebecca. Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. “The Secrets of Manderley: Rebecca.” In Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity, and the Gothic Imagination, pp. 99-127. New York: Twayne, 1998. Examines Rebecca as a complex, layered study of female identity.

Malet, O. (ed.) (1993) Daphne du Maurier: Letters from Menabilly, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

———. “Deaths in Venice: Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Don’t Look Now.’” In Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography, edited by Glennis Byron and David Punter, pp. 219-32. London and New York: Macmillan, 1999.

Massé, M. A. (1992) In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press.

Asserts that in the story “Don’t Look Now,” du Maurier used Gothic conventions to explore issues of identity, particularly gender identity.

Modleski, T. (1988) The Women Who Knew too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, London and New York, Routledge.

Kael, Pauline. “Labyrinths.” New Yorker 49 (24 December 1973): 68, 71.

Shallcross, M. ([1991] 1993) The Private World of Daphne du Maurier, London, Robson Books. Stoker, B. ([1897] 1993) Dracula, Harmondsworth, Penguin. Stott, R. (1992) The Fabrication of the Late Victorian Femme Fatale: The Kiss of Death, London, Macmillan. Warwick, A. (1995) ‘Vampires and the Empire: Fears and Fictions of the 1890s’, in S. Ledger and S. McCracken (eds), Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Favorable review of Don’t Look Now, the film based on du Maurier’s short story. Kelly, Richard. Daphne du Maurier. New York: Twayne, 1987. Book-length survey of du Maurier’s works. Shallcross, Martyn. “Sinister Stories.” In The Private World of Daphne du Maurier, pp. 144-55. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Discusses the film adaptations of two of du Maurier’s most famous short stories, “The Birds” and “Don’t Look Now.”

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Doane, M. A. (1991) Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, New York and London, Routledge.

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Smith, Harrison. “The Anatomy of Terror.” The Saturday Review (14 March 1953): 29, 52. Review of Kiss Me Again, Stranger, in which Smith asserts that du Maurier “has the gift of making believable the unbelievable.” Wisker, Gina. “Don’t Look Now! The Compulsions and Revelations of Daphne du Maurier’s Horror Writing.” Journal of Gender Studies 8, no. 1 (March 1999): 19-33. Focuses on du Maurier’s horror writings, examining their relationship to traditional Gothic literature and their exploration of gender identity and power.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of du Maurier’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson

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Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 37; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography and Resources, Vol. 1; British Writers Supplement, Vol. 3; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8R, 128; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 6, 55; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 6, 11, 59; Contemporary Popular Writers; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 191; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Popular Fiction and Genre Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Mystery and Suspense Writers; Novels for Students, Vol. 12; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, Vol. 4; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 14, 16; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 18; Something about the Author, Vols. 27, 60; Twayne’s English Authors; and Twentieth Century Romance and Historical Writers.

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WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897 - 1962)

(Born William Cuthbert Falkner; changed surname to Faulkner) American novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and essayist.

social critique, using it to paint a picture of a culture in ruins, populated by grotesques and living ghosts who refuse to recognize their alienation and defeat.

A

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

preeminent figure in twentieth-century American literature, Faulkner created a profound and complex body of work that examines exploitation and corruption in the American South. Many of Faulkner’s novels and short stories are set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional area reflecting the geographical and cultural background of his native Mississippi. Faulkner’s works frequently reflect the tumultuous history of the South while developing perceptive explorations of human character. His use of bizarre, grotesque, and violent imagery, melodrama, and sensationalism to depict the corruption and decay of the region make him one of the earliest practitioners of the subgenre known as Southern Gothic literature. Faulkner’s works that are especially well known for their Gothic qualities include the novels Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936); the novella As I Lay Dying (1930); and the short story “A Rose for Emily” (1930). They combine burlesque and dark humor with realism and elements of the horrific and macabre to caricature a society that is unable to break from its past and look to the future. Faulkner employs gothicism, then, as a searing

Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, into a genteel Southern family. When Faulkner was five, the family moved to the town of Oxford. He showed considerable artistic talent as a boy, drawing and writing poetry, but was an indifferent student. He dropped out of high school in 1915 to work as a clerk in his grandfather’s bank, began writing poetry, and submitted drawings to the University of Mississippi’s yearbook. During World War I, Faulkner tried to enlist in the U.S. army, but was rejected because of his small stature. Instead, he manipulated his acceptance into the Royal Canadian Air Force by affecting a British accent and forging letters of recommendation. The war ended before Faulkner experienced combat duty, however, and he returned to his hometown, where he intermittently attended the University of Mississippi as a special student. In August, 1919, his first poem, “L’Apres-midi d’un faune,” was published in New Republic, and later that year the Mississippian published one of his short stories, “Landing in Luck.” After a brief period of employment as a bookstore clerk in New York, Faulkner returned to Oxford, where he was hired as a

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university postmaster. He resigned, however, when the postal inspector noticed that Faulkner often brought his writing to the post office and became so immersed in what he was doing that he ignored patrons.

he suffered serious injuries in horse-riding accidents. Faulkner died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962.

In 1924, with the help of his friend Phil Stone, Faulkner published The Marble Faun, a volume of poetry. The following year he moved to New Orleans, where he associated with other writers, including Sherwood Anderson, and wrote his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), which was accepted for publication. He traveled in Europe for a few months and then returned to New Orleans and continued to write. His first notable success came in 1929 with Sartoris. Later that year, a few months after he married his childhood sweetheart Estelle Oldham, Faulkner published what is regarded as his greatest work, The Sound and the Fury (1929). The following year his novella As I Lay Dying and “A Rose for Emily” were published, and in 1931 Sanctuary, which had been rejected by publishers two years earlier, appeared and became a bestseller. Light in August followed in 1932, the same year Faulkner began his career in Hollywood as a screenwriter. He traveled between Mississippi and Hollywood for several years, writing scripts when he was not working on his novels and short stories. Among his film credits were To Have and Have Not (1945), based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel, and The Big Sleep (1946), an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s detective thriller. Works that appeared during these years include Absalom, Absalom!, The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses and Other Stories (1942).

MAJOR WORKS

By the mid-1940s, most Americans had largely ceased to read Faulkner’s works, although they were popular in Europe. This changed in 1946 with the publication The Portable Faulkner, which renewed critical and popular interest in Faulkner’s works in his native country. His election in 1948 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters was followed by his receipt of the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, making Faulkner one of the most respected living American writers. He continued to write novels and stories as well as essays and plays. Faulkner won the National Book Award for his Collected Stories, published in 1950, and was awarded Pulitzer Prizes for his novels A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962). In the 1950s Faulkner was a much-sought-after lecturer throughout the world. In 1957 he became writerin-residence at the University of Virginia, dividing his time between Virginia and Mississippi. In 1959

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From the beginning of his career, Faulkner’s writing showed the influence of the Gothic tradition. His first great work, The Sound and the Fury, contains elements typical of Southern Gothic literature: grotesque characters, violence, and a dilapidated, decaying setting. The novel chronicles the disintegration of members of the Compson family who are obsessed with and controlled by forces and events from their pasts. The siblings Quentin and Caddy fall from a state of innocence and succumb to the family pattern of incest, erotomania, and suicide. Faulkner called his next novel, Sanctuary, “the most horrific tale I could imagine.” Containing graphic violence and extravagant depravity, the crime thriller about the coquettish Temple Drake is a study of human evil that includes a psychopathic bootlegger, corrupt local officials, the trial of an innocent man, and a public lynching. As I Lay Dying charts the journey of a poor family to bury their mother, Addie Bundren, in Jefferson. They make the coffin themselves and survive crossing the flooded Yoknapatawpha River, a fire, and other difficulties before reaching their destination. The novella, composed of fifty-nine interior monologues providing various perspectives through constantly shifting, contrasting points of view, including that of the dead mother, is humorous, tragic, and horrifying. As I Lay Dying was followed by Faulkner’s acclaimed horror story “A Rose for Emily,” considered an exemplary work of Southern Gothic fiction. The tale begins with the announcement of the death of Miss Emily Grierson, an alienated spinster living in the South in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The narrator, who speaks in the “we” voice and appears to represent the people of the town, recounts the story of Emily’s life as a lonely and impoverished woman left penniless by her father, who drove away suitors from his overprotected daughter. Emily was left when her father died with a large, dilapidated house, into which the townspeople have never been invited, and there is an almost lurid interest among them when they are finally able to enter the house upon Emily’s death. At that point they discover the truth about the extent of Emily’s problems: she has kept the body of her lover, a Northerner named Homer Barron, locked in a bedroom since she killed him years before, and

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Other notable works by Faulkner with Gothicinspired settings and themes include Light in August, which examines the origins of personal identity and the roots of racial conflicts, and Absalom, Absalom!, about Thomas Sutpen, a poor white man from the Virginia hills who marries an aristocratic Mississippi woman, inadvertently launching a three-generation family cycle of violence, degeneracy, and mental retardation.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

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she has continued to sleep with him. Some critics initially criticized Faulkner for writing what they saw as an exploitative horror story, but commentators since then have recognized the power of the work as a commentary on the South wrapped up in the past and unable to accept change.

The Marble Faun (poetry) 1924 Soldiers’ Pay (novel) 1926 Mosquitoes (novel) 1927 Sartoris (novel) 1929; also published as Flags in the Dust, 1973 The Sound and the Fury (novel) 1929 As I Lay Dying (novella) 1930 “A Rose for Emily” (short story) 1930; published in the journal Forum Sanctuary (novel) 1931 *These Thirteen (short stories) 1931 Light in August (novel) 1932 A Green Bough (poetry) 1933

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Pylon (novel) 1935

Early criticism of Faulkner’s fiction ranged from considering it hopelessly incoherent to the work of unparalleled genius. Since the mid-1940s, the latter opinion has prevailed, and critics have come to regard Faulkner as a singular talent and writer of extraordinary scope and power. Since Faulkner’s death, his work has been extensively analyzed and critics have remarked that his writing, while distinctively American and Southern, reflects, on a grander scale, the universal values of human life. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner declared that the fundamental theme of his fiction is “the human heart in conflict with itself.” One of the most notable ways in which he depicts this struggle is in his portrayal of the corruption and decay of the South, and he uses Gothic imagery and atmosphere in particular to highlight this idea. Gothicism is also used in Faulkner’s work to emphasize distorted religious views, the clash between those with power and those without, the isolation of the individual, humans’ powerlessness in an indifferent universe, the moral decay of the community, the burden of history, the horrors of humans’ treatment of each other, and the problem of evil. The vast body of Faulkner criticism that has been generated since the 1960s has included discussions of the Gothic elements in his writing, which have focused on his particular brand of American Southern Gothic; the use of gothicism to portray Southern dislocation and decadence; the Gothic influences on his writing, including English novelists and Nathaniel Hawthorne; and his influence on younger writers of Southern Gothic such as Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor.

Absalom, Absalom! (novel) 1936 The Unvanquished (short stories) 1938 The Wild Palms (novellas) 1939 The Hamlet (novel) 1940 Go Down, Moses and Other Stories (short stories) 1942 To Have and Have Not [with Jules Furthman] (screenplay) 1945 The Big Sleep [with Furthman and Leigh Brackett] (screenplay) 1946 The Portable Faulkner (novellas and short stories) 1946; revised as The Essential Faulkner, 1967 Intruder in the Dust (novel) 1948 Knight’s Gambit (short stories) 1949 Collected Stories of William Faulkner (short stories) 1950 Requiem for a Nun (play) 1951 A Fable (novel) 1954 The Town (novel) 1957 Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957-1958 (lectures) 1959 The Mansion (novel) 1959 The Reivers (novel) 1962 Essays, Speeches and Public Letters (essays, speeches, and letters) 1966 Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962 (interviews) 1968

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Selected Letters of William Faulkner (letters) 1976 Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (short stories) 1979 *

This collection includes the stories “A Rose for Emily,” “All the Dead Pilots,” “Victory,” and “Divorce in Naples.”

PRIMARY SOURCES

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GENERAL COMMENTARY ELIZABETH M. KERR (ESSAY DATE 1979) SOURCE: Kerr, Elizabeth M. “From Otranto to Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner’s Gothic Heritage.” In William Faulkner’s Gothic Domain, pp. 3-28. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979. In the following excerpt, Kerr surveys the Gothic as it is exemplified in Faulkner’s novels set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha.

The term “Gothic” unfortunately has pejorative connotations which we must recognize before giving it the comprehensive definition necessary to an examination of the pervasive Gothic elements in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels. In current literary criticism “Gothic” either refers in the historical sense to the Gothic novel as a subgenre, from Horace Walpole through his literary successors such as Ann Radcliffe, Matthew G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2

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Gregory Lewis, and Charles Maturin, or is loosely applied to various aspects of serious modern novelists such as Faulkner and Carson McCullers. The modern popular “Gothic romance,” so labeled and advertised on the covers of paperback editions by a picture of an archetypal castle with a girl in flight in the foreground, is scorned by critics as subliterary, sentimental “formula” fiction, easily recognized because, as Northrop Frye pointed out in The Secular Scripture, “the more undisplaced the story, the more sharply the design stands out,” being undisguised by representational realism. Like melodrama, with which it has much in common, the popular Gothic romance arouses sham terror and has a reassuring happy ending. Because such romances tend to be fabricated of ordinary or cheap stuff, with slick or sloppy workmanship, the critical eye may not perceive that they are often copied from such original and superior designs as those of Ann Radcliffe or the Brontës. This polluted stream of Gothicism is but a shallow branch of the deep and dark waters which, if one accepts Leslie Fiedler’s thesis in Love and Death in the American Novel, might be called the Father of Waters of American novels, the Mississippi to which Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha River is tributary. Fully to appreciate that tributary, we must return to its deep Gothic source, for, in Harry Levin’s words, “When we come to appreciate the strategic part that convention is able to play, we shall be better equipped to discern the originality of individual writers.” . . .

cited Faulkner to exemplify all kinds of parody. Fiedler concluded that parody is “a kind of necessary final act of destroying the past, required of all who belong to the tradition of the New.”

From its beginning Gothicism had embraced medievalism, fantasy, realism, and burlesque, categories of the roman noir listed by Montague Summers. Burlesque, with its kinship to caricature and parody, is of special interest in a modern context. In Love and Death Leslie Fiedler explained the “gothic mode” as “essentially a form of parody, a way of assailing clichés by exaggerating them to the limit of grotesqueness”: in Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner mocked “the banal harsh taunt “Would you want a nigger to sleep with your sister!’” In “The Dream of the New” Fiedler explained further that for the American writer the only “fruitful relationship” to the past “compatible with the tradition of the New” is parody, “which simultaneously connects and rejects.” Fiedler identified “conscious parody” (“one of the chief modes of our books”); “unconscious parody”; and “parody of parody”—illustrated by Mark Twain “consciously parodying Sir Walter Scott” and then being “inadvertently parodied by Ernest Hemingway.” Self-parody is the fourth kind. Without reference to Gothicism, Fiedler

In Love and Death Leslie Fiedler stressed the absence in American fiction of eroticism based on adult, heterosexual love. The transformation of European Gothic themes to express the “obsessive concerns” of Americans identified by Fiedler (see p. 8 above) are all exemplified in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels, as are the general characteristics of Gothicism already dealt with. Romantic solitude sought by Old World characters was found in the New World in primeval forests or unbroken prairies, affording frontier freedom; as Fiedler said, “Scott’s romantic North” became Cooper’s “romantic West,” and flight to escape oppressive society became flight from women and society to male companions in the wilderness. The bandits and outlaws of Europe— German freebooters and Italian banditti, according to Montague Summers—were replaced by Indians. The English gentleman-highwayman was brother under the skin to southern Civil War guerrillas. The iniquities of the Old World authoritarian church and state and corrupt social institutions were matched by New World exploitation of

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Exaggeration, one element in burlesque, is identified by Eric Bentley as a basic element in melodrama, which he defined as “the Naturalism of the dream life,” akin to the exaggerated fantasies of childhood and adult dreams. Eric Newton credited “the romantic thirst for melodrama” with penetrating “so deeply into the common consciousness that excess had ceased to be ridiculous.” Characteristics of melodrama given by James Smith sound much like white Gothic fiction: to provide what Michael Booth termed “‘the fulfillment and satisfaction found only in dreams,’” melodrama presented stereotyped, unreal characters on a stage filled with “gigantic pictures” and “grandiose scenery,” in which the hero is exposed to physical dangers. “Every act leads up to its ‘tableau.’” The hero is finally rewarded by dream justice. Predictably, Smith cites among variations in melodrama the Gothic; in late Gothic the hero is sometimes “a poor man’s Faust.” “Medievalism, fantasy, realism, and burlesque”—all but medievalism, in the literal sense, are found in modern American Gothic fiction. Ironic inversion, a strategy by which a kind of parody can be used seriously to convey values directly opposed to those ostensibly presented, may be used with any varieties of literary or black Gothic.

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With modifications and transformations noted above, the new American literary Gothic continues the Gothic tradition, chiefly the black Gothic, in character types and psychological concerns, in settings, and in thematic ideas and narrative patterns. The character types of the Gothic novel, described by Eino Railo, largely paralleled by those in poetry and drama of the Romantic decadence, discussed by Mario Praz, flourished in both European and American fiction. Parallels also to medieval romance are obvious in such characters as the chivalric hero and the persecuted maiden, the villain and the evil woman, and in the general polarity of good and evil. Here will be listed the chief types of characters from which Faulkner, in following the Gothic tradition, could make his choice. Prominent among leading male characters are the heroes or villain-heroes descended from Elizabethan drama

and from Milton’s Lucifer, culminating in the Faustian or Byronic hero—handsome, melancholy, mysterious, and passionate, with exceptional capacity for both good and evil. Byron inherited this hero from Gothic romance and the poems of Sir Walter Scott. Lovecraft said that the Gothic villain and the Byronic hero are “essentially cognate types.” Eric Bentley stated that villains in melodrama “stem from the archvillain Lucifer.” “The dark, rebellious Byronic hero,” as Byron developed the type, was described by John Ehrstine as “a composite and evolutionary figure,” relentlessly pursuing in isolation “the demonic root of all evil.” The Don Juan type, of which Lovelace is the prime example in the novel, is less typical of American Gothic than is the Byronic or Faustian hero. The Romantic hero is descended from the virtuous chivalric heroes but is less interesting than the knights errant. The leading female characters offer parallels to the males; the persecuted maiden, rescued from the villain by the hero, is contrasted with the evil, strong woman, often dark and sometimes a prostitute. The relationship between the Romantic decadence and the Gothic tradition is reflected by Addison Bross’s study of the influence of Aubrey Beardsley on Faulkner in Soldiers’ Pay. Bross concluded that Beardsley contributed to “Faulkner’s inherent sense of the grotesque and absurd element in man” and to the contrast between Margaret, the evil dark beauty, and the girl Cecily. In the South the Dark Lady, termed by Fiedler in Love and Death the “sinister embodiment of the sexuality denied the snow maiden,” might be expected to have Negro blood. Faulkner did not use this contrast, not even when a woman with Negro blood was the rival to a white heroine. In Absalom, Absalom! Charles Bon’s octoroon mistress is Judith Sutpen’s rival. She is even described with explicit reference to Beardsley, as Bross and Timothy Conley noted. This passage exemplifies Conley’s point that in Faulkner’s mature works “his own pictorial genius” carried Beardsley’s art “to its fictional heights.” The octoroon is a victim, not an evil woman, and Judith provides no blonde contrast to the “magnoliafaced woman” as they stand together at the grave of Charles Bon. The octoroon suggests the Suffering Wife of the Gothic tradition, created in Horace Walpole’s Hippolita and found, as Eino Railo observed, “in every later romance in which an unhappy mother and child is needed.” Development of servants as distinctive characters, whether loyal and amusing or treacherous and disgusting, was a feature of The Castle of

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nature, by Negro slavery, and by frontier roughness and violence. Anti-Catholicism gave place to anti-Calvinism. The defiance of Faust, which Fiedler called “the diabolic bargain,” became the center of the modern American Gothic novel, with the vast New World as the stage for the drama of superhuman ambition—a recurrent theme noted by Robert Hume in Dark Romantic writing. In a society founded by rebels, rebels and outcasts could be redeemed in the general Romantic revolt against the past and its values. Fiedler noted that the redeemed ones included Prometheus, Cain, Judas, the Wandering Jew, and even Lucifer. The use of superstition and the supernatural, made more plausible by a medieval setting, in the New World lost its power to produce Gothic mystery, awe, and shudders. Dream experience, Howard Lovecraft said, “helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world.” In fiction the supernatural could be replaced by psychological phenomena which readers could accept with at least “a willing suspension of disbelief”: common experiences such as dreams; rarer phenomena such as hallucination; special power such as telepathy, prescience, and clairvoyance; psychological abnormalities, including mental deficiency and paranoia. As Leslie Fiedler observed in Love and Death, rejection of superstition was succeeded by the realization that such belief, “far from being the fabrication of a Machiavellian priesthood, was a projection of a profound inner insecurity and guilt, a hidden world of nightmare not abolished by manifestos or restrained by barricades. The final horrors, as modern society has come to realize, are neither gods nor demons, but intimate aspects of our own minds.”

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Otranto in which Walpole imitated Shakespeare’s servants. Only in the southern Gothic is a servant likely to be a member of the family. Clytie, halfsister in Absalom, Absalom! to Judith and Henry Sutpen, combines the Dark Woman with the Loyal Servant. Most typical of Gothic fiction and least common in other kinds of narrative are the grotesque characters which, in the Gothic tradition, reflected the acceptance in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury aesthetic theory of the grotesque as an aspect of the sublime. The grotesque was one means of achieving the terror which, as Samuel Monk said, was the foundation of Edmund Burke’s theory of sublimity. Ugliness could be “associated with sublimity if it is ‘united with such qualities as excite strong terror.’” Maurice Lévy considered Burke’s evidence valuable because “Burke formulated strictly what his epoch felt vaguely.” Lévy regarded the Gothic as the product of a fantastic or grotesque imagination. John Ruskin, however, was more influential than Burke in forming the tastes of readers and writers in nineteenth-century Romanticism. Ruskin’s “Grotesque Renaissance” (chapter 3 in The Stones of Venice, volume 2) differentiates true or noble grotesque from false grotesque by the qualities of the spirit revealed in art. (In “The Grotesque in the Fiction of William Faulkner” Robert Ferguson applies Ruskin’s categories to characters.) Howard Lovecraft referred to “the grotesque gargoyles,” “the daemonic gargoyles of Notre Dame and Mont St. Michel,” as gauges of “the prevalence and depth of the medieval horrorspirit in Europe, intensified by the dark despair which waves of pestilence brought.” The psychological justification for the grotesque in aesthetic theory and the arts is stated by Wolfgang Kayser in “a final interpretation of the grotesque: AN ATTEMPT TO INVOKE AND SUBDUE THE DEMONIC ASPECTS OF THE WORLD.” In “The Victim” Ihab Hassan noted the ancient association between “evil and the ludicrous” and cited “the grotesque magnification of evil” by Dante as a religious act. Whether “grotesque” is limited to characters or is extended to imagery and to incongruities and distortions of all kinds, the grotesque is an integral part of the total pattern of Gothic fiction and usually combines the terrible and the ludicrous in some deformation of what is regarded as natural and pleasing, some nightmarish violation of the daylight world, some ominous disruption of order and harmony. In substantial agreement with Leslie Fiedler’s basic idea in Love and Death in the American Novel,

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Irving Malin said that the “New American Gothic is in the mainstream of American fiction.” Malin found the source of the grotesque in Gothic fiction to be the breakdown of order into dream effects. Agreeing with William Van O’Connor that “the grotesque is produced by disintegration,” Malin observed that this disintegration, evident in narcissism and the breakdown of the family, is reflected “by the technique of new American Gothic.” In “Flannery O’Connor and the Grotesque,” Irving Malin grouped her “grotesquerie” with that of “Capote, Hawkes, Carson McCullers, and Purdy,” all new American Gothic novelists. Although the grotesque extends beyond characters to structure and imagery, we are concerned here only with the kinds of grotesque characters, all being deviations from the normal in appearance, capacities, and actions. Defining the grotesque as “the unresolved clash of incompatibles in work and response; the ambivalently abnormal,” Philip Thomson stated that “the grotesque has a strong affinity with the physically abnormal,” to which our uncivilized response is “unholy glee and barbaric delight.” Such grotesques include: sexual deviants who are visibly so, such as hermaphrodites, epicene persons, and transvestites; the blind, or dumb; characters whose appearance or manner shows mechanical rigidity or some other nonhuman quality; cripples; mentally deficient or insane persons. From the dwarves of medieval romance to the dwarf in Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café, grotesques have been prominent in romances and novels. In modern Gothic, popular or literary, grotesque characters may even predominate, a tendency illustrated in the works of Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and Flannery O’Connor, all southern followers of Faulkner. In The Mortgaged Heart, a miscellany of works by Carson McCullers, Margarita Smith, the editor and the sister of McCullers, ventured an explanation of Gothic fiction: “I wonder sometimes if what they call the ‘Gothic’ school of Southern writing, in which the grotesque is paralleled with the sublime, is not due largely to the cheapness of human life in the South.” A Season of Dreams by Alfred Appel deals with Eudora Welty. In the chapter “The Grotesque and the Gothic” Appel explains the relationship between his book and chapter titles: The grotesque is characterized by a distortion of the external world, by the description of human beings in nonhuman terms, and by the displacement we associate with dreams. The infinite possibilities of the dream inform the grotesque at every turn, suspending the laws of proportion and symmetry: our deepest promptings are projected

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Although Appel erroneously equates “grotesque” with “gothic” in his chapter title, instead of subordinating the grotesque to the encompassing Gothic configuration, his analysis sheds light on all the southern Gothic novelists. In Radical Innocence, without reference to Gothicism, Ihab Hassan noted the prevalence of the grotesque in southern writers and explained the functions of grotesque characters in serious fiction. The grotesque, as clown and scapegoat, is both comic and elegiac, revolting and pathetic. As hunchback or cripple, he is born an outsider, his very aspect an affront to appearances. His broken body testifies to the contradictions of the inner man, the impossible and infrangible dream, raging against his crooked frame and against the world in which flesh is housed.

The prominence of the grotesque in Faulkner’s novels is a significant aspect of his Gothic world. In this world “the obsessive images and recurring emblematic figures” constitute what G. R. Thompson termed “an ‘iconography’ of the Gothic”: the recurring character types and edifices and landscapes serve as “some sort of objective correlative” of “the themes of physical terror, moral horror, and religious mystery.” The most obvious single objective correlative is derived from The Castle of Otranto and is suggested by the term “Gothic”: the medieval castle or ancient abbey, an image of somber ruin and mystery symbolizing the past. The haunted castle, one of the three images Irving Malin deals with in New American Gothic, is prevalent in popular Gothic romance which clings to the splendor that “falls on castle walls” remote in time and place; in literary Gothic, with an American setting, the “castle” must be less ancient and magnificent and may be merely a ruined mansion like Faulkner’s Old Frenchman’s place or the Sutpen mansion. The second of Malin’s images, the voyage into the forest, also has characterized Gothic fiction since Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe: the unaxed forest, the prairie, a mighty river, and any other scene offering solitude, danger, and mystery represent aspects of the American experience in the New World and the American dream which dominate the transfor-

mation of the Gothic novel into an American genre. Jonathan Baumbach’s title The Landscape of Nightmare might well suggest these two images, the castle and the forest, although Baumbach selected the novels he dealt with on the basis of their treatment of a typically Gothic theme, the “spiritual passage from innocence to guilt and redemption,” without regard to other Gothic features. A third kind of setting adds another nightmare image: enclosed places representing retreat and asylum or imprisonment or both. Taking the phrase from the title of Truman Capote’s most Gothic novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, Irving Malin in New American Gothic refers to the “other room” in the haunted castle which is “‘the final door’ through which the ghost-like forces march.” The other room is the transformation in new American Gothic of the haunted castle, “the metaphor of confining narcissism, the private world.” Insane asylums like the one at Jackson where Benjy Compson and Darl Bundren were sent, the jail in Jefferson, Miss Reba’s brothel in Memphis, the room in Sutpen’s Hundred where Henry Sutpen ended his flight and exchanged freedom for safety and care—these are only a few of the many enclosed places where people of Yoknapatawpha were trapped or hid themselves. In front of the castle on covers of popular Gothic paperbacks forever flees the girl who represents one of a small cluster of narrative patterns of dreamlike motion. In Love and Death Leslie Fiedler said that the Persecuted Maiden in flight, descended from Horace Walpole’s Isabella or Richardson’s Clarissa, may be fleeing “through a world of ancestral and infantile fears projected in dreams”; pursued by the villain and threatened with violation, she may be fleeing from her own darker impulses as well. But according to Fiedler the flight of “the typical male protagonist of our fiction” has been from “the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage, and responsibility.” The hero may also be in flight from guilt, pursued by conscience and justice. The ultimate issue of any flight, if escape from a fate worse than death is impossible, is suicide. In contrast to the flight-pursuit pattern but also involving recurrent or prolonged motion is the quest, the positive journey directed toward a goal, what Northrop Frye in The Secular Scripture called “the epic of the creature, man’s vision of his own life as a quest.” In New American Gothic Irving Malin viewed the journey or voyage as opposed to “the other room” but equally fraught with anxiety, the movement being usually “er-

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into the details of the scene—inscape as landscape. Because the grotesque replaces supernaturalism with hallucination, it expresses the reality of the unconscious life—the formative source which the Gothic writer, in his romantic flights, may never tap. The grotesque is a heightened realism, reminiscent of caricature, but going beyond it to create a fantastic realism or realistic fantasy that evokes pathos and terror.

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ratic, circular, violent, or distorted.” The journey in the nouveau roman is envisioned by Enrico Garzilli “as an anonymous quest toward selfunderstanding,” portrayed by “the metaphor of the labyrinth.” The journey in a quest for selfunderstanding or self-realization may follow an initiation pattern. In The Quest Mircea Eliade linked the initiation with the quest, noting that most “scenarios in the Arthurian cycle have an initiatory structure” and that “the pattern of initiation persists in the imaginary universes of modern man—in literature, dreams, and daydreams.” Dealing in Radical Innocence with some of the writers that Malin discussed, Ihab Hassan saw their work as “a parody of man’s quest for fulfillment,” an ironic tragicomedy. A quest that resembles Hassan’s parody quest was observed by Robert Phillips in the work of Carson McCullers: “the search for a sexless, dim ideal, a manifestation of the hero’s avoidance and fear of reality.” The quest may, however, be quite directly the equivalent of a common traditional theme, the search for identity which involves ascertaining the facts of one’s parentage and finding one’s father and family. In the old romances and in Gothic fiction, this search culminated in the recognition and acceptance of the hero and often in his claiming his rightful heritage. In new American Gothic the climax of the quest is more likely to be the rejection and destruction of the hero, as in Absalom, Absalom! The Faustian theme also usually involves a quest or purposeful journey in order to realize an ambition, such as Sutpen’s design in Absalom, Absalom! The purpose of the quest may be evil, such as murderous revenge, or it may be a search for truth and justice involving the detective story pattern. But serious Gothic fiction is likely to have more than one pattern: the detection in Intruder in the Dust, for example, is subordinated to the story of Chick Mallison’s successful initiation. A third pattern of motion contrasts with both flight and quest: purposeless wandering. The stories of the Wandering Jew and of Cain have been absorbed into the Gothic tradition: wandering imposed as a doom casts a man out of human society into isolation, often literally into the wilderness. Geoffrey Hartman interprets the significance of this theme as one “which best expresses this perilous nature of consciousness”: Those solitaries are separated from life in the midst of life, yet cannot die. They are doomed to live a middle or purgatorial existence which is neither life nor death, and as their knowledge increases, so does their solitude. It is consciousness, ultimately, which alienates them from life and im-

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poses the burden of a self which religion or death or a return to the state of nature might dissolve.

The wandering of Joe Christmas in Light in August combined the racial doom of alienation with a flight from both racial identities. The purgatorial life of Henry Sutpen, Faulkner’s Cain, is left to our imagination until death rid him of “the burden of self.” Scenes of violence are so characteristic of Gothic themes and patterns that they are too diverse to allow specification. The effect of horror which distinguishes Gothic fiction may be secured by any and all means, realistic or fantastic, objective or psychological, but underlying all scenes of horror are the dream images and nightmare sensations in the thematic patterns noted above. Modern Gothic fiction not only makes frequent use of dreams but lends such subjective distortion to physical events that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the inner from the outer nightmare, as in the riot scenes in West’s The Day of the Locust and in Ellison’s Invisible Man. The frequency with which the landscape of nightmare in recent Gothic fiction takes on distinctly southern features is due only in part to the pervasive influence of William Faulkner upon younger southern writers. The southern background and tradition which Faulkner shared with his successors accounts in large measure for their Gothic tendencies. In explaining the prevalence of Gothic fiction in the South, Leslie Fiedler, in The Return of the Vanishing American, contrasted the South with “the real West,” which “contains no horrors which correspond to the Southerner’s deep nightmare terrors.” Robert Phillips noted the frequency of violent themes in southern fiction and the shift at times to the minds of tormented souls caught in a labyrinthine life. To Jacques Cabau, the South and the North join “in nostalgia for the West, the lost prairie.” Phillips observed that the southern obsession with the problem of evil sprang from a sense of guilt. Referring specifically to Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and Eudora Welty, Carter W. Martin’s view confirms that of Phillips: “The themes that arise from their use of the Gothic mode are essentially spiritual ones, for they speak of matters of the soul and not matters of the glands or the nervous system.” Adaptation of Gothic patterns to existing social scenes has proved easier in the South than in most other regions of the United States. Indeed, some Gothic features which attract readers can be plausibly approximated in very few other American settings. Of genuine medieval ruins, of course,

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The influence of Scott strengthened also the southern white Protestant version of medieval courtly love, the cult of the White Goddess. In Love and Death, Fiedler cited Mark Twain’s hatred of Scott as based on a conviction that Scott had “utterly corrupted the Southern imagination by dreams of chivalry and romance, which made it quite impossible for any Southern writer to face reality or describe an actual woman.” In The Mind of the South W. J. Cash showed how southern gyneolatry developed as a consequence of cultural and literary influences and social circumstances. The sexless three decades described by Fiedler, the 1860s to the 1890s, contributed to the cult of the white virgin, which could evoke such fervid devotion only in a racially mixed society with aristocratic white leaders. Furthermore, Calvinistic repression of sex moved from New England to the South during the religious awakening of the early 1800s, with the consequent equating of sin and sex; the image of woman as temptress became the obverse of the image of woman as savior. Fiedler in Love and Death sums up this duality by saying that the underside of adoration was “fear and contempt”: women were goddesses or bitches. The

effect of the cult of the white virgin was to inhibit healthy sexuality in upper class white women and to make them frigid physically or psychologically. Mr. Compson in Absalom, Absalom! well described the white gentleman’s attitude toward women and his solution of his sexual problems. There were “three sharp divisions” of women: “ladies, women, females—the virgins whom gentlemen someday married, the courtesans to whom they went while on sabbaticals to the cities, the slave girls and women upon whom that first caste rested and to whom in certain cases it doubtless owed the very fact of its virginity . . .” (p. 109). Mr. Compson continued to explain how a young man on a plantation, with the first two classes inaccessible psychologically and financially, would turn to the accessible slave girls, among whom he could freely choose. Hence, the most prevalent sexual offense was miscegenation, but it was also in principle the most abhorred; miscegenation between a white woman and a Negro man was regarded as sodomy, punishable by summary death. The remoteness and exclusiveness of the plantation contributed to other sexual aberrations than miscegenation. In the absence of eligible companions of the opposite sex, narcissism, incest, or homosexuality might result from the aristocratic self-esteem and pride that sought the image of self in the loved one. The Gothic tradition had transmitted the theme of incest which Northrop Frye, in The Secular Scripture, showed to be recurrent in romance and which, according to J. M. S. Tompkins, pervaded the popular eighteenth-century novel. But the plantation society after the Civil War provided a scene in which “incest was a constant,” according to Andrew Lytle, not merely a literary convention which by that time had come to be regarded with horror. This was a defeated society, cherishing the myth of the past and fostering in the southern psyche elements characteristic of romance and the Gothic tradition, with their conservative and nostalgic attitude toward the past, to which Maurice Lévy’s observation that “man dreams to the right” perfectly applies. The southern myth was more aristocratic and conservative, especially in the later-settled states like Mississippi, than the past had actually been. The Gothic delight in landscape was gratified by the picturesque landscape of the South, with its moss-and-vine-draped trees and flamboyant flowers and mysterious forests and swamps. This natural setting was conducive to the paranoid “melodramatic vision”

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there is a complete lack in the United States; popular Gothic romances cherish the phony Gothic castles along the Palisades of the Hudson River. But the plantation world of antebellum days provided an analogy to feudal society and fostered chivalric ideals. The plantation aristocrat might see himself as like the lord of a manor, ruling over his serfs in a little world over which he held sovereign sway. This inclination toward medievalism accounted in part for the popularity in the South of Sir Walter Scott’s novels and, in turn, strengthened by the influence of Scott, provided the foundation of the southern myth of the past, with its ideal of noblesse oblige and its devotion to a lost cause. Although, according to Fiedler, in Love and Death, Scott had retained Gothic devices without penetrating to the meanings of Gothic, his novels preserved and transmitted the Gothic tradition in the South. The plantation house which, in its prosperity, had stood for the orderly life of a semi-feudal society, in its ruin and decay resembled the ruined castle in Gothic novels, symbolizing the collapse of the old order. As Jacques Cabau said: “Only the South was material rich enough to express in artistic terms all the aspects—religious, social, political, psychological—of the reaction.” The reaction was against liberalism and faith in human perfectibility: the most characteristic of the “artistic terms” chosen was Gothicism.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR MAX PUTZEL ON FAULKNER’S GOTHIC

Most obviously and perhaps most significantly, only the South could provide writers with an emotionally satisfying parallel for the ruined castle which was virtually the protagonist of early Gothic fiction. But the mood of tender melancholy inspired by the southern ruin had a personal, family, and community significance lacking in most haunted castles in which Gothic heroines were immured. The paintless and dilapidated mansion, vacant or inhabited, is still a familiar sight in the South, a reminder of glory and suffering only a century past, rather than a bit of stage scenery in a tale about distant times. The ghosts which haunt these southern ruins may be the living, like Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, who dwell in a past more real to them than the present and who have rejected the modern world which offers them no gratifications commensurate with those of the myth of the past. The cult of the past in the South, as symbolized in its ruins, its preserved glories displayed in spring pilgrimages, its monuments and graveyards, owes less to cultural climate and imagination than to remembered history. In the South new intensity reanimates the original Gothic feeling for ruins as described by Montague Summers: “The ruin was a sacred relic, a memorial, a symbol of infinite sadness, of tenderest sensibility and regret.” The southern ruin also is a symbol of a legendary Golden Age little more than a century past.

One effect of all the several Gothic revivals was to domesticate the past and make it uniquely our own—whatever ownership might claim it. In England and then in Germany that past was felt to be distinct from the mysterious lost perfection of Greece or Rome. Its crumbling, ivied ruins betokened authority overcome and mouldering decay, lost greatness and failing powers. I think that Faulkner’s impression of his American past is an accelerated panorama of similar decay and decline. He sees Southern chivarly as a belated but genuine survival of medieval values and faith. It arose as the product of a noble dream and perished in the nightmare of civil war, victim of mercenary force and sterile philistinism. There is a dreamlike quality to the sequence of disclosure in Absalom. We perceive through the medium of Quentin’s meandering, helpless search—the dreamer’s agony in bondage to that with which he has no strength to cope. SOURCE: Putzel, Max. “What Is Gothic About Absalom, Absalom!?” Southern Literary Journal 4, no. 1 (1971): 3-19.

described by Eric Bentley: “We are being persecuted, and we hold that all things, living and dead, are combining to persecute us.” “The landscape in Light in August,” Francois Pitavy said, “is never immutable or dead: motion still inhabits it and is potentially present, as in the stilled characters. Indeed, as in a dream or nightmare, the shadows tremble and bulge monstrously, and the landscape slowly alters. . . .” The landscape is “a projection or a reflection” of the characters. One is not surprised when Pitavy concludes: “The Faulknerian landscape in Light in August is above all the image of a state of mind.” The reality, as seen by Doc Peabody, conditioned its inhabitants: rivers and land were “opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image” (As I Lay Dying, p. 44). The South was an agrarian society, hostile to the urban North and to evil cities, the scenes of

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southerners’ own premeditated sins—an attitude shared with southerners by Romanticism and the Romantic decadence. London, the sum of felicity to Dr. Samuel Johnson in the age of reason, was the City of Dreadful Night to James Thomson in the next century.

In The Return of the Vanishing American Leslie Fiedler’s summing up of the significance of the southern plantation setting, with references to southern writers from Poe through William Faulkner to Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote, suggests why the Gothic mode was naturalized particularly and uniquely in the South and why Yoknapatawpha was conceived in the Gothic tradition: . . . the Southern, as opposed to the Northern, does not avoid but seeks melodrama, a series of bloody events, sexual by implication at least, played out in the blood-heat of a “long hot summer” against a background of miasmal swamps, live oak, Spanish moss, and the decaying plantation house so dear to the hearts of moviemakers. . . . The mode of the Southern is Gothic, American Gothic, and the Gothic requires a haunted house at its center. It demands also a symbolic darkness to cloak its action. . . .

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To discern the new meaning in the old formulas, the reader must recognize what the writer could choose from in the Gothic tradition, what he did choose, and how he transformed a type of fiction originally distanced in time and space to deal with recent or present realities, often of universal urgency, the nightmares that do not vanish with the dawn. William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels cover the whole range of American Gothic; his original modifications and modulations of Gothic elements are uniquely combined with non-Gothic, daylight views of the same society, within individual works or in the extended scope of the Yoknapatawpha chronicles.

Bibliography The following works of fiction and nonfiction by William Faulkner are published in New York by Random House.

Yoknapatawpha novels and stories: Flags in the Dust, ed. Douglas Day. 1973. Sartoris. © 1929, 1956. The Sound and the Fury. Modern Library College ed., photographic reproduction of 1st printing, 7 October 1929. Sanctuary. © 1931, 1958. Light in August. Vintage ed., photographic reproduction of 1st printing, 6 October 1932. Absalom, Absalom! Modern Library ed., facsimile of 1st ed., 1936. The Unvanquished. Photographic reproduction of 1st printing, 15 February 1938. Go Down, Moses. Modern Library ed., © 1942.

Intruder in the Dust. 12th printing, © 1948.

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Thus, the South provided William Faulkner and other southern writers with a reality which could be depicted with the strong contrasts of the Gothic genre to reveal social and psychological truths less accessible to purely objective and realistic treatment. Seldom, however, does modern southern Gothic play it straight and depict society and characters in terms of the myth and the tradition, as in the old-fashioned historical novel about the South or the modern popular Gothic romance. With a foundation of realistic displacement which conceals Gothic structure beneath the representation of modern society, all the strategies of point of view, discontinuity, ironic inversion, exaggeration, and parody are employed to give new meaning to old formulas, to “penetrate the instinctual reservoirs out of which terror arises,” as Dr. Kubie said, or in Fiedler’s words in The Vanishing American, to evoke “the nightmare terror,” the “blackness of darkness.”

Knight’s Gambit. 4th printing, © 1949. Collected Stories of William Faulkner. N.d. Requiem for a Nun. N.d.; © 1950, 1951.

Works Cited KEY: Italicized numbers indicate pages of [William Faulkner’s Gothic Domain] on which reference to cited work appears. Numbers following colon indicate the specific page reference in the cited work. Appel, Alfred. “The Grotesque and the Gothic.” A Season of Dreams: The Fiction of Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969, pp. 73-103. [21: 74] Baumbach, Jonathan. The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. New York: New York University Press, 1965. [22: 15] Bentley, Eric. “Melodrama.” Tragedy: Vision and Form. Ed. Robert W. Corrigan. San Francisco: Chandler, 1965, pp. 217-31. [17: 223, 222; 18: 221; 26: 221;] Bross, Addison C. “Soldiers’ Pay and the Art of Aubrey Beardsley.” American Quarterly 19 (Spring 1967): 3-23. [19: 23, 6] Cabau, Jacques. La Prairie perdue: histoire du roman américain. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966. [24: 228; 25: 57] Conley, Timothy K. “Beardsley and Faulkner.” Journal of Modern Literature 5 (September 1976): 339-56. [19: 348] Ehrstine, John. “Byron and the Metaphysic of SelfDestruction.” The Gothic Imagination. Ed. G. R. Thompson. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1974, pp. 94-108. [18: 94, 95] Eliade Mircea. The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. [23: 121, 66] Ferguson, Robert C. “The Grotesque in the Fiction of William Faulkner.” Ph.D. dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 1971. [20] Fiedler, Leslie A. “The Dream of the New.” American Dreams, American Nightmares. Ed. David Madden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970, pp. 19-28. [16: 24, 26, 27] ———. Love and Death in the American Novel. Rev. ed., New York: Dell, Delta Books, 1967. 16: 205, 369, 421 17: 179, 181 17: 134, 34 18: 38 19: 296 23: 128, 26 25: 172, 194 26: 259, 312 ———. The Return of the Vanishing American. New York: Stein and Day, 1969. [24: 134; 28: 18] Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. 23: 15 26: 5 Hartman, Geoffrey H. “Romanticism and ‘Anti-SelfConsciousness,’” Romanticism and Consciousness. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Norton, 1970, pp. 46-56. [24: 51] Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. [16: 24, 27]

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———. “The Novel of Outrage: A Minority Voice in Postwar American Fiction.” American Scholar 34 (Spring 1965): 239-53. [16: 252] ———. Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. [21: 78; 23: 118] ———. “The Victim: Images of Evil in Recent American Fiction.” College English 21 (December 1959): 140-46. [20: 145] Hume, Robert D. “Exuberant Gloom, Existential Agony, and Heroic Despair: Three Varieties of Negative Romanticism.” The Gothic Imagination. Ed. G. R. Thompson. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1974, pp. 109-27. [17: 112] Kayser, Wolfgang. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Trans. Ulrich Weisstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. [20: 188] Kubie, Lawrence S., M.D. “William Faulkner’s Sanctuary.” Saturday Review of Literature (20 October 1934). Rpt. in Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robert Penn Warren. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966, pp. 137-46. [28: 139] Lévy, Maurice. Le Roman “Gothique” anglais, 1764-1824. Toulouse: Association des publications de la faculté des lettres et sciences humaines de Toulouse, 1968. [19: 71, 53; 26: 612] Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. Supernatural Horror in Literature, with a new introduction by E. F. Bleiler. Republication of 1945 ed., New York: Dover, 1973. [18: 13; 18: 37; 20: 19] Lytle, Andrew. “The Working Novelist and the Mythmaking Process.” Daedalus (Spring 1959), pp. 326—38. [26: 331] Malin, Irvng. “Flannery O’Connor and the Grotesque.” The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O’Connor. Eds. Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson. New York: Fordham University Press, 1966, pp. 108-22. [20: 108] ———. New American Gothic. Crosscurrents: Modern Critiques. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. [20: 4, 9; 22: 11, 80; 23: 106] Martin, Carter W. The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969. [24: 160] Monk, Samuel. “The Sublime: Burke’s Inquiry.” Romanticism and Consciousness. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Norton, 1970, pp. 24-41. [19: 27, 39] Newton, Eric. The Romantic Rebellion. New York: Schocken, 1964. [17: 130] O’Connor, William Van. The Grotesque: An American Genre and Other Essays. Crosscurrents: Modern Critiques. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. [23: 19] Phillips, Robert S. “The Gothic Architecture of The Member of the Wedding.” Renascence 16 (Winter 1964): 59-72. [23: 60; 24: 63] Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Trans. Angus Davidson. 1933; rpt. New York: Meridian, 1951. [17] Railo, Eino. The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. 1927; rpt. New York: Humanities Press, 1964. [18; 19: 49]

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Smith, James L. Melodrama. The Critical Idiom, no. 28. London: Methuen, 1973. [17: 17, 26-27, 34, 39] Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. 1938; rpt. New York: Russell, 1964. [17: 397] Thompson, G. R., ed. The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1975. [22: 6] Thomson, Philip. The Grotesque. The Critical Idiom, no. 24. London: Methuen, 1972. [20: 27] Tompkins, J. M. S. The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800. 1932; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. [26: 62] Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. New York: Collier Books, 1963. [22: 20]

TITLE COMMENTARY “A Rose for Emily” JAMES M. MELLARD (ESSAY DATE FALL 1986) SOURCE: Mellard, James M. “Faulkner’s Miss Emily and Blake’s ‘Sick Rose’: ‘Invisible Worm,’ Nachträglichkeit, and Retrospective Gothic.” Faulkner Journal 2, no. 1 (fall 1986): 37-45. In the following essay, Mellard argues that in “A Rose for Emily” Faulkner utilizes William Blake’s “The Sick Rose” as a source and inspiration for his Gothic narrative. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. —Shakespeare

Perhaps the last thing the world needs just now is another study of Faulkner’s macabre masterpiece, “A Rose for Emily.” Least of all, perhaps, do we need another suggestion regarding the story’s plot sources, titular allusions, or literary analogues. By now the most frequently anthologized and, therefore, the most frequently written about story in the Faulkner canon, Faulkner’s “Rose” has been rooted in everything from the author’s own verse to Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover,” from John Crowe Ransom’s “Emily Hardcastle, Spinster,” to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Helen,” from Hawthorne’s “White Old Maid” to Dickens’ Miss Havisham, to say nothing of Oxford’s Captain Jack Hume and Miss Mary Louise Neilson.1 The only question in the story as vexed as where Faulkner got it is that of chronology,2 which also hinges on Miss Emily’s origins, at least as far as her year of birth is concerned. But we live in a world of the superfluous, the gratuitous— whether of the word or of violence; so it will come

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I Many different figures from literature have been suggested by scholars as Faulkner’s “source” for the story’s title. Moreover, Faulkner himself has contributed to the probable misunderstanding regarding the nature of the titular rose. He has either been rather vague about its significance— “It was just ‘A Rose for Emily’—that’s all” (Inge 22)—or has suggested that the idea for the story came from an entirely different image—“from a picture of the strand of hair on the pillow” (Inge 22). Thus, readers have tended to look for some salutary image of the rose, and have consequently thought in terms of Gertrude Stein’s a “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” Robert Burns’s “Oh, my luve is like a red, red rose,” or Shakespeare’s “That which we call a rose by an other name would smell as sweet” (Inge ix). Indeed, Faulkner did contribute to the notion that the titular gesture was an acknowledgement of triumph; he told a Japanese audience at Nagano that the title “was . . . allegorical; the meaning was, here was a woman who had had a tragedy, an irrevocable tragedy and nothing could be done about it, and I pitied her and this was a salute . . . To a woman you would hand a rose” (Inge 81). With Faulkner causing interference, it is no wonder that readers have not looked to the lines in Blake that virtually delineate the tale. O rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.3

Anyone who knows Faulkner’s story will see the Blakean parallels immediately. The “rose” that is taken by Miss Emily in tribute can be none other than Homer Barron, the lover she murdered, ap-

parently by arsenic poisoning, and stashed in her bedroom for some forty years of nocturnal ministrations. In this context, we can say that Miss Emily has to be the “invisible worm” whose “dark secret love / Does thy life destroy”—that is, destroys the life of the Homeric rose, the romantic lover, or, shall we say, the Barronic hero. Or, on a more abstract level, we might say that the worm is merely Miss Emily’s murderous love, for it is love that serves as the worm of destruction, finding Homer’s bed and turning it into one “Of crimson joy.” A reading of the story could turn on either interpretation, perhaps, but in fact Faulkner’s text makes it rather dificult to deny that the conquering worm is in there somewhere. And, indeed, that worm, after years of battening upon the now blind Homer, would look a lot like Miss Emily herself. Faulkner includes clear evidence in the story that Miss Emily has been transformed into the deadly, invisible worm. His precise pictures of her show the change. As a young woman, before Homer appears, she is seen as “a slender figure in white,” cast into the background behind her father, “a spraddled silhouette in the foreground” (CS [Collected Stories of William Faulkner] 123). Still young, but following the much-mourned death of that spraddled-legged parent, she is seen with her hair “cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows—sort of tragic and serene” (CS 124). Pictured twice before Homer’s demise, Miss Emily is pictured twice afterwards, too. Six months after Homer had last been seen in Jefferson, Miss Emily is seen again for the first time: “she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray.” Here, Faulkner makes much of her graying locks: “During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-andsalt irongray, when it ceased turning.” Moreover, Faulkner makes of the hair a metonym of Emily’s now somewhat masculine vitality: “Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man” (CS 127-28). Later in her life, though the account comes earlier in the narration, Miss Emily is seen again. She is “a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face,

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as no surprise that I shall propose yet one more possible source, analogue, allusion—this one in William Blake’s “The Sick Rose.” I want to do so, however, in the context of a reading of the story as an innovative version of the Gothic. I believe that Faulkner’s apparent allusion to Blake is a direct reflection of the retrospective Gothic form of the story, but the necessary retrospection, which causes readers to have missed the “sick rose” and the “invisible worm” lurking there, also reflects a psychoanalytic phenomenon called Nachtraglichkeit or “deferred action” that helps to account for the story’s unsettling appeal.

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looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough” (CS 121). Not a pretty sight, is she? But would a nice Southern Belle like Miss Emily stoop to conquer a man like Homer—a Northerner and a day laborer, to boot—and in that ghoulish way? Faulkner’s text suggests rather strongly that, indeed, she had done so. The townsfolk in Jefferson think that she is a bit crazy, perhaps inheriting insanity from her aunt on the Alabama side of her kin—from “old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman” (CS 125), over whose estate Emily’s father had had a falling out with those relatives. Miss Emily does try, we know, to hold on to a body longer than the ordinary. When her father had died, Faulkner writes, she had put off the town’s delegation of mourners, meeting “them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly” (CS 123-24). The story, thus, establishes that—given the opportunity—she would keep a body around just for moral support, if not an immoral rapport. “We did not say she was crazy then,” says our narrator; “We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will” (CS 124). But would she lie with the body? Again, the text makes it pretty clear that she had, though it does not make clear for just how many nights or for how many years after Homer’s death. As all who know the story can say, the telltale bit of evidence is Miss Emily’s hair. We have seen already the emphasis Faulkner places on its color—its graying over the years, becoming “that vigorous iron-gray” (CS 128). Thus, when, upon the opening up of the above stairs bedroom that had become Homer’s mausoleum, “a long strand of iron-gray hair” (CS 130) was noticed on the second pillow, next to Homer’s, it is as if Miss Emily has left her personal signature. Not only had she killed Homer and lain next to the corpse, she also had grown fat as a result. Faulkner makes that plain. In this case the sign lies in a difference: she is thin before Homer, and even “thinner than usual” (CS 125) when she buys the arsenic for doing him in. Within six months of his demise, she is the fat, pallid, bloated body one expects to turn

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out from under a log, or pull out of stagnant water, or find beneath the fleshless shell of a decomposed cadaver.

II By now almost every detail of “A Rose for Emily” is familiar to most readers before they ever actually read the story. At least, readers now almost invariably know in advance what the townspeople will find when they break into that dusty bridal suite. From the beginning, readers have found the story’s ending so shocking that very soon a sort of mythology arose around it as it took on a life of its own, particularly in the critical reactions to Faulkner’s work. This reaction has meant that new readers of the story are seldom “innocent” any more. If they are truly innocent, they may well miss the point. Robert Crosman, in a recent article called “How Readers Make Meaning,” recounts an experience he had teaching the story. He and the students were expected to keep journals of their reading responses. Crosman’s own journal entry records the response one is more likely to find among sophisticated readers who nonetheless have not read it before: “This is a story I had never actually read,” he says, “though I had heard of it, read something about it, and in particular knew its ending, which kept me from feeling the pure shock that the reader must feel who knows nothing of what is coming. Even so I felt a shock, and reacted with an audible cry of mingled loathing and pleasure at the final and most shocking discovery: that Emily has slept with this cadaver for forty years” (Crosman 207). His student named “Stacy,” however, read entirely around the presumably crucial Gothic elements: “On questioning, she said that Emily’s poisoning of Homer remained shadowy and hypothetical in her mind, and she had completely missed the implication of the strand of Emily’s hair found on the pillow next to the corpse. Instead, Stacy had written a rather poetic reverie about her grandmother, of whom she was strongly reminded by Emily” (Crosman 209). These rather different responses may simply represent different “styles of reading,” as Norman Holland or George L. Dillon might suggest. Stacy would represent, for instance, what Dillon calls the “Character-Action Moral” (CAM) reader, Crosman the “Digger-for-Secrets.”4 But to attribute readings of the story to personal styles of reading is to denigrate—if not deny—the role played by the form of the story itself in shaping readerly and, perhaps, informed critical responses. The same denial, perforce, would pertain to the role of

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The most extensive reading of the story as conventional Gothic is by Edward Stone.5 But Stone simply misses the way in which Faulkner modifies the genre. He notes the presence of the aging recluse in the “majestic stronghold” of a decaying mansion (Stone 86) in his comparison of Faulkner’s to George Washington Cable’s story, “Jeanah Poquelin” (1879). But the innovation he recognizes in both Cable and Faulkner is their emphasis on a particular “time and place” (Stone 86); of Faulkner, he says, “With ‘A Rose for Emily’ morbidity is domesticated in the American small town” (Stone 86). Stone, of course, is correct in these judgments, but he is quite wrong in most of his other claims because he does not pay attention to the effect of the retrospective form Faulkner creates. Stone calls Miss Emily a “pathetic yet sinister relic” (Stone 88), but in fact she is not sinister (as Crosman’s “Stacy” illustrates) until one looks back over the story-as-narrated (its récit as opposed to its histoire). Stone is correct in claiming that the story does not maintain suspense, but he is wrong in his reason for making the claim. There is little or no suspense as such because the

story does not engender in the reading process an anticipation of some particular type of event or climax. The question that readers will have is much more primitive, almost like that of the auditor of a shaggy-dog story: what is the point of the tale or, even, is there a point to it? Stone claims, however, that “not only do we early anticipate the final outcome with a fair degree of accuracy: for this very reason we are imbued with the horror of the heroine’s personality at every step throughout the story, and thus in her case the basic mystery outlives the working out of the plot” (Stone 95). In this respect, the story, says Stone, is comparable to Poe’s “A Cask of Amontillado”: “both stories have a total horror, rather than a climax of horror, for in both we are given at the start a distinct impression of the moral depravity of the central figure, and the following pages deliberately heighten that impression rather than merely solve for us a mystery that the opening pages have set forth” (Stone 95). But Stone is simply wrong inasmuch as he is speaking of the process of interpretation that goes on during the reading. Crosman’s naive readers demonstrate that such claims about the story’s “total horror” or Miss Emily’s sinister depravity can only be made retrospectively; only from the end can the “precise prodigality” (Stone 95) of clues Faulkner indeed scatters throughout be put together to form a horrifying Gothic heroine of Miss Emily, “a necrophile or a veritable saprophytic organism” (Stone rightly notes) that grows fat from her ghoulish marriage (Stone 96-7). Faulkner’s story is Gothic, but it is not common so much as retrospective Gothic.

III In his own journal entries on “A Rose for Emily,” Crosman points to another dimension of this story and the Gothic form generally. Crosman notes that “the whole feeling of the story is of a mystery, something to do with male-female relationships, as well as time, perhaps, but a mystery one doesn’t entirely want solved” (Crosman 208). He goes on to say that his response is governed largely by a “considerable fear of the discovery I know is waiting, the sex-and-death thing, though there is a fascination, too” (Crosman 208). Crosman recognizes this combination of fear and fascination as Oedipal, likely to “give comfort to literary Freudians” (Crosman 208). For what I saw in “A Rose for Emily” was pretty certainly a “primal scene.” Both my fear and my interest, my loathing and pleasure, derived, at

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the generic shape or tradition of the story. Do readers not respond to familiar genres? Once a story has been classified, most critics believe, generic classification not only will have a bearing on what we read and how we read, but also on when we read the generic signals into it. The instant mythologization of the ending of “A Rose for Emily,” where its genre is concerned, has caused most readers to overlook one of Faulkner’s innovations. As most critics, if not the more naive student-readers, recognize, the story belongs to the tradition of the literary Gothic. But not even the critics have recognized its innovation within the form of the Gothic: its being what can only be called retrospective Gothic. Unlike the Gothic stories and novels most of us know, “A Rose for Emily” is Gothic after the fact, not before. That is, we recognize the story’s details as part of a total Gothic form only after we read through to the ending. Then, we look back over the story or our experience of the story and say, “Oh, that’s what was going on.” Our response, thus, is likely to be that of the person who has learned that the strange landscape she was just passing by is a graveyard, or it might be that of the person who has just realized he’s missed being in a terrible accident, say, on a plane that later crashes. The chill of terror comes, yes, but it comes later, deferred, after the fact. That is the effect, I think, of the retrospective form of Gothic Faulkner has created in “A Rose for Emily.”

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trauma, but the traumatic memory was only secondarily traumatic: we never manage to fix the traumatic event historically” (LDP 41), a situation Laplanche compares to Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy in physics: “in situating the trauma, one cannot appreciate its traumatic impact, and vice versa” (LDP 41).

least in part, from remembered childish speculation as to what went on in the parental bedroom. The structure of the story’s plot is to set up a dark and impenetrable mystery—what is troubling Emily?—and to penetrate deeper and deeper into her past in hopes of getting an answer. Formally the pleasure is derived from solving the mystery, but the solution is a shocking one. (Crosman 208)

What Crosman suggests here about the specific tale seems very accurate, but his perception also points to a dimension implicit in the genre of the Gothic. This dimension is certainly Freudian and Oedipal, but it also relates to the psychoanalytic concept of Nachträglichkeit or “deferred action.” The concept of Nachträglichkeit is persistent in Freud’s theories of repression, primal fantasies, and psychical cause and effect. According to Laplanche and Pontalis, the authors of the authoritative The Language of Psycho-Analysis, “The credit for drawing attention to the importance of this term must go to Jacques Lacan” (LP-A 111). The notion has become important today because it modifies somewhat the usual understanding that for Freud every neurosis was to be attributed to an actual event, one usually occurring in the early life of the subject. The concept of “deferred action” suggests, instead, that it is the reinterpretation of an earlier event or scene in light of a later one and within certain structures emanating from culture or language or the register that Lacan (not Freud) calls the Symbolic. Laplanche, for example, in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis shows how Freud’s analysis of “Emma” in that famous casehistory illustrates the way in which the subject’s “primal” experience of seduction or sexual assault by an adult is neither remembered nor pathogenic until a second scene triggers the memory at a time when Emma is then sexually mature enough to attribute sexual motives to the original molestor. Emma’s phobia is a fear of entering stores by herself. The onset of the fear at age twelve occurred upon her observing two store clerks laughing—she thinks at her clothes. Freud’s analysis shows, however, that this scene is associated with another one that had occurred when Emma was about eight years old and her clothes were twice grabbed in her genital area by a shopkeeper. Laplanche’s commentary on Freud’s analysis points out that “the first scene does not penetrate into consciousness with its full meaning of assault but does so through an entirely extraneous [metonymic] element: the clothes” (LDP 41). Moreover—and this is particularly important to Lacan’s rereading of Freud—“we try to track down the

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I would argue that the normal or ordinary first reading of “A Rose for Emily” would illustrate this concept of “deferred action,” which might better be called deferred interpretation. In effect, there are two crucial scenes represented in the tale. In temporal order, the first is the scene in which Miss Emily “seduces” Homer Barron in her upstairs bedroom: this is the scene of the “parental bedroom,” as Crosman puts it, but it is also associated at the same time with other evidences of mysterious and potentially dangerous activity—the purchase of the arsenic and, later, the unexplained odor emanating from the mystified scene (the old house). The second scene in the temporal order is that of the discovery of the skeleton on the bed in the upstairs bedroom and the strand of gray hair on the pillow with the indentation of a person’s head. The “deferred action” here is defined in the way in which the details of the second scene suddenly cause a reinterpretation of the details of the other, earlier scene. Now, Homer Barron’s disappearance is explained as a function of the explanation of the purchase of the arsenic and the subsequent emanation of the foul odor from the old Grierson house. All at once, then, the earlier details of the story become Gothic—in the way that, within the boundaries of Nachträglichkeit, earlier scenes become “Oedipal” or scenes of seduction or sexual assault. In the reading of “A Rose for Emily,” I suggest, one’s sudden chill or thrill at the recognition of the sexual and thanatic significance of the earlier scene (or scenes, for the number is not so important as the deferred interpretation) is indeed—as Crosman suggests— related to the significance of sexuality and the vital order. It is the combination of the sexual and the thanatic that makes Faulkner’s story so effective as a Gothic tale, retrospective or otherwise. For the core of the Gothic is the fusion of the two elements of sex and death, especially forbidden or incestuous sex and the most heinous of mortal crimes—parricide and other versions of family murder such as matricide, fratricide, or infanticide. Incest and family murder underlie Poe’s Gothic tales, for example, as they have underlain other classic Gothics since the first—Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). In Walpole, for instance,

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From a Freudian-cum-Lacanian perspective, the classic Gothic and, especially, its rather transparent symbols interpret some of the motivations underlying “A Rose for Emily.” The classic question is simply, “What does Miss Emily want?” Walpole’s answer (filtered through Freud) would be, she wants a night with a giant saber; a Lacanian answer would be that she wants the plenitude of power and knowledge associated with the place of the Father (in the structure of the unconscious) and symbolized in the Phallus. In the simplest psychoanalytic terms, she wants to hang on to the father himself, for he is of course the symbol of that Phallus. If she cannot have him in life, then she will keep the body as an object that stands for him, a desire expressed in her effort to keep his corpse from proper burial (a feat she does manage, Faulkner tells us, for three days, after which, were this a tale of the Christian scapegoat, instead of a phallic surrogate, she might have expected it to rise again). But if she cannot

have the father, who loomed over her in life and then loomed over her in death, then she will have a substitute. Enter Homer Barron. This time she will hang on to her symbol of phallic power in life and in death. But her behavior, finally, does make of Homer a ritually slain “god” whose powers can be claimed through contiguity—the transfer achieved by physical proximity or even ingestion. What makes the thought of Emily’s sexual acts with Homer’s corpse so repulsive to any reader is the evidence Faulkner gives us that it is oral, not genital; not merely necrophiliac, but also—as Stone astutely observes—saprophitic or, perhaps more accurately, saprophagous. The two signs that Faulkner gives us that link Emily, bodily, to Homer’s cadaver are the gray strand of hair and the odious obesity that overtakes her after she has murdered the man. Faulkner’s strategic emphasis on her repulsive shape—“bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue” (CS 121)—really makes absurd the interpretation of John V. Hagopian et al.—that the hair was placed beside Homer “as a gesture of grief and farewell” (Inge 79). Emily’s gesture certainly has to do with grief and farewell, for it has indubitably to do with death. But the significance of the gesture, finally, is more properly associated not with some noble chivalric token, but with Blake’s song of experience celebrating the penetration of the sick rose by the invisible worm of mortality. Thus, “A Rose for Emily” suggests the principle that Laplanche outlines in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis—that human sexuality, the sex drive, is less associated with life than, finally, with death. Such may be the reason Faulkner’s story has aroused very intense reader-response and critical debate.

Notes 1. These different suggestions have been made, respectively, by Going (Faulkner), Edwards and Winchell (Browning), Barber and Levitt (Ransom), Stevens and Stronks (Poe), Barnes (Hawthorne), and Stewart (Dickens). I should add that Inge (ed.), William Faulkner: A Rose for Emily includes many of the most interesting essays written on the story, and I am very grateful to him for providing me with a copy of the out-of-print book. 2. See the essays by Going, McGlynn, Nebeker, Sullivan, Wilson, and Woodward. 3. See Bidney (278), who suggests an allusion to Blake’s image of the “worm” in Faulkner’s Light in August, but he does not refer to “A Rose for Emily.” I am not aware that any other critic has made this suggestion about Blake and Faulkner. I have not been able to find

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Manfred (the Gothic villain) intends to marry off his son to a young woman (Isabella), but when the son is killed beneath a mysterious gigantic helmet, Manfred decides he will marry Isabella himself. But when she comes under the protection of her father—so Freudianly named the Knight of the Gigantic Sabre—Manfred decides to trade his own daughter (Matilda) to the Knight, thus creating the possibility of two unnatural weddings. But the good Knight (upon dire warnings from the spirit world) chooses to give up Matilda, whom Manfred by mistake later murders, thinking to stab his betrothed Isabella instead. His crime leaves the true heir of the Castle—Theodore, son of good Father Jerome—to marry Isabella, daughter of the Knight who appears in the image of Alfonso the Good, original owner of the Castle whose ownership Manfred had usurped. Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a stripped down, highly condensed version of such Gothic goings on. In place of all the doubling of parents and children found in Walpole, Poe collapses all— parents and children—into just the two remaining Ushers—Roderick and Madeline. They have to stand for the paternal and the maternal forces and for the son and the daughter, but also for the groom and the bride, as well as for the murderer and his victim. Thus, Poe gives us the inevitable incest and the family murder, in addition to the thrill of the double discovery of eros and thanatos, in one dense, Narcissistic, mirror-laden tale. It is no wonder—from a psychoanalytic viewpoint— that “The Fall of the House of Usher” has been so persistent a reader’s favorite over the years.

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evidence in Blotner or in Blotner’s William Faulkner’s Library: A Catalogue that Faulkner is likely to have read “The Sick Rose” in any volumes he owned by 1929 when he wrote the story. 4. A third readerly style, not illustrated here, is that of the “Anthropologist,” who looks for cultural norms and values, and who would be represented by, say, Feminist or Marxist or other “ideological” critics (see Allen’s essay as a recent example). 5. See Benton for a discussion of the central issues in the Gothic; see Carothers for discussions of Faulkner’s habits of style, composition, and genre in his short fiction.

———, and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith; Intro. Daniel Lagache. New York: Norton, 1973. Levitt, Paul. “An Analogue for Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily.’” Papers on Language and Literature 9 (Winter 1973): 91-4. McGlynn, Paul D. “The Chronology of ‘A Rose for Emily.’” Studies in Short Fiction 6 (Summer 1969): 461-62. Nebeker, Helen E. “Chronology Revised.” Studies in Short Fiction 8 (Summer 1971): 471-73. Stevens, Aretta J. “Faulkner and ‘Helen’: A Further Note.” Poe Newsletter 1 (October 1968): 31.

Works Cited Allen, Dennis W. “Horror and Perverse Delight: Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily.’” Modern Fiction Studies 30.4 (Winter 1984): 685-96. Barber, Marion. “The Two Emilys: A Ransom Suggestion to Faulkner?” Notes on Mississippi Writers 6 (Winter 1973): 103-05. Barnes, Daniel R. “Faulkner’s Miss Emily and Hawthorne’s Old Maid.” Studies in Short Fiction 9 (Fall 1972): 373-77. Benton, Richard P. “The Problem of Literary Gothicism.” ESQ 18 (1972): 1-5. Bidney, Martin. “Faulkner’s Variations on Romantic Themes: Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley in Light in August.” Mississippi Quarterly 38.3 (Summer 1985): 277-86. Blotner, Joseph. William Faulkner’s Library: A Catalogue. Charlottesville: U. of Virginia Press, 1964. Carothers, James B. William Faulkner’s Short Stories. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985. Crosman, Robert. “How Readers Make Meaning.” College Literature 9.3 (1982): 207-15. Cullen, John B., with Floyd C. Watkins. Old Times in the Faulkner Country. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1961. Dillon, George L. “Styles of Reading.” Poetics Today 3.2 (1982): 77-88. Edwards, C.H., Jr. “Three Literary Parallels to Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily.’” Notes on Mississippi Writers 7 (Spring 1984): 21-5. Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” In Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Random, 1950: 119-30. Going, William T. “Chronology in Teaching ‘A Rose for Emily.’” Exercise Exchange 5 (February 1958): 8-11. ———. “Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily.” Explicator 16 (February 1958): Item 27. Hagopian, John V., and Martin Dolch. “A Rose for Emily.” Insight I: Analyses of American Literature. Frankfurt am Main: Hirschgraben-Verlag, 1964: 43-50. Holland, Norman N. “Fantasy and Defense in Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily.’” Hartford Studies in Literature 4 (1972): 1-35. ———. 5 Readers Reading. New Haven, CT: Yale U. P., 1975. Inge, M. Thomas, ed. William Faulkner: A Rose for Emily. Columbus, OH: Merrill, 1970.

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Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1976.

Stewart, James Tate. “Miss Havisham and Miss Grierson” Furman Studies 6 (Fall 1958): 21-3. Stone, Edward. A Certain Morbidness: A View of American Literature. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois U. P., 1969: 85-100. Stronks, James. “A Poe Source for Faulkner? ‘To Helen’ and ‘A Rose for Emily.’” Poe Newsletter 1 (April 1968): 11. Sullivan, Ruth. “The Narrator in ‘A Rose for Emily.’” Journal of Narrative Technique 1 (September 1971): 159-78. Wilson, G. R., Jr. “The Chronology of Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’ Again.” Notes on Mississippi Writers 5 (Fall 1972): 44, 56, 58-62. Winchell, Mark Royden. “‘For All the Heart’s Endeavor’: Romantic Pathology in Browning and Faulkner.” Notes on Mississippi Writers 15.2 (1983): 57-63. Woodward, Robert H. “The Chronology of ‘A Rose for Emily.’” Exercise Exchange 13 (March 1966): 17-19.

Sanctuary TERRY HELLER (ESSAY DATE SUMMER 1989) SOURCE: Heller, Terry. “Mirrored Worlds and the Gothic in Faulkner’s Sanctuary.” Mississippi Quarterly 42, no. 3 (summer 1989): 247-59. In the following essay, Heller focuses on Faulkner’s use of mirrors in Sanctuary as it relates to the convention of mirroring in Gothic fiction.

In Sanctuary Faulkner presents a mirror structure, the underworld of bootlegging and prostitution mirroring the respectable world of law and order. This mirroring is extended from the world to characters and to language. William Patrick Day’s study of the Gothic tradition, In the Circles of Fear and Desire,1 suggests a fruitful way of interpreting the meanings of this mirroring in relation to romantic definitions of sexual identity. Interpreters of Sanctuary have noted the multiple appearances of mirrors, the first being Horace’s discovery of Popeye mirrored in the spring from which Horace drinks. For each of the

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There is enough symmetry here to establish a mirror relationship between the two worlds, but not so much and so exact a symmetry as to suggest that the underworld is merely a fantasy projection of the respectable world. This rough and limited symmetry distinguishes Sanctuary from the central works of the Gothic tradition where it appears that “the Gothic world,” as Day argues, is not a representation of the real world, but rather, a fantasy projection of the unconscious side of a romantic imagination (Day, pp. 27-42). Sanctuary’s underworld is pointedly not fantastic, though it is presented with techniques that make it seem alien and “unreal” to those respectable characters who come into contact with it. Even though this underworld is not merely a fantastic projection of the unconscious of particular characters, it is a projection. The underworld of Sanctuary exists in part because respectable society needs it; it is a real projection of the respectable world. The underworld exists to provide alcohol to respectable Virginia gentlemen, to provide the services of prostitution to the “biggest” lawyers, politicians, and other civic leaders in the area, as Reba repeatedly reminds her visitors, and to cooperate with political powers such as Eustace Graham, to maintain the status quo. Reba’s comments on the protection she enjoys in Memphis emphasize the degree to which her institution, illegal and disreputable, is nevertheless essential and valued. The underworld mirrors the respectable world in a particular way; it reveals those parts of society that belong to its “unconscious,” which are placed out of sight, repressed but not eliminated. The mirroring underworld points to the fictionality of respectable society, to its pretense that its ideology is comprehensive. Even though the underworld has a real existence and real functions in relation to the respectable world, there is a sense in which

it is also a fantasy. For example, respectable characters often make use of the underworld to maintain fantasies of self and social relations. The usefulness of the split worlds is obvious, for example, in the cases of Narcissa and Reba. Narcissa is a respectable widow with no apparent desire to marry. She has found a socially acceptable feminine identity in which she is completely independent of male domination. She has no desire to change, and she ruthlessly, even viciously, maintains her position. Reba occupies a similar position in the underworld, though she appears less ruthless, perhaps because her position depends less on appearances than Narcissa’s does. Reba, too, will do whatever is necessary to protect her position from real threats, and she has no compunctions about helping Popeye to hold Temple prisoner. Narcissa’s independence from male domination depends, at least in part, upon the services Reba’s business provides, satisfying the sexual drives of respectable men so that they may do without the services of respectable women. Likewise, Reba’s business depends to some extent upon the various reasons respectable women have for avoiding sex, one of which is to avoid submission to men. This convenient arrangement is one symptom of the social sickness of which the split in the world is a major sign. The arrangement suggests that unjust gender relations are somehow at the center of social illness. The extent and seriousness of the disease are indicated by a more sinister connection between Narcissa and Reba. Narcissa maintains her social position by making indirect use of the underworld. To separate Horace from the Goodwin case, she goes to Eustace Graham with the information that Clarence Snopes has talked with Horace. Eustace, then, is able to muscle information from Snopes, to reach through Reba, presumably, and a Memphis “Jew lawyer,” to Popeye in hiding with Temple after the murder of Red, and to bring Temple to the Jefferson courtroom where she cooperates in asserting Narcissa’s view of the case. Narcissa’s view is that Goodwin is a bootlegger and murderer, who lives with a whore and, therefore, deserves violent destruction; by threatening her social position, Goodwin is violating a lady, so it is appropriate that he also be a perverted rapist. Her view of the situation coincides almost perfectly with the view most advantageous to Popeye. Narcissa’s portrayal of Horace and of the ideals of justice that he believes should underpin society is justified by the event, an event in which the underworld is preserved at the expense of a bootlegger who has

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main characters in the respectable world, there is at least one mirrored opposite in the disreputable world. Opposed to Horace as a protector of innocence is Popeye, a violator of innocents. Opposed to Narcissa and her son are Ruby and her son. Also opposed to the ruthlessly respectable Narcissa and the Baptist ladies she manipulates are the ruthlessly respectable, but disreputable Reba and her retired prostitute friends. Opposed to Gowan, the Virginia gentleman, are Lee, Van, Tommy, and Red, who become or attempt to become Temple’s “dates” in the underworld. Opposed to the respectable Temple, daughter of Judge Drake, is the sexually active Temple at the Grotto who calls Popeye “Daddy.”

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become inconvenient to the respectable world, an “embarrassment” to the underworld, and a useful sacrifice for both worlds. Narcissa’s identity is affirmed, the status quo is preserved, and Popeye evades charges of murder and rape.

The split between these two worlds extends into language and character: words fragment into double meanings that reflect the two worlds; the main characters reveal internal divisions that also parallel their divided world.

Respectable society gives up the genuine truth, justice, and virtue that law, order, and morality should serve. The respectable world maintains the social order by using the underworld to help sustain false but desirable definitions of people and events. Such cooperation between the two worlds reveals that the split between them is a form of disease. This disease is manifested in virtually every choice and activity in the two worlds. For example, Faulkner introduces parodies of respectable activities that illustrate the disease. Red’s funeral and the gathering afterwards at Reba’s house parody grief and moral outrage by showing underworld characters acting out the external behavior of grief and outrage without the feeling that would make the actions sincere. Though some people at each event may have genuine feelings, the groups cannot sustain the behavior without sharing the feelings. In both cases the result is grotesque black humor: the corpse spilled from the casket in a riot about beer, the beer-stealing child punctuating with vomit the retired prostitutes’ detailed condemnation of Popeye’s voyeurism. Clarence’s initiation of Virgil and Fonzo into bargain-basement sex parodies the processes of moral education that lead to the arrogance and mendacity of the college students Horace observes on the train to Oxford and that lead to Gowan’s learning how to drink like a gentleman at Virginia. These people mask utterly self-indulgent and amoral behavior with grossly insufficient pieties. The grief of Red’s drunken mourners and the outrage of the madames may seem more sincere and moral than the petty economies of Clarence, the wit and polish of the students, or Gowan’s ridiculous idea that a gentleman is defined by the quantity of liquor he can consume while remaining conscious, but all are missing the necessary core of a deeply held belief about what is good for individuals and society. The self-indulgent amorality of the respectable world rests upon an almost universally shared fantasy that evil impulses remain confined to the underworld. Sustained by this belief, respectable people depend daily upon the existence of an underworld, yet manage through false pieties, both large and small, to remain blind to their dependence and to the horrors they commit in preserving it.

Words repeatedly double their meanings in the novel, from Horace’s and Popeye’s transformations of bird in the opening chapters, through Horace’s and Little Belle’s unravelling of shrimp, the chaos unleashed at Red’s funeral by blue and the confusion of bier with beer, to Popeye’s and his associates’ problems with jack, to Popeye’s finally getting entangled in the meanings of fix. Horace needles Popeye about his ignorance of birds, except those he eats; then Popeye tells Ruby that there is a “bird” outside (meaning a man from the respectable world). Horace carries shrimp home, his life is measured in drops of shrimp juice on the sidewalk, his wife eats shrimp, and Little Belle, in calling him a shrimp, taunts him with his role as Belle’s servant and suggests that Belle consumes him body and soul. Popeye calls all males “Jack” and spends his life dragging down jack until he is tired of it. When he asks the hangman (also Jack) to fix his disarranged hair, the hangman agrees and springs the trap. These are only a few examples of transforming puns in which significant words shift meanings between one situation and another in arbitrary and often highly dangerous ways. These point again to the way in which this culture is diseased, for they emphasize the degree to which people remain blind to the forces that manipulate them. These characters assume their control over language, only to find that it turns back upon them in surprising, usually violent ways, especially when the characters move outside their familiar social worlds. They remain unable to see the eddies and currents of the culture within which they are submerged, but this flow is revealed to us readers. We see how all are trapped in diseased cultural assumptions, the main sign of which is society’s very split into two antithetical worlds.

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One of the most terrifying of these revelations of blindness centering on a shifting word occurs when Temple stands before a mirror at the Grotto looking for marks on her face of Popeye’s recent violence that she might use to incite Red to kill Popeye: “’Shucks,’ she said, ‘it didn’t leave a mark even;’ drawing the flesh this way and that. ‘Little runt,’ she said, peering at her reflection. She added a phrase, glibly obscene, with a detached parrotlike effect.”2 Though for the reader shucks is a heavily laden word by this point in the novel, associated with the corn cob, the mocking sounds

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The split in Temple, which this unconscious pun emphasizes, is visible as well in Popeye and Horace. In Popeye, the split appears as a lack, indicated by his impotence. He reaches out blindly for self-realization by imitating others, having no inner understanding of the spiritual qualities beneath the surfaces he can observe. As a result, his behavior seems arbitrary and selfcontradictory. In Horace, as in Temple, the split is between two selves. The Old Frenchman place and Reba’s present a surface where it becomes possible for people from the respectable world to view their mirrored images in the disreputable world. Horace meets his opposite, Popeye, at the Old Frenchman place, and he encounters another much more complex mirroring when he talks with Temple at Reba’s. Temple comes from the respectable world to the Old Frenchman place, where she “passes through the looking-glass” to be seen on the other side of it when Horace talks with her. Why Popeye approaches “the surface of the mirror” by spending time at the Old Frenchman place is essentially mysterious, but his behavior suggests at least one interesting possibility. Popeye talks more intimately with Ruby than with anyone else, trying to persuade her to come to Memphis with him. Ruby implies to Horace that she and Lee are living and working at the Old Frenchman place, despite its isolation and inconvenience, for the sake of their child. When Horace persists in asking why Ruby and Lee remain in such an outof-the-way place, she shows him her child (pp. 17-20); and both Lee and Ruby see Popeye as an unwelcome intruder. That Popeye has joined them there, that he tries to obtain Ruby, and that he appropriates Temple, when she proves more attractive to the other men than Ruby, may indicate that he, like the Goodwins, is reaching toward a meaningful, fulfilling identity. Such an identity proves incomprehensible to him. Unable to love or to understand love, he can never escape the

underworld to another world as Ruby and Lee have attempted, with limited success, to do. Instead, he grasps at the physical symbol of desire. Of course, Lee and Ruby have not attempted to enter the respectable world, but to separate themselves from the trap or disease of the entire mirroring structure of two worlds. Popeye’s attempt is futile, then, not only because he cannot love, but also because passing through the mirror, as he might do by appropriating a woman and imitating a marriage, is not really a solution. Temple’s fate makes this clear. Temple’s split is perhaps the clearest, for she tries life in both worlds. As a college freshman, Temple is a child moving into respectable womanhood. Before her arrival at the Old Frenchman place she has mastered respectable courtship in which a woman depends upon the man to restrain his and her sexual desire by not forcing sex upon her. Therefore, she is always “safe,” especially in the groups of men where she is usually found. At the Old Frenchman place she is forced into a new group of men, among whom this rule does not apply. Her split appears when she is simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the possibilities of this world. Temple at the Old Frenchman place looks and behaves as Day describes the typical Gothic heroine in her fantastic Gothic world. When Popeye rapes her with a corn cob and kidnaps her, he takes her through the mirror. At Reba’s, Temple puts away her respectable self and enters fully into her dark, sexually aggressive side. She finds that this life does not provide the gratification it promised, in part because it is based on a false opposition in which female sexual desire is evil. She expects to be free when she passes through to the dark side, but she finds that the underworld controls female sexuality as rigidly as does the respectable world. Popeye does not allow her to have sex except when he is present. When he sees that she is enjoying sex with Red, Popeye separates them. Because Popeye does not experience “normal” sexual desire, she cannot use her attractiveness to gain satisfaction by manipulating him. Her attempt to have Red kill Popeye fails. She is as powerless in the underworld as in the respectable world, and she is as ungratified, though she has experienced sexual desire and pleasure. She relives a version of Ruby’s experience when Ruby’s father killed her first lover. Wrested back through the mirror, Temple appears at Goodwin’s trial, dressed in black, like Popeye, beneath her white coat, as Popeye’s and Eustace’s puppet. When her father and brothers take her away from court, she responds to the completion

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of her bed at the Old Frenchman place, the laughing in the coffin in her death fantasy, and with Horace’s nightmare rape vision after he interviews her, she is blind to these associations, just as she fails to see that she is utterly changed at this moment compared to her moral state when she pitied Ruby’s baby. Even though he has left no visible mark, Popeye has helped transform her from a somewhat rebellious co-ed into a sexually active “moll” contemplating murder. Her failure to appreciate this transformation is a symptom of her society’s failure to provide Temple with an inner, “spiritual” identity, a perspective like the reader’s from which the transformation would be visible.

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of her return to respectability with gestures reminiscent of her violation and abduction at the Old Frenchman place.3 Shifting from one group of men to another, from one “daddy” to another, changes nothing important for her. Her last gestures, a look into her mirror and, then, out at a Parisian “waste land,” underline a discontent that borders upon despair. Like Narcissa in her preservation of respectability, Temple, in her movement through the underworld, seems unconsciously concerned with a problem of feminine identity. While Narcissa ruthlessly preserves an identity she has achieved, Temple tries out and finds wanting two versions of feminine identity. Horace’s split also concerns feminine identity. Indeed, an examination of Horace’s divided self helps to open another perspective on these mirroring worlds. Several critics, but most notably John T. Matthews (pp. 247-255), have noticed Horace’s attraction to his step-daughter, Little Belle. This attraction takes the form of a concern for her respectability. When he becomes drunk at the Old Frenchman place, he expresses frustration at his inability to influence Little Belle’s moral development. Her budding sexuality appears to him as a natural force that will bloom as it may; because she sees him as a sort of employee rather than as a fatherly moral guide, he cannot successfully direct her sexual life. Horace wants to exercise the traditional authority of the father who superintends his daughter’s sexual behavior in order to guarantee her respectability and her entrance into the moral order he wishes to affirm. His narration of recent events shows that he has sublimated his response to her sexual attractiveness by recourse to the father’s role. He leaves home in part because nothing there confirms him in that role. Indeed, when he sees in the double mirrors Little Belle’s dissimulation of her affirmation of his role as father, he sees quite literally the split that troubles him. The mirrors show the lack of restraint beneath her pretense. If he accepts this lack of restraint, then his sublimation will be defeated; he will have to recognize the natural as fundamental. In his case, sexual attraction to this step-daughter is “natural.” In the absence of social agreement that sublimation is valuable and necessary, Horace will have to know himself as split. He will be forced to acknowledge his desire for Little Belle, a fate that could be liberating, since it would tend to dissolve Horace’s rigid separation of the split worlds. Horace, like Narcissa, depends upon the existence of the two mirroring worlds. His desire to

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bring Popeye to justice is justified by the literal truth of Popeye’s guilt, but it is also necessary to Horace’s concept of himself. As Horace is forced to recognize when he interviews Temple (though he seems to repress it afterwards), Popeye has apparently had intercourse with Temple, thereby enacting the desire Horace tries so hard to repress, to have intercourse with Temple’s double, Little Belle. When Horace vomits the coffee he drank in Memphis, he envisions that violation of Temple as his own desire to violate Little Belle, and he views the composite act as utter self-destruction, as his own rape by “the world.” Horace needs Popeye to stand for his repressed self. This need accounts for Horace’s great mistake in attempting to save Lee by accusing Popeye. However, he cannot eliminate the “Popeye” in himself. Horace’s attempt to create a scapegoat by accusing Popeye is no more successful than Temple’s to eliminate Popeye as forbidding “father.” Furthermore, Horace’s attempt contributes to Lee’s destruction just as surely as do Narcissa’s betrayal and Temple’s perjury. Horace’s split between a conscious desire to control his women for their own good and the good of society and his unconscious desire to possess them sexually is mirrored in his entire culture. This is especially apparent in the novel’s many misogynist jokes. For example, the jokes of the college boys on the train to Oxford reduce sexual intercourse to the violent, mechanical punching of tickets, and their women to pieces of meat: “I’m going to punch mine Friday night.” “Eeeeyow.” “Do you like liver?” “I cant reach that far.” “Eeeeeyow.” (pp. 178-179)

When the salesmen discuss Temple after the trial, one says, “She was some baby. Jeez. I wouldn’t have used no cob” (p. 309). While condemning Lee as a pervert, they also identify with his desire to possess the violated woman. The Kinston cab driver who returns Horace home says, “We got to protect our girls. Might need them ourselves” (p. 313). These and several other similar jokes reveal the doubleness of all men’s attitudes toward women. Protecting their violated respectability is a matter for “a bonfire of gasoline” because genitals are the most sacred parts of “that most sacred thing in life: womanhood” (p. 298). But every man secretly desires to do what these prohibitions and punishments are to prevent.

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The mirroring worlds of Sanctuary form a recognizable representation of Faulkner’s contemporary, social world. The doubling of that split in Horace and in the general misogyny of his culture points toward one important aspect of the origin and meaning of this split. William Patrick Day provides a way of coming at the origin of the split that will help to explain its meaning.

than merely available to the reader. Sanctuary is not a reader’s fantasy as are The Mysteries of Udolpho or Dracula. Instead, the reader observes the fantasy-making of characters and culture. Nevertheless, the characters of Sanctuary seem to be dealing with the same Gothic problems Day discusses, though at a later historical stage. Horace is closest to the tradition as described by Day, but the women and the male culture apart from Horace reveal changes in attitudes. At this historical stage, women show a strong discontent with their culturally defined roles, and male misogyny bubbles near the surface of the whole culture.

Day argues that the Gothic tradition in fiction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is concerned with the psychological adjustments of the new middle class to an industrial capitalist society. Of primary concern to the consumers of Gothic novels were adjustments of family structure and gender role. Hence popular Gothic novels repeatedly deal with themes of the relationships between parents and children, between brothers and sisters, and between lovers. One of the functions of the Gothic novels was to parody the romantic conceptions of gender roles illustrated in Richardson’s Pamela. In such novels, good females exhibit a will to virtue that tends to render them passive before male authority. Good males are characterized by a will to power consistent with their duty to dominate and to order life. Gothic novels parody these conceptions of gender roles by revealing their dark sides: the feminine desire to submit in order to partake of power and the masculine desire to ravish in order to possess the feminine without restraint. Day contends that human identity is artificially split by these conventional archetypes, that males find themselves cut off from aspects of themselves culturally defined as feminine and that females are cut off from aspects of themselves culturally defined as masculine. Gothic fiction shows such characters attempting to establish wholeness of identity in perverse ways, by projecting the forbidden self onto another, then attempting to appropriate the other. The other is often a family member, making the relationship incestuous. Incest conveys the tension between the two parts of the self that desire unity in identity, but which are forbidden it by a strongly internalized cultural ideology. The results of attempting to unify are usually terror and destruction (Day, Chapter 2).

Horace really wants to fulfill the traditional father’s role, seeing it as necessary to familial, social, and moral order. Beneath that desire is a repressed desire to claim “feminine” aspects of his self. This desire takes the form of sexual attraction to Little Belle. When he encounters an enactment of that desire in Popeye’s violation of Temple, Horace contemplates the loss of his world and his self. Unable to bear this loss, he represses his vision of an androgynous, self-destroying monster and attempts a return to his mission of destroying Popeye. Seeing only the horror of Temple’s violation, he is confirmed in his inability to see that in desiring Little Belle he is really trying to unify his self. Furthermore, Horace cannot repress his own desires by repressing their projections in the external world as do the protagonists of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and Stoker’s Dracula. Like those Gothic protagonists who attempt to achieve wholeness through the exercise of power, Horace destroys or, at least, maims himself; he is unable to achieve unity by asserting separation.

Faulkner produces a more self-conscious and sophisticated text than is usual in the Gothic tradition. He brings the acts of fantasy and projection into the fiction, making them visible to rather

Narcissa’s role as virtuous widow makes her independent of the masculine; she need not submit. Of course, Narcissa’s rebellion against male domination is self-defeating. In order to

The women of Sanctuary are discontented with their socially defined roles, unlike the Gothic heroine Day describes, who wants most of all to live a conventional life (Day, p. 17). When Horace recounts his argument with Little Belle over how she should regulate her sex life, he reveals that Little Belle is asserting her right to choose her male friends without the intervention of fathers and brothers. When Ruby tells the story of how her father and brother killed her first lover, branding her a whore for loving in defiance of their choices, she asserts her freedom, a freedom she has subsequently exercised despite that early defeat. However, though Ruby’s attempts come closest to success, she does not break away from the sickness of the split worlds. Neither do Narcissa and Temple.

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Therefore, all such desires are projected onto the underworld, where one can go to indulge them, but of which one makes an example whenever the opportunity arises, thus reaffirming the repression.

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insulate herself from particular males and to assert power over them, she surrenders utterly to the cultural ideology that confines her to a narrow and grossly immoral life, which deprives her of spiritual being as the price of her independence. She becomes cold, soulless, and loveless. Temple’s perpetual discontent, though it is terrifyingly childish in comparison with Ruby’s pursuit of love, is yet another indicator of the failure of traditional female roles, whether respectable or disreputable, to provide fulfillment for women in Sanctuary’s world. She, too, surrenders her soul in order to experience freedom and power. Though the women of Sanctuary, unlike most women in earlier Gothic novels, actively, if not always consciously, oppose the roles imposed upon them by their culture, their opposition remains partial and unsuccessful, leading to stunning defeats and wrenching horrors. Only Ruby approaches a vision of her situation as inclusive as that granted the reader. Males’ protests against evisceration by their culture take the form of a violence that almost constantly boils near the surface of social behavior. They seem required to place respectable women on the pedestal of purity, and then to hate them for their unattainability. Their anger shows not only in their misogynous humor but also in the fury and perversity of their repression. While destroying Goodwin, Jefferson duplicates the crime of which it accuses him: “Do to the lawyer what we did to him. What he did to her. Only we never used a cob. We made him wish we had used a cob” (p. 311). They threaten Horace with his own nightmare vision of multiple, mutual, selfdestructive rape, revealing how fully they violate themselves to preserve what their diseased ideology tells them are virtue and justice. In a terrifying reflection of Red’s funeral that perverts the ritual it attempts, the town repeats and extends the crime it punishes. In earlier Gothic novels, aggression against women is usually confined to the male protagonists and their particular victims. In Sanctuary, the will to aggression against all females is general among the males, for all the men seem to sense that their cultural ideology, in effect, castrates them by forbidding them the unity with the other sex that they naturally desire, the unity of pleasure in the procreative act. This unity is only possible if, as Day argues, men and women can affirm and “identify with” the other sex in themselves (Day, p. 132), and the culture of this novel places such an ideal beyond anyone’s reach.

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In Sanctuary, the old moribund definitions of gender roles have become so restrictive that they inevitably lead to real, rather than fantasized, perversity and destruction in whatever direction one attempts to extend them. The only sane alternative suggested in the novel is to leave society behind, to found a family on mutual love and commitment as far away from contemporary social values as one can get. There, perhaps, conventional gender roles may be abandoned, and the “androgyny” of pleasure in reproduction may be realized (Day, pp. 146-149). Ruby and Lee seek sanctuary from the dangers of Memphis, Ruby sacrificing the comforts that Horace and Popeye believe she could easily have, were she willing to abandon Lee or let her child grow up the way Popeye did. Like many an escapee before them in American fiction—Ishmael, Huckleberry Finn, and Jake Barnes spring to mind—Ruby and Lee are drawn back into the corrupt and powerful social structure by their needs and desires, their weaknesses and errors, and the arbitrary disasters brought on by others such as Popeye, Temple, and Horace. In Sanctuary, then, Faulkner continues the exploration of concerns that were central to the Gothic tradition as described by Day. By placing these concerns more explicitly in a social context than was often the case in earlier Gothic classics and by representing the characters and culture as fantasy-makers, Faulkner exposes the fictionality as well as the terrifying destructiveness of a decadent social ideology that has descended from the conventions of gender role parodied in the earlier Gothic tradition. Faulkner shows women making futile and destructive attempts to escape the conventional definitions of feminine and masculine identities, and he shows men in violent, unconscious protest against the psychologically castrating power of those same definitions.

Notes 1. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 2. William Faulkner, Sanctuary: The Corrected Text (New York: Vintage, 1987), p. 245. 3. John T. Matthews, “The Elliptical Nature of Sanctuary,” Novel, 17 (1984), 257-258.

A Selection of Other Sources Consulted Adamowski, T. H. “Faulkner’s Popeye: The ‘Other’ as Self.” Canadian Review of American Studies, 8 (1977), 36-51. Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner. The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. Broughton, Panthea R. William Faulkner: The Abstract and the Actual. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974.

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Cox, Dianne Luce. “A Measure of Innocence: Sanctuary’s Temple Drake.” Mississippi Quarterly, 39 (1986), 301324. Frazier, D. L.”Gothicism in Sanctuary: The Black Pall and the Crap Table.” Modern Fiction Studies, 2 (1956), 109113. Heller, Terry. “Terror and Empathy in Faulkner’s Sanctuary.” Arizona Quarterly, 40 (1984), 344-364. ———. The Delights of Terror. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Kerr, Elizabeth. William Faulkner’s Gothic Domain. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1979. Mellard, James M. “Lacan and Faulkner: A Post-Freudian Analysis of Humor in the Fiction,” in Faulkner and Humor: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1984, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth. “Bewildered Witness: Temple Drake in Sanctuary.” Faulkner Journal, 1 (1986), 43-55. Page, Sally R. Faulkner’s Women. Deland, Florida: Everett/ Edwards, 1972.

Contends that Southern Gothic is a literary technique that both represents and hides the dehumanization of the South into perceived stereotypes; analyzes works by Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner as examples of this technique. Donaldson, Susan V. “Making a Spectacle: Welty, Faulkner, and Southern Gothic.” Mississippi Quarterly 50, no. 4 (fall 1997): 567-83. Compares the portraits of women created by Faulkner and Eudora Welty, noting that while Faulkner’s narratives reverberate with the effort to impose cultural ideas of femininity on his Southern characters, Welty’s narratives present Gothic heroines that break out of the narrow confines of their worlds. Jarraway, David R. “The Gothic Import of Faulkner’s ‘Black Son’ in Light in August.” In American Gothic: New Inventions in a National Narrative, edited and with an introduction by Robert K. Martin, pp. 57-74. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. Uses the critical theory of Julia Kristeva to explore Gothic identity in Light In August, focusing on the tragic career of Joe Christmas. Machinek, Anna. “William Faulkner and the Gothic Tradition.” Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny 36, no. 2 (1989): 10514. Traces the Gothic elements in Faulkner’s fiction.

Polk, Noel. “‘The Dungeon was Mother Herself’: William Faulkner: 1927-1931,” in New Directions in Faulkner Studies: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1983, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984.

Martin, Robert K. “Haunted Jim Crow: Gothic Fictions by Hawthorne and Faulkner.” In American Gothic: New Inventions in a National Narrative, edited and with an introduction by Robert K. Martin, pp. 129-42. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998.

Rossky, William. “The Pattern of Nightmare in Sanctuary; or Miss Reba’s Dogs.” Modern Fiction Studies, 15 (1969-70), 503-515.

Compares Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables with Absalom, Absalom! and argues that Faulkner’s novel presents a more complicated picture of the world, as it replaces Hawthorne’s happy ending with a vision that is ultimately nightmarish.

Seidel, Kathryn Lee. “From Narcissist to Masochist: A New Look at Temple Drake.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 5 (1984), 27-35. Vickery, Olga. The Novels of William Faulkner. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964. Zink, Karl E. “Flux and Frozen Moment: The Imagery of Stasis in Faulkner’s Prose.” PMLA, 71 (1956), 285-301.

FURTHER READING Biographies Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2005, 778 p. Originally published in 1974, this is an updated version of what is considered by many to be the definitive Faulkner biography. Parini, Jay. One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner. New York: Harper Collins, 2004, 512 p. Biography that includes interviews with Faulkner’s friends and family, and an examination of each of Faulkner’s works.

Criticism Burns, Margie. “A Good Rose Is Hard to Find: Southern Gothic as Signs of Social Dislocation in Faulkner and O’Connor.” In Image and Ideology in Modern/Postmodern Discourse, pp. 105-23. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.

Perry, J. Douglas. “Gothic as Vortex: The Form of Horror in Capote, Faulkner, and Styron.” Modern Fiction Studies 19 (1973): 153-67. Proposes that in addition to the commonality of theme and images, American Gothic fiction also uses traditional structures and techniques to create a concentric series of events, drawing the reader into an intense interaction between human communities that exist inside and outside the novel. Stone, Edward. “Usher, Poquelin, and Miss Emily: The Progress of Southern Gothic.” Georgia Review 14 (winter 1960): 433-43. Considers “A Rose for Emily” in the tradition of Southern Gothic fiction.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Faulkner’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: American Writers; American Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 1; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 7; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography and Resources, Vol. 1; Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vols. 5, 15; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 1929-1941; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 81-84; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 33; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 1, 3, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 18, 28, 52, 68; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 9, 11, 44, 102; Dictionary of Literary Biography

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Canfield, J. C., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of “Sanctuary.” Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1982. Reprints several authors on this list as well as other useful selections.

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Documentary Series, Vol. 2; Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1986, 1997; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Exploring Novels; Exploring Short Stories; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 2; Literature and Its Times,

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Vol. 2; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Novels for Students, Vols. 4, 8, 13; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 2, 5, 6, 12; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 1, 35, 42; Twayne’s United States Authors; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 141; and World Literature Criticism.

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WILLIAM GODWIN (1756 - 1836)

English philosopher, novelist, essayist, historian, playwright, and biographer.

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lthough known primarily for his philosophical works and his influence on English Romantic writers, Godwin is also remembered for his contributions to the Gothic literary tradition. His best-known novel, Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), is a didactic tale about the evils of government that borrows heavily from the popular Gothic fiction of the day. Caleb Williams dramatizes many of the anarchistic and rationalistic beliefs that Godwin put forward in his philosophical masterpiece, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793), which argues that humankind is innately good and capable of living harmoniously without laws or institutions. Godwin’s only other work in the Gothic tradition is the occult tale St. Leon (1799), which also has philosophical overtones. Critics point out that this novel, as well as his numerous other works, lack the emotional power and intellectual appeal of Caleb Williams and Political Justice. The influence of Godwin’s writings on his younger contemporaries, including novelists, poets, economists, and philosophers, was considerable. However, Godwin’s philosophical and literary reputation has declined, and he is chiefly known today as a figure

of historical importance—as the husband of philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, as the father of novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and as the author of two minor Gothic novels.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION The seventh of thirteen children, Godwin was born in Wisbeach, England, to a Presbyterian minister and his wife. Raised in a strict, puritanical environment, Godwin trained for the ministry at an early age and became a Sandemanian clergyman in 1777. However, after studying the French revolutionary philosophers, he grew disenchanted with religion and eventually became an atheist. Leaving the church in 1783, Godwin moved to London, intending to make his living as an author. He began writing pamphlets and literary parodies, most of them published anonymously. Against the backdrop of revolution in France and the repression of seditious writings and speech in Britain, he produced Political Justice, which met with immediate success. Although its primary appeal was to intellectuals, it also found its way into the hands of the working class. A year later Godwin addressed that audience more directly with the publication of Caleb Williams, which he claimed to have written for people who would never read books of science or philosophy. Godwin was already an established and influential writer and radical when in 1796 he met

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Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), an attack on society’s treatment of women. Their rapport was immediate, and soon the two began living together. When Wollstonecraft became pregnant a few months later, the two wed despite their mutual distaste for the institution of marriage because they wanted to ensure the legal rights of their child. By all accounts, both found great joy in wedlock, but their happiness was short-lived. Several days after the birth of their daughter in 1797, Wollstonecraft died of complications from the delivery. A desolate Godwin recorded his memories of their brief life together in Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1798), in which he wrote of his wife, “I honoured her intellectual powers and the nobleness and generosity of her propensities; mere tenderness would not have been adequate to produce the happiness we experienced.” Left with his infant daughter as well as a stepdaughter to care for, Godwin set out to find a mother for his children. He was turned down by one woman after another before marrying Mary Jane Clairmont, by all accounts a harsh, cruel woman who treated his children poorly. Although he continued to write and publish works of philosophy and fiction, Godwin was struggling financially, and around 1805 he and his wife began publishing children’s books, histories, and biographies in a desperate attempt to support their growing family. Godwin also relied heavily on the financial assistance of the young followers who sought his philosophical guidance; most notable among these was the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In 1814, Shelley, who was already married, eloped with Godwin’s sixteenyear-old daughter, Mary. Though a furious Godwin disowned them both, he continued to demand Shelley’s monetary support. Godwin’s wrath diminished when the two married several years later, and he became once again extremely close to his daughter. Shelley too remained a devoted disciple of his father-in-law, supporting his writing even as his popularity was declining and his ideas were falling out of favor. Godwin continued to write until his death due to complications of a cold in 1836.

MAJOR WORKS Political Justice contains the theoretical essence of all Godwin’s later writings. In this work, Godwin denounced contemporary governments as corrupt and ineffective, arguing that reason rather than law should provide the ruling force of

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society. Through the development of reason, he declared, humanity could become perfect. Godwin maintained too that criminals should be reformed, not merely punished. Of all the arguments advanced in Political Justice, perhaps the best known is Godwin’s disdain for the institution of marriage: he advocated that men and women should be united solely by a bond of mutual respect rather than a social and legal contract. Godwin was nearly prosecuted for these unconventional beliefs. However, among those who sympathized with its unorthodox tenets, Political Justice met with immediate acclaim, and its author was widely hailed as an influential philosopher. Following the success of Political Justice, Godwin produced Caleb Williams, a novel inspired by his desire to disseminate the ideas of Political Justice through a more popular form. A tale of good triumphing over evil and an individual conquering a corrupt system, the novel tells the story of Caleb Williams, a man persecuted by his employer, Ferdinando Falkland, and jailed for a crime he did not commit. Williams’s troubles begin when he learns that Falkland once committed murder. When he confesses his discovery, he gets swept up in a series of events over which he has no control, as Falkland frames him for a capital crime. Falkland is an important prototype of the seemingly benevolent but cruel and morally bankrupt Gothic villain, a dual personality that foreshadows Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The account of Caleb’s imprisonment and exile is a calculated indictment of the horrors of the British criminal justice. Godwin’s plot combines historical events with psychological realism and Gothic and detective elements. Though undeniably propagandistic, the novel won critical praise for its synthesis of content and style. It established the sub-genre of “political Gothics” and was a precedent for the popular Victorian crime-fiction genre. It was a great success, to the extent that the publishers reinstated in the later editions of 1795 the controversial preface they had not dared to print in 1794 because it had been considered politically subversive. Godwin’s other Gothic-inspired tale, St. Leon, is a historical novel that reflects his interest in heroic drama and his desire to modify some of his earlier radical beliefs, which were considered harsh and insensitive. A sentimental depiction of the joys of domesticity, St. Leon is also a tribute to his late wife. In the apologetic preface to an 1831 edition of St. Leon, Godwin observed that he had been urgently solicited to follow up the success of his first, but had long remained in a state of “dif-

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Two years before he died at the age of seventyeight, Godwin published another work that delves into the occult. Lives of the Necromancers (1834), despite its title, is less a series of biographies than a study of the way the mind is readily deceived by the overwrought imagination and the desire for immortality. The work has been described as a series of tales of sorcery culled from the Bible, the Ancient World, and the Far East, as well as from medieval Europe. One of the admirers of the book was Edgar Allan Poe.

adventure narrative and to focus on the psychological and emotional excesses of the characters. They have pointed out too that the use of Gothic elements highlights the defenselessness of the protagonist against a cruel and often faceless power. Critical commentary on Godwin’s other Gothic novel, St. Leon, is more scant today, but shortly after it was published in 1799 there appeared a parody entitled St. Godwin: A Tale of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century (1800), which is a testament, if nothing else, to the work’s popularity—or notoriety. Criticism of the novel today has focused on its exploration of lifeextension and immortality, its influence on Frankenstein, as well as its debt to the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Despite Poe’s appreciation of Lives of the Necromancers, it is of little more than historical interest. Godwin’s more important legacy, at least for readers of Gothic literature, is the influence he had on later practitioners of the genre and the synthesis of philosophy, social criticism, and horror in his novels.

PRINCIPAL WORKS CRITICAL RECEPTION At the time of his death, Godwin’s contemporaries considered him a figure of historical and literary importance whose beliefs had inspired such individuals as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth. However, Godwin’s works soon fell into relative obscurity, receiving attention only from critics who censured his verbosity and excessive didacticism. It was not until the turn of the century that critics began to demonstrate a renewed interest in Godwin as a philosopher and author. Early twentieth-century studies stressed the literary merits of Political Justice, and its value as one of the main documents of English Romantic philosophy is now firmly established. Caleb Williams, too, has enjoyed a revival. Since the 1940s, critics have analyzed various aspects of the work, including its elements of tragedy and mystery, its status as a work of Gothic fiction, its two endings, and its prose style. Scholars regard the work as an important contribution to the evolution of the English novel and one of the first novels to successfully combine fiction and philosophy. Critics who have focused on the work’s gothicism have argued that the author used Gothic devices to make the work less of a simple

An Account of the Seminary That Will Be Opened at Epsom (essay) 1783 The History of the Life of William Pitt (biography) 1783 An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (essay) 1793 Cursory Strictures on the Charge delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury, October 2, 1794. First Published in the Morning Chronicle, October 21 (essay) 1794 Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (novel) 1794 Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bill Concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices, and Unlawful Assemblies (essay) 1795 The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (essays) 1797 Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (memoirs) 1798 St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (novel) 1799 Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (biography) 1803 Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling (novel) 1805

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fidence and irresolution” for lack of a new idea. What he eventually produced was a longer and far more orthodox Gothic tale following the adventures of a dissolute French nobleman who takes to farming after gambling away his inheritance but loses everything to a caprice of nature. Response to the novel was mixed, and critics termed St. Leon more ambitious in design than Godwin’s range would permit. St. Leon is, however, regarded as significant in several respects. In its flirtation with Rosicrucian mysticism it anticipates Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni and further compounded the influence of Godwin on that writer. It also provided inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

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Faulkener (play) 1807 Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England (novel) 1817 Of Population: An Enquiry Concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind, Being an Answer to Mr. Malthus’ Essay on That Subject (essay) 1820 Cloudesly: A Tale (novel) 1830 Thoughts on Man: His Nature, Productions, and Discoveries (essay) 1831 Deloraine: A Tale (novel) 1833

MAY 12, 1794

Lives of the Necromancers; or, An Account of the Most Eminent Persons Who Have Claimed or to Whom Has Been Imputed by Others, the Exercise of Magical Power (biographical sketches) 1834 Essays Never before Published (essays) 1873

PRIMARY SOURCES

This preface was withdrawn in the original edition, in compliance with the alarms of booksellers. Caleb Williams made his first appearance in the world, in the same month in which the sanguinary plot broke out against the liberties of Englishmen, which was happily terminated by the acquittal of its first intended victims, in the close of that year. Terror was the order of the day; and it was feared that even the humble novelist might be shown to be constructively a traitor. OCTOBER 29, 1795

WILLIAM GODWIN (ESSAY DATE 1794) SOURCE: Godwin, William. Preface to The Adventures of Caleb Williams; or, Things as They Are. 1794. Revised edition, pp. xix-xx. London: Richard Bentley, 1849. In the following preface to Caleb Williams, written in 1794, Godwin explains the philosophical underpinnings of the novel. In a note appended to the original preface for the 1796 edition of the novel, Godwin explains why the preface was deleted from the first edition of the novel in 1794.

The following narrative is intended to answer a purpose more general and important than immediately appears upon the face of it. The question now afloat in the world respecting Things as they are, is the most interesting that can be presented to the human mind. While one party pleads for reformation and change, the other extols in the warmest terms the existing constitution of society. It seemed as if something would be gained for the decision of this question, if that constitution were faithfully developed in its practical effects. What is now presented to the public is no refined and abstract speculation; it is a study and delineation of things passing in the moral world. It is but of late that the inestimable importance of political principles has been adequately apprehended. It is now known to philosophers that the spirit and character of the government intrudes itself into every rank of society. But this is a truth highly worthy to be communicated to persons whom books of philoso-

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phy and science are never likely to reach. Accordingly it was proposed in the invention of the following work, to comprehend, as far as the progressive nature of a single story would allow, a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man. If the author shall have taught a valuable lesson, without subtracting from the interest and passion by which a performance of this sort ought to be characterised, he will have reason to congratulate himself upon the vehicle he has chosen.

WILLIAM GODWIN (ESSAY DATE 1834) SOURCE: Godwin, William. “Ambitious Nature of Man.” In Lives of the Necromancers; or, An Account of the Most Eminent Persons in Successive Ages, Who Have Claimed for Themselves, or to Whom Has Been Imputed by Others, the Exercise of Magical Power. 1834. Reprint edition, pp. 13-18. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2004. In the following excerpt from a book originally published in 1834, Godwin discusses certain pursuits and practices of persons skilled in magic and the supernatural.

The Desire to Command and Control Future Events. Next to the consideration of those measures by which men have sought to dive into the secrets of future time, the question presents itself of those more daring undertakings, the object of which has been by some supernatural power to control the future, and place it in subjection to the will of the unlicensed adventurer. Men have always, especially in races of ignorance, and when they most felt their individual weakness, figured to themselves an invisible strength greater than their own; and, in proportion to their impatience, and the fervour of their desires, have sought to enter into a league with those beings whose mightier force might supply that in which their weakness failed.

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It is an essential feature of different ages and countries to vary exceedingly in the good or ill construction, the fame or dishonour, which shall attend upon the same conduct or mode of behaviour. In Egypt and throughout the East, especially in the early periods of history, the supposed commerce with invisible powers was openly professed, which, under other circumstances, and during the reign of different prejudices, was afterwards carefully concealed, and barbarously hunted out of the pale of allowed and authorised practice. The Magi of old, who claimed a power of producing miraculous appearances, and boasted a familiar intercourse with the world of spirits, were regarded by their countrymen with peculiar reverence, and considered as the first and chiefest men in the state. For this mitigated view of such dark and mysterious proceedings the ancients were in a great degree indebted to their polytheism. The Romans are computed to have acknowledged thirty thousand divinities, to all of whom was rendered a legitimate homage; and other countries in a similar proportion.

Sorcery and Enchantment. In Asia, however, the gods were divided into two parties, under Oromasdes, the principle of good, and Arimanius, the principle of evil. These powers were in perpetual contention with each other, sometimes the one, and sometimes the other gaining the superiority. Arimanius and his legions were therefore scarcely considered as entitled to the homage of mankind. Those who were actuated by benevolence, and who desired to draw down blessings upon their fellow-creatures, addressed themselves to the principle of good: while such unhappy beings, with whom spite and ill-will had the predominance, may be supposed often to have invoked in preference the principle of evil. Hence seems to have originated the idea of sorcery, or an appeal by incantations and wicked arts to the demons who delighted in mischief.

whom their animosity was directed. Unlawful and detested words and mysteries were called into action to conjure up demons who should yield their powerful and tremendous assistance. Songs of a wild and maniacal character were chaunted. Noisome scents and the burning of all unhallowed and odious things were resorted to. In later times books and formulas of a terrific character were commonly employed, upon the reading or recital of which the prodigies resorted to began to display themselves. The heavens were darkened; the thunder rolled; and fierce and blinding lightnings flashed from one corner of the heavens to the other. The earth quaked and rocked from side to side. All monstrous and deformed things showed themselves, “Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire,” enough to cause the stoutest heart to quail. Lastly, devils, whose name was legion, and to whose forms and distorted and menacing countenances superstition had annexed the most frightful ideas, crowded in countless multitudes upon the spectator, whose breath was flame, whose dances were full of terror, and whose strength infinitely exceeded everything human. Such were the appalling conceptions which ages of bigotry and ignorance annexed to the notion of sorcery, and with these they scared the unhappy beings over whom this notion had usurped an ascendency into lunacy, and prepared them for the perpetrating flagitious and unheard-of deeds. The result of these horrible incantations was not less tremendous, than the preparations might have led us to expect. The demons possessed all the powers of the air, and produced tempests and shipwrecks at their pleasure. “Castles toppled on their warder’s heads, and palaces and pyramids sloped their summits to their foundations;” forests and mountains were torn from their roots, and cast into the sea. They inflamed the passions of men, and caused them to commit the most unheard-of excesses. They laid their ban on those who enjoyed the most prosperous health, condemned them to peak and pine, wasted them into a melancholy atrophy, and finally consigned them to a premature grave. They breathed a new and unblest life into beings in whom existence had long been extinct, and by their hateful and resistless power caused the sepulchres to give up their dead.

These beings rejoiced in the opportunity of inflicting calamity and misery on mankind. But by what we read of them we might be induced to suppose that they were in some way restrained from gratifying their malignant intentions, and waited in eager hope, till some mortal reprobate should call out their dormant activity, and demand their aid.

Witchcraft.

Various enchantments were therefore employed by those unhappy mortals whose special desire was to bring down calamity and plagues upon the individuals or tribes of men against

Next to sorcery we may recollect the case of witchcraft, which occurs oftener, particularly in modern times, than any other alleged mode of changing by supernatural means the future course

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Commerce with the Invisible World.

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of events. The sorcerer, as we shall see hereafter, was frequently a man of learning and intellectual abilities, sometimes of comparative opulence and respectable situation in society. But the witch or wizard was almost uniformly old, decrepid, and nearly or altogether in a state of penury. The functions, however, of the witch and the sorcerer were in a great degree the same. The earliest account of a witch, attended with any degree of detail, is that of the witch of Endor in the Bible, who among other things, professed the power of calling up the dead upon occasion from the peace of the sepulchre. Witches also claimed the faculty of raising storms, and in various ways disturbing the course of nature. They appear in most cases to have been brought into action by the impulse of private malice. They occasioned mortality of greater or less extent in man and beast. They blighted the opening prospect of a plentiful harvest. They covered the heavens with clouds, and sent abroad withering and malignant blasts. They undermined the health of those who were so fortunate as to incur their animosity, and caused them to waste away gradually with incurable disease. They were notorious two or three centuries ago for the power of the “evil eye.” The vulgar, both great and small, dreaded their displeasure, and sought, by small gifts, and fair speeches, but insincere, and the offspring of terror only, to avert the pernicious consequences of their malice. They were famed for fabricating small images of wax, to represent the object of their persecution; and, as these by gradual and often studiously protracted degrees wasted before the fire, so the unfortunate butts of their resentment perished with a lingering, but inevitable death.

Compacts with the Devil. The power of these witches as we find in their earliest records, originated in their intercourse with “familiar spirits,” invisible beings who must be supposed to be enlisted in the armies of the prince of darkness. We do not read in these ancient memorials of any league of mutual benefit entered into between the merely human party, and his or her supernatural assistant. But modern times have amply supplied this defect. The witch or sorcerer could not secure the assistance of the demon but by a sure and faithful compact, by which the human party obtained the industrious and vigilant service of his familiar for a certain term of years, only on condition that, when the term was expired, the demon of undoubted right was to obtain possession of the indentured party, and to convey him irremissibly and for ever to the regions of the damned. The contract was drawn out in authentic form, signed by the

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sorcerer, and attested with his blood, and was then carried away by the demon, to be produced again at the appointed time.

Imps. These familiar spirits often assumed the form of animals, and a black dog or cat was considered as a figure in which the attendant devil was secretly hidden. These subordinate devils were called Imps. Impure and carnal ideas were mingled with these theories. The witches were said to have preternatural teats from which their familiars sucked their blood. The devil also engaged in sexual intercourse with the witch or wizard, being denominated incubus, if his favourite were a woman, and succubus, if a man. In short, every frightful and loathsome idea was carefully heaped up together, to render the unfortunate beings to whom the crime of witchcraft was imputed the horror and execration of their species.

Talismans and Amulets. As according to the doctrine of witchcraft, there were certain compounds and matters prepared by rules of art, that proved baleful and deadly to the persons against whom their activity was directed, so there were also preservatives, talismans, amulets, and charms, for the most part to be worn about the person, which rendered him superior to injury, not only from the operations of witchcraft, but in some cases from the sword or any other mortal weapon. As the poet says, he that had this, Might trace huge forests and unhallowed heaths,— Yea there, where very desolation dwells, By grots and caverns shagged with horrid shades,

nay, in the midst of every tremendous assailant, “might pass on with unblenched majesty,” uninjured and invulnerable.

Necromancy. Last of all we may speak of necromancy, which has something in it that so strongly takes hold of the imagination, that though it is one only of the various modes which have been enumerated for the exercise of magical power, we have selected it to give a title to the present volume. There is something sacred to common apprehension in the repose of the dead. They seem placed beyond our power to disturb. “There is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave.”

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Their remains moulder in the earth. Neither form nor feature is long continued to them. We shrink from their touch, and their sight. To violate the sepulchre therefore for the purpose of unholy spells and operations, as we read of in the annals of witchcraft, cannot fail to be exceedingly shocking. To call up the spirits of the departed, after they have fulfilled the task of life, and are consigned to their final sleep, is sacrilegious. Well may they exclaim, like the ghost of Samuel in the sacred story, “Why hast thou disquieted me?” There is a further circumstance in the case, which causes us additionally to revolt from the very idea of necromancy, strictly so called. Man is a mortal, or an immortal being. His frame either wholly “returns to the earth as it was, or his spirit,” the thinking principle within him, “to God who gave it.” The latter is the prevailing sentiment of mankind in modern times. Man is placed upon earth in a state of probation, to be dealt with hereafter according to the deeds done in the flesh. “Some shall go away into everlasting punishment; and others into life eternal.” In this case there is something blasphemous in the idea of intermeddling with the state of the dead. We must leave them in the hands of God. Even on the idea of an interval, the “sleep of the soul” from death to the general resurrection, which is the creed of no contemptible sect of Christians, it is surely a terrific notion that we should disturb the pause, which upon that hypothesis, the laws of nature have assigned to the departed soul, and come to awake, or to “torment him before the time.”

TITLE COMMENTARY Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams THE BRITISH CRITIC (REVIEW DATE JULY 1794) SOURCE: A review of Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, by William Godwin. The British Critic 4 (July 1794): 70-1. In the following excerpt, the critic condemns Caleb Williams as an “evil use” of Godwin’s talents.

[Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams] is a striking example of the evil

use which may be made of considerable talents, connected with such a degree of intrepidity as can inspire the author with resolution to attack religion, virtue, government, laws, and above all, the desire (hitherto accounted laudable) of leaving a good name to posterity. In this extraordinary performance, every gentleman is a hard hearted assassin, or a prejudiced tyrant; every Judge is unjust, every Justice corrupt and blind. Sentiments of respect to Christianity are given only to the vilest wretch in the book; while the most respectable person in the drama abhors the idea of “shackling his expiring friend with the fetters of superstition.” In order to render the laws of his country odious, the author places an innocent prisoner, whose story he (avowedly) takes from the Newgate Calendar of the first George’s reign, in a dungeon; the wretched, unhealthy state of which he steals (as avowedly) from one of the benevolent Howard’s painful descriptions of a worse gaol than common. We will only add, that the character, on which the author seems to dwell with most pleasure, is that of a leader of robbers, one who dwells in a ruinous retreat, and dispatches felons and murderers, in parties, around the country. When a work is so directly pointed at every band which connects society, and at every principle which renders it amiable, its very merits become noxious as they tend to cause its being known in a wider circle.

THE MONTHLY REVIEW (REVIEW DATE OCTOBER 1794) SOURCE: “Godwin’s Things as They Are.” The Monthly Review 15 (October 1794): 145-49. In the following review, the critic terms the plot of Caleb Williams “a whining love tale,” but praises the novel as an outstanding example of philosophical fiction.

Between fiction and philosophy there seems to be no natural alliance:—yet philosophers, in order to obtain for their dogmata a more ready reception, have often judged it expedient to introduce them to the world in the captivating dress of fable. It was not to be supposed that the energetic mind of Mr. Godwin, long inured as it must have been to abstract speculation and sublime inquiry, would condescend to employ itself in framing a whining love tale; which, after having drawn a few tears from the eyes of a number of tender virgins, would have reposed in eternal peace on the loaded shelves of some circulating libraries. In writing the Adventures of Caleb Williams, this philosopher had doubtless

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After life’s fitful fever they sleep well: Nor steel, nor poison, Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing, Can touch them further.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR EDGAR ALLAN POE REVIEWS GODWIN’S LIVES OF THE NECROMANCERS

The name of the author of Caleb Williams, and of St. Leon, is, with us, a word of weight, and one which we consider a guarantee for the excellence of any composition to which it may be affixed. There is about all the writings of Godwin, one peculiarity which we are not sure that we have ever seen pointed out for observation, but which, nevertheless, is his chief idiosyncrasy—setting him peculiarly apart from all other literati of the day. We allude to an air of mature thought—of deliberate premeditation pervading, in a remarkable degree, even his most common-place observations. He never uses a hurried expression, or hazards either an ambiguous phrase, or a premature opinion. His style therefore is highly artificial; but the extreme finish and proportion always observable about it, render this artificiality, which in less able hands would be wearisome, in him a grace inestimable. We are never tired of his terse, nervous, and sonorous periods—for their terseness, their energy, and even their melody, are made, in all cases, subservient to the sense with which they are invariably fraught. No English writer, with whom we have any acquaintance, with the single exception of Coleridge, has a fuller appreciation of the value of words; and none is more nicely discriminative between closely-approximating meanings. SOURCE: Poe, Edgar Allan. “Godwin’s Necromancy.” Southern Literary Messenger 2, no. 1 (December 1835): 65.

some higher object in view; and it is not difficult to perceive that this object has been to give an easy passport, and general circulation, to some of his favourite opinions. Having laid it down as a first principle that virtue consists in justice, or the wise and equal pursuit of general good, he thinks it necessary, in order to carry his system into effect, to investigate many sentiments which, though hitherto considered as the legitimate offspring of nature, and even as possessing some

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degree of moral value, are in his judgment only the creatures of error and prejudice. In this class he appears to rank that sense of honour which seeks its ultimate reward in the good opinion of mankind. Accordingly, this fictitious narrative seems to have been written chiefly for the purpose of representing, in strong colours, the fatal consequence of suffering the love of fame to become predominant. Mr. Falkand, who ought, perhaps, rather than Caleb Williams, to be considered as the principal actor in this drama, exhibits a character wholly formed on the visionary principles of honour. Early tinctured with extravagant notions on this subject, by the heroic poets of Italy, he cherishes a romantic pride; which, notwithstanding his natural propensity toward benevolence, displayed in occasional acts of generosity, soon forms his ruling passion, and at length overwhelms him with accumulated wretchedness. He is the fool of honour; a man whom, in the pursuit of reputation, nothing could divert; who would purchase the character of a true, gallant, and undaunted hero, at the expence of worlds; and who thinks every calamity nominal except a stain on his honour. His virtue, his life, his everlasting peace of mind, are cheap sacrifices to be made at the shrine of same; and there is no crime too horrible for him to commit in pursuit of this object.—In the early part of his history, his pride suffers extreme irritation from the insulting provocations of a neighbour, Tyrrel; a man who has no other title to distinction than a large estate, and great bodily strength; whose ferocious temper, brutal manners, and shocking cruelties, render him to Falkland an object of profound contempt and abhorrence: but who, nevertheless, continually finds means to harass and torment him, and, while he is bringing on himself universal disgust by his enormities, and even at the very moment when he is suffering the extreme mortification of being driven from a public room, offers Falkland personal insult of the most disgraceful kind. Falkland, to whom disgrace is worse than death, wholly incapable of supporting this load of humiliating and public ignominy, yields to the irresistible impulse of detestation and revenge, and secretly assassinates his rival. The reproach and the penalty of the murder, however, fall on two innocent persons, Hawkins and his son, formerly tenants of Tyrrel; they are convicted on circumstantial evidence; and Falkland suffers them to die, rather than disclose the secret which would load his name with eternal infamy. This fatal secret becomes the burden of his soul, and the torment of his life.

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This visionary character is drawn with uncommon strength of conception and energy of language. The reader, while he respects and adores the virtues of Falkland, feels infinite regret that his mad passion for reputation should suppress every feeling of humanity, and become the source of unspeakable misery to himself, and of the most tragical calamity to others. The character, though original, will perhaps be admitted to be consistent; unless it should be thought difficult to reconcile the benevolence every where ascribed to Falkland, with the deliberate injustice and cruelty which were shewn in suffering the innocent Hawkins and his son to be executed, in preference to confessing his own guilt.—It will perhaps be said that the ruling passion of Falkland was not benevolence, but the love of fame; yet it may be questioned whether such benevolence, as is ascribed to Falkland, be not utterly incompatible with the tyrannical sway which is given in his character to the selfish passion of the love of fame. A farther object in this story appears to have been to exhibit an example of the danger of indulging an idle curiosity, merely for its own gratification; and the fatal consequences of this folly were perhaps never so impressively exemplified as in the story of Caleb Williams, the confidential servant of Falkland. Williams, having been made acquainted with many particulars of his master’s history by his steward, begins to suspect that the murder of Tyrrel had been committed by Falkland: he is therefore determined, at all hazards, to detect the secret; he becomes a perpetual spy on his master’s actions, and practises a thousand artifices to accomplish his purpose, till at length he extorts the truth from Falkland, on a solemn oath of secrecy. Having gained his wish, he finds the secret a most painful burden, which, through his master’s jealous apprehension for his reputation, brings on him a long series of persecution and perils; and the relation of them forms a large and interesting part of the narrative. Nothing can exceed the skilful management with which that part of the story is conducted, in which the reader remains unacquainted with the real occasion of Tyrrel’s death, till the suspicion against Falkland is gradually excited, and at length confirmed by the persevering ingenuity of Williams. The sufferings of Williams in prison, on a fictitious charge of having robbed his master,—the contrivances by which he repeatedly regains his liberty,—and the

adventures through which he passes, while he is wantonly persecuted as the perpetrator of a heinous felony, and flies in disguise from place to place for safety; till, in the last extremity of danger, he discloses the fatal secret, and becomes miserable under a load of self-reproach: all are related with an interesting particularity that evidently shews the hand of a master. The general result is a forcible conviction of the hazard of suffering any foolish desire, or curiosity, (that restless propensity,) to creep into the mind. ‘Error, (as Caleb well remarks,) once committed, has a fascinating power, like the eyes of the rattlesnake, to draw us into a second error. It deprives us of that proud confidence in our own strength, to which we are indebted for so much of our virtue.’ This narrative seems, moreover, intended to give the author an opportunity of making an indirect attack on what he deems vulgar prejudices respecting religion, morals, and policy. On these subjects, he expresses himself with that kind of latitude which those, who are acquainted with his treatise on Political Justice, will be prepared to expect. Striking pictures are drawn, in various parts of the work, of the oppression which is often practised under the form of law, and of the hardships which are inflicted in our prisons even on those whom the law has not convicted of any crime. Artful apologies are put into mouths of professional robbers, without any adequate refutation. Law is said to be better adapted for a weapon of tyranny in the hands of the rich, than for a shield to protect the humble part of the community against their usurpation. Caleb Williams thinks with unspeakable loathing of those errors, in consequence of which every man is fated to be, more or less, the tyrant or the slave; and he is astonished at the folly of his species, that they do not rise up as one man, and shake off chains so ignominious, and misery so insupportable. Mind, to his untutored reflections, is vague, airy, and unfettered; the susceptible perceiver of reasons, but never intended by nature to be the slave of force. He thinks it strange that men should, from age to age, consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely in order that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to law; and he prays that he may hold life at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of beasts, or of the revenge of barbarians, but not at that of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!—What all this means we cannot precisely say: but, before the old fences of law be broken down, we hold it prudent that some effectual provision should be made for taming the ferocious

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The fear of the infamy of detection drives him to a thousand acts of phrenzy and cruelty, and, after having tortured him with perpetually increasing anguish, at last destroys his existence.

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With due allowance for systematical eccentricity, (the reader will pardon the paradoxical expression,) this performance, interesting but not gratifying to the feelings and the passions, and written in a style of laboured dignity rather than of easy familiarity, is singularly entitled to be characterized as a work in which the powers of genius and philosophy are strongly united.

FROM THE AUTHOR AN EXCERPT FROM THE PREFACE TO FLEETWOOD

Yet another novel from the same pen, which has twice before claimed the patience of the public in this form. The unequivocal indulgence which has been extended to my two former attempts, renders me doubly solicitous not to forfeit the kindness I have experienced.

KENNETH GRAHAM (ESSAY DATE WINTER 1984) SOURCE: Graham, Kenneth. “The Gothic Unity of Godwin’s Caleb Williams.” Papers on Language and Literature 20, no. 1 (winter 1984): 47-59.

One caution I have particularly sought to exercise: “not to repeat myself.” Caleb Williams was a story of very surprising and uncommon events, but which were supposed to be entirely within the laws and established course of nature, as she operates in the planet we inhabit. The story of St. Leon is of the miraculous class; and its design, to “mix human feelings and passions with incredible situations, and thus render them impressive and interesting.”

In the following essay, Graham examines how Godwin utilized the Gothic narrative to unify disparate themes and plot lines in Caleb Williams.

In Caleb Williams a conflict between Godwin the novelist and Godwin the philosopher seems to have resulted in a work that is woefully bifurcated. A divided attitude to the prose narrative is reflected in the two titles, two prefaces, and two conclusions he conferred on the work. All reveal opposed assessments of the novel’s nature. This binary pattern is continued in a fourth opposition—in the form of two beginnings—that signals a source of unity amidst all this discrepancy and suggests that Godwin found in a young but flourishing Gothic tradition the way to reconcile apparent divisions.

Some of those fastidious readers—they may be classed among the best friends an author has, if their admonitions are judiciously considered—who are willing to discover those faults which do not offer themselves to every eye, have remarked, that both these tales are in a vicious style of writing; that Horace has long ago decided, that the story we cannot believe, we are by all the laws of criticism called upon to hate; and that even the adventures of the honest secretary, who was first heard of ten years ago, are so much out of the usual road, that not one reader in a million can ever fear they will happen to himself. Gentlemen critics, I thank you. In the present volumes I have served you with a dish agreeable to your own receipt, though I cannot say with any sanguine hope of obtaining your approbation. SOURCE: Godwin, William. “Preface.” In Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling. Vol. 1, 1805. Reprint edition, pp. v-xii. New York: Garland, 1979.

passions of those animals, who have never yet been turned loose into the wilds of nature without biting and devouring one another.

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At times it appears that Godwin intended Caleb Williams to be a fictionalization of Political Justice directed toward an audience not accustomed to the dizzy atmospheres of philosophical speculation but content to take their radical philosophy coated in engaging fictions. It was a practice favored by Holcroft, Wollstonecraft, Inchbald, and others of the coterie published by Joseph Johnson in the 1780s and 90s. Didactic intent is apparent in what was the work’s main title in its early editions, Things as They Are, and is apparent as well in radical reflections on specific social and political conditions. These include the pernicious effects of the class system in Britain, the debilitating and dangerous dependence of women, the foul conditions in prisons (with a reference to John Howard’s studies), and the injustice of the legal system. The preface to the first edition, withdrawn amidst the threats and repressions of May 1794 but published in the following year, informs the reader that “the spirit and character of government intrudes itself into every rank of society” encouraging the kinds of “domestic . . . despotism” that the novel illustrates.1 Thus, in the

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In a preface published thirty-eight years after the first edition, Godwin presents his novel in quite a different light. Discussing Caleb Williams in an 1832 edition of Fleetwood, he places his emphasis on the spirit of the work’s sub-title, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, and describes his work as “a series of adventures of flight and pursuit.” Underlining this emphasis on plot rather than on theme is Godwin’s account of the process of composition. He wrote it backwards, he tells us, presenting Falkland’s protracted harrying of Caleb before establishing the motivation for the pursuit. According to this later preface, then, the political message that centers on the tyrannies of Tyrrel and Falkland was an afterthought; the Tendenzroman was subordinate to the adventure story. Godwin does not mention in his preface that he rewrote the ending, but Gilbert Dumas discovered in the holograph manuscript of Caleb Williams an original ending in which Falkland triumphs and grows strong while Caleb, imprisoned and harassed, declines into mental and physical debility and death. Caleb leaves behind only his manuscript to proclaim a final condemnation of Things as They Are.2 In the published version a debilitated Falkland reveals his crimes but Caleb expresses no triumph in the victory of truth and justice but, rather, expresses guilt and revulsion at his own complicity in the destruction of Falkland. Thus with titles, prefaces, and conclusions, Godwin offers us a systematic contradiction that reveals diverging conceptions of two quite different works. On one hand, one finds the Tendenzroman bearing the title Things as They Are, illustrating the teaching of Political Justice and ending (given the power of the prejudices that Political Justice was seeking to undermine) on the victory of tyranny. This is the novel that Godwin, in one of his moods, appears to have thought he had written. The novel he published lacks this “thematic logic.”3 It focuses on Caleb Williams, offers “a series of adventures of flight and pursuit,” but concludes on a paradox that probes the psychological implications of dominance and submission. That terrible peripety in which tyrant becomes victim and victim tyrant permits neither the simple triumph of an adventure story nor the healing catharsis that the death of a victim of tyranny might arouse. That Godwin’s novel leaves Caleb in a condition of self-contempt and disillusionment represents a victory of art over politics and adventure.

Whether the victory came about consciously or unconsciously we shall never know, but there may be a wry self-awareness in an assertion that Godwin makes in The Enquirer of 1797. On the subject of moral and immoral tendencies in writing, Godwin remarks: “authors themselves are continually falling into the grossest mistakes in this respect, and show themselves superlatively ignorant of the tendency of their own writings.”4 The 1832 preface may reveal how Godwin came not to write a politically appropriate and logically coherent Tendenzroman, for in it one finds a brief account of another (and fourth) binary opposition. He reports that he began the narrative in the third person but soon changed to first person point of view as “best adapted . . . to my vein of delineation,” remarking at the same time that “the thing in which my imagination revelled the most freely was the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind” (339). That second start makes the second ending comprehensible. Despite suggestions to the contrary, the peripety that leaves Caleb not vindicated and triumphant but guilty and depressed is not to be explained by the politics of the time but by narrative demands exerted by the change in point of view.5 That change reflects the true emphasis of the narrative which is on character and not on theme or plot. Caleb’s subjective narrative introduces into the world of the novel a solipsism that integrates the novel of politics with the novel of adventure and, yet, owing to imperatives inherent in the point of view and the subject, responds to purposes separate from those of politics and adventure. Godwin imposed on his novel a rigorous empiricism that creates fictional reality from Caleb’s conscious adversions to the swarm of impressions, ideas, and thoughts flowing through his mind. The wavering, nervous account of passion and compulsion, temptation and harassment, despite the two titles, is neither a Tendenzroman nor an adventure story. It is a Gothic romance of modern times that embraces the other two narrative purposes in fascinating and ambivalent ways. Broadly speaking, because of the inclination of Gothic narrative to operate at the furthest verges of fictional reality where the natural confronts the supernatural, all Gothic conflict tends to represent or enact psychomachia. Thus, to exemplify the universal conflict between tyranny and liberty, Godwin chose a narrator who perceives the world in Gothic polarities. It is owing to Caleb’s perspective that Falkland takes his place among a class of

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early editions, title and preface prepared the reader for a Tendenz-roman very much in the spirit of its radical author and its revolutionary times.

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Gothic tyrants that includes Walpole’s Manfred, Beckford’s Vathek, and Radcliffe’s Montoni. The Gothic mode is appropriate also to the presentation of an adventure of flight and pursuit since such action is stimulated by irrational hatreds and terrors. Ultimately the Gothic emphasis carries Caleb Williams away from the narrative simplicities of either an adventure story or a Tendenzroman and into the complexities natural to the portrayal of abnormal psychologies. While Caleb’s is the dominant solipsism, the major characters are similarly confined by their own extreme views of reality. Their perspectives combine to engender a narrative full of characteristics we associate with the Gothic novel but with subtle and significant transformations appropriate to its contemporary setting. Intense psychological energies unleashed by the interaction of characters take the place of conventional ghosts and demons. As expressed through Caleb’s guilt- and fearridden consciousness, those energies give rise to a chain of hauntings, of obsession and compulsion, of guilt and anxiety, that lead Tyrrel to attack Falkland, Falkland to murder Tyrrel, and Caleb to uncover Falkland’s secret. The searing conjunction of the sensibilities of the three characters impels them to confer upon one another the roles of malignant supernatural agency. To Falkland, Caleb is “devil”; Falkland haunts Tyrrel “like a demon”; Caleb describes Falkland’s energy and rage as “more than mortal.” Each acts, voluntarily or involuntarily, to threaten the tranquility or selfesteem of another. To portray a world solipsistically projected by the emotional intensities of his characters, Godwin draws upon a Gothic vocabulary that invokes and evokes ideas of infernal supernatural agency, of physical torture and murder, and of psychological and emotional excess. I have already mentioned some instances of the use of terms like ghost and demon as characters project the powers of supernatural evil upon one another. One can multiply examples of such usage as actions are portrayed to represent “supernatural barbarity,” “demoniac malice,” or suffering as the “torment of demons.” The very recurrence of terms evoking the demonic supernatural such as spectre, devil, chimera, basilisk, demon expresses the nature of the world the characters experience. A vocabulary of physical and psychological excess reflects the terrible violence of this world. Characters “writhe with agony,” “poison . . . pleasures,” endure “insufferable tortures . . . upon the rack.” Their emotional frenzies are often

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presented in the language of psychological aberration as they are “stung . . . to madness,” “drunk with choler,” foaming “with anguish and fury,” or in a “paroxysm of insanity.” Coral Ann Howells has called attention to the use of theatrical convention in the Gothic novel, and Peter Brooks reminds us of the similarities in source and subject of the Gothic novel and late eighteenth-century melodrama.6 While often awkward and artificial, Godwin’s theatrical rhetoric does succeed in evoking the vibrant emotional intensities of his characters and the reality they experience. Tyrrel, tormented with a jealousy of Falkland that grows in him like Ambrosio’s lust, “writh[es] with intolerable anguish, his rage . . . unbounded and raving” (93). This violent vocabulary reaches an extreme in the robber-woman who, in her hatred of Caleb, with “fevrous blood of savage ferocity” threatens to “tear” his flesh “piecemeal,” to thrust her fingers through his ribs and drink his blood (231). A rational vocabulary is not appropriate to the rages and frenzies of the “divine intoxication” that Georges Bataille asserts is the traditional definition of evil.7 The images of cannibalism and vampirism help portray the physical and psychological violence of his novel’s world that is forever forcing Godwin to challenge the expressive limits of language. Thus, the reality that the passionate and violent minds of the characters project is a characteristically Gothic one. The elemental conflicts of pleasure/pain, reason/unreason, good/evil are enacted, and actions succeed one another with a terrible inevitability. When Horace Walpole replaced the drawing room of eighteenth-century fiction with the Gothic labyrinth, he introduced a Manichean dimension to the novel and offered glimpses of evil as a vital, independent force as he set a series of dark heroes on the path to inevitable damnation. The Gothic reality projected by Caleb’s consciousness is marked by emotional extremes. His pleasures are ecstasies that are describable only in near-sexual terms. Here is his reaction to the discovery of Falkland’s guilt: My mind was full almost to bursting. . . . I was conscious to a kind of rapture for which I could not account. I was solemn, yet full of rapid emotion, burning with indignation and energy. In the very tempest and hurricane of the passions, I seemed to enjoy the most soul-ravishing calm. . . . I was never so perfectly alive as at that moment. [129-30]

More familiar than such euphoria in the worlds of the major characters is the experience of pain. Theirs is a manic world of stark polarities.

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The malignant destiny of Caleb Williams is, in fact, an adaptation of Godwin’s concept of necessity. Although Godwin keeps his philosophical beliefs subordinate to the demands of his narrative, in this instance he has employed his philosophy to enrich his fiction. Godwin was a determinist. He saw life as “a vast system of interrelated events, an eternal chain of causes and effects” 8 in which particular outcomes can be foreseen if one’s knowledge of causes is full enough. The world of Caleb Williams is subject to necessity, but it is a Gothic necessity characterized as mysterious, inexorable, and malignant. Caleb confers a sense of dark foreboding on the work through his continual references to “painful presentiments,” “mysterious fatality,” and “ill destiny.” The characters frequently express a sense of being compelled or acted upon by merciless forces, both within and outside themselves. Caleb characterizes Falkland’s life as “the uninterrupted persecution of a malignant destiny.” Emily’s infatuation with Falkland “appeared to [Tyrrel] as the last persecution of a malicious destiny” (46). All three major characters seem driven also from within by passions they cannot control: Tyrrel to persecute Emily, Falkland to kill Tyrrel, and Caleb to discover Falkland’s secret. Caleb talks about his curiosity as a “fatal impulse . . . destined to hurry me to my destruction” and terms like “uncontrollable passion” and “unconquerable impulse” recur in the narrative to characterize the irrational compulsions of all three characters. Often involuntarily, they inflict terrible sufferings on each other. Caleb excoriates Falkland’s tender conscience; Falkland’s very presence in the district assaults Tyrrel’s self-worth; and Falkland, fearing the effects of Caleb’s knowledge, harasses him for ten long years, denying him any peace and security. In accordance with Godwin’s determinism, the characters are subtly directed by their interaction with the world around them. But through

their own intense irrationalities and imaginative energies, they create Gothic monsters of each other and impose a perspective that transforms a morally neutral necessity into a Gothic fatality and their world into a region of sorrow presided over by a malignant demon. Two motifs very much associated with the politics of the time undergo fascinating transformation as a result of this Gothic perspective. Modern audiences may be baffled by the vehemence the novel directs against, of all unlikely subjects, chivalry and its corrupting influence. Caleb’s penultimate paragraph, in overwrought rhetoric, establishes and attacks the source of Falkland’s degeneration: “But thou imbibedst the poison of chivalry with thy earliest youth,”—a potion, Godwin suggests, though not in these anachronistic terms, that transformed Falkland from a Dr. Jekyll into a Mr. Hyde. David McCracken explains the attack as a reaction to the praise of chivalry9 in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France that soars to this ringing ubi sunt lament: I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened [the Queen of France] with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.1 0

Godwin’s response to Burke resulted in the creation of a unique character type. With his passion for chivalry, his sensitivity to personal honour that, when threatened, drives him to paroxysms of anger, tyranny, and guilt, Falkland is a Gothic quixote, and as such must take his place with the female quixote, the spiritual quixote, and the other quixotic types that adorn the fiction of the eighteenth century. Another political motif that undergoes a Gothic distortion is the social contract. The novel’s demonstration of the distortions of solipsism that must be corrected through sympathetic social intercourse is a more convincing moral for Caleb Williams than the dangers of a socially inculcated corruption based on myths of chivalry. A perverse relationship between Caleb and Falkland is established through the operation of Caleb’s passionate curiosity upon Falkland’s overwhelming sense of guilt and shame. Together they enact a kind of courtship ritual as Caleb assaults Falkland’s guilty sensitivities with probing questions and remarks, and Falkland, tempted to share the burden of guilt and allured by selfdestruction, alternately encourages and rejects Caleb’s overtures. Waxing in intensity through an

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From Caleb’s viewpoint the major characters he encounters are angelic or demonic: Clare, Collins, Emily, and Laura are in seraphic contrast to Tyrrel, Grimes, and Gines. Falkland passes through Caleb’s vacillating percipience from one extreme to the other. The world of the characters’ experiences, colored by their intermittent episodes of mania and melancholia, is subject to a demonic destiny. Entrapped in their intense emotional states, the three major characters—Caleb, Falkland, and Tyrrel—create the world they experience, a world bereft of Providence and presided over by a demonic fatality that draws each character ever deeper into suffering.

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intimacy of guilt, Falkland for his secret and Caleb for his curiosity, their relationship reaches a consummation as Falkland swears Caleb to secrecy and confesses his guilt. Their covenant, sworn by “every sacrament, divine and human” (135), is a kind of marriage distorted into a satanic bargain. It confirms Godwin’s demonstration in Political Justice of the immorality of oaths and promises as forms of compulsion that restrict unnaturally the mutable individual.1 1 “You have sold yourself,” declares Falkland, and for the rest of their lives the two are joined by guilt, secrecy, and forbidden knowledge in a Gothic social contract that precludes development or change in their relationship and entraps both in bonds of suspicion and fear. When Godwin decided on a first person point of view he changed, consciously or not, the purpose of his novel from an illustration of Political Justice to a study of solipsism.1 2 The decision reflects a willingness to sacrifice objectivity to subjectivity and political to aesthetic purpose. His chosen point of view is fraught with distortion: Caleb moves in and out of dream states; his sense of time is frequently awry—indeed he acknowledges the subjective distortions of time in his prison experiences. In the subsequent nightmare of prolonged harassment Caleb is so immersed in his own misery that he has little sense of objective time, and it is with shock that we discover with the return of Collins from the West Indies that ten years have elapsed since Caleb’s discovery of Falkland’s secret. The years of flight, disguise, and anxiety also affect his sense of identity. Seeking laboriously to evade Falkland’s omniscient eye (305) and vainly to establish creative and normal relationships with ordinary societies, Caleb is in turn a beggar, an Irish vagabond, a farmer’s son, a Jew, a deformed young man, twisted and lisping, and a rural watchmaker. The adoption and maintenance of alterations in behavior and appearance impose strains on his sense of self that are exacerbated by the assessments of his character expressed by others. In the story he is thrilled to overhear in a public house he is “the notorious housebreaker, Kit Williams” (235). In the broadsheet printed by Gines he is “the most accomplished swindler in plausibleness, duplicity and disguise” (269). He is devastated when Laura Denison gives credence to such stories and dismisses him as “a monster, and not a man” (300). Characterizations that disagree so markedly with his sense of self contribute to Caleb’s disorientation.

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The last few paragraphs of Godwin’s rewritten conclusion demonstrate how far his conception of his narrative had developed beyond political polemic. Falkland’s degeneration and death have acted so strongly on Caleb’s wavering sense of selfapprobation that the logic of Falkland’s decline and his own survival has forced him to redefine himself not as persecuted but as persecutor. “I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate” (326). Caleb ends his narrative enveloped by an uncertainty that extends even to his own identity. The assaults on his sense of identity are accompanied by other distortions in perspective that demonstrate the limitations of Caleb Williams as a political document. One hears reverberations of paranoia in his confession: “I could almost have imagined . . . that the whole world was in arms to exterminate me” (238). Caleb acknowledges the effects of his nightmare life in two revealing statements: “My sensations at certain periods amounted to insanity” (306) and “I sometimes fear that I shall be wholly deserted of my reason” (314). Godwin, having made reason central to his conception of human nature in Political Justice, entrusts his narrative of “Things As They Are” to a narrator who doubts his own reason. Such acknowledgments of uncertainty with regard to time, identity, and sanity make Caleb’s narrative dubious testimony. The problem of credibility is complicated by inconstancies of narrative purpose. Caleb is writing his story in three stages and each stage is subject to different moods and purposes. He begins the process of composition on being driven out of Wales. His deep longings to be a respected and useful member of a community have been frustrated by false reports of a criminal past. His opening paragraph establishes for his narration the two aims of therapy and self-vindication. By writing he will divert his mind from his calamitous situation and rescue his reputation from wrongful accusation. The first and most extensive narrative stage extends to the fourteenth chapter of the third volume. Demonstrating a kind of modal unity, it ends with a repetition of its double purpose: For some time I had a melancholy satisfaction in writing. . . . I conceived that my story faithfully digested would carry in it an impression of truth that few men would be able to resist; or at worst that . . . posterity might be induced to do me justice. [303-4]

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Caleb’s postscript, written after Falkland’s death, represents the third and final narrative stage. In a tone of desperate remorse, the chastened and disillusioned Caleb regrets his aim of revenge and seeks to repair Falkland’s reputation, tarnished by public trial and confession. For Caleb, now, the truth is that “a nobler spirit lived not among the sons of men”; Caleb stands selfcondemned for “the baseness of my cruelty” (325). Ten years of persecution have shrunk in the face of his perceived responsibility for Falkland’s death. The limitations of a solipsistic perspective had blinded Caleb to the effects of a prosecution on Falkland. The narrative that begins in selfassertive protest ends on the psychological vacuity of that final paragraph with its repudiation of the former aim of self-vindication. The narrative that begins as apologia ends as confession. Opening with vehement appeals to Truth and Justice, the narrative closes on fundamental doubts about the nature of guilt and innocence. Such neat reversals in narrative purpose are part of a series of ironic patterns in the structure of Caleb Williams that demonstrate Godwin’s willingness to reject conventional realisms. It is the nature of realistic fiction to enact a tension between the demands of verisimilitude for empirical randomness and the demands of aesthetics for attractive resolutions and surprising reversals. Godwin was able to satisfy his aesthetic impulses as an artist and his disciplined investigations as a philosopher by substituting for empirical reality the realm of necessity. In this realm of necessity the hidden forces behind appearances reside, and seemingly casual events are seen to spring from

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The second main stage of the narrative is marked by impatience and depression. Caleb has just encountered Collins’ reluctance to be of assistance in his struggles with Falkland. His earlier aims, he writes, “have diminished in their influence. . . . Writing . . . is changed into a burthen. I shall compress . . . what remains to be told” (303-4). Caleb here asserts a narrative freedom that heretofore he has scrupulously avoided admitting: he will take a liberty with truth by compressing his story. In this narrative stage he declares also a new aim, revenge on Falkland for years of torment. “I will tell a tale . . . justice . . . shall hear me. . . . His fame shall not be immortal” (31415). With this declaration, his tone has modulated from impatience to indignation and for the passive aim of therapy he has substituted the active one of revenge. This last purpose has the potential to carry the story even further away from truth.

Title page from the 1795 edition of Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams.

basic drives to form strange patterns of irony, reversal, and inevitability. The hidden laws of Gothic necessity shape the action of the novel. The story of Falkland’s long harassment of Caleb is punctuated by coincidences in which Caleb’s escapes are prevented and his sanctuaries discovered. When the violation of Falkland’s sense of honour drives him to a frenzied murder of Tyrrel, the instrument, “a sharp-pointed knife,” Falkland tells us, by unexplained coincidence “fell in my way.” That mysterious fate behind the unlikely events of the plot is in harmony with a world of surprising peripeties in which victim becomes oppressor, accuser becomes accused, freedom means imprisonment and imprisonment freedom, the peripeties that carry the work so far beyond the novel of adventure. While Godwin’s consciousness of the demands of philosophical consistency confers significance on his anti-realism, we should not be too blinded by his philosophy to overlook his use of the conventional anti-realism of the Gothic romance. Indeed, a fictional world that can

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contain a secret chamber, a locked truck bearing a dreadful secret, banditti and their violent consort reminds us that even at its most philosophical, the Gothic novel is still a thriller. The importance of Godwin’s employment of a solipsism that transforms his narrative from a political to a Gothic novel can be assessed by viewing Caleb Williams in its context in the young but developing Gothic tradition. It is a tradition that begins with Horace Walpole’s impatience with Richardson specifically and the novel of bourgeois realism generally. “I thought . . . that a god, at least a ghost, was absolutely necessary to frighten us out of too much senses.”1 3 The naturalsupernatural tension takes a particular direction with Clara Reeve’s strictures against the over-use of the marvelous and her complaint that Otranto should have been kept “within the utmost verge of probability.”1 4 That movement comes to a significant focus with Ann Radcliffe who, by the example of excellence that she set, established a particular school of the Gothic in which the verge of probability is firmly located on the natural side of the boundary, and the focus of narrative is on the frightened apprehensions of her heroines. Godwin appears to have learned from Ann Radcliffe’s example that the Gothic romance need not rely on supernatural events; it does not need even a pseudo-medieval setting. What is essential is terror, a frightened uncertainty enwrapped in a threat of violence. Radcliffe demonstrates that terror need not be supernaturally generated. Godwin represents a further significant stage in the internalization of the sources of Gothic apprehensiveness by demonstrating that a response of terror is not dependent upon such physical properties of a Radcliffian scenario as mirrors, gloom, creaking stairs, wax works, and servant girls sleepwalking. In Caleb Williams, Godwin’s fearful Gothic reality is almost entirely generated internally. He demonstrates his creative grasp of the psychological Gothic by founding a series of Gothic motifs and images on the swarming thoughts and impressions of his characters. We find the hauntings, the demonic villains, the fearful threatenings, the passion and the violence that we expect in a Gothic novel, but all are psychologically generated. There is little physical description in Caleb Williams and none of the sublime word-painting characteristic of Ann Radcliffe’s novels. Godwin’s fictional setting is a projection of the experiences and expectations of his characters. Owing to their intense psychological agitation, Godwin’s Gothic world is a charged reality, a subtle complex of strange tensions arising from the irrational willful-

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ness of the characters and the uncanny destiny to which they believe themselves subject. Ann Radcliffe’s narrative technique that impels and enthralls the reader in engulfing excitement and suspense is subject to a serious liability, as Coleridge noted in his 1794 review of Udolpho in the Critical Review: Curiosity is raised oftener than it is gratified; or rather, it is raised so high that no adequate gratification can be given it; the interest is completely dissolved when once the adventure is finished, and the reader, when he is got to the end of the work, looks about in vain for the spell which had bound him so strongly to it.1 5

Like the structures created by Swift’s spider, Ann Radcliffe’s novel has ingenious form but lacks substance. Such criticism is not applicable to Caleb Williams because its characters and its world are emanations from a thoroughly conceived philosophical system. They may not always illustrate Political Justice (which Godwin intended as an inquiry and not as fixed doctrine) but they derive substance and significance from a theoretical foundation. True to Godwin’s political beliefs, Caleb Williams undermines the notions of sacred hierarchy and Burkean chivalry, and it replaces Providence with Necessity. It satisfies the demands of doctrine and adventure without being merely doctrinaire or merely sensational. Consequently, it does not leave the reader with curiosity gratified but unsatisfied. Rather it encourages reflection on the human need for social interaction and the distortions of solipsism. Godwin recognized with Hume that there may be no resemblance between a sensation and its cause and that reality must remain a mystery to a human experience limited by sensation. But, as F. E. L. Priestley points out in his edition of Political Justice, in the development of Godwin’s thought, human isolation is mitigated by the resemblance between the contents of one mind and another.1 6 Perhaps it was a reflection on the plights of Falkland, Caleb, and Tyrrel, isolated and imprisoned in their own consciousness, or perhaps it is a normal development in his philosophy that had Godwin write in Thoughts on Man (1831): “The belief in the reality of matter explains nothing. . . . But the belief in the existence of our fellow-men explains much.” And “sympathy is the only reality of which we are susceptible; it is our heart of hearts.”1 7 For different reasons, Falkland, Caleb and Tyrrel resist communication with their fellow men and thus create conditions for the distortions of a

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Notes 1. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (1970; rpt. London, 1977), p. 1. Subsequent citations from this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. This edition includes the prefaces of 1794, 1795, and 1832 as well as the extant fragments of the original ending. 2. For a discussion of the political events surrounding the revised ending see D. Gilbert Dumas, “Things As They Were: The Original Ending of Caleb Williams,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 6 (1966): 57597. 3. The term is used by Dumas who prefers the original ending. I incline to Gary Kelly’s opinion that the second ending “raises the novel above the doctrinaire.” The English Jacobin Novel 1780-1805 (Oxford, 1976), p. 197. 4. The Enquirer (1797; rpt. New York, 1965), p. 132. 5. By linking his discussion of Godwin’s revision of the conclusion to Caleb Williams to the political arrests of radicals in May 1794, D. Gilbert Dumas encourages the conclusion that the revisions were politically motivated. 6. Howells, Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (London, 1978), pp. 20-23; Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, 1976), pp. 16-21. 7. Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London, 1973), p. 9. 8. F. E. L. Priestley, “Critical Introduction” in William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Toronto, 1946), 3:6. 9. “Godwin’s Caleb Williams: A Fictional Rebuttal of Burke,” Studies in Burke and His Times 11 (1970):144252. 10. Ed. Thomas H. D. Mahoney (New York, 1955), p. 86. 11. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. K. Codell Carter (Oxford, 1971), pp. 98-112. 12. Gay Clifford makes the solipsistic limitations of firstperson narratives the basis for a fruitful comparison between Caleb Williams and Frankenstein. See “Caleb Williams and Frankenstein: First-Person Narratives and ‘Things as They Are,’” Genre 10 (1977): 601-17. 13. The Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Mrs. Paget Toynbee (Oxford, 1904), 6:201. 14. The Old English Baron, ed. James Trainer (London, 1967), p. 4.

15. Included in A Wiltshire Parson and His Friends: The Correspondence of William Lisle Bowles, ed. Garland Greever (Boston, 1926), pp. 169-70. 16. “Critical Introduction,” 3:98. 17. Ibid.

BETTY RIZZO (ESSAY DATE 1992) SOURCE: Rizzo, Betty. “The Gothic Caleb Williams.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 305 (1992): 1387-89. In the following essay, Rizzo addresses the disagreement over the classification of Caleb Williams as a Gothic novel, and argues that “Godwin’s novel is squarely in the tradition.”

William Godwin’s 1794 novel Caleb Williams has long been placed firmly but uneasily in the Gothic tradition. If one defines the Gothic as that form that describes a mortal combat between one or more virtuous but comparatively powerless protagonists and others far more unscrupulous and powerful, as well as that form which deals obliquely with subjects which cannot be directly addressed, then Godwin’s novel is squarely in the tradition. In his preface to the book Godwin states his intention: to provide ‘a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man’. A recent editor of the book has noted that this preface has ‘by no means an obvious conection with the novel itself’. On the contrary, the preface points squarely to the purport of the book, which is to expose the malignancy of the patriarchal establishment of the England of his day. In exposing the corruptions and terrible injustices inflicted for the perpetuation of their own power on the dependents it was their avowed responsibility to protect, by both the seeming worst and the seeming best of the English aristocracy, Godwin adopts the devices of the Gothic: the hidden past crime of the patriarch, his willingness to take any course to avoid exposure, his sacrifice of every human relationship, every human right, to preserve the reputation necessary to preserve his prerogative. Much Gothic material lies on the surface of the plot. Godwin himself began with the compelling image of flight and pursuit of his third and final book. But the political import of the persecution of the less privileged must soon have attached itself to this pursuit theme, as Godwin worked out the circumstances which were to lead to the chase. Caleb Williams in the course of the persecution he endures, is isolated, terrorised, imprisoned, and

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Gothic perspective to operate. Godwin’s narrative builds to a climactic anagnorisis at Falkland’s trial as Falkland’s terrible physical degeneration acts upon Caleb, and Caleb’s forthright testimony upon Falkland, to dissipate the demonic illusions that they had projected upon each other. Simplified, the underlying meaning of Caleb Williams is that solipsism distorts perspective and sympathy counteracts solipsism. That is the real focus of the narrative and the real basis for the title, Things As They Are.

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denied the opportunity for personal development. He cannot settle down and work, cannot have human relationships, cannot win respect or love. These are the conditions of the Gothic; they are also the conditions of the victims of the patriarchy. More hidden Gothic material has to do with the nature of the administration of the English social system—its true pernicious nature. The corruption of the law as a tool in the hands of the law’s administrators is obviously highlighted. The defenceless Hawkinses, who think they can stand up for their own rights, are ruined and gaoled. The defenceless Emily who believes she can refuse to marry a brutish suitor chosen by her cousin Tyrrel is sued for her maintenance as a minor and thrown ill with a fever into gaol, where she dies. The law co-operates with the persecution of Caleb Williams at every turn. Less obvious is the lesson that the swinish Tyrrel and his opponent the courtly gentleman Falkland are not opposites at all, but are doubles. And in both cases their corruption derives from their proud determination to be preeminent. Tyrrel is crude, abusive, and obviously an enemy of the rights of all other humans. Falkland opposes with abhorrence his destruction of the Hawkinses and Emily. But in fact he is simply a far more clever and subtle version of Tyrrel. The corruption of both men has been caused by their having been given control of others. Corrupted by their power, Tyrrel demands the incense of perpetual adulation; Falkland demands only the public acknowledgement of his impeccable honour. To protect that ‘honour’, Falkland murders Tyrrel, allows the Hawkinses to go to the gallows for the crime— now he is clearly branded as Tyrrel’s double—and takes control of the life of Caleb Williams, who has learned his secret. On the level of the Gothic plot this secret is the motive for the patriarchal concern to hide the truth in order to retain control. Caleb’s function in the plot therefore is not to provide a clinical example of a curiosity wildly out of bounds, but to represent the rational just man who pursues truth from a love of truth and justice and from a sense that something is ‘wrong’. Caleb Williams represents the new emerging man, not privileged, not tenderly educated, but a reader, and a man who, even while young and inexperienced, sees the criminality of Alexander the Great, whom Falkland defends. Furthermore Williams, who does not have an empire to protect, is compassionate and kind. Knowing Falkland’s guilt, he still reveres and respects him, and would never

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have turned him in. His is the proper love and respect of the son for the father. The patriarchy, however, has perverted every system including that of the proper relationship of fathers and sons. Though the Hawkinses were a model in this regard Caleb is denied the paternal care he needs and longs for. The fatherly Collins is sent away on Falkland’s concerns, on his return is turned against Caleb, and finally is too old and frail to be burdened with the truth about Falkland’s plots. The watchmaker who adopts Caleb as a surrogate son is seduced into betraying him by Falkland’s proffered reward. Humbler characters are more likely to sense the truth. Old Tom, Caleb’s fellow servant, even against his own reason, smuggles him tools with which to escape from prison, and in London Mrs Marney protects him even though she herself is followed—and characteristically is rewarded by being arrested herself. The novel therefore is Gothic, dealing with the persecution of a humble, defenceless protagonist by others who wield the power. And it confirms the idea that the Gothic in fact exposes the vicious excesses of the patriarchal establishment seeking to perpetuate and confirm its ascendancy.

FURTHER READING Bibliography Pollin, Burton R. Godwin Criticism: A Synoptic Bibliography. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 1967, 659 p. Bibliography of works by and about Godwin published between 1783 and 1966.

Criticism Chandler, Anne. “Romanticizing Adolescence: Godwin’s St. Leon and the Matter of Rousseau.” Studies in Romanticism 41, no. 3 (fall 2002): 399-416. Discusses the influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile on St. Leon. Clemit, Pamela. The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, 254 p. Analysis of the school of fiction inaugurated by Godwin and developed in the works of his principal followers, Charles Brockden Brown and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Ellis, Kate Ferguson. “Men as They Are: William Godwin.” In The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology, pp. 151-65. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Examines the reconceptualization of manhood and the presentation of opposing ideals of masculinity in Caleb Williams.

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Interprets St. Leon as an elaboration of the literary techniques Godwin used in Caleb Williams and of his philosophical theories in Political Justice; asserts that the novel uses the trappings of Gothic fiction for didactic purposes. Fludernik, Monika. “Spectacle, Theatre, and Sympathy in Caleb Williams.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 14, no. 1 (October 2001): 1-30. Traces the theatrical metaphors in Caleb Williams and explores the idea of sympathy in the novel. ———. “William Godwin’s Caleb Williams: The Tarnishing of the Sublime.” ELH 68, no. 4 (winter 2001): 857-96. Examines Godwin’s deployment of the Burkean notion of the sublime. Handwerk, Gary. “Of Caleb’s Guilt and Godwin’s Truth: Ideology and Ethics in Caleb Williams.” ELH 60, no. 4 (winter 1993): 939-60. Argues that the tendency of Godwin’s fiction runs contrary to the political assumptions and expectations of Political Justice. Leaver, Kristen. “Pursuing Conversations: Caleb Williams and the Romantic Construction of the Reader.” Studies in Romanticism 33, no. 4 (winter 1994): 589-610. Discusses the relationship of author and reader in Caleb Williams.

Meyers, Mitzi. “Godwin’s Changing Conception of Caleb Williams.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 12, no. 4 (autumn 1972): 591-628. Asserts that Godwin’s views about morality and psychology evolved as he was writing Caleb Williams. Morse, David. “The Social Novel and the Gothic.” In Romanticism: A Structural Analysis, pp. 13-49. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1972. Suggests that Godwin’s use of the Gothic form in Caleb Williams enabled him to combine psychological exploration with social criticism. Roberts, Marie. “William Godwin’s Darkness of Enlightenment.” In Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, pp. 25-52. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Charts Godwin’s role in the development of the Rosicrucian novel, showing why it was that this reformer and anarchist philosopher became the founder of a branch of Gothic fiction inspired by the Brothers of the Holy Cross.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Godwin’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1789-1832; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 39, 104, 142, 158, 163, 262; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 14, 130; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, Vol. 4; and St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers.

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Flanders, Wallace. “Godwin and Gothicism: St. Leon.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 8 (1967): 533-45.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749 - 1832)

German poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer, essayist, critic, biographer, memoirist, and librettist.

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oethe is considered Germany’s greatest writer and a genius of the highest order. He distinguished himself as a scientist, artist, musician, philosopher, theater director, and court administrator. Excelling in various genres and literary styles, Goethe was a shaping force in the major German literary movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His first novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther), epitomizes the Sturm und Drang, or storm and stress, movement, and his dramas Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787; Iphigenia in Tauris) and Torquato Tasso (1790), as well as the poetry collection Römische Elegien (1795; Goethe’s Roman Elegies), exemplify the neoclassical approach to literature. His drama Faust is considered one of the greatest works of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Faust is ranked beside the masterpieces of Dante and Shakespeare, thus embodying Goethe’s humanistic ideal of a world literature transcending the boundaries of nations and historical periods.

bourgeois family. By the age of eight, he had composed an epistolary novel in which the characters correspond in five languages. Against his wishes, Goethe was sent to study law at the University of Leipzig, but he devoted most of his time to art, music, science, and literature. His university studies were interrupted by illness, and Goethe spent his convalescence learning about alchemy, astrology, and occult philosophy, subjects that would inform the symbolism of Faust. His earliest literary works, including the rococostyled love poetry of Buch Annette (1767), are considered accomplished but not outstanding. A decisive influence on Goethe’s early literary work was Johann Gottfried von Herder, whom the poet met in Strasbourg, where he continued his legal studies. Herder taught Goethe to appreciate the elemental emotional power of poetry, directing his attention to Shakespeare, Homer, Ossian, and German folk songs. Goetz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (1773; Goetz of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand) exemplifies Goethe’s work of this period. Somewhat Shakespearean in its emphasis on action and high emotion, the drama was popular in its time, but modern critics generally consider it superficial.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

MAJOR WORKS

The son of an Imperial Councilor, Goethe was born in Frankfurt am Main into an established

While critics have debated whether certain of Goethe’s works might be classified as Gothic, most

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agree that elements of the genre can be found in his work. Chief among Goethe’s works noted for containing Gothic elements is his two-part retelling of the classic legend of Faust, the scholar who gives Mephistopheles, or the devil, a chance to claim his soul in exchange for unlimited knowledge and eternal life. Goethe began working on the drama during his student days in Strasbourg. In 1790 he published an incomplete version, known as Faust: Ein Fragment. In 1808, the complete version of the first part appeared. Goethe continued to work on the play, and Faust II was published posthumously in 1832. For its poetic power, formal variety and complexity, as well as its philosophical universality, the first part of Faust was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of mythic proportions. Faust II, however, was not fully analyzed or appreciated until the twentieth century. Goethe addressed the Gothic in his nonfiction writing as well. In his essay “Von deutscher Baukunst” (1773) and in book nine of his autobiography, Aus meinen Leben (1811-22; Memoirs of Goethe), he discusses at length his initial distaste for Gothic architecture, recalling that the wholeness and harmony he found in the cathedral at Strasbourg changed his views.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Following his death, Goethe’s literary reputation diminished outside of the German-speaking world. Twentieth-century British and American critics have generally acknowledged Goethe’s greatness. Generally more favorable to Goethe than their American and European colleagues, German critics have viewed their national poet as one of the central figures of world literature. Criticism of the Gothic in Goethe’s work centers on Faust. Noting that the play “lacks almost totally the sadistic terror that was the visible hallmark of the gothic,” critics Jane K. Brown and Marshall Brown identify several Gothic tendencies in the work, including the title character’s pact with Mephistopheles, the appearance of supernatural figures (and human characters’ reaction to them), and depictions of transcendental consciousness. The legend of Faust, and Goethe’s telling in particular, has been credited with influencing such classic works of Gothic fiction as Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk. In the twenty-first century Faust continues to be regarded as Germany’s great contribution to world letters and one of the most important works of Western civilization.

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PRINCIPAL WORKS Buch Annette (poetry) 1767 Die Laune des Verliebten (play) 1767 Neue Lieder (poetry) 1769 Rede Zum Schäkespears Tag (criticism) 1771 Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand [Goetz of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand] (play) 1773 Von deutscher Baukunst (criticism) 1773 Clavigo (play) 1774 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers [The Sorrows of Werter; also published as Werter and Charlotte, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and The Sufferings of Young Werther] (novel) 1774 Stella (play) 1776 Die Geschwister [The Sister] (play) 1787 Iphigenie auf Tauris [Iphigenia in Tauris] (play) 1787 Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (play) 1787 Egmont (play) 1788 Faust: Ein Fragment (play) 1790 Torquato Tasso [Torquato Tasso: A Dramatic Poem from the German with Other German Poetry] (play) 1790 Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären [Goethe’s Botany: The Metamorphosis of Plants; also published as Tobler’s Ode to Nature] (essay) 1790 Beiträge zur Optik (essay) 1791-92 Der Gross-Kophta (play) 1792 Der Bürgergeneral (play) 1793 Reineke Fuchs [History of Renard the Fox; also published as Reynard the Fox] (poetry) 1794 Römische Elegien [Goethe’s Roman Elegies] (poetry) 1795 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship] (novel) 1795-96 Venezianische Epigramme (poetry) 1796 Xenien [with Friedrich Schiller; Goethe and Schiller’s Xenions] (poetry) 1797 Hermann und Dorothea [Herman and Dorothea] (poetry) 1798 Die natürliche Tochter (play) 1804 Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert (biography) 1805 Faust—Der Tragödie erster Teil [Faust. Part I.; published in Faust: A Drama by Goethe and Schiller’s “Song of the Bell”] (play) 1808

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Pandora (unfinished play) 1810 Wanderers Sturmlied (poetry) 1810 Zur Farbenlehre [Theory of Colours; also published as Goethe’s Colour Theory] (essay) 1810 Aus meinen Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit [Memoirs of Goethe: Written by Himself; also published as The Autobiography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry from My Own Life] (autobiography) 1811-22

Goethes sämmtliche Gedichte (poetry) 1869 Goethe’s Works. 9 vols. (autobiography, plays, poetry, novels, essays, travel essays) 1885 †Goethes Faust in urspünglicher Gestalt nach der Göch hausenschen Abschrift herausgegeben (play) 1888 Wilhelm Meisters theatricalische Sendung [Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission] (unfinished novel) 1911 Werke. 14 vols. (poetry, plays, novels, novellas, short stories, autobiography, biography, criticism, essays, history) 1961-64

Des Epimenides Erwachen (play) 1815 Sonnette (poetry) 1815

*

Italienische Reise [Travels in Italy; also published as Italian Journey] (travel essay) 1816

†

This work is a revision of the earlier Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre; oder, Die Enstagenden. This work is generally referred to as Urfaust.

Ueber Kunst und Altertum von Goethe. 6 vols. (criticism) 1816-32 Zur Morphologie (essay) 1817-23

PRIMARY SOURCES

West-öestlicher Divan [Goethe’s West-Easterly Divan; also published as West-Eastern Divan] (poetry) 1819

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (POEM DATE 1808)

Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre; oder, Die Entsagenden [Wilhelm Meister’s Travels; or, The Renunciants] (novel) 1821 Die Campagne in Frankreich: 1792 [Campaign in France in the Year 1792] (history) 1822 Trilogie der Leidenschaft (poetry) 1823 Marienbader Elegie (poetry) 1827 Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe [Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe from 1794 to 1805] (letters) 1828 Novelle [Goethe’s Novel; also published as Novella] (novella) 1828 *Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre; oder, Die Entsagenden [Wilhelm Meister’s Travels: Translated from the Enlarged Edition] (novel) 1828 Annalen: Tag-und Jahreshefte [Annals; or, Day and Year Papers] (journal) 1830

SOURCE: Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Dedication.” In Faust: Part One, translated by David Luke, p. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. The following poem serves as Goethe’s dedication to his Faust I, first published in 1808. Uncertain shapes, visitors from the past At whom I darkly gazed so long ago, My heart’s mad fleeting visions—now at last Shall I embrace you, must I let you go? Again you haunt me: come then, hold me fast! Out of the mist and murk you rise, who so Besiege me, and with magic breath restore, Stirring my soul, lost youth to me once more. You bring back memories of happier days And many a well-loved ghost again I greet; As when some old half-faded legend plays About our ears, lamenting strains repeat My journey through life’s labyrinthine maze, Old griefs revive, old friends, old loves I meet, Those dear companions, by their fate’s unkind Decree cut short, who left me here behind.

The Poems of Goethe (poetry) 1846

They cannot hear my present music, those Few souls who listened to my early song; They are far from me now who were so close, And their first answering echo has so long Been silent. Now my voice is heard, who knows By whom? I shudder as the nameless throng Applauds it. Are they living still, those friends Whom once it moved, scattered to the world’s ends?

Goethes sämmtliche Werke. 30 vols. (poetry, plays, essays, novels, novellas, short stories, criticism, history, biography, autobiography, letters, and librettos) 1848

And I am seized by long unwonted yearning For that still, solemn spirit-realm which then Was mine; these hovering lisping tones returning Sigh as from some Aeolian harp, as when

Faust II [Goethe’s Faust: Part II] (play) 1832 Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens: 1823-1832 [with J. P. Eckermann; Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life] (conversations) 1837-48

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Die Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities] (novel) 1809

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druck füllte meine Seele, den, weil er aus tausend harmonierenden Einzelheiten bestand, ich wohl schmecken und genießen, keineswegs aber erkennen und erklären konnte” (HA XII, 11).

I sang them first; I tremble, and my burning Tears flow, my stern heart melts to love again. All that I now possess seems far away And vanished worlds are real to me today.

GENERAL COMMENTARY KENNETH S. CALHOON (ESSAY DATE MARCH 2001) SOURCE: Calhoon, Kenneth S. “The Gothic Imaginary: Goethe in Strasbourg.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 75, no. 1 (March 2001): 5-14. In the following essay, Calhoon studies how Goethe’s recorded early encounters with Gothic architecture informed his representations of fear and horror in his later works.

In the spring of 1771 Goethe, on the mend after a long illness, and aching to escape the sphere of his father’s influence, rode the mail to Strasbourg, where he would convalesce further and read the law. Immediately upon alighting—so he reports in Dichtung und Wahrheit—he rushed to view at close range what had been visible for miles, namely the great thirteenth-century cathedral at the heart of town. His encounter with this medieval colossus is described dithyrambically in the essay Von Deutscher Baukunst, which Herder included in his Von Deutscher Art und Kunst (1772). A hymn to master-builder Erwin von Steinbach, the essay mounts a diatribe against a prevaling Neo-Classicism whose tenets had left Goethe disinclined to appreciate anything Gothic. He admits to sharing the common prejudice that made the term “Gothic” interchangeable with every conceivable aesthetic flaw—the absence of proportion and definition, ornamental excess, a jumbled mess of naturally incompatible forms. It is thus with apprehension that he approaches, braced to confront an unsettling amalgam of illmatched components, in a word, a “monster”: “so graute mir’s im Gehen vorm Anblick eines mißgeformten krausborstigen Ungeheuers.”1 To his surprise, Goethe discovers not a monster, but a structure suffused with a wholeness and harmony commensurate with the natural world. The building’s formal integrity, moreover, seems an outgrowth of its creator’s soul, in which the whole is one with its parts: “Er [der Genius] ist der erste, aus dessen Seele die Teile, in ein ewiges Ganze zusammengewachsen, hervortreten” (HA XII, 9). The facade, then, functions as a medium through which a wholeness, proper to the creator, is installed in the spectator: “Ein ganzer, großer Ein-

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This opposition of intuitive and cognitive faculties favors an immediacy of perception, which here smacks of oral pleasure and a concomitant unity of self and world. The physical connotation of the verb “schmecken” undoes the distance from necessity that conditions “good taste”. To be sure, the canons of taste are present as Goethe, recalling his wary approach, enumerates the frightful attributes that supposedly awaited him: “Unter die Rubrik Gotisch . . . häufte ich alle synonymische Mißverständnisse, die mir von Unbestimmtem, Ungeordnetem, Unnatürlichem, Zusammengestoppeltem, Aufgeflicktem, Überladenem jemals durch den Kopf gezogen waren” (HA XII, 10). Goethe identifies the confused synonymy by which the eighteenth-century champions of Classical restraint invoked the monstrous as something common to a range of distinct styles and representational practices. When Batty Langley observed in 1742 that “every ancient building, which is not in the Grecian mode, is called a Gothic building”, he echoed a Palladian Classicism, later embraced by Goethe himself, that had long defined itself in pointed opposition to the grotesque.2 With its inorganic aggregates of human, animal and plant forms, the grotesque lent expression to forces of instability—of “disruptive or insurgent vitality”— embodied catastrophically by Dr. Frankenstein’s “gothic” monster, who is stitched together out of disparate and aesthetically incompatible parts, both human and animal.3 Finding in the great Gothic structure a dynamic, organic integrity, Goethe absolves the cathedral of the “grotesque” promiscuity that an ascendant bourgeois order was prone to project onto the styles of the old régime. Indeed, the excessive and imbalanced ornamentation that Goethe anticipated is suggestive of the Baroque and Rococo. The latter was at hand when Quatremère de Quincy, writing in 1798, warned of an enduring taste for the bizarre, which he ascribed to a “satiety that comes from abundance”. Bizarrerie he condemned as an “incurably immoral use of form”—one that “makes the simple beauties of nature seem insipid”. De Quincy laments the wide-ranging influence that this predilection for the bizarre exercised over architecture: “[S]traight lines were replaced by convolutions; severe outlines by undulations; regular plans by over-

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Straight, severe, regular, symmetrical, ordered—these normative values convey the moralism behind a new, ideal architecture governed by the language of geometry and the law of function. The doctrine that would subordinate the edifice to the principle of uniform visibility stood opposite an old régime whose revelry in the play of appearances was now understood as spiritual dissipation—as Zerstreuung. The anodyne of distraction, namely concentration (Sammlung), is aligned with Anschauung, which in its full anthropological import denotes a simultaneous, undivided seeing. Something of this kind is evoked by de Quincy when he extols an architecture that refuses to divide itself into a variety of dissociated effects: “To produce an effect of grandeur, the object in which it is to inhere must be simple enough to strike us at a glance, that is to say, in its entirety, and at the same time to strike us in relation to its parts.”5 Commenting on these lines, Jean Starobinski cites “a nouveau régime of sensibility” that “set aside multiplicity of sensation in favor of the unity of one great spiritual intuition”6 . One great spiritual intuition: so closely does this echo Goethe’s evocation of the informing principle of the Gothic that it seems possible to situate his essay within a discourse whose other is that same “multiplicity of sensation”. Subverting the logic that made the Gothic synonymous with the dispersive energies of the grotesque, Goethe enlists this architecture as an amalgam by which to conflate otherwise dissimilar Baroque and NeoClassical traditions. The Baroque and Rococo make more or less explicit appearances in the Baukunst-essay, Baroque in the form of Bernini’s much-maligned colonnade in front of St. Peter’s, Rococo in the guise of those whom Goethe decries as “geschminkte Puppenmaler”. One thinks of the brightly painted figurines from Meissen and elsewhere, so popular at the time, which perfectly epitomize the minute elaborations of a waning aristocratic society built on delicacy, intimation, politesse, not to mention the studied effeminacy of the honnéte homme: “Sie [unsre geschminkten Puppenmaler] haben durch theatralische Stellungen, erlogne Teints, und bunte Kleider die Augen der Weiber gefangen” (HA XII, 14). Rejecting the precepts of trompe-l’oeil, Goethe removes himself from a specularity that would implicate him in so blatantly narcissistic a self-presentation. His own image fragmented, he proceeds from a lack that stands opposite the aforementioned “satiety that

comes from abundance”. He describes himself early on as a “patched up vessel” poised between death and prosperity but drifting toward the former: “eh’ ich mein geflicktes Schiffchen wieder auf den Ozean wage, wahrscheinlicher dem Tod als dem Gewinst entgegen . . .” (HA XII, 7), etc. He goes on to recount his attempt to improvise a monument to Erwin, whose grave-marker he has failed to locate. The missing crypt marks an emphatic absence, which is offset by the vision of the cathedral, itself the product of an ostensibly undivided genius. In this context, David Wellbery notes the “semantics of verticality” that pervades Goethe’s essay and specifies the symbolic position as phallic.7 The observation is doubly applicable to the cathedral in question, given that only one of its twin towers was finished, leaving the lone spire forever shadowed by a symmetrical lack. Goethe’s vision of the massive church as a natural, harmonious and eternal whole does not neutralize his anxiety but confirms it—in the way that, in a certain psychoanalytic regimen, the tension between belief and disavowal is sustained through hallucinations that represent both. The cathedral acquires a strangely hallucinatory quality, as when Goethe comments on how the huge building seems suspended aloft: “wie das festgegründete, ungeheure Gebäude sich leicht in die Luft hebt” (HA XII, 12). In Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe remembers how the church, at first sight, struck him as something monstrous—ein Ungeheures—which would have terrified him were it not so finely conceived and carefully wrought (HA IX, 357-58). In the same account, he describes his repeated climbs to the top of the tower. In one instance, he forces himself out onto the narrow platform, from which the vertiginous spectacle, which he likens to the view from a hot-air balloon, is not framed or foregrounded by any part of the church: “Es ist völlig, als wenn man sich auf einer Montgolfiere in die Luft erhoben sähe. Dergleichen Angst und Qual wiederholte ich so oft, bis der Eindruck mir ganz gleichgültig ward . . .” (HA IX, 374). He adds that this strategy of exposing himself to unpleasant or disturbing experiences for the purpose of mastering them served him well in other endeavors, in particular his anatomical studies, where he learned to bear even the most repulsive sight, i.e., “den widerwärtigsten Anblick [zu] ertragen”. A certain “compulsion to repeat” (Wiederholungszwang) defines a sequence of exclamatory gestures that build on Goethe’s first close encounter with the Gothic giant: “Mit welcher unerwarteten Empfindung überraschte

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elaborate, mixtilinear designs; the symmetrical by the picturesque; and order by the confusion of chaos.”4

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mich der Anblick, als ich davor trat!” (HA XII, 11). The experience is represented not only in terms of an unalloyed sensation but also as the resolution of the tension, indeed the suspense, that informs Goethe’s approach. We have noted how Goethe, winding his way through town, virtually trembles at the prospect of confronting “a misshapen, curly-bristled monster” (“eines mißgeformten krausborstigen Ungeheuers”). And while the actual encounter does not initially appear fearinducing, the long paragraph describing Goethe’s reaction—in which the spirit of the architect whispers (“lispelt”) his secrets to the visitor— builds to a point of equilibrium that supersedes fear: “Deinem Unterricht dank’ ich’s, Genius, daß mir’s nicht mehr schwindelt an deinen Tiefen” (HA XII, 12). The intervening one-and-one-half pages take their structure from Goethe’s repeated trips to the church—return journeys that here seem apocryphally condensed between evening and morning. The following sentences are not consecutive, but they convey the Steigerung that this passage achieves: “wie oft bin ich zurückgekehrt, diese himmlisch-irdische Freude zu genießen. . . . Wie oft hat die Abenddämmerung mein durch forschendes Schauen ermattetes Aug’ mit freundlicher Ruhe geletzt, wenn durch sie die unzähligen Teile zu ganzen Massen schmolzen, und nun diese, einfach und groß, vor meiner Seele standen . . .” (HA, XII, 11). Not only is this repetitiveness made explicit, but the repetition also coincides with a refreshment of vision, which in turn corresponds to a melting of divisions that establishes the plenitude of presence. This presencing culminates in the image of the awakening Goethe, childlike, his arms outstretched toward the shimmering church, which is suddenly animated by the birds that inhabit its pierced and porous facade: “Bis die Vögel des Morgens, die in seinen tausend Öffnungen wohnen, der Sonne entgegenjauchzten und mich aus dem Schlummer weckten. Wie frisch leuchtet’ er im Morgenduftglanz mir entgegen, wie froh konnt’ ich ihm meine Arme entgegenstrecken, schauen die großen harmonischen Massen . . .” (HA XII, 12). These figures of fluidity, of masses melting into each other, and of organic wholeness, are juxtaposed to the spectacle of a church perceived to be incomplete, fragmented, discordant, constructed mathematically and piece by piece. This sense of incompleteness, like the anxiety it provokes, is not invalidated by the experience of wholeness, but is part of the dynamism that structures the suspense. Incidentally, Richard Sennett, in his study of visibility and urban design, takes issue

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with the common idea that the physical immensity of Gothic cathedrals served to make conspicuous the predominance of the Church over secular life: “God’s power was in no need of advertisement; the problem was how humankind . . . can approach Him, a problem of how to bring the congregation to an apprehension of His presence rather than an affirmation of His existence.”8 With rather less confidence in “His existence”, the Baroque orchestrates apprehension on a grand scale. Secrecy and obscurity are used to engage subjects in processes of decipherment, as wonder and astonishment ensure contemplation by bringing it temporarily to a halt. In his defining study of Baroque culture, José Antonio Maravall identifies a technique of suspension (not unrelated to suspense)—a means of “[arresting] one’s attention in a state of anxious instability so as to reinforce the consequences of emotional effects”9 . Hence a taste for difficulty, one manifestation of which was anamorphosis, where geometrical virtuosity was used to predict and project—or correct—visual distortion. This is part of a more general technique of incompleteness that Maravall finds in the later works of Shakespeare, sometimes thought to be loosely constructed, or the paintings of Velásquez, which typically have an unfinished quality: “It is a process of suspension wherein one expects the contemplating eye to end up supplying what is missing. . . . All painting of ‘splotches’ or ‘smears’ . . . is to a certain extent an anamorphosis that calls for spectator intervention to recompose the image.”1 0 Goethe supplies what is missing, his eye reassembling the image, finding completeness in place of “zerstreute Elemente” and “unzählig kleine Teile”. The cathedral at Strasbourg, as it functions in his essay, is anamorphic, wavering between a wholeness, which Goethe hallucinates, and the monstrosity lurking behind it, whereby “monster” carries the connotation of something ill-born.1 1 We may add that adjectives like “sinuous” and “flaccid”, commonly applied to architecture at the time, superimpose onto the structure an image of the body. To the extent that Goethe finds in the church a counterpart to his own “geflicktes Schiffchen”—Schiff (“nave”) being itself an architectural term—the stone edifice constitutes an imaginary reflection built around an internal sense of disunity. There is something here of Lacan’s mirror-stage—of the child’s jubilant recognition of his reflected image, which offers a semblance of wholeness that contrasts markedly with what the child experiences in himself. (The “disruptive or insurgent vitality” of the grotesque may here be thought of in analogy to

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Lacan is concerned with the manner in which living beings adapt to an internal bi-partitioning. This division is evident in the natural world in the phenomenon of mimicry, whereby the organism splits itself between its being and its semblance, the latter taking the form of masks, camouflage, alluring and threatening gestures. Lacan observes that the mechanism by which organisms assume the mottled coloration of the surrounding world is “the equivalent of the function which, in man, is exercised by painting”1 3 . He suggests provocatively that if a bird were to paint it would do so by “letting fall its feathers”1 4 . It is intriguing that Goethe, as an example of the “bildende Natur” that inheres in man and engenders artistic creation, refers to the self-decoration— the “body art”—of primitive peoples: “Und so modelt der Wilde mit abenteuerlichen Zügen, gräßlichen Gestalten, hohen Farben, seine Kokos, seine Federn und seinen Körper” (HA XII, 13). Art is atavistically derived. Lacan asserts that the stroke of the painter’s brush is a gesture, meant to intimidate, calculated to make an impression. Maravall has said with respect to the gestural excess of mannerism that painters like Michelangelo and Vasari “understood that what was unrestrained, taken to the extreme, possesses an ability to impress”1 5 . Likewise, Lacan affirms that “the [painted] picture is first felt by us, as the terms impression and impressionism imply, as having more affinity with the gesture than any other type of movement”1 6 . By ascribing an evasive function to the painting of “splotches” and “smears” (typical of but not limited to Velásquez), Maravall echoes the suggestion that “those touches that fall like rain from the painter’s brush” are analogous to natural mimicry and thus constitute a screen.1 7 Ortega y Gasset, who locates Velásquez at the beginning of a series of “successive impressionisms”, identifies a revolution in painting that “denied the pretensions of solidity”, replacing tactile, corporeal shapes with “a mere surface that intercepts vi-

sion”. Impressionism proper (Ortega’s account has the tone of complaint) represents a more complete withdrawal from the visible world and into the subject. This gradual distancing from things favors the genre of landscape, which formalizes the separation between subject and object: “The point of view has been retracted, has placed itself farther from the object, and we have passed from proximate to distant vision. . . . Between the eye and the bodies is interposed the most immediate object: hollow space, air.”1 8 As if to confirm Ortega’s claim that distant vision issues from the increasing self-absorption of the modern subject, Goethe produces, literally in place of the cathedral, a landscape. Having just arrived in Strasbourg, and anxious to take advantage of remaining daylight, he climbs the lone spire to partake of the view. The rustic panorama that greets him unfolds in accordance with the movements of the eye as it traces the courses of rivers and contours of the land: Und so sah ich denn von der Plattform die schöne Gegend vor mir, in welcher ich eine Zeitlang wohnen und hausen durfte: die ansehnliche Stadt, die weitumherliegenden, mit herrlichen dichten Bäumen besetzten und durchflochtenen Auen, diesen auffallenden Reichtum der Vegetation, der, dem Laufe des Rheins folgend, die Ufer, Inseln und Werder bezeichnet. Nicht weniger mit mannigfaltigem Grün geschmückt ist der von Süden herab sich ziehende flache Grund, welchen die Iller bewässert; selbst westwärts, nach dem Gebirge zu, finden sich manche Niederungen, die einen ebenso reizenden Anblick von Wald und Wiesenwuchs gewähren, so wie der nördliche mehr hügelige Teil von unendlichen kleinen Bächen durchschnitten ist, die überall ein schnelles Wachstum begünstigen. Denkt man sich nun zwischen diesen üppig ausgestreckten Matten, zwischen diesen fröhlich ausgesäeten Hainen alles zum Fruchtbau schickliche Land trefflich bearbeitet, grünend und reifend, und die besten und reichsten Stellen desselben durch Dörfer und Meierhöfe bezeichnet, und eine solche große und unübersehliche, wie ein neues Paradies für den Menschen recht vorbereitete Fläche näher und ferner von teils angebauten, teils waldbewachsenen Bergen begrenzt; so wird man das Entzücken begreifen, mit dem ich mein Schicksal segnete, das mir für einige Zeit einen so schönen Wohnplatz bestimmt hatte. (HA IX, 356-357)

Heroic in its own right, the Gothic structure is less something seen than the source of a point of view. We might even venture that Goethe’s first act in Strasbourg was to rush to the one spot from which the cathedral is not visible. The above landscape, which carefully adheres to eighteenthcentury formulas, constitutes a screen—a holistic

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the emerging I’s sense of inner turbulence, which in dreams, as in the works of Bosch, takes the form of anatomical monstrosities.)1 2 And there is Goethe—again childlike—roused from sleep to the sight of the church, redolent with the dawn, and shining back at him, i.e., entgegenleuchtend. The earlier feeling of fragmentation, now expiated, reappears through a doubling expressed as elective affinity: “Aber zu dir, teuerer Jüngling, gesell’ ich mich, der du bewegt dastehst und die Widersprüche nicht vereinigen kannst, die sich in deiner Seele kreuzen . . .” (HA XII, 13).

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counterpart to the Gothic “monster”, whose potentially grotesque features disappear behind a pleasing surface. If Impressionism represents a culmination of the pleasing surface, it also manifests the triumphal gaze of the modern subject which, following Ortega, organizes visual phenomena into a certain mise-en-scène: “The eye of the artist is established as the center of the plastic Cosmos, around which revolve the form of objects.”1 9 Hence Goethe’s synoptic view from the mighty spire, which fixes a monumental vantage point.2 0 While not impressionist as such, the landscape Goethe describes resembles those painted by John Constable, whose often rough application of color is consistent with the “technique of incompleteness” described by Maravall, and whose “Claudian” renderings of the English countryside depict not objects, but “objects transformed by atmosphere”2 1 . Between 1892 and -95, a good hundred-twenty years after Goethe’s arrival in Strasbourg, Claude Monet produced some thirty canvases depicting the cathedral at Rouen, each painted from the same point of view. Accommodations of ambient light, many of these paintings bear supplementary titles such as “Morning Effect”, “Gray Day”, or “Sunset”—appellations that identify the object as an effect of its surroundings. Camouflaged as it were, the great facade appears always on the verge of dissolving into flecks of color, which fade or deepen in accordance with the hour, season, indeed atmosphere. While not tethered to a single point of view, Goethe likewise celebrates the variety supplied by changing light: “Wie oft bin ich zurückgekehrt, von allen Seiten, aus allen Entfernungen, in jedem Lichte des Tags zu schauen seine Würde und Herrlichkeit!” (HA XII, 11). This exclamation illustrates what is apparent throughout, namely that Goethe describes little while saying much about his affective response to what he sees. His repeated returns to the building, and his repeated affirmation of its wholeness, has the effect of a compulsive disavowal, for that structural integrity does not reveal itself to the eye. Rather, it is fantasmatic, conveyed in darkness by the whispering spirit of the architect. Goethe’s Baukunst-essay begins with an affirmation of a lack, his failure to locate Erwin’s grave-marker inducing melancholy (“da ward ich tief in die Seele betrübt” [HA XII, 7]). The cathedral, rising into the air, seems little more than a substitute—an anamorphic ghost whose apparition oscillates between Abenddämmerung and Morgenduftglanz, hovering at the threshold of the visible.

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Notes 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz and Hans Joachim Schrimpf, 8th edition, Munich 1978, XII, 11. All subsequent references to the Hamburger Ausgabe are abbreviated as HA. 2. Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (17891920), New Haven 1983, 176. See William J. Lillyman, “Andrea Palladio and Goethe’s Classicism”, Goethe Yearbook V (1985), 85-102. 3. See Paulson (note 2), 178, 239-247. 4. Cited in Jean Starobinski, 1789: Emblems of Reason, trans. Barbara Bray, Cambridge/Mass. 1988, 74. 5. Starobinski (note 4), 75. Emphasis added. 6. Starobinski (note 4), 75. 7. David Wellbery, The Specular Moment. Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism, Stanford 1996, 128. 8. Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye. The Design and Social Life of Cities, New York 1990, 13. 9. José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque. Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran, Minneapolis 1986, 216. 10. Maravall (note 9), 218. 11. In an essay from 1823 also entitled Von Deutscher Baukunst Goethe characterizes the cathedral at Cologne, which at the time was still substantially incomplete, as something monstrous (“so tritt uns hier ein Unvollendetes, Ungeheures entgegen”), the sight of which arroused apprehension (“eine gewisse Apprehension in mir erregte”) (HA XII, 180). 12. Jacques Lacan: “This fragmented body . . . usually manifests itself in dreams . . . in the form of disjointed limbs, or of those organs represented in exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions—the very same that the visionary Hieronymus Bosch fixed, for all time, in painting, in their ascent from the fifteenth century to the imaginary zenith of modern man” (Écrits. A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York 1977, 4-5). 13. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York 1981, 109. 14. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts (note 13), 114. 15. Maravall (note 9), 211. 16. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts (note 13), 115. 17. Maravall (note 9), 219; Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts (note 13), 110. 18. José Ortega y Gasset, “On Point of View in the Arts”, trans. Paul Snodgrass and Joseph Frank,” in: The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture, Garden City, New York 1956, 111-112. See Albert Schug, “Über den Gegenstand der impressionistischen Landschaftsmalerei,” in: Götz Czymmek (ed.), Landschaft im Licht. Impressionistische Malerei in Europa und Nordamerika, Cologne, Zurich 1990, 67 f. 19. Ortega y Gasset (note 18), 112. 20. That Goethe’s view from the tower is paradigmatic is suggested by a comparison to Lynkeus, the towerwatch in Faust II. See Helmut J. Schneider: “Lynkeus

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21. Ronald Paulson, Literary Landscape. Turner and Constable, New Haven 1982, 112.

TITLE COMMENTARY Faust SYNDY M. CONGER (ESSAY DATE 1977) SOURCE: Conger, Syndy M. “An Analysis of The Monk and Its German Sources.” In Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans: An Interpretive Study of the Influence of German Literature on Two Gothic Novels, pp. 12-42. Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache unde Literatur, Universitat Salzburg, 1977. In the following excerpt, Conger studies the influence of Goethe’s Faust on Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk.

The Monk and Goethe’s Faust Various critics have noticed the Faust-like characteristics of Lewis’s Ambrosio, but no one has gone beyond jotting down basic similarities between the two, nor has anyone even tried to establish whether The Monk stands more indebted to Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus or Johann Goethe’s Faust.1 To students interested in determining the extent of German influence on English gothic fiction, this issue is crucial, even more so because the marriage of gothic fiction and the Faust legend, first performed by Lewis in The Monk, was one of the important events in the history of gothicism, producing some of the world’s best-known gothic novels: Melmoth the Wanderer, Frankenstein, and Moby Dick.2 . . . While it cannot be said that Lewis’s The Monk is a carbon copy of Goethe’s Storm and Stress Faust either, there are nevertheless many more points of resemblance between these two works, making Goethe’s influence on Lewis decidedly more pervasive than Marlowe’s. At crucial points in his novel Lewis draws upon those scenes from Goethe’s Faust which constitute the kernel of the Gretchen tragedy. Some of these parallel scenes have been noted by one critic, but none has analyzed them carefully.3 At first the parallels between characters are casual and fleeting, as if

Lewis was unable to decide who should play the role of Faust to his “Gretchen,” Antonia. For example, in the first scene of the novel, while Lorenzo is the obvious admirer of Antonia, Don Christoval speaks the lines that Faust speaks to Gretchen on first meeting her. Once Antonia meets Ambrosio, however, Lewis’s indecision is over. Ambrosio becomes his Faust, and then parallel scenes follow one another in quick succession. But before we analyze these scenes, a closer look at the fragmentary version of Goethe’s Faust available to Lewis is necessary. What has not been widely recognized is that the Faust that Lewis had to draw upon was not the completed version we have today; it was Faust: Ein Fragment, published first in 1790, but despite the late date essentially a product of the Storm and Stress.4 Goethe had begun working on a Faust drama in 1771 or 1772 at the height of his own Storm and Stress period; and around the time he made his permanent move to the Weimar court in 1776, he was able to take with him a Faust manuscript of at least twenty-one scenes.5 For the next ten years, however, his new courtly duties and a gradual change in literary taste prevented him from working on the play, and not until he took his first extended vacation to Italy in 1786 was he able to return to it. Because “the material would not yield to Goethe,” as one critic has put it,6 he decided to publish a version to which he had added two scenes, “Hexenküche” and “Wald und Höhle,” but which as yet had neither the crucial pact scene nor a resolution. Important final scenes known to have been written at the time, among them Gretchen’s mad scene in prison, Goethe omitted.7 A more complete version of the early play in manuscript form existed at Weimar; but whether Lewis saw it during his half-year in Weimar in 1792 is not known, though is there some evidence in The Monk to support such a hypothesis.8 This early Faust is hardly a scholar’s tragedy at all, but a tragedy of love9 which was one of Goethe’s unique additions to the Faust material.1 0 Responsive to Storm and Stress sympathy for unwed mothers or dishonored women,1 1 he wrote the story of a simple middle-class maiden Margarethe (or Gretchen, as she is called by Faust) whose seduction and subsequent abandonment by Faust leads her to child murder, imprisonment, madness and death.1 2 The central subject of Goethe’s early Faust is, then, quite different from Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Even the initial discontent Faust feels and the solution he seeks are quite different from those of

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. . . betreibt jene von [Joachim] Ritter analysierte Kosmos-Schau, die speculatio, die wörtlich nichts anderes als Turm-Schau bedeutet” (“Utopie und Landschaft im 18. Jahrhundert”, in: Wilhelm Voßkamp [ed.], Utopieforschung. Interdisziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopie, Stuttgart 1982, III, 187).

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FROM THE AUTHOR SIR WALTER SCOTT’S TRANSLATION OF GOETHE’S “DER ERLKONIG” (“THE ERL-KING”) O! who rides by night thro’ the woodlands so wild? It is the fond Father embracing his Child; And close the Boy nestles within his lov’d arm, From the blast of the tempest to keep himself warm. “O Father! see yonder, see yonder!” he says. “My Boy, upon what dost thou fearfully gaze?” “O! ’tis the ERL-KING, with his staff and his shroud!” “No, my Love! it is but a dark wreath of the cloud.” [THE PHANTOM SPEAKS.] “O! wilt thou go with me, thou loveliest Child! “By many gay sports shall thy hours be beguil’d; “My Mother keeps for thee full many a fair toy, “And many a fine flow’r shall she pluck for my Boy.” “O Father! my Father! and did you not hear, “The ERL-KING whisper so close in my ear?” “Be still my lov’d Darling, my Child be at ease! “It was but the wild blast as it howl’d thro’ the trees.” [THE PHANTOM.] “O wilt thou go with me, thou loveliest Boy! “My Daughter shall tend thee with care and with joy; “She shall bear thee so lightly thro’ wet and thro’ wild, “And hug thee, and kiss thee, and sing to my Child.” “O Father! my Father! and saw you not plain “The ERL-KING’s pale daughter glide past thro’ the rain?” “O no, my heart’s treasure! I knew it full soon, “It was the Grey Willow that danc’d to the Moon. [THE PHANTOM.] “Come with me, come with me, no longer delay! “Or else, silly Child, I will drag thee away.” “O Father! O Father! now, now, keep your hold! The ERL-KING has seiz’d me—his grasp is so cold.” Sore trembled the Father; he spurr’d thro’ the wild, Clasping close to his bosom his shuddering Child; He reaches his dwelling in doubt and in dread; But, clasp’d to his bosom, the Infant was dead! Scott, Sir Walter. “The Erl-King. From the German of Goethe. Author of the Sorrows of Werter.” In An Apology for Tales of Terror. Kelso: printed at the Mail office, 1799.

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Marlowe’s Faustus. Both plays do open with the scholars sitting in their studies, fulminating about how little they know, but for Faustus discontent springs from pride and a lust for near-divine power, while Goethe’s Faust despairs because he has failed to learn nature’s best kept secret, the Truth. Faustus rejects analytics because it will afford him “no miracle” (l.9), medicine because it cannot teach him Christ’s gift for raising the dead (l.24-26), law because it’s not worthy of his intellect (l.35), and divinity because it would teach him humility and penitence (l.40-45). On the other hand, Goethe’s Faust has wearied of his studies because they have only taught him that he knows nothing (“Nacht,” l.11), nor have they enabled him to teach or help others (ll.19-20). Even though he has cut himself off from the joys of living for years, ultimate knowledge is still beyond his grasp: he still has not seen “was die Welt / Im Innersten zusammen hält” (l.29-30).1 3 Faustus’ solution to his discontent is to barter with the devil for the power he longs for. Faust’s solution is to clap shut his books and barter with the devil to give him wisdom through experience: Und was der ganzen Menschheit zugetheilt ist, Will ich in meinem innern Selbst geniessen, Mit meinem Geist das Höchst’ und Tiefste greifen, Und so mein eigen Selbst zu Ihrem Selbst erweitern (“Nacht,” ll.247-52)1 4

Faust is not to blame that Mephistopheles interprets this reductively as a wish for wine, women and song. As Goethe’s Fragment springs over any conjuration or pact scene between Faust and Mephistopheles, the next important scene for the purposes of this comparison is “Hexenküche,” added at the revision. Part of Mephistopheles’ scheme for winning Faust’s soul is to restore his youth and with it his youthful longings. While the witch brews the right potion, Mephistopheles makes sure Faust catches a glimpse of a beautiful woman in the witch’s mirror. The potion and the mirror have done their job well, for the first girl he sees, as it happens Gretchen, he desires. “Hör,” he barks at Mephistopheles the moment she has passed on the street, “du musst mir die Dirne schaffen!” (“Strasse,” l.1080).1 5 When Mephistopheles balks, claiming he has “no power” over such a virtuous girl (l.1087), Faust responds with a threat to call off their deal and the boast that he could arrange it in seven hours without the devil’s help (ll.110305). Even Mephistopheles’ mockery (“Ihr sprecht schon fast wie ein Franzos,” l.1106) doesn’t budge G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2

The rest of the drama is the Gretchen tragedy. Mephistopheles arranges a rendezvous for Faust and Gretchen at a neighbor’s house (“Marthens Garten”), Faust easily overwhelms the naive Gretchen with costly jewels and a display of affection and erudition, they arrange to meet at night at Gretchen’s house by giving the mother a sleeping potion, the mother dies as a result, and the now pregnant Gretchen is separated from Faust. The Fragment stops abruptly at a very unhappy moment for both lovers. Faust is last seen in a forest (“Wald und Höhle”), deciding under Mephistopheles’ pressure that he cannot resist seducing Gretchen even if it means her perdition. Gretchen is then seen in three moments of panic which follow her discovery that she is pregnant. We see her guilt-stricken at the village well (“Am Brunnen”) when a neighbor slanders another girl in similar straits; then praying to Mary (“Zwinger”); and finally fainting in church (“Dom”), terrified by both the mass being sung for the dead and an evil spirit plaguing her for her crimes. Because the Fragment breaks off where it does, it is painfully pessimistic;1 7 the forces of evil appear to have total control at the end. Much more than conjuration, pact, and ending are missing in the Fragment. Faust is also less sympathetic in this version, for Goethe has not yet included those scenes which will depict him as God’s devoted “Knecht,” the good man who “in seinem dunklen Drange, / Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst,”1 8 and the man who makes the clever wager he’s bound to win with the devil. The Fragment also skips over the pathos of scholar Faust:1 9 his despair, his near suicide when he believes he will never know nature’s secret, his self-revealing talks with his student Wagner, and with Mephistopheles, the adulation of the townspeople for their doctor. At the earliest possible moment in the Fragment, the reader sees Faust, raw and hungry, wooing Gretchen. Clearly, Lewis would not have had much difficulty seeing a likeness between this Faust, who abandons the recluse’s life of contemplation for the pleasures of the flesh, and his Ambrosio. Despite the fragmentary nature of the 1790 version, its ties to the Storm and Stress movement are unmistakable. Even though Goethe cast some of his earlier rhapsodic prose into verse during the revisions in the 90’s, for the most part the form is typical of dramatic form of the movement. It is essentially non-neoclassical: the action is a series

of loosely allied scenes with huge gaps in time and leaps in space.2 0 The content even more markedly reflects the preoccupations of the Storm and Stress. First of all, the fact that Faust is a drama drawn from German folklore identifies it as a response to Herder’s plea for German authors to revive their own national heritage in literature.2 1 Secondly, the values which receive emphasis in the play are Storm and Stress values. Faust demonstrates an appreciation for both nature and the natural. The forest is where he retreats to regain some peace and control over his life; and for a few moments nature heals him and restores his virtue until Mephistopheles intervenes. Faust treasures Gretchen, too, for her unspoiled, spontaneous response to life, and she gives him the same peaceful feeling the forest does (“Abend,” 11.1147-55). Faust is also an enthusiastic exponent of experience.2 2 It is this which first causes him to turn to Mephistopheles, and he admits in “Wald und Höhle” that the devil is now indispensible to him in gratifying what has become his quenchless yearning for one experience after another: “So tauml’ ich von Begierde zu Genuss, / Und im Genuss verschmacht’ ich nach Begierde” (11.191920).2 3 It was not just physical experience that Faust initially longed for, but emotional or subjective experience. His conviction that “Gefühl ist alles” (“Feeling is all,” from “Marthens Garten,” 1.1756) is behind the special nature of his first request to Mephistopheles to “feel within” everything the human being has ever felt (“Nacht,” 11.247-49). Finally, the central conflict of the drama links it with the Storm and Stress: the conflict between unorthodox inner values and constricting social forms. Both Faust and Gretchen are caught up in this conflict, though not in the same way. Faust openly disregards the codes of church and society. He would rather bask in his own sensibility than contemplate God (“Marthens Garten,” 11.173158), and he would rather seduce Gretchen than marry her. Gretchen is no conscious rebel, yet she too unwittingly violates the moral code, thinking Faust will eventually marry her.2 4 When she realizes her love has made her criminal, something she imagined to be impossible, this tragic truth snaps her mind.2 5 Both characters’ attempts to assert their own private values are viewed sympathetically by Goethe, though it must be added that he does not paint their society as black as some of his fellow Stürmer und Dränger.2 6 He leaves the impression instead that the conflict at the center of life is not one easily resolved by chang-

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Faust’s resolve (“Hab’ Appetit . . . ,” l.1114).1 6 The disillusioned professor is hungry for sensual experience.

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ing laws. The persistent assertion of private values, the repeated search for gratification of self, always eventually lead to a tragic clash with society. If Lewis’s The Monk is Storm and Stress, then it should at least share some of these characteristics. What Lewis clearly shares with Goethe is an interest in the Gretchen tragedy; and this fact alone makes Goethe’s influence on The Monk certain, since the Gretchen tragedy had been his own original contribution to the Faust legend. The first three scenes from Faust Lewis draws upon to create his opening episode are lighthearted, buoyed up by Mephistopheles’ devilish wit: “Strasse,” the initial meeting of Faust and Gretchen outside a cathedral; “Der Nachbarinn Haus,” Mephistopheles’ successful attempt to convince neighbor Marthe she’s a widow, so that he and Faust can return to come courting (ostensibly to bring her the death certificate of her long-absent husband); and “Garten,” the subsequent rendezvous at Marthe’s house. Whenever possible, Lewis tries to approximate that tone in his forest scene. Faust is immediately fascinated by Gretchen when he sees her for the first time leaving a church, and he accosts her on the spot, asking if he may walk her home: “. . . darf ich wagen / Meinen Arm und Geleit Ihr anzutragen” (11.1066-67). Don Christoval and Lorenzo are just as taken with Antonia when they first see her in church, and Don Christoval asks her a very similar question: “Will you permit us to attend you home?” (p. 10). Gretchen and Antonia react similarly also. Gretchen has little to say, though what she does say is said with spirit: “Bin weder Fräulein, weder schön, / Kann ungeleitet nach Hause gehen” (11.1068-69).2 7 Antonia is shy and taciturn: “. . . the Lady did not open her lips. . . . At last, in so low a voice as to be scarcely intelligible, she made shift to answer,—‘No segnor’” (p. 10). Both also avert their eyes and when pressured to do something they think improper, plead they cannot because it is not “the custom.” Gretchen rejects the suggestion from Mephistopheles that she take a lover; Antonia tries to keep on her veil: Margarethe:

Antonia:

“Das ist des Landes “Dear Aunt; it is not nicht der Brauch.” the custom in Murcia.” (“Der Nachbarinn Haus,” l.1410) (p. 11)

In order to help Faust in his pursuit of Gretchen, Goethe’s Mephistopheles makes friends with Gretchen’s neighbor Marthe and arranges a rendezvous in her garden for the four of them. His task is to make sure Marthe’s attention will be

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diverted so that Faust can woo Gretchen, a task which comically turns out to be much more painful than Mephistopheles expected. The aging Marthe, a woman whose husband left her long ago, is aggressively interested in men, money (Mephistopheles seems to be a nobleman), and marriage, and immediately begins an attack. Understandable in the light of his profession, Mephistopheles prefers the witch’s bacchanals of Walpurgisnacht to holy wedlock, and deliberately misinterprets all her blatant advances. He does avoid committing himself, but is only too anxious to leave, muttering to himself as he goes: “Die hielte wohl den Teufel selbst bey’m Wort!” (l.1466).2 8 In the first scene of The Monk Don Christoval functions in an analogous way. He is to divert Leonella’s attention so that Lorenzo may make Antonia’s acquaintance, and he also finds himself trapped. Leonella is as aggressive and man hungry as Marthe, and makes the clever rhetorical assumption that Don Christoval wishes to marry her (p. 23). In Lewis’s description of Don Christoval’s reaction to Leonella, an echo from Faust is audible: “. . . at the end of an hour I find myself upon the brink of matrimony! . . . Diavolo!” (pp. 23-24). Since Don Christoval’s aversion to the old woman is so similar to Mephistopheles’ to Marthe, Lewis’s use of the word “devil” was probably not accidental. . . . . . Besides the death of the mother, two other potentially sensationalistic scenes in Faust are never dramatized by Goethe: the seduction and eventual execution-death of Gretchen. No doubt he recognized that, since Faust was responsible for both to some extent, they would blacken his hero’s character irreparably. Again, Lewis spells out what Goethe left out. In what are usually acknowledged to be the least palatable scenes in The Monk, Lewis depicts Ambrosio raping and murdering Antonia in the church vaults surrounded by moldering corpses. No comparatists have yet noticed that these scenes yield something positive. They offer textual evidence that Lewis may have been familiar with the Faust manuscript at Weimar2 9 which included Gretchen’s prison scene. In this scene in the Urfaust, Mephistopheles has managed to get Faust into Gretchen’s prison the night before her execution, and Faust has been trying in vain to convince the deranged girl to flee with him. At dawn Mephistopheles reappears and presses Faust to hurry or he is lost: “Auf! oder ihr seyd verlohren! Meine Pferde schaudern!” (italics mine, “Kercker,” p. 65).

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Goethe’s Faust helped Lewis move beyond a stereotyped villain to this more ethically complex one, a character one step closer to a Victor Frankenstein or a Melmoth. Melmoth and Frankenstein are admittedly closer to Faust than is Ambrosio, for they have Faust’s insatiable, self-destructive desire to know. But the gothic novel with a villainhero whose goal is to know the unknowable is a novel markedly different in plot and theme from pre-Lewis gothic novels, and it was Lewis, under Goethe’s influence, who pointed later gothic novelists in this new direction. Another innovation in the cast of characters which was inspired by Lewis’s interest in Goethe’s Faust is the addition of the devil. Bredvold heralds The Monk as the first gothic novel to exploit the “Satanic as a thrill,”3 1 and it may very well be true that Lewis did add the devil for the thrill of it.3 2 It is not true, however, that the devil’s presence adds thrills only. It makes evil more absolute, more unmanageable, especially since Lewis’s devil controls not only human actions, but also even the thoughts and dreams of the virtuous. Such ubiquitous and all-powerful demons encourage just as many unsettling questions as the villainhero Ambrosio does. Is life something we can never fully understand or control? Are we at the mercy of inexplicably demonic forces outside ourselves? Within ourselves?3 3 These questions had not been raised so effectively in gothic fiction before The Monk. Goethe’s influence can be traced also in the plot of The Monk, where enough episodes of the Gretchen tragedy are reenacted to necessitate a basic tragic structure: the meeting at the church, the conversations about religion, the vision in the mirror, the visit to the bedroom, seduction for the girl, and death for the mother and the girl. Lewis does for the gothic romance, then, what Richardson did for the epistolary romance and Goethe did for the Faust legend: he introduces to it the

pattern of a lovers’ tragedy.3 4 Such an innovation was an important one, again, bound to invite later gothic romancers to choose more serious themes. One needs only to look at the increasing thoughtfulness of such tragic gothic novelists as Mary Shelley, Maturin, Brontë, and Melville to realize that Lewis’s tragic ending, however absurd or grotesque it is, freed future gothic romancers from the intellectually shackling concept of poetical justice and its conventional happy ending.

Notes 1. Of the four critics who discuss the subject, neither Railo nor Dédéyan specifies any particular Faust. Carré and Guthke deal exclusively with the relationship between Goethe’s Faust and The Monk. 2. Robert D. Hume, “Exuberant Gloom, Existential Agony, and Heroic Despair: Three Varieties of Negative Romanticism,” in The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, ed. G. R. Thompson (Pullman: Washington State Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 109-27, devotes considerable time to the discussion of Faust as an apt archetypal figure for the Dark Romantics, and mentions these three novels in the process (p. 112). 3. Carré, pp. 35-36, lists the following scenes in The Monk as partially derived from Goethe’s Faust: the first in the church, Ambrosio’s mirror vision, Matilda’s getting him into Antonia’s chamber, and the sacrifice of mother and daughter. Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, pp. 38-39, 133, concurs with just three: the mirror vision and the double sacrifice. 4. For an excellent discussion of the history of the composition and publication of Goethe’s Faust, see “Introduction,” Goethe’s Faust ed. R-M. S. Heffner, Helmut Rehder, W. F. Twaddell (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1954), pp. 31-46. See also Pascal, p. 306. Only the German critics have noted that Lewis probably only knew Goethe’s 1790 Fragment: Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, p. 34, and Otto Ritter, “Studien zu M. G. Lewis’ Roman ‘Ambrosio, or The Monk,’” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 111, NS, 11 (1903), 117. 5. A copy of Goethe’s 1774 manuscript, made by a lady of the Weimar court by the name of Luise von Göchhausen, was discovered in 1887 and published with the designation of Urfaust. See Heffner, et al, pp. 3234, and J. G. Robertson, A History of German Literature, 5th ed., rev. Edna Purdie (Edinburgh: Wm. Blackwood & Sons, 1966), p. 271. It would have been available and certainly known when Lewis was in Weimar, as it was made sometime before 1786. 6. Frenzel and Frenzel, Vol. 1, 218. 7. To compare the three available versions of Faust (Urfaust; Faust: Ein Fragment; and Faust: Eine Tragödie) see Die Faustdichtungen. Referred to in notes as Artemis. 8. Lewis was well acquainted with Faust according to Byron’s biographer Moore. See The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, author of “The Monk,” “Castle Spectre,” & c., with many Pieces in Prose never before

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Margrete (alternate spelling in Urfaust) reacts hysterically, sensing she is in the presence of God’s enemy: “Der! Der! Lass ihn, schick ihn fort! der will mich! Nein! Nein! Gericht Gottes, komm über mich . . .” (p. 65).3 0 In Antonia’s dungeon scene, Ambrosio is thinking of granting her liberty, when, like Mephistopheles, Matilda rushes into the vault to urge Ambrosio to take quick action: “We are lost, unless some speedy means is found of dispelling the Rioters” (p. 389). Antonia’s response is a cry of joy followed by increased terror as she realizes that Matilda is no friend: “‘Help! for God’s sake.’” (italics mine, p. 391). . . . . .

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Published (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), I, 73. Since Göchhausen’s transcription was done sometime between 1775 and 1786, it would have been available. 9. Heffner, p. 33; Robertson, p. 271.

. . . . .

11. Frenzel and Frenzel, p. 172; Garland, p. 144; Pascal, pp. 66-68. 12. Much of this is not shown in the fragment, however, which breaks off with Gretchen in church, the child not yet born. 13. “What secret force / Hides in the world and rules its course.” I have used Walter Kaufmann’s translation of Goethe’s Faust (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1963), p. 95. Page numbers after translations are Kaufmann’s. And what is portioned out to all mankind, I shall enjoy deep in my self, contain Within my spirit summit and abyss, Pile on my breast their agony and bliss And thus let my own self grow into theirs, unfettered. . . . (p. 189)

15. “Get me that girl, and don’t ask why?” (p. 257). 16. Mephistopheles: “You speak just like a Frenchman”; Faust: “I’ve appetite . . .” (pp. 257, 259). 17. “Infinitely more pessimistic” than the Urfaust is Heffner’s assessment of tone, p. 38. 18. “A good man in his darkling aspiration / Remembers the right road throughout his quest” (p. 89). 19. The Fragment contains only fifteen pages concerning the scholar’s tragedy as compared to roughly fifty in the 1808 version. 20. See Frenzel and Frenzel, pp. 172-73. 21. Pascal, p. 266. 22. Heffner, p. 37. 23. “Thus I reel from desire to enjoyment, / And in enjoyment languish for desire” (p. 313). 24. When Faust tells Gretchen his love for her is “eternal” and will have “no end” (11.1648-49), he means the feeling will always endure; she thinks he means he will marry her. Lecture, Albrecht Schöne, 30 October 1973, Univ. of Göttingen. 25. Pascal, pp. 64-65. 26. Pascal, p. 145. 27. “I’m neither a lady nor am I fair, / And can go home without your care” (p. 257). 28. “She’d keep the Devil to his word, I fear” (p. 289). 29. See n. 5 above. 30. MEPHISTOPHELES:

Up! Or you are lost. Prating and waiting and pointless wavering. My horses are quavering . . . . .

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He! He! Send him away! . . . . . He wants me!

10. Heffner, p. 33.

14.

MARGARET:

Judgment of God! I give Myself to you. (p. 421) 31. Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1962), p. 95. 32. I base this on Lewis’s own admission that he strove for “strong colours” in writing The Monk, see above, n. 23. 33. An excellent discussion of the internalization of the demonic is Francis Russell Hart’s “The Experience of Character in the English Gothic Novel,” in Experience in the Novel, Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 83-105; Lowry Nelson, Jr., “Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel,” Yale Review, 52 (1963), 242, also remarks that gothic novelists become ever more interested in the “presentation of the subconscious drama of the mind.” 34. Sheldon Sacks suggests in “Clarissa and the Tragic Traditions,” in Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 2 of Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1972), that all new literary forms may feel the “subtle influence” of poetical justice, p. 197.

JANE K. BROWN AND MARSHALL BROWN (ESSAY DATE 1994) SOURCE: Brown, Jane K. and Marshall Brown. “Faust and the Gothic Novel.” In Interpreting Goethe’s Faust Today, edited by Jane K. Brown, Meredith Lee, and Thomas P. Saine, in collaboration with Paul Hernadi and Cyrus Hamlin, pp. 68-80. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994. In the following essay, the Browns trace various common elements in Gothic fiction and Faust. . . . un vampire, une goule, un homme artificiel, une espèce de Faust . . . (H. de Balzac, Sarrasine)

Our aim in the present paper is to conjure up an unfamiliar vision of Faust. So far as we know, our topic is nearly virgin, though Faust’s vision of Gretchen appears for a moment at the start of Mario Praz’s classic La Morte, la carne e la diavola.1 Since, after all, Faust isn’t a gothic novel, we are not inclined to call this neglect startling. Goethe’s play lacks almost totally the sadistic terror that was the visible hallmark of the gothic, and what motifs it shares with the gothic novel are also Shakespearean or general romantic features. Yet while Goethe was cool toward the fashionable gothic, he was not ignorant about it.2 Surely, for instance, he knew the work of the Jena professor

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Early readers of the play clearly perceived its gothic tendencies or potential. Despite their differences, Faust’s devilish wager is readily assimilated to demonic pacts in works like Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.4 When Balzac’s Raphaël starts hallucinating in the old curiosity shop of La Peau de chagrin, it was, the narrator says, “un mystérieux sabbat digne des fantaisies entrevues par le docteur Faust sur le Brocken.”5 In opera, too, there is no doubt that the Faustian witches’ sabbath provided a stimulus for gothic creators. Der Freischütz, La Damnation de Faust, and Mefistofele are likely to leave spectators feeling they have missed something in Goethe’s more pedestrian world. Or there is that quintessentially gothic concert piece, the Symphonie fantastique, where the hallucinatory witches’ sabbath is accompanied by so many other representative features: the dream of an ideal beloved (with its ungrounded or immaterial consciousness evoked by unsupported treble melodies), primitive pastoralism, the dissolution of aristocratic society in a mad waltz that serves as a kind of “Walpurgisnachtstraum,” and the concluding march to the scaffold. A review like this calls to mind how many elements Faust really does share with gothic novels dating from before, during, and after its composition. Supernatural figures: devils, angels, witches, hags. Excessively natural figures: the innocent maiden, fatherless and ultimately orphaned, the warrior, the tormented natural scientist and philosopher. Figures of exceptional authority in church and state: rulers and holy men. Plot motifs: dangerous and illicit sexuality (though infanticide replaces the more common gothic incest), disguises and Doppelgänger figures, spying on actions near and far, religious rites and mysteries, political despotism and usurpation, a last-minute deathbed struggle of good and evil. Elements of setting: prison-like enclosures, gothic chambers,

churches, and fortresses, vast, moonlit natural expanses through which the characters voyage in space and time. Psychodynamics: a feminine focus, regression to infantile states, haunted reverie, impending doom, with the clock either stopped or moving with unnatural swiftness, helpless unconsciousness. Formal characteristics: most obviously the inserted songs and ballads, but also the multitude of fictional frames, together with the combination of epic sweep and dramatic concentration that makes the gothic novel into its own peculiar kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. And, in addition to all these familiar gothic features, an important, but less well recognized one—a certain ambivalence of tone and a self-conscious playfulness that the gothic often reinforced with themes of playing or gambling. Unfamiliar as a Faustian device, wagers and contests are almost inescapable as a gothic one, whether centrally, or else— what is even more revealing—as an almost gratuitous kind of generic tag.6 In gothic play, it’s often not even a step from the sublime to the ridiculous. If critics argue endlessly about how we are supposed to feel at different moments in Goethe’s play, perhaps the moral is not the futility of critical analysis, but rather the affinity of the play with a mode in which such things are generically, uncannily undecidable.7 “Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten.” The wavering visions of the notorious “Proktophantasmist,” for example, lead directly to the gothic milieu. Although commentaries correctly identify him as Friedrich Nicolai, Germany’s leading rationalist, they do not mention that the story was originally reported (without the name, as in Faust) in 1797 by Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, who at the time was court physician in Weimar and Goethe’s family doctor.8 A delightfully prosaic vitalist, Hufeland was widely known for his lifelong preoccupation with the premature burial of the dead, a topic on which he wrote a book and numerous essays. Faust, like his epigones in the various sections of Melmoth, is prone to falling asleep at moments of crisis, in order to revive refreshed. And at the end, when Mephisto is in too much of a hurry to inter him, Faust rises like one of Hufeland’s none-too-dead souls to complete the proof that you can’t keep a good self down.9 Flea-bitten rationalism proves to be the nightmare from which even Goethe’s gothic is always trying to awaken. * * * Mostly, when Faust approaches the characteristic gothic mood of terror, it veers off into satire— “Hexenküche,” “Walpurgisnacht” with its dissolve

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of philosophy, Justus Christian Hennings, since he attacks Hennings in the “Walpurgisnachtstraum,” both by name and as the “Ci-devant Genius der Zeit.” Writing in the spirit of the Enlightenment about supernatural beliefs in his book of 1780, Von Geistern und Geistersehern, Hennings asks derisively, “Vielleicht denkst du, der böse Feind spucke zum Wohl des Menschen?”3 —a possibility that the more imaginative Faust plays with. As Faust says in the last speech before his blinding, “Dämonen, weiß ich, wird man schwerlich los” (11491). Perhaps it isn’t so foolish to wonder what the old men—Faust and his creator—thought about ghosts and those who see them.

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into “Walpurgisnachtstraum,” the scene with—or, better, without—the Mothers, “Grablegung.” But then, the Burkean terror that is often identified as the defining characteristic of the gothic is, in our view, the least of the genre. Rather, the romantic gothic naturally interrogates or ironizes its worst imaginings. It presupposes Olympian detachment, whether in Goethe’s apparent serenity1 0 or in the triumph of a demon confronting a shipwreck (Melmoth, ch. 4). Hence Radcliffe is full of reverie and reflection, Lewis and Maturin are full of exotic pageantry and meticulous exposition, Hoffmann of witty outrage. Whether underdone or overdone—or, typically, some of each—romantic gothic novels achieve their effects by testing, tantalizing, and teasing their characters and their readers alike. Like Faust they offer sophisticated pleasures of crafty, knowing superiority. The true focus is not on the supernatural, but on the human response and resistance to the supernatural. The conclusions, as in Faust, are characteristically rapid, and whether the victims ultimately triumph or fail, the issue is not so much suffering as survivability. In their own way, then, romantic gothic novels are as much a critique of gothic terror as Faust is.1 1 If works like Dracula bare the inhuman desires that gnaw at all of us, romantic gothic novels display the human face within their extraordinary events. Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” shows how much punishment the human spirit can take; Tieck’s “Der blonde Eckbert” or Byron’s “Prisoner of Chillon” show how much punishment it takes to overwhelm the human spirit. And though the back cover of our edition of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto proclaims in red, “A Bleeding Statue, A Praying Skeleton, A Castle of Horror!,” the author’s preface has this to say: The author of the following pages . . . wished to conduct the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability; in short, to make them think, speak, and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do in extraordinary positions. He had observed, that, in all inspired writings, the personages under the dispensation of miracles, and witnesses to the most stupendous phenomena, never lose sight of their human character.1 2

What Walpole wished in his book never to lose sight of is also what our approach to the gothic aims to keep in view. It is the humanity that matters, not the inhumanity. Consequently, in admitting that Faust is opposed to the gothic in its vulgar sense, we are also in a position to claim that it is allied with the deeper tendencies

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of the mode. Were we given to paradox, we might say that Faust is gothic precisely because it is antigothic. Where the supernatural character of events lies in melodramatic externals, the human character of agents might naturally be expected to lie in their inward reserves. The mysterious physical powers of an overwhelming world are encountered by a mysterious spiritual integrity. The best language that we have discovered for analyzing this configuration is that of Kantian philosophy, and it turns out indeed that a direct line leads from Kant’s own works to the abnormal psychiatry of high romantic medicine and into the tradition of the gothic itself. As the post-Kantian analysis develops, it relates the supernatural mysteries beyond our knowledge or control to the impenetrable world of things in themselves, and it locates the power confronting that world in what Kant calls the transcendental consciousness. Again, we cannot fully argue this thesis here, which will eventually be developed in a book on the gothic novel. But the terms that generate the analysis—and specifically the notion of a transcendental inwardness as defense against a supernatural outwardness—will provide the framework for our consideration of Faust, both in its partial affiliation with and in its distinctive response to the gothic mode. Here, still as a series of largely undeveloped theses, are the basic features of the transcendental consciousness as they emerge in romantic philosophical and medical discourse, as well as in gothic representations. The first is the unity of the individual, or, as Kant terms it, the transcendental unity of apperception. In contrast to the heterogeneity of experience as envisioned by Enlightenment empiricism, romanticism envisions an integral self whose fundamental character is immutably generated from within. For Kant himself, the unity of the self is a universal phenomenon defined by the laws of experience that all humans share; for those who come after, it often appears as a psychological rather than a logical unity and may differ in character or mood from one individual to another. Second, as the unity of the self is removed from and precedes any possible experience, it cannot be manifested to ordinary consciousness. But those who followed Kant and tried to apply his conceptions to real life looked for the essence of the person in manifestations that lie beyond the conditioning of empirical existence. Specifically, it is in the dream state that we come into contact with our most inward and most fundamental self. Third, however, there also exist

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* * * In order to outline Goethe’s complex stance toward this complex mode, we propose to scrutinize his use of the typically gothic terms schaudern and Grauen.1 3 “O schaudre nicht!” (3188) Faust tells Gretchen after she has plucked the last petal from the daisy and discovered that Faust loves her. Both recognize in this shudder the doom allegorically executed upon the flower that bears her name. Gretchen had already had a similar moment of premonitory terror in “Abend” (2757),

right after Mephistopheles left the first casket of jewels in her cupboard; in “Dom” the evil spirit transforms her into an object of terror for others (3831). Faust also has his moments of terror— when the Erdgeist appears (473) and when he enters the dungeon at the end of Part I (4405), where the phrase “längst entwöhnt” connects his Schauer to his response to his study and to the Erdgeist. The conventional gothic sensationalism manifested in such moments is at its height in the prison scene at the end of Part I. “Kerker” predates the gothic fad, which began in the 1780s, yet the early text of the Urfaust contains the most explicit mention of terror, “Inneres Grauen der Menschheit,” altered in the final version to the more sentimental, “Der Menschheit ganzer Jammer” (4406). And the Urfaust’s gothic stage direction, “Er hört die Ketten klirren und das Stroh rauschen,” turns into self-conscious discourse: “Sie ahnet nicht, daß der Geliebte lauscht, / Die Ketten klirren hört, das Stroh, das rauscht” (4421-22). Thus, quite apart from the addition of Gretchen’s abrupt salvation, Goethe distances himself from the gothic even as its popularity was spreading. And then, just a few lines before Faust terrifies Gretchen for the last time (“Mir graut’s vor dir,” 4610), Mephistopheles’ horses shudder because dawn arrives (4599). Suddenly the supernatural is subject to nature, reversing the gothic norm. Indeed, natural and supernatural complement one another: for the archangels in the “Prolog im Himmel” night is “schauervoll” (254); for the devil day is. The process of terror is reversible; it can be part of building up a consciousness as well as of reducing one to its core. As Part II unfolds, it becomes increasingly gothic on a cosmic scale. Despite its moments of uncanny terror such as the arrival of Faust’s antimasque or Mephistopheles’s reference to the Mothers, Act I hardly evokes a full-scale gothic response. Indeed the gothic Mothers—regressive, awakening shudders—prompt Faust to say, “Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil” (6272), just as he had earlier told Mephistopheles “In deinem Nichts hoff’ ich das All zu finden” (6255). Terror evokes the answering assertion of creation from the self. This is more explicit in Act II, where Schauer and its compounds occur nine times (of the total of twenty-two occurrences in all of Faust II). First, terror is trivialized in a series of elaborate compounds from the beginning of the act (“Schauderfest” 7005, “Schaudergrauen” 7041, “schauderhaft” 7518 and 7788, “schauern” 7798, 7968—notice the progression away from absurd compounds once the point is made). The most

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waking states in which the core of humanity surfaces. These are the states in which we are least responsive to the world around. Daydreaming and mesmeric states—such as, for instance, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) explores—are borderline conditions where the inward self enters into a kind of contact with the outside world. But most commonly in the romantic period the inner self is brought into view by madness. Those driven beyond the bounds of normal experience are also not vulnerable to the pressures of experience, and they reveal instead the inviolable, transcendental basis of humanity. Hence, in Maturin, the more successful the devil’s persecutions are in corporeal terms, the more he frustrates his endeavour to win over the minds of his victims. Fourth, then, there is a fundamental continuity to the self that cannot be broken by any force short of complete annihilation. The inward self reposes on a real, if indeterminate, inner sense of self, in its continuous and unbroken integrity. Kant’s name for the inner sense is likewise that of those who come after him— namely, time. Our outer, spatial existence may be broken, fragmented, cut off—may be infringed in countless ways. But our true life is our life in time. So long as our mental existence continues—even in dreams, even in madness—so long do we continue to feel the pulse of existence. Fifth and finally, that pulse then beats through and despite all the forces that would destroy it. In the gothic, life often seems to hang by a thread. Yet the thread persists with a remarkable obstinacy that transcends the mere necessity to keep the narrative going. It becomes hard to keep even the dead down, starting with the ancestral ruler of The Castle of Otranto, who rises up after generations to restore his rightful heir to the throne. The gothic, in this period, is one of the most striking manifestations of the pervasive vitalism of the romantic period. There may be nothing else—not wealth, not health, not even sanity—but there is still life. “Des Lebens Pulse,” these books keep insisting, “schlagen frisch lebendig.”

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specific moment of terror is the eruption of Seismos, who makes the earth itself shake. He unleashes human greed and violence, supernatural forces of destruction (the meteor that destroys the mountain), and dream (we finally learn that the entire affair was an illusion). Other gothic elements around this scene include descent, night, uncertainty, disorientation, and the demonic encounters of Mephistopheles, the Lamien, and the Phorcyads, where sexuality is a constant threat to identity. But the great oddity of these gothic elements is that terror is felt by the supernatural figures who themselves ought to evoke terror— the witch Erichtho, the sirens, Mephistopheles, the dryads, and Homunculus all experience Schauer. Whose consciousness is actually being narrated in Act II? Whose dream is it? Stuart Atkins (note 7, 142) has long since asserted that Act II is Faust’s dream, but we might go even further. Somehow this is a dream Goethe dreams for the spectator, calling the very boundaries of the individual into question. Act V is more traditionally gothic. The three mighty men terrorize the world about, especially Baucis and Philemon, who are also terrorized by the mysterious nighttime goings-on at Faust’s castle. Here are the evil and violence we conventionally expect from the gothic. Faust himself has become part of this terrorizing mentality, so that the alien shadow of Baucis’s and Philemon’s trees makes him shudder. A “Schauerwindchen” (11380) brings the four ghosts Death, Care, Want, Need. In a gesture of stripping down to core consciousness Care blinds Faust; as Faust dies, Mephistopheles calls for the clock to stop. Faust’s last moments in “Mitternacht” are perhaps the only moments of full gothic horror in Faust. Yet they too are soon ironized as angels descend to the rescue. Even here terror is rapidly commuted into play. Crucial to Faust’s death is the experience of time. Gothic time fluctuates between the extremes of frenzied disorientation and empty, rudderless waiting. The most revealing period terms come from Kant’s student and close friend, the physician Markus Herz, who in the 1780s wrote a treatise on vertigo. Herz’s term for proper time, like Goethe’s, is Weile; Schwindel is the insane pace associated with supernatural action and Langerweile the aimlessness found in the demon’s lost victims.1 4 Clearly Faust suffers at the beginning of the play from boredom; he is desperate to speed time up, to experience Schwindel (“das Rauschen der Zeit,” “[das] Rollen der Begebenheit,” 175455.). But the wager as formulated challenges Me-

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phisto to instill in him a healthy, purified temporal Weilen. Similarly, though Care claims the power to stop time just before she blinds Faust (11455ff.), the night of his soul approaches apace, without terrifying suddenness (11499: “Die Nacht scheint tiefer tief hereinzudringen”). And though early in the play Care was associated with the shipwreck of hopes in the maelstrom of time (643-44), that is, with arrested time, even earlier yet the Erdgeist had awakened in Faust the courage to overcome shipwrecks (467). It follows, then, that Care now only provokes a counterspirit (11510: “ein Geist”) into activity. Faust resists Care with his famous speech about slowing down to the pace of nature (11450: “Wenn Geister spuken, geh’ er seinen Gang”): his absolute striving yields to a relation to transcendence mediated by his own imaginative consciousness. Thus Faust confronts the gothic challenge differently from the gothic novels: in place of a reduction to pure consciousness and internal selfhood, Faust outlines a healthy relationship to time extending beyond the self dynamically into the future. Such reversals are characteristic of Faust’s response to the gothic. In the first line of “Zueignung” wavering forms approach us with their madness (4) and “Zauberhauch” (8), bringing in their train the temporal disorientation of the second and third stanzas. The moment of terror, however, comes only in the second half of the last stanza, “Ein Schauer faßt mich” (29), in the same language as the terror of the Erdgeist (472-74: “Es weht / Ein Schauer vom Gewölb’ herab / Und faßt mich an!”). Yet in “Zueignung” the terror brings peace: Ein Schauer faßt mich, Träne folgt den Tränen, Das strenge Herz, es fühlt sich mild und weich; Was ich besitze, seh’ ich wie im Weiten, Und was verschwand, wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten. (29-32)

The heart softens, consciousness releases its hold, yet what follows is the return of the whole world that had been lost. Gothic nothingness is nowhere to be found, let alone feared. But if there is no nothingness, there is then no pressing need for the unconditional selfhood explored so intensely by the gothic. Gothic novels usually reach their climax in a prison, but Faust begins in one, feeling imprisoned in his “hochgewölbten, engen gotischen Zimmer.” We know what the first word of the play proper is not: instead of “ich,” Faust has only a depressive and paranoid “ach” to offer. Friedrich Kittler, who has called our attention to these words, sees in this

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What normally symbolizes a late stage in the reduction to pure consciousness is here a starting point Faust rejects with vigor. Consciousness of self is not Faust’s defense in the prison; on the contrary, it is itself the very prison to be escaped.1 6 Time and again the play unmasks selfconsciousness as empty solipsism. Imprisoned Gretchen in her madness is a paradigm of gothic reduction to the essential core of the self: her continuing love for an infant and family and her unstained innocence are unchanged from her earlier, sane moments, and she desires only to return to the past. But in Faust this essential self represents the temptation to stasis articulated in the bet—“verweile doch.” It must be rejected, and indeed, “Anmutige Gegend” brings growth and change through positive erasure of the past; as Emrich says, “Schlaf und spontan organisches ‘Vergessen’ sind Funktionen einer Natur, die nur darum ‘mildert’, versöhnt und ‘heilt’, weil sie ihren ‘Liebling’ bis zu den Grenzen des Daseins geführt hat, über die hinaus es nur Entsetzen oder—Vergessen geben kann.”1 7 Faust’s monologue once again contains all the themes of the post-Kantian gothic self. “Des Lebens Pulse schlagen frisch lebendig”: the life force is the first thing to impinge on the consciousness of the waking Faust. Next comes continuity in time: “Du, Erde, warst auch diese Nacht beständig.” But as Faust’s awakening consciousness gathers force, it focuses less and less on a unified self, and more and more on a world that comes into being through the words he utters (“Ein Paradies wird um mich her die Runde”). By the end of the monologue his consciousness extends beyond the earth to the rainbow, a sign that is anchored both in scientific objectivity and in a tradition that evokes not gothic shudders but rather pastoral showers (as “Schauer” must clearly be translated in line 4726).

In such manner Faust adds layer after layer until consciousness of self disappears in consciousness of the world. The first three acts of Part II abandon self-absorption for a phantasmagoria of the history of our culture and bring Faust and Helena onto the stage only as literary figures in elaborate costumes, conscious at every moment of themselves as constructs from a long tradition (hence Helena: “Ich schwinde hin und werde selbst mir ein Idol,” 8881). And what then of the apparent return to an authentic self when Faust resists Care? Faust grounds his satisfaction with time and his supposed identity in the labors of others who will do what he has done all through Part II—be conscious not of themselves but of the need to recreate the world each day through their own labor (11575-76). Faust’s death provokes a mock-epic battle in which each side looks gothic to its opponents. “Grablegung” gives us, of course, the devil’s perspective.1 8 To Mephisto all the wavering rescuers (11723: “Schon schwebts heran”; 11740 s.d.: “Sich mit den schwebenden Rosen herumschlagend”; 11787: “Ihr schwanket hin und her”) appear as demons; he calls them “ein überteuflisch Element,” “Liebesspuk,” and the like (11754, 11814). But the final scene revives the perspective of “Zueignung,” in which wavering and swaying are associated with the uncertain, preconscious reawakening to life. The “Chor und Echo” that open “Bergsschluchten” begin the last revival of the song whose “erster Widerklang” resonated behind “Zueignung” (20). Answering to the gothic interior of Faust’s monologue, the stage now presents a gothic exterior, a mountainous region reminiscent of the landscapes of The Mysteries of Udolpho. Yet the setting sheds the contamination by individualized conflict that polarizes the gothic self. Release proceeds in stages, without the cathartic shudder that would memorialize what is to be left behind. Hence, responding to Mephisto’s mistaken boast, “Gerettet sind die edlen Teufelsteile” (11813), Goethe produces the following sequence. First angels “schwebend in der höheren Atmosphäre,” emit a counterboast, “Gerettet ist das edle Glied / Der Geisterwelt vom Bösen” (11934-35). Next the more perfect angels correct them, complaining, “Uns bleibt ein Erdenrest / Zu tragen peinlich, / Und wär er von Asbest, / Er ist nicht reinlich” (11954-57). And then the purifying Doctor Marianus, “in der höchsten, reinlichsten Zelle,” mediates the ultimate release, “Hier ist die Aussicht frei, / Der Geist erhoben” (11989-90), once more evoking “Zueignung,” which ends, “Was ich besitze, seh ich wie im Weiten, / Und was ver-

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opening a condition of “pure soul” preceding Faust’s fall into writing, a change in mode vital to the action of the play.1 5 Yet Faust’s initial condition of “pure soul” is as much an unhappy limbo as the successor condition is: whatever “pure” means here, it does not include healthy or effective. Suspended in such gothic chambers, “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born” (Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”), the continuity of the self is tested and, very often, assured. The gothic novel is, generically, a thought experiment with premature burial, and Faust in his dark and narrow chamber, almost like a figure from Poe, starts off already dead and waiting to be reborn.

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schwand [Faust’s body, in the final instance], wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten” (31-32). Redeeming the blinded, haunted Faust, the clarified vision into the distance lifts spirituality to a new and higher level. At the end gothic conflict gives up the ghost. The younger angels, who were there, appear to speak of victory: “Böse wichen, als wir streuten, / Teufel flohen, als wir trafen” (11947-48). But in truth their attack transformed the nature of the encounter: “Statt gewohnter Höllenstrafen / Fühlten Liebesqual die Geister” (11949-50). War has become passionate love, and the necessary lessons of human violence have forged bonds between individuals. “Und aus ätherischem Gewande / Hervortritt erste Jugendkraft!” (1209091). Finally Faust is truly born—but not into a merely personal condition of separated consciousness: “Er ahnet kaum das frische Leben [not selfconscious], / So gleicht er schon der heiligen Schar [not personal]” (12086-87). A powerfully active response replaces the spiritual essentialism typical of the gothic, as the blessed youths say, with a circling motion, “Er überwächst uns schon / An mächtigen Gliedern” (12076-77). The professor has become a good learner, and hence a good teacher at last: “Doch dieser hat gelernt, / Er wird uns lehren” (12082-83). But he becomes a good teacher by virtue of confronting his Unmündigkeit. A powerful child rather than an independent adult, Goethe’s counter-gothic personality does not free himself by force of will, for “Wer zerreißt aus eigner Kraft / Der Gelüste Ketten?” (1202627). Rather, the gothic manacles lose their terror and become an ecstatic living union transcending any possible individualism. In the penultimate strophe of the play the Doctor Marianus describes the process thus: “Euch zu seligem Geschick / Dankend umzuarten” (12098-99), in a pair of lines whose collective plural is as essential as its perhaps unprecedented verb of communal response, “umzuarten.”1 9 Faust, then, preserves the legacy of the gothic in the very process of transmuting it. There is, to be sure, no novelty in contending that Faust in some sense transvalues evil and that in some sense it honors collectivities. But it does make a difference if we stress the gothic tonalities that persist into the final scene, even as the play abandons a conventionally gothic vision. The gothic is the realm of the sublime, of the unspeakable and unperformable that the final “Chorus Mysticus” invokes. Consequently, the gothic bequeaths to the play’s ideological convictions a sense of urgency and a restless energy beyond conceptual

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grasp.2 0 Because it has passed through the gothic crucible, the world of Faust must always view love as passion—a better form of war and not a negation of it. It must always view maturity under the sign of power, breaking the bonds of earth, and not as settled conviction. And it must always view teaching as a stab in the dark: even through the desperate straits of Sorge and her companions men must risk the Hinanziehen and Hinangezogensein of and by the Eternal Feminine, formerly the spinning Gretchen whose rest is always and forever gone because she does not and cannot hold her beloved firmly on the spot. She knows, as the blessed youths in their blissful ignorance do not, that Faust has not really learned and cannot really teach: she answers them with a reminder that their new teacher is blind, with a blindness carried over from his prior, gothic existence into a new day that can never fully dawn for humans, since humanity lies in acceptance, not rejection, of their gothic fetters: “Vergönne mir, ihn zu belehren! / Noch blendet ihn der neue Tag” (12092-93). That is the sublime condition we transcend exactly to the extent that we learn to submit to it.2 1 What Faust rejects, then, is not the gothic as such—not human limitation, not the confrontation with evil, not fatality—so much as the rebelliousness that the gothic novels inscribe into their portrayal of the gothic condition. Gothic rebellion is contaminated by the forces it opposes; as Act V shows, if you command the devil, it is only to become a stronger devil yourself. Resistance is always tainted, whether by the perpetual melancholy of The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe’s undercurrents of sexual indulgence, or the recalcitrant monstrousness of Mary Shelley’s pure-hearted monster. Like his creators in the “Vorspiel auf dem Theater,” Faust begins angry. Unlike his fellows in confrontation with forces of evil—and most unlike the increasingly angry Mephisto—Faust wins by losing, swallowing his pride, and submitting. The gothic mode is divided against itself, and Goethe rectifies it by refusing to bring its dialectic to a standstill. Amid all the differences, then, Faust shares with the gothic a radical dialectic.2 2 Indeed, insofar as the gothic novels bring their dialectic to a terminus, Faust outdoes their radicalism. It is a dialectic because its values insistently come in competing pairs: good and evil, heaven and earth, man and woman. Its two-souledness is radical in the political sense that human structures will not satisfy its demands; radical in the moral sense that erring, sin, and care, hopeless blindness and the

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Notes 1. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) 26, following only a long Shelley quote. Other bits of Part I figure very occasionally through the rest of the book as analogies to Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and to victimized females. 2. Cf. WA I, 42.2:86-88 (Scott, Hoffmann); he made repeated references to Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (WA III, 2:224; WA IV, 13:91, 343, 361; 14:54; and 15:50), also to Walpole’s “Das Geheimnis der Mutter” (WA I, 35:86). He even translated a bit of Maturin’s Bertram (WA I, 11:353-58) and was aware of Monk Lewis. Closer to home he knew both Tieck’s “romantic” writings, as he refers to them (WA III, 2:259), and Schiller’s “Geisterseher” (WA III, 3:124). On Kant as an ironist, WA II, 11:54-55 and 13:448. 3. [Justus Christian Hennings], Von Geistern und Geistersehern (Leipzig: Weygand, 1780) 368. 4. The most detailed comparison of Faust and Melmoth can be found in Syndy M. Conger, Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans: An Interpretative Study of the Influence of German Literature on Two Gothic Novels, Salzburg Studies in English Literature 67 (Salzburg: Institut für englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1977) 12-42. 5. Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin, in La Comédie humaine, ed. Marcel Bouteron, 10 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1950) 9:30. 6. On gothic play see Marshall Brown, “Kant e i demoni della notte,” Studi sull’estetica 12 (1984): 155-65. 7. See for instance the “quite astonishing” claim by Jane K. Brown that the final moments of Part I derive from the comic-opera tradition (quoted words on p. 111). The more conventional reading can be illustrated with Stuart Atkins’s emphasis on the “tragic defeat,” “horror,” and “tragic dignity” of Gretchen’s “secularsentimental apotheosis”: Goethe’s “Faust”: A Literary Analysis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964) 99-100. 8. We quote a sentence to illustrate the tone of Hufeland’s narrative: “Es fängt wirklich diesem äußerst aufgeklärten und vorurtheilsfreyen Manne endlich an darüber zu schwindeln; nie allein zu seyn, sich ewig von sonderbaren und immer wechselnden Gestalten umgeben, ja angesprochen zu sehen, dieß raubt ihm endlich alle Gemüthsruhe, ja alle Gedanken, und es versetzt ihn in die peinlichste Agitation.” C.W. Hufeland, “Sonderbare Geistererscheinung,” in Kleine medizinische Schriften 2 (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1823): 378 (originally in Hufeland’s Journal der praktischen Heilkunde).

9. Emil Staiger mentions Hufeland in connection with Faust’s resurrection, 3:451. 10. Matthew Arnold’s lines on Goethe in “Memorial Verses: April, 1850,” note the gothic ground of his detachment: “And he was happy, if to know / Causes of things, and far below / His feet to see the lurid flow / Of terror, and insane distress, / And headlong fate, be happiness.” Wilhelm Emrich (73-74) builds his passing mention of madness on a line from Egmont, “eingehüllt in gefälligen Wahnsinn versinken wir und hören auf zu sein”; his Hegelian bias toward redemptive Gefälligkeit leads him to slight the significance of Wahnsinn, a word that is absent from his index of concepts. 11. See Marshall Brown, “A Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel,” Studies in Romanticism 26 (1987): 275301, for a fuller presentation of the way that gothic novels test the limits of terror. 12. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. Marvin Mudrick (New York: Collier, 1963) 19. 13. As part of his demonstration of the thematic unity of Faust, Joachim Müller surveys representative occurrences of schauern and schaudern in the play, without discussing their significance: “Zur Motivstruktur von Goethes ‘Faust,’” in: Sitzungsberichte der sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig: Philologischhistorische Klasse 116:3 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1972) 9-11. 14. Herz defines Langerweile [sic] as “ein einförmiger Spatziergang oder Reiseweg, auf welchem sich keine abwechselnde Mannichfaltigkeit darbietet,” leading to despair; Schwindel is “der widernatürlich schnelle Fortgang der Ideen.” Markus Herz, Versuch über den Schwindel, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Vossische Buchhandlung, 1791) 158-59. 15. Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990) 3. 16. See the groundbreaking general discussion of this phenomenon by Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness,” Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970) 298-310. 17. Emrich 71. See further Peter Michelsen’s nice analysis of “Anmutige Gegend” in relation to Faust’s opening monologue, “Fausts Schlaf und Erwachen,” Jahrbuch des freien deutschen Hochstifts (1983) 21-61. Michelsen identifies cathartic forgetting as the new motif at this point in the play, and he compares the action here to the procedures “des Experiments in der Naturwissenschaft” (38). For his theory of sleep Michelsen draws on the Aphorismen aus der Physiologie der Pflanzen (1808) by Goethe’s friend and admirer Dietrich Georg Kieser. The passages he quotes (40-41) were, however, commonplace both among mystics and, in variants, among rationalists like Heinrich Nudow, whose Versuch einer Theorie des Schlafs was published by Kant’s (and Fichte’s) publisher Nicolovius in Königsberg in 1795. For a stronger account of the power of forgetting in the play, see Theodor Adorno, “Zur Schlußszene des Faust,” Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1981) 129-38. Helmut Schanze presents the final scene as a theatrum memoriae in “Szenen, Schema, Schwammfamilie: Goethes Arbeitsweise und die Frage der Struktureinheit von Faust I und II,” Euphorion 78 (1984) 383-400; however, Schan-

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struggle against it remain inevitable; radical in the epistemological sense that mediations are relentlessly excluded or satirized in a series of ever more astonishing dramatic confrontations; and radical in the aesthetic sense that this is all a wondrous spectacle, of value precisely to the extent that it does not touch real—ordinary, petty—life. Faust consummates the gothic self-critique not by turning against the gothic but rather by pursuing the gothic impulse to its logical, bittersweet end.

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ze’s thesis differs less from ours than might appear, since he emphasizes collective memory and a transcendence of the individual perspective. 18. On the importance of perspective and point of view in Faust see Jane K. Brown, Faust: Theater of the World (New York: Twayne, 1992) 26-34. 19. Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch cites only this passage to illustrate a transitive use of “umarten.” Its two prior instances of intransitive “umarten” do not appear to constitute a precedent. In a subsection (145-52) of his essay “Theatrum Mundi: Anfang und Schluß von Goethes ‘Faust’” called “Umartung,” Hermann Kunisch transmutes the reflexive into a passive, “ein Umgeartetwerden in dem gnadevollen Sichmitteilen der Liebe”: Goethe-Studien, ed. Franz Link (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991) 131-58 (quotation is on p. 146). 20. We argue here against the type of idealizing reading canonized by Max Kommerell in “Faust II: Letzte Szene,” Geist und Buchstabe der Dichtung (Frankfurt/ Main: Klostermann, 1956) 112-31. “In Prosa aufgelöst” (116)—which is to say, substituting doctrinal pieties for human feeling—the conclusion seems to Kommerell a “Mysterium” that preaches “eine seraphische Geselligkeit und Kollegialität” (121) and that portrays “die Genialität des Liebeszustands in jener Allgemeinheit, wie sie der Stil des zweiten Teils mit sich bringt” (129). “D’un coup,” writes one pygmy working the vein of this generalissimo and oblivious of the Ibycean cranes on the horizon, “les scènes de magie noire, les interminables promenades de la seconde partie à travers les diableries anciennes et modernes, pâlissent devant cette fin d’un centenaire aveugle et visionnaire,” Pierre Grapin, “Faust aveugle,” Etudes germaniques 38 (1983): 146. 21. Jean-François Lyotard has provided the most apposite analyses of the sublime as a darkness that wrings morality out of disintegration. See in particular “L’Intérêt du sublime,” Du sublime (a collective volume with preface by Jean-Luc Nancy) (n.p.: Belin, 1988) 149-77. In the more concise formulation of another essay, “the sublime is the affective paradox, the paradox of feeling (of feeling publicly) in common a formlessness for which there is no image or sensory intuition,” “The Sign of History,” trans. Geoff Bennington, Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 176. 22. There are valuable comments about Faust as a dialectic in extremis in Jochen Schmidt, “Die ‘katholische Mythologie’ und ihre mystische Entmythologisierung in der Schlußszene des Faust II,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 34 (1990) 230-56. See particularly the essay’s last sentence: “So weitet sich das Spektrum der Entmythologisierung ins Totale, indem nicht bloß eine alte Welt von gestalthaft ausgeprägten Glaubens-

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vorstellungen und Sinn-Figuren, sondern überhaupt die Vorstellung einer allumfassenden Sinn-Figur: die Vorstellung des ganzheitlich geordneten Kosmos als mythologische Vorstellungsform aufgehoben wird in einem Jenseits, das als Sphäre des irreal Gewordenen schon umschlägt ins Nichts” (256). Having let the genie out of the bottle, however, Schmidt simultaneously tries to nail it to the wall, claiming that Dionysius the Areopagite is the secret source that explains all. “Erst damit wird der Sinn der bisher unerschlossenen berühmten Verse [of the final chorus] exakt faßbar” (245)—a claim that would be more persuasive if the “exact” meaning that he finds were more than a conventionally hermetic approximation: “Daher ist Gott nicht in seiner Eigentlichkeit, sondern nur uneigentlich zu erkennen” (246).

FURTHER READING Criticism Hildebrand, Janet. “An Ecology of Elemental Spirits and Mortals in Goethe’s Ballads.” History of European Ideas 12, no. 4 (1990): 503-21. Explores supernatural and folkloric elements in Goethe’s ballads. Wicksteed, Philip H. “‘Magic’—A Contribution to the Study of Goethe’s Faust.” Hibbert Journal 10, no. 4 (1911): 754-64. Contends that the magic practiced by Mephistopheles and Faust impedes Faust’s search for intellectual and spiritual contentment. Wood, Robin. “‘Der Erlkönig’: The Ambiguities of Horror.” In American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Robin Wood and Richard Lippe, pp. 29-32. Toronto, Ontario: Festival of Festivals, 1979. Analysis of the Goethe’s handling of horror in his poem “Der Erlkönig” (“The Erl-King”).

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Goethe’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Concise Dictionary of World Literary Biography, Vol. 2; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 94; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Dramatists, MostStudied Authors, and Poets; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Drama Criticism, Vol. 20; European Writers, Vol. 5; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature and Its Times Supplement; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 4, 34, 90, 154; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 5; Reference Guide to World Literature, Eds. 2, 3, Short Story Criticism, Vol. 38; Twayne’s World Authors; and World Literature Criticism.

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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804 - 1864)

American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.

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awthorne is an acknowledged master of American fiction. His novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) is one of the most-read classics of American literature, and several of his short stories are ranked as masterpieces of the genre. Hawthorne’s works reflect his dark vision of human nature, as he frequently portrays Puritanism as an expression of humanity’s potential for cruelty, obsession, and intolerance. His strange, haunting tales of guilt, isolation, and death betray his fascination with the macabre even as they plumb the depths of human psychology and moral responsibility. With Edgar Allan Poe, Hawthorne was instrumental in the evolution of American Gothic fiction, moving away from sensationalism to focus on the aesthetic and emotional response to horror and dissecting the mental processes of his characters. His highly allegorical works use Gothic conventions to explore questions about human actions and their consequences and the effects of sin on the human psyche. Gothic elements are seen in his most important works, from the short story “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) to The Scarlet Letter to his last completed novel, The Marble Faun (1860). All these works are highly symbolic, challenging moral fantasies that are chilling in their dark assessment of the human character. The

Gothic world Hawthorne created in his fiction— with its his gloomy settings, concern with death, and explorations of the demonic—is central to his moral and thematic purposes as it allowed him a wider fictive realm through which he could tell the dark truths about the world as he perceived it.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804, Hawthorne was descended from a line of staunch Puritans that included William Hathorne (Hawthorne himself added the “w” to the family name), an ardent defender of the faith who participated in the persecution of Quakers during the seventeenth century, and his son John Hathorne, a presiding judge at the infamous Salem witch trials. This melancholy heritage was augmented by the premature death of Hawthorne’s father, which left the four-year-old Nathaniel in the care of his grief-stricken and reclusive mother. Spending much time alone during his childhood, Hawthorne developed an intensely introspective nature and eventually came to believe that the misfortunes of his immediate family were the result of divine retribution for the sins of his ancestors. An avid reader with an affinity for the works of John Bunyan and Edmund Spenser, Hawthorne began to write while attending Bowdoin College,

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where he met Franklin Pierce and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. After graduation, Hawthorne returned to his mother’s home in Salem where he passed a twelve-year literary apprenticeship, occasionally publishing unsigned tales in journals but more often than not destroying his work. He published a novel, Fanshawe: A Tale (1828), but later withdrew it from circulation and burned every available copy. Many of Hawthorne’s early pieces appeared in The Token, an annual anthology published by Samuel Goodrich, during the early 1830s. Goodrich played a major role in the development of the young author’s career, naming him editor of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge in 1836 and arranging for the publication of his first collection of short stories, Twice-Told Tales (1837), one year later. Twice-Told Tales contains historical sketches and stories displaying the dark themes and skillful technique that would characterize his later work. Although lavishly praised by critics, the volume sold poorly, and an enlarged edition issued in 1842 fared no better. This pattern of critical appreciation and public neglect continued throughout Hawthorne’s literary career, and he was forced to occupy a series of minor governmental posts in order to supplement the meager income from his writings. Soon after the publication of Twice-Told Tales, Hawthorne became engaged to Sophia Peabody, a neighbor who had admired his work. Hoping to find a permanent home for himself and Sophia, Hawthorne joined Brook Farm in 1841. An experimental utopian community outside of Boston, Brook Farm was intended to be an agricultural cooperative that would provide its members— through the principle of shared labor—with a living while allowing them leisure for artistic and literary pursuits. The community was founded by the literary critic and social reformer George Ripley, and various prominent authors expressed interest in the scheme, including Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Orestes Brownson. Hawthorne’s enthusiasm for the venture quickly wore off, however. He left after six months, convinced that intellectual endeavor was incompatible with hard physical exertion. Although his literary efforts at Brook Farm proved a failure, Hawthorne kept careful records of his time there in his journals and letters; these later informed the plot, physical settings, and characters of The Blithedale Romance (1852). In July of 1842, Hawthorne married Peabody, and the couple moved into a large house in Concord, Massachusetts, known locally as the

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“Old Manse.” There Hawthorne wrote many of the pieces included in his next collection of stories and sketches, Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). He worked in the Salem customhouse from 1846 to 1849, when he was fired because of a change in political administrations. After his dismissal, in an intense outpouring of creative effort, he wrote The Scarlet Letter in just four months. The book was an immediate success, and Hawthorne soon followed with a number of others, including two important novels, The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance, as well as a volume of short pieces, The Snow-Image, and Other Tales (1851). The years 1850-1852 were Hawthorne’s most intensely productive period. After this time, he had great difficulty writing any more fiction. His position as United States consul at Liverpool from 1853 to 1857 left him with enough free time to write, but during that period he could only fill up his notebooks with jottings from his travels in Europe. In 1860 he did manage to finish one last novel, The Marble Faun, which was drawn from his tour of Italy, but the remaining years of his life were marked by a frustrating series of false starts. His unfinished manuscripts were periodically interrupted by marginal notes asking, “What meaning?” Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864 in Plymouth, New Hampshire, at the age of fiftynine.

MAJOR WORKS Hawthorne’s stories written shortly after he graduated from college indicate his early interest in the occult and the supernatural. “The Hollow of the Three Hills” (1830) and “An Old Woman’s Tale” (1830), for example, use Gothic devices and contain witches and burial grounds. They display as well Hawthorne’s concern with questions of religion and morality, sin and guilt. Stories written just a few years later and published in the 1837 volume Twice-Told Tales, such as “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” illustrate Hawthorne’s mastery of the technique of the symbolic tale, as they present deeply felt moral and psychological concerns in a highly evocative fictional form. Other important fabular tales in Twice-Told Tales include “The Prophetic Pictures,” in which a painter captures the fates as well as the faces of his subjects; “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” about an elixir of life; and “Legends of the ProvinceHouse,” which features three rationalized ghost stories.

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Gothic elements and devices abound in Hawthorne’s longer fiction as well. The Scarlet Letter, which treats the cruel and unusual punishment of an adulteress, begins with the discovery of a dusty manuscript found in a garret from which the narrator learns the story he recounts. The House of the Seven Gables is a Gothic romance in which a monstrous house infects and corrupts all who live in it. Hawthorne’s last completed novel, The Marble Faun, is a symbolic romance as well as a story of a murder and a parable of the Fall of Man. In these works, as in his shorter fiction, Hawthorne uses gothicism to create a sense of mood and place in which to explore the somber truths about human nature, morality, and the struggles of the human soul.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Critics have long acknowledged Hawthorne to be among the United States’ most important writers. He projected profound moral concerns on a distinctly American background and sought to interpret the spiritual history of a nation. He is regarded as one of the architects of the modern short story and an important figure in the devel-

opment of Gothic American fiction. His portrayal of the protagonists in The Scarlet Letter set the standard for psychological realism for generations of writers. Through his depiction of the consequences of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale’s adulterous union, Hawthorne explored the historical, social, theological, and emotional ramifications of sin, concealment, and guilt. In this novel as in his other fiction, he used gothicism as a vehicle to investigate the dark side of the human soul, not terrifying readers but horrifying them with clinical depictions of the inner workings of his characters’ minds. Critics who have investigated Hawthorne’s Gothic vision have focused on the Gothic influences on his work, his use of particular Gothic devices for symbolic purposes, the thematic importance of horror in his fiction, and his concern with sin and evil. They have also paid particular attention to the relationship between religion and the fantastic in Hawthorne’s work and to his use of the supernatural to explore the psychological and social effects of guilty knowledge.

PRINCIPAL WORKS Fanshawe: A Tale (novel) 1828 Twice-Told Tales (sketches and short stories) 1837 Twice-Told Tales [second series] (sketches and short stories) 1842 Mosses from an Old Manse (sketches and short stories) 1846 The Scarlet Letter: A Romance (novel) 1850 The House of the Seven Gables, a Romance (novel) 1851 The Snow Image, and Other Tales (short stories) 1851 The Blithedale Romance (novel) 1852 Life of Franklin Pierce (biography) 1852 A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (short stories) 1852 Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys; Being a Second Wonder-Book (short stories) 1853 The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of Monte Beni (novel) 1860; published in England as Transformation; or, The Romance of Monte Beni, 1860 Our Old Home (essays) 1863 Passages from the American Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne (journal) 1868

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Mosses from an Old Manse is often regarded as Hawthorne’s best collection of short stories. It features “Young Goodman Brown,” regarded as perhaps Hawthorne’s greatest work of Gothic fiction, which expresses the darkest and most universal truths about human nature with particular simplicity and intensity. In the story, Young Goodman Brown goes into the forest one night for an admittedly evil purpose, leaving behind his young wife, Faith. There he meets the devil and, in a gradual series of revelations, learns that everyone in his world—including his minister, the pious old woman who taught him his catechism, all the elders of his church, even his father and mother— has gone into the forest before him, and has met with the devil. He returns to the village a changed man: stern, sad, darkly meditative, and distrustful; he has lost all faith in the human race and he spends a gloomy life cut off from the chain of humanity. Other tales of psychological horror in Mosses from an Old Manse include “The Birthmark,” about a scientist who tries to erase a slight flaw in his wife’s complexion and obliterates her entirely; “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” in which a young student falls in love with a girl raised in a garden of poisons; and “Ethan Brand,” about the unpardonable sin which a laborer-turnedshowman claims to have discovered after a long search.

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Passages from the English Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne (journal) 1870 Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne (journal) 1872 Septimius Felton; or, The Elixer of Life (unfinished novel) 1872 The Dolliver Romance and Other Pieces (unfinished novel) 1876 Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret: A Romance (unfinished novel) 1883

PRIMARY SOURCES NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (STORY DATE 1830) SOURCE: Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Hollow of the Three Hills.” In Great Ghost Stories: 34 Classic Tales of the Supernatural, compiled by Robin Brockman, pp. 305-09. New York: Gramercy Books, 2002. The following short story was originally published in 1830 in the Salem Gazette.

In those strange old times, when fantastic dreams and madmen’s reveries were realized among the actual circumstances of life, two persons met together at an appointed hour and place. One was a lady graceful in form and fair of feature, though pale and troubled and smitten with an untimely blight in what should have been the fullest bloom of her years; the other was an ancient and meanly-dressed woman, of ill-favored aspect, and so withered, shrunken, and decrepit, that even the space since she began to decay must have exceeded the ordinary term of human existence. In the spot where they encountered, no mortal could observe them. Three little hills stood near each other, and down in the midst of them sunk a hollow basin, almost mathematically circular, two or three hundred feet in breadth, and of such depth that a stately cedar might but just be visible above the sides. Dwarf pines were numerous upon the hills, and partly fringed the outer verge of the intermediate hollow, within which there was nothing but the brown grass of October, and here and there a tree trunk that had fallen long ago, and lay mouldering with no green successor from its roots. One of these masses of decaying wood, formerly a majestic oak, rested close beside a pool of green and sluggish water at the bottom of the basin. Such scenes as this (so gray tradition tells) were once the resort of the Power of Evil and his plighted subjects; and here, at midnight or on the dim verge of evening, they

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were said to stand round the mantling pool, disturbing its putrid waters in the performance of an impious baptismal rite. The chill beauty of an autumnal sunset was now gilding the three hilltops, whence a paler tint stole down their sides into the hollow. “Here is our pleasant meeting come to pass,” said the aged crone, “according as thou hast desired. Say quickly what thou wouldst have of me, for there is but a short hour that we may tarry here.” As the old withered woman spoke, a smile glimmered on her countenance, like lamplight on the wall of a sepulchre. The lady trembled, and cast her eyes upward to the verge of the basin, as if meditating to return with her purpose unaccomplished. But it was not so ordained. “I am a stranger in this land, as you know,” said she at length. “Whence I come it matters not; but I have left those behind me with whom my fate was intimately bound, and from whom I am cut off forever. There is a weight in my bosom that I cannot away with, and I have come hither to inquire of their welfare.” “And who is there by this green pool that can bring thee news from the ends of the earth?” cried the old woman, peering into the lady’s face. “Not from my lips mayst thou hear these tidings; yet, be thou bold, and the daylight shall not pass away from yonder hill-top before thy wish be granted.” “I will do your bidding though I die,” replied the lady desperately. The old woman seated herself on the trunk of the fallen tree, threw aside the hood that shrouded her gray locks, and beckoned her companion to draw near. “Kneel down,” she said, “and lay your forehead on my knees.” She hesitated a moment, but the anxiety that had long been kindling burned fiercely up within her. As she knelt down, the border of her garment was dipped into the pool; she laid her forehead on the old woman’s knees, and the latter drew a cloak about the lady’s face, so that she was in darkness. Then she heard the muttered words of prayer, in the midst of which she started, and would have arisen. “Let me flee—let me flee and hide myself, that they may not look upon me!” she cried. But, with returning recollection, she hushed herself, and was still as death. For it seemed as if other voices—familiar in infancy, and unforgotten through many wander-

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“A weary and lonesome time yonder old couple have of it,” remarked the old woman, smiling in the lady’s face. “And did you also hear them?” exclaimed she, a sense of intolerable humiliation triumphing over her agony and fear. “Yea; and we have yet more to hear,” replied the old woman. “Wherefore, cover thy face quickly.” Again the withered hag poured forth the monotonous words of a prayer that was not meant to be acceptable in heaven; and soon, in the pauses of her breath, strange murmurings began to thicken, gradually increasing so as to drown and overpower the charm by which they grew. Shrieks pierced through the obscurity of sound, and were succeeded by the singing of sweet female voices, which, in their turn, gave way to a wild roar of laughter, broken suddenly by groaning and sobs, forming altogether a ghastly confusion of terror and mourning and mirth. Chains were rattling, fierce and stern voices uttered

threats, and the scourge resounded at their command. All these noises deepened and became substantial to the listener’s ear, till she could distinguish every soft and dreamy accent of the love songs that died causelessly into funeral hymns. She shuddered at the unprovoked wrath which blazed up like the spontaneous kindling of flame, and she grew faint at the fearful merriment raging miserably around her. In the midst of this wild scene, where unbound passions jostled each other in a drunken career, there was one solemn voice of a man, and a manly and melodious voice it might once have been. He went to and fro continually, and his feet sounded upon the floor. In each member of that frenzied company, whose own burning thoughts had become their exclusive world, he sought an auditor for the story of his individual wrong, and interpreted their laughter and tears as his reward of scorn or pity. He spoke of woman’s perfidy, of a wife who had broken her holiest vows, of a home and heart made desolate. Even as he went on, the shout, the laugh, the shriek, the sob, rose up in unison, till they changed into the hollow, fitful, and uneven sound of the wind, as it fought among the pine-trees on those three lonely hills. The lady looked up, and there was the withered woman smiling in her face. “Couldst thou have thought there were such merry times in a madhouse?” inquired the latter. “True, true,” said the lady to herself; “there is mirth within its walls, but misery, misery without.” “Wouldst thou hear more?” demanded the old woman. “There is one other voice I would fain listen to again,” replied the lady faintly. “Then, lay down thy head speedily upon my knees, that thou mayst get thee hence before the hour be past.” The golden skirts of day were yet lingering upon the hills, but deep shades obscured the hollow and the pool, as if sombre night were rising thence to overspread the world. Again that evil woman began to weave her spell. Long did it proceed unanswered, till the knelling of a bell stole in among the intervals of her words, like a clang that had travelled far over valley and rising ground, and was just ready to die in the air. The lady shook upon her companion’s knees as she heard that boding sound. Stronger it grew and sadder, and deepened into the tone of a death bell, knelling dolefully from some ivy-mantled tower, and bearing tidings of mortality and wo to the cottage, to the hall, and to the solitary wayfarer,

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ings, and in all the vicissitudes of her heart and fortune—were mingling with the accents of the prayer. At first the words were faint and indistinct, not rendered so by distance, but rather resembling the dim pages of a book which we strive to read by an imperfect and gradually brightening light. In such a manner, as the prayer proceeded, did those voices strengthen upon the ear; till at length the petition ended, and the conversation of an aged man, and of a woman broken and decayed like himself, became distinctly audible to the lady as she knelt. But those strangers appeared not to stand in the hollow depth between the three hills. Their voices were encompassed and re-echoed by the walls of a chamber, the windows of which were rattling in the breeze; the regular vibration of a clock, the crackling of a fire, and the tinkling of the embers as they fell among the ashes, rendered the scene almost as vivid as if painted to the eye. By a melancholy hearth sat these two old people, the man calmly despondent, the woman querulous and tearful, and their words were all of sorrow. They spoke of a daughter, a wanderer they knew not where, bearing dishonour along with her, and leaving shame and affliction to bring their gray heads to the grave. They alluded also to other and more recent wo, but in the midst of their talk their voices seemed to melt into the sound of the wind sweeping mournfully among the autumn leaves; and when the lady lifted her eyes, there was she kneeling in the hollow between three hills.

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that all might weep for the doom appointed in turn to them. Then came a measured tread, passing slowly, slowly on, as of mourners with a coffin, their garments trailing on the ground, so that the ear could measure the length of their melancholy array. Before them went the priest, reading the burial service, while the leaves of his book were rustling in the breeze. And though no voice but his was heard to speak aloud, still there were revilings and anathemas, whispered but distinct, from women and from men, breathed against the daughter who had wrung the aged hearts of her parents—the wife who had betrayed the trusting fondness of her husband—the mother who had sinned against natural affection, and left her child to die. The sweeping sound of the funeral train faded away like a thin vapor, and the wind, that just before had seemed to shake the coffin pall, moaned sadly round the verge of the Hollow between three Hills. But when the old woman stirred the kneeling lady, she lifted not her head. “Here has been a sweet hour’s sport!” said the withered crone, chuckling to herself.

GENERAL COMMENTARY NEAL FRANK DOUBLEDAY (ESSAY DATE FEBRUARY 1946) SOURCE: Doubleday, Neal Frank. “Hawthorne’s Use of Three Gothic Patterns.” College English 7, no. 5 (February 1946): 250-62. In the following essay, Doubleday illustrates Hawthorne’s view of the Gothic tradition and how he adapted it to treat moral and psychological themes.

Hawthorne’s critics have generally considered Hawthorne’s literary methods as manifestations of his temperament and, in particular, his use of the Gothic convention as evidence of limited imaginative resources or of morbidity. There is a tempting picturesqueness in a disproportionate emphasis upon the “spectral” qualities of Hawthorne’s art; but the interpreters of Hawthorne have often lost sight of important contemporary influences upon his literary practice and important motives for it. Hawthorne’s use of the Gothic is a particularly good illustration of his way of adapting conventional materials to allegorical and psychological uses.1 In Hawthorne’s work the familiar resources of the Gothic romancer are not used primarily to awaken terror or wonder but to embody a moral— not to induce an intense psychological state in

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the reader but to make imaginatively concrete a truth of general and permanent significance or to symbolize a condition of mind or soul. A romance, Hawthorne tells us, whatever its liberties, “sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart.” He has been, he avers, “burrowing, to his utmost ability, into the depths of our common nature”; he has “appealed to no sentiment or sensibilities save such as are diffused among us all”; he has been “merely telling what is common to human nature.” “Everything,” he makes Sybil Dacy say, “has its spiritual meaning, which to the literal meaning is what the soul is to the body.”2 Hawthorne’s use of Gothic materials for his special artistic purpose sets us interesting questions in the problem of his relation to his time and in the problem of literary convention. Certainly, Hawthorne had read a sufficient number of Gothic romances.3 Wilbur Cross has written: Nearly all the Gothic machinery of Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Godwin is to be found in this Puritan: high winds, slamming doors, moonlight and starlight, magic and witchcraft, mysterious portraits, transformations, malignant beings, the elixir of life, the skeleton, the funeral, and the corpse in its shroud. To these were added, as time went on, mesmerism and clairvoyance.4

But Hawthorne is never more in accord with the general fictional practice of his time than he is in the use of these Gothic materials. It is entirely natural—almost inevitable—that a young writer in America looking for material should work a vein that had been present in English literature since the mid-eighteenth century; that was an important part of the German literature which was becoming so influential in New England; and that had been apparent in, almost characteristic of, American literature since its very beginnings.5 The appeal of the Gothic is strikingly illustrated by Poe’s deliberate choice of the tale of terror as the form calculated to win immediate acceptance.6 Hawthorne, no less than Poe, was under the necessity of writing salable material, and he paid attention to his market, adapting his work to the conventions of that market and, at the same time, adapting the conventions to his peculiar purposes. As time went on, the Gothic became part of his literary habit—perhaps too persistently. The use of the Gothic convention was a recognized method of making romance from American materials, which were considered too new to be entirely available for fiction. Hawthorne was very much influenced by the demand for the

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The same sort of magical authority over the spirit of romance, which belongs in common to Scott, Radcliffe, Walpole, and our countryman Brown, is, for us at least, possessed by this writer in an eminent degree. Places, for example, familiar to us from our boyhood, and which are now daily before our eyes, thronged with the vulgar associations of real life, are boldly seized upon for scenes of the wildest romance; and yet our imaginations do not revolt at the incongruity. . . . A military conclave at the Province House possesses something of the same interest as if it were holden before the walls of Tillietudlem; and we attend a midnight marriage at the altar of King’s Chapel, and feel our blood curdle at the overshadowing arm upon the wall, with the same superstitious terror as when the gigantic armor rattles in the purely imaginative Castle of Otranto. . . . It is the creation and adaptation of a kind of machinery, which may be original in its character, and yet within the narrowed limits of modern probability, that stretch to the utmost the inventive faculties of the novelist. . . .8

Acknowledging this motive as his own, Hawthorne remarks at the end of “Howe’s Masquerade”: “In truth, it is desperately hard work, when we attempt to throw the spell of hoar antiquity over localities with which the living world, and the day that is passing over us, have aught to do.” And he frequently uses the Gothic for atmospheric effect, as well as for allegorical or psychological purposes. Hawthorne’s debt to his Gothic sources is more general than specific; and although specific derivation, when it can be found, is important, discussion of Hawthorne’s Gothic is not therewith complete. And we can hardly assume that the influences upon him came exclusively from the well-known writers we know him to have read; we must at least assume his familiarity with the publications to which he contributed. Nor need we suppose that everything in his work that has a Gothic flavor has an immediate literary source: mesmerism and clairvoyance, for instance, although they may be considered Gothic, did not come into Hawthorne’s work from literary tradition, for they were present in his New England.9 The three Gothic patterns which appear in Hawthorne’s tales (each one at least twice) and recur in his romances best illustrate his attitude

ABOUT THE AUTHOR EDGAR ALLAN POE REVIEW’S HAWTHORNE’S TWICE-TOLD TALES

[The Essays in Twice-Told Tales] are each and all beautiful, without being characterised by the polish and adaptation so visible in the tales proper. A painter would at once note their leading or predominant feature, and style it repose. There is no attempt at effect. All is quiet, thoughtful, subdued. Yet this repose may exist simultaneously with high originality of thought; and Mr. Hawthorne has demonstrated the fact. At every turn we meet with novel combinations; yet these combinations never surpass the limits of the quiet. We are soothed as we read; and withal is a calm astonishment that ideas so apparently obvious have never occurred or been presented to us before. Herein our author differs materially from Lamb or Hunt or Hazlitt—who, with vivid originality of manner and expression, have less of the true novelty of thought than is generally supposed. . . . The essays of Hawthorne have much of the character of Irving with more of originality, and less of finish. . . . [In the case of Mr. Irving,] repose is attained rather by the absence of novel combination, or of originality, than otherwise, and consists chiefly in the calm, quiet, unostentatious expression of commonplace thoughts, in an unambitious unadulterated Saxon. In them, by strong effort, we are made to conceive the absence of all. In the essays before us the absence of effort is too obvious to be mistaken, and a strong undercurrent of suggestion runs continuously beneath the upper stream of the tranquil thesis. In short, these effusions of Mr. Hawthorne are the product of a truly imaginative intellect, restrained, and in some measure repressed, by fastidiousness of taste, by constitutional melancholy and by indolence. SOURCE: Poe, Edgar Allan. “Review of New Books: Twice-Told Tales.” Graham’s Magazine (1842): 298-300.

toward the convention and his special uses of it. They are (1) mysterious portraits, (2) witchcraft,

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use of American materials in fiction;7 and the Gothic convention and literary nationalism had already been combined by Charles Brockden Brown, by John Neal, and, to some extent, by Cooper. A passage from an 1826 review of Cooper by W. H. Gardiner makes explicit a motive for the use of the Gothic which the modern interpreter may easily overlook:

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and (3) the esoteric arts or researches which would break through the limitations of mortality.

drama, in its treatment of oracles, express something similar to the profound truth here uttered by the American novelist?”1 1

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The Gothic element in “Edward Randolph’s Portrait” has a comparable use. The suggestion for the story, it has been pointed out, may have come from The Bride of Lammermoor, though the mysterious portrait with glaring eyes is too common a device to be positively identified with a specific source. The story concerns an awful warning against trampling on a people’s rights, a warning that comes to Colonel Hutchinson in the “peculiar glare” in the eyes, and in the tortured countenance, of the temporarily restored portrait of Edward Randolph. The story may be considered as a sort of companion piece to “The Grey Champion,” which concerns Randolph’s contemporary, Sir Edmund Andros. In “Edward Randolph’s Portrait” the Gothic is used as atmosphere, but it is primarily, as in “The Prophetic Pictures,” a vehicle for the theme, this time a nationalistic one. Hawthorne is never closer to the main stream of the American fiction of his time than he is when, in this story, he uses materials from the Gothic convention to fulfil the demand for “patriotism and native incident.”

From The Castle of Otranto down, the mysterious portrait is an important item in the list of Gothic paraphernalia and sometimes, as in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, a most effective one. Hawthorne’s use of it is a particularly good example of his way of taking a wholly conventional property and making it a symbol for a moral truth. Two stories—“The Prophetic Pictures” (1837) and “Edward Randolph’s Portrait” (1838)—are built around mysterious portraits, and the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon is an important element in The House of the Seven Gables. Old portraits interested Hawthorne, as they do any sensitive person—indeed, the mysterious portrait is one of the most imaginatively convincing of Gothic properties. He records in his notebooks for 1837 his impressions of some old portraits in the Essex Historical Society—a portrait of John Endicott (“Endicott and the Red Cross” was published in the same year); a portrait of Sir William Pepperell, a sketch of whom he had published in 1833; a portrait of Governor William Pyncheon; and others. His comment in summary of his impressions suggests the use he was to make of a portrait in The House of the Seven Gables, some thirteen years later: “Nothing gives a stronger idea of old worm-eaten aristocracy—of a family being crazy with age, and of its being time that it was extinct— than these black, dusty, faded, antique-dressed portraits. . . .”1 0 “The Prophetic Pictures” is characteristic of Hawthorne’s attitude toward Gothic materials. The suggestion for the story, Hawthorne’s footnote tells us, came from Dunlap’s History of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834). Hawthorne works out the suggestion in a Gothic manner, but he does not exploit the elements of terror and wonder and, indeed, refuses obvious opportunities to play upon his reader’s nerves. He is usually careful and here particularly careful, not to allow the interest of the Gothic element to obscure the theme—in this story the theme that individual destiny is the result of what the individual is and does. What is Gothic is merely a vehicle for the theme—a theme that Professor Leach does not hesitate to compare with that of Oedipus Rex: “The portentous knowledge of the oracle does not save the man; as with Oedipus, the impulsive nature flashing out in wrath brings upon him the very doom he sought to escape. Does not the Greek

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When, in The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne returns to the use of the mysterious portrait, he makes clear at the outset how we are to take the portrait of old Colonel Pyncheon. And, frequently reminding us in the course of the book that the portrait is a symbol, he depreciates the notion that there may be any real terror connected with it: he “is tempted to make a little sport with the idea”—as if he were afraid that his readers might become interested in the portrait as a thing in itself and that, therefore, the delicate balance of atmosphere and meaning might be destroyed.1 2 Hawthorne, then, in his use of mysterious portraits, finds a way of adapting a common device to his peculiar purposes. Yet he is also careful to give the Gothic property a local habitation: it was supposed that the painter of the prophetic pictures was “the famous Black Man, of old witch times”; one of the speculations about Edward Randolph’s portrait, before its restoration, was that it was “an original and authentic portrait of the evil one, taken at a witch meeting, near Salem”; the Colonel’s portrait gets its significance from “the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon and the wizard Maule.” The Gothic device is made part of New England legend.

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In witchcraft, indeed, Hawthorne found a special opportunity. “We know not the country or age,” wrote J. G. Palfrey in 1821, “which has such capacities” for the purposes of fiction “as N. England in its early day.”1 3 But American writers, deeply influenced by the Gothic tradition, complained for a long time about the lack of ruins and castles; even Cooper felt American materials unsatisfactory. Charles Brockden Brown attempted in Edgar Huntly to find an American Gothic in Indian material instead of in “Gothic castles and chimeras,” and Freneau was once reduced to writing some stanzas about the ruins of a country inn. Hawthorne echoes the complaint in the Prefaces to the The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun; and the ancestral home of the Pyncheons is probably the best substitute for a Gothic castle any American romancer ever devised. Witchcraft, however, was part of American history and legend, and Hawthorne’s treatment of New England witchcraft is an American Gothic that deserves separate consideration, an answer to the demand for the use of distinctively American materials. If it is true that “Alice Doane’s Appeal” was written in its original form before Hawthorne’s graduation from college in 1825, the first version was one of the earliest fictional treatments of New England witchcraft.1 4 The tale as published in the Token (1835) suggests the influence of John Neal or “Monk” Lewis and has a macabre quality; but it is not, certainly, in Hawthorne’s best vein. The original seems to have escaped1 5 the holocaust of tales which Hawthorne describes in “The Devil in Manuscript”; but it is just such tales that Hawthorne has in mind when he makes Oberon say to his friend: You have read them, and know what I mean,— that conception in which I endeavored to embody the character of a fiend, as represented in our traditions and the written records of witchcraft. Oh, I have a horror of what was created in my own brain, and shudder at the manuscripts in which I gave that dark idea a sort of material existence!”1 6

The version published in the Token is a description and summary of a tale, not the tale itself, and has for a frame an account of the narrator’s afternoon walk on Gallows Hill with two young women. I think we may take it that Hawthorne is really giving us a condensed account of a tale he once wrote and that we are fortunate not to have the original. Although he speaks of “good authority in our ancient superstitions,” the tale obviously does not come out of New England legend

but out of the Gothic tradition, in which the motif of potential incest is not infrequent.1 7 But if Hawthorne was unable to make use, in “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” of the possibilities for fiction in New England witchcraft, he nevertheless had shown himself aware of them, probably before he was twenty-one. In “The Hollow of the Three Hills” (1830), which may also have been written before 1825,1 8 Hawthorne’s treatment of the Gothic is somewhat more restrained, and his use of it has a moral purpose. But Hawthorne here makes no use of New England witchcraft materials, and the setting is not localized. Poe, who speaks as an expert in the Gothic, finds the tale original in that it makes the ear instead of the eye the medium by which the witch’s revelations are received, a substitution for the conventional pictures in a mirror or a cloud of smoke.1 9 And the use made of the Gothic device is probably more original than the change made in the device. Nevertheless, the tale has the marks of Hawthorne’s immaturity, for it is overwritten and without the imaginative substantiation of tradition and locale. Hawthorne’s later treatments of witchcraft are governed by carefully worked-out principles. “Almost all forms of popular superstition,” he says, “do clothe the ethereal with earthly attributes, and so make it grossly perceptible.”2 0 And witchcraft in particular has a serious import. Randall Stewart quotes an interesting passage from a letter of 1845 in which Hawthorne replies to Evert A. Duyckinck’s suggestion that he write a history of witchcraft: I had often thought of such a work, but I should not like to throw it off hastily, or to write it for the sole and specific purpose of getting $500. A mere narrative, to be sure, might be prepared easily enough; but such a work, if worthily written, would demand research and study, and as deep thought as any man could bring to it. The more I look at it, the more difficulties do I see—yet difficulties such as I should like to overcome. Perhaps it may be the work of an after time.2 1

Moreover, traditional material is particularly valuable to the artist. Hawthorne puts the principle into the mouth of Septimius Felton: genuine legends adopted into the popular belief . . . incrusted over with humanity, by passing from one homely mind to another . . . get to be true, in a certain sense, and indeed in that sense may be called true throughout, for the very nucleus, the fiction in them, seems to have come out of the heart of man in a way that cannot be imitated of malice aforethought.2 2

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And this quality of traditional material must be preserved in its literary treatment. In a review of Whittier’s The Supernaturalism of New England, Hawthorne writes:

nation of those three levels is the result of analysis and not the experience of the tale itself, in which the three fuse and in which meaning does not separate itself from symbol.

The proper tone for these legends is, of course, that of the fireside narrative, refined and clarified to whatever degree the writer pleases. . . . Above all, the narrator should have faith, for the time being. If he cannot believe his ghost-story while he is telling it, he had better leave the task to somebody else.2 3

We, as readers, view the action through Hawthorne, who consistently maintains the air of one who tries to interpret an action that has come to his knowledge, not an action created by him—an air which gives the tale the effect of legend. That effect may be illustrated: the staff of Goodman Brown’s guide looked like a snake, but perhaps that was “an ocular deception assisted by the uncertain light”; “some affirm that the lady of the governor was there,” but we cannot be sure; Goodman Brown did not actually see the minister and Deacon Gookin, but “he could have sworn” he heard their voices. But illustration is insufficient; the effect must be realized in its totality.

The principles of simplicity and imaginative assent are exemplified in “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), although balanced against the imaginative assent there is an alternative explanation, characteristic of Hawthorne and used (I think) to point up for the reader the symbolic value of the action. If the reason would conclude that Goodman Brown had a dream, “be it so if you will”; the reason thus satisfied need not interfere with the imagination’s assent to the fable and to its spiritual implications. Even when Hawthorne is writing, in “Main Street,” as a historical essayist, he implies that, though the witch judges were horribly wrong in their interpretation, witchcraft was a psychological state and often a manifestation of a wilful devotion to evil. His remarks about Martha Carrier and George Burroughs serve as a commentary on “Young Goodman Brown.” If such persons were wilfully devoted to evil, witchcraft would be only the sign of their spiritual pride. The symbolic value of witchcraft is inherent in the thing itself. Martha Carrier “the Devil found in a humble cottage, and looked into her discontented heart, and saw pride there, and tempted her with his promise that she should be Queen of Hell”; as for George Burroughs, “it may have been in the very strength of his high and searching intellect that the Tempter found the weakness which betrayed him.”2 4 Certainly, the witchcraft material of “Young Goodman Brown” functions as imaginative substantiation for a parable of the soul. The tale holds in solution much witch-lore and some historical incident, most of which is from Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World.2 5 But this material is not precisely the source of the tale, though it gives the tale substance. “Young Goodman Brown” may be read on at least three levels: as a witch story; as an analysis of a state of mind in which, through the contact of the individual with evil, all virtue seems hypocrisy; and as a theological allegory, the allegorical interpretation being pointed up by the double meaning of the title character’s name and by the name of his wife, Faith, whom he left for one night. Yet the discrimi-

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The allegory is very delicately pointed. Faith is not an allegorical type; she does not represent Goodman Brown’s creed. Her name and his duty to her are enough to give her husband’s simple statement, “Faith kept me back a while,” or his question, “But where is Faith?” sufficient meaning. That Goodman Brown’s guide was his own evil nature is never explicit, but the quide was like Goodman Brown in expression, and even, but for a worldly air, in manner. The guide’s discourse, moreover, was so apt “that his arguments seemed rather to spring up in the bosom of his auditor than to be suggested by himself.” When he left Goodman Brown, “as if he had vanished into the deepening gloom,” it is a sign to us that no longer were a good and an evil nature contending in Goodman Brown; he was, for the time being, governed completely by “the instinct that guides mortal man to evil.” “Young Goodman Brown” has been called morbid. That judgment arises (I think) from not taking the tale on Hawthorne’s terms. Goodman Brown comes from his experience, not disillusioned, but under a terrible illusion. Goodman Brown put himself in peril; of his own will he went into the wood of evil, “and there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveller knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and thick boughs overhead.” The tale may appear morbid to one who assumes that men do not will evil. Hawthorne uses witchcraft as a symbol of the will to evil. And so it is, too, in the twentieth chapter of The Scarlet Letter. Just after Dimmesdale “had yielded himself, with deliberate choice, as he had never done before, to what he knew was deadly

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Despite the nineteenth-century setting of the book, witchcraft is an important element in The House of the Seven Gables. The prophecy of the wizard Matthew Maule was used, Professor Orians shows, in John Neal’s Rachel Dyer (1828) and has a source in actual records.2 6 But in Hawthorne’s romance the fulfilment of the prophecy is the symbol of retribution: “The act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time.” So far Hawthorne’s use of witchcraft serves to unify his “legend prolonging itself from an epoch now grey in the distance, down into our own broad daylight.” Nevertheless, the reader is likely to feel that Hawthorne’s use of witchcraft in The House of the Seven Gables does not always make for unity of impression. One difficulty is that Holgrave, a type who “in his culture and want of culture . . . might fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his native land,” is made the descendant of the legendary Matthew Maule. Now, although that descent may be taken to signify, perhaps, the new importance of the economic class to which the Maules belong, the hereditary connection between the Gothic wizard and a type disciple of the “newness” is hard to realize. Then, too, Holgrave’s experiments in

mesmerism and the interpolated story of Alice Pyncheon and Matthew Maule offer a disappointing explanation for the power of the Maules. Of course, the “explained supernatural” is a part of the Gothic convention2 7 and so characteristic of Gothic fiction in America that Professor Coad finds Mrs. Radcliffe the dominant influence on it before 1835.2 8 But mesmerism and apoplexy as the cause of the sudden deaths of the Pyncheons remind us of the kind of explanation in Brown’s Wieland; and Hawthorne himself suggests, in The Marble Faun, that he thought the “explained supernatural” tedious.2 9 His near-approach to it in The House of the Seven Gables is less subtle than his way, in earlier work, of suggesting a doubt of the literal witchcraft even while asking imaginative assent, and seems less characteristic. The success of any portion of an artist’s work is to a great extent imponderable. But Hawthorne’s success with witchcraft material admits of some definition. He discovers an inherent symbolism in the material itself, and he pays careful attention to historical appropriateness and to the congruity of his treatment of witchcraft in a particular work with the other elements in that work.3 0 In “Young Goodman Brown” and in The Scarlet Letter the imaginative strength of his treatment of witchcraft is fully displayed.

III A considerable body of Gothic literature concerns itself with the transcendence of the limits of mortality. The legend of the Wandering Jew, the compact with the devil for extended existence, and elixir of life had been, by Hawthorne’s time, often used and often combined,3 1 and they are the elements of the Gothic tradition which most influence Hawthorne. He was attracted to these materials because they were capable of carrying much meaning; indeed, Gothic work with serious implications had already been written around them. In Hawthorne’s work the attempt to transcend the limits of mortality is a symbol for intellectual pride, a symbol that has for him, I believe, immediate contemporary reference.3 2 As in his treatments of witchcraft, there is an inherent symbolism in the material itself. And his specialized use of his materials takes him far enough beyond his literary sources so that those sources are never entirely apparent. Hawthorne wrote no story around the Wandering Jew, but that significant and credible figure turns up sometimes in his work. He is a guest of the Man of Fancy in “A Select Party” (1844), and Hawthorne remarks that he “had grown so com-

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sin,” he met the governor’s sister and reputed witch, old Mistress Hibbens; and this encounter, “if it were a real incident, did but show his sympathy and fellowship with wicked mortals, and the world of perverted spirits.” “If it were a real incident”—just as in “Young Goodman Brown,” the doubt of actuality is the sign of symbolic value, and witchcraft becomes the symbol for the will to evil. When Dimmesdale returned from the forest and the interview with Hester in which he had chosen to flee with her, he had put aside the possibility of atonement and confession; like Goodman Brown in his homecoming, “another man had returned out of the forest; a wiser one; with a knowledge of hidden mysteries which the simplicity of the former never could have reached.” “A bitter kind of knowledge that!” Hawthorne exclaims and shows that from his new knowledge came temptations—temptations the minister had never known before—and the ability to lie with fluency and grace. “Am I mad?” the minister asked just before he saw Mistress Hibbens, “or am I given over utterly to the fiend? Did I make a contract with him in the forest, and sign it with my blood? And does he now summon me to its fulfilment by suggesting the performance of every wickedness which his most foul imagination can conceive?”

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mon by mingling in all sorts of society and appearing at the beck of every entertainer that he could hardly be deemed a proper guest in a very exclusive circle.” Yet Hawthorne had made him curator of “A Virtuoso’s Collection” (1842); and the aged Seeker in “The Great Carbuncle” (1837), though not the Wandering Jew, has much in common with him. In his notebooks for 1845 Hawthorne records a plan for a treatment of the Wandering Jew, a plan which would give him a career remarkably like that of Goethe’s Faust and which suggests the career Septimius Felton hopes for when he shall have found the elixir of life: A disquisition—or a discussion between two or more persons—on the manner in which the Wandering Jew has spent his life. One period, perhaps, in wild carnal debauchery; then trying, over and over again, to grasp domestic happiness; then a soldier; then a statesman & c—at last, realizing some truth.3 3

And in “Ethan Brand” (1851) the showman who operates the diorama is, I take it, the Wandering Jew. The showman and his diorama Hawthorne took from his notebook account of a visit to North Adams in 1838, but there the showman is merely “the old Dutchman.”3 4 This transformation, not essential to Hawthorne’s fable, suggests the persistence of the Wandering Jew in his imagination and something of the literary background of his tale. Bliss Perry has shown us how interesting an example of Hawthorne’s literary methods “Ethan Brand” is;3 5 and its combination of the Gothic with the materials of Hawthorne’s own observation makes it important to the present purpose. The person, character, career, and death of Ethan are all in the Gothic tradition; one may find almost every aspect of them paralleled in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Particularly, “Ethan Brand” resembles the last two chapters of the romance, and Hawthorne’s subtitle, “A Chapter from an Abortive Romance,” points up that resemblance; for, if “Ethan Brand” be considered a chapter from a romance, it must surely be the last.3 6 This likeness suggests that Hawthorne was influenced by Maturin; but, because Maturin’s book combines many elements of the Gothic tradition,3 7 it may only indicate Hawthorne’s general indebtedness to Gothic literature. Both Ethan and Melmoth are distinguished by their wild laughter and their unearthly gleaming eyes.3 8 They are alike, too, in essential character: Ethan’s sin was the “sin of an intellect that triumphed over the

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sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims”; Melmoth’s sin, he says, “was the great angelic sin—pride and intellectual glorying. It was the first mortal sin—a boundless aspiration after forbidden knowledge.”3 9 The careers of the two are said to have had the same sort of inception: the legend was that Ethan invoked a fiend to aid him in his search for the Unpardonable Sin; “it has been reported of me,” says Melmoth, “that I obtained from the enemy of souls a range of existence beyond the period allotted to mortality” and other preternatural powers.4 0 Yet neither has the direct aid of the devil; Ethan’s remark, “I have left him behind me,” is true of both. Both are wanderers, driven by their own unrest to and fro upon the earth, though Ethan’s time of wandering is shorter. Both, having worn out their fate, come home to die. Ethan casts himself into the lime kiln, and in their sleep the lime burners hear a fearful peal of laughter; Melmoth casts himself (or is cast, the matter is left unclear) over a cliff, and there are horrible sounds in his room and then at the cliff. The night before his death the Wanderer dreams of a sea of flame into which he must go— Ethan’s lime kiln seems to be that sea in little. But the most important parallel is that both suffer in the same kind of awful isolation. Maturin’s best critic says: “The character of Melmoth the Wanderer becomes . . . distinct from all common men . . . what causes him his keenest sufferings is not that he is shut out of paradise but that he is shut out of the community of the good among human beings.”4 1 Yet nothing in Maturin’s book approaches the power of Hawthorne’s irony. Ethan’s success in his quest is his punishment for it: “My task,” he says, “is done and well done.” Neither of the two suggestions for “Ethan Brand” which Hawthorne wrote in his notebook in 1844 does more than outline the bare allegory of the tale.4 2 When he wrote it more than four years later, he used material from his notebook account of a visit to North Adams in 1838. Perhaps the story came about in this manner: No way of embodying the allegorical outline of 1844 occurred to Hawthorne until 1848, when a reminiscence of Melmoth the Wanderer suggested a Gothic treatment, which he found a way to substantiate and to localize with material from the account of his North Adams visit. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) may be considered a companion piece to “Ethan Brand.” Both concern the efforts of an individual to transcend the limits of mortality, and both are

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From “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (1837) to the unfinished romances of the last years of his life, Hawthorne frequently used in his fiction, or referred to, the search for the elixir of life and kindred attempts to transcend the limits of mortality. Randall Stewart has pointed out that Hawthorne’s interest in the subject may have come from his early reading of William Godwin’s St. Leon, and one can see that the moral isolation of the hero is like that of several of Hawthorne’s characters.4 4 Yet when Hawthorne writes of practitioners of the esoteric arts in old New England, he is in historical keeping. Lowell, in “New England Two Centuries Ago,” notes the presence of students of the esoteric in Colonial New England and, implying that Hawthorne could not have known historical instances, remarks: “And yet how perfectly did his genius divine that ideal element in our early New England life, conceiving what must have been without asking proof of what actually was!”4 5 Hawthorne could not have seen the work Lowell was reviewing, but the appearance of students of the esoteric in his work is not all based on divination. In “Sir William Pepperell” (1833), he refers to an alchemist and

seeker for the elixir of life as a historical person of Colonial times; in his notebooks for 1838 he speaks of a Salem house where an alchemist had resided and of “other alchemists of old in this town,—one who kept his fire burning seven weeks, and then lost the elixir by letting it go out”; and again in “Main Street” (1849) he speaks of the house of an alchemist.4 6 Of all the tales, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” in its apparent simplicity, reveals most clearly Hawthorne’s attitude toward his Gothic materials. Those materials are entirely conventional; the attitude toward them is peculiarly fresh. In a single paragraph, just after the doctor has welcomed his friends to his study, Hawthorne crowds in and heaps together a welter of Gothic properties and devices—this one room, indeed, has enough Gothic paraphernalia for all the romances Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland ever read. There is, in this catalogue of the Gothic romancer’s stock in trade, a delicate satire on the very convention Hawthorne is using. Yet “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” is not primarily satire; it has an intent as a parable. The touch of satire is a sign to the reader to accept the tale as allegory—a way of restraining one kind of interest in the action so that another kind may emerge. We have noted in the treatment of the portrait in The House of the Seven Gables somewhat the same kind of whimsical depreciation of Gothic materials. In “The Birthmark” (1843), Hawthorne depends upon his reader’s familiarity with the materials he is using to insure their acceptance on the lowest level of approach. But the Gothic figures, by their very familiarity, are available for symbolism; and Hawthorne, having the existing type, simply makes it a symbol. Aylmer’s assistant, the earthly Aminadab, “seemed to represent man’s physical nature.” Aylmer himself represents the intellectual and spiritual and (as the theme develops) the intellectual gone wrong, or at least defeated in an attempt to break through the limits of mortal power. Aylmer will not accept the fact that imperfection is a necessary part of mortality, that perfection and existence are incompatible. Too wise to attempt the unnatural extension of life—though that seems to be within his power—he is not wise enough to know the limits to which human aspiration ought to keep. For Georgiana, Hawthorne has taken the Gothic lady of remarkable and perfect beauty and added a tiny hand, the color of blood, to her cheek—added the symbol of the imperfection in everything mortal.

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treatments of the sin of pride. “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” however, is concerned primarily with the effect of the sin on persons innocent in intent, not with the effect of the sin on the sinner himself; Beatrice is united in “fearful sympathy” with Giovanni, isolated from all the world beside. Though the tale is connected in theme with other tales in which Gothic symbols represent the sin of pride, in treatment it stands apart. The Gothic atmosphere is intense, unrelieved, and used for an effect different from any in Hawthorne’s other work. The suggestion for a tale that Hawthorne found in Sir Thomas Browne and recorded in his notebook4 3 is developed in that half-real, halfimaginary Italy that has been, since Elizabethan times, traditional in English fiction for romantic terror. There, experienced readers will easily believe, such a toxicologist as Dr. Rappaccini might have lived. And Hawthorne is careful to recall the associations which his readers will have with the locale by references to Dante’s Inferno, the University of Padua, Benvenuto Cellini, and the Borgias. The persons in the tale are less allegorical types than the persons in his tales with similar themes, and the symbolism less explicit. He develops the hectic and unwholesome atmosphere of terror and wonder to enforce the truth and the horror “of the fatality that attends . . . perverted wisdom.”

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Hawthorne’s most interesting use of the esoteric arts is in the development of the character of Roger Chillingworth. Nothing in the action of The Scarlet Letter requires that he be an adept, and the frequent suggestion that he is has value primarily as psychological symbolism. Chillingworth speaks of his “old studies in alchemy” and of teaching the Indians “some lessons . . . as old as Paracelsus”; his medical knowledge seems to be a by-product of his unholy researches; it is reported that he has been an associate of Dr. Simon Forman and that his dark knowledge has been extended by instruction by Indian priests; the popular opinion is that he is “Satan himself, or Satan’s emissary.”4 7 In Chillingworth—as in Ethan Brand, Dr. Rappaccini, and Aylmer—the Gothic furnished Hawthorne a means of representing the sin of pride. But Chillingworth’s skill in unholy arts means something more, for the suggestion that Chillingworth is the servant of Satan prepares us for his greatly enlarged significance in the final scene. The people of Boston (who, like the chorus in Greek tragedy, comment on the action without full knowledge of it) see Chillingworth as a diabolical agent pitted against Dimmesdale, but look “with an unshaken hope, to see the minister come forth out of the conflict transfigured with the glory he would unquestionably win.” Their hope is ironically fulfilled; and in the moment of Dimmesdale’s victory, Chillingworth has a representative character beyond his significance as a vengeful individual. If this were not so, his words to Dimmesdale in this final scene would be mere fustian, but I think few readers take them so. He has “thrust himself, through the crowd,—or, perhaps, so dark, disturbed, and evil, was his look, he rose out of some nether region.” And he says: “Hadst thou sought the whole earth over, there was no place so secret,—no high place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me,—save on this very scaffold!” Hawthorne’s last attempts at romance—Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret, The Dolliver Romance, and Septimius Felton—throw into relief his successful practice in the Gothic, for in them the Gothic materials get out of hand, assume too great an importance in and for themselves, and get in the way, therefore, of the meaning. And this is not just another way of saying that the romances are unfinished; Hawthorne’s own term for this work— “abortive”4 8 —is precise, for it had never come to full birth. The intention itself cannot be understood, for the relationship between symbol and

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theme is never fully established. Of course, it is true that Hawthorne sometimes had been embarrassed by the plot material of his long fictions, but his meaning had never been frustrated. He seems to have been aware of the trouble without being able to correct it; for example, in Septimius Felton we can observe him endeavoring to balance and offset the Gothic interest of Septimius’ quest for the elixir by long reflective expositions, often in his best manner. But the delicate balance of interest that distinguishes Hawthorne’s best work is gone. Taken all together, the tales and romances which have characters who refuse to recognize the conditions in which humanity subsists are an important part of Hawthorne’s work and of his thought. A recent critic complains that Hawthorne did not know the meaning of his own symbols.4 9 But he was at least in positive opposition to the spiritual attitudes of his own time; he was, indeed, preoccupied throughout most of his career with allegorical warning against the sin of pride. That is why Gothic symbols for the effort to be more than mortal, more than man, recur so often in his work. Hawthorne’s use of the Gothic extends much beyond the three patterns here discussed; there is, for example, evidence of Radcliffean influence in The Marble Faun and in Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret, the two romances with settings in which Mrs. Radcliffe’s materials might be appropriate. But because the three patterns considered in this paper recur most often, they are the best means of illustrating his intent in the use of the Gothic. The illustrations must substantiate, as best they may, the paper’s initial generalizations; for a summary would inevitably reduce Hawthorne’s practice to a formula, and no formula will represent the flexibility and the convolution of his use of Gothic materials or his way of making them the means to individual and often significant ends. “There are some works in literature,” Hawthorne once wrote, “that bear an analogy to his [Bernini’s] works in sculpture, where great power is lavished a little outside of nature, and therefore proves to be only a fashion, and not permanently adapted to the tastes of mankind.”5 0 The impulse of Gothic literature has evidently often been abnormal, and it is one of the distinctions of Hawthorne’s work in the Gothic that in it he has kept to a humane purpose. His control of the Gothic is a double control—a control of his materials and a control of his reader’s reaction. The reader’s response to a

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Notes 1. I am indebted to Professor Austin Warren for his generous help and for a copy of his unpublished “Hawthorne and the Craft of Fiction,” a paper read at the 1941 meeting of the Modern Language Association. 2. Works (“Riverside” ed.), III, 13, 386; II, 44; IX, 336; XI, 330. 3. Hawthorne read Mrs. Radcliffe, Godwin, Scott, and John Neal in his youth (see Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Wife [Boston, 1885], I, 105 and 145; G. P. Lathrop, A Study of Hawthorne [Boston, 1876], p. 108; Works, II, 426). It is likely that his first reading of Charles Brockden Brown and Walpole was also early (see Lathrop, op. cit., p. 343; Works, II, 198 and 428, and VIII, 528). 4. Development of the English Novel (New York, 1926), pp. 163-64. 5. See Oral Coad, “The Gothic Element in American Literature before 1835,” JEGP, XXIV (January, 1925), 72-93. 6. See Napier Wilt, “Poe’s Attitude toward His Tales,” Modern Philology, XXV (August, 1927), 101-5. 7. See my “Hawthorne and Literary Nationalism,” American Literature, XII (January, 1941), 447-53. 8. North American Review, XXIII (July, 1826), 152-53. 9. See Works, III, 312; V, 544-45; IX, 244-45. 10. Works, IX, 88-89. 11. Abby Leach, “Free Will in Greek Literature,” in Lane Cooper (ed.), The Greek Genius and Its Influence (New Haven, 1928), p. 137. 12. See, e.g., Works, III, 50, 116-17, 236, 329-31. 13. North American Review, XII (April, 1821), 480. 14. Julian Hawthorne, op. cit., I, 124; G. H. Orians, “New England Witchcraft in Fiction,” American Literature, II (March, 1930), 54-71. 15. Works, XII, 282. 16. Ibid., III, 575.

24. See Works, III, 467-71. 25. Austin Warren cites the most important passages in a note on the tale (Nathaniel Hawthorne [New York, 1934], pp. 361-62). 26. Op. cit., p. 67. 27. See Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest (London, n.d.), pp. 135-40. 28. Op. cit., pp. 91-92. 29. Works, VI, 514. 30. Two witches, Mother Rigby, of “Feathertop” (1852), and Septimius Felton’s Aunt Keziah, Hawthorne makes humorous, not strictly Gothic, figures. Yet in his treatment of them he in no way violates his general principles. 31. Eino Railo’s discussion of these materials, though disappointing, is perhaps the best (see op. cit., pp. 191217). 32. See my “Hawthorne’s Inferno,” College English, I (May, 1940), 658-70. 33. American Notebooks, ed. Stewart, p. 117; cf. Works, XI, 404-10. 34. American Notebooks, pp. 58-59. 35. “Hawthorne at North Adams,” The Amateur Spirit (Boston, 1904). 36. The reader will remember that Melmoth is a series of six tales, connected only by the appearance of Melmoth in each, set in a frame consisting of five chapters of introductory narrative and two concluding chapters. Melmoth, in return for his preternatural powers, must endure an existence prolonged by one hundred and fifty years unless he can persuade someone to take his place. But no one will lose his soul to gain the whole world (which is Maturin’s theme), and the Wanderer cannot leave the existence he comes to hate until his time comes. Only in the last two chapters does the nature of his curious destiny become clear. 37. See Niilo Idman, Charles Robert Maturin (London, 1923), pp. 197 ff.; Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror (New York, n.d.), pp. 84-85. H. Arlin Turner has noted the likeness of Ethan’s laugh to Melmoth’s (see his “Hawthorne’s Literary Borrowings,” PMLA, LI [June, 1936], 556). 38. See Melmoth the Wanderer (3 vols.; London, 1892), I, 44 and 50.

17. See Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle (London, 1927), pp. 269-72.

39. Ibid., III, 358.

18. See Elizabeth Chandler’s study of Hawthorne’s sources in Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, VII, No. 4 (July, 1926), 8-9.

41. Idman, op. cit., p. 265.

19. Works (“Virginia” ed.), XI, 112.

43. Works, IX, 209.

20. Works, VIII, 271.

44. American Notebooks, pp. lxxxii-lxxxviii; and see St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (4 vols.; London, 1816), II, 110-11.

40. Ibid., pp. 326-27.

42. American Notebooks, ed. Stewart, p. 106.

21. Randall Stewart, “Two Uncollected Reviews by Hawthorne,” New England Quarterly, IX (September, 1936), 505.

45. See Writings (“Riverside” ed.), II, 46-57.

22. Works, XI, 326.

46. Works, XII, 239; IX, 206; III, 456.

23. Stewart, op. cit., p. 507.

47. Works, V, 94-95, 146-47, 155-56.

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tale or romance by Hawthorne is, on its final level, intellectual, and toward such response he carefully directs his work.

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48. Works, VII, 16; VIII, 10. 49. Yvor Winters, Maule’s Curse (Norfolk, Conn., 1938), p. 20. 50. Works, X, 143.

JANE LUNDBLAD (ESSAY DATE 1946) SOURCE: Lundblad, Jane. “Hawthorne and the Gothic Romance.” In Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Tradition of The Gothic Romance. 1946. Reprint edition, pp. 24-94. New York: Haskell House, 1964. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1946, Lundblad surveys the impact of Gothic works on Hawthorne’s writing.

The student of Hawthorne’s life and writings is usually regarded as a privileged person because of the fact that Hawthorne’s posthumous notebooks, manuscripts, and letters have been so scrupulously kept and published. It is true that his widow, out of misguided zeal and exaggerated modesty, made a great many deletions and alterations in his manuscripts before she authorized their publication, in order to weed out items and remarks concerning the family or herself that she deemed improper. But on the whole, all this extensive material remains intact. Day by day, the reader may follow Hawthorne’s life, step by step the composition of his romances and stories. As has already been remarked, Hawthorne applied the method of the later naturalistic school: he made notes of every spectacle, every acquaintance, idea or memory that might be turned to literary use. But there are nearly no notes on his reading. The scholar who is looking for literary influences on Hawthorne must therefore avail himself largely of the method of indirect induction. During my work on this essay, I have had direct access only to printed editions of Hawthorne’s note-books and his unfinished manuscripts. The letters have not been available to me otherwise than as quotations in the works of various other authors. It has been pointed out that the chief Gothic novels written in English may be presumed to have been well known in America during the first decades of the nineteenth century, while the works of the German writers were only partly translated or reviewed in the periodical press. Hawthorne’s own disposition, and the environment in which he grew up, made him receptive, from the beginning, towards tales concerning the supernatural world. In the above-mentioned review of Morris’s biography,1 we find an excellent characterization of Hawthorne’s attitude: “. . . he was no mystic, and was, if anything,

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repelled by mysticism. But he was absorbed in something which is often confused with mysticism—in mystery and mysteriousness. And this fact is really the clue to his character, if we can arrive at an understanding of it.” In the introduction to his edition of Hawthorne’s first diary, Samuel T. Pickard mentions a letter from one of the young Nathaniel’s friends, W. Symmes, who wrote in later years:2 “One of your correspondents . . . describes the mother of Nathaniel as being somewhat superstitious, and from what I recollect of her, he is correct. Not a gross and ignorant, but a polished and pious superstition. Perhaps this proclivity in the parent may account for his filling his journal with so many of the local stories of the supernatural.” The stories referred to treat of Pulpit Rock Hill, from which the devil was said to have preached to the Indians, thereafter to make them sink down into a swamp, so that great masses of skeletons were still lying under the surface of the field—or of an enchanted appletree, whose fruit was guarded by spirits, so that the reapers were in constant danger of being hit by stones thrown from nowhere—or of a bewitched house, the windows of which perpetually sprang open, etc., etc. Certainly Nathaniel also heard in childhood many of the stories from the early immigration days when witchery was rampant among the pious settlers—stories which have left so many traces in his later works. Like any other American schoolboy, Hawthorne was, from his early youth, acquainted with the English classics. Spenser and Bunyan are generally indicated as the most important sources of inspiration derived from his early reading. Randall Stewart3 also mentions Shakespeare and Milton. A. Turner, in his treatise on Hawthorne’s literary borrowings,4 points to the important influence wrought on Hawthorne by the historical writings of Increase and Cotton Mather on the legends and customs of 17th century Massachusetts, especially stressing “the Mather witch tradition” with its accounts of witch meetings, ridings through the air on broomsticks, etc., which we shall meet in some of Hawthorne’s stories, e. g. “Young Goodman Brown.”5 As to the literature of terror and wonder, we have direct evidence of his having read some of the best-known novels in a couple of letters written to his sister Elizabeth. On September 28th, 1819, he writes:6 “I have read Waverley, Roderick Random and the first volume of The Arabian Nights.” And on October 31st, 1820:7 “I have read Hogg’s Tales, Caleb Williams, St. Leon and Mandeville. I admire Godwin’s Novels, and intend to read them all.” The deep impression which Mathurin’s

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That the contemporaries of Hawthorne, or at least his European critics, were fully aware of the fact that a considerable part of his literary background was of the traditional Gothic kind, is clearly shown by an article in the Revue des deux mondes, of 1852,9 by E. D. Forgues. The writer is speaking of the rôle assigned to the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables: “Ce portrait se trouve mêlé à l’action, où il joue le rôle réservé aux fantômes avant l’invention de la peinture à l’huile: c’est lui qui cache le document perdu; c’est lui qui suspend et dénoue la chaîne des revenants, comme Walter Scott, Lewis, Mme Radcliffe et Washington Irving, sans parler de Maturin, de Hoffmann et de bien d’autres encore, en ont tous écrit.” Hoffmann is here mentioned in the same breath as the English and American authors of novels of terror and wonder. We have already discussed the question of Hawthorne’s acquaintance with the German Romanticists, and only a few facts shall here be added. Contemporary criticism sometimes accused Hawthorne of being influenced by the Germans. As an example may be cited an article in the National Magazine of 18531 0 where it is cursorily remarked: “Saving certain shadowy resemblances to some of the Germans . . .” and above all Poe’s criticism of Mosses from an Old Manse, where he deliberately accuses Hawthorne of having imitated Tieck. The critical discussion of this problem has attracted many participants (Cp. p. 13, note 3) but may be regarded as settled. H. M. Belden1 1 has succeeded in proving beyond doubt that Hawthorne may have read in translation some of Tieck’s betterknown tales before 1833, but that the imitation with which Poe tried to charge him is exceedingly unlikely. Another scholar who has thoroughly examined the possibilities of European influence

on Hawthorne’s writings, A. Schönbach, arrives at a similar result:1 2 “Am ehesten räume ich noch Balzac etwas Einfluss auf Hawthorne ein, ferner mag sein Liebling Walter Scott ihn ermutigt haben, die Geschichten aus der Colonialzeit zu schreiben, später hat er noch von Dickens ein weniges gewonnen. Aber, wie Poe glaubte, und seither mit Ausdauer nachgeschrieben wird, dass Tieck Hawthornes Muster gewesen und von ihm nachgebildet worden sei, das ist mir schon aus diesen inneren Gründen höchst unwahrscheinlich. In Tiecks Erzählungen sind Dargestelltes und Darsteller von derselben Stimmung erfüllt: wird das Reale an einer Stelle verlassen, dann aber sofort auch an allen und im Ganzen.” To Hawthorne’s attitude towards the unreal and supernatural we will revert later on. First, we shall for a moment occupy ourselves with the possibilities of an influence from the earlier American versions of the Gothic novel. The most prominent representative of the Gothic school in America was, as has already been said, Charles Brockden Brown. It is to be assumed that Hawthorne was well versed in his tales. An American scholar, Professor Quinn, who has devoted a study1 3 to the rôle of the supernatural in the literature of his country, is of opinion that no impressions of real import derive from this source: “Brown, however, has little direct influence upon Poe or Hawthorne.” We have greater reason to assume an influence from Washington Irving. From the point of view of literary form, it is likely that Hawthorne acquired something of his early predilection for the short story by reading the works of his countryman. There are also stylistic similarities. Woodberry remarks:1 4 “From the former (the eighteenth century) he had that pellucid style, whose American flow began with Washington Irving and ceased with his own pen.” But neither in respect of actual plots, nor when it comes to the general trend of ideas, need we believe Hawthorne to be indebted to the author of the Tales of a Traveller—so perfect in their kind, where common sense pervades the atmosphere far too thoroughly to permit any kind of transcendental extravagance. There is a close affinity between Hawthorne’s taste for magic and supernatural stories and his interest for Swedenborg, for spiritualism and mesmerism, which we find expressed in different ways in his writings and is surreptitiously mentioned in his notebooks. During his stay in England, in 1857, he discusses spiritualism thoroughly with some friends, and sums up his own position in a passage in his note-book, which gives a fair

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Melmoth had made on him is apparent in the evident traces that its reading has left on his first novel, Fanshawe, as also in the fact that the motto of one of its chapters is directly drawn from Melmoth. An item in his English note-book of 1857 shows that Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto was once familiar to him. Hawthorne is wandering about in a picture-gallery, and remarks:8 “Of all the older pictures, the only one that I took pleasure in looking at, was a portrait of Lord Deputy Falkland, by Vansomer, in James I’s time—a very stately, full-length figure in white, looking out of the picture as if he saw you. The catalogue says that this portrait suggested an incident in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto; but I do not remember it.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR HERMAN MELVILLE REVIEWS MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE

“The Christmas Banquet,” and “The Bosom Serpent,” would be fine subjects for a curious and elaborate analysis, touching the conjectural parts of the mind that produced them. For [in] spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black. But this darkness but gives more effect to the ever-moving dawn, that forever advances through it, and circumnavigates his world. Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades; or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom,—this, I cannot altogether tell. Certain it is, however, that this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. . . . [Perhaps] no writer has ever wielded this terrific thought with greater terror than this same harmless Hawthorne. Still more: this black conceit pervades him through and through. You may be witched by his sunlight,—transported by the bright gildings in the skies he builds over you; but there is the blackness of darkness beyond; and even his bright gildings but fringe and play upon the edges of thunderclouds.

The scenery and the whole machinery of Gothic Romance became, just like Puritanism or Spiritualism, one of Hawthorne’s media of artistic expression. He called all his whole-length stories romances,1 6 and has given reason for this in the introduction to The House of the Seven Gables: “When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former—while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated, and especially to mingle the Marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavour, than as any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public. He can hardly be said, however, to commit a literary crime, even if he disregard this caution.”

SOURCE: Melville, Herman. “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” Literary World 7, no. 7 (17-24 August 1850): 53-86.

idea of his view on these matters:1 5 “Do I believe in these wonders? Of course; for how is it possible to doubt either the solemn word or the sober observation of a learned and sensible man like Dr———? But again do I really believe it? Of course not; for I cannot consent to have heaven and earth, this world and the next, beaten up

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together like the white and yolk of an egg, merely out of respect to Dr———’s sanity or integrity. I would not believe my own sight, nor touch of the spiritual hands; and it would take deeper and higher strains than those of Mr. Harris to convince me. I think I might yield to higher poetry or heavenlier wisdom than mortals in the flesh have ever sung or uttered. Meanwhile, this matter of spiritualism is surely the strangest that ever was heard of, and yet I feel unaccountably little interest in it—a sluggish disgust, and repugnance to meddle with it—insomuch that I hardly feel as if it were worth this page or two in my not very eventful journal.” But regarded as literary themes, these things possessed for him an interest as great as all other problems concerning the human soul.

Hawthorne’s literary ideal has been in a certain measure foreshadowed by Leigh Hunt who once wrote:1 7 “A ghost story, to be a good one, should unite as much as possible objects such as they are in life with a preternatural spirit. And to be a perfect one—at least to add to the other utility of excitement a moral utility.” Moral utility is, however, not the accurate term for the aim of

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own hearts delicately fried, with brain-sauce, as a tit-bit for their beloved public.” Hawthorne is no psychologist in the proper meaning of the word. Hardly any of his figures possesses a life of its own. They are all embodiments of ideas that have been made to borrow features from his Puritan forefathers, from honest citizens of Salem or Concord, from the intellectuals of Brook Farm or from artists and tourists he had chanced to meet in his work or during his travels. Not one of them finds his own path, being driven by that inner necessity which may compel a figure of fiction to develop in a way contrary to the original intentions of its creator. They all move more or less like puppets in skilfully constructed tracks which go to prove the author’s ethical theories. Of this art, Hawthorne attained an ever-growing mastery.

Notes 1. The Times Literary Supplement, May 3rd, 1928. 2. Hawthorne’s First Diary. With an Account of its Discovery and Loss, by Samuel T. Pickard. London 1897. 3. Randall Stewart, The American Note-books. New York 1932.—The author classifies Hawthorne’s villains into three types, of which one, the type of Chillingworth, “old men stooped and gray,” traces his ancestry to Spenser’s Archimago (Faerie Queene I. 1.29. 1-7). He also refers to Milton’s Paradise Lost IV, 127-130. 4. A. Turner, Hawthorne’s Literary Borrowings. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1936. 5. Cp. pages 35, 36, 37 of the present essay. 6. Cited from J. Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife. 7. Cited from Randall Stewart, Hawthorne’s American Note-books. 8. Hawthorne’s English Note-book, July 30th, 1857. 9. E. D. Forgues, Nathaniel Hawthorne. La revue des deux mondes. 15.4. 1852. 10. Cited from Bertha Faust, Hawthorne’s Contemporaneous Reputation. Philadelphia, 1939. 11. Anglia, 1900. 12. Anglia, 1886. 13. Quinn, Some Phases of the Supernatural in American Literature. Modern Language Association of America, XVIII, Baltimore, 1910. 14. Woodberry, Hawthorne, How to Know Him. 15. Hawthorne’s English Note-book. December 20th, 1857. 16. Cp. p. 14. 17. Cited from Cross, The Development of the English Novel. London, 1905. 18. The title of a story included in Mosses from an Old Manse.

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Hawthorne’s writings. Utility of any kind was hardly sought by this “Artist of the Beautiful.”1 8 And moralist is certainly not the right word to denote this indefatigable seeker, incessantly hunting for the innermost motives of human actions. Henry James, whose Life of Hawthorne1 9 is of a masterly composition but stamped by too much cool insensibility wholly to convince the reader, has, however, in this respect found a good formula: “He was not a moralist,” says James, “and he was not simply a poet. The moralists are weightier, denser, richer in a sense; the poets are more purely inconclusive and irresponsible. He combined in a singular degree the spontaneity of the imagination with a haunting care for moral problems.” It is difficult to find a label to fix on to this methodical and intense, not to say frantic plumber of the depths of sin in the human soul. Childhood remembrances, religious and philosophical conceptions, literary reminiscences, and the creations of his own fantasy are to him only artistic means for throwing a penetrating light over the truths of the human soul, which he believes to have found out during years of neverceasing, devoted study. His work is of a deeply individual stamp. We cite P. Kaufman who writes:2 0 “. . . into traditional form he infused profound brooding and achieved the distinction of making romance profoundly subjective. Hitherto this genre both in prose and verse had been, in the psychological phrase of our day, of extrovert nature. He created an original introvert form true to his own character, thus introducing the recent romantic preoccupation with individual feeling and imagination into the traditional type.” But at the same time, Hawthorne always remained the “detached observer” of which Erskine2 1 speaks in his biographical study. His oversensibility and his scepticism alike prevented him from giving way to any kind of self-reflection. He consciously sought to avoid any form of it, as he expressly declares in the introduction to Mosses from an Old Manse: “Has the reader gone wandering hand in hand with me, through the inner passages of my being, and have we groped together into all its chambers and examined their treasures or their rubbish? Not so. We have been standing in the greensward, but just within the cavern’s mouth, where the common sunshine is free to penetrate and where every footstep is therefore free to come. I have appealed to no sentiment or sensibilities, save such as are diffused among us all. So far as I am a man of really individual attributes, I veil my face; nor am I nor have I ever been, one of those supremely hospitable people, who serve up their

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19. Henry James Jr, Hawthorne. London, 1902. 20. Paul Kaufman, The Romantic Movement. In the Reinterpretation of American Literature. 21. In the Cambridge History of American Literature.

TITLE COMMENTARY The Marble Faun MARJORIE ELDER (ESSAY DATE 1972) SOURCE: Elder, Marjorie. “Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun: A Gothic Structure.” Costerus, no. 1 (1972): 81-8. In the following essay, Elder studies Hawthorne’s Gothic narrative structure in The Marble Faun.

Hawthorne has frequently been referred to as, to some extent and in some ways, a “Gothic” novelist. Whether mentioned in general revaluation of the Gothic,1 looked at within the tradition of the Gothic Romance for his use of devices like castles, ghosts, crime and blood, or works of art with signs of life,2 or cited for his appreciation of Gothic architecture,3 Hawthorne is variously labeled “Gothic.” It is the purpose of this study to interrelate Hawthorne’s use of what may be called Gothic structure in a work of art with his use of specific Gothic devices and techniques in The Marble Faun. It is, in part, the uniqueness in the Hawthorne canon of his last finished romance that prompts the critic to try to account for the different “art of style of narrative”4 characterizing this work. One of the most obvious differences is in the extent and kind of mystery and its effect on the reader. No other Hawthorne work has a “Postscript” to deal with “the mysteries of the story.”5 Since mystery characterizes the Gothic novel, and reader involvement within a particular atmosphere is of central significance in both Gothic and romantic writings, it may be asked whether it is the Gothic element that accounts in some ways for the uniqueness of this work. In his French and Italian Notebooks, where he entered the idea for and extensive details used in The Marble Faun, Hawthorne admires a Gothic structure for its delightful intricacies comprehended into one idea: “that solemn whole, mightily combined out of all these minute particulars.”6 Such a view is quite consistent with his aesthetics as expressed in earlier statements and works.7 But

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a new emphasis may well be suggested when he writes: “the multitudinous richness . . . the thousand forms of Gothic fancy . . . A majesty and a minuteness, neither interfering with the other; each assisting the other; this is what I love in Gothic architecture.”8 This implies (1) an increased majesty and (2) a more extensive minuteness which could be artistically combined to produce a Gothic structure of “multitudinous richness” surpassing any of Hawthorne’s other work. The majesty of The Marble Faun is evident first in Hawthorne’s idea. Hawthorne himself felt that “a high truth” could “add an artistic glory” to a work though “never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.”9 While for Hawthorne any work of art was a reflection by the imagination of the artist acting upon life to produce an image of “the truth of the human heart,”1 0 his usual method in both stories and romances is to speak what might be called a side of the truth to reflect the whole; whereas in The Marble Faun, he begins with the whole truth, noting a symbol for the scope of his thought in the first paragraph of his work: “the Human Soul, with its choice of Innocence or Evil close at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom, but assaulted by a snake” (5). Or as he phrases his thought midway in the book: “Every human life, if it ascends to truth or delves down to reality, must undergo a similar change” (262). Hawthorne undertakes, then, to delineate “the mystery of human life,” “as Gothic structures do.”1 1 One can ask of The Marble Faun the large questions of life, though for answers he may well get “mysteries.” As Hawthorne shapes his idea in The Marble Faun, he introduces symbolically some of the mysteries. Miriam, with her “ambiguity” (Hawthorne’s word in the chapter, “Subterranean Reminiscences,” 20), is representative of a human life with which most readers can identify. What human life has not its own past of guilt or sorrow, however deeply buried within? Hawthorne emphasizes the mystery of Miriam, centering it in her relation to the spectre of the catacombs, who comes out of “that immenser mystery which envelopes our little life” (26-27). She is shadowed by that “mysterious, dusky, death-scented apparition” (36) through some “sadly mysterious fascination” (93). Where does the guilt, the sorrow, come from? Why is it related to us as it is? Why are we tormented and fascinated, shadowed, perhaps destroyed? The reader may fill in Miriam’s ambiguous past with Gothic details brought to mind by the suggestions in the work: perhaps incestuous

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While the central mystery in The Marble Faun lies in the source and nature of evil, a related mystery is symbolically pictured through another question left mysterious: Where was Hilda when the light went out? Literally, the saintly Hilda is imagined pursued by all the corruptions of Rome, but to Kenyon she is hope and truth personified. Hawthorne’s “Postscript” leaves the reader with the question: What happens to hope and truth in times of great evil? Without attempting to answer that unanswerable question, Hawthorne pictured them as somewhere in the midst of all the corruption and believed they could be found again. This is the transcendent majesty of hope, the hope of redemption, that (in the last words of the romance) sees “sunlight on the mountain-tops” (462).

mystery of innocence, guilt, and oppressive sorrow indescribable, at first reflects Miriam and, later in the story, Hilda herself. Kenyon models the bust of Donatello and the Cleopatra that Miriam resembles. Often the Gothic novel used works of art in more or less magical ways as they “came to life,” and modern critics may read Gothic actions as revealing an inner grotesqueness. But in The Marble Faun, Hawthorne chose to use works of art as better than magical devices by having his artists reveal the inner selves through their created art works.

Not only does Hawthorne’s idea reach into the unfathomable darkness and toward the infinite heavens, but his development to show every human life has the majesty of four interrelated parallel plots. Each of his four major characters moves through human life toward truth or reality. Donatello finds a soul in the depths and struggles with it toward the light of heaven. Miriam in her relation to Donatello exemplifies a second search. Hilda comes down from her high and isolated tower to know reality through Miriam’s crime. Kenyon symbolically seeks truth in seeking Hilda.

Since a picture kindles the imagination more than the reality would, the keynote of The Marble Faun places the reader in a doubly-removed position which will involve his imagination to a greater degree than would otherwise be possible. If the atmosphere of any good romance or Gothic novel is unique to itself, expecting the reader to adopt a somewhat different set of values, it may at least be said that here Hawthorne not only chooses his usual romantic atmosphere, his “poetic or fairy precinct” (3) but gives the reader more room yet for imagination in reading the mystery. In one instance he indicates that the reader should not depend too heavily on suspense (28), an important factor in Gothic stories of flight and pursuit, but more than once he talks of the importance of the imagination of the reader. He says, “A picture, however admirable the painter’s art, and wonderful his power, requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due proportion with the miracle which has been wrought . . . There is always the necessity of helping out the painter’s art with your own resources of sensibility and imagination” (335).

The Marble Faun has a majesty not only in idea but also in the keynote of the work: resemblance: the resemblance of an actual young Italian to a marble statue, The Faun of Praxiteles. Hawthorne points this up both within the work (22) and by the double title, The Marble Faun: or, The Romance of Monte Beni. This is the sublimity of a double removal of the artist from his work with a centering at the heart of the creative: resemblance. Hawthorne creates artists who create, and those artists picture the inner selves. Miriam’s inner torments, her haunted mind with its grotesqueness and sadness, her thoughts of bloodshed—she recognizes in her sketches as “ugly phantoms that stole out of my mind” (45). Hilda’s “Beatrice,” a copy of Guido’s, which she let sink into her heart, “makes us shiver as at a spectre,” with its “mysterious force” (64-65). Beatrice Cenci, whose look is a

Hawthorne may be termed Gothic in that he builds on terror and horror, but the building is from the inside out and moves from physical terror to psychological horror. Between Miriam and the model the feeling has at some time in the ambiguous past developed into horror; Miriam’s heart trembles with horror and the model finds “an equal horrour” in his own heart as her presence makes a “tremour and horrour” seize her persecutor until he shakes and turns“ashy pale” (95). But Donatello, though capable of terror, is psychologically and spiritually incapable of horror in his early state. When he first sees Miriam’s inner self reflected in her self-portrait, her dark mood produces terror for him. But through Miriam’s influence and his active response he comes to know horror. First, he witnesses “a spectacle that had its own kind of horrour,” when Miriam,

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love? perhaps a bloody crime? Perhaps something even more horrible than the imagination can suggest. The mystery of the spectre’s demonic relation to Miriam is the “mystery of human life” with all its horror. Hawthorne’s “Postscript” shows that he knew that readers who asked questions about Miriam’s past asked questions whose answers are mystery: “the mystery of evil.”

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fancying herself unseen, “began to gesticulate extravagantly, gnashing her teeth, flinging her arms wildly abroad, stamping with her foot” (157). Then, on the edge of the precipice with Miriam, he seems “to feel that perilous fascination which haunts the brow of precipices, tempting the unwary one to fling himself over, for the very horrour of the thing” (169-70). But the understanding of horror comes with his own personal crime; with “the dead thump” of the murdered model upon the stones beneath the precipice comes to him “an unutterable horrour” (173). Then Hawthorne shadows both the terror and the horror: after the crime they are afraid of the “terrour and deadly chill” of solitude (174), but a more fearful day comes when Donatello is “horrour-stricken” (188) at Miriam. When Miriam sees a “little stream of blood” oozing “from the dead monk’s nostrils” (189), it is not the obvious “vulgar horrour” (191) that makes her quail; her horror comes from within herself. After viewing the crime, Hilda sees, “nor was it without horrour” (205), that her own face resembles the face of Beatrice. The horror follows the young count to his ancestral home and leaves the observant Kenyon “aghast at the passionate horrour,” “wild gestures, and ghastly look” (261). Then Donatello recognizes the “distorted and violent look” which Kenyon accidentally catches in the countenance of Donatello’s bust, a look “more horrible” than “the dead skull” his forefathers had handed down to him (272). His horror is in and of himself and is a horror from which only divine hope can save him. Kenyon studies “the group of the Laocoon, which, in its immortal agony,” impressed him “as a type of the long, fierce struggle of Man, involved in the knotted entanglements of Errour and Evil, those two snakes, which (if no Divine help intervene) will be sure to strangle him and his children, in the end . . . Thus, in the Laocoon, the horrour of a moment grew to be the Fate of interminable ages” (391). The second major component of Hawthorne’s “multitudinous richness” of the Gothic is the minuteness. He notes in his preface to The Marble Faun that he was surprised in rewriting the novel “to see the extent to which he had introduced descriptions of various Italian objects, antique, pictorial, and statuesque” (3), and any serious reader of Hawthorne senses a proliferation of such details beyond the usual Hawthorne technique. The specific details of atmosphere and setting, of character and plot, in a typical Hawthorne story can usually be shown to be effective in terms of

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what Hawthorne called an “iron rod” of truth running through the tale.1 2 This view of the use of all details in a work of art is essentially the romantic view which sees “every natural fact” as “symbol of some spiritual fact.”1 3 Typically, in Hawthorne, this minuteness is evident, and one senses the specificity of meaning suggested by a “transcendental” image of that meaning. However, in The Marble Faun, it appears that the minuteness of detail expands beyond this. Whether one argues that Hawthorne included more realistic details because of the highly imaginative nature of the “tissue of absurdities” he wished “to impose . . . upon the public”1 4 or because of the larger scope of his thought, the fact remains that while the minuteness of individual detail never interferes with the majesty of single idea, neither can each minute detail be taken as quite so individually meaningful to the central idea. It is as though the reader passes through the ruins and through the galleries with Hawthorne and his artists, catching glimpses of many details among which he chooses some on which to focus his imagination, often helped along by one of the artists or by Hawthorne himself in authorial comment. This proliferation of detail is of itself meaningful in the Gothic structure of The Marble Faun. Obviously, somewhere beneath the great idea of “the mystery of human life” there must be room for all details, but as Hawthorne suggests a great many, creating an atmosphere of “multitudinous richness,” he chooses to center his attention and the reader’s minutely on those details that speak most meaningfully to the imagination. These details are often significantly Gothic. Hawthorne’s Italian setting, a romantic, even a Gothic setting of desolation and decay, provides its ruins, artistic and religious—its catacombs, its old castles and palaces. Of all the castles and palaces Hawthorne chooses several for particular picturing, among them, for a sketch of his total picture, the ancestral home of Monte Beni. It is here where all sorts of mystical suggestions hover over the pedigree of Donatello, and it is Donatello’s tower which Hawthorne uses to make a symbolic sketch of the pathway of the soul’s struggle toward heaven when he pictures Donatello showing Kenyon the slow movement up the long staircase toward the summit, with the details of each successive room suggesting the inner progress of that soul. Donatello shows Kenyon up the first flight of stairs to a forlorn chamber with brick-paved floor, bare iron-grated holes in the massive walls, and one old stool—the prisoner’s cell; up the narrow staircase to another room, with

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be caught up in a deeper, truer horror and a higher, more eternal hope. Assisting the majesty by the thousand forms of Gothic fancy, Hawthorne enriches the work by unusually extensive minuteness. He selects and elaborates such Gothic devices of setting as the catacombs and the castle tower while he chooses for the protagonist a spectre who prompts the mysterious Miriam to a crime of blood. In its “multitudinous richness,” with “a majesty and minuteness, neither interfering with the other, each assisting the other,”1 5 The Marble Faun is Hawthorne Gothic at its best.

Of the number of palaces in Rome, perhaps the most Gothic for its suggestion through name alone is the Palazzo Cenci, to which Hilda was to deliver the secret packet from Miriam as Hawthorne lets the very secrecy of the packet represent an inward giving of Miriam’s secret that made her look a Beatrice Cenci to Hilda, who came to appear so after she saw Miriam’s and Donatello’s crime.

Notes

Not only are Hawthorne’s minutely detailed settings particularly Gothic, but the plot itself is a “succession of sinister events” that “followed one spectral figure” (426) out of the catacombs. That “death-scented apparition” (36) produces the grotesqueness often characteristic of the Gothic novel—an insidious and horror-filled grotesqueness that through Miriam’s influence reaches Donatello and Kenyon, each in a different way. The overt crime and scenes of blood, often a large part of “Gothic horrour” (156), are suggested in The Marble Faun through the single murder committed near “one of the especial blood-spots of the earth” (154), overshadowed by the crimes of ages, and effected by the influence of the vile spectre from the surrounding darkness. Then that “individual wrong-doing melts into the great mass of human crime, and makes us—who dreamed only of our own little separate sin—makes us guilty of the whole” (177). There is “an odour of guilt, and a scent of blood,” “a stain of ensanguined crime” (97), no doubt flowing from some “fatal gulf,” some “mighty subterranean lake of gore, right beneath our feet” (163). In one sense all mankind becomes “cemented with blood” (175). So Hawthorne creates the “multitudinous richness” of The Marble Faun, to speak the majestic mystery of human life, a majesty of horror and hope, with its majestic keynote in resemblance, doubly involving the reader’s imagination to see the inner soul revealed outwardly and so to

1. Robert D. Hume, “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 282-90. 2. Jane Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Tradition of Gothic Romance, Essays and Studies on American Language and Literature, 4 (Upsala: A.-B Lundequistska Bokhandeln, 1946). 3. Maurice Charney, “Hawthorne and the Gothic Style,” NEQ, 34 (1961), 36-49. 4. Hawthorne letter quoted in James T. Fields, Hawthorne, Modern Classics (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1879), p. 79. 5. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun: or, The Romance of Monte Beni, Centenary Edition (Ohio State Univ. Press, 1968), IV,463. All subsequent page citations in the text are to this edition. 6. Quoted by Charney from Norman Holmes Pearson, ed. (Unpublished Yale doctoral diss., 1941), p. 555. 7. See my study of Hawthorne’s art, Nathaniel Hawthorne: Transcendental Symbolist (Ohio Univ. Press, 1969), for detailed analysis of Hawthorne’s aesthetic theory and practice. 8. French and Italian Notebooks, p. 555. Italics mine. 9. “Preface,” The House of the Seven Gables, Centenary Edition, 1965, II, 2-3. 10. House of the Seven Gables, II, 1. 11. Randall Stewart, ed., The English Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1941), p. 413. 12. Letter to Charles A. Putnam, The Critic, N. S. 3 (Jan. 17, 1885), p. 30. 13. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Centenary Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1903), I, 26. 14. Fields, pp. 78-79. 15. French and Italian Notebooks, p. 555.

FURTHER READING Bibliography Scharnhorst, Gary. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Metuchen, N. J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990, 416 p. Provides a list of nineteenth-century reviews and booklength studies of Hawthorne.

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the pair of owls; up the third flight, as the windows and narrow loop-holes give more extensive eyeshots over the hills and valleys, to the topmost chamber with its crucifix, its holy emblems, and its gray alabaster skull; and after one more flight of stairs, out upon the summit whence can be seen all the surrounding area, where the sculptor gets such a view of God’s dealings with mankind that he says: “It is a great mistake to try to put our best thoughts into human language. When we ascend into the higher regions of emotion and spiritual enjoyment, they are only expressible by such grand hieroglyphics as these around us” (258).

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Biography Stewart, Randall. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948, 279 p.

Levin, David. “Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” American Literature 34, no. 3 (November 1962): 344-52.

Full-length biography that contains commentary on Hawthorne’s interest in the works of Radcliffe, Godwin, Maturin, and Scott.

Examines Hawthorne’s short story from a seventeenthcentury perspective and notes that Goodman Brown succumbs to despair on only spectral evidence of evil.

Criticism Allen, M. L. “The Black Veil: Three Versions of a Symbol.” English Studies 47 (1966): 286-89. Discusses the significance of the veil in Hawthorne’s fiction. Baym, Nina. “Hawthorne’s Gothic Discards: Fanshawe and ‘Alice Doane.’” Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal (1974): 105-15. Studies Hawthorne’s attempts to Americanize the English Gothic tradition. Berthold, Dennis. “Hawthorne, Ruskin, and the Gothic Revival: Transcendent Gothic in The Marble Faun.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 74 (1974): 15-32. Delineates the influence of the Gothic on The Marble Faun and relates this to the novel’s theme. Calhoun, Thomas O. “Hawthorne’s Gothic: An Approach to the Four Last Fragments: ‘The Ancestral Footstep,’ ‘Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret,’ ‘The Dolliver Romance,’ ‘Septimus Felton.’” Genre, no. 3 (1970): 229-41. Examines the Gothic elements in Hawthorne’s unfinished works. Charney, Maurice. “Hawthorne and the Gothic Style.” The New England Quarterly 34, no. 1 (March 1961): 36-49. Discusses Hawthorne’s affinity for Gothic art and architecture. DeLamotte, Eugenia C. “‘Deadly Iteration’: Hawthorne’s Gothic Vision.” In Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic, pp. 93-117. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Analyzes Hawthorne’s use of the Gothic narrative pattern of repetition in his works, and in The Marble Faun in particular. Elbert, Monika M. “Bourgeois Sexuality and the Gothic Plot in Wharton and Hawthorne.” In Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition, edited by John L. Idol Jr. and Melinda M. Ponder, pp. 258-70. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Maintains that in Hawthorne’s opinion, the judgment of others is itself the profoundest evil. Graham, Wendy. Gothic Elements and Religion in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fiction. Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 1999, 101 p. Explores the parallels and differences between English Gothic fiction and its religious critique and the fiction of Hawthorne.

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Lewis, Paul. “Mournful Mysteries: Gothic Speculation in The Scarlet Letter.” American Transcendental Quarterly 44 (fall 1979): 279-93. Examines the use and function of mystery, particularly as a challenge to orthodoxy, in The Scarlet Letter. Lloyd-Smith, Allan. “Hawthorne’s Gothic Tales.” In Critical Essays on Hawthorne’s Short Stories, edited by Albert J. Von Frank, pp. 232-43. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1991. Overview of Hawthorne’s gothicism. Ringe, Donald A. “Nathaniel Hawthorne.” In American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, pp. 152-76. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982. Discusses the Gothic influences on Hawthorne’s work and analyzes the Gothic elements and devices in various novels and stories. Voller, Jack G. “Allegory and Fantasy: The Short Fiction of Hawthorne and Poe.” In The Supernatural Sublime: The Metaphysics of Terror in Anglo-American Romanticism, pp. 209-39. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994. Discusses the use of symbolism and allegory in Hawthorne’s fantastic tales.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Hawthorne’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: American Writers; American Writers: The Classics, Vol. 1; American Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 1; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 18; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography and Resources, Vol. 2; Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 3; Children’s Literature Review, Vol. 103; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 1640-1865; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 1, 74, 183, 223, 269; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring Novels; Exploring Short Stories; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 2, 10, 17, 23, 39, 79, 95, 158; Novels for Students, Vols. 1, 20; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 1, 7, 11, 15; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 3, 29, 39; Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 1; Twayne’s United States Authors; World Literature Criticism; Writers for Children; and Yesterday’s Authors of Books for Children, Vol. 2.

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E. T. A. HOFFMANN (1776 - 1822)

(Born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann, changed third name to Amadeus) German short story writer, novella writer, novelist, and music critic.

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omposer, musician, and artist E. T. A. Hoffmann is best known as a writer of bizarre and fantastic fiction. Drawing from English Gothic romance, eighteenth-century Italian comedy, the psychology of the abnormal, and the occult, he created a world in which everyday life is infused with the supernatural. Hoffmann’s tales were influential in the nineteenth century throughout Europe and America. Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Heinrich Heine, and George Meredith are among the authors who derived plots, characters, and motifs from Hoffmann.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION The child of estranged parents, Hoffmann lived with his uncle, a pragmatic civil servant who did not encourage his nephew’s prodigious talents. Hoffmann studied law and accepted a government appointment, but cared for music above all and devoted himself to composing theatrical scores, opera, and ecclesiastical pieces. A public official by day and a composer of romantic music by night, Hoffmann experienced the conflict that became a

recurring theme in his fiction: the opposition between artistic endeavors and mundane concerns and the struggle of the artist to create in an unsympathetic, philistine society. In 1806 Hoffmann lost his bureaucratic post and joined the Bamberg theater as musical conductor and stage director. His theatrical experience provided Hoffmann with an understanding of character, dialogue, and dramatic structure that enriched his fiction. Also significant was Hoffmann’s passionate attachment to Julia Marc, a gifted voice student whom he idealized in his writings as a representation of music incarnate. In Hoffmann’s life, however, as in his fiction, the ideal is inviolable, and his love for Julia remained platonic.

MAJOR WORKS Hoffmann’s first published works were reviews of the works of composers such as Ludwig von Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, Christoph Willibald Gluck, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the last of whom Hoffmann honored by changing his own third name from Wilhelm to Amadeus. Believing that music was the supreme mode of expression, Hoffmann tried to replicate in his fiction what he viewed as music’s superior traits, such as its immediacy, emotional power, and supernatural qualities. Hoffmann hoped to transport readers beyond the physical realm by thrusting them into an environment palpably real, yet

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strangely unfamiliar. Hoffmann’s stories range from fairy tales to traditional narratives, but his most characteristic works feature doppelgängers, automata, and mad artists and each has a dark, hallucinatory tone. His most famous story is “Der Sandmann” (1817; “The Sandman”). The tale begins in epistolary form and centers on a young man, Nathanael, who believes a salesman he encounters is a gruesome childhood fairy tale character come to life. As with many of Hoffmann’s stories, the line between fantasy and reality is blurred. Nathanael links the Sandman to an associate of his late father’s, by whom he was once attacked. The eerie similarities between the Sandman, the father’s friend and the salesman inspired Sigmund Freud’s celebrated essay “The Uncanny,” in which Freud uses Hoffman’s story to illustrate his ideas, which eventually led to his theory of the Oedipal castration complex. Hoffmann himself considered “Der goldene Topf” (1814; “The Golden Pot”), in which the supernatural enters a poet’s everyday life, as his best piece of writing. Additional stories in the Gothic tradition include “Die Automate” (1814; “Automata”) a two-part tale containing a ghost story and a mystery centering on an automaton or robot, and “Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht” (1814; “A New Year’s Eve Adventure”) in which two characters in two different settings represent polarities of the same personality. In both stories, Hoffmann underscores his belief that real-life activities can open doors to the supernatural. In “The Golden Pot” the impetus is creative expression while in “A New Year’s Eve Adventure” it is alcohol. One of Hoffmann’s recurring themes was the descent of the artist into a madness caused by being forced to live in a mundane world. While “The Golden Pot” centers on a poet, “Rat Krespel” (1819; “The Cremona Violin,” also translated as “Councillor Krespel”) portrays a musician’s fall into what E. F. Bleiler describes as “sane insanity,” a result of his hypersensitivity to daily occurrences. “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” (1819; “The Mines of Falun”) was inspired by the real-life discovery of a preserved body in archaic clothing in a Swedish mining tunnel. Hoffman’s miner became a supernatural being with intimate knowledge of nature and creation. Hoffmann also produced one Gothic novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815-16; The Devil’s Elixir), a doppelgänger tale in which two characters’ identities are so intermeshed that neither can tell where one begins and the other ends.

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CRITICAL RECEPTION Hoffmann’s potent language and images sometimes shocked and offended his contemporaries. Sir Walter Scott wrote that Hoffmann required “the assistance of medicine rather than of criticism,” and an anonymous reviewer in The Literary World insisted his plots and characters stemmed from “a diseased imagination.” Many critics, however, still appreciate the grotesque humor, social satire, and extravagant artistry beneath the horrific surface. Commentators have noted Hoffmann’s adept placement of the supernatural against the backdrop of the everyday. An anonymous writer for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1824 called Hoffmann “a man of rare and singular genius” and noted his ability to “mix up the horrible notion of the double-goer, with ordinary human feelings of all kinds.” Hoffmann is credited with influencing the work of numerous literary descendants, from Poe and the symbolists to the surrealists and modernists.

PRINCIPAL WORKS *Fantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier: Blätter aus dem Tagebuche eines reisenden Enthusiasten. 4 vols. [published anonymously] (short stories) 1814-15 Die Elixiere des Teufels. 2 vols. [published anonymously; The Devil’s Elixir] (novel) 1815-16 †Nachtstücke, herausgegeben von dem Verfasser der Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier. 2 vols. [published anonymously] (short stories) 1817 Klein Zaches genannt Zinnober: Ein Mährchen herausgegeben von E. T. A. Hoffmann [Little Zack] (novella) 1819 Seltsame Leiden eines Theater-Direktors: Aus mündlicher Tradition mitgeteilt vom Verfasser der Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier [published anonymously] (novella) 1819 ‡Die Serapions-Brüder: Gesammelte Erzälungen und Mährchen. Herausgegeben von E. T. A. Hoffmann. 4 vols. [The Serapion Brethren] (short stories) 1819-21 Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern (unfinished novel) 1820-22 Prinzessin Brambilla: Ein Capriccio nach Jacob Callot [Princess Brambilla] (novella) 1821

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Die letzten Erzählungen von E. T. A. Hoffmann. 2 vols. (short stories) 1825 Hoffmann’s Strange Stories (short stories) 1855 Hoffmann’s Fairy Tales (short stories and novellas) 1857 Weird Tales. [translated by J. T. Bealby] 2 vols. (short stories) 1885 Tales of Hoffmann [edited and translated by Christopher Lazare] (short stories) 1946 Selected Writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann. 2 vols. [translated by Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight] (short stories, novellas, and novel) 1969 *

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Volume 3 contains the short story “Der goldene Topf: Ein Märchen aus der neuen Zeit” (“The Golden Pot” or “The Golden Flower Pot”), and Volume 4 contains the short story “Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht” (“A New Year’s Eve Adventure”). Volume 1 contains the short story “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman”). Volume 1 contains the short stories “Rat Krespel” (“The Cremona Violin” or “Councillor Krespel”) and “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” (“The Mines of Falun”), and Volume 2 contains “Die Automate” (“Automata”).

PRIMARY SOURCES E. T. A. HOFFMANN (STORY DATE 1817) SOURCE: Hoffmann, E. T. A. “The Sand-Man.” In The Best Tales of Hoffmann, edited by E. F. Bleiler, pp. 184214. New York: Dover, 1967. The following excerpt was originally published in German as “Der Sandmann,” in the first volume of Nachtstücke, herausgegeben von dem Verfasser der Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier in 1817.

Nathanael rushed in, impelled by some nameless dread. The Professor was grasping a female figure by the shoulders, the Italian Coppola held her by the feet; and they were pulling and dragging each other backwards and forwards, fighting furiously to get possession of her. Nathanael recoiled with horror on recognizing that the figure was Olimpia. Boiling with rage, he was about to tear his beloved from the grasp of the madmen, when Coppola by an extraordinary exertion of strength twisted the figure out of the Professor’s hands and gave him such a terrible blow with her, that Spalanzani reeled backwards

and fell over the table among the phials and retorts, the bottles and glass cylinders, which covered it: all these things were smashed into a thousand pieces. But Coppola threw the figure across his shoulder, and, laughing shrilly and horribly, ran hastily down the stairs, the figure’s ugly feet hanging down and banging and rattling like wood against the steps. Nathanael was stupefied—he had seen only too distinctly that in Olimpia’s pallid waxed face there were no eyes, merely black holes in their stead; she was an inanimate puppet. Spalanzani was rolling on the floor; the pieces of glass had cut his head and breast and arm; the blood was escaping from him in streams. But he gathered his strength together by an effort. “After him—after him! What do you stand staring there for? Coppelius—Coppelius—he’s stolen my best automaton—at which I’ve worked for twenty years—my life work—the clockwork— speech—movement—mine—your eyes—stolen your eyes—damn him—curse him—after him— fetch me back Olimpia—there are the eyes.” And now Nathanael saw a pair of bloody eyes lying on the floor staring at him; Spalanzani seized them with his uninjured hand and threw them at him, so that they hit his breast. Then madness dug her burning talons into Nathanael and swept down into his heart, rending his mind and thoughts to shreds. “Aha! aha! aha! Fire-wheel—fire-wheel! Spin round, firewheel! merrily, merrily! Aha! wooden doll! spin round, pretty wooden doll!” and he threw himself upon the Professor, clutching him fast by the throat. He would certainly have strangled him had not several people, attracted by the noise, rushed in and torn away the madman; and so they saved the Professor, whose wounds were immediately dressed. Siegmund, with all his strength, was not able to subdue the frantic lunatic, who continued to scream in a dreadful way, “Spin round, wooden doll!” and to strike out right and left with his doubled fists. At length the united strength of several succeeded in overpowering him by throwing him on the floor and binding him. His cries passed into a brutish bellow that was awful to hear; and thus raging with the harrowing violence of madness, he was taken away to the madhouse. Before continuing my narration of what happened further to the unfortunate Nathanael, I will tell you, indulgent reader, in case you take any interest in that skillful mechanician and fabricator

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Meister Floh: Ein Märchen in seiben Abenteuern zweier Freunde [Master Flea] (novella) 1822

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of automata, Spalanzani, that he recovered completely from his wounds. He had, however, to leave the university, for Nathanael’s fate had created a great sensation; and the opinion was pretty generally expressed that it was an imposture altogether unpardonable to have smuggled a wooden puppet instead of a living person into intelligent tea-circles—for Olimpia had been present at several with success. Lawyers called it a cunning piece of knavery, and all the harder to punish since it was directed against the public; and it had been so craftily contrived that it had escaped unobserved by all except a few preternaturally acute students, although everybody was very wise now and remembered to have thought of several facts which occurred to them as suspicious. But these latter could not succeed in making out any sort of a consistent tale. For was it, for instance, a thing likely to occur to anyone as suspicious that, according to the declaration of an elegant beau of these tea-parties, Olimpia had, contrary to all good manners, sneezed oftener than she had yawned? The former must have been, in the opinion of this elegant gentleman, the winding up of the concealed clockwork; it had always been accompanied by an observable creaking, and so on. The Professor of Poetry and Eloquence took a pinch of snuff, and, slapping the lid to and clearing his throat, said solemnly, “My most honourable ladies and gentlemen, don’t you see then where the rub is? The whole thing is an allegory, a continuous metaphor. You understand me? Sapienti sat.” But several most honourable gentlemen did not rest satisfied with this explanation; the history of this automaton had sunk deeply into their souls, and an absurd mistrust of human figures began to prevail. Several lovers, in order to be fully convinced that they were not paying court to a wooden puppet, required that their mistress should sing and dance a little out of time, should embroider or knit or play with her little pug, & c., when being read to, but above all things else that she should do something more than merely listen—that she should frequently speak in such a way as to really show that her words presupposed as a condition some thinking and feeling. The bonds of love were in many cases drawn closer in consequence, and so of course became more engaging; in other instances they gradually relaxed and fell away. “I cannot really be made responsible for it,” was the remark of more than one young gallant.

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At the tea-gatherings everybody, in order to ward off suspicion, yawned to an incredible extent and never sneezed. Spalanzani was obliged, as has been said, to leave the place in order to escape a criminal charge of having fraudulently imposed an automaton upon human society. Coppola, too, had also disappeared. When Nathanael awoke he felt as if he had been oppressed by a terrible nightmare; he opened his eyes and experienced an indescribable sensation of mental comfort, while a soft and most beautiful sensation of warmth pervaded his body. He lay on his own bed in his own room at home; Clara was bending over him, and at a little distance stood his mother and Lothair. “At last, at last, O my darling Nathanael; now we have you again; now you are cured of your grievous illness, now you are mine again.” And Clara’s words came from the depths of her heart; and she clasped him in her arms. The bright scalding tears streamed from his eyes, he was so overcome with mingled feelings of sorrow and delight; and he gasped forth, “My Clara, my Clara!” Siegmund, who had staunchly stood by his friend in his hour of need, now came into the room. Nathanael gave him his hand—“My faithful brother, you have not deserted me.” Every trace of insanity had left him, and in the tender hands of his mother and his beloved, and his friends, he quickly recovered his strength again. Good fortune had in the meantime visited the house; a niggardly old uncle, from whom they had never expected to get anything, had died, and left Nathanael’s mother not only a considerable fortune, but also a small estate, pleasantly situated not far from the town. There they resolved to go and live, Nathanael and his mother, and Clara, to whom he was now to be married, and Lothair. Nathanael had become gentler and more childlike than he had ever been before, and now began really to understand Clara’s supremely pure and noble character. None of them ever reminded him, even in the remotest degree, of the past. But when Siegmund took leave of him, Nathanael said, “By heaven, brother! I was in a bad way, but an angel came just at the right moment and led me back upon the path of light. Yes, it was Clara.” Siegmund would not let him speak further, fearing lest the painful recollections of the past might arise too vividly and too intensely in his mind. The time came for the four happy people to move to their little property. At noon they were going through the streets. After making several purchases they found that the lofty tower of the town hall was throwing its giant shadows across

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“Oh! do look at that strange little gray bush, it looks as if it were actually walking towards us,” said Clara. Mechanically he put his hand into his side pocket; he found Coppola’s perspective and looked for the bush; Clara stood in front of the glass. Then a convulsive thrill shot through his pulse and veins; pale as a corpse, he fixed his staring eyes upon her; but soon they began to roll, and a fiery current flashed and sparkled in them, and he yelled fearfully, like a hunted animal. Leaping up high in the air and laughing horribly at the same time, he began to shout in a piercing voice, “Spin round, wooden doll! Spin round, wooden doll!” With the strength of a giant he laid hold upon Clara and tried to hurl her over, but in an agony of despair she clutched fast hold of the railing that went round the gallery. Lothair heard the madman raging and Clara’s scream of terror: a fearful presentiment flashed across his mind. He ran up the steps; the door of the second flight was locked. Clara’s scream for help rang out more loudly. Mad with rage and fear, he threw himself against the door, which at length gave way. Clara’s cries were growing fainter and fainter—“Help! save me! save me!” and her voice died away in the air. “She is killed— murdered by that madman,” shouted Lothair. The door to the gallery was also locked. Despair gave him the strength of a giant; he burst the door off its hinges. Good God! there was Clara in the grasp of the madman Nathanael, hanging over the gallery in the air, holding on to the iron bar with only one hand. Quick as lightning, Lothair seized his sister and pulled her back, at the same time dealing the madman a blow in the face with his doubled fist, which sent him reeling backwards, forcing him to let go his victim. Lothair ran down with his insensible sister in his arms. She was saved. But Nathanael ran round and round the gallery, leaping up in the air and shouting, “Spin round, fire-wheel! Spin round, fire-wheel!” The people heard the wild shouting,

and a crowd began to gather. In the midst of them towered the lawyer Coppelius, like a giant; he had only just arrived in the town, and had gone straight to the market place. Some were for going up to overpower and take the madman, but Coppelius laughed and said, “Ha! ha! wait a bit; he’ll come down of his own accord;” and he stood gazing up along with the rest. All at once Nathanael stopped as if spellbound; he bent down over the railing and perceived Coppelius. With a piercing scream, “Eh! Fine eyes-a, fine eyes-a!” he leaped over the railing. When Nathanael lay on the stone pavement with a shattered head, Coppelius had disappeared in the crush and confusion. Several years afterwards it was reported that, outside the door of a pretty country house in a remote district, Clara had been seen sitting hand in hand with a pleasant gentleman, while two bright boys were playing at her feet. From this it may be concluded that she eventually found that quiet domestic happiness which her cheerful, blithesome character required, and which Nathanael, with his tempest-tossed soul, could never have been able to give her.

GENERAL COMMENTARY BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE (REVIEW DATE JULY 1824) SOURCE: A review of The Devil’s Elixir, by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 16, no. 90 (July 1824): 55-67. In the following excerpt, the critic provides a laudatory assessment of The Devil’s Elixir, noting especially Hoffmann’s skillful handling of the device of the doppelgänger, or double.

The Devil’s Elixir is, we think, upon the whole, our chief favourite among the numerous works of [E. T. A. Hoffman,] a man of rare and singular genius. It contains in itself the germ of many of his other performances; and one particular idea, in which, more than any other, he, as a romancer, delighted, has been repeated by him in many various shapes, but never with half the power and effect in which it has been elaborated here. . . . [This idea is] what he calls, in his own language, a doppelgänger. . . . [In some works using

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the market place. “Come,” said Clara, “let us go up to the top once more and have a look at the distant hills.” No sooner said than done. Both of them, Nathanael and Clara, went up the tower; their mother, however, went on with the servantgirl to her new home, and Lothair, not feeling inclined to climb up all the many steps, waited below. There the two lovers stood arm in arm on the topmost gallery of the tower, and gazed out into the sweet-scented wooded landscape, beyond which the blue hills rose up like a giant’s city.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR SIR WALTER SCOTT ON HOFFMANN’S TALENT AND MENTAL STATE

The author who led the way in [the Fantastic style] of literature was Ernest Theodore William Hoffmann; the peculiarity of whose genius, temper, and habits, fitted him to distinguish himself where imagination was to be strained to the pitch of oddity and bizarrerie. He appears to have been a man of rare talent,—a poet, an artist, and a musician, but unhappily of a hypochondriac and whimsical disposition, which carried him to extremes in all his undertakings; so his music became capricious,—his drawings caricatures,—and his tales, as he himself termed them, fantastic extravagances. . . . It is no wonder that to a mind so vividly accessible to the influence of the imagination, so little under the dominion of sober reason, such a numerous train of ideas should occur in which fancy had a large share and reason none at all. In fact, the grotesque in his compositions partly resembles the arabesque in painting, in which is introduced the most strange and complicated monsters, resembling centaurs, griffins, sphinxes, chimeras, rocs, and all other creatures of romantic imagination, dazzling the beholder as it were by the unbounded fertility of the author’s imagination, and sating it by the rich contrast of all the varieties of shape and colouring, while there is in reality nothing to satisfy the understanding or inform the judgment. Hoffmann spent his life, which could not be a happy one, in weaving webs of this wild and imaginative character, for which after all he obtained much less credit with the public, than his talents must have gained if exercised under the restraint of a better taste or a more solid judgment. . . . [T]he inspirations of Hoffmann so often resemble the ideas produced by the immoderate use of opium, that we cannot help considering his case as one requiring the assistance of medicine rather than of criticism. SOURCE: Scott, Sir Walter. “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition.” The Foreign Quarterly Review 1, no. 1 (July 1827): 61-98.

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the doppelgänger,] the idea is turned to a halfludicrous use—and very successfully too—but by far the best are those romances in which it has been handled quite seriously—and of all these, the best is [The Devil’s Elixir]. . . . The superior excellence of the Devil’s Elixir lies in the skill with which its author has contrived to mix up the horrible notion of the double-goer, with ordinary human feelings of all kinds. He has linked it with scenes of great and simple pathos— with delineations of the human mind under the influences of not one, but many of its passions— ambition—love—revenge—remorse. He has even dared to mix scenes and characters exquisitely ludicrous with those in which his haunted hero appears and acts; and all this he has been able to do without in the smallest degree weakening the horrors which are throughout his corps de reserve. On the contrary, we attribute the unrivalled effect which this work, as a whole, produces on the imagination, to nothing so much as the admirable art with which the author has married dreams to realities, the air of truth which his wildest fantasies draw from the neighbourhood of things which we all feel to be simply and intensely human and true. Banquo’s ghost is tenfold horrible, because it appears at a regal banquet—and the horrors of the Monk Medardus affect our sympathies in a similar ratio, because this victim of everything that is fearful in the caprices of an insane imagination, is depicted to us as living and moving among men, women, and scenes, in all of which we cannot help recognizing a certain aspect of life and nature, and occasionally even of homeliness.

LITERARY WORLD (REVIEW DATE 4 APRIL 1885) SOURCE: “Hoffmann’s Weird Tales.” Literary World 16, no. 7 (4 April 1885): 111-12. In the following excerpt from a review of Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brethren), the critic maintains that Hoffmann’s collection is without literary merit and is worthwhile only as an object of morbid curiosity.

Hoffmann is one of the idols of literature whose powers are spoken of with traditional reverence, but whose works few take the trouble to read. How much we heard in our younger days of the fearful joys to be snatched from the pages of this uncanny romancer, and how little did the result appear in the full measure of breathless expectation! And now, after an interlude of Trollope, and Daudet, and Howells, we find it more difficult than ever to awaken a sympathetic thrill over the antiquated psychological horrors of the G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2

Where, then, lies the secret of Hoffmann’s fascination? It is in the consummate art with which he conveys passing impressions, and the unflagging fertility of invention which is constantly bringing forth new and startling episodes. Master Martin, as was his wont, threw his head back into his neck, played with his fingers upon his capacious belly, and, opening his eyes wide and thrusting forward his under-lip with an air of superior astuteness, let his eyes sweep round the assembly.

Later on, you may get a wholly different portrait, but here, for the time being, is Master Martin, as if reflected from the author’s mind into a mirror. This wonderful gift of expression lends a seemingly vivid realism to the most improbable of Hoffman’s productions. . . . And yet, a careful perusal of Hoffmann’s tales brings no feeling of gratification. The mind is perturbed with all this fantastic imagery; the satire is acrid and leaves unpleasant traces; the passion is too much like brute instinct; the magic wand of the enchanter is thrust too often or our notice; the grim, unyielding doctrine of fatalism, which the author takes occasion to profess so often, stimulates an instinct of revolt. Hoffmann’s tales are to be read, if read at all, as one would take hasheesh or opium—to note the effects upon the mind and cull therefrom an interesting experience. Of no other series of romances can it be said so absolutely that the effects vary with the temperament of the reader. Only an abnormal intellect could find in them genuine and habitual enjoyment.

E. F. BLEILER (ESSAY DATE 1967) SOURCE: Bleiler, E. F. Introduction to The Best Tales of Hoffmann, pp. v-xxxiii. New York: Dover, 1967. In the following excerpt, Bleiler surveys some of Hoffmann’s works of short fiction.

III Most critics agree that “The Golden Flower Pot” (“Der goldne Topf”) is Hoffmann’s best story. Hoffmann himself considered it such, and

while working on it, he wrote, “God grant me to finish the story as I have begun it. I have never done anything better; everything else is still and lifeless compared to it.” Nowhere else has Hoffmann been so successful in blending the real and the fantastic as in this story, in which the powers of the supernatural world run rampant through Dresden. “The Golden Flower Pot” first appeared in 1814 in Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, Hoffmann’s first collection of stories, and was revised slightly in 1819 for the second edition of the book. It is his first major literary work, and it marks his unheralded emergence as an author of world stature after he had written only a few critical essays and semifictional musical critiques. It is a many-leveled story, and as might be expected, a great amount of time has been spent in trying to interpret Hoffmann’s intentions. Two opposing general interpretations have been the most favored: (1) that it is an optimistic story about the emergence of a poet, and (2) that it is a basically pessimistic story in which the sad problems of the poet are treated with irony. The proponents of optimism claim that this story mirrors Hoffmann’s excitement and joy at his decision to turn to literature instead of to music for his livelihood. According to the pessimists, however, Hoffmann states that a poet must abandon the life of this world, marry a dream girl of his own projection, neglect all worldly advantages— and where shall he go? To Atlantis, the mythical kingdom that does not exist and never did exist. At present the pessimistic interpretation seems the stronger, especially since the text incorporates a letter which Hoffmann first wrote to accompany the story. In this letter he stated his discouragement at the turn that events had taken. A modern reader, perhaps more than Hoffmann’s contemporaries, is likely to find difficulty in isolating and evaluating the various levels of interpretation that lie within “The Golden Flower Pot.” On the most superficial level, it can be read simply as a fantastic thriller, in which the supernatural emerges and invades the world of everyday life, just as supernaturalism within a pseudohistorical setting did in the Gothic novels that Hoffmann delighted in reading. Some of Hoffmann’s minor fiction, indeed, is written on this level, but it is very unlikely that “The Golden Flower Pot” is to be taken this way. Beyond the external events of magic in Dresden and the emergence of the elemental world of the Renaissance Rosicrucians, for example, there

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Serapionsbrüder [The Serapion Brethren]. Clever the tales undoubtedly are, but their fantastic episodes and characters are the fruit of a diseased imagination, rather than of poetical genius. Hoffmann’s mental traits were akin to those of Poe (the comparison is general) but the German lacked Poe’s marvelous faculty of concentration. His representations of character, as such, have no value, for they are devoid of coherency, they are marionettes, and are wholly at the mercy of the grotesque whims of their creator.

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lie several themes that appear in much of Hoffmann’s other work: that loss of faith or denial of revelation can be destructive; that there is a connection between madness and the suffering world; and that art and life do not mingle, but must be separated. Individuation, in the modern psychological sense, offers one of the most plausible symbolic interpretations of “The Golden Flower Pot.” This amounts to a statement (in fantastic terms) of character growth. It is thus the story of the awakening of poetic sensibility in Anselmus, and of the upheaval which the new developments cause in Anselmus’s personality. According to this interpretation the incidents in the story are simply fictionalized metaphors. The old apple woman, Liese, is simply fear, and Anselmus’s hesitation before the doorknocker which assumes her shape is simply a metaphoric way of saying that Anselmus became frightened and did not enter. Serpentina would stand for Poesy; the strange experiences in the boat and around the punchbowl are simply ironic ways of stating that all parties had had too much to drink and that alcohol evoked the demonic forces within each. The enclosure of Anselmus in a glass bottle simply describes the paralysis which occurs when faith and hope have been lost. According to this interpretation the entire story of “The Golden Flower Pot” is the projection of Anselmus’s mind. His emergent sense of ecstasy colors and transforms everything he beholds, and the daily life of a staid, bourgeois early 19th-century city is seen as a mad scramble of occult powers, half-insane super-humans, strange perils and remarkable benisons as Anselmus becomes a poet. Yet beyond this there are other possible levels of interpretation. It has been noticed that the characters and ideas of “The Golden Flower Pot” are arranged in two series, each with one pole in the world of reality and another in the world of fantasy. Indeed, there is even a sort of identity between the two forms: Serpentina with Veronica, Anselmus with the Registrator Heerbrand, Archivarius Lindhorst with Conrector Paulmann, and so on. According to this interpretation, Anselmus is simply a projection of the Registrator which disappears in the world of fantasy, while the Registrator, giving up his dreams, marries Veronica. She, in turn, recognizes that she cannot possess the Anselmus complex but must be content with the Registrator-turned-Geheimrat. Both of these interpretations may seem to be far-fetched interpretation for its own sake, but the fact remains that some justification exists for them

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or comparable unriddlings. Hoffmann’s work is permeated with the concept of personality fragments coming to separate identity and acting as characters. To quote one example which is beyond dispute, in Hoffmann’s remarkable novel The Devil’s Elixir (Die Elixiere des Teufels) the identities of two of the characters, the Monk Medardus and the Graf Viktorin, are so merged and interchanged that the characters themselves do not know where one begins and the other ends. The heart of “The Golden Flower Pot” is the märchen, or literary myth, that the Archivarius begins in the tavern; it is concluded by a strange glossologia from an Oriental manuscript that Anselmus is copying. The archphilistine of the story calls this märchen “Oriental bombast,” but as the Archivarius replies, it is not only true but important. It recapitulates the central thought of “The Golden Flower Pot” sub specie aeternitatis, stripped of the accidentals of time, space, and personality. The central idea of this märchen is the birth of poetry, expressed in terms of cosmic symbols drawn from the Naturphilosophie. It tells of the divine spark (phosphorus was the chemical symbol for the nervous fluid or intelligence in some of the systems of the day) which awakens and fertilizes a vegetative life. This in terms of mounting triads (a concept borrowed from the philosophical systems of the day) must die to give birth to a higher principle. Lindhorst’s märchen is thus a combination of several elements: a pseudobiblical creation statement; an allegory in which details have special meaning, although it is not always clear now what each point means; a fanciful statement of the human situation; and perhaps an ironic spoofing of some of the philosophical systems of the day. Hoffmann, although he was greatly interested in the outgrowths of Schelling’s philosophy and accepted much of it, could be expected to retain a pawky incredulity at certain aspects of it. But perhaps analysis should not be pushed too far; it may be enough to say that this is a numinous statement of life, in which both profound and trivial concepts are fused. German literature at the end of the 18th century frequently made use of märchen, or literary myths. These often appeared as symbolic kernels or germs within the larger context of a story, offering in a frankly poetic and mythical form the point offered more or less realistically in the full story. The märchen was thus a microcosm within a macrocosm.

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All in all, it seems unlikely that there ever will be complete agreement about all the details of “The Golden Flower Pot.” Perhaps Hoffmann himself was not entirely clear about his intentions. It would lie more within the realm of the Romantic movement to leave things in a tantalizing mist than to strip them of illusion. The symbol should be permitted to unroll and expand as it will. In any case, the modern reader can exercise his own judgment in deciding what really happened to Anselmus. “Automata” (“Die Automate”) first appeared as a whole in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt in 1814, although it was written between parts of “The Golden Flower Pot.” It falls into two parts: the untitled Ghost Story in the foreword, and secondly, the experiences of Ferdinand with an automaton called the Talking Turk. There are also other elements in the story, notably an essay on the mechanical creation of music, new musical instruments and man’s relation to music; Hoffmann is said to have included this material so that he could sell the story to a music journal. The Ghost Story is built on two supernatural motives, one of which has had considerable importance in the history of the supernatural story. This is the motive of the White Lady, in which someone impersonates a ghost and receives supernatural punishment for his rashness. M. G. Lewis based his narrative of the Bleeding Nun in The Monk on this idea; it is the subject of one of the Ingoldsby Legends; and in more recent times Ambrose Bierce, E. F. Benson, W. W. Jacobs, H. Russell Wakefield and others have made effective use of it. In most instances, however, the story has been developed beyond Hoffmann’s narra-

tive, which remains at best sketchy. The second element in the Ghost Story is an attempt to defeat fate by distorting the time sense. It is related to an important literary form of the day, the so-called Fate Novel, the central idea of which was an attempt (usually unsuccessful) to dodge an inevitable fate. In the second part of “Automata” much space is devoted to one of Hoffmann’s idées fixes, the automaton or robot. The story reveals Hoffmann’s own strong feelings when he describes the horror he feels at the possibility of mistaking an automaton for a human being. (This concept later became even more important in the episode of the dancing doll in “The Sand-Man.”) For us much of the emotional power of Hoffmann’s story may be lost since the late 18th-century and early 19th-century automata are now mostly destroyed or inoperative. We can have no real idea of their remarkable performances nor can we regain their emotional impact, since robots and mechanized intelligence have become part of our daily life. During Hoffmann’s lifetime, however, Maelzel’s chess player (which was a fraud) aroused a sensation in Europe, while Vaucanson’s mechanical duck (a remarkable mechanism that would grace any era) and his speaking head and similar marvels of mechanics were held to be almost miraculous. The historical works of Chapuis and Droz can hint to the modern reader something of the wonder which these figures inspired. In Hoffmann they aroused a multiple reaction: admiration for their skill, horror at their inhumanness, and perhaps fear. “Automata” remains a mystery story in the narrower acceptance of the form, for no convincing explanation can be given for the mysterious events that befall Ferdinand. Hoffmann’s “explanation” of the functioning of the Turk involves clairvoyance, which is awakened through the mechanical medium of the Turk. This strange theory, which Hoffmann does not propound in the clearest way, is not his own, but was advanced by several early 19th-century psychologists to account for paranormal phenomena. It is connected with theories of animal magnetism derived ultimately from F. A. Mesmer on one side and from philosophical mysticism on the other. Even beyond the phenomena of the Talking Turk, however, are Ferdinand’s adventures in Poland, which simply cannot be explained rationally. “A New Year’s Eve Adventure” (“Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht”) was written late in 1814 and was published in 1816 in Hoffmann’s first collection of stories, Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier. It demonstrates a literary device that

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This form and its use were not Hoffmann’s invention. Goethe had written an independent allegorical story called “Das Märchen,” which aroused a great deal of criticism among the Romantics, and Wackenroder had incorporated the fairytale of the Naked Saint in his Her zensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders. Novalis, who represents the high point of the Early Romantic School in Germany, had incorporated two such märchen in his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Novalis characterized the märchen as being “like a dream vision . . . beyond logic . . . an assembly of wonderful things and happenings . . . a [pregnant] chaos.” This description fits his own work and Hoffmann’s when it is remembered that chaos to the Romantics did not mean an empty waste as it usually does for us, but an infinitely rich, undifferentiated, undiversified “plasma,” out of which universes could be formed.

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is very common in Hoffmann’s work: the narration of two or more stories, which at first seem different, but upon closer examination prove to be the same story told on different levels. The two levels usually consist of the level of daily life and the level of fantasy, which are so intermingled that the reader sometimes is not sure of boundaries. Just as the student Anselmus in “The Golden Flower Pot” lives two lives (one in the realm of poetry and the other around the Biedermeier establishment of Conrector Paulmann), the Travelling Enthusiast or Roving Romanticist of “A New Year’s Eve Adventure” and Erasmus Spikher are polarities of the same personality and situation. One is set in humdrum Berlin, the other in the counter-pole of Italy, which often appears in Hoffmann’s work as a synonym for luxury and decadence. Whether Hoffmann was completely successful in telling his story in this way is open to dispute; at worst he tells two repetitive stories, at best his method offers a strange parallelism and fusion of experience. The mundane narrator confines the fantasy of Spikher and is in turn enriched by it. Personal elements from Hoffmann’s life are evident in this story. It was not too long after his unhappy association with Julia Marc in Bamberg that Hoffmann wrote “A New Year’s Eve Adventure,” and when he read it to his circle of friends in Berlin, as was his custom with new work, they must have recognized the reflection of Hoffmann’s personal affairs in the story. Hoffmann pictures Julia in two facets, on the one hand a cold opportunist who did not even have vision enough to recognize the quality of her admirer and on the other hand as a witch of Satan. Another element of Hoffmann’s personal life appears here in the presence of the famous Peter Schlemihl, the character created by his close friend Adelbert von Chamisso. The story of Peter Schlemihl, who sold his shadow to the Devil, was one of the most famous and most popular stories of the day, and Hoffmann obviously admired it greatly. Many of the details of the episode in the Bierkeller acquire new depth if the reader is acquainted with Chamisso’s story. Just what Peter Schlemihl lost, however, is no clearer in Hoffmann’s story than it was in Chamisso’s. For Chamisso, interpretations of Schlemihl’s plight have ranged from poverty to statelessness, from loss of virility to the inability to form human associations. What Hoffmann considered the “shadow” is also mysterious; indeed, he evaded the question. Erasmus Spikher’s lost reflection, on the

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other hand, is rather clearly identified with an alter ego, a dream-self, the ability to dream, a personality focus that is associated with dreams and passions. This story would then be another statement about the separateness of art and life. The mechanisms that evoke the world of fantasy in “A New Year’s Eve Adventure” are quite different from those in “The Golden Flower Pot.” While it was the poetic impulse that awakened the ecstatic experience in Anselmus, in the Travelling Enthusiast/Spikher the impulse was alcohol. For Hoffmann there were several such doors to the supramundane world, and the type of door could condition the transcendent experience which was attained. In this theory Hoffmann simply stated in fictional terms what several of the psychologists and natural philosophers of the day said in more or less technical terminology. For such theorists the human autonomous nervous system, to which they assigned a center in the solar plexus, was an organ of experience which far transcended the sense organs of the conscious mind. This nervous system was the seat of a secondary, unconscious personality, which by its very essence was in intimate contact with all Nature. Normally, this Dream Self was silent, submerged by the clatter of the conscious mind, but in sleep, in religious ecstasy, in drug states, and in insanity it sent its energy up to the cortex, where it could be perceived. If this energy were controlled by the higher spiritual faculties of man, the result could be a great aesthetic impulse, or prophecy; if it were uncontrolled, it could be the distorted mumblings of the clairvoyant, or the unhappy visions of the addict. It is the lesser voice which inspires Spikher. In the fall of 1816 Hoffmann finished “Nutcracker and the King of Mice” (“Nussknacker und Mausekönig”), which first appeared in a Christmas collection of children’s stories entitled Kindermärchen von C.W. Contessa, Friedrich Baron de la Motte Fouqué und E. T. A. Hoffmann. The story was based in part on his own life situation: the family among whom the adventure takes place were modelled after the Hitzigs, friends of Hoffmann’s Polish and early Berlin days. The two children in the story, Fritz and Marie, represent Hitzig’s children. Hoffmann himself served as a prototype for Grandfather Drosselmeier, for he had built a cardboard castle for the Hitzig children the previous year, just as Drosselmeier does in the story. It might be noted that the same combinations of whimsy, aberration, ineffectuality, insight and ecstasy enter the character of Drosselmeier as enter the other masks of Hoffmann.

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Hoffmann himself did not regard “Nutcracker and the King of Mice” as an entirely successful story, and apparently his friends agreed with this opinion. In the critical parts of Die Serapionsbrüder two of Hoffmann’s characters, Lothar (a sceptic, modelled in part on Fouqué) and Ottmar (perhaps modelled on Hitzig), discuss the story. They conclude that the mixture of children’s elements with elements that only an adult would appreciate is not completely acceptable. Hoffmann would have been better advised, it is stated, to have written either a children’s story or a symbolic narrative for adults, not both. In a later story, “The Stranger Child” (“Das fremde Kind”), which was written for the Christmas annual of the following year, Hoffmann adhered more closely to a children’s level. Despite this formal improvement the story itself lacks the vitality of “Nutcracker and the King of Mice,” which has long been a favorite, both in itself and in its various musical and dramatic adaptations. “The Sand-Man” (“Der Sandmann”), which appeared in Nachtstücke, Volume 1 (1816-1817), is one of Hoffmann’s most bewildering stories. His contemporaries were inclined to read many personal references into it, and Hoffmann’s friend Fouqué considered himself reflected in the personality of Nathanael. There are many problems involved in “The Sand-Man.” The first and greatest, of course, is the meaning of the story. Are Nathanael’s adventures to be taken literally or symbolically? Is Hoffmann again using his old device of treating mental projections as personalities? Do the characters in the story exist, or are they fragments of personalities, or are both conditions true?

Psychiatrically oriented readers have considered Nathanael to be mad, and have dismissed the story of Coppelius/Coppola as a projection, as the influence of a traumatic childhood experience on an unstable young man. The story is thus interpreted as a figurative statement of growing mental illness, in other words, the emergence of insanity. Everything that Nathanael sees is distorted by this peculiar defect of his “vision,” and his life is a succession of wild misinterpretations. Other readers, however, have taken the position that Hoffmann intended the story to be primarily a fate drama, in which the central idea is that man is powerless against an external fate that moves in on him. According to this interpretation Nathanael was saved from death once by his father, once by Clara and her brother, but must succumb on the third occasion. Nathanael may go mad at the end, but his previous experiences are objective. Coppelius/Coppola really exists; he is the Enemy. It would be pointless to select one of these interpretations and reject the other, since Hoffmann offered clues to support both. In all probability he had both interpretations in mind when he wrote the story, and was deliberately creating a mystery. A unifying factor can possibly be found in the saying, “Things are as we see them.” Many strange threads run through this story. One is the motive of the eye. Over and over Hoffmann brings the physical organ and its function (or malfunction) into the story: the eyes that appear during the experiment that Nathanael watches, Coppelius’s threat to destroy Nathanael’s eyes, the distorted vision of Nathanael when he assigns life to Olimpia, the destruction of the dancing doll’s eyes, and the manifestations at the end of the story when Nathanael goes mad. Indeed, even the names Coppola and Clara are important: “coppola” means eye-socket in Italian, while the significance of Clara is obvious. Allied to the motive of eyes is the nature of the “experiments” performed by Coppelius and Nathanael’s father. They are usually interpreted as alchemy or perhaps magic, but we cannot be sure of this. To Hoffmann’s contemporaries this incident may simply have been a fanciful way of suggesting coining. Certainly the furnaces and cauldrons are all to be connected with casting. “Rath Krespel” first appeared as an untitled story in the Frauentaschenbuch für das Jahr 1818, where it was prefaced by a long letter of dedication to Fouqué. It was revised a little when it was included in Die Serapionsbrüder.

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In “Nutcracker and the King of Mice” a märchen or literary fairytale serves as the “unconscious focus” of the story. It indicates the inner relationships in the ideal world that created the present story situation, together with possibilities for future resolution. In this case, however, the märchen is not a literary myth, as in “The Golden Flower Pot” or The Master Flea. It is basically a children’s story, in which medieval Nuremberg receives one of its first glorifications. The concept linking this myth with the relationships Drosselmeier-Hoffmann and Stahlbaum-Hitzig is that a child is closer to the primal innocence (as in Wordsworth’s “trailing clouds of glory”) than an adult, and can enter and savor realms of experience or beyond-experience that even an adult with insight cannot enter. Dreams can become real only for children.

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One source of the story was Johann Bernhard Crespel (1747-1815), an eccentric German official who was a friend of the Goethe family and is mentioned in a letter from Goethe’s mother to the poet. Crespel apparently designed his own clothing to fit his moods, and at one time designed and built a house in the same way as Hoffmann’s Rath Krespel. How Hoffmann learned about Crespel is not known, although it has been speculated by H. W. Hewett-Thayer in his excellent Hoffmann, Author of the Tales that Hoffmann may have heard of him through Brentano. This, however, is only part of the personality of Krespel. It is generally conceded that an element of Hoffmann’s own personality has been added to that of the historical Crespel. Hoffmann’s Krespel is not really mad, but is very much like Hoffmann himself. He is really a man without a skin—as, indeed, Hoffmann describes him. Krespel’s sensitivity is so great that daily life would be impossible for him if he could not take refuge in semi-madness to abreact his unconscious processes. Ultimately, he is really horribly sane. Hoffmann’s musical life is also reflected in this story, particularly in the clash of the Italian and German musical cultures of the day. Such a clash of musics is often described in Hoffmann’s work. “The Interrupted Cadence” (“Die Fermate”), for example, describes a tempestuous affair between an Italian soprano and a German composer, who discover that there is no real possibility of understanding between them. Hoffmann himself shared such a tension between his admiration for the German tradition of Bach and Mozart on one hand, and his delight in Italian opera. It may be significant to Hoffmann’s point of view that in “Rath Krespel” the ideal combination of power and beauty, Antonia, cannot survive; she bears within herself germs of destruction. “Rath Krespel” is one of the most tragic of Hoffmann’s stories, since it involves not only death, but the destruction of an art and the misery of sane insanity. Equally sinister is the equation of Antonia and the strange violin, and the life-bond between them. It would be curious to know if the name Antonia had any special significance for Hoffmann, what with Antonio Stradivari. “Tobias Martin, Master Cooper and His Men” (“Meister Martin der Küfner und seine Gesellen”) first appeared in the Taschenbuch zum geselligen Vergnügen auf das Jahr 1819, and was reprinted with some alterations in the second volume of Die Serapionsbrüder (1819). Like another of Hoffmann’s stories, “Doge und Dogaressa,” it is essentially a program piece written to

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explain a painting by a now nearly forgotten Romantic artist, Karl Wilhelm Kolbe. “Tobias Martin” was suggested by a very large oil entitled “Die Böttcherwerkstatt,” which shows a group of coopers in antique costume working in an open shed. Hoffmann’s story creates the background against which this picture situation arose, and also carries the situation through to a resolution. Hoffmann thereby transmuted an academic painting into one of the most entertaining stories in early 19th-century German literature. The source for Hoffmann’s information about medieval Nuremberg and the meistersingers and early guilds was Johann Christoph Wagenseil’s De sacri romani imperii libera civitate Noribergensi Commentatio, or Chronicle of Nuremberg, which later became more famous as the source for Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. This same book also served as the source for Hoffmann’s well-known story about a homicidal maniac motivated by aesthetic impulses, “Das Fräulein von Scuderi,” which has been variously translated under the titles “Mademoiselle de Scuderi,” “Cardillac the Jeweller,” “Cardillac,” and so forth. In “Tobias Martin, Master Cooper,” as in most of his historical nouvelles, Hoffmann used a straight-line mode of narration which contrasts greatly with the involved avant-garde development of his fantasies, what with their double narratives, symbolic cores and fragmentations of personality. Yet even here there are unusual features. Another author might have told the story more strongly from the point of view of Friedrich, and might have pushed Meister Martin, the title figure, more into the background. Another artist might have treated Martin’s “growth” and his interpretation of the mysterious prophecy a little less ambiguously. At times it almost seems as if the story cannot be permitted to end until all of the major characters have learned that they must be honest with themselves. “Meister Martin” has long been a favorite, and around the turn of the present century it was usually regarded as Hoffmann’s best story. It has since fallen in esteem, while the fantasies have risen. To me it seems unfortunate that Hoffmann confined himself to writing “program fiction” simply to elucidate a mediocre painting. If the story had been independently written, it might be stronger in central situation and less sentimental. Nevertheless, the basic personalities of the story emerge with charm and clarity, and Hoffmann evokes the personality of Nuremberg so attractively that the story has served as the suggestion

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“The Mines of Falun” (“Die Bergwerke zu Falun”) first appeared in 1819 in Die Serapionsbrüder. In a critical afterword to the story one of Hoffmann’s spokesmen tells where the idea came from: an anecdote in G. H. Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaften, one of the most influential books of the day. According to Schubert, when miners opened a new tunnel in the great Swedish mine complex at Falun, they found the perfectly preserved body of a man dressed in archaic garments. Hoffmann was one of many writers who seized upon this incident as the kernel for a story, and the basic idea became as important for the early 19th century as the motive of the Frozen Pirate was at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Hoffmann’s story is written against a background that is strikingly romantic in its concepts and associations. Starting with Novalis (Count Friedrich von Hardenberg), prophet of German Romanticism, the miner as such took on a peculiar significance in German literature. He was not considered to be an exploited toiler or a laborer in a particularly dirty and dangerous mode of work. He became a quasisupernatural being who knew the intimate secrets of nature, of creation, and of the fructifying force that was believed to create the minerals. His knowledge passed beyond that of ordinary men, and he had a touch of the divine or demonic about him. Novalis in his Heinrich von Ofterdingen says of miners and mining, “Possessors of a much-envied happiness in learning nature’s hidden mysteries, and communing in solitude with the rocks, her mighty sons. . . . It is enough for the miner to know the hiding places of the metallic powers and to bring them forth to light; but their brilliance does not raise thoughts of covetousness in his pure heart. Untouched by this dangerous madness, he delights more in their marvellous formations, the strangeness of their origin, and the nooks in which they are hidden. . . . His business cuts him off from the usual life of man, and prevents his sinking into dull indifference as to the deep supernatural tie which binds man to heaven. He keeps his native simplicity, and sees in all around its inherent beauty and marvel. . . . In these obscure depths there grows the deepest faith in his heavenly Father, whose hand guides and preserves him in countless dangers. . . . He must have been a godlike man who first taught the noble craft of mining, and traced in the rocks so striking an image of life.” Novelis’s comments are not simply a literary

device; there are also elements here of the ancient magic associated with metals and minerals (as Mircea Eliade has discussed them in his Forge and the Crucible) which persisted strongly up through the Renaissance. For Hoffmann, the miner owes allegiance to a supernatural power personified as the Metal Queen. The heart of the story is Elis’s rejection of the metal revelation. Once again the artist (as in many other stories by Hoffmann) must choose between loss of his supernatural aims and the death of the domestic man. The agent of Elis’s death, the demonic Torbern, is really a creature out of Germanic literary folklore. Many of the Numbernip (Rübezahl) stories by Fouqué, for example, discuss folkloristic demons as erratically malevolent beings who are associated with the chthonic powers and serve both to lead and mislead man. “Signor Formica,” or “Salvator Rosa,” first appeared in late 1819 in the Taschenbuch zum geselligen Vergnügen auf das Jahr 1820, and was reprinted with minor changes in the fourth volume of Die Serapionsbrüder. It was subtitled a “novella,” and probably was written with the work of the Italian Renaissance novelists in mind. One of the critics in Die Serapionsbrüder, however, criticized it as resembling Boccaccio more in the beatings its characters received than in much else. Another facet of Hoffmann defended the story mildly by pointing out that both Cervantes and Boccaccio did not hesitate to propel their stories by physical violence. For “Signor Formica,” which in many ways is one of Hoffmann’s most interesting stories, Hoffmann drew upon the life of the great 17th-century Italian painter Salvator Rosa. At the time that Hoffmann wrote, Rosa stood high critically. The early Romantic revival of the late 18th century found him congenial. His well-known terribilità; his devastating energy; his highly felt painting technique and subject matter, in which the forces of nature seemed to be the real subjects, with but a few scattered humans as symbolic punctuation; and his general evocation of untamable, dynamic violence—all aroused enthusiasm. Rosa’s life was reasonably well known in Hoffmann’s day, and Hoffmann made a thorough study of French, Italian, and German sources. To get local color and to create the atmosphere of Italy, Hoffmann read extensively in travel accounts, particularly the reminiscences of Karl Philipp Moritz, an 18thcentury German traveller. Hoffmann also collected Italian prints and maps, which he hung on the walls of his rooms, for inspiration, just as his

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for much other work, chief of which is Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger.

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character Peregrinus Tyss in Meister Floh does for China. Hoffmann, of course, was saturated in Italian musical life, and for this needed no special sources. Basically “Signor Formica” is accurate—with occasional liberties—although the personality of Antonio Scacciati and the incidents of his courtship are fictitious. Salvator Rosa did leave Naples a few steps ahead of the police because of his share in Masaniello’s insurrection; he did act as a member of a commedia dell’ arte group in Rome; and he did later found an accademia in Florence. Like Hoffmann himself the historical Rosa was a virtuoso in many media: painting, literature, music, and the stage. Today, however, he is a nearly forgotten member of a branch of Baroque painting. One of the most curious aspects of “Signor Formica” lies in its use of the double or doppelgänger. Originally, the doppelgänger was an element of Germanic folklore. It amounted to seeing one’s own ghost, an exact double of oneself: this meeting was usually an omen of death. (In origin this idea would seem to go back to the primitive idea of multiple souls and soul-loss as a cause of death.) Around the end of the 18th century the doppelgänger became an important element in German fiction. The sinister elements were often suppressed and in their place came an intellectual interest in seeing oneself. The most curious incident involving a doppelgänger came from the life of Goethe: the great poet believed that on several occasions he had seen his own doppelgänger. For Hoffmann the doppelgänger had a special significance. It was not simply a mysterious, supernatural double; instead it was associated with the strange phenomena of the mind, with personality fragments, with multiple personalities (a phenomenon which interested early 19th-century psychologists) and with emergence of an unconscious mind. In story technique this meant that a personality complex could assume spontaneous, autonomous life and become a character itself. From a converse point of view, two persons who were physically nearly identical might fuse, to form a single personality, or to create an impermanent, rotating personality which shifts from pole to pole of identity. This is the case in The Devil’s Elixir where two persons in a doppelgänger relationship to one another contaminate each other. At times this concept of the doppelgänger (as in Jean Paul’s Doppelgänger and Goethe’s Wahlverwandschaft) can become attenuated enough to drop the idea of likeness or identity,

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and to indicate inner relationships, like “elective affinities” in the chemistry of the day. This results in a horizontal concept of kinship as opposed to a vertical one. The strongest bonds of relationship are between persons who are similar rather than those of vertical blood descent. Persons in a doppelgänger relationship are sympathetic (in the derivational sense of the word) to one another’s experiences. A later stage of this idea, familiar to us from Dumas’ novel, is the motive of the “Corsican brothers”—identical twins, perhaps separated Siamese twins, who both feel pain if one is injured, no matter how far apart they may be. In “Salvator Rosa” Hoffmann makes use of the doppelgänger motive in a novel way. The idea is now completely secularized and stripped of its supernatural associations, and as stage imposture it serves to resolve the story. The confrontation of a lecherous old miser with his double twice dissolves the frame of difficulties that beset Antonio and Salvator Rosa. All in all, Hoffmann’s story is successful in evoking the atmosphere of baroque Italy, with its violence, egotism, saturation in the pictorial arts, and devotion to music. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that in this respect “Salvator Rosa” is the most successful historical novel that had yet appeared in Europe. Where Hoffmann may have lagged somewhat in literary technique (as compared with, say, Goethe), he was ahead in the intuitive apprehension of alien times and places which was so characteristic of the German Romantics from Herder on. As a result, his picture of 17th-century Italy carries conviction. In other respects, however, the novel suffers a little from Gothic survivals. The concept of the hero as one “der nie als Held des Stückes, sondern nur als Vermittler” forces Antonio Scacciati to have a passive role, while Salvator Rosa, the demonic activist, initiates and creates. The point would seem to be that the artist can succeed in his work and his love-life only with the assistance of a daimon. To a modern reader, this peculiar plot device may make the story seem less a true nouvelle than a narrative, but the fact that “Salvator Rosa” is written to an unfamiliar aesthetic need not impair our pleasure in reading it. “The King’s Betrothed” (“Die Königsbraut”) was written especially for the last volume of Die Serapionsbrüder (1821). Each volume of the collection ends with a fantastic story, and “The King’s Betrothed” concludes Volume IV and the set on a note of fantasy. It is very heavily ironic in tone, and it satirizes several contemporary phenomena: bad poets, particularly the sickly senti-

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The subject matter of “The King’s Betrothed” has been taken from Renaissance and Enlightenment books on occultism and magic, an area in which Hoffmann was well-read. The doctrine of Paracelsus and others in this tradition was that the natural forces were the product of ideal substances, which were personified as supernatural beings, usually called elementals because of their relationship to the Aristotelian elements: salamanders as the spirits or essence of fire; undines for water; sylphs for the air; and gnomes for the earth. Slightly variant classifications may be found in the several sources. Hoffmann found the precise origins of his system and many of the ludicrous historical details about human-elemental relationships in one of the early books associated with the Renaissance Rosicrucian movement, Le Comte de Gabalis, an eccentric novel by the Abbé Montfaucon de Villars. Yet beyond this occult background is Hoffmann’s probable intention of showing a personality (Aennchen) who has submerged herself in the vegetative life so deeply that it emerges separately and tries to swallow her.

TITLE COMMENTARY “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman”) S. S. PRAWER (ESSAY DATE 1965) SOURCE: Prawer, S. S. “Hoffmann’s Uncanny Guest: A Reading of ‘Der Sandmann.’” German Life and Letters 18 (1965): 297-308. In the following essay, Prawer analyzes the psychological issues addressed through Hoffmann’s use of various narrative patterns in “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman”).

Why should we interest ourselves in such grossly improbable tales as E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann”? That is the question raised forcibly—and justly—by Sir Walter Scott, in a critique which Goethe endorsed but which is far too often dismissed, nowadays, as an explosion of jealousy at Hoffmann’s success with a foreign as well as a German public. ‘It is impossible’, Scott maintains in his essay On the Supernatural in Fictitious Compositions,

to subject tales of this nature to criticism. They are not the visions of a poetical mind, they have scarcely even the seeming authenticity which the hallucinations of lunacy convey to the patient; they are the feverish dreams of a lightheaded patient, to which, though they may sometimes excite by their peculiarity, or surprise by their oddity, we never seem disposed to yield more than momentary attention. In fact, the inspirations of Hoffmann so often resemble the ideas produced by the immoderate use of opium, that we cannot help considering his case as one requiring the assistance of medicine rather than of criticism.

And Scott breaks off his attempt to retell the plot of “Der Sandmann” with the words: ‘But we should be mad ourselves were we to trace these ravings any farther.’1 What Sir Walter seems to have missed is that the questions he quite properly raised were very much in Hoffmann’s own mind, and that his indictment is in fact anticipated in “Der Sandmann” itself. Nathanael, the hero of the tale, reads a horrific poem to Clara in order to excite her, ‘wiewohl er nicht deutlich dachte, wozu denn Clara entzündet und wozu es denn nun eigentlich führen solle, sie mit grauenvollen Bildern zu ängstigen.’ Clara’s reactions to this poem are clear enough, and should have won Scott’s approval: ‘Wirf das tolle—unsinnige—wahnsinnige Märchen ins Feuer.’2 When Hoffmann’s narrator, however, comes to speak of his own motives in setting down Nathanael’s history, he suggests another line of approach. No-one, he declares, had asked him for his story: Du weisst ja aber wohl, dass ich zu dem wunderlichen Geschlechte der Autoren gehöre, denen, tragen sie etwas so in sich, wie ich es vorhin beschrieben, so zumute wird, als frage jeder, der in ihre Nähe kommt, und nebenher auch wohl noch die ganze Welt: ‘Was ist es denn? Erzählen Sie, Liebster!’—So trieb es mich denn gar gewaltig, von Nathanaels verhängnisvollem Leben zu dir zu sprechen.

He then discusses the difficulty he had in giving his tale a suitable literary form (affording Hoffmann an opportunity to indulge in some delightful self-parody) and continues: Vielleicht wirst du, o mein Leser! dann glauben, dass nichts wunderlicher und toller sei als das wirkliche Leben und dass dieses der Dichter doch nur wie in eines mattgeschliffnen Spiegels dunklem Widerschein auffassen könne.3

That is one possible answer to Scott’s objections: a story like “Der Sandmann” is true, it gives literary shape to insights which cannot be conveyed in any way that is less grotesque, absurd and uncanny. The narrator sees himself as an

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mental poets of a school parallel to the English Della Cruscans; ineffectual, ivory-tower mystical philosophers and philosophy; and stories describing erotic relationships between mortals and supernatural beings. Of such stories Fouqué’s Undine is the most famous.

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Ancient Mariner driven to speak of what he has seen, driven to compel the attention of his auditors through every possible rhetorical device. One remembers that Cyprian, in Die Serapionsbrüder, rejects ‘Grauen ohne Not, ohne Beziehung’ as forcibly as Scott himself.4 In the opening paragraph of “Der Sandmann” two worlds confront each other; and this confrontation determines the structure of the whole story that is to follow. We need only list the adjectives of this paragraph: ‘Hold’, ‘süss’, ‘hold’ again, ‘freundlich’, ‘hell’—all attributes of Clara who represents (as her very name tells us) a realm of light, clarity and simplicity that stands in dialectical relationship to another realm of which the following adjectives speak: ‘zerrissen’, ‘dunkel’, ‘grässlich’, ‘drohend’, ‘schwarz’ and—a little further on—‘feindlich’, ‘tödlich’. 5 These two realms belong together, and it is only because we are given so plain a vision of the first that the second has such power to terrify. This is what Dostoevsky hinted at when he contrasted the ‘poetic’ fantasy of Hoffmann with the ‘materialistic’ fantasy of Edgar Allan Poe. Hoffmann is immeasurably greater than Poe as a poet. With Hoffmann there is an ideal, not always explicit perhaps, but in this ideal there is purity, real beauty. . . . If there is fantasy in Poe, it is a kind of materialistic fantasy, if one may speak of such a thing. It is obvious that he is wholly American even in his most fantastic tales.6

The ‘ideal’ of which Dostoevsky speaks in this passage is quite different from that presented in “Der goldne Topf,” for Clara belongs firmly to the world we all know—she is Veronica raised to the status of a ‘holdes Engelsbild’;7 but it is an ideal nevertheless, and it says much for Hoffmann’s psychological penetration that he makes his Nathanael send to Clara (by what we would now call a Freudian error) the letter addressed to Lothar in which he speaks of his encounter with Coppola. The world of the ‘Sandmann’ and that of Clara belong together—the tension between them constitutes the ultimate theme of this as of so many other of Hoffmann’s tales. That is one important pattern of which the opening of the story makes us aware; but there are others that are no less important. The first paragraph rises to a climax of apprehension (‘Dunkle Ahnungen eines grässlichen . . . Geschicks’) and seems suddenly to swoop down, bathetically, into the banal everyday. ‘Kurz und gut, das Entsetzliche, was mir geschah, dessen tödlichen Eindruck zu vermeiden ich mich vergeblich bemühe’ (now it comes, we think, now we

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are to be given a good look at the object of terror that has been so consistently hinted at) ‘besteht in nichts anderm, als dass vor einigen Tagen, nämlich am 30. Oktober mittags um 12 Uhr, ein Wetterglashändler in meine Stube trat und mir seine Ware anbot. Ich kaufte nichts und drohte, ihn die Treppe herabzuwerfen, worauf er aber von selbst fortging.’8 But this is not really an anticlimax at all, for Hoffmann’s subject is precisely the terror that lurks in the most apparently ordinary and everyday. Almost immediately he repeats the pattern just described, in Nathanael’s childhood reminiscence of lying in wait for the dreadful, the fascinating Sandman. ‘Der Sandmann, der fürchterliche Sandmann’—again tension is built up with the characteristic, often over-insistent Hoffmann rhetoric—‘ist der alte Advokat Coppelius, der manchmal bei uns zu Mittage isst!’ ‘Aber’, Nathaniel continues, in terms that make the intention crystal-clear, ‘die grässlichste Gestalt hätte mir nicht tieferes Entsetzen erregen können, als eben dieser Coppelius.’9 Here we have an exact reversal of the structural pattern of, say, Mrs Radcliffe’s novels, in which ‘supernatural’ events are given a ‘natural’ explanation at the end. Hoffmann’s explanations explain nothing at all: they point, instead, to the real mystery, to the connexion between the familiar and the uncanny; they suggest the working of unknown powers in a world in which we feel at home. Yet a third important pattern may be observed in the opening paragraphs of “Der Sandmann.” We are taken into a comfortable family circle—all the members of the family are disposed about a round table at which the father smokes his pipe, drinks his glass of beer and tells the children fantastic stories. Into this circle breaks the terrifying figure of the Sandman, at first in the nurse’s tale, then in the shape of the lawyer Coppelius; there is a climax of terror, until, it seems, the Sandman is cast out and the family circle closes again protectively about the child. ‘Ein sanfter warmer Hauch glitt über mein Gesicht, ich erwachte wie aus dem Todesschlaf, die Mutter hatte sich über mich hingebeugt. “Ist der Sandmann noch da?” stammelte ich. “Nein, mein liebes Kind, der ist lange, lange fort, der tut dir keinen Schaden!”—So sprach die Mutter und küsste und herzte den wiedergewonnenen Liebling.’1 0 But this is nothing but a reculer pour mieux sauter, for soon afterwards all ‘Gemütlichkeit’ is dispelled and the family group shattered by the father’s death.—The pattern of Nathanael’s childhood reminiscence is repeated exactly in the second part of the story, where we find the idyllic love of Nathanael and

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What appears in “Der Sandmann” as a structural principle is made explicit when Cyprian, in Die Serapionsbrüder, comments on a story significantly entitled “Der unheimliche Gast.” In einen stillen gemütlichen Familienkreis trat, als eben allerlei Gespenstergeschichten aufgetischt wurden, plötzlich ein Fremder, der allen unheimlich und grauenhaft erschien, seiner scheinbaren Flachheit und Alltäglichkeit unerachtet. Dieser Fremde verstörte aber durch sein Erscheinen nicht nur den frohen Abend, sondern das Glück, die Ruhe der ganzen Familie auf lange Zeit.1 2

A stranger, an ‘uncanny guest’, who appears at first banal and undistinguished, destroys the family idyll. The very form of the sentence which introduces him, however, shows that he really belongs to this family idyll—that he is witness to a realm with which the family was seeking contact at the very moment of his irruption: ‘. . . trat, als eben allerlei Gespenstergeschichten aufgetischt wurden, plötzlich ein Fremder . . .’ The stranger is ‘unheimlich’ not only in the sense that after his appearance men no longer feel ‘at home’ in their world, but also in that deeper sense of which Schelling spoke when he defined the word ‘unheimlich’ as ‘Alles, was im Geheimnis, im Verborgnen, in der Latenz bleiben sollte und hervorgetreten ist’;1 3 or Freud, when he endorsed Schelling’s definition and added: ‘Das Unheimliche ist . . . das ehemals Heimische, Altvertraute. Die Vorsilbe un an diesem Worte ist aber die Marke der Verdrängung.’1 4 In the essay from which the sentence just quoted comes, Freud discusses “Der Sandmann” as a notable example of the Uncanny in literature. He lays particular stress, not so much on the motif of the mechanical doll (which had attracted Offenbach, Délibes and many others) as that of ‘fear for the loss of one’s eyes’. The Sandman threatens the boy’s eyes in the nurse’s tale and in the scene in which Coppelius and Nathanael’s father are observed at their alchemistic experiments; and he later comes between Nathanael and the consum-

mation of his love. Freud sees in CoppeliusCoppola, Spalanzani and Nathanael’s father parts of a single image, a ‘split type figure’ like the two fathers of Hamlet; fear for the loss of one’s eyes is a disguise assumed by fear of castration; and Olimpia, the mechanical doll, is an objectified complex of Nathanael’s, a sign that his father-fixation has made him incapable of normal love. Freud concludes: Wir haben das Recht, diese Liebe [zu Olimpia] eine narzissistische zu heissen, und verstehen, dass der ihr Verfallene sich dem realen Liebesobjekt entfremdet. Wie psychologisch richtig es aber ist, dass der durch den Kastrationskomplex an den Vater fixierte Jüngling der Liebe zum Weibe unfähig wird, zeigen zahlreiche Krankenanalysen, deren Inhalt zwar weniger phantastisch, aber kaum minder traurig ist als die Geschchte des Studenten Nathaniel [sic].1 5

But as with Scott so with Freud—we find once again that Hoffmann has himself anticipated his interpreter’s point of view. ‘Gerade heraus’, writes Clara in the letter whose rationalizing Nathanael finds so distasteful, ‘will ich es Dir nur gestehen, dass, wie ich meine, alles Entsetzliche und Schreckliche, wovon Du sprichst, nur in Deinem Innern vorging, die wahre, wirkliche Aussenwelt aber daran wohl wenig Teil hatte.’1 6 The possibility that everything in the story which transcends ordinary experience may be taken as Nathanael’s delusion is an important part of the effect of “Der Sandmann.”1 7 This does not mean, however, that the story has only private significance. In Die Serapionsbrüder, Lothar defends the fascination that insanity has for him by speculating ‘dass die Natur gerade beim Abnormen Blicke vergönne in ihre schauerliche Tiefe’;1 8 and Kreisler is shown, in Kater Murr and elsewhere, to see more deeply into the heart of things than his more obviously ‘sane’ contemporaries. In “Der Sandmann” Clara puts it as follows: Gibt es eine dunkle Macht, die so recht feindlich und verräterisch einen Faden in unser Inneres legt, woran sie uns dann festpackt und fortzieht auf einem gefahrvollen, verderblichen Wege, den wir sonst nicht betreten haben würden—gibt es eine solche Macht, so muss sie in uns sich wie wir selbst gestalten, ja unser Selbst werden. . . .1 9

The ‘dark powers’, ‘uncanny powers’, ‘inimical principles’ of which Hoffmann likes to speak work through men’s minds, but are not necessarily identical with men’s minds, are not necessarily merely signs of our personal unconscious. There is something devilish, something motivelessly malign in Coppelius-Coppola, something which connects him with that more than natural realm of evil which is hinted at in the nurse’s story.

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Clara disturbed by the appearance of Coppola and Olimpia; instead of the swoon of the earlier episode we now have a fit of madness, until the protective circle closes, or seems to close, again. Nathanael ‘erwachte wie aus schwerem, fürchterlichem Traum, er schlug die Augen auf und fühlte wie ein unbeschreibliches Wonnegefühl mit sanfter himmlischer Wärme ihn durchströmte . . .’1 1 But this too proves to be nothing but the calm before the real storm, before the last appearance of Coppelius and Nathanael’s incurable madness and death.

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Freud is undeniably right when he maintains that a story like “Der Sandmann” taps deeper regions than that of our normal waking consciousness; and it is interesting to find Hoffmann himself, through the mouth of BelcampoSchönfeld in Die Elixiere des Teufels, anticipating Freud’s image of a ‘censor’ of the mind whose activities must be circumvented. Hoffmann’s image is that of a customs-official: Ei, ehrwürdiger Herr! . . . Was haben Sie denn nun davon! Ich meine von der besonderen Geistesfunktion, die man Bewusstsein nennt, und die nichts anders ist, als die verfluchte Tätigkeit eines verdammten Toreinnehmers—Acciseofficianten— Oberkontrollassistenten, der sein heilloses Comptoir im Oberstübchen aufgeschlagen hat und zu aller Ware, die hinauswill, sagt: ‘Hei . . . hei . . . die Ausfuhr ist verboten . . . im Lande, im Lande bleibt’s.’ Die schönsten Juwelen werden wie schnöde Saatkörner in die Erde gesteckt und was emporschiesst, sind höchstens Runkelrüben . . . Und doch sollte jene Ausfuhr einen Handelsverkehr begründen mit der herrlichen Gottesstadt da droben, wo alles stolz und herrlich ist.2 0

The last sentence of Belcampo’s speech, like the extract from Clara’s letter quoted above, suggests that Hoffmann’s sympathies would have been with Jung rather than Freud—as is indeed only natural when we consider that there is a direct line between Jung’s mode of thinking and that of writers like Schelling, Baader, Reil and G. H. Schubert, whom Hoffmann read with great avidity. For Hoffmann the personal unconscious is a means of gaining contact with something larger and deeper, something to which Belcampo gives the Augustinian name ‘die herrliche Gottesstadt’ but which we may equate, without serious distortion, with Jung’s ‘Collective Unconscious’. We already have an illuminating exegesis of “Der goldne Topf” by Jung’s closest associate;2 1 but “Der Sandmann” too—which may be regarded as the reversal or ‘Zurücknahme’ of “Der goldne Topf”—has many elements that would seem to demand a Jungian analysis. Coppelius-Coppola may be seen as the hero’s ‘Shadow’; Lothar and Siegmund give us (rather colourlessly, it must be admitted) the archetype of the ‘Seelenfreund’; Clara and Olimpia clearly represent two opposing aspects of the Anima; and the ‘circle of fire’, which plays so prominent a part in Nathanael’s visions and poems, may be seen as a perverted Mandala.2 2 The important point, here and elsewhere, is that “Der Sandmann” must not be regarded—as Scott clearly tried to do—as a mere capriccio or arabesque; that it reproduces through its figures, incidents and structure, the logic of the uncon-

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scious. And this leads us back to a motif which we have already seen to be of central importance: the irruption of an ‘uncanny guest’ into a cosy familycircle to which he seems, somehow, to belong. We may now interpret this as the irruption of dark images from below the threshold of consciousness, images that push past the ‘censor’ or ‘Acciseofficiant’ of the conscious mind. This may lead to disaster, as in “Der Sandmann”; but it may also lead to healing and salvation as in “Der goldne Topf.” No wonder that we owe a close analysis of the former story to Freud, while an analysis of the latter has been inspired by Jung. There is great danger, however, in Freud’s approach to “Der Sandmann”—the danger of treating literary figures and episodes as mere disguises, as mere analogies to psychic processes. This does violence to the complexity and concreteness of the work. Take the ‘eye’-motif, for instance, whose importance in “Der Sandmann” Freud quite properly stressed. It is undeniable that ‘eyes’ often seem to suggest something else in this story: when we see Spalanzani take up Olimpia’s bleeding eyeballs and throw them at Nathanael, exclaiming that they had been stolen from the very Nathanael who is watching all this—then we may be forgiven for believing, with Freud, that organs of generation rather than organs of sight are here in question. But elsewhere in the story, ‘eyes’ are clearly something with which one sees, something whose loss is particularly dreadful to an artist who must view the world he uses as material for his art. In “Der Sandmann,” eyes are mirrors at once of the soul and of the universe; painters compare Clara’s eyes with Ruisdael’s lakes that mirror a whole landscape, while musicians exclaim: ‘Was See—was Spiegel!—Können wir denn das Mädchen anschauen, ohne dass uns aus ihrem Blick wunderbare himmlische Gesänge und Klänge entgegenstrahlen, die in unser Innerstes dringen, dass da alles wach und rege wird?’2 3 Then there are the eyes of the hypnotist, the ‘stechende Augen’ of Coppelius and Spalanzani, means of subduing the will, of imposing one man’s dominance on another: this too is a motif that does not fit easily into the scheme Freud suggested. In the same way, one may agree with Freud in seeing the doll Olimpia as a sign of Nathanael’s narcissism—especially since Hoffmann makes Nathanael call Clara a ‘lebloses, verdammtes Automat’ when she fails to admire his literary compositions. But Olimpia is surely more than this. She embodies the fascination—half terror, half delight—that Hoffmann felt, ever since his early studies of Wiegleb’s ‘Natural Magic’, in the face of magical tricks.

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Last but not least, there is the grotesque figure of Coppelius, the ‘Sandmann’ of the title. On his delineation Hoffmann has expended more care than on anything else in the story—almost all the alterations he made between the first draft and the final printing have to do with Coppelius. He strikes out, for instance, a passage in which the lawyer, dressed all in white, is seen as a walking snowman whose face has been painted red; he removes the episode in which Coppelius lays his hands on the eyes of Nathanael’s little sister, who thereupon falls into a sickness that first blinds and then kills her; he remodels the end of the story, in which Coppelius was originally made to challenge Nathanael to throw himself down from the tower he has climbed with Clara; and he cancels sentences which make Coppelius appear, even before the death of Nathanael’s father, as a social outcast: Mit wüthendem Blick fuhr er auf mich loss ich schrie Hülfe—Hülfe, des Nachbars Brauers Knecht sprang in die Thür, Hey hey—hey—der tolle Advokat—der tolle Coppelius—macht euch über ihn her—macht euch über ihn her—so rief es und stürmte von allen Seiten auf ihn ein—er floh gehetzt über die Strasse. . . .2 5

Coppelius remains eccentric and sinister—but in the later version he is more integrated into the small-town world in which he and Nathanael live. He is not only a childhood bogey-man, not only part of a threatening father-image; as lawyer and secret alchemist he is also an embodiment of greedy Philistinism as Hoffmann saw it (in Die Serapionsbrüder, it will be remembered, Lothar

talks at one point of ‘tiefer, gespenstischer Philistrismus’2 6 ). The small provincial town, and the university-town too, with its professors who live only for their science and who see in man (like the doctor in Woyzeck) no more than a guinea-pig for their psychological or physiological or mechanical experiments—these places have become uncanny, they are no longer a home for a sensitive child or an artistic adult. Coppelius and Spalanzani objectify feelings of alienation that we meet again and again in the literature of the last century and a half: the alienation of man from the world he has created; the alienation of man from parts of his own personality that have been repressed only to return as spectral ‘doubles’ to hound and torment him. Here Hoffmann must be seen together with Poe, with Dickens, with Dostoevsky; with all those writers who have depicted the city as the home of uncanny presences that haunted, in earlier times, the castles of the Gothic novel and of de Sade, or the mountains and woods of Tieck’s first ‘Märchen’. Once again we are confronted by the image of the ‘uncanny guest’. Coppola seems an outsider, an itinerant Italian in the world of the small German town: but is he not identical with the lawyer Coppelius, who belonged to that world and whom Nathanael’s father venerated above all his fellow-citizens? The neurotic constitution that makes Nathanael appear predestined to madness, gives him at the same time a clear insight into social realities; and his ‘Zerrissenheit’ makes him into a drastic paradigm for the fate of a sensitive, artistically gifted man in the world of cities. In a letter to Nathanael from which I have quoted several times already, Clara speaks of a ‘dunkle, psychische Macht’ 2 7 that draws the strange shapes of the outer world into ourselves. ‘Es ist das Phantom unseres eigenen Ichs’, she concludes, ‘dessen innige Verwandtschaft und dessen tiefe Einwirkung auf unser Gemüt uns in die Hölle wirft oder in den Himmel verzückt.’2 8 Once again we have that opposition of two worlds, one of darkness and one of light, which we noted at the beginning; but this time they are termed ‘Hölle’ and ‘Himmel’, and on other pages we meet again and again words like ‘Engel’ and ‘Teufel’, or ‘ewiges Verderben’, which seem to take us into familiar theological regions. In Die Elixiere des Teufels Hoffmann tried his hand at integrating such elements into a traditional, Christian scheme; but in works like “Der Sandmann” they seem to be floating loose, torn from their moorings by secularization. This contributes to the uncanny effect of such stories: transcendence

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She is also, quite consciously, made into a symbol of all that is soulless in art and in society: a certain kind of bel canto singing, in which the human voice is reduced to the level of a mechanical instrument; a purely passive and receptive attitude to art, which enervates the artist and harms him more than the most destructive criticism; the state of mind of those who attended the ‘aesthetic teaparties’ which were so prominent a feature of German social life in the early nineteenth century. Fouqué once maintained that Hoffmann conceived Olimpia after meeting a lady who provoked comment because of ‘das streng Gemessene in ihrem Benehmen . . . wie auch das allzu Taktmässige ihres Gesanges.’2 4 Moreover: we may see Spalanzani as part of a split father-image, as Freud would have us do—but he is also Cagliostro, the swindler whose tricks are an earnest of real wonders and miracles; he is also the scientist and mechanician, who was already beginning, in Hoffmann’s time, to usurp the functions of God and the Devil and whom Hoffmann was to pillory again in Klein Zaches.

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breaks, literally as an ‘Ammenmärchen’, into a world that has no generally accepted theological scheme to accommodate it; the demonic breaks into a world in which thoughts of the devil tempt to laughter as well as atavistic terror. Mag der ehrliche alte Hafftitz [Lothar tells his fellow-‘Serapionsbrüder’ at one point] Anlass gehabt haben, jenes seltsame Ereignis, wie der Teufel in Berlin ein bürgerliches Leben geführt, anzumerken, welchen er will, genug, die Sache bleibt für uns rein fantastisch, und selbst das unheimlich Spukhafte, das sonst dem ‘furchtbar verneinenden Prinzip der Schöpfung’ beiwohnt, kann, durch den komischen Kontrast in dem es erscheint, nur jenes seltsame Gefühl hervorbringen, das, eine eigentümliche Mischung des Grauenhaften und Ironischen, uns auf gar nicht unangenehme Weise spannt.2 9

The shifts in tone imposed by the ‘game’ that has just been noticed affect the structure of Hoffmann’s sentences, too; paratactic, breathless sentences alternate startlingly with hypotactic, long-winded, encapsulated ones:

Once again the image of the ‘uncanny guest’ obtrudes itself. Once again something dark breaks into a circle of light—the ‘Diesseitigkeit’ of Hoffmann’s world (attested by the strong realistic elements of his art) is invaded by mysterious and threatening messengers from beyond. In reading “Der Sandmann” and other, similar, stories one has the impression that the wondrous, the transcendent, the demonic are playing a game of hide-and-seek—or, more accurately, of cat-and-mouse—with the characters; and this game seems to have materially determined the structure of such stories too. Everywhere in “Der Sandmann” we meet on the one hand motifs of dressing up and disguising, of keeping secret and mystifying; and on the other motifs of peeping from a hiding-place, peering out from cupboards and curtains, peering across into strange houses with the aid of telescopes. (This ‘Peeping Tom’ motif is of course connected with the ‘eye’ images whose prominence has already been noted). The cat-and-mouse game, however, determines not only what Hoffmann tells but also his manner of telling it. The author retreats behind a fictitious narrator, an imagined friend of Nathanael’s engaged in piecing his story together. This narrator, in his turn, sometimes identifies himself with his readers’ tastes, sometimes ironically distances himself from them, ascribing Philistine imperceptiveness to his ‘dear reader’; sometimes he seeks to draw the reader into his spell by every possible rhetorical device, then again he retreats in a cloud of witticisms à la Jean Paul. The somewhat bizarre construction of the tale—hovering between epistolary and third person narrative, between flashback and straightforward time-sequence interrupted, again and again, by an ironic excursus— this too is part of the pervading cat-and-mouse game. Zigzagging narrative hides an action that is

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logical and symmetrical: twice Nathanael’s life moves from idyll to a crescendo of terror; this is followed, on each occasion, by a fit of swooning or of madness, after which the idyll is reestablished; and only after this false reassurance does fate show its hand completely, bringing death at first to Nathanael’s father and then to Nathanael himself.3 0

Siegmund, so stark er war, vermochte nicht den Rasenden zu bändigen; der schrie mit fürchterlicher Stimme immerfort: ‘Holzpüppchen, dreh’ dich’’ und schlug um sich mit geballten Fäusten. Endlich gelang es der vereinten Kraft mehrerer, ihn zu überwältigen, indem sie ihn zu Boden warfen und banden. Seine Worte gingen unter in entsetzlichem tierischen Gebrüll. So in grässlicher Raserei tobend wurde er nach dem Tollhause gebracht. Ehe ich, günstiger Leser! dir zu erzählen fortfahre, was sich weiter mit dem unglücklichen Nathanael zugetragen, kann ich dir, solltest du einigen Anteil an dem geschickten Mechanikus und AutomatFabrikanten Spalanzani nehmen, versichern, dass er von seinen Wunden völlig geheilt wurde. . . .3 1

These are Hoffmann’s two voices, which stand in the same relationship to one another as the worlds of Clara and Coppelius, or the fantastic and realistic elements of the tale: the voice of the visionary who wants to draw the reader into his spell by fair means or foul, and the voice of the ironic artist who knows how to distance himself from his creation. It is the co-presence in him of visionary and coolly weighing craftsman which makes Hoffmann find such exact expression for the physiology as well as the psychology of fear; makes him experiment so successfully with grotesquely distorted language and gradations of sound; enables him to blend so perfectly exactly observed vignettes of German small-town life with terrifying fantasy. Only occasionally he writes too quickly and takes the easy way out—then he produces passages (like his description of the abortive duel between Nathanael and Lothar) that read like parodies of Spiess, Benedicte Neubert or even Clauren. For all their occasional lapses of taste, Hoffmann’s tales of terror have not lost their fascination for us today. It is not their plot that draws us (for that is often melodramatic) nor is it the characters Hoffmann presents (for these are often either colourless or grotesquely incredible). We

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2. E. T. A. Hoffmanns Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. C. G. v. Maassen, München und Leipzig 1908-1928, III, 24, 25. This edition is henceforward cited as S.W. 3. S.W., III, 18-19. 4. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Sämtliche Werke, ed. E. Grisebach, Leipzig n.d., VI, 102. This edition is henceforward cited as Grisebach. 5. S.W., III, 3. 6. Quoted in C. E. Passage, Dostoevski the Adapter. A Study of Dostoevski’s Use of the Tales of Hoffmann, Chapel Hill, 1954, pp. 191-2. 7. S.W., III, 3. 8. S.W., III, 3-4. 9. S.W., III, 7. 10. S.W., III, 10. 11. S.W., III, 40. 12. S.W., VII, 158. 13. F. W. J. v. Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, Stuttgart and Augsburg 1857, 2. Abt., II, 649. 14. Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche. Aufsätze zur Literatur, Frankfurt 1963, p. 75. 15. Ibid., pp. 60-1. 16. S.W., III, 13. 17. Cf. E. F. Hoffmann, ‘Zu E. T. A. Hoffmanns ‘Sandmann’’, Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht, deutsche Sprache und Literatur, Wisconsin, LIV (1962), pp. 244 ff. 18. Grisebach, VI, 28. 19. S.W., III, 14-15. 20. S.W., II, 263. 21. A. Jaffé, Bilder und Symbole aus E. T. A. Hoffmanns Märchen ‘Der goldne Topf’, in: C. G. Jung, Gestaltungen des Unbewussten, Zürich 1950, pp. 240 ff. 22. An interesting account of the connexion between Jung and the ‘natural philosophers’ of German Romanticism will be found in K. Ochsner, E. T. A. Hoffmann als Dichter des Unbewussten, Frauenfeld und Leipzig 1936, pp. 133 ff. 23. S.W., III, 20. 24. S.W., III, ix-x. 25. S.W., III, 359. 26. Grisebach, VI, 16. 27. ‘Physisch’ (in all editions) is probably a misprint for ‘psychisch’. cf. Hoffmann’s MS version, S.W., III, 363: ‘die unheimliche psychische Gewalt’. 28. S.W., III, 15. 29. S.W., VII, 17.

Notes 1. Essays on Chivalry, Romance and the Drama, London n.d. (The Chandos Classics), pp. 467-8.

30. Cf. M. Kuttner, Die Gestaltung des Individualitätsproblems bei E. T. A. Hoffmann, Düsseldorf 1936, p. 40. 31. S.W., III, 38.

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read them for the complicated and tortured personality that shows itself behind and within plot and characters, revealing itself in rhetoric of terror, in play of irony, in complex narrative structures. We read them for the strange and haunting visions that are evoked as precisely as the familiar setting into which they break. We read them because they exemplify perfectly what Hoffmann called the ‘Serapiontic principle’: the ability to mould the materials of the outer world (men, landscapes, events, literary reminiscences) into images for an exactly apprehended inner world. In one sense such visions are private—they are clearly connected with Hoffmann’s experiences in the broken home of his youth, his life with the ‘Oh-Weh-Onkel’, his affairs with Julia Marc and Cora Hatt, and all those sufferings and annoyances which he depicted so faithfully in his books about Kreisler. But they also have representative force: they constitute powerful symbols of the experience of artists in a world of cities, of Germans in the early nineteenth century, of men in a world which they have themselves made but which now confronts them in strange, hostile, terrifying shapes. Sir Walter Scott preferred “Das Majorat” to “Der Sandmann,” because the old ‘Justitiarius’ in the former story corresponded more exactly than any figure in the latter with Sir Walter’s image of a German (that ‘upright honesty and firm integrity which is to be met with in all classes which come from the ancient Teutonic stock’); and also because the ‘Justitiarius’ showed himself able ‘as well to overcome the malevolent attacks of evil beings from the other world as to stop and control the course of moral evil in that we inhabit’.3 2 Twentieth-century readers may well feel more sceptical, not only about the innate virtuousness of the ‘ancient Teutonic stock’, but also about man’s ability to control moral and metaphysical evil; they have learnt to see the grotesque and absurd in art as more than just ‘feverish dreams of a light-headed patient’; they are able to sense the experienced truth behind Hoffmann’s luminous fantasies; they feel a shudder of intimate recognition when they are shown, again and again and in ever new ways, the irruption of an ‘uncanny guest’ into a homely, familiar and interpreted world.3 3 Sir Walter Scott, we may feel, asked the right question—but most modern readers will give an answer that differs fundamentally from his.

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32. Scott, op. cit., pp. 452, 462. 33. Hoffmann does not dismiss his readers without another glimpse of that world of light which he had opposed, from the beginning, to that of Coppelius. “Der Sandmann” ends with a vision—a dim one, hedged around by suggestions of hear-say and inference—of the kind of idyllic contentment from which Nathanael is excluded but which Peregrinus Tyss is allowed to achieve in the ‘Märchen’ world of Meister Floh.

SHELLEY L. FRISCH (ESSAY DATE 1985) SOURCE: Frisch, Shelley L. “Poetics of the Uncanny: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Sandman.’” In The Scope of the Fantastic: Theory, Technique, Major Authors, edited by Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearce, pp. 49-55. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985. In the following essay, Frisch asserts that the reader provides a crucial component in the creation of the uncanny elements in “The Sandman.” The tale’s narrators continually force an identification of their narratees with the unnerving events of Nathanael’s life, so that the narratees adopt their own anxieties and fear of the uncanny.

Sigmund Freud defined the “uncanny” as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.”1 He illustrated this conception of the uncanny by analyzing E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Sandman,” which comprises the first of Hoffmann’s “Night Pieces,” written in 1816.2 Hoffmann’s “Sandman” explores the increasingly schizophrenic world of a young man, Nathanael, who cannot shake his obsession with a childhood fairy tale, and who reacts hysterically to a salesman who seems to be the Sandman come to life. Readers share Nathanael’s mounting distress and find themselves, like Nathanael, ultimately incapable of distinguishing between the fantasy of fairy tales and the reality stressed by other characters in the story. The story begins in epistolary format. In a letter from Nathanael to his friend Lothar, Nathanael reflects on his recent encounter with a barometer salesman/optician, whom he identifies with the Sandman. From a flashback we learn that when Nathanael was a boy, his father had associated with a dreadful alchemist named Coppelius, and during the experiments the two conducted together, Nathanael’s father died. On the evenings that Coppelius came to visit, Nathanael was always sent to bed early, with the warning that the Sandman was coming. Upon questioning his nurse Nathanael discovered that the Sandman plucks out the eyes of children who do not obey their parents’ orders to go to bed; he then trans-

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ports the eyes to the “half-moon” to feed his children. Curious to see the dreaded Sandman for himself, Nathanael hides in the closet of his father’s study one night and is discovered by Coppelius, who attempts to harm the boy: but Nathanael is saved by the intervention of his father. We then return to the present and to Nathanael’s encounter with an Italian optician named Giuseppe Coppola, who exclaims in faulty German that he has eyes to sell. Nathanael draws back in terror, both at the similarity of the optician’s name to the alchemist Coppelius’s and to the mention of eyes as the product for sale. Memories of the Sandman come flooding back, and Nathanael reels in panic until he realizes that Coppola is selling spectacles and telescopes, not eyes. Still, he is struck by these uncanny similarities and remains haunted by the possibility of their identity. Nathanael buys a telescope from Coppola and with its aid discovers a neighbor of whom he was hitherto unaware, a beautiful but strangely immobile woman named Olimpia. He pursues her, only to discover that she is an automaton, whose eyes have been implanted in her by Coppola. At this discovery Nathanael goes mad and falls into a long illness, during which he produces eerie, fantastic poetry. Upon recovering he returns to the “rational” world of his correspondent Lothar and his girlfriend Klara, who, he now believes, are right in dismissing the extraordinary events he has experienced. Nathanael is disappointed that they reject his poetic ventures but agrees that they are irrational. Finally, though, he spies Coppola/ Coppelius once again, through his telescope, and jumps to his death from a tower. This short summary provides the essentials of the material from which Freud drew in his essay to explain how events become uncanny. Freud noted that Nathanael’s fear of losing his eyes represents a castration complex, akin to Oedipus’ self-blinding when he discovers that he has killed his father and slept with his mother. Nathanael may harbor a secret wish to kill his father, Freud explained, and finds his wish fulfilled in the figure of the Sandman/Coppelius, the instrument of his father’s death. Because he then wishes to repress that fulfilled wish, Nathanael buries the memory of the Sandman. When he encounters the optician Coppola and notices in him two uncanny resemblances (similarity of name and business of selling “eyes”), Nathanael succumbs to a temporary madness. The “un-” prefix of uncanny, Freud explained, denotes a confrontation with that which is familiar but until that moment success-

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Freud isolated the Sandman as the focal point of interest in the story, thereby countering the view of other critics who attributed the presence of the uncanny to the mechanical doll Olimpia. Freud considered it irrelevant to debate the humanity of Olimpia, because establishing whether she is in fact living or a mere automaton does not address the effect of the uncanny on Nathanael. It is through his perceptions of the uncanny, maintained Freud, that we can best understand the meaning of the story. Freud concentrated in part on the biographical background of E. T. A. Hoffmann himself, whose father abandoned the family when Hoffmann was young, and on Freud’s own case studies; both of these factors are said to bear out the verisimilitude of Nathanael’s experiences. Freud’s dissection of Nathanael’s psychoses illuminates the character of Nathanael and the relationship of Hoffmann to his main character. Freud followed Nathanael’s increasing madness with a shrewd explication of how Nathanael’s feelings of the uncanny escalate. He accurately noted the central role of the Sandman and the subsidiary role of Olimpia in unleashing long-repressed anxieties, which may be connected to an ambivalent feeling of Nathanael (and perhaps of Hoffmann) toward an inattentive father. Most important, Freud stressed that the uncanny involves something long familiar and yet unfamiliar, which by its reappearance at unexpected moments disconcerts an unwary victim. Overall, however, Freud’s interpretation of “The Sandman” fails as a literary interpretation of the fantastic. Freud admitted that the uncanny in literature differs from the uncanny in life; yet he treated the confusion of Nathanael, in which fantasy and reality intermingle, more as a case study of schizophrenia than as a work of literature. Freud even underscored the psychological “truth” of Nathanael’s visions by describing similar personality disorders among his own patients. Freud once remarked to a friend that he was not fond of reading and commented: “I invented psychoanalysis because it had no literature.”3 He viewed the story through the perspective of the protagonist’s neuroses and constantly judged its truth value. Freud thereby committed the error that Jonathan Culler called “premature foreclosure—the unseemly rush from word to world.”4

It is within the German Romantic circle itself that we discover a more pertinent analysis of the literary creation of the uncanny. Ludwig Tieck’s “Shakespeares Behandlung des Wunderbaren” of 1796 lays a theoretical foundation for the manner in which the illusion of the supernatural is created in the comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare.5 Tieck’s discussion of comedies treats the Wunderbare (“marvelous”) in much the same manner as Tzvetan Todorov’s recent Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre: the supernatural events described provoke no definitive reaction of anxiety in either the characters or in the implicit reader.6 According to Tieck the supernatural world is moved so close to the reader (or viewer) that it becomes accepted as part of the fictional premise.7 His examination of tragedies demonstrates how fear and anxiety can be induced in the reading or viewing audience by the use of particular fictional techniques. The characteristics of the tragedies that compel the viewer both to accept and to be repelled by the supernatural are three, according to Tieck. First, the world of the supernatural is presented as distant and incomprehensible and is always subordinated to the “real” world; consequently, the passions and events concerning the major characters attract the attention of the viewer and are of more interest than the ghosts themselves. Thus we yearn to understand Hamlet’s dilemma but care little for his father’s apparition. Second, the supernatural must be prepared in some way. If the appearance of Hamlet’s father’s ghost were to open the play, Tieck explained, we would not have developed a necessary fear of him; instead, we would simply accept the ghost as part of the fictional frame work. We must be convinced that it is both possible and frightening for him to appear, so as to share the characters’ dismay when we must formally face him. Therefore, Hamlet opens not with the ghost himself but with the frightened sentries who ponder his reality. Third, a natural explanation of the supernatural increases our intellectual uncertainty and thus augments our suspense. In the case of Hamlet we can attribute his vision of the ghost in part to Hamlet’s proclivity to melancholy and superstition. All three of these characteristics accurately describe the evocation of the supernatural in Hoffmann’s “Sandman.” First, the “real” character Nathanael commands our attention far more than the Sandman Coppelius or the automaton Olimpia. The fantastic characters remain abstractions for us, but Nathanael’s raptures and fears seem close and comprehensible. Second, the Sandman

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fully repressed. Repeated encounters with Coppola/Coppelius, in which the motif of eyes continues to play an important role, reinforce the feeling of the uncanny, in which repetition constitutes an important factor.

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does not appear in the story until the reader has heard of the evil he can perpetrate and how great Nathanael’s fear of him is, and so we are prepared to experience with the sympathetic character Nathanael the uncanny similarity he draws to the optician Coppola who sells “eyes.” Finally, although we identify with Nathanael we have just enough reason to doubt the reliability of his perceptions that we cannot shake a nagging doubt about the actuality of the Sandman throughout much of the story. Recent “reader-response” criticism has called for a renewed interest in this type of poetics. Like Tieck reader-response critics examine the means by which readers’ reactions are encoded into texts. However, their analyses go further than those of Tieck by showing that the reader is addressed directly and indirectly within the text. Walker Gibson spoke of the “mock reader” in texts, Stanley Fish of the “informed reader,” Gerald Prince of the “narratee,” Walter J. Ong of the “fictionalized audience,” Wolfgang Iser of the “implied reader,” and Christine Brooke-Rose of the “encoded reader.”8 None of these “readers” is identical to the “real” reader who peruses a book in his living room. These narratees (to use Prince’s apt term) are the fictional counterparts of “narrators”: they exist within the fictional framework itself. Although the critical literature on Hoffmann has nowhere recognized the role that the narratee plays in his works, I will demonstrate that this role is crucial in creating the uncanny effects of “The Sandman.”9 The story opens with a letter from Nathanael to his friend Lothar, which he begins by exclaiming: “You certainly must be disturbed” (Hoffmann, “The Sandman,” p. 93). The exclamation sets the narrative tone for the tale as a whole. Secondperson narration, addressed to a sympathetic narratee, appears not only in the introductory letters but in the subsequent interpretation of them by an additional narrator whose reliability is even more questionable than Nathanael’s. The second narratee is told by this narrator that he has experienced similar encounters with the fantastic: “Have you, gentle reader, ever experienced anything that possessed your heart, your thoughts, and your senses to the exclusion of all else? Everything seethed and roiled within you; heated blood surged through your veins and inflamed your cheeks. Your gaze was peculiar, as if seeking forms in empty space invisible to other eyes, and speech dissolved into gloomy sighs” (p. 104). We, the “real” readers, are thus allied with the anxieties of Nathanael, with an equally nervous narrator

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who continually apologizes to us for needing to set down Nathanael’s experiences in a story, and with two narratees in whom Nathanael and the narrator explicitly attempt to instill feelings of the uncanny. Our uncomfortable intimacy with all of these figures forces us to confront the fantastic along with them and heightens our personal horror of each appearance of the dreaded Sandman. The narrator overtly states his intention to make his narratee, whom he calls the “gentle reader” and the “sympathetic reader,” receptive to the supernatural occurrences of the story (pp. 1045): “my dear reader, it was essential at the beginning to dispose you favorably towards the fantastic—which is no mean matter” (p. 105). He expresses the hope that his narratee will picture the characters as vividly as if he had seen them with his own eyes. Nathanael pleads for understanding and acceptance of the supernatural from his narratee Lothar. The “real” reader is left with the question of whether he ought to accept the role assigned to both of these narratees and thereby declare its events uncanny. Christine Brooke-Rose’s article “The Readerhood of Man” suggests that a text with an apparent overencoding of the reader gives rise to the truly ambiguous text: The clearest type is the truly ambiguous text. . . . [It] seems to overdetermine one code, usually the hermeneutic, and even to overencode the reader, but in fact the overdetermination consists of repetitions and variations that give us little or no further information. The overdetermination functions, paradoxically, as underdetermination.1 0

Hoffmann’s “Sandman” provides us with two narratees after whom we may model our own interpretation of events. The “real” reader thus becomes an overencoded reader, who is told repeatedly that he ought to accept the uncanny. That this text remains nonetheless fundamentally underdetermined is attested to in the ample critical literature on “The Sandman,” which debates and redebates the question of the relative reliability of the narratees and the story’s other characters. In the end the “real” reader must dismiss as inconsequential any attempt to distinguish between “actual” supernatural events and “mere” products of Nathanael’s and the narrator’s imaginations. The production of uncanny effects in literary texts rests precisely on the intellectual uncertainty built into the text. Freud’s study of the uncanny concentrates on removing stories from the literary sphere and ascertaining their degree of psychological truth. Tieck directed his

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Notes 1. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 17: 220. 2. E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The Sandman,” in Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, trans. and ed. Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 93-125. Further references appear in parentheses in the text. 3. Quoted in Neil Hertz, “Freud and the Sandman,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue Harari (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), 318. 4. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 130. 5. Ludwig Tieck, “Shakespeares Behandlung des Wunderbaren,” in German Essays, ed. Max Dufner and Valentine C. Hubbs (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 4: 61101. 6. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Press, 1973), 53-57. 7. Tieck, “Shakespeares Behandlung des Wunderbaren,” 65. Recent research on the fairy tale has led to similar conclusions about the presentation and reception of the supernatural in that genre. See especially Max Luthi, Es War einmal, 4th ed. (Gottingen and Zurich: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973). 8. Walker Gibson, “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers,” College English 11 (1950): 265-69; Stanley Fish, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” New Literary History 2 (1970): 123-62; Gerald Prince, “Introduction to the Study of the Narratee,” in ReaderResponse Criticism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 7-25; Walter J. Ong, “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction,” PMLA 90 (1975): 9-21; Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); idem, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Christine Brooke-Rose, “The Readerhood of Man,” in The Reader in the Text, ed.

Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 120-48. 9. Most of the recent literature on the “Sandman” can be grouped according to the following six goals. 1. Analyzing the psyche of the main character Nathanael, generally with reference to Freud’s “Uncanny” essay: Ilse Aichinger, “E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Novelle ‘Der Sandmann’ und die Interpretation Sigmund Freuds,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 95 (1976): 113-32; Hélène Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche,” New Literary History 7 (1976): 525-48; and Hertz, “Freud and the Sandman.” 2. Describing the roles of peripheral characters in evoking the suspense of the tale: S. S. Prawer, “Hoffmann’s Uncanny Guest: A Reading of Der Sandmann,” German Life and Letters 18 (1965): 297-308; Allan J. McIntyre, “Romantic Transcendence and the Robot in Heinrich von Kleist and E. T. A. Hoffmann,” German Review 54 (1979): 29-34. 3. Uncovering implicit and explicit social criticism: Lienhard Wawrzyn, Der AutomatenMensch: E. T. A. Hoffmanns Erzahlung von Sandmann (Berlin: Klaus Wagenback, 1977); Herbert Kraft, “E. T. A. Hoffmann: Geschichtlichkeit und Illusion,” Romantik: Ein literaturwissenschaftliches Studienbuch, ed. Ernst Ribbat (Konigstein: Athenaum, 1979), 138-62. 4. Fixing the role of the narrator: Maria Tatar, “E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Der Sandmann’: Reflection and Romantic Irony,” MLN 95 (1980): 585-608. 5. Ascertaining Hoffmann’s attitudes toward the writing process as reenacted by the story’s characters: Raimund Belgardt, “Der Kunstler und die Puppe: Zur Interpretation von Hoffmanns Der Sandmann,” German Quarterly 42 (1969): 686-700; Ursula Mahlendorf, “E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman: The Fictional Psycho-Biography of a Romantic Poet,” American Imago 32 (1975): 21739; Jean Delabroy, “L’Ombre de la theorie (A propos de L’Homme au sable de Hoffmann),” Romantisme 24 (1979): 29-41. 6. Exploring the natural or supernatural basis of the events related: Ernst Fedor Hoffmann, “Zu E. T. A. Hoffmanns ‘Sandmann,’” Monatshefte 54 (1962): 244-52. 10. Brooke-Rose, “Readerhood of Man,” 135.

JOSEPH ANDRIANO (ESSAY DATE 1993) SOURCE: Andriano, Joseph. “‘Uncanny Drives’: The Depth Psychology of E. T. A. Hoffmann.” In Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction, pp. 47-67. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. In the following excerpt, Andriano views “The Sandman” as an example of “The Ambiguous Gothic” tradition, and illustrates how Hoffmann treats issues of identity crisis in the story.

The first glimmerings of a sophisticated “literary psychology” in the Gothic were in The Monk, for Lewis seemed intuitively aware of mental entities to which Freud and Jung would later give a habitation and a name. But it was, appropriately, the German Romantics who first fully realized the psychological implications of the supernatural, not only in the fairy tale, which they raised to high art (Kunstmärchen), but also in the lowly genre of the Schauerroman. The masters of psycho-

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attention to the manner in which responses to the supernatural events are incorporated structurally into a text and thereby addressed the specifically literary conventions that separate fact from fiction. In applying reader-response critical theory to Hoffmann’s “Sandman,” I hope to have demonstrated that the tale’s narrators continually force an identification of their narratees with the unnerving events of Nathanael’s life, so that the narratees adopt their own anxieties and fear of the uncanny. Remarks addressed in the second person to these narratees necessarily draw in the “real” reader as well. We become the “gentle” and “sympathetic” reader about whom the narrator exclaims: “Everything seethed and roiled within you” (Hoffmann, “The Sandman,” p. 104).

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR PALMER COBB ON HOFFMANN’S GENIUS

It has been the fashion among certain of Hoffmann’s critics to give him no higher rating than that of a skillful spinner of ghost yarns. He is more than that. . . . Hoffmann conjures up before our eyes figures and events which the greatest skill of other virtuosos of the ghost story could not invest with a semblance of probability. We see most fearful transformations. Divided personalities in a double physical embodiment confront us. One student falls in love with a doll with glass eyes, another with a “gentle green serpent.” Cats and dogs philosophize over and satirize the life of their human associates. Diseased states of mind are portrayed with startling distinctness, while uncanny noises, stupefying odors of marvelous flowers, magic organ music, etc., all play their part in Hoffmann’s machinery of the narrative. How is it possible that he is able to rescue such material from the realm of the ridiculous and childish, pass it through the mill of his genius, and turn out a product which is food for intelligent minds? . . . The explanation is to be sought in the fact that Hoffmann’s figures are, to him at least, absolutely real. He believed with all his heart in the most improbable figure of his fevered fancy. It was as real and tangible to him as the most prosaic fact or object in his daily existence. For him the trivial, commonplace, work-a-day world about him was filled with the marvelous and supernatural. In his stories he hovers always on the boundary between the real and the supernatural, crossing and recrossing at will. And one realm was as real to him as the other. Given his faith in his productions, add to that his remarkable power of description, and the secret of the peculiar character of his art is revealed.

Unlike Cazotte and Lewis, who had much less control over their material, Hoffmann deliberately makes his supernatural beings into numinous symbols of the Weltseele or the Geisterreich. The green snake Serpentina in “The Golden Pot,” for example, is clearly both a Nature figure and an image of feminine forces within Anselmus.4 A Jungian reading of Hoffmann, then, should reveal how thoroughly and how profoundly this “literary psychologist” anticipated Jungian ideas about the archetypal feminine and its relation to men.5 A post-Jungian reading should avoid the Platonism of Geisterreich and Weltseele as forerunners of the Collective Unconscious. Instead, I will examine specific texts for signs of archetypes. Whether Hoffmann was psychoanalyzing himself in these works I will not conjecture;6 my focus remains on the universal, on what the texts reveal—albeit parabolically—about the problems of growing up a male human being. The Ambiguous Gothic, which Hoffmann learned from Cazotte, Tieck, and Schiller,7 is an excellent vehicle for psychological parables, especially fables of identity crisis, since (as has been seen) the genre tends to break down boundaries between self and other, male and female.8

SOURCE: Cobb, Palmer. “Poe and Hoffmann.” South Atlantic Quarterly 8 (1909): 68-81.

logical horror in Germany were Schiller, Tieck, and especially E. T. A. Hoffmann.1

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Hoffmann was profoundly interested in the philosophers who were forebears of Jungian thought—Kant, Schelling, and G. H. von Schubert, to name the most important.2 He was, for example, intrigued by Schelling’s conception of the world soul (Weltseele), and Schubert’s idea that the Unconscious provided a bridge between the world soul and the individual (Taylor, 78; Ellenberger, 729). Like Schelling and Schubert, Hoffmann believed that the unconscious was a person’s link to cosmic forces, if only he or she could understand its language.3

Hoffmann’s two stories “The Sandman” (1815) and “The Mines of Falun” (1818) are perfect examples of this Ambiguous Gothic. They mingle the moral with the macabre, the humorous with the grotesque, the horrific with the absurd. Both may be read as cautionary stories of sensitive young men who go mad. Though merely absurd and anomalous to some early critics,9 these tales have more recently found readers and rereaders (e.g., Hertz and Fass) who have created brilliantly coherent texts out of Hoffmann’s ambiguities. Below are two post-Jungian attempts to create coherence out of the seemingly anomalous numinous figures haunting Hoffmann’s protagonists.

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Dramatized in Offenbach’s opera Tales of Hoffmann and analyzed by Freud in his famous essay “The Uncanny,” the much anthologized “Der Sandmann” is perhaps the most familiar of Hoffmann’s tales. The close reading offered below, to some extent an elaboration on Freud’s, involves a study of the language of archetypes; that is, how they attempt to communicate to the protagonist, who misinterprets their message. The tale opens with a letter from the student protagonist, Nathanael, to his friend Lothar, the brother of his fiancée, Klara. Worried that his friend, fiancée, and mother are disturbed and angry with him, Nathanael is writing to convince them that he is not “a crazy visionary” (“einen aberwitzigen Geisterseher”) (K, 137; W, 7).1 0 As the story will ironically reveal, however, Nathanael’s problem is that he is not a visionary and that he is a ghost-seer. Archetypal implications begin with Nathanael’s description of Klara, his “pretty angel-image, so deeply imprinted in heart and mind” (“holdes Engelsbild, so tief mir in Herz und Sinn eingeprägt”) (K, 137; W, 7). Immediately, Hoffmann reveals that the young man perceives the beloved as a divine figure within him. She seems his guardian angel. She even accepts the role (K, 146), but for her it is only a figure of speech, while for Nathanael it is a literal reality. Unfortunately for him, however, she cannot live up to the role he has projected onto her from his own Idea of Woman. Klara is a fairly complex character in her own right, refusing to be inflated to the archetypal or reduced to the stereotypical angel. In his letter to Lothar, Nathanael attempts to explain his apparent paranoia by going back to his early childhood, when he formed an obsession with that goblin of the nursery, the Sandman, whom he identifies with a friend of his father, Coppelius. Freud has shown that Coppelius is really the boy’s image of his father (Vater Imago), who seems to have made a diabolic alliance with this ominous figure of horror.1 1 But why does Nathanael come to view his father as the ally of the evil one? At first, before he knows about Coppelius, Nathanael describes the father in nostalgic terms. When he was little (he writes to Lothar) he enjoyed the “marvelous stories” his father told the children while he smoked his pipe, which Nathanael loved to light for him (K, 138; W, 8). But “mother was very sad on such evenings, and hardly had the clock struck nine when she would say: ‘Now children, off to bed with you! The Sandman is coming, I can already hear him’”

(K, 138; emphasis added). And Nathanael would hear someone clumping up the stairs. The child perceives a conflict here between the parents. His mother does not seem to share his enthusiasm for the father’s marvelous tales. She is sad and nervous. At such a young age (he is still in the nursery), he remains very attached to his mother (K, 142), whom he perceives as angelic. Unconsciously, then, the father’s smoke is seen as issuing not from a genial pipe but from hellfire. Nathanael does not yet realize the reason for his mother’s sadness: the lawyer Coppelius is coming over to continue on some mysterious alchemical work with Nathanael’s father. She tells her son that in fact there is no Sandman—“it only means that you are sleepy, that your eyes feel as though someone had sprinkled sand in them” (K, 139; emphasis added). But he does not believe her; he is already frightened, traumatized by the first rift he has ever seen between his parents. He knows that it has something to do with the Sandman. Asking the nurse, he discovers that the Sandman is “a wicked man who comes to children when they refuse to go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes till they bleed and pop out of their heads.” (K, 139; emphasis added). Here the possibility arises that Nathanael is an unreliable narrator—anticipating Poe’s insane narrators. There may actually be no nurse; she could be a hag projection of the mother—an image of Nathanael’s interpretation of his mother’s words, which were supposed to comfort him. A figure of speech, a simile, becomes a literal horror, magnified in the lens of the child’s soul, which is troubled by a disharmony between his parents. The simile “feeling as though” sand is in the eyes transforms into literal sand thrown in the eyes by an ogre, who is really a father: “Then he throws the eyes into a sack and takes them to the halfmoon as food for his children” (K, 139). The halfmoon (“Halbmond”—W, 9) could also be a sign of partition, the splitting of the parental image. The boy’s fantasy, in any case, attempts to assert that the father is an Other father, one who may steal his eyes. Freud considered this anxiety to be that of castration, an idea that remains controversial among critics.1 2 Eyes are complex symbols; as “windows of the soul,” they are more than mere sexual symbols. They are metonymies for vision. “The Sandman” is about the failure of vision, what Hoffmann calls “faulty vision” (K, 142; “Augen Blödigkeit”—W, 13). Nathanael fails to see the real Coppelius, who is indeed a wicked man, but a man only. The youth has magnified the lack of harmony between his parents into an arche-

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typal conflict between the maternal feminine— which he knows to be angelic—and the paternal masculine, which must therefore be diabolic. When Nathanael realizes that the clumping footfalls belong to Coppelius, and that Coppelius is the source of the parental rift, he jumps to the only conclusion that makes sense—Coppelius, not father, is the diabolical sandman. But “his intimacy with my father occupied my imagination more and more” (K, 139). Try as he might, he cannot separate the father from the Sandman. The boy consciously likes his father, however. The tales he tells stimulate Nathanael’s imagination and probably help develop his later aspiration to be a writer. But the conflicts struggling just below consciousness create ambivalence; “I liked nothing better than to hear or read horrible tales about goblins, witches, dwarfs [Kobolten, Hexen, Daumlingen] and such; but at the head of them all was the Sandman, of whom I was always drawing hideous pictures” (K, 141-42; W, 9). He likes what he fears; he is compelled to draw pictures of his nightmare, and the pictures give him pleasure. When he concludes, however, that the Sandman is not just a “hobgoblin of the nurse’s tale,” but is actually a creature of flesh and blood named Coppelius, fear dominates, and all of the lawyer’s grotesque features are magnified (K, 140-41). In his presence, the father magically changes—all of his good qualities vanish: “As my old father now bent over the fire, he looked completely different. His mild and honest features seemed to have been distorted into a repulsive and diabolical mask. . . . He looked like Coppelius” (K, 141-42). As the boy observes the diabolic alliance between his father and Coppelius, he begins hallucinating. His father is some sort of demon now, servant to the satanic Sandman. This delusion precipitates a nightmare in which Coppelius treats Nathanael like a doll, twisting his hands and feet, saying, “There’s something wrong here! It’s better the way they were. The Old Man knew his business” (K, 142). The Old Man, the reader does not realize until later, is the scientist Spalanzani. The nightmare has revealed, before Nathanael has even met the scientist, that he too is a father image; but why Nathanael sees himself in the dream as the mechanical creation of the old man is not yet clear. The nightmare ends when “a gentle warm breath passed across my face” (K, 142) and his nurturing mother revivifies him, kisses and cuddles her reclaimed darling. In a revealing synecdoche, the mother is represented by her

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breath—as the child’s inspiring soul image, she is his first incarnation of anima. So far the tale has been narrated by Nathanael, and there is no way of telling which events are objectively true and which are psychic realities. The conflict between the parents has something to do with the mysterious experiments Coppelius and the father are conducting. When they result in an explosion that kills the father, Nathanael blames Coppelius, the “vile Satan” (K, 143). But if this is a tale told by a madman, the father may not literally be dead. In a story in which figures of speech become uncannily literal, it is also possible that apparently literal events are really figurative. The father does not die; only the good in him does. He leaves, and in so doing undergoes another transformation—into Spalanzani. When Nathanael swears to avenge his father’s death, he may really be saying that he will get revenge on his father’s real or imagined desertion of his mother. The original father/ mother unity is completely severed now. The second part of the story is a letter from Klara to Nathanael, who in his distraction has accidentally addressed the letter meant for Lothar to Klara. This young woman, somewhat reminiscent of Lewis’s Agnes, is a bright levelheaded girl whom Hoffmann presents as a kind of Enlightenment heroine, toward whom he is therefore somewhat ambivalent.1 3 She is perceptive enough to realize that “all the fears and terrors of which you speak took place only in your mind,” and that “dark powers within” Nathanael seem “bent upon his destruction” (K, 145-46). She goes on to give a psychological analysis of doppelgängers: If there is a dark power . . . it must form inside us, from part of us, must be identical with ourselves; only in this way can we believe in it and give it the opportunity it needs if it is to accomplish its secret work. If our mind is firm enough and adequately fortified by the joys of life to be able to recognize alien and hostile influences as such . . . then this mysterious power will perish in its futile attempt to assume a shape that is supposed to be a reflection of ourselves. (K, 146)

She goes on to reveal that she and Lothar have come to grasp the mechanism of what psychoanalysts would later call projection; the “dark power” within frequently introduces in us “the strange shapes the external world throws in our way, so that we ourselves engender the spirit which in our strange delusion we believe speaks to us from that shape” (K, 146). But Klara’s sanity goes too far in the other direction; this Enlightenment heroine dismisses Nathanael’s Sandman as a “phantom of

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Nathanael, however, sees them as literal monsters. He has been unable to outgrow his childish fears because he still takes them literally, in a failure of vision that originates in a misconstruction of his parents as diametrically opposed entities (mother/angel/moonlight; father/devil/ hellfire). Another important—and related—split in the story is the dissociation of sensibility that also originates in Nathanael’s bifurcation of the parental image: feminine/heart versus masculine/ head. He is therefore, in his next letter to Lothar, outraged by Klara’s letter, which he finds too “logical” and “analytical” for a girl. He can only believe that Lothar has poisoned her feminine sensibility with lessons in masculine Logos (K, 147). And no sooner is his disenchantment with Klara spoken than he sees (through peeking, as usual) the “divinely beautiful face” of Olimpia, Spalanzani’s supposed daughter (actually a mechanical doll). He does not realize that what he sees in her is a reflection of himself: “Her eyes seemed fixed, I might almost say without vision. It seemed as if she were sleeping with her eyes open” (K, 148— emphasis added; cf. Freud, 385 n. 1). But it is Nathanael (whose eyes have been “stolen” by the Sandman) who has no vision, who is the automaton. He has automatically withdrawn anima (Engelsbild) from Klara, no longer worthy of it, and projected it into Olimpia, his feminine ideal. Hoffmann then switches to an omniscient narrative (K, 148),1 4 prefacing it with a reminder that Nathanael’s case is not an anomaly: he should be recognizable to the reader, “and you may feel as if you had seen him with your own eyes on very many occasions. Possibly also, you will come to believe that real life is more singular and more fantastic than anything else and that all a writer can do is present it as ‘in a glass darkly’” (K, 149). Nor is Nathanael’s anima projection of Klara unusual (though his withdrawal of it certainly is). The authorial narrator himself has a tendency, he admits, to apotheosize Klara, likening himself to poets and musicians who cannot “look at the girl without sensing heavenly music which flows into us from her glance and penetrates to the very soul until everything within us stirs awake and pulsates with emotion” (K, 150). But in reality, Klara is not a muse. “Dreamers and visionaries” have bad luck with her because she is practical; her “clear glance and rare ironical smile”

seem to dissipate their “shadowy images.” Yet she is tenderhearted and intelligent (K, 151); in short, she is not a mere reflection (“‘That is nonsense about a lake and a mirror!’”), magnified in the convex lens of the dreamer. She has her own substance. But Nathanael can only see the reflection of his own projected image—the guardian angel inherited from his sense of the Feminine, formed from his perception of his mother. Unable to “dissolve the projection” (Jung, CW 9.1: 84) and recognize Klara as a woman rather than an Englesbild, he simply withdraws it and reprojects it onto Olimpia, who fits the mold. Much has been made by critics of Nathanael’s aspirations as a poet.1 5 A common misreading of the tale, in my opinion, is to see Klara as a domestic philistine and Olimpia as the Romantic artist’s true muse (cf. Veronika vs. Serpentina in “The Golden Pot”). But Nathanael is not a poet; he is at best a poetaster. Rather than a visionary, he is a literalist. Believing in the objective, external reality of those “dark powers” Klara wrote to him about (K, 151), he imagines himself their “plaything.” He also believes that poetic inspiration comes from external powers, rather than from an inner light. Consequently, his tales and poems are “really very boring” (K, 152), for he has reified the archetypes, mistaken them for external beings, for Others. He writes a poem about his presentiment that Coppelius will destroy him: He portrayed himself and Klara as united in true love but plagued by some dark hand which occasionally intruded into their lives. . . . Finally, as they stood at the altar, the sinister Coppelius appeared and touched Klara’s lovely eyes, which sprang onto Nathanael’s breast, burning and scorching like bleeding sparks. Then Coppelius grabbed him and flung him into a blazing circle of fire. (K, 152)

The poem turns out to be prophetic, but not in a visionary sense; it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nathanael refuses to see that he himself is the impediment to their marriage, not only because of sexual cowardice, as McGlathery points out, but because of a fragmentation of his personality.1 6 Klara implores him to realize that what burned into his breast were not her eyes but the drops of his own heart’s blood—a heart torn apart by the hands of his own inner daemon, an animus run amok, dissociated from anima.1 7 The two must be in harmony for a man truly to love a woman. But all Nathanael can see in Klara’s eyes now is death, which “looked upon him kindly” (K, 153). And as he gets more enrapt in his poem,

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the ego”—mere figment of an imagination overpowered by uncanny drives (“unheimliche Treiben”—W, 16). Hoffmann’s tale reveals, on the contrary, that the phantoms have their own psychic reality, even if it is not an external reality.

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more self-possessed, she cries out for him to throw the “mad, stupid tale into the fire.” This is not philistinism; she knows rather that his poem is mentally dangerous, a blind rehearsing of his inner turmoil in occultist terms. But Nathanael is indignant: He “thrust Klara away, and cried, ‘You damned lifeless automaton!’” (K, 154). He is the automaton, of course, and though there are a few remissions from his mental disease when he manages momentarily to restore “Klara in his heart” (K, 153-55, 166), he keeps relapsing into a more and more psychotic paranoia. As long as he refuses to accept the “dark powers” as his own, he is doomed. During one of his remissions, he recognizes that he has been the victim of a “gruesome illusion . . . the product of his own mind,” and that the optician Coppola cannot possibly be “the ghostly double [verfluchter Doppeltgänger] and revenant of the accursed Coppelius” (K, 156; W, 28). But then, picking up one of Coppola’s spyglasses, he “involuntarily” peeps at Olimpia. At first she looks lifeless and rigid (for he has momentarily withdrawn anima from the doll and reinvested Klara with it), but as he peeps she is transformed; “moist moonbeams were beginning to shine in Olimpia’s eyes.” Hoffmann again uses anima signs—water and the moon.1 8 But what is more remarkable in this passage is his insight into the unconscious process of projection. Nathanael animates Olimpia with “everincreasing life,” imposing on her his feminine ideal. Thus she becomes an angel that “hovered before him in the air,” glowing with “divine beauty” (K, 156-57). When Hoffmann has Nathanael acquire a new set of eyes, the author creates a symbol of what Nathanael has been doing all along—magnifying. Through apotheosis he turns people into archetypes, and through reification he turns archetypes into people. Olimpia, through projection, becomes a real girl, in character the opposite of Klara. Nathanael is the only man at her concert and coming-out party who does not see that she is dull, empty-headed, and inarticulate—a mere machine. When he dances with her, he animates her further, as his “warm life-blood surges through her veins” (K, 159). She merely takes life from him; she has none of her own. She cannot say anything intelligent, and yet he considers her a “magnificent and heavenly woman! You ray shining from the promised land of love! You deep soul, in which my whole being is reflected” (“du tiefes Gemut, in dem sich mein ganzes Sein spiegelt”) (K, 159; W, 31).

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Although Olimpia reminds him of “the legend of the dead bride” (K, 160), he continues to give life to her.1 9 She is the ultimate in feminine passivity and receptivity, infinitely preferable to the more masculine Klara: Never before had he had such a splendid listener. . . . She sat for hours on end without moving, staring directly into his eyes, and her gaze grew ever more ardent and animated. . . . It seemed to him as if she expressed thoughts about his work and about all of his poetic gifts from the very depths of his own soul, as though she spoke from within him. (K, 162)

Perceiving her “utter passivity” as a fascination for him and his poetic genius, Nathanael is unable to see the significance of her identity as the “daughter” of the diabolical Spalanzani, even after he sees Spalanzani and Coppola/Coppelius fighting over her. They twist and tug her “this way and that, contending furiously for possession of her” (K, 163). For the first time, Nathanael sees that she is a lifeless doll; and worse, her eyes are missing. What he fails to see is the similarity between this scene and the dream that he had (K, 142) in which it was his hands and feet that were being twisted. Spalanzani now tells him that the eyes used in the doll had been stolen from Nathanael, at whom he now hurls the bloody things, which hit his breast. The poem comes true; Spalanzani is revealed as yet another doppelgänger of Coppelius, and Nathanael’s mind, overwhelmed by this appearance of yet another goblin, is completely shattered by madness. The dream, the poem, and now this hallucination are all messages from his unconscious that he is unable to decipher, because he takes the symbols literally. Convinced that the male phantoms are gone, he once again “recovers” by reprojecting anima onto Klara: “An angel guided me to the path of light” (K, 166). They prepare to marry, but one day after they have climbed a tower to look at the mountains, Nathanael “automatically” takes Coppola’s spyglasses out of his pocket, and looks at Klara through them. Babbling incoherently about a whirling wooden doll and a circle of fire, he tries to hurl Klara from the tower. Lothar saves her, but Nathanael, seeing “the gigantic figure of the lawyer Coppelius” (K, 167) in the crowd below, throws himself to his death. The narrative ends with the assurance that Klara found a husband many years later, along with the “quiet domestic happiness” that “Nathanael, with his lacerated soul [Innern zerrissene], could never have provided her” (K, 167; W, 40). Klara here seems like Veronika in “The Golden Pot”—symbol of

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Nathanael is but the travesty of an artist. Instead of creating powerful poetic symbols out of the “dark powers” of his mind (as Hoffmann himself is able to do), he creates reifications, pathetic fallacies that take figures too literally— that make out of the archetypes of the soul mere bogeymen and dolls. Hoffmann shows us that we all have our inner phantoms. We must recognize them as such without merely dismissing them (like Klara) as unreal figments. Nathanael never realizes that Coppelius, Coppola, Spalanzani, and the Sandman are all identical—all go back to his father imago, the child’s unconscious image of the father. He is perceived as sinister only after the child notices a conflict with the mother. This split causes a dissociation of sensibility that makes it impossible for him to love Klara as a woman. He can only perceive her in the holy light of the angelic feminine, utterly dissociated from the analytical, scientific, logical masculine. When she fails to live up to this ideal, he withdraws the anima projection and apparently reprojects it onto a more feminine girl. But Olimpia is nothing more than a vacuous and passive receptacle for Nathanael’s projections, a symbol of his own femininity. She is an Echo to his Narcissus.2 0 What dooms Nathanael, then, is his unconscious fission of the androgynous archetype— what Jung called “the divine syzygy”2 1 —which is split when the child perceives an unresolvable conflict between his parents. Masculine and feminine become polar opposites; then each gets magnified as Nathanael is unable to outgrow his childish deification of the parents.2 2 This polarization in turn causes him to reify the dark powers, mistaking inner daemons for external occult influences.2 3 He is trapped in a vicious circle of deification and reification—the “circle of fire” through which he finally throws himself.

Notes 1. Schiller’s “Der Geisterscher” (1789) was especially influential on later, more psychological horror (Frank, 145-46). Ludwig Tieck was the more innovative, blending Gothic and märchen elements in “Der Blonde Eckbert” (1797) and “Der Runenberg” (1812).

2. Hewett-Thayer (113-21) provides a concise summary of Hoffmann’s reading of these and other philosophers. See also McGlathery’s exhaustive source study Mysticism and Sexuality: E. T. A. Hoffman. Part One: Hoffmann and His Sources, 136-50. 3. Cf. Tymms, 60: “To Hoffmann, the apparent absurdities of dreams, visions, and other figments of the irrational mind imply deep mysteries of cosmic proportions, which might be revealed to man if he were but able to . . . decipher,the symbolism.” Other readers draw direct links between Hoffmann and Jung. Prawer asserts: “For Hoffmann, the personal unconscious is a means of gaining contact with something larger and deeper . . . which we may equate . . . with Jung’s collective unconscious” (302); Peters (62) agrees: “the Other Realm exists at a deep subconscious level . . . common to all human beings, not unlike C. G. Jung’s concept of the Collective Unconscious.” 4. Hoffmann’s masterful “märchen for modern times” therefore inspired one of the best Jungian interpretations of literature: Aniela Jaffé’s monograph. Prawer (302) and other non-Jungians have praised her study. Another Jungian interpretation more relevant to this essay is Elardo’s dissertation, “The Chthonic Woman.” But his study, heavily dependent on Neumann, overemphasizes the negative aspects of the feminine, forgetting the bipolarity of the archetype. She cannot be “always the vixen, never the virgin” (2704A), she is often imagined as both. 5. In a sense, Jungian analytical psychology is a “formulation . . . of the confluence of traditions that shaped . . . Romanticism” (Bickman, 5), but it must be remembered that Jung did not derive his theories from the Romantic philosophers. He made inferences, often in agreement with theirs, based on observations of dreams and fantasies of patients. Hoffmann seems to have made similar inferences based on his own observations. 6. Kiernan (310) thinks “The Sandman” is “an autobiographical sketch of Hoffmann’s childhood.” McGlathery (Part One, 35-37) sums up the psychobiographical interpretations. See also Mahlendorf’s article, which reveals “the thin line between creativity and pathology” (232) in Hoffmann. Nathanael in “The Sandman” is that part of Hoffmann he wishes to exorcize. McGlathery (passim) sees Hoffmann’s protagonists as “self-ironic” portraits. 7. Le Diable amoureux was one of Hoffmann’s favorite books (McGlathery, Part One, 122; cf. Winkler), but it was probably mostly from Tieck that Hoffmann learned the techniques of Ambiguous Gothic—e.g., of refusing to explain away the supernatural, seeing in the uncanny a psychic reality that is not mere delusion. 8. Cf. Daemmrich, 23: The unconscious alter-ego projections appearing in the Romantic fiction of the Germans are “the first indication of the modern crisis in man’s identity.” This identity crisis involves doppelgängers of both sexes—it is a crisis also of gender identity, as Nathanael’s identity in “The Sandman” dissolves into Olimpia. 9. Sir Walter Scott (467) missed their moral significance completely, seeing Hoffmann’s tales as mere raving, the “feverish dreams of a lightheaded patient . . .

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domesticity, inappropriate mate for an artist, who must be married to his muse. But since no woman can be a muse except in the imagination of the artist, he is better off not imposing upon mortal woman the awesome responsibility of “inspiratrice.” At least, he should recognize, as Nathanael never does, that inspiration ultimately comes from within.

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requiring the assistance of medicine rather than of criticism.” Goethe agreed that they seemed meaningless. Their ambiguity has resulted in conflicting interpretations, from Neoplatonic Idealism (Negus) to Romantic Irony (Tatar) to the Absurd (Daemmrich, 75, and Prawer, 307).

18. Emma Jung (65-70) reveals how frequently the anima is associated with water. The moon is traditionally viewed as feminine by men, while the sun is supposedly masculine. Icons of the androgynous archetype have often been presented as fusions of sun and moon (see Man and His Symbols, 69, woodcut illustration).

10. All references in English to “The Sandman” and “The Mines at Falun” are to Knight and Kent’s edition, Selected Writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Volume One, hereinafter abbreviated as K. References to the original German, given for key words and phrases, are to E. T. A. Hoffmanns Werke, vol. 2, hereinafter abbreviated W.

19. The corpse bride (discussed more fully in Chapter 5 below), as Knight and Kent point out in a footnote (K, 160), is an allusion to Goethe’s ballad “The Bride of Korinth.” In Hoffmann, the necrophilia made explicit in the poem is only hinted at; Goethe’s bride is not ambiguous like Olimpia, whose corpselike features are an ironic metaphor for what Nathanael really wants in a woman and for the dead state of Nathanael’s soul.

11. Freud, 384: “The figure of his father and Coppelius represent the two opposites into which the fatherimago is split by the ambivalence of the child’s feeling.” 12. McGlathery (Part One, 36) considers Freud’s equation of the fear of eye-loss with castration anxiety “unacceptable,” since Freud was more interested here in supporting his theories than in understanding Hoffmann. Cf. Prawer, 303. For Prawer, the intrusion of the unheimlich into the cozy heimlich domestic circle is a matter of much more than sexual consequence. 13. That Klara may be an Enlightenment figure is further supported by the German word for Enlightenment: Aufklärung. Hoffmann’s distrust of Enlightenment science is apparent in his sinister portrayal of Spalanzani, a prototype for Frankenstein and Rappaccini (see Cohen’s article). 14. Thus complicating his tale even further. As several readers have noticed, the narrator who comes in after the epistolary first half seems yet another reflection— another “alter-ego projection” either of Nathanael (his sane self perhaps) or of Hoffmann himself. See Tatar’s article for an explanation of these multiple reflections in terms of Romantic Irony. I see this narrator as an authorial voice of sanity. 15. Mahlendorf, for example, sees Nathanael as a Romantic poet. Although she recognizes in the tale “the thin line between genius and madness,” she does not see that Nathanael, as a reifying literalist, is no poet. Nor does Kamla, for whom Olimpia is “the mirror image of the [Romantic] solipsistic poet” (95). 16. McGlathery reduces the tale to a comic conte licencieux involving sexual panic or “cold feet” (Part Two, 58). I do not deny the sexual element in the tale, but I think it is part of a larger whole. Sexuality is only part of Eros. 17. Here I am following the post-Jungian idea (supporting Freud’s notion that humans are innately bisexual) that men must have an animus as well as an anima (Hillman, “Anima II,” 141-43). Cf. Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 210; Logos and Eros exist within a person of either sex: “The balance and relation between the two separate principles regulate the individual’s sense of himself as a sexed and gendered being.” One might argue that Coppelius is better seen as a “shadow” than an animus (as Prawer [302] suggests), but as Hillman and Samuels imply, Jung’s notion of the shadow developed in the absence of an animus theory in the male. Once dissociated from anima, the animus becomes the “shadow.”

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20. Cf. Irving Massey’s chapter 6. He comes to a similar conclusion (that Nathanael is narcissistic) by a different route. When Klara refuses to become a projection of Nathanael, “she throws him back upon his . . . nothingness” (118). Cf. also G. R. Thompson, Romantic Gothic Tales, 50, and Kamla’s article. 21. Jung, CW 9.1. 67: “It therefore seems probable that the archetypal form of the divine syzygy first covers up and assimilates the image of the real parents until, with increasing consciousness, the real figures of the parents are perceived—often to the child’s disappointment. Nobody knows better than the psychotherapist that the mythologizing of the parents is often pursued far into adulthood and is given up only with the greatest resistance.” Nathanael’s parents at first fit the archetypal mold, which presents them as a unity. 22. Cf. Schneidermann, 285, who cites Heinz Hartmann’s idea that “there is a tendency in the pre-phallic stage to identify the parents as idealized, powerful, magical protectors”—a tendency Jung explains as archetypal. 23. That Hoffmann was somewhat skeptical of occultism seems clear from McGlathery, Part One, chapter 9: “Hoffmann’s tales are . . . ironic jests about the widespread occultism and spiritualism of his own day” (155).

Works Cited Bickman, Martin. The Unsounded Centre: Jungian Studies in American Romanticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Cohen, Hubert I. “Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’: A Possible Source for ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter.’” ESQ 68 (1972): 148-55. Daemmrich, Horst S. The Shattered Self: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Tragic Vision. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973. Elardo, Ronald Joseph. “The Chthonic Woman in the Novellas and Fairy Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann.” DAI 40 (1979): 2704A. Ellenberger, Henri F. The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books, 1970. Frank, Frederick S. “The Gothic Romance—1762-1820.” Horror Literature: A Core Collection and Reference Guide, ed. Marshall Tymn, 3-175. New York: Bowker, 1981. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” 1919. Rpt. in Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Joan Riviere, 368-407. New York: Basic Books, 1959.

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Tatar, Maria M. “E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Der Sandmann’: Reflection and Romantic Irony.” Modern Language Notes 95 (1980): 585-608.

Hillman, James. “Anima II.” Spring (1974): 113-46. Taylor, Ronald. Hoffmann. London: Bowes & Bowes, 1963. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. Selected Writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Volume One: The Tales. Ed. and trans. Elizabeth C. Knight and Leonard J. Kent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. ———. Werke. Vol. 2. Ed. Herbert Kraft and Mandred Wacker. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1967. Jaffé, Aniela. Bilder und Symbole aus E. T. A. Hoffmanns Märchen “Der goldne Topf.” Gestaltungen des Unbewussten. Ed. C. G. Jung. Vol. 7. Zurich: 1950. Jung, Carl Gustav. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. [CW] Trans. R. F. C. Hull, 20 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953-79. ———. “Psychology and Literature.” Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes, 152-72. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1933. ———, ed. Man and His Symbols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964. Jung, Emma. Animus and Anima. Dallas: Spring Publ., 1981. Kiernan, James G. “An Ataxic Paranoia of Genius: A Study of E. T. A. Hoffmann.” The Alienist and Neurologist 17 (1896): 295-310. Knight, Elizabeth C., and Leonard J. Kent. “Introduction.” Selected Writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Volume One: The Tales, 9-45. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. McGlathery, James M. Mysticism and Sexuality: E. T. A. Hoffmann. Part One: Hoffmann and His Sources. Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1981. ———. Mysticism and Sexuality: E. T. A. Hoffmann. Part Two: Interpretation of the Tales. Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1985. Mahlendorf, Ursula R. “E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’: The Fictional Psycho-Biography of a Romantic Poet.” American Imago 32 (1975): 217-39. Massey, Irving. The Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. Negus, Kenneth. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Other World: The Romantic Author and His New Mythology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965. Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother. Trans. Ralph Manheim. 2d ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Peters, Diana S. “The Dream as Bridge in the Works of E. T. A. Hoffmann.” Oxford German Studies 8 (1973): 60-85. Prawer, S. J. “Hoffmann’s Uncanny Guest: A Reading of ‘Der Sandmann.’” German Life and Letters 18 (1965): 297-308. Samuels, Andrew. Jung and the Post-Jungians. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Schneidermann, Leo. “E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Tales: Ego Ideal and Parental Loss.” American Imago 40.3 (Fall 1983): 285-310.

Thompson, G. Richard. ed. Romantic Gothic Tales, 17901840. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. Tymms, Ralph. Doubles in Literary Psychology. Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1949. Winkler, Marcus. “Cazotte lu par E. T. A. Hoffmann: Du Diable amoureux à ‘Der Elementargeist.’” Arcadia 23.2 (1988): 113-32.

FURTHER READING Criticism Bresnick, Adam. “Prosopoetic Compulsion: Reading the Uncanny in Freud and Hoffmann.” Germanic Review 71, no. 2 (spring 1996): 114-32. Builds on Sigmund Freud’s theories by analyzing his essay “The Uncanny” and Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman.” Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny, by Sigmund Freud, translated by David McLintock, pp. 12362. New York: Penguin, 2003. An essay originally published in Imago in 1919 as “Das Unheimliche” and considered the quintessential work on the subject of the uncanny. Defines the uncanny, provides examples of how it is exemplified in “The Sandman,” and explains how the uncanny functions within the context of human psychology. Ireland, Kenneth R. “Urban Perspectives: Fantasy and Reality in Hoffmann and Dickens.” Comparative Literature 30, no. 2 (spring 1978): 133-56. Discusses the parallels between the works of Hoffmann and Dickens, with particular emphasis on doubling. Jones, Malcolm V. “‘Der Sandmann’ and ‘the Uncanny’: A Sketch for an Alternative Approach.” Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 7 (March 1986): 77101. Counters Sigmund Freud’s reading of “The Sandman.” Kamla, Thomas A. “E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Vampirism: Instinctual Perversion.” American Imago 42 (1985): 235-53. Examines the pathological behavior of the characters in the untitled vampire tale published in The Serapion Brethren. Labriola, Patrick. “Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffman: The Double in ‘William Wilson’ and The Devil’s Elixirs.” International Fiction Review 29 (2002): 69-77. Using Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny” as a guide, outlines the developmental stages of the double in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson” and Hoffman’s The Devil’s Elixirs and analyzes both authors’ treatment of the divided self. McGlathery, James. E. T. A. Hoffmann. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997, 195 p. Full-length analysis of Hoffmann’s life and works.

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Hewett-Thayer, Harvey W. Hoffmann: Author of the Tales. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948.

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Negus, Kenneth. “The Allusions to Schiller’s Der Geisterseher in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Majorat.” German Quarterly 32, no. 4 (November 1959): 341-55. Explores the influence of Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller’s Der Geisterseher on Hoffmann’s Das Majorat. ———. “The Family Tree in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 73, no. 5, Part 1 (December 1958): 516-20. Assesses the significance of ancestry in The Devil’s Elixier. Romero, Christiane Zehl. “M. G. Lewis’ The Monk and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels: Two Versions of the Gothic.” Neophilologus 63 (1979): 574-82. Compares the gothicism in The Monk and in Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixir).

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Willson, A. Leslie. “Hoffmann’s Horrors.” In Literature and the Occult: Essays in Comparative Literature, edited by Luanne Frank, pp. 264-71. Arlington, Tex.: University of Texas at Arlington, 1977. Explores elements of magic and the supernatural in Hoffmann’s tales.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Hoffmann’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Concise Dictionary of World Literary Biography, Vol. 2; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 90; European Writers, Vol. 5; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vol. 2; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; Reference Guide to World Literature, Eds. 2, 3; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 13; Something about the Author, Vol. 27; Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 1; and Writers for Children.

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JAMES HOGG (1770 - 1835)

Scottish poet, novelist, short story and song writer, journalist, editor, playwright, and essayist.

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nearly illiterate shepherd until the age of eighteen, Hogg became a prolific writer of poetry, ballads, songs, short stories, and historical narratives who was ranked among Scottish writers only below Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. He established a persona as the “Ettrick Shepherd,” a rustic and provincial poet, and gained fame through his association with the influential Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Yet that reputation declined after his death, and a century later he was remembered, if at all, only for an unconventional novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), which during his life had been dismissed as an obtuse satire on Christian fanaticism. Featuring Gothic and supernatural elements, including a schizophrenic narrator and a psychological double/devil figure, as well as proto-modern narrative complexity, the work has been rediscovered by modern critics who have come to view it as a masterpiece of prose fiction. In recent years, the revival of Scottish nationalism has led to new interest in Hogg and the reprinting of his other works as well. Despite his many imitations of Burns and Scott, the pieces that utilize the supernatural folk traditions represent Hogg’s best achievements and also provide the most interest for modern readers. Ghosts, both real and

explained, appear regularly in Hogg’s works, as do less familiar creatures: brownies, fairies, kelpies, and wraiths. Critics continue to reevaluate Hogg’s work and find much to recommend in it, showing how the author uses the occult for purposes other than mere shock and integrates his own humor and folk wisdom with strange and lively narratives to produce highly moral, extremely entertaining tales.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Born to a pious tenant farmer in 1770, Hogg spent his early life as a shepherd in the Ettrick hills of Scotland following his family’s bankruptcy in 1777. With minimal formal schooling, he taught himself to read using the only book available, a Bible, while his early interest in literature was founded on the Scottish oral tradition of ballads, songs, and fairy tales that were recited to him by his mother. As his self-education continued in his late teens, Hogg began to read the great works of English and Scottish literature and composed his first pieces of poetry, including verses imitative of John Milton, Alexander Pope, and others. By 1802 he had met Sir Walter Scott as the famous writer was collecting folk ballads for his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Hogg later read the work and, largely unimpressed with its quality, determined to compose superior verse on the same subject. He subsequently sent several poems

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to Scott, both his own original ballads and adaptations of those his mother had taught him. Hogg’s poetic abilities and his knowledge of Scottish lore impressed Scott, and in the following years a friendship grew between the two men that had an important influence on Hogg’s career. Hogg’s writings of this period appeared in his 1807 collection, The Mountain Bard: Consisting of Ballads and Songs, Founded on Facts and Legendary Tales. In February of 1810, after Hogg had lost two farms due to lack of funds, he departed the pastoral tranquility of Ettrick for several years and moved to Edinburgh. His weekly periodical, The Spy, containing articles, poems, and tales mostly written by Hogg himself, was published between 1810 and 1811, but collapsed following the printing of a particularly scandalous story. Meanwhile, Hogg began crafting his literary persona as the “Ettrick Shepherd,” a self-taught poet of provincial Scotland. He contributed poetry and prose to Scottish literary magazines and established himself as a national literary figure with his collection The Queen’s Wake in 1813. The parodies of The Poetic Mirror; or, The Living Bards of Britain (1816) delighted audiences and maintained Hogg’s popularity, though many of his other works of this period were ignored or denigrated by contemporary critics. In 1817 Hogg began a successful relationship with the newly founded Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which published the collaborative “Translation from an Ancient Chaldee MS.” in October of that year. Coauthored with John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart, the anonymous satire written in biblical form lampooned prominent Edinburgh Whigs and created a stir in the city. By 1820 Hogg had married and returned to rural life, retreating to his Altrive farm near Yarrow. The sales of his 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner proved discouraging, and Hogg’s writings of the subsequent period were frequently ignored or panned by his contemporaries, though he remained a recognizable figure in Scottish literary circles. His reminiscences of a lifelong friendship, Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott, appeared in 1834 and capitalized on interest in Scotland’s most popular writer, but his later collection of short stories, Tales of the Wars of Montrose (1835), was a failure. Hogg died in November of 1835 after a prolonged illness and was buried in Ettrick.

MAJOR WORKS With few exceptions, Hogg’s writings about the occult and paranormal are acknowledged to be his best. His attitude toward the supernatural is

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ambivalent: his ancestors believed fully in the existence of creatures from another level of reality, and Hogg constantly shifts between providing rational explanations of strange events and presenting them without comment—a technique that effectively increases the suspense. He recognized that religious faith, like superstition, demands the acceptance of things unseen, and although he was a devout Presbyterian, he saw no inconsistency in maintaining beliefs in both fairy lore and Christianity. In the poem “Superstition” (1815), Hogg laments that “gone is [Superstition’s] mysterious dignity, / And true Devotion wanes away with her.” Supernatural creatures, he says, not only teach the necessity of accepting the unseen but also fill guilty hearts with dread and make known their dark deeds. Hogg’s fiction features various supernatural beings, from conventional ghosts to fairies. “The Barber of Duncow” (1831), one of his best ghost stories, tells how a spirit reveals to a new bride her husband’s profligate past. After the wife disappears, her ghost—with throat nearly severed—leads villagers to her corpse, and when the husband touches the body, it begins to bleed profusely. Other tales depict more unusual supernatural creatures, those found in the folklore with which Hogg was familiar such as wraiths, fairies, and brownies. In “Adam Bell” (1811), some servants, having seen the apparition of their missing master, learn that a wraith appearing in daylight prognosticated very long life. In “The WoolGatherer” (1811), a young shepherd, Barnaby, whiles away a journey by telling the heroine some fine ghost stories. His seriousness provokes her to ask if he truly believes in such events. He believes in them, he says, a much as he believes in the gospels; he believes in the apparitions that warn of death, that save life, and discover guilt. Brownies figure in two of Hogg’s best works, the historical novel The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818), which mixes legends of a preternatural creature with the efforts of several defeated revolutionaries to hide from political and religious persecution in the hills and farmlands of Scotland, and the story “The Brownie of the Black Haggs” (1828). Witches appear in the entertaining novel The Three Perils of Man (1822) and the story “The Hunt of Eildon” (1818). In his poems, too, Hogg writes extensively of otherworldly creatures. In “Lyttil Pynkie” (1831), a beautiful elf-girl begins a wild dance that causes the death of the evil Baron and his profligate retainers; at the end, she enables the good priest who has come to exorcise her to see clearly the invisible evil at work throughout the world. The

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Hogg’s acknowledged masterpiece, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, is more overtly religious than his other works and rather than using supernatural creatures presents supernatural events that emphasize terror and evil. The figure alluded to in the title is Robert Wringhim Colwan, the illegitimate son of a reverend, who is brought up as an Antinomian Calvinist and thus believes himself a member of God’s elect—and therefore assured of divine salvation regardless of his sins in life. After the strange disappearance of his elder brother, Robert meets a mysterious individual, Gil-Martin, who encourages him to commit acts of violence against the “ungodly,” culminating in several murders and Robert’s own suicide. The novel features a dual narrative, first that of the deluded and possibly schizophrenic “sinner,” followed by the apparently objective account of the work’s fictional editor who had purportedly discovered Robert’s memoirs after his body was exhumed some one hundred years later. The work, which explores questions about morality, religion, psychology, and the demonic, works up to a terrifying climax, and some critics have claimed that the character of Gil-Martin is one of the most convincing representations of the power of evil in literature.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Hogg was a prolific writer who had enjoyed renown in his day, yet after his death and until the mid-twentieth century most of his work was ignored by commentators. Many of Hogg’s short poems and tales were written purely to turn a profit, and these hastily composed works are generally regarded as deeply flawed and of little merit. But even his best writings, much appreciated by his contemporaries who enjoyed his celebrations of Scottish rural scenes and superstitions as well as his imitations of ancient Scottish ballads, generated little critical interest after his death. Those who read his work generally found

his plots inadequate, his endings haphazard, and his poetry poorly crafted. A turning point in Hogg’s critical reputation occurred in the 1920s when André Gide (see Further Reading) “rediscovered” Hogg’s novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, recognizing it as a significant work of world literature and as Hogg’s masterpiece. Gide praised Hogg’s depiction of the supernatural side of faith and the work’s moral and religious effects. Since Gide’s comments, numerous scholars have studied the novel and praised its sophisticated narrative technique, psychological complexity, and deeply ironic and ambivalent elements. Critics have begun to investigate the author’s other neglected writings as well, and some have shown how the supernatural informs nearly all of the writer’s best work. They have pointed out how it achieves its effects through the tension of belief and unbelief rather than through gratuitous horror and shows that supernatural events should not be ignored because the wonders of the invisible world reveal the moral universe. Critics acknowledge that much of Hogg’s writing is ordinary and uninteresting, but his best work is enjoying renewed attention and gaining stature as some of the most original writing from the nineteenth century in its depiction of the tension between things of this world and those of other realms.

PRINCIPAL WORKS Scottish Pastorals, Poems, Songs, etc., Mostly Written in the Dialect of the South (poetry) 1801 Memoir of the Author’s Life (memoirs) 1806 The Mountain Bard: Consisting of Ballads and Songs, Founded on Facts and Legendary Tales (poetry, songs, and autobiographical sketch) 1807 The Forest Minstrel; A Selection of Songs, Adapted to the Most Favourite Scottish Airs [with Thomas M. Cunningham and others] (poetry and songs) 1810 The Spy [editor and main contributor] (journalism, poetry, and sketches) 1810-11 The Queen’s Wake (poetry) 1813 The Pilgrims of the Sun (poetry) 1815 Mador of the Moor (poetry) 1816 The Poetic Mirror; or, The Living Bards of Britain [with Thomas Pringle] (poetry) 1816 Dramatic Tales. 2 vols. (short stories) 1817

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Pilgrims of the Sun (1815), Hogg’s most ambitious poem, combines an allegorical and philosophical journey through the universe with an effective ghost story, while “Kilmeny” (1813), often praised as Hogg’s best lyric, deals with the visit of the purest maiden on earth to Fairyland—a conjunction of the fairy and Christian paradises—from which she returns to recount what she has seen. Hogg’s comic poem “The Witch of Fife” (1813) presents a pleasure-loving old man who finds himself married to a witch, who later saves him as he is about to be burned at the stake.

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“Translation from an Ancient Chaldee MS.” [with John Gibson Lockhart, John Wilson, and others] (satire) 1817 The Brownie of Bodsbeck, and Other Tales (novel and short stories) 1818 A Border Garland (songs) 1819 The Jacobite Relics of Scotland: Being the Songs, Airs, and Legends of the Adherents of the House of Stuart. 2 vols. [editor and contributor] (songs) 1819-21 Winter Evening Tales, Collected among the Cottagers in the South of Scotland. 2 vols. (short stories) 1820 The Poetical Works of James Hogg. 4 vols. (poetry and songs) 1822 The Three Perils of Man; or, War, Women, and Witchcraft. 3 vols. (novel) 1822 The Three Perils of Woman; or, Love, Leasing, and Jealousy. 3 vols. (short stories) 1823 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (novel) 1824; republished as The Suicide’s Grave, 1828 Queen Hynde (poetry) 1825 The Shepherd’s Calendar. 2 vols. (poetry) 1829 Songs, by the Ettrick Shepherd (songs) 1831 Altrive Tales: Collected from among the Peasantry of Scotland, and from Foreign Adventurers (short stories) 1832 A Queer Book (poetry) 1832 Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott (reminiscences) 1834; also published as The Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott Tales of the Wars of Montrose. 3 vols. (short stories) 1835 Tales and Sketches. 6 vols. (novels and short stories) 1837 The Works of the Ettrick Shepherd. 2 vols. (ballads, poetry, and sketches) 1865

PRIMARY SOURCES JAMES HOGG (STORY DATE 1836) SOURCE: Hogg, James. “Expedition to Hell.” In Gothic Tales of Terror, Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain, edited by Peter Haining. 1972. Reprint edition, pp. 496-506. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1973. In the following excerpt from a story first published in 1836, the narrator addresses the reader on the significance of dreams.

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There is no phenomenon in nature less understood, and about which greater nonsense is written than dreaming. It is a strange thing. For my part I do not understand it, nor have I any desire to do so; and I firmly believe that no philosopher that ever wrote knows a particle more about it than I do, however elaborate and subtle the theories he may advance concerning it. He knows not even what sleep is, nor can he define its nature, so as to enable any common mind to comprehend him; and how, then, can he define that ethereal part of it, wherein the soul holds intercourse with the external world?—how, in that state of abstraction, some ideas force themselves upon us, in spite of all our efforts to get rid of them; while others, which we have resolved to bear about with us by night as well as by day, refuse us their fellowship, even at periods when we most require their aid? No, no; the philosopher knows nothing about either; and if he says he does; I entreat you not to believe him. He does not know what mind is; even his own mind, to which one would think he has the most direct access: far less can he estimate the operations and powers of that of any other intelligent being. He does not even know, with all his subtlety, whether it be a power distinct from his body, or essentially the same, and only incidentally and temporarily endowed with different qualities. He sets himself to discover at what period of his existence the union was established. He is baffled; for Consciousness refuses the intelligence, declaring, that she cannot carry him far enough back to ascertain it. He tries to discover the precise moment when it is dissolved, but on this Consciousness is altogether silent; and all is darkness and mystery; for the origin, the manner of continuance, and the time and mode of breaking up of the union between soul and body, are in reality undiscoverable by our natural faculties— are not patent, beyond the possibility of mistake: but whosoever can read his Bible, and solve a dream, can do either, without being subjected to any material error. It is on this ground that I like to contemplate, not the theory of dreams, but the dreams themselves; because they prove to the unlettered man, in a very forcible manner, a distinct existence of the soul, and its lively and rapid intelligence with external nature, as well as with a world of spirits with which it has no acquaintance, when the body is lying dormant, and the same to the soul as if sleeping in death. I account nothing of any dream that relates to the actions of the day; the person is not sound

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GENERAL COMMENTARY DOUGLAS S. MACK (ESSAY DATE 1995) SOURCE: Mack, Douglas S. “Aspects of the Supernatural in the Shorter Fiction of James Hogg.” In Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter Davidson, and Jane Stevenson, pp. 129-35. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. In the following essay, Mack explores the sources that inform Hogg’s use of the supernatural in his works.

This essay focuses on some of the roots of the use of the supernatural in the works of James Hogg; this subject will be approached through an examination of specific examples provided by The Shepherd’s Calendar, a series of articles contributed by Hogg to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine between 1819 and 1828. The Shepherd’s Calendar is a title with a long history in the literature of the English language. Hogg, however, had a particular and unusual right to use it: in his youth he had spent many years as

a professional shepherd in the remote and mountainous Ettrick district of southern Scotland. Indeed, in parts of his Shepherd’s Calendar he draws upon the experiences of his own pastoral life in the 1790s; and elsewhere in the series he sets out to re-create on paper something of the manner and the content of the traditional oral story-telling of Ettrick. To describe The Shepherd’s Calendar in this way seems to suggest that it is a project of a somewhat antiquarian nature, involving an attempt to record and preserve old customs and manners before they finally pass away. That is no doubt part of what Hogg is seeking to achieve; but his “Shepherd’s Calendar” articles go far beyond a mere antiquarian interest. Indeed, these contributions to Blackwood’s make up a sequence of sophisticated and complex narratives in which the supernatural plays a particularly striking role. Let us begin by looking at “Storms”, a largely autobiographical article in which Hogg writes about the trials and dangers encountered by shepherds as a result of severe snow-falls. Much of the article is devoted to an account of Hogg’s own experiences during the winter of 1794-95. At this time he was working as a shepherd at Blackhouse in the Yarrow valley, part of the Ettrick district, and he was a member of a local literary society formed by “a few young shepherds”. At the society’s meetings each of the members “read an essay on a subject previously given out; and after that every essay was minutely investigated, and criticised”.1 In The Rise of the Historical Novel, John MacQueen has convincingly argued that the society’s agenda probably “included the forbidden subject of radical politics and the need for reform, if not revolution”.2 This was, after all, the 1790s: revolution was in the air. Be that as it may, Hogg was on his way to a meeting of this society when signs of an approaching storm forced him to turn back. The meeting of the society went ahead in his absence; and as events turned out the shieling at which it was held “was situated in the very vortex of the storm; the devastations made by it extended all around that, to a certain extent; and no farther on any one quarter than another” (16). The storm was universally viewed in the Ettrick community “as a judgement sent by God for the punishment of some heineous offence” (15). Hogg goes on to record a conversation, during which he learned that the blame for the heinous offence was being laid at the door of his literary society: “Weel chap” said he to me “we hae fund out what has been the cause of a’ this mischief now.” “What do you mean John?”

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asleep who dreams about these things; there is no division between matter and mind, but they are mingled together in a sort of chaos—what a farmer would call compost—fermenting and disturbing one another. I find that in all dreams of that kind, men of every profession have dreams peculiar to their own occupations; and, in the country, at least, their import is generally understood. Every man’s body is a barometer. A thing made up of the elements must be affected by their various changes and convulsions; and so the body assuredly is. When I was a shepherd, and all the comforts of my life depended so much on good or bad weather, the first thing I did every morning was strictly to overhaul the dreams of the night; and I found that I could calculate better from them than from the appearance and changes of the sky. I know a keen sportsman who pretends that his dreams never deceive him. If the dream is of angling, or pursuing salmon in deep waters, he is sure of rain; but if fishing on dry ground, or in waters so low that the fish cannot get from him, it forebodes drought; hunting or shooting hares is snow, and moorfowl wind, & c. But the most extraordinary professional dream on record is, without all doubt, that well-known one of George Dobson, coach-driver in Edinburgh, which I shall here relate; for though it did not happen in the shepherd’s cot, it has often been recited there.

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his novels; and the Scottish capital was still basking in the afterglow of the great days of David Hume and Adam Smith, of Hutton the geologist and Black the chemist, and of all the other major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. Ettrick also had its importance, at any rate for those sensitive to the living significance of the great traditional ballads. It was from Ettrick that Scott (with Hogg’s help) obtained some of the material for Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; and it was Yarrow (in Ettrick) that Wordsworth famously left Unvisited in 1803—and later Visited in the autumn of 1814, with Hogg as his guide. The mature Hogg was the heir of the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment, and he was also the heir, and even the embodiment, of Wordsworth’s unvisited Yarrow, with its “treasured dreams of times long past”.

“What do I mean? It seems that a great squad o’ birkies that ye are conneckit wi’, had met that night at the herds house o’ Ever Phaup, an had raised the deil amang them.” Every countenance in the kitchen changed; the women gazed at John and then at me, and their lips grew white. These kind of feelings are infectious, people may say what they will; fear begets fear as naturally as light springs from reflection. I reasoned stoutly at first against the veracity of the report, observing that it was utter absurdity, and a shame and disgrace for the country to cherish such a rediculous lie. “Lie!” said John “It’s nae lie; they had him up amang them like a great rough dog at the very time that the tempest began, and were glad to draw cuts, an’ gie him ane o’ their number to get quit o’ him again.” Lord how every hair of my head, and inch of my frame crept at hearing this sentence; for I had a dearly loved brother who was one of the number, several full cousins, and intimate acquaintances; indeed I looked on the whole fraternity as my brethern, and considered myself involved in all their transactions. I could say no more in defence of the society’s proceedings, for to tell the truth, though I am ashamed to acknowledge it, I suspected that the allegation might be too true. (16-17)

“For to tell the truth, though I am ashamed to acknowledge it, I suspected that the allegation might be too true.” These are highly significant words. They show the young Hogg wholly at home with a system of assumptions in which a blizzard can be explained as the judgement of God, and in which it can seem natural to encounter the physical and active presence of the Devil, here and now, among one’s relations and intimate acquaintances. On the other hand, he says “I am ashamed to acknowledge it”. The mature Hogg is by no means contained by a naive acceptance of the old beliefs: he is fully aware that times have changed, and that in a post-Enlightenment world the old ideas have come to be seen as childishly absurd. All this points to a crucial feature of Hogg’s intellectual and cultural position: he is situated between two worlds—or rather, he is fully part of two very different worlds. One of these worlds is the Ettrick of his pastoral youth, a district where he continued to spend much of his time throughout his life, and where he died. His other world is Edinburgh, which he graced for more than a quarter of a century as a professional author. It would not be extravagant to say that in Hogg’s lifetime each of these two worlds was in its own way a key site in the intellectual life of Europe. From Edinburgh, Walter Scott was enthralling an international audience with his poetry and

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Hogg’s place within these two worlds is important for his fiction; indeed much of his writing can be seen as an assertion, aimed at a sceptical Edinburgh audience, of the validity of traditional Ettrick beliefs and values. An excellent example of this process is provided by “Mr Adamson of Laverhope”, a story from The Shepherd’s Calendar in which a narrator, who clearly shares the assumptions of Enlightenment Edinburgh, offers for our contemplation an account of what peasant superstition has made of a natural calamity—a man being killed by lightning during a thunderstorm. How does the story of Mr Adamson appear if we accept the supernatural interpretation of the superstitious inhabitants of Ettrick? In this view, we are not dealing with a natural event in which a man is struck by lightning; we are dealing rather with a divine judgment. God’s lightning strikes down an evildoer; and the Devil, who has been present in disguise, carries Mr Adamson’s soul off to Hell in the last thunderclap of the storm. What has Adamson done to deserve this condign punishment? His first offence is that, while seeking to collect debts, he has evicted a poor family and caused their goods to be sold by public auction. Thereafter, the community comes together to shear Mr Adamson’s sheep, “it being customary for the farmers to assist one another reciprocally on these occasions”; but Adamson, dissatisfied with himself over the eviction, sours the usual hilarity of the communal shearing by irritably and violently attacking first a sheep-dog, and then a boy who comes to the dog’s defence. Finally, Adamson refuses the customary alms to a beggar who visits the shearing. It is made clear that all these actions are contrary to Adamson’s duty as a professing Christian; and we are also made to see

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The values of Ettrick are celebrated within the story by means of a detailed and affectionate account of the shared pleasures of the communal sheep-shearing, and these values are given explicit expression through the words and actions of the shepherd Rob Johnson. The Good Shepherd is always a resonant figure in Hogg. Behind fictional characters like Rob Johnson and Daniel Bell of The Three Perils of Woman there lies, of course, the figure of James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd; but we are also reminded of the biblical King David, once a shepherd boy—and of Jesus, the supreme Good Shepherd. In the supernatural interpretation of “Mr Adamson of Laverhope”, then, evil deeds provoke divine vengeance. This view is powerfully backed up by Hogg’s detailed rendering of the convulsion of the thunderstorm, a notable feature of which is a description of a flood which sweeps down on Adamson’s sheepfolds “with a cataract front more than twenty feet deep” (33). This is an apt image in a story of divine anger; but surprisingly enough it is also true to weather conditions in southern Scotland, where flash floods of this kind are by no means unknown. For example, a report on the front page of The Scotsman newspaper for 27 July 1983 describes “a wall of water 20ft high and 200yds wide in places” which earlier in the week had surged across a four-mile area in the valley of the Hermitage Water, causing widespread damage to property and considerable danger to life and limb. The flood, then, however extraordinary, nevertheless remains firmly within the boundaries of the possible; and this may serve as a reminder that Hogg’s Enlightenment narrator does not share the Ettrick community’s supernatural interpretation of Mr Adamson’s death. For the narrator, Adamson is simply the unfortunate victim of a natural event, and this interpretation is reinforced by the narrator’s concluding anecdote concerning the death by lightning of Mr Adam Copland of Minnigess. In this anecdote there is not a hint of the supernatural; instead we have cool, detached and rational comments on the operation of “the electric matter that slew Mr Copland”. The story of the death of Mr Copland is, as it were, an Enlightenment version of the story erected by peasant superstition around the death of Mr Adamson; but Hogg so manages matters that the peasant superstition becomes much more coher-

ent, impressive and convincing than the views of his Enlightened narrator. Hogg, that is to say, subverts his own narrator—just as the Editor is subverted in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It seems, then, that in “Mr Adamson of Laverhope” Hogg employs a devious narrative strategy in order to question the Enlightened assumptions of his readers; indeed, the thrust of the story is that the traditional Christian world-view, dismissed by the narrator as peasant superstition, is in fact the source of an enlightenment which is genuine and real. Such a view sits comfortably with opinions expressed by Hogg in other contexts, for example in the sermon on Deism in the Lay Sermons of 1834, and in the poem “Superstition”, which dates from 1815. “Superstition” looks back with regret to the old Ettrick belief in the supernatural, which has faded under the advance of modern rationalism. Those were the times for holiness of frame; Those were the days when fancy wandered free; That kindled in the soul the mystic flame, And the rapt breathings of high poesy; Sole empress of the twilight—Woe is me! That thou and all thy spectres are outworn; For true devotion wanes away with thee. All thy delirious dreams are laughed to scorn, While o’er our hills has dawned a cold saturnine morn.3

The Ettrick tradition was a Christian one, but it contained elements surviving from pre-Christian times. This is reflected in a number of Hogg’s works, in which a young woman is taken from Scotland to a heavenly land, from which she returns transformed in one way or another. Most of Hogg’s variations on this theme have certain things in common: the story is usually set in preReformation Scotland; the young woman is usually linked in some way to the Blessed Virgin Mary—indeed, she is usually called Mary; the question of whether she does, or does not, remain a virgin is always an issue of some importance; and the heaven to which she is taken always has strong hints of pre-Christian or non-Christian traditions about Fairyland. This group of Hogg texts includes such works as “Kilmeny”, The Pilgrims of the Sun, “A Genuine Border Story”, and “Mary Burnet”. The last-named, from The Shepherd’s Calendar, is a story quite different in tone from “Mr Adamson of Laverhope”. The central character, Mary Burnet, is subjected by her lover John Allanson to something between a seduction and a rape. Supernatural forces, both good and evil, are

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that his actions outrage the shared values of an agricultural community which must depend upon mutual support for survival in a harsh environment.

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brought into play by this outrage; and Mary, apparently under the protection of the Blessed Virgin, disappears from earth to become a partheavenly, part-fairy creature. In her fairy guise, Mary returns to earth to lure her seducer to his destruction, and seven years after her disappearance she returns again, in heavenly and fairy glory, to give comfort to her grieving parents. The word “glamour” came into use in the Scots language before becoming established in English usage; and this word, in its traditional Scots sense of “magic, enchantment, witchcraft”, exactly captures the spirit of “Mary Burnet”.

rapidly thereafter. There has been a substantial revival over the past forty years or so, as good modern editions of some of his works have become available. A complete and accurate edition of The Shepherd’s Calendar has still to appear, however: and the same could be said of many other major Hogg texts and collections. It is therefore pleasant to be able to record that a new and complete edition of Hogg is at present in active preparation, under the auspices of the University of Stirling’s Centre for Scottish Literature and Culture.

Another aspect of Hogg’s use of the supernatural in The Shepherd’s Calendar comes to the fore in the story “The Brownie of the Black Haggs”, a work which explores deep and disturbing recesses of the human mind. Lady Wheelhope becomes obsessed by Merodach, a servant thought by the country people to be a brownie sent to haunt her as a punishment for her wickedness. Her obsession deepens and becomes more complex as, again and again, she tries unsuccessfully to harm him only to suffer herself from the results of her own actions. We are told that the lady “fixed her eyes on Merodach. But such a look! . . . It was not a look of love nor of hatred exclusively; neither was it of desire or disgust, but it was a combination of them all. It was such a look as one fiend would cast on another, in whose everlasting destruction he rejoiced” (105). The author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is very much on his home ground here.

Notes

I have been attempting to suggest that Hogg’s short stories are richly complex works which draw on deep wells of tradition in their resonant use of the supernatural; and it would be fair to say that his shorter fiction is beginning to achieve a high reputation, especially in Scotland and North America. If this emerging reputation is deserved, why has it taken so long for the worth of these stories to be recognized? A clue is provided by “Tibby Hyslop’s Dream”, another of the Shepherd’s Calendar pieces. This is in effect a story of sexual harassment and attempted seduction; but in the numerous nineteenth-century collected editions of Hogg’s works the text is so heavily bowdlerized as to be almost entirely innocent of sexual implication. The story is thus emptied of its significant content. The posthumous nineteenth-century collected editions of Hogg are all deplorably inadequate; and, as was to be expected in the circumstances, his reputation—high in his lifetime—declined

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1. James Hogg, Selected Stories and Sketches, ed. Douglas S. Mack, Edinburgh, 1982, 5. 2. John MacQueen, The Rise of the Historical Novel, Edinburgh, 1989, 208. 3. James Hogg, Selected Poems, ed. Douglas S. Mack, Oxford, 1970, 75; ll. 91-99.

TITLE COMMENTARY The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner THE NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE (REVIEW DATE 1 NOVEMBER 1824) SOURCE: “New Publications, with Critical Remarks: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.” The New Monthly Magazine 11 (1 November 1824): 506. In the following excerpt, the critic offers a strongly negative assessment of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, objecting especially to Hogg’s “bad grammar.”

[The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is,] we presume, intended to bring that exaggerated and extravagant style of writing which has lately become too prevalent, into the contempt which it so richly merits. All former horrors are nothing to the ineffable enormities of this justified Sinner, who is a parricide, fratricide, and clericide—for we must coin new words to comprehend all his multifarious offences. Nothing more completely ridiculous can well be imagined than the whole of the story. . . . We do not altogether approve of the mode which the author has chosen of attacking the religious prejudices of numbers, who, notwithstanding their speculative opinions, are in no danger of becoming either parricides or fratricides. We must also remark, that in spite of

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WILLISTON R. BENEDICT (ESSAY DATE SPRING 1983) SOURCE: Benedict, Williston R. “A Story Replete with Horror.” Princeton University Library Chronicle 44, no. 3 (spring 1983): 246-51. In the following essay, Benedict studies the original, 1824 edition of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and interprets the novel within the context of the literature of the early nineteenth century and within Hogg’s oeuvre.

Among the books in the private collection of Mr. Robert H. Taylor, which is now housed in the Firestone Library, is a fine and uncut copy in the original boards of James Hogg’s only novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Hogg (1770-1835) was born into a humble farming family of the Lowlands of Scotland. He taught himself to read and write at an early age, and had the good fortune, at about the age of 30, to be drawn from rural obscurity into Edinburgh’s literary society through the aid and encouragement of Sir Walter Scott. Like his mentor, Hogg proved successful at publishing some volumes of poetry before turning to the composition of works of fiction about 1818. By 1824, the date of his novel’s publication, he had demonstrated to the Edinburgh “literati” his interest in and vast knowledge of the traditional tales of rural Scotland, which constitute one of the principal sources of his novel. Hogg’s few references, in his other works and in his chiefly unpublished correspondence, to the Justified Sinner provide little information as to his intention in writing it. William Blackwood, Edinburgh’s most important publisher of the age, had evidently declined to publish the novel, and it appeared instead under the London imprint of T. N. Longman and his associates in the summer of 1824. Departing from his previous practice, Hogg authorized publication of the book without

the inclusion of his name on the title page. In a letter to Blackwood dated 28 June 1824 Hogg wrote, with considerable urgency in his usual hurried manner: “There is one hint I beseech you to remember to give. . . . It is that as some one of our friends are likely to be the first efficient noticers of The Confessions they will not notice them at all as mine but as written by a Glasgow man by all means. . . . This will give excellent and delightful scope and freedom.”1 In the preface to another volume published in 1832, Hogg explained his desire for anonymous authorship: “The next year, 1824, I published The Confessions of a Sinner; but it being a story replete with horror, after I had written it I durst not venture to put my name to it: so it was published anonymously, and of course did not sell very well.” Other comments on the book in Hogg’s correspondence are rare. In a letter to Blackwood, probably dated 6 August 1828, he wrote that a certain Mrs. Hughes “insists on the Confessions of a Sinner being republished with my name, as she says it is positively the best story of that frightful kind that ever was written. I think you must buy up the remaining copies [of the 1824 edition] and make an edition of them for a trial.”2 This suggestion resulted in the reprinting in 1828 of the novel under Hogg’s name, but with the title altered to The Suicide’s Grave. A substantially revised version, expunged of its more sensational passages, was issued in 1837 as The Confessions of a Fanatic. Subsequent editions of the novel utilized the text of 1837 until 1895, when it was at last reprinted with the text of the original 1824 edition fully restored. Another edition containing Hogg’s initial version appeared in 1924, with a short but perceptive introduction by T. Earle Welby. But not until an edition was printed in 1947, containing a cogent and more extended analysis of the novel by André Gide, did the Confessions begin to receive the serious attention of scholars of 19th-century Scottish literature. The “bowdlerization” of Hogg’s novel throughout the 19th century gives a special importance to its initially published text under Hogg’s own supervision. For the setting of his “story replete with horror” Hogg chose Edinburgh and its environs in the early years of the 18th century. The memory of the terrible period of civil and religious conflict in Scotland during the second half of the 17th century remained vivid in the minds of men and women ca. 1710, as did the powerful influence of Calvinist doctrine. The most inveterate Calvinists were the children of those Cameronians who were

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the high seasoning given to these Confessions, they are still singularly dull and revolting, and that it is altogether unfair to treat the reader with two versions of such extraordinary trash as the writer has given us in “the Editor’s narrative,” and the Confessions themselves. Moreover, though we may be compelled to read as much bad Scotch, as any gentleman on the other side of the Tweed may choose to pour out upon us, yet we do protest most solemnly against the iniquity of bad English, of which the present work furnishes most abundant instances. We account his bad grammar amongst the most crying sins of the miscreant with whose history we are here regaled.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR GEORGE SAINTSBURY ON THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS AND CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER

[In the midst of all of Hogg’s] chaotic work, there is still to be found, though misnamed, one of the most remarkable stories of its kind ever written—a story which . . . is not only extraordinarily good of itself, but insists peremptorily that the reader shall wonder how the devil it got where it is. . . . [In] truth, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, while it has all Hogg’s merits and more, is quite astoundingly free from his defects. His tales are generally innocent of the most rudimentary notions of construction: this goes closely ordered, with a few pardonable enough digressions, from beginning to end. He has usually little concentrated grasp of character: the few personages of the Confessions are consistent throughout. His dialogue is, as a rule, extraordinarily slipshod and unequal: here there is no fault to find with it. His greatest lack, in short, is the lack of form: and here, though the story might perhaps have been curtailed, or rather “cut” in the middle, with advantage, the form is excellent. . . . In no book known to me is the grave treatment of the topsy-turvy and improbable better managed. . . . The story of the pretended Gil Martin, preposterous as it is, is told by the unlucky maniac exactly in the manner in which a man deluded, but with occasional suspicions of his delusion, would tell it. The gradual change from intended and successful rascality and crime into the incurring or the supposed incurring of the most hideous guilt without any actual consciousness of guilty action may seem an almost hopeless thing to treat probably. Yet it is so treated here. SOURCE: Saintsbury, George. “Hogg.” Macmillan’s Magazine 60, no. 359 (September 1889). Reprinted in The Collected Essays and Papers of George Saintsbury, 1875-1920. Vol. I, pp. 26-52. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1923.

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the determined opponents of episcopacy and of the doctrine of salvation through the efficacy of good works. The anonymous reviewer of Hogg’s novel in London’s Literary Gazette (July 1824) shrewdly judged that “the main object of his book . . . seems to be to satirize the excess of that Calvinical or Cameronian doctrine, which rests the salvation of mankind entirely on faith without good works.” The novel functions principally as a severe indictment of the self-righteousness of the “just Pharisee,” and as a fearful warning of the perils of religious mania, which can, as here, lead to a career of homicide. Hogg’s presentation of this thesis in the Confessions constitutes the subtlest development of it in his works of fiction, and may well comprise its most powerful and original realization in British fiction. To personify the homicidal “righteous Pharisee” Hogg created as his protagonist Robert Wringhim Colwan. Educated exclusively in the Calvinist tenets of the predestined salvation of a few souls and the damnation of the majority of mankind, Colwan espouses the unique efficacy of faith in one’s personal salvation to justify the commission of crimes against those imagined to be personal and ideological enemies. These crimes culminate in a succession of homicides that envelop most of the members of Colwan’s immediate family. He is impelled to perpetrate these acts by a mysterious being who, while giving his name as Gil-Martin, embodies most of the attributes traditionally associated by Scottish Calvinists with the Devil. The Cameronians, obsessed by the power and omnipresence of the forces of darkness, ascribed to these invisible entities an almost palpable reality. The Devil was to them the most fascinating and terrifying of imagined supernatural powers, possessing among other gifts the ability to appear and disappear at will and the possibility of assuming the physiognomy and shape of any mortal. Combining the talents of Calvinist minister and Scottish lawyer, Satan is described by one of Hogg’s characters as often posing as “a strick believer in a’ the truths of Christianity.” It is while pretending to be a strict coreligionist of Colwan that Gil-Martin incites him to commit the succession of homicides and to kill himself after his insane acts have been revealed to the authorities. One of Gil-Martin’s chief devices of persuasion was the assumption of Colwan’s precise appearance, so that the former seemed to constitute Colwan’s “second self.” In the Confessions this delusion of the “second self” is linked in Colwan’s mind with the possibility that his intrinsic self has been possessed by the Devil. In fact it represents a

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While composing his novel during the early 1820s, Hogg was evidently relying upon the current vogue of the “Gothic novel” to assure it a readership readily excited by the terrifying and the improbable in fiction. A powerful revival of interest in German literature, especially of the sensational variety, had followed the publication in London in 1813 of Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne. There ensued numerous translations of and reviews concerning German works of this genre from 1817 through 1828, chiefly by Hogg’s fellow Scotsmen Thomas Carlyle and Robert Pearse Gillies. Preoccupation with the supernatural was an inherent theme in this proliferation of publications, some of the most interesting of which employ the idea of the “second self” (or “Doppelgänger”) to create an atmosphere of suspense and terror. Hogg’s novel appears to be the only extended work of fiction published in the British Isles during the early 19th century to utilize the motif of the “second self” in a manner comparable to such contemporary German authors as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Jean-Paul Richter. The works most resembling Hogg’s novel to be translated at this period were Adalbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl and Hoffmann’s sole completed novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels. (The latter is unique in contemporary German fiction in linking the “Doppelgänger” theme to a criminally insane protagonist, resembling Hogg’s Colwan.) Can the appearance in 1824 in English translations of Peter Schlemihl and Die Elixiere des Teufels have materially influenced Hogg’s treatment of the “second self” in the Confessions? A notice in the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany for April indicates that Hogg’s book was already in the press. It remained unpublished, however, until mid-July, when both the Literary Gazette and the magazine John Bull carried advertisements (on 17 and 18 July respectively) that it had just been published. However, the appearance of Hogg’s important anecdote “A Scots Mummy,” later incorporated almost verbatim into the novel, in the issue of Blackwood’s Magazine for August 1823 indicates that Hogg had for many months pondered the composition of his book, and was already preparing readers of that periodical for its subsequent publication. It seems probable, therefore, that Hogg concentrated his efforts on composing the novel during the period from autumn 1822 to spring 1824, and that it was largely completed by April 1824. Information in John Bull

indicates the prior publication of both of the German novels; the periodical advertised Peter Schlemihl as available to the public on 14 March, while the first announcement of Gillies’s translation of Die Elixiere des Teufels appeared there on 27 June. While the friendship of Hogg and Gillies complicates the problem of the influence of the latter’s translation on Hogg’s novel, one must conclude that it has so far proved impossible to establish any documented influence upon Hogg’s employment of the “second self” in his novel by any contemporary German author. Although he relied for the success of the Confessions upon the popularity of English and German fiction of the supernatural, Hogg introduced important elements into his novel which set it— and his numerous works of shorter fiction—apart from such authors as Ann Radcliffe, “Monk” Lewis, and Charles Robert Maturin. Hogg’s works have as their settings predominantly rural environments, with characters drawn from the Scottish peasantry or lesser landed gentry rather than from the aristocracy or wealthy middle class. Also notable are the frequent use by Hogg’s characters of Scots dialect, in contrast to the more genteel language of “Gothic” romances; a reliance upon prosaic and homely details to enhance the sense of horror; a less inhibited employment of explicit details of physically hideous and morally shocking occurrences; and, above all, a firm and frequently demonstrated conviction that ordinary men and women constantly experience the intervention of the supernatural in their everyday lives. The traditional elements of superstition, communicated orally from generation to generation among the Scottish peasantry, and the long legacy of Scottish Calvinism influenced Hogg’s Confessions and his shorter works of fiction to a considerably greater degree than did the conventions of the “Gothic novel.” These traditional themes included retribution for real or imagined grievances, with supernatural intervention being often employed to reveal past crimes and impose a vengeance (like that directed against Colwan) that human justice could not provide. Linked to this idea is Calvinism’s emphasis upon the punishment of the “unrighteous,” rather than upon their redemption, an emphasis that contributed to the fearful and mysterious ethos of Hogg’s novel. Another element is Hogg’s frequent use of dreams or hallucinations to prove (in Hogg’s words) “in a very forcible manner, a distinct existence of the soul, and its lively and rapid intelligence with . . . a world of spirits with which it has no acquain-

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projection into visible form of Colwan’s own spiritual pride, worldly ambition, and unresolvable inner conflicts.

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tance, when the body is lying dormant, and the same to the soul as if sleeping in death.” Despite the modest but unflagging success of his previous published volumes of prose, the Confessions proved a complete failure with the reading public of 1824. The enigmatic nature of the book also baffled the four anonymous London reviewers who took the trouble to write about it after its publication. The critic for the Westminster Review (October 1824) dismissed Colwan as an insane fanatic, and Gil-Martin as a “mongrel devil.” The reviewer in the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal (November 1824) attacked Hogg’s style as “exaggerated and extravagant,” ridiculed the narrative as totally implausible, and denounced the author for his adverse view of Calvinism. On 17 July there appeared in the Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres a much more searching analysis of the novel. The critic found it, although “mystical and extravagant,” nonetheless “curious and interesting, such as we might have expected from Mr. Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, whose [creation] it is.” The reviewer in the British Critic (July 1824) was also perspicacious enough to recognize Hogg as the author. While judging the novel a “most uncouth and unpleasant volume,” he described and even reproduced verbatim many of its incidents in the review, and perceptively linked Hogg’s work—in “machinery” and themes (including that of the “second self”)—to Gillies’s translation of the Elixiere des Teufels. After four reviews, generally adverse in tenor, the commercial failure of Hogg’s novel was assured. As a result of this contemporary neglect, the book enjoys a reputation for scarcity among modern collectors of Scottish and English literature, copies in the original condition of publication (such as the Taylor copy) being exceedingly uncommon. With the possible exception of one or two of his short tales, nothing in Hogg’s copious body of prose fiction prepares the reader for a book of such psychological subtlety and tension as The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It was, in fact, much closer in conception and spirit to certain celebrated works of German Romanticism than to the fiction of Hogg’s own compatriots, including of course the vastly more popular Sir Walter Scott. Hogg’s combination of traditional, theological, supernatural, and psychological motifs in a manner alien to the readers of his own day delayed critical recognition of the literary importance and originality of his work for more than a century.

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Notes 1. Unpublished holograph letter, National Library of Scotland. 2. Ibid.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH (ESSAY DATE 1993) SOURCE: Smith, Iain Crichton. “A Work of Genius: James Hogg’s Justified Sinner.” Studies in Scottish Literature 28 (1993): 1-11. In the following essay, Smith offers high praise for The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, arguing that its sophisticated and advanced (by nineteenth-century standards) psychological and philosophical aspects, among others, distinguish the novel as “one of the very greatest of all Scottish books.”

It is a strange thing that in a biography of James Hogg written by Sir George Douglas and dated September 1899, there are only three references to the Memoirs of Justified Sinner, the most substantial of these occurring in a footnote rebutting an opinion apparently held by Andrew Lang that John Gibson Lockhart had a hand in the novel.1 There is no attempt at an analysis of the book. Yet this is a towering Scottish novel, one of the very greatest of all Scottish books. We know that Scott and Hogg were acquaintances and that their relationship was sometimes uneasy. Douglas writes: His [i.e., Hogg’s] principal grounds of irritation against Scott were the consistent abstinence of the latter from recognizing him in any of his published writing: his sometimes gratuitous and unhelpful criticism of the prose pieces. . . . and his rather inconsiderate recommendation of Hogg to the post of head shepherd to Lord Porchester, the condition of that appointment being that he should put his ‘poetical talent under lock and key for ever.’2

Yet I believe that Scott wrote nothing as artistically satisfying, as brilliant in conception and execution and continuous logical power as Hogg’s novel. When we set beside it the Walpoles and the Radcliffes one can see that Hogg moves in an altogether different dimension. The story is easily told. A life-loving laird called Colwan marries a religious zealot whose implacable spiritual adviser, a minister called Wringhim, believes utterly in the Calvinist Law of Election by Grace. Two sons are born of her, one called George whom her husband acknowledges as his and who is an amiable average normal boy, the other Robert (whom the laird

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Now it is no use comparing Hogg with Scott or, as far as I can see, with anyone in his century (born in 1770, Hogg died in 1835). This novel seems to me to be psychologically far in advance of Hogg’s time and can only be properly understood in the twentieth century. (I believe this also to be true of Dostoevski with whom Hogg can without chauvinism be compared) I have often thought that there is a resemblance between Scottish and Russian writers in their primary concerns. The Scot is a metaphysical philosophical being, and, in general, refuses to rest content with the description of manners. It is no accident that Macdiarmid, for example, writes often of the Russians. In A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle he asks for a share of Dostoevski’s “appalling genius.” I believe that Hogg had more than his share, especially (and probably exclusively) in this book. Time and time again we are reminded of Dostoevski and of no one else. (If one compares the book with, say, Gogol’s Diary of a Madman we are, I think, in a different world.) One is reminded of Dostoevski first of all in the fact that both writers are capable of inducing a sense of vertigo in the reader. It is difficult to explain this clearly but I mean that one seems to be caught up in a curiously dizzy mechanism so that the normal appears strange and foggy and inverted. One thinks for instance of the Vision at Arthur’s Seat which is metaphysical in its implications and much more sophisticated than the grotesque visions, say, in The Castle of Otranto. Again, one gets, now and again, a scene in Hogg which reminds one directly of Dostoevski, that is, the proud glorying in abasement and injury as in the following. Robert is trying to spoil George’s tennis game and has been hit: In the meantime, young Wringhim [i.e., Robert] was an object to all of the uttermost disgust. The blood flowing from his mouth and nose he took no pains to stem, neither did he so much as wipe it away; so that it spread over all his cheeks, and breast, even off at his toes. In that state did he

take up his station in the middle of the competitors; and he did not now keep his place, but ran about, impeding everyone who attempted to make at the ball. They loaded him with execrations, but it availed nothing; he seemed courting persecution and buffetings, keeping steadfastly to his old joke of damnation, and marring the game so completely that, in spite of every effort on the part of the players, he forced them to stop their game and give it up. He was such a rueful-looking object, covered with blood, that none of them had the heart to kick him, although it appeared the only thing he wanted; and, as for George, he said not another word to him, either in anger or reproof.3

In another passage we get another Dostoevski theme, the contempt of the absolute man for the liberal. The passage begins: He [i.e., Robert] then raised himself on his knees and hams, and raising up his ghastly face, while the blood streamed over both ears, he besought his life of his brother, in the most abject whining manner, gaping and blubbering most piteously. (p. 41)

The passage continues, later on: “Well, Robert, I will believe it. I am disposed to be hasty and passionate: it is a fault in my nature; but I never meant, or wished you evil; and God is my witness that I would as soon stretch out my hand to my own life, or my father’s, as to yours.” At these words, Wringhim uttered a hollow exulting laugh, put his hands in his pockets, and withdrew a space to his accustomed distance. (p. 42)

There is a curious effeminacy (combined with absolutism) in Robert who, one senses, would have admired George more if he had been totally ruthless and not liberal. Another Dostoevskian characteristic is the humor of the book. The opening section where the laird’s wife sits up with a prayer book in her hand on her wedding night and refuses to come to bed is brilliantly funny, especially when the laird himself drops off to sleep in the middle of her prayers and begins to snore: He began, in truth, to sound a nasal bugle of no ordinary calibre—the notes being little inferior to those of a military trumpet. The lady tried to proceed, but every returning note from the bed burst on her ear with a louder twang, and a longer peal, till the concord of sweet sounds became so truly pathetic that the meek spirit of the dame was quite overcome; and, after shedding a flood of tears, she arose from her knees, and retired to the chimney-corner with her Bible in her lap, there to spend the hours in holy meditation till such time as the inebriated trumpeter should awaken to a sense of propriety. (p. 7)

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does not acknowledge on the grounds that he has been separated from his wife who now lives with Wringhim). Robert is educated into the strict Calvinist religion and is persuaded of the truth of the Law of Election. Robert one day meets a young man who speaks to him about religious things but is really the Devil. On the latter’s instructions he kills a minister, his brother George and possibly his mother. At the end of the book—his psyche tortured beyond endurance—he kills himself.

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True, this might appear to be pawky humor but a careful analysis will show that it is very purposeful. Hogg is asserting human values against absolute ones gone mad. He has learnt (what Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe haven’t) that there is a place for humor in the he kind of book he is writing, as Dostoevski also knew. Much of his other humor is on a more purely metaphysical level as for instance at the end of the book where the Devil gets into the printer’s shop—a printer’s devil. This is a nice metaphysical pun. But there are many other instances of this nature, for the story belongs to the kingdom of the absurd. A number of names are bandied about in connection with Hogg, for example, Defoe, Poe, and Henry James in a book such as The Turn of the Screw. The latter, I think, is closer to him in conscious art: as for Defoe and Poe I cannot see that they are very like him. Poe is far more morbid than Hogg, and Defoe doesn’t have his sense of ideology. It seems to me that the chosen theme suggests more the milieu of a Dostoevski in its ambiguous explorations of the spirit. And to find a writer treating a Dostoevskian theme in the eighteenth century—what a miracle! I can in fact think of no other Scottish book which is a miracle of this kind. How did Hogg—a minor poet and minor prose writer in his other work—make this transcendental leap? It seems to be inexplicable except that in some strange fashion—perhaps in a hallucinatory logical vision—he was given the sight of this particular extreme form of religion carried to its ultimate conclusion, and worked out the implications with the instantaneous grasp of genius. The crucial discovery he made is overwhelmingly simple. It is this. What if the Doctrine of Divine Election is actually a doctrine not of God but of the Devil? What if the Devil should find himself able to acquiesce quite sincerely in the implications of the doctrine? What if the Devil should on these terms admit that he is a Christian and really mean it? It is worth thinking about this before we discuss it in more detail. There are plays by Marlowe and Goethe about a man who sells his soul to the Devil. In these plays the man is intellectually brilliant but he knows that he is dealing with the Devil—he is selling his soul to him. It is the ultimate capitalist transaction. The Devil offers, in return, knowledge, luxury and women. But the Devil in this particular book doesn’t offer luxury or women. He offers in fact what God appears to offer—Divine Election—and this in itself is the

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damnable thing because the theory is in its axioms devilish for it states that a certain number are elected to be saved. God does the selection. The inexorable logic of the theory arises from the attempt to deny that good works are enough—for a man could do all sorts of good works and still be a heathen. There is a logic to the theory but it is the logic of madness since it leads unequivocally to the conclusion that ideology is more important than humanity, and it is therefore in essence a peculiarly twentieth-century preoccupation. It is a special instance of a general theory which has perverted our own civilization. It implies the creation of a spiritual elite implacable against all those who do not belong to it. It is a Mensa society of theology. It leads to the kind of thinking that enticed Leopold and Loeb to carry out their murder on the grounds of their own superiority. It is not so unlike the ideas of Nietzche as commonly understood and put into practice, say, by the student in Crime and Punishment. Members of the elite elect each other. Robert Wringhim’s father elects Robert as he elected himself previously. One of the victims is not a heathen but a minister. Here we are in the presence of something very modern. The Communist, for instance, hates the Socialist more than he hates the Tory. Now this theory can also be compared with Dostoevski’s work. In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevski begins with the proposition, “If there is no immortality all things are permissible.” Hogg begins essentially with the proposition: “If a man knows that he is saved no matter what he does— saved to all eternity—and all good works are irrelevant—then all things are permissible.” Such ideas lead to a totalitarian philosophy. That is why I said that Hogg and Dostoevski can only be fully understood in the twentieth century. Now Robert does not recognize the Devil for the simple reason that the Devil agrees with all his ideas and does so sincerely since the ideas themselves are devilish. Again and again we find this idea: “Tell me this, boy:” [says Wringhim to Robert after he has seen and spoken to the Devil] “did this stranger, with whom you met, adhere to the religious principles in which I have educated you?” “Yes, to every one of them in their fullest latitude,” said I. “Then he was no agent of the Wicked One with whom you held converse,” said he. (pp. 110-11)

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The Devil quotes the Old Testament in order to justify murder: “If the acts of Jehu, in rooting out the whole house of his master, were ordered and approved of by the Lord,” said he, “would it not have been more praiseworthy if one of Ahab’s own sons had stood up for the cause of the God of Israel, and rooted the sinners and their idols out of the land?” (p. 134)

The most astounding passage of all is this: “We are all subjected to two distinct natures in the same person” [says the Devil]. “I myself have suffered grievously in that way. The spirit that now directs my energies is not that with which I was endowed at my creation. It is changed within me, and so is my whole nature. My former days were those of grandeur and felicity. But, would you believe it? I was not then a Christian. Now I am. I have been converted to its truths by passing through the fire, and, since my final conversion, my misery has been extreme.” (p. 174)

The methods Hogg uses for involving the reader in this whirlpool are various in operation but similar in essence. They all depend on ambiguity. The quotation just given shows ambiguity operating linguistically and in ideology. We find ambiguity at the very beginning of the book. Robert tries to enter the inn into which George and his companions have gone after their tennis game. They won’t let him, and eventually he attracts a crowd to attack the inn saying that it is occupied by Jacobites. However there happens to be a number of Whigs in the inn and the landlord tells them that the crowd is composed of Jacobites whereupon the Whigs sally out and attack their own people, not finding out till the end of the fray what has happened. The Devil, too, often transforms himself into all kinds of shapes. Sometimes he looks like George, sometimes like Robert, sometimes like a minister. One of the interesting bits in the novel is when the Devil disguises himself as an actual preacher just after he and Robert have murdered Blanchard, the minister, and causes that preacher to be arrested for the crime though he wasn’t in the area at all. This does not seem to me to be akin to the horseplay in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. It

is much more seriously intended and more metaphysical in its implications. There is also a continuous confusion of identities. At times Robert doesn’t know who he is. He is supposed to have killed his mother and seduced a neighboring girl but he has no recollection of such things. There are typical schizophrenic manifestations: indeed Hogg’s book can be partly discussed in modern psychological terms. At the end of the book Hogg, or rather the narrator, writes as follows: Were the relation at all consistent with reason, it corresponds so minutely with traditionary facts that it could scarcely have missed to have been received as authentic; but in this day, and with the present generation, it will not go down that a man should be daily tempted by the Devil, in the semblance of a fellow-creature; and at length lured to self-destruction, in the hopes that this same fiend and tormentor was to suffer and fall along with him. It was a bold theme for an allegory, and would have suited that age well had it been taken up by one fully qualified for the task, which this writer was not. In short, we must either conceive him not only the greatest fool, but the greatest wretch, on whom was ever stamped the form of humanity; or, that he was a religious maniac, who wrote and wrote about a deluded creature, till he arrived at that height of madness that he believed himself the very object whom he had been all along describing. (pp. 229-30)

Now clearly the latter part cannot be true. The woman called Calvert (and her male accomplice) did see Robert Wringhim and a companion kill George. There are other phenomena that can only be explained on the basis that there was a real physical person, Devil or otherwise. Nevertheless, parts of the narrative reveal perfectly explicable psychological phenomena of a modern kind. There is no reason for doubting that Robert might, without consciously knowing it, have killed his own mother. By the time that she was killed he was beginning to repent of his association with a person whom he believed to be the Devil and, recognizing perhaps that his mother by her religious bigotry was partly the cause of his own spiritual destruction, he might indeed have killed her. Similarly he might have seduced the neighboring girl. The suffocated Id might have taken its revenge on the Superego. The novel does give a continuous impression of psychological insight as when Robert sees himself divided into two persons, none of them his own, one George and the other his new friend, the Devil.

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“For a man who is not only dedicated to the King of Heaven in the most solemn manner, soul, body, and spirit, but also chosen of him from the beginning, justified, sanctified, and received into a communion that never shall be broken, and from which no act of his shall ever remove him—the possession of such a man, I tell you, is worth kingdoms . . .” (p. 131)

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It would, in fact, have been of the greatest interest to have had a Freudian analysis of this novel which has come out of that country where for long periods the Superego has been rampant. It is clear for instance that the suicide at the end is psychologically right. If all is predestined, the mind can only prove that it is not a machine by asserting at least its right to suicide—if that too is not predestined. In the second half of the Memoirs we feel a certain pity for this tortured being, Robert Wringhim, who has gone irretrievably to the good which at a certain point turns into the bad. It reminds one of the pity one feels for the Frankenstein’s monster of Mary Shelley. The righteousness of the parents is visited upon Robert with a vengeance. Trying to escape, he is at the end enmeshed in a weaver’s web and is relentlessly pursued by the Devil with a friendship which is really hatred. One can quite clearly imagine a mind so imprisoned by the Superego of a Calvinism carried to extremes that it would in fact follow the logic contained in this book. The Id would presumably emerge in aggression and pride. Burns’s “Holy Willie” occasionally lifted a leg on various girls. Robert doesn’t even do this and consequently he might later have seduced the neighboring girl (losing the memory of it in the process). The possibility of schizophrenia is always present but Hogg didn’t as yet have the knowledge to be consistently accurate. One feels, however, that his imagination had seized the essentials of it. If one, for instance, compares this book with Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, one recognizes that the latter emerges from a cardboard world manufactured in a metaphysical void. A very interesting and specially Scottish paragraph is this: There was only one boy at Mr Wilson’s class who kept always the upper hand of me in every part of education. I strove against him from year to year . . . and I was convinced he had dealings with the Devil . . . and I was at length convinced that it was no human ingenuity that beat me with so much ease in the Latin, after I had often sat up a whole night with my reverend father, studying my lesson in all its bearings. (p. 99)

There is however one other point which might be profitably discussed and that is the use to which Scots has been put in this novel. Clearly an important thing that Hogg has to do is to establish a mean by which the inhumanity of Robert can be judged. I believe that he has done this by using the Scottish language. If English is alien to the Scottish consciousness (especially in the eighteenth century) then why not let the alienation of a particular consciousness be expressed in it? Similarly if the Scottish language is the natural language of the Scottish consciousness why not let the normal, the average, the human, be expressed in it? Consider this passage: “Ineffectual Calling? There is no such thing, Robert,” said she. [i.e. his mother] “But there is, madam,” said I, “and that answer proves how much you say these fundamental precepts by rote, and without any consideration. Ineffectual Calling is the outward call of the gospel without any effect on the hearts of unregenerated and impenitent sinners. Have not all these the same calls, warnings, doctrines, and reproofs, that we have? And is not this Ineffectual Calling? Has not Ardinferry the same? Has not Patrick M’Lure the same? Has not the Laird of Dalcastle and his reprobate heir the same? And will any tell me that this is not Ineffectual Calling?” “What a wonderful boy he is!” said my mother. “I’m feared he turn out to be a conceited gowk,” said old Barnet, the minister’s man. (p. 90)

Altogether, in his use of shifting identity, ambiguity as a deliberate device, the cult of the superior mind, a possibly traumatic loss of memory and other methods, Hogg’s novel impresses one as being a manifestation of hallucinatory genius which has resulted from intense

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concentration on a specifically Scottish theme projected itself into the future. It might be worth reminding ourselves once again of the work of Mrs. Radcliffe and Walpole to realize how essentially different Hogg’s book is. What he has in fact done is to pursue a logic to its conclusion and then uncover what he finds. The device of describing the events externally in the third person and then shifting to the first person works extremely well especially for this kind of book. He has instinctively realized that a standard of external reality must be given before the Memoir itself is quoted. Otherwise, it would be difficult for the reader to establish himself.

Now I believe that this last sentence establishes by the use of the Scottish language the reaction of ordinary humanity when confronted by what it senses to be abstract ideological nonsense. And I believe farther that only the Scottish language at this point could have had the power to be so curt and precise and yet at the same time so intimate. The very words recall even in their

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“Hear then my determination, John. If you do not promise to me, in faith and honour, that you never will say, or insinuate such a thing again in your life, as that that boy is my natural son, I will take the keys of the church from you, and dismiss you from my service.” John pulled out the keys, and dashed them on the gravel at the reverend minister’s feet. “There are the keys o’ your kirk, sir! I hae never had muckle mense o’ them sin’ ye entered the door o’t. I hae carried them this three and thretty year, but they hae aye been like to burn a hole i’ my pouch sin’ ever they were turned for your admittance. Tak them again, an’ gie them to wha you will, and muckle gude may he get o’ them. Auld John may dee a beggar in a hay barn, or at the back of a dike, but he sall aye be master o’ his ain thoughts an’ gie them vent or no, as he likes.” (pp. 97-8)

This last sentence I consider of particular importance. It represents the assertion of human freedom against abstract repression true for all ages and all times. It is life rebelling against the ideological. One further instance should be enough to show this use of the Scots language. Mrs. Logan has lost some valuables and a woman called Calvert has been accused of stealing them. Mrs. Logan’s maid refuses to identify certain of the stolen objects in court as belonging to her mistress so that Calvert may not be hanged. Here the values of ordinary humanity—unpredictable and comic—are established again and again in the maid’s intimate Scots language. In this passage she talks about herself and Mrs. Logan. “What passed, say ye? O, there wasna muckle: I was in a great passion, but she was dung doitrified a wee. When she gaed to put the key i’ the door, up it flew to the fer wa’. ‘Bless ye, jaud, what’s the meaning o’ this?’ quo she. ‘Ye hae left the door open, ye tawpie!’ quo she. ‘The ne’er o’ that I did,’ quo I, ‘or may my shakel bane never turn another key.’ When we got the candle lightit, a’ the house was in a hoad-road. ‘Bessy, my woman,’ quo she, ‘we are baith ruined and undone creatures.’ ‘The deil a bit,’ quo I; ‘that I deny positively. H’mh! to speak o’ a lass o’ my age being ruined and undone!

I never had muckle except what was within a good jerkin, an’ let the thief ruin me there wha can.’” (p. 61)

Later there is the passage: “Perhaps you are not aware, girl, that this scrupulousness of yours is likely to thwart the purposes of justice, and bereave your mistress of property to the amount of a thousand merks.” (From the Judge.) “I canna help that, my lord: that’s her look-out. For my part, I am resolved to keep a clear conscience, till I be married, at any rate.” “Look over these things and see if there is any one article among them which you can fix on as the property of your mistress.” “No ane o’ them, sir, no ane o’ them. An oath is an awfu’ thing, especially when it is for life or death. Gie the poor woman her things again, an’ let my mistress pick up the next she finds: that’s my advice.” (pp. 62-3)

It is unnecessary to indicate the relevance of this scene (apparently discursive) to the rest of the book. The maid has a sense of proportion: she realizes that a human life is worth more than a thousand marks. What in effect the Scots language does is to keep things in proportion. It is, as in The House with the Green Shutters, a marvellous instrument for deflation, though it can also be cruel. What then does this book teach us? It teaches us that to go beyond the bounds of humanity is to lose oneself so utterly that one cannot tell God from the Devil. In a long section about the Cameronian sect this ambiguity is discussed. Apparent irrelevancies in this book turn out not to be irrelevant at all as the book is beautifully made. This is not true of many of Hogg’s other stories. A careful reading of Hogg’s other prose shows nothing comparable to the Memoirs. The stories, though always readable, are often rambling. One at least, “Welldean Hall,” which depends on a ghost who has left a will among the classics in a library, reminds one of Mrs. Radcliffe. However, Hogg tends to be more humorous than she is and less portentous. “The Bridal of Polmood” has a very funny multiple bedroom scene and an interesting detective-story denouement dependent on two bodies both of whose heads have disappeared. Many of the stories are about devils or wraiths but none shows the metaphysical treatment found in the Memoirs. The Brownie of Bodsbeck, though apparently about the supernatural, is not: the

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contempt a human intimacy which Robert has lost. Even more, their gestures, while to be considered as an impatient demolition, invite him into a world which he has abandoned, imprisoned as he is in a language—representative of a world—that will destroy him. Consider another passage: Robert has told Wringhim that Barnet has been insulting him (that is Wringhim). The latter crossexamines Barnet; and concludes as follows in what I consider to be a crucial linguistic confrontation:

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events are cleared up in a perfectly rational manner at the end. It is interesting too that this story is about the Covenanters, a harried sect almost as fanatical as Robert himself. Though the story tends to ramble a bit I think that, outside of the Memoirs, it is his best. The Covenanters are saved by the daughter of a man who is himself on the other side and when praising his daughter for saving them in spite of his own ideological hostility he expresses the humanity which transcends ideas: “Deil care what side they war on, Kate!” cried Walter, in the same vehement voice; “ye hae taen the side o’ human nature; the suffering and the humble side, an’ the side o’ feeling, my woman . . .”4 The story is notable too for the portrait of Claverhouse but above all for the marvellous Highland soldier, Daniel Roy MacPherson, who says: “Any man will stand py me when I am in te right, put wit a phrother I must always pe in te right.”5 “The Wool Gatherer” is a nice romantic story with the inevitable happy ending. The stories show interesting though conventional invention. In them Hogg is always strongest on his home ground around the Borders and in Scots of which he has a remarkable command.

FURTHER READING Criticism Bligh, John. “The Doctrinal Premises of Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner.” Studies in Scottish Literature 19 (1984): 148-64. Interprets The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner as a didactic but finally ambivalent attack on Antinomian Calvinism and the associated theological doctrine of Predestination. Campbell, Ian. “James Hogg and the Bible.” Scottish Literary Journal 10, no. 1 (May 1983): 14-29. Considers Hogg’s understanding of the Bible and his use of this knowledge for artistic and satirical ends in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Gide, André. Introduction to The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg, pp. ix-xvi. London: The Cresset Press, 1947. Influential introduction, in which Gide pioneered the concept of the psychological nature of Hogg’s personal demon. Gide’s comments triggered a resurgence of interest in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and provided a foundation for later critics’ interpretations of the work. Gosse, Edmund. “The Confessions of a Justified Sinner.” In Silhouettes, pp. 121-30. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1925. Grudging appraisal of Hogg’s novel that finds fault with its ambiguity and reckless introduction of the supernatural.

However, there is nothing in them to prepare us for the Memoirs, though they contain, scattered here and there, many of the themes treated on in that book—including stories about the Devil and the supernatural, stories about religious extremists and ambiguities of motive.

Groves, David. “Allusions to Dr. Faustus in James Hogg’s A Justified Sinner.” Studies in Scottish Literature 18 (1983): 157-65.

Only, however, in the Memoirs do all these themes take on a logical rigor and undeviating development. Only in the Memoirs do we sense the continuous shadow of metaphysical meaning running below the external one.

———. “Other Prose Writings of James Hogg in Relation to A Justified Sinner.” Studies in Scottish Literature 20 (1985): 262-66.

All that this proves is that the productions of genius are ultimately inexplicable.

Explores the ways in which Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus is reflected in the imagery, theme, and structure of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Emphasizes the theme of Christian moderation in Hogg’s writing, concluding that neither of the narrators in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner entirely represent the author’s own beliefs. ———. James Hogg: The Growth of a Writer. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1988. 160 p. Study of Hogg’s self-education and development as a writer.

Notes 1. George Douglas, James Hogg (Edinburgh & London, 1899), p. 104.

Heinritz, Reinhard Silvia Mergenthal. “Hogg, Hoffmann, and Their Diabolical Elixirs.” Studies in Hogg and his World, no. 7 (1996): 47-58.

2. Ibid., p. 109. The quotation is from Hogg’s Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott.

Considers Hogg’s relationship to the Gothic tradition and compares his work to that of E. T. A. Hoffmann.

3. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (New York, 1959), pp. 23-4. Further references will be to this edition and will appear in the text.

Hutton, Clark. “Kierkegaard, Antinomianism, and James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.” Scottish Literary Journal 20, no. 1 (May 1993): 3748.

4. James Hogg, The Brownie of Bodsbeck, ed. Douglas S. Mack (Edinburgh and London, 1976), p. 163.

Compares Hogg’s treatment of antinomianism in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner with that of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.

5. Ibid., p. 144.

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Examines Hogg’s depiction of opium use in the nightmarish experiences of Robert Wringhim in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Jones, Douglas. “Double Jeopardy and the Chameleon Art in James Hogg’s Justified Sinner.” Studies in Scottish Literature 23 (1988): 164-85. Argues against psychoanalytic interpretations of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, concentrating instead on the narrative’s concern with subjectivity, ambiguity, circularity, and disguise Mack, Douglas S. “James Hogg in 2000 and Beyond.” Romanticism on the Net, no. 19 (August 2000): . Maintains that despite Hogg’s status as a disenfranchised marginal writer, his texts have a part to play at the heart of current discussion of British literature of the Romantic era because they give voice to the insights, culture, and concerns of non-elite, subaltern Scotland. Mackenzie, Scott. “Confessions of a Gentrified Sinner: Secrets in Scott and Hogg.” Studies in Romanticism 41, no. 1 (spring 2002): 3-32. Discusses the allusions in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner to Walter Scott’s authorship of the Waverley novels. Oost, Regina B. “‘False Friends, Squeamish Readers, and Foolish Critics’: The Subtext of Authorship in Hogg’s Justified Sinner.” Studies in Scottish Literature 31 (1999): 86-106.

Contends that in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner Hogg comments on the writing profession and the act of authorship. Pope, Rebecca A. “Hogg, Wordsworth, and Gothic Autobiography.” Studies in Scottish Literature 27 (1992): 218-40. Argues that The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner parodies William Wordsworth, undermines conventional realism, and utilizes a Gothic logic of ironic reversal. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Murder Incorporated: Confessions of a Justified Sinner.” In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, pp. 97-117. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Examines the articulations of male paranoia in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Simpson, Louis. James Hogg: A Critical Study. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1962, 222 p. Detailed analysis of Hogg’s life and works. Smith, Nelson C. James Hogg. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980, 183 p. Critical study of Hogg’s life and works.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Hogg’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: British Writers Supplement, Vol. 10; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 93, 116, 159; Literature Resource Center; NineteenthCentury Literature Criticism, Vols. 4, 109; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; and Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 1.

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Jackson, Richard D. “James Hogg and the Unfathomable Hell.” Romanticism on the Net, no. 28 (November 2002): .

WASHINGTON IRVING (1783 - 1859)

(Also wrote under the pseudonyms Fray Antonio Agapida, Geoffrey Crayon, Diedrich Knickerbocker, Launcelot Langstaff, and Jonathan Oldstyle) American short story writer, essayist, historian, journalist, and biographer.

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rving is considered both the first American man of letters and the creator of the American short story. Although best known for such tales of rural Americana as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (both published in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., 1819-20), Irving later became a prolific and accomplished biographer as well as a distinguished statesman. He explored a number of literary styles and genres in his writings, with many of his best-known stories incorporating elements of Gothic literature. Such works, many of which were written in a humorous, lighthearted tone, reveal the author’s interest in mystery, horror, and the supernatural.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Born in New York in 1783, Irving was the youngest of eleven children. Although he studied the law and eventually worked at a law office, his legal studies were halfhearted; he much preferred writing for his brother Peter’s journal, The Morning

Chronicle. In 1802 Irving wrote a series of letters to the Chronicle under the pseudonym of Jonathan Oldstyle. These letters gently mocked New York society and brought Irving his first recognition as a writer. Failing health forced him to seek a change of climate, and he traveled to Europe. In 1806 he returned home and was admitted to the bar. Irving, his brother William, and brother-in-law James Kirke Paulding, along with some other friends, were known as the “Nine Worthies of Cockloft Hall,” named after their favorite place for “conscientious drinking and good fun.” They collaborated on the satirical journal Salmagundi; or, The Whimwhams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others (1807-8), which included many essays by Irving that reflected his Federalist political attitudes and social stance. The venture proved unprofitable, however, and the young men were forced to abandon the publication. In 1809 Irving enjoyed literary success with the publication and favorable reception of the satirical A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. His success, however, was overshadowed by the death of his fiancee, Matilda Hoffman, in 1809. Grief consumed Irving, and from that time on his works reflected a more serious tone. In an effort to ease his sorrow, Irving entered a period of fervid activity. He acted as his brother’s law partner, helped in the family hardware business, and edited a magazine, the Analectic.

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Irving eventually returned to England and worked in the Liverpool branch of his family’s import-export firm for three years until it went bankrupt. After years of wavering indecisively between a legal, editorial, and mercantile career, he finally decided to make writing his livelihood. He began recording impressions, thoughts, and descriptions in a small notebook. These, polished and revised in Irving’s meticulous manner, eventually became The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Irving’s most enduring work, the collection—which includes the stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—ensured his reputation as a man of letters. Its timing proved opportune, as no one had yet produced a universally appealing piece of American literature. In 1826 he traveled as a member of the American diplomatic corps to Spain, where he wrote A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828). A subsequent tour of Spain produced A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) and The Alhambra (1832). During the 1830s, Irving returned to America, taking part in a tour of the Oklahoma territory. His travels in the West were fodder for several of his subsequent books, including The Crayon Miscellany (1835), A Tour on the Prairies (1835), Astoria; or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains (1836), and The Rocky Mountains; or, Scenes, Incidents, and Adventures in the Far West (1837). In 1842 Irving became minister to Spain. Although he enjoyed his role as a diplomat, he returned to the United States to further his career as a biographical writer. His biography of Oliver Goldsmith is considered a particularly fine example of Irving’s concise, balanced style. His last years were spent at work on a biography of George Washington; though assessed as overly elaborate and lacking his former naturalness of tone, the work expresses Irving’s belief in a glorious American past. Irving’s funeral was attended by thousands of admirers who mourned the death of a beloved author.

MAJOR WORKS Irving’s initial forays into writing were essays that satirized the political, social, and cultural life of his native New York City. A number of these were published in the short-lived journal Salmagundi. Irving continued in this satirical vein with his first book, A History of New York. Narrated by the fictional Diedrich Knickerbocker, a fusty, colorful Dutch American, the work provided a comical, deliberately inaccurate account of New York’s past. A History of New York has been considered Irving’s

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most consistently optimistic work, in which he expounds on native themes with affection and candor; indeed, the name “Knickerbocker” has become synonymous with a period of early American culture. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., Irving’s subsequent effort, is considered a landmark work in American fiction. The book not only introduced the modern short story form in the United States but was also the first work by an American author to gain recognition abroad. The collection was widely popular in both England and the United States. Purportedly the work of Geoffrey Crayon, a genteel, good-natured American wandering through Britain on his first trip abroad, The Sketch Book consists largely of his travel impressions. These sketches are picturesque, elegant, and lightly humorous in the tradition of the eighteenth-century essayists Richard Addison and Oliver Goldsmith, Irving’s literary models. The most enduring pieces, however, are those in which Irving wove elements of legend, folklore, and drama into narratives of the New World. “Rip Van Winkle,” the story of a lackadaisical Dutch American who slumbers for twenty years, and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” which recounts Ichabod Crane’s meeting with a headless horseman, have long been considered classics. Critics generally agree that these were the models for the modern American short story and that both tales introduced imagery and archetypes that enriched the national literature. After the appearance of The Sketch Book, Irving wrote steadily, capitalizing on his international success with two subsequent collections of tales and sketches that also appeared under the name Geoffrey Crayon. Bracebridge Hall; or, The Humorists: A Medley (1822) centers loosely on a fictitious English clan that Irving had introduced in several of the Sketch Book pieces. Bracebridge Hall further describes their manners, customs, and habits, and interjects several unrelated short stories, including “The Student from Salamanca” and “The Stout Gentleman.” Tales of a Traveller (1824) consists entirely of short stories arranged in four categories: European stories, tales of London literary life, accounts of Italian bandits, and narrations by Irving’s alter-ego, Diedrich Knickerbocker. The most enduring of these, according to many critics, are “The Adventure of the German Student,” which some consider a significant early example of American Gothic and supernatural fiction, and “The Devil and Tom Walker,” a Yankee tale that like “Rip Van Winkle” draws upon myth and legend for characters and incident.

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CRITICAL RECEPTION Contemporaneous reviews illustrate the level of approval Irving won in the nineteenth century. While many of these reviewers were aware of deficiencies in Irving’s work, their praise is generally overwhelming. Not all subsequent critics have been so enthusiastic; critical reception of the author’s work has been mixed over the past two centuries. However, most modern critics classify Irving as one of the greatest American writers, responsible for establishing an American style of writing, especially in the short story genre. He is well respected as a biographer and as a chronicler of American culture. His short stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” are considered American masterpieces, their legacy so great that they have become part of popular culture. Many of Irving’s stories, particularly “The Adventure of the German Student,” have received attention for their unique handling of the supernatural and the Gothic. At the time Irving began working on his earliest—and best known—tales, the popularity of Gothic literature had begun to wane. In recognition of the genre’s declining appeal, Irving opted for a fresh approach, employing Gothic conventions in nontraditional ways. For example, a number of his stories feature supernatural or macabre happenings, but such events

are presented in a comical, lighthearted way—a technique described by some critics as “sportive” Gothic. Michael Davitt Bell has suggested that Irving’s influence on the American Gothic tradition is undervalued in part because of his humorous and sometimes satiric tone. While some critics may dismiss his impact as minimal, John Clendenning has asserted that Irving’s works “anticipated the advanced gothic fiction of [Edgar Allan] Poe and [Nathaniel] Hawthorne.”

PRINCIPAL WORKS Salmagundi; or, The Whim-whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others [with William Irving and James Kirke Paulding] (journal) 1807-8 A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty [as Diedrich Knickerbocker] (parody) 1809 The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. [as Geoffrey Crayon] (short stories) 1819-20 Bracebridge Hall; or, The Humorists: A Medley [as Geoffrey Crayon] (short stories) 1822 Tales of a Traveller [as Geoffrey Crayon] (short stories) 1824 A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (biography) 1828 A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (history) 1829 The Alhambra [as Geoffrey Crayon] (sketches and short stories) 1832 The Crayon Miscellany [as Geoffrey Crayon] (sketches and short stories) 1835 A Tour on the Prairies (travel sketches) 1835 Astoria; or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains (history) 1836 The Rocky Mountains; or, Scenes, Incidents, and Adventures in the Far West: Digested from the Journal of Captain B. L. E. Bonneville, of the Army of the United States, and Illustrated from Various Other Sources (biography and history) 1837; also published as The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, 1898 Oliver Goldsmith (biography) 1849 The Life of George Washington (biography) 1855-59

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Irving’s later career is marked by his shift toward biography writing. While traveling through Europe in the 1820s, Irving was asked to translate some documents relating to Christopher Columbus. Instead, Irving decided to write a biography on the man central to the American identity. Critics praised A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus as one of the greatest biographies ever written; the book earned Irving distinction both as a scholar and as a biographer. Irving employed his skills as a researcher again in his biographies on Oliver Goldsmith and George Washington. In addition, Irving’s keen interest in the American character and identity led him to write several books about the American West. In his works A Tour on the Prairies, Astoria, and Captain Bonneville, Irving recounted the adventurous and sometimes brutal life of the frontiersman. He is credited with realistically portraying the pioneers’ cruel treatment of Native Americans. However, he championed American enterprise and the courage of American men forging a future for the country.

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PRIMARY SOURCES WASHINGTON IRVING (STORY DATE 1824) SOURCE: Irving, Washington. “Adventure of the German Student.” In Great Tales of Terror from Europe and America: Gothic Stories of Horror and Romance, 17651840, edited by Peter Haining. 1972. Reprint edition, pp. 424-30. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1973. The following short story was originally published in 1824 in Tales of a Traveller.

On a stormy night, in the tempestuous times of the French revolution, a young German was returning to his lodgings, at a late hour, across the old part of Paris. The lightning gleamed, and the loud claps of thunder rattled through the lofty, narrow streets—but I should first tell you something about this young German. Gottfried Wolfgang was a young man of good family. He had studied for some time at Göttingen, but being of a visionary and enthusiastic character, he had wandered into those wild and speculative doctrines which have so often bewildered German students. His secluded life, his intense application, and the singular nature of his studies, had an effect on both mind and body. His health was impaired; his imagination diseased. He had been indulging in fanciful speculations on spiritual essences until, like Swedenborg, he had an ideal world of his own around him. He took up a notion, I do not know from what cause, that there was an evil influence hanging over him; an evil genius or spirit seeking to ensnare him and ensure his perdition. Such an idea working on his melancholy temperament produced the most gloomy effects. He became haggard and desponding. His friends discovered the mental malady that was preying upon him, and determined that the best cure was a change of scene; he was sent, therefore, to finish his studies amidst the splendours and gaieties of Paris. Wolfgang arrived at Paris at the breaking out of the revolution. The popular delirium at first caught his enthusiastic mind, and he was captivated by the political and philosophical theories of the day: but the scenes of blood which followed shocked his sensitive nature; disgusted him with society and the world, and made him more than ever a recluse. He shut himself up in a solitary apartment in the Pays Latin, the quarter of students. There in a gloomy street not far from the monastic walls of the Sorbonne, he pursued his favourite speculations. Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those

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catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature. Wolfgang, though solitary and recluse, was of an ardent temperament, but for a time it operated merely upon his imagination. He was too shy and ignorant of the world to make any advances to the fair, but he was a passionate admirer of female beauty, and in his lonely chamber would often lose himself in reveries on forms and faces which he had seen, and his fancy would deck out images of loveliness far surpassing the reality. While his mind was in this excited and sublimated state, he had a dream which produced an extraordinary effect upon him. It was of a female face of transcendent beauty. So strong was the impression it made, that he dreamt of it again and again. It haunted his thoughts by day, his slumbers by night; in fine he became passionately enamoured of this shadow of a dream. This lasted so long, that it became one of those fixed ideas which haunt the minds of melancholy men, and are at times mistaken for madness. Such was Gottfried Wolfgang, and such his situation at the time I mentioned. He was returning home late one stormy night, through some of the old and gloomy streets of the Marais, the ancient part of Paris. The loud claps of thunder rattled among the high houses of the narrow streets. He came to the Place de Grève, the square where public executions are performed. The lightning quivered about the pinnacles of the ancient Hôtel de Ville, and shed flickering gleams over the open space in front. As Wolfgang was crossing the square, he shrunk back with horror at finding himself close by the guillotine. It was the height of the reign of terror, when this dreadful instrument of death stood ever ready, and its scaffold was continually running with blood of the virtuous and the brave. It had that very day been actively employed in the work of carnage, and there it stood in grim array amidst a silent and sleeping city, waiting for fresh victims. Wolfgang’s heart sickened within him, and he was turning shuddering from the horrible engine, when he beheld a shadowy form cowering as it were at the foot of the steps which led up to the scaffold. A succession of vivid flashes of lightning revealed it more distinctly. It was a female figure, dressed in black. She was seated on one of the lower steps of the scaffold, leaning forward, her face hid in her lap, and her long dishevelled

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He approached, and addressed her in the accents of sympathy. She raised her head and gazed wildly at him. What was his astonishment at beholding, by the bright glare of the lightning, the very face which had haunted him in his dreams. It was pale and disconsolate, but ravishingly beautiful. Trembling with violent and conflicting emotions, Wolfgang again accosted her. He spoke something of her being exposed at such an hour of the night, and to the fury of such a storm, and offered to conduct her to her friends. She pointed to the guillotine with a gesture of dreadful signification. ‘I have no friend on earth!’ said she. ‘But you have a home,’ said Wolfgang. ‘Yes—in the grave!’ The heart of the student melted at the words. ‘If a stranger dare make an offer,’ said he, ‘without danger of being misunderstood, I would offer my humble dwelling as a shelter; myself as a devoted friend. I am friendless myself in Paris, and a stranger in the land; but if my life could be of service, it is at your disposal, and should be sacrificed before harm or indignity should come to you.’ There was an honest earnestness in the young man’s manner that had its effect. His foreign accent, too, was in his favour; it showed him not to be a hackneyed inhabitant of Paris. Indeed there is an eloquence in true enthusiasm that is not to be doubted. The homeless stranger confided herself implicitly to the protection of the student. He supported her faltering steps across the Pont Neuf, and by the place where the statue of Henry the Fourth had been overthrown by the populace. The storm had abated, and the thunder rumbled at a distance. All Paris was quiet; that great volcano of human passion slumbered for a while, to gather fresh strength for the next day’s

eruption. The student conducted his charge through the ancient streets of the Pays Latin, and by the dusky walls of the Sorbonne to the great, dingy hotel which he inhabited. The old portress who admitted them stared with surprise at the unusual sight of the melancholy Wolfgang with a female companion. On entering his apartment, the student, for the first time, blushed at the scantiness and indifference of his dwelling. He had but one chamber—an old fashioned saloon—heavily carved and fantastically furnished with the remains of former magnificence, for it was one of those hotels in the quarter of Luxembourg palace which had once belonged to nobility. It was lumbered with books and papers, and all the usual apparatus of a student, and his bed stood in a recess at one end. When lights were brought, and Wolfgang had a better opportunity of contemplating the stranger, he was more than ever intoxicated by her beauty. Her face was pale, but of a dazzling fairness, set off by a profusion of raven hair that hung clustering about it. Her eyes were large and brilliant, with a singular expression that approached almost to wildness. As far as her black dress permitted her shape to be seen, it was of perfect symmetry. Her whole appearance was highly striking, though she was dressed in the simplest style. The only thing approaching to an ornament which she wore was a broad, black band round her neck, clasped by diamonds. The perplexity now commenced with the student how to dispose of the helpless being thus thrown upon his protection. He thought of abandoning his chamber to her, and seeking shelter for himself elsewhere. Still he was so fascinated by her charms, there seemed to be such a spell upon his thoughts and senses, that he could not tear himself from her presence. Her manner, too, was singular and unaccountable. She spoke no more of the guillotine. Her grief had abated. The attentions of the student had first won her confidence, and then, apparently, her heart. She was evidently an enthusiast like himself, and enthusiasts soon understand each other. In the infatuation of the moment Wolfgang avowed his passion for her. He told her the story of his mysterious dream, and how she had possessed his heart before he had even seen her. She was strangely affected by his recital, and acknowledged to have felt an impulse towards him equally unaccountable. It was the time for wild theory and wild actions. Old prejudices and superstitions were done away; everything was under the sway

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tresses hanging to the ground, streaming with the rain which fell in torrents. Wolfgang paused. There was something awful in this solitary monument of woe. The female had the appearance of being above the common order. He knew the times to be full of vicissitude, and that many a fair head, which had once been pillowed on down, now wandered houseless. Perhaps this was some poor mourner whom the dreadful axe had rendered desolate, and who sat here heartbroken on the strand of existence, from which all that was dear to her had been launched into eternity.

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of the ‘Goddess of reason’. Among other rubbish of the old times, the forms and ceremonies of marriage began to be considered superfluous bonds for honourable minds. Social compacts were the vogue. Wolfgang was too much of a theorist not to be tainted by the liberal doctrines of the day. ‘Why should we separate?’ said he: ‘our hearts are united; in the eye of reason and honour we are as one. What need is there of sordid forms to bind high souls together?’ The stranger listened with emotion: she had evidently received illumination at the same school. ‘You have no home nor family,’ continued he; ‘let me be everything to you, or rather let us be everything to one another. If form is necessary, form shall be observed—there is my hand. I pledge myself to you for ever.’ ‘For ever?’ said the stranger, solemnly. ‘For ever!’ repeated Wolfgang. The stranger clasped the hand extended to her: ‘Then I am yours,’ murmured she, and sunk upon his bosom. The next morning the student left his bride sleeping, and sallied forth at an early hour to seek more spacious apartments, suitable to the change in his situation. When he returned, he found the stranger lying with her head hanging over the bed, and one arm thrown over it. He spoke to her, but received no reply. He advanced to awaken her from her uneasy posture. On taking her hand, it was cold—there was no pulsation—her face was pallid and ghastly.—In a word—she was a corpse. Horrified and frantic, he alarmed the house. A scene of confusion ensued. The police were summoned. As the officer of police entered the room, he started back on beholding the corpse. ‘Great heaven!’ cried he, ‘how did this woman come here?’ ‘Do you know anything about her?’ said Wolfgang eagerly. ‘Do I?’ exclaimed the police officer: ‘she was guillotined yesterday!’ He stepped forward; undid the black collar round the neck of the corpse, and the head rolled on the floor! The student burst into a frenzy. ‘The fiend! the fiend has gained possession of me!’ shrieked he: ‘I am lost for ever!’ They tried to soothe him, but in vain. He was possessed with the frightful belief that an evil

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spirit had reanimated the dead body to ensnare him. He went distracted, and died in a madhouse. Here the old gentleman with the haunted head finished his narrative. ‘And is this really a fact?’ said the inquisitive gentleman. ‘A fact not to be doubted,’ replied the other. ‘I had it from the best authority. The student told it me himself. I saw him in a madhouse at Paris.’1

Note 1. The latter part of the above story is founded on an anecdote related to me, and said to exist in print in French. I have not met with it in print.

GENERAL COMMENTARY JOHN CLENDENNING (ESSAY DATE 1964) SOURCE: Clendenning, John. “Irving and the Gothic Tradition.” Bucknell Review 12, no. 2 (1964): 90-8. In the following essay, Clendenning assesses Irving’s works within the context of a developing American Gothic tradition.

Although we may scoff at the thrills, tricks, and flights of gothic fiction, its durable influence cannot be ignored. How this popular genre, despite its medieval twaddle and its supernatural bombast, was appropriated by our most serious writers remains an enigma, though some critics have argued convincingly that the genre was, in some ways, serious from the outset. Whatever the case, everyone will agree that the gothic element which survived in the novels of Henry James was distinctly different from the heavy machinery of The Monk. To identify this difference, let me risk a generalization: James learned to subjectify all that Lewis had to objectify; in James unvarnished horror may occur in full sunlight, whereas the grimness of The Monk exists only behind the abbey’s closed door. The gothicists’ traditional “machinery” was necessarily tangible, because it produced a terror which always fascinated them. But when Isabel Archer Osmond sits before her fireplace, her anguish produces the images which are identifiably gothic in origin. She sees herself in “a dark, narrow alley with a dead wall at the end”; she is locked behind a closed door; she is “draped . . . in pictured tapestries . . . shut up with an odor of mould and decay.” Lewis was admittedly an interesting psychologist, having accurately described phenomena which today we call suppres-

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sion, sublimation, projection, and so forth, and yet he could not treat human motivation without a chiller-thriller cause. On the other hand, we admire James because he preserved the gothicists’ imagery but treated it as a psychic result, not the factual cause of terror. It was a major accomplishment of the modern novelist to have seen the images of the gothic world as distorted perceptions of reality. Washington Irving was about half-way between modern fiction and the cult of Mrs. Radcliffe. When he began producing his major works—The Sketch Book (1819-20), Bracebridge Hall (1822), and Tales of a Traveller (1824)—the popularity of gothic novels was falling apart, and a period of reaction, represented chiefly by Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), was under way. That Irving probably sensed this decline of gothicism and the dangers of aping its style is indicated by these remarks to his brother in 1823: There are such quantities of the legendary and romantic tales now littering from the presses, both in England and in Germany, that one must take care not to fall into the commonplace of the day. Scott’s manner must likewise be avoided. In short, I must strike out some way of my own, suited to my own way of thinking and writing.1

Instead, therefore, of continuing an exhausted tradition, Irving hoped to find some original use for gothic material. To be sure, he did not always succeed, but at his best he became a skillful parodist and a highly suggestive psychologist. When Irving failed, and his failures were frequent, he merely imitated the “littering” sensationalism at its worst. “The Story of the Young Robber,” a sentimental bandit tale commonly associated with gothic fiction, will serve as an example. Here we have the inane plot of a young Italian who falls madly in love with a girl, appropriately named Rosetta, but has his hopes spoiled when he learns that the girl’s father has arranged a more lucrative marriage. Unable to control his rage, the young man murders his rival and joins a band of robbers, who eventually kidnap Rosetta and attempt to sell her back for ransom. Unfortunately, the father rather curiously decides that, since the robbers have probably raped his daughter, she may as well be left to die. And die she must. But hoping to make her death painless, the young bandit volunteers to murder her himself, an act which is described with the cheap sentiment typical of the whole tale: “So perished this unfortunate.” Everything is false— the bizarre actions, the feigned passions, the histrionic prose. The story exists on the most

Illustration from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

superficial of surfaces. Never do we enter the world of motives; never is the description a sign of the unwilling killer’s agony. But as innovator of the so-called “sportive” gothic, Irving was a master. Although the term “sportive” is too vague, it is generally assumed to describe a tale which employs an abundance of “machinery” assembled in a light-hearted tone, as is characteristic of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” So pervasive is this tone that the mystery and terror common to most gothic tales are permitted to flourish only in the ironic sense that melodrama is used to promote humor and satire. How Irving managed to employ the machinery without its usual tone is not easy to determine. Certainly his zestful narrator, whom he had used earlier in his Knickerbocker History and who was conspicuously missing in “The Story of the Young Robber,” provides the basic ingredient for the humorous tone. The structure of “Sleepy Hollow” also guards against gothic terror, for though the headless Hessian dominates the last pages of the story, he is preceded by amusing details that never lose their influence on the narrative. Finally, the central characters themselves resist a melodramatic treatment. The original gothic hero (a fair representative being Irving’s Italian robber) claimed only an ideal existence, whereas Ichabod Crane, the prototypic Yankee schoolmaster who

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wants only food, comfort, and a plump Dutch wife, brings to the story such a weight of actuality that a world of haunted forests seems, by contrast, absurd. This local-color element is, on the simplest level, what Irving made the story’s central interest: the Connecticut Yankee meets the New York Dutch. The same element, however, by itself so superficial, gives way to an exploration of the role of imagination and the artistic process. Ichabod, we are told, was “an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity.” Having the wit of a Yankee peddler, he is careful to win the affection and confidence of the village. But having also the superstitions of a Puritan, he trembles in fear. One quality enables him to deal with the world as he wishes; the other eventually causes him to leave town at midnight, fearful for his life, never to return. But the “odd mixture” is really two applications of the same thing; for what chiefly characterizes Ichabod’s mind is his rich imagination, a mind which dreamingly arranges the pieces of his experience—sometimes giving vivid impressions of himself luxuriating in food, wealth, and women, and giving also clues for realizing them. Thus the New England pedagogue manages, until the end of the story to stay a few steps ahead of the intellectually lethargic Dutch. And when Ichabod is defeated, Brom Bones is not the real victor; he merely stimulated the Yankee’s self-destructive imagination. Thus the capacity that enables Ichabod to see the world as it may be—a “sumptuous promise of luxurious winter fare”—is the same irresistible curse which makes ghosts and goblins as palpable as pigeon pies. The story can, then, be understood as an allegory of the artistic process itself, for the literary artist must imaginatively create legends for the world’s sleepy hollows. But the limits on the imagination—limits that Irving failed utterly to observe in his “Italian Robber”— demand that the artistically created world coexist with actuality. Permit the imagination to be wholly separated from human experience—as gothic fiction constantly separates them—and the art is destroyed. This problem is, of course, familiar to every student of American literature; our writers, particularly the New Englanders, have repeatedly felt a tension, whether as identified by Emerson between experience and reality, or as seen by Henry James between art and life. Thoreau, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Cummings, Stevens—all of these Yankee artists felt the tension. Frost wanted to climb his birch tree of imagination toward the ideal, but he feared it, prayed that the tree would set him down again to

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earth, the right place for love. Ichabod’s fate was not so kind; he is indeed snatched away not to return, for he rambled too exclusively in the world of pure imagination, and was lost. Thus, the gothic material in “Sleepy Hollow” serves a vital function. Constantly juxtaposed with the actual world, it represents the extreme form in literary art of the imagination disassociated from life. Hence, if Irving has given us a “sportive” gothic, he has not done so uncritically. But “sportive” gothicism is not parody, though Irving’s critics have tended to confuse them. “Sleepy Hollow” is only allegorically an attack on gothicism; parody reveals the excesses of a genre by imitating it. This distinction should be clear enough if we examine a genuine parody of gothic fiction, “The Spectre Bridegroom.” Unlike the other Sketch Book tales, this story has the stereotypic setting of medieval Germany, complete with the satiric names, Baron Von Landshort, Herman Von Starkenfaust, and Katzenellenbogen. For his plot, Irving chose the impossibly obvious formula of the supernatural expliqué, popularized by Mrs. Radcliffe and imitated extensively in America: the hero pretends to be the ghost of the murdered bridegroom in order to win the affections of the heroine and the confidence of her family. The major element, however, which makes “The Spectre Bridegroom” a travesty is not the artificial structure, the grotesque setting, or the ridiculous names, but rather the minds of the characters. Irving presents a society which, craving the supernatural, is ideally prepared to find it. The daughter’s literary fare consists exclusively in “church legends” and “the chivalric wonders of the Heldenbuch.” Her morbid imagination is clearly indicated by the agonized expressions of the saints she embroiders, who “looked like so many souls in purgatory.” Other members of the family seem equally drawn to gothic themes. The baron’s greatness seems to consist chiefly in his ability to tell ghost stories. “He was much given to the marvellous and a firm believer in all those supernatural tales with which every mountain and valley in Germany abounds.” Indeed, young Starkenfaust got his idea of posing as a spectre from one of the baron’s stories, and the family’s commitment to the supernatural explanation was their own idea. Like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, the Katzenellenbogens attempt to interpret their experience in terms of German legends. In fact, the poor relation who suggests the truth—that the spectre may be some evasive young cavalier—draws upon himself the “indignation of the whole company.” And when

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If “The Spectre Bridegroom” is a delightful though serious parody of the gothic tale— particularly of the Radcliffian supernatural expliqué—Irving designed other stories to render it quite as ridiculous, but in an exactly opposite manner. Instead of resolving the supernatural in natural terms, his heroes sometimes—as in “The Bold Dragoon,” for example—disguise their very embarrassing natural activities under a gothic mask. Here is our saucy-eyed dragoon, a bold fellow indeed, weaseling his way into an alreadyfilled inn by blarneying the landlord and charming the women, notably “the hostess’s daughter, a plump Flanders lass.” Then after rousing the entire house by crashing to the floor in the middle of the night, he tells a perfectly incredible story about a “weazen-faced” ghost of a bagpiper, dancing furniture, and a midnight caper with a clothespress. Though doubts are suggested, these are easily silenced by the dragoon’s ever-threatening sword and shillelah and by the even more preposterous corroboration of the daughter, who, we are told, was already with the dragoon when the rest of the house appeared. Apparently, therefore, we have an inverted form of the explained supernatural tale; Irving has given us what we may, in fact, call the inverted gothic story—not unlike Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale”—in which the lusty dragoon escapes recrimination for his midnight peccadillo with the landlord’s daughter by throwing up an absurd haze of supernaturalism. Although this form has failed to survive in modern fiction, it was one of Irving’s favorites. In “Dolph Heyliger,” for instance, we have a similarly inverted gothic tale, in which the picaresque hero returns with his life’s fortune and a ghost story to explain how he got it. Doubts of Dolph’s honesty are never uttered, not of course because his character is spotless but because it is noted that he is “the ablest drawer of a long-bow in the whole province.” If we consider “Rip Van Winkle” in the context of “Dolph Heyliger” and “The Bold Dragoon,” it appears that this most famous of Irving’s stories also employs the techniques of inverted gothicism. Like Dolph, Rip disappears, only to return later with a supernatural account of his

absence. And like the dragoon’s story, Rip’s tale is “authenticated” in a fashion which is as irrational as the story itself; crucial testimony is given by Peter, “the most ancient inhabitant of the village, and well versed in all the wonderful events and traditions of the neighborhood.” The gullible narrator, old Diedrich Knickerbocker, who relates the story without a flicker of doubt, believes Rip’s account because (1) stranger stories have been told, (2) Rip was “venerable,” “rational,” and “consistent,” and (3) the story had been recorded by an illiterate country justice. Indeed, the whole community refused even to consider what they should have suspected from the first: that Rip had finally become exasperated with his “termagant wife,” took his dog and gun, and deserted. He was, long before his disappearance, a great teller of ghost stories and a notorious malingerer—exactly the sort of man who would ramble for twenty years, then return with a bit of gothic nonsense designed to amuse the town and avoid its scorn. The final paragraph of the story seems to point directly toward this conclusion. Old Knickerbocker admits that Rip had several versions of his account: “He was observed, at first, to vary on some points every time he told it. . . .” Only later did Rip settle down to the story as we have it related. Those few who doubt it suspect that Rip has lost his faculties. The others—men, women, children—have the story memorized. Some even literally believe that thunder is the sound of “Hendrick Hudson and his crew . . . at their game of ninepins. . . .” We have, then, a society willingly trying to turn life into a gothic legend; as such, “Rip Van Winkle” is a brilliant satire on the gothic mind. But what should we make of Rip? Only he escapes Irving’s satire, for he unites both Starkenfaust and Ichabod: the poseur in one sense, the artist in another. Like Irving himself, and like countless writers in America, Rip’s problem is that of a vocation. What is a creature of the imagination to do in a world whose values are represented by Dame Van Winkle? Art in such a world is, as Hawthorne complained in his sketch “The Custom-House,” driven to become a mere escape. Thus, the youthful Rip spends his days “telling endless sleepy stories about nothing.” Finally, “reduced almost to despair,” he is driven to an actual escape: he rambles off, a sad counterpart to Odysseus, not to return for twenty years, a ragged old man, greeted by his dog with a snarl. Yet one quality in him has not been destroyed by age; his imagination is even richer than before, and he had “arrived at that happy age when a man can be idle with impunity. . . .” Perhaps that was

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the hoax is finally revealed, one of the aunts is “particularly mortified at having her marvellous story marred. . . .” The most important facet of this parody, therefore, is Irving’s interest in the psychology of gothicism. Turning the external gothic theme inward, he treated the supernatural world as an expression of an excessively morbid imagination.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR DONALD A. RINGE ON IRVING’S GOTHIC

All of Irving’s Gothic tales, sportive though most of them may be, are fundamentally concerned with a problem of human perception, the reasons why people sometimes fail to perceive the world as it is, but see instead a world of Gothic terror. Most of those who fall prey to these self-engendered delusions are men whose minds are filled with superstition, much like the common folk whom Geoffrey Crayon describes in The Sketch Book and Bracebridge Hall. Others, however, are hardly men of this type. The guests at the hunting dinner in the Nervous Gentleman’s tales are by no means credulous men like Ichabod Crane or Wolfert Webber. Rather, the very stories they tell clearly reveal their disbelief in ghosts and goblins, and their initial response to the Nervous Gentleman’s experience with the mysterious picture is to laugh uproariously at his discomfort. As Crayon observes in Bracebridge Hall, however, men like these are not immune from feeling Gothic effects, especially if they submit themselves, however lightheartedly, to the influence of supernatural tales. This is, of course, the point of the Nervous Gentleman’s stories. All the guests eventually feel the effect of even the sportive stories that have been told, and the comic conclusion makes it especially plain that what happens to them when they view what they think is the mysterious picture bears no relation to reality. . . . Their imaginations have led them to perceive what their reason would deny. But the comic conclusion serves yet another purpose. In revealing the purely mental basis of the Gothic experience, it returns the series of stories to the world of actuality from which it began. In effect, it affirms the reality of the world perceived through reason—the world of common sense and prosaic daylight, which, though less attractive perhaps than the world of fantasy, is nonetheless the one in which Irving’s Gothic tales are always firmly anchored. SOURCE: Ringe, Donald A. “Irving’s Use of the Gothic Mode.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 7, no. 1 (1974): 51-65.

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what brought him home, the hope that his world could finally accommodate him. It does: Rip becomes an honored village patriarch and chronicler. Unlike Ichabod, therefore, Rip is not defeated by his gothic imagination, because, for him, it was never dissociated from life. Even if the village skeptics are right, and they may be, in believing that old Van Winkle is edging toward senility, he is granted “an old man’s frenzy,” which Yeats hoped for and which he recognized in King Lear and William Blake. Imagination alone, whether inspired by frenzy or plain cunning, makes Rip’s life significant. Thus, in “Rip Van Winkle,” Irving accomplished a judgment of the extremes of the gothic mind and a frail reconciliation between it and the role of the artist. In most of these modifications of the gothic tradition, Irving’s “psychology” played an important part. The too richly imaginative Ichabod Crane, with Puritan superstitions whirling in his brain, was able to manufacture his own midnight goblin, whether or not the external world of fact could give evidence of it. An imitation spectre bridegroom captured the credulity of nearly all the Katzenellenbogens, nourished as they were on the gothic thrills of German legends. This emphasis on the subjective rather than the objective, which was, as I have indicated, the really significant use of gothic motifs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was brought to an intriguing climax in “The Adventure of the German Student.” At the outset of the story we learn that young Gottfried Wolfgang, a student of German philosophy who literally believes that he is dwelling among “spiritual essences,” had been sent by his family to Paris to regain his mental stability. Unfortunately, his monastic life at the Sorbonne, together with the sobering effect of the reign of terror, cancels “the splendors and gayeties of Paris.” In the extremity of his isolation. Gottfried has a recurring dream of a woman, “a female face of transcendent beauty.” Occupied constantly with thoughts of this dream-woman, he comes one evening upon the guillotine at the Place de Grève, where he meets her, exactly the woman of his dreams. They talk; he brings her home; they make love. The next morning, on rising to greet his bride, he finds her dead. A closer examination reveals that she has been decapitated; in fact, she is the very woman who had been guillotined the day before. This knowledge is too much for Gottfried who screams, “I am lost forever,” just before he suffers a mental breakdown. We are left, as we are often left in Irving’s stories with two possible explanations: either Gottfried met the transcen-

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dent lady truly incarnated, a ghost who became a corpse in the morning, or the woman was a corpse from the beginning. If the psychic condition of Gottfried who, we are told, related the story to the narrator in a madhouse, is significant, then the second version has the greater validity. Viewed in this way, the tale is a story of a madman having sexual intercourse with a decapitated cadaver, thinking she is the transcendent lover of his wildest dreams. No doubt the whole plan is too fantastically sensational. But this is not the sensationalism of “The Young Robber” or indeed of the usual gothic novel. For the factual events are not those that create the terror of the story, nor can the avowal of supernaturalism account for its effectiveness; the acute terror of “The German Student” results from the derangement and the delusions that give a horribly false view of the world. Irving has, therefore, given us one of the first examples of psychological gothicism, in which the crude supernatural motif is dismissed and the gothic tale becomes genuinely a study of grim terror and anguish. I do not pretend that Irving was a great artist; he was not. But as a parodist, he mirthfully helped to destroy all that was crude in gothic fiction. More importantly, one cannot deny that he anticipated the advanced gothic fiction of Poe and Hawthorne. Then following admittedly in their wakes, we have French symbolism and Henry James—two fundamental forces behind twentiethcentury fiction. We should not be surprised, therefore, to find traces of Irving’s “sportive” gothic in the works of William Faulkner or his subjectified “machinery” in the midnight novels.

Notes This paper was presented in an earlier and somewhat different form at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association at Chicago in December, 1963. 1. Pierre M. Irving, The Life and Letters of Washington Irving, II (New York, 1864), 166.

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TITLE COMMENTARY “Adventure of the German Student” JAMES E. DEVLIN (ESSAY DATE SPRING 1979) SOURCE: Devlin, James E. “Irving’s ‘Adventure of the German Student.’” Studies in American Fiction 7, no. 1 (spring 1979): 92-5. In the following essay, Devlin analyzes “Adventure of the German Student” as a “cautionary tale warning against sexual fantasy and masturbation.”

Although it remains one of Washington Irving’s more popular pieces, “Adventure of the Ger-

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One need be no dyed-in-the-wool Freudian to recognize the host of disguised sexual allusions that haunt the work of the “genteel” Irving and provide considerable insight into his mind. William L. Hedges wrote accurately some years ago that “an interplay of desire, fear and guilt . . . characterizes his treatment of love, sexuality, and marriage.”1 Indeed, his two best-loved tales, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” are now read as replete with sexual innuendo. The first of these, as Leslie Fiedler,2 Philip Young,3 and others have convincingly shown, expresses a desire to escape adult male sexual responsibility and the duties of marriage for a second childhood of advanced old age; of the second, it is enough to note that the devastatingly seductive Eula Varner owes both her being and her mentality to Faulkner’s vivid recollection of Katrina Van Tassel.4 In short, Dame Van Winkle’s depiction represents a disavowal of the mature woman while Katrina Van Tassel’s offers an unflattering picture of a nubile maiden. In the latter tale Irving’s careful diction, ostensibly used to describe a fertile farm, serves in its plosive bounty to characterize a blouse-bursting Dutch coquette whose chief delight is the torment of young men. It is hardly surprising, then, that the “Adventure of the German Student,” one of the Tales of a Traveler (1824), yields considerably more meaning when viewed from a similar perspective. This brief tale, which the reader ultimately discovers is narrated at several removes, recounts, in terms anticipating Poe, the progressive psychic disintegration of young Gottfried Wolfgang, who leaves the University of Goettingen for Paris in hope of escaping “the mental malady preying upon him.” The Paris of the Reign of Terror proves even less accommodating than his German habitat, however. Crossing a dark, stormy Parisian square late at night in a state of perturbation, he encounters a “female figure” languishing at the foot of the guillotine whom he leads back to his rooms in the Latin Quarter near the Sorbonne. There, agreeing to be his “forever,” she “sank upon his bosom.” On his return home the next morn-

ing from a quest to find “more spacious apartments suitable to the change in his situation,” he discovers the woman still lying on his bed and apparently dead. When the police are summoned, an officer immediately recognizes her as a victim of yesterday’s guillotine. Stepping forward he undoes the black ribbon around her neck as her head falls rolling to the floor. The distracted student is shortly thereafter committed to an asylum whence his story is ultimately spread. The tale, the plot of which Irving had at second hand from Thomas Moore,5 is clearly more than a ghost story. It turns out to be, in fact, a cautionary tale warning against sexual fantasy and masturbation, with overtones and situations that will remind German readers of Frank Wedekind’s pointed assault on sexual repression in the daring Fruehlings Erwachen written some fifty years later. Evidence to support such a “Freudian” reading, one might almost say “orthodox reading” in the light of recent Irving scholarship, appears at every turn. A young man, whose morbid habits of seclusion are constantly reiterated in the story, has “impaired his health” by “indulging in fanciful speculations” of an uncertain nature, but which are later revealed to involve fantasies of “female beauty.” Convinced that there is “an evil influence hanging over him,” he agrees to exchange his “secluded life” for a less morbid environment lest he “ensure his perdition.” His “imagination” is already “diseased” and he himself “haggard and desponding” in need of a “cure.” While neither Gottfried Wolfgang’s condition nor its cause is in any wise identified, apart from a vague reference to the intensity of his studies, Irving’s diction consistently draws on the oblique terminology regularly employed in the last century (and much of this) to describe the milieu and effects of “selfabuse” or the “solitary sin.” In Gottfried’s seclusive behavior, indulgence in erotic fantasies, frantic effort to change his habits, and his concomitant guilt and fear for both his health and soul, Irving offers a contemporary profile of the solitary sinner. In Paris Gottfried is unable to change his ways. He continues to keep to his room and to indulge his “ardent temperament.” While he is “too shy” to “make any advances to the fair,” or to seek the companionship and love of a real woman, he remains “a passionate admirer of female beauty, and in his lonely chamber would often lose himself on forms and faces which he had seen, and his fancy would deck out images of loveliness

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man Student” has escaped the critical attention accorded his best known tales. Regarded usually as an eerie hoax on the basis of a trick narration that seems to dismiss any more serious meaning, or seen simply as a Gothic fancy, “Adventure of the German Student” has failed to profit from the sort of scrutiny that has proved so successful in the study of other of Irving’s tales.

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far surpassing the reality.” No words here are quite so revealing as the phrase “lose himself” which suggests that the student’s lonely erotic reveries frequently culminated in the dread loss of virility solitary sexual indulgence was feared to cause. But Gottfried Wolfgang’s final commitment to unwholesome fantasy comes only after a series of dreams of a particular woman of whom he grows “passionately enamoured.” This fantasy woman, who appears to him only in an “excited and sublimated state,” represents his acceptance of a life governed by sensual satisfaction and an allegiance to his indulgence even at the cost of growing madness. On a stormy night some time later, how long is uncertain, he finds her, crouching at the foot of the guillotine, prototypical symbol of castration. Thus is the sin (masturbation) emblematically linked to its punishment (the loss of manhood). The spectral creature, “ravishingly beautiful,” of course, and “clad in black” accompanies the gaunt student home where Gottfried enjoys a final night, not of necrophilial passion, as the story would suggest, but rather of final surrender to sexual satisfacion in solo. The otherwise ascetic young German’s pleasure with a French lamia in the decadent environment of an ancient hôtel in the Latin Quarter, an image that would certainly have appealed to Thomas Mann, is undoubtedly tempered by dreadful anxieties. But it is only on the next day when the lady’s head falls from her body that Gottfried’s emasculation is complete. If the looming silhouette of the guillotine has not established what is transpiring, the decapitation must, for as William Hedges has seen, Irving’s “images of maiming and cutting down seem to carry an unconscious implication of fear of castration.”6 The story is over. Wolfgang is indeed “lost forever” as he shrieks. Mad and impotent, at least psychically, he is led off to the madhouse since the penalty for masturbation is insanity.

Notes 1. William L. Hedges, Washington Irving: An American Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), p. 11. 2. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), pp. 339-43. 3. Philip Young, “Fallen from Time: The Mythic Rip Van Winkle,” KR, 22 (1960), 547-73. 4. Cecil D. Eby, Jr., “Ichabod Crane in Yoknapatawpha,” GaR, 16 (1962), 465-69. 5. Hedges, pp. 148-49. 6. Hedges, p. 201n.

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BARBARA TEPA LUPACK (ESSAY DATE FALL 1984) SOURCE: Lupack, Barbara Tepa. “Irving’s German Student.” Studies in Short Fiction 21, no. 4 (fall 1984): 398-400. In the following essay, Lupack examines aspects of delusion, fantasy, parody, and the Gothic in “Adventure of the German Student.”

Sensing the decline of gothicism and the dangers of aping its style, Washington Irving rejected an exhausted tradition.1 Not wanting to abandon “the legendary and romantic tales” entirely, however, he sought an original use for gothic material and turned to a manner more “suited to [his] own way of thinking and writing.”2 Suggestive psychology through parody, a technique which reveals the excesses of a genre by imitating it, allowed Irving simultaneously to employ and to burlesque the conventional treatment of the elements of “German” romanticism: angst, weltschmerz, sentimentality, supernatural intervention, horror, sexual aberration, and psychological disorders. “Adventure of the German Student,” one of Irving’s most delightful and enduring tales, is indeed a successful parody of the “exhausted” gothic form. Gottfried Wolfgang, a young and impressionable student of German philosophy living in Paris during the bloody reign of terror, believes that he is possessed by an evil spirit. His imagination, fired by his loneliness and melancholy, creates a “shadow,” the recurrent dream of a woman of “transcendent beauty.” One evening, Gottfried, preoccupied with the vision of this female face, encounters a young woman dressed in black at the Place de Greve. He offers her lodging, brings her back to his home, and there he recognizes her as the woman of his dreams; that same evening, they pledge eternal affection for each other and consummate their compact. The next morning, Gottfried is shocked to find his “wife” dead—indeed the corpse of a woman guillotined the previous day. Realizing that “the fiend” had reanimated her body to ensnare him and to ensure his perdition, he goes mad. John Clendenning has argued that the reader is left with two possible explanations: either Gottfried met the transcendent lady truly incarnated, a ghost who becomes a corpse in the morning, or the woman was a corpse from the beginning. If the reader concedes the imbalance of the protagonist, as suggested by the fact that he related his adventure to the narrator of the tale while in a madhouse, then, according to Clendenning, the

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While Clendenning’s arguments are convincing—as far as he pursues them—he overlooks a third alternative, another viable and plausible reading of the sketch’s ending. Admitting Irving’s suggestion that Gottfried is insane—which most critics of the tale, including Clendenning, do—it follows that the entire adventure may have been no more than the mere psychological projection of a deranged and repressed young man. That Gottfried is deranged can be assumed from his peculiarly melancholic disposition which leads to his breakdown and subsequent incarceration in a Paris asylum; that he is repressed is clear from his lack of involvement with real women and his commitment to the pursuit of his fantasy female. “His imagination [was] diseased,” writes Irving early in the story; it is probable, therefore, that the woman by the guillotine was nonexistent, a manifestation of this madman’s imagination, the perfect sado-masochistic relationship, as in Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover.” Regardless of which interpretation the reader chooses, neither the “facts” of the sensational plot nor the intimations of supernaturalism constitute the terror of the tale; the ultimate terror results, rather, from the psychological gothicism Irving achieves, based upon the derangements and delusions which create a horribly false view of the world. As a parody, “German Student” destroys the crudeness which exists in nineteenth-century romance, playfully dispels the excesses of gothic fiction, and anticipates the advanced gothicism of Poe, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and such diverse forces behind twentieth-century literature as Henry James and the French symbolists.4 Nowhere in the tale, however, is Irving’s parody more skillful than in the description and treatment of the character, Wolfgang. A tremendous irony is implicit in his very name: Gottfried literally means “God’s peace,” yet peace— particularly God’s peace—is one virtue the young student glaringly lacks. He is a rebellious and restless romantic whose “visionary and enthusiastic character” has caused him to wander “into those wild and speculative doctrines which have so often bewildered German students.” He indulges in fanciful speculations on spiritual essences and rejects conventional Christian beliefs to create his own “ideal world.” Like Faust—and the archetypal ramifications of Wolfgang’s perverse quest for knowledge are deliberate and pervasive—he, in ef-

fect, sells his soul to an evil and forbidden agent. Then he consummates his bargain, somewhat unknowingly, by engaging in intercourse with a demon, a succubus not unlike the beautiful Helen in the Faust legend. His damnation is inevitable and he dies, despairingly, in a madhouse. Ironically, he becomes the victim of his own rapacious appetite for arcane knowledge. Yet it is precisely this rapaciousness, as integral to the typical gothic hero as his despondent Germanic nature and brooding melancholy, which, when deliberately exaggerated in “Adventure of the German Student,” makes Irving’s protagonist a parody of the very type he epitomizes.

Notes 1. John Clendenning, “Irving and the Gothic Tradition,” Bucknell Review, 12 (May 1964), 91. Mr. Clendenning provides a perceptive study of Irving’s “inverted gothic” form and a fine analysis of “Adventure of the German Student.” 2. Pierre M. Irving, The Life and Letters of Washington Irving (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1864), II, 166. 3. Clendenning, pp. 97-98. 4. Clendenning, p. 98.

FURTHER READING Biography Reichart, Walter A. Washington Irving and Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957, 212 p. Biographical discussion of Irving’s experiences in Germany. The author points out the similarity between Irving’s short stories and German folktales.

Criticism Aderman, Ralph M. “Washington Irving As a Purveyor of Old and New World Romanticism.” In The Old and New World Romanticism of Washington Irving, edited by Stanley Brodwin, pp. 13-25. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Considers the influence of European Romanticism on Irving’s writings, particularly his later works. Bowden, Mary Weatherspoon. Washington Irving. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981, 201 p. Book-length study of Irving’s life and works. Christensen, Peter. “Washington Irving and the Denial of the Fantastic.” In The Old and New World Romanticism of Washington Irving, edited by Stanley Brodwin, pp. 51-60. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Provides an overview of Irving’s treatment of the supernatural in his writings from 1819 to 1832. Coad, Oral Sumner. “The Gothic Element in American Literature before 1835.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 24, no. 1 (January 1925): 72-93. An historical overview of gothicism in American literature that includes a survey of Gothic elements in The Sketch Book.

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second version has the greater validity. Viewed in this way, a madman has sexual intercourse with a decapitated cadaver, thinking she is the transcendent lover of his wildest dreams.3

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Critical Essays on Washington Irving, edited by Ralph M. Aderman. Boston: Hall, 1990, 276 p. A collection of essays exploring varied aspects of Irving’s works.

Turner, Deanna C. “Shattering the Fountain: Irving’s ReVision of ‘Kubla Khan’ in ‘Rip Van Winkle.’” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 4, no. 1 (April 2000): 1-17.

Dawson, Hugh J. “Recovering ‘Rip Van Winkle’: A Corrective Reading.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 40, No. 3 (1994): 251-73.

Compares “Rip Van Winkle” to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” suggesting similarities in theme, symbolism, and form.

Contends that the forest scene in “Rip Van Winkle” is Gothic rather than comic and that the story is not antifeminist.

Veeder, William. “Form, Psychoanalysis, and Gender in Gothic Fiction: The Instance of ‘Rip Van Winkle.’” In Gothick Origins and Innovations, edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage, pp. 79-94. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.

Griffith, Kelley, Jr. “Ambiguity and Gloom in Irving’s ‘Adventure of the German Student.’” CEA Critic 38 (1975): 10-13. Asserts that the ambiguity in Irving’s “Adventure of the German Student” accounts for the story’s “shocking and depressing psychological realism.” Ringe, Donald A. “Washington Irving.” In American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, pp. 80-101. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982. Examines Irving’s Gothic writings, asserting that they are “fundamentally concerned with a problem of human perception.” Rodes, Sara Puryear. “Washington Irving’s Use of Traditional Folklore.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 19, no. 3 (September 1956): 143-53. Describes Irving’s effective use of folklore in “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and recounts the original folktales from which Irving drew his stories. Roth, Martin. “Irving and the Old Style.” Early American Literature 12, no. 3 (winter 1977-78): 256-70. Focuses on Irving’s “Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle,” suggesting that these early essays shed light on the author’s later works.

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Analyzes “Rip Van Winkle” to demonstrate that “form and psychology are . . . intricately related to questions of gender in the Gothic.”

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Irving’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: American Writers; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 56; Children’s Literature Review, Vol. 97; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 1640-1865; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 3, 11, 30, 59, 73, 74, 183, 186, 250, 254; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Moststudied Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring Short Stories; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 2, 19, 95; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 1, 8, 16; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 2, 37; Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 1; Twayne’s United States Authors; World Literature Criticism; Writers for Children; and Yesterday’s Authors of Books for Children, Vol. 2.

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HENRY JAMES (1843 - 1916)

American novelist, short story and novella writer, essayist, critic, biographer, autobiographer, and playwright.

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ames is considered one of the great novelists in the English language and the writer at the forefront of the movement toward more realism in literature. By enlarging the scope of the novel, introducing dramatic elements to the narrative tale, using highly self-conscious narrators, and refining the point-of-view technique to a new level of sophistication, he advanced the art of fiction. He also probed a number of social and psychological concerns, such as the artist’s role in society, the need for both the aesthetic and moral life, and the benefits of a developed consciousness receptive to the thoughts and feelings of others. Psychological and social questions pervade James’s small body of supernatural fiction as well, which uses hauntedness and horror to offer insights into the conscious self and the truth that lies within the human soul. James’s best-known Gothic works are the novella The Turn of the Screw (1898) and the ghost stories that he wrote over the course of his long career, notably “The Ghostly Rental” (1876) and “The Jolly Corner” (1908). Absent from these works are the typical Gothic conventions found in other works of the genre, as James concentrates on the internal rather than the external conditions of his fictional subjects. The

psychological ghost story is taken to new heights as it focuses not on external specters but on the perceiving consciousness. In James’s fiction, Gothic elements are used in the service of realism and psychology to emphasize the impenetrable depths of human emotion and to highlight the strange and often frightening nature of the human mind.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION James was born in New York City, the second son of well-to-do, liberal parents. Because of his grandfather’s enormous wealth, a fortune he divided equally among his children, James’s father never had to work for his income. Henry James, Sr. was an intellectual man of his day: a devotee of the philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg and an occasional theorist on religion and philosophy. He sometimes had hallucinations that he regarded as religious experiences, and as he was growing up James witnessed his father’s strange behavior during such episodes. James’s mother had a more practical bent, a quality she was forced to develop in order to compensate for her husband’s erratic conduct. James himself was a shy, bookish boy who assumed the role of a quiet observer beside his active elder brother William, who later became the founder of psychological study in America and the prominent philosopher of pragmatism. Both Henry and William spent much of their youth

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traveling between the United States and Europe. They were schooled by tutors and governesses in such diverse environments as Manhattan, Geneva, Paris, and London. Both developed a skill in foreign languages and an awareness of Europe rare among Americans in their time. At the age of nineteen James enrolled at Harvard Law School, briefly entertaining thoughts of a professional career. However, this ambition soon changed and he began devoting his study time to reading literature, particularly the works of Honoré de Balzac and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Inspired by the literary atmosphere of Cambridge and Boston, James wrote his first fiction and criticism, his earliest works appearing in the Continental Monthly, The Atlantic Monthly, and The North American Review. From the beginning of his career James wrote supernatural stories, inspired by his love for the work of Hawthorne; his first two unearthly stories, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1868) and “De Grey: A Romance” (1868) clearly show Hawthorne’s influence. In the 1860s James met and formed lifelong friendships with William Dean Howells—then assistant editor at The Atlantic—Charles Eliot Norton, and James Russell Lowell. Howells was to become James’s editor and literary agent, and together the two could be said to have inaugurated the era of realism in American literature. In 1869 James went abroad for his first adult encounter with Europe. While in London he was taken by the Nortons to meet some of England’s greatest writers, including George Eliot, John Ruskin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. The year 1869 also marked the death of James’s beloved cousin Minny Temple, for whom he had formed a deep emotional attachment. This shock, and the intensity of his experiences in Europe, provided much of the material that would figure in such later works as The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Wings of the Dove (1902). James returned to the United States in 1870 determined to discover whether he could live and write in his native country. He continued to write stories and began work on his first novel, Watch and Ward (unpublished until 1878). However, after a winter of unremitting hackwork in New York, James became convinced that he could write better and live more cheaply abroad. In 1875 he moved permanently to Europe, settling first in Rome, then in Paris, and eventually in London, where he found the people and conditions best suited to his imagination. He wrote stories and wasted no time in producing the early novels which would establish his reputation—Roderick

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Hudson (1876), The American (1877), and The Europeans (1878). While in Paris, James was admitted into the renowned circle of Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, and Ivan Turgenev. He greatly admired the French writers, but felt closest to Turgenev, who confirmed his own view that a novelist need not worry about “story,” but should focus exclusively on character. Though James earned recognition with his first European novels, it was not until the publications of Daisy Miller (1879) and The Portrait of a Lady that he gained popular success. The latter marked the end of what critics consider the first period in his career. Throughout the following decades and into the twentieth century he progressed toward more complex effects in his novels and stories. Because of his experiments he eventually lost the popularity that he had achieved with Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady. Many critics suggest that it was this growing neglect by the public which induced him to try his hand as a playwright. However, after several attempts at drama—most notably his dramatization of The American (1891) and his new productions, Guy Domville (1895) and The High Bid (1908), all of which failed at the box office—James gave up the theater. The years 1898 to 1904 were the most productive of James’s literary career. During this period he published several volumes of stories, his ghostly novella The Turn of the Screw, and the consummate novels of his late maturity—The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). After 1904 James’s health and creativity began to decline. Though he still produced a sizeable amount of work, consisting mainly of his autobiographies, essays, and criticism, he finished only one novel, The Outcry (1911). With the outbreak of World War I, James became particularly distressed. He devoted much of his remaining energy to serving the Allied cause, and when the United States did not immediately back the Allies he assumed British citizenship in protest against his native land. On his deathbed the following year he received the British Order of Merit.

MAJOR WORKS James’s reputation rests primarily on his novels, the best of which are acknowledged to be the “international” novels and those depicting the American character, including Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians (1886), Washington Square (1881) and The Golden Bowl. James’s ghost stories

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The “reality” of the ghostly experience is further complicated in “Sir Edmund Orme” (1891). The story is framed by an unidentified speaker who claims that he came into “possession” of this manuscript—narrated in the first person—after the death of the narrator’s wife, “whom I take,” the speaker conjectures, “to have been one of the persons referred to. There is nothing in the strange story to establish this point.” The uncertainty as to how the reader should take the story is further emphasized when the speaker cautions that the manuscript may not be a “report of a real occurrence.” The reader’s incredulity is matched by the speaker’s skepticism. In less than a paragraph, James establishes a sense of verisimilitude and gently leads the reader into a willing suspension of disbelief. In “The Private Life” (1892) there is no question as to the reality of the supernatural—at least as far as the main characters are concerned—but the story is more amusing than terrifying, both for the characters who experience the strange phenomena and for the reader who is privy to their adventure. James based his story and the character of Clare Vawdrey on the great Victorian poet Robert Browning. Observing him socially, James found Browning “loud” and aggressive but mundane, even banal. Yet James acknowledged his greatness as a poet. This story playfully explores the contradiction. “Owen Wingrave” (1892) is a more somber effort. Trained as a soldier, young Owen Wingrave challenges the family military tradition and leaves school. Shocked, his tutor, his friends, and his family accuse him of selfishness and cowardice, and put enormous pressure on him to continue in the military. All of the characters—including Owen’s teacher—meet for a weekend in one of the family’s homes, one room of which is supposedly haunted by the ghost of Owen’s ancestor

Colonel Wingrave, who had killed one of his sons. To prove that he is not a coward, Owen accepts a dare to spend the night in the room, and the next day is found dead. The circumstances of both his ancestor’s and Owen’s death suggest a supernatural explanation, but the horror is not in the account of Owen’s death but in the portrait of the family that pressures Owen and leads him to this desperate act. The Turn of the Screw is by common consent James’s best tale of supernatural horror. It is framed with a speaker, Douglas, who produces a manuscript by a governess who had been infatuated with her employer. Her manuscript describes how she is confronted by a pair of ghosts that she suspects is corrupting the two young children in her charge. The apparitions are those of Peter Quint, a man formerly employed in the household, and Miss Jessel, the previous governess. As her suspicions deepen, the new governess confronts each of the children concerning their collusion with the ghosts; during each confrontation, one of the specters appears to the governess, bringing the action to a crisis. The girl, Flora, denies having seen the wraiths and, apparently hysterical, is sent to her uncle in London. The boy, Miles, dies in the governess’s arms during the culmination of a psychic battle between the governess and the ghost of Peter Quint. In this story James once again leaves the nature and “reality” of the supernatural a mystery, and the story has been read variously as a horrifying ghost story and a penetrating psychological study of an emotionally unstable woman whose visions of ghosts are mere hallucinations. “The Jolly Corner” is James’s last and one of his best stories involving the supernatural. Its hero, Spencer Brydon, returns to New York after a thirty-year absence to visit his boyhood home (the house on the jolly corner). Obsessed by a desire to know what he might have become had he remained in New York, Brydon visits the house several times and senses “presences,” which he interprets to be members of his family, now dead, and their history. Brydon is so frightened that he faints. When he awakens, his head is in the lap of a woman friend, who has also seen this ghost. While not as ambiguous as The Turn of the Screw— Brydon’s friend confirms the existence of the ghost—the story is similarly powerful as a study of one’s search for personal identity, as the protagonist gains insight into himself by his comparison with his “other self.” Moreover, the core idea, the consequences of his choices, is the basis of art itself. It is the exploration through the imagina-

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are less well known, but they continue to be read and admired. Written over the course of his career, they reveal how the author’s interests and craftsmanship developed. The early stories “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” and “De Grey: A Romance,” for example, explore the Hawthornian themes of pride, envy, and guilt as well as the “presentness of the past,” but without the psychological complexity of Hawthorne’s short fiction. But then in the lurid 1876 tale “The Ghostly Rental,” centered around a haunted house, James leaves the reader to judge the authenticity of ghosts, supplying just enough psychological detail to make the characters’ supernatural experiences genuinely convincing but the reality of the ghosts equally problematic.

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tion of the possibilities of human action, a theme that has universal appeal.

Confidence (novel) 1880 The Portrait of a Lady (novel) 1881 Washington Square (novel) 1881

CRITICAL RECEPTION James achieved commercial and critical success during his lifetime. However, because of the subject matter of his works—their lack of social and political concerns and emphasis on high society—his reputation suffered after World War I, only to be revived again in the 1940s. By the 1960s most critics realized the depth of James’s fiction, and since then he has been acknowledged as a master of the novel. Although James is not thought of primarily as a Gothic writer, some critics regard The Turn of the Screw as perhaps the world’s finest ghost story, and the most satisfyingly ambivalent and provocative piece of fiction James ever wrote. Because of the work’s relative accessibility and popularity compared to much of James’s other work, the novella is often read as an introduction to James. A critical debate has raged since the 1930s as to the exact nature of the piece. Is it a ghost story or a psychological study of an unstable woman? Like James’s ghost stories, the novella is admired not only for its ability to horrify but because it presents so realistically the ambiguity inherent in questions of the occult and supernatural. Critics writing about the Gothic elements in James’s fiction have discussed his ghost stories as aesthetic experiments in which the author tries to come to terms with questions about consciousness that he explores more fully in other works; the use of the supernatural to investigate complex questions about human psychology; and the ghosts in the works as representations or manifestations of the human psyche.

Daisy Miller [first publication; adaptation of the novel] (play) 1883 The Siege of London. Madame de Mauves (novellas) 1883 A Little Tour in France (travel essays) 1885 The Bostonians (novel) 1886 The Princess Casamassima (novel) 1886 The Aspern Papers. Louisa Pallant. The Modern Warning (novellas) 1888 “The Lesson of the Master” (short story) 1888; published in the journal Universal Review Partial Portraits (criticism) 1888 A London Life (short stories) 1889 The Tragic Muse (novel) 1890 The American [adaptation of the novel] (play) 1891 “The Real Thing” (short story) 1892; published in the journal Black and White The Real Thing, and Other Tales (short stories) 1893 Theatricals. Two Comedies: Tenants, Disengaged [first publication] (plays) 1894 Guy Domville (play) 1895 Theatricals, Second Series: The Album, The Reprobate [first publication] (plays) 1895 The Other House (novel) 1896 The Spoils of Poynton (novel) 1897 What Maisie Knew (novel) 1897 The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End (novellas) 1898 The Awkward Age (novel) 1899 The Sacred Fount (novel) 1901

PRINCIPAL WORKS

The Wings of the Dove (novel) 1902

A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales (short stories) 1875

The Ambassadors (novel) 1903

Roderick Hudson (novel) 1876

“The Beast in the Jungle” (short story) 1903; published in the journal The Better Sort

The American (novel) 1877

The Golden Bowl (novel) 1904

The Europeans (novel) 1878

English Hours (travel essays) 1905

French Poets and Novelists (criticism) 1878

The American Scene (travel essays) 1907

Watch and Ward (novel) 1878 Daisy Miller (novel) 1879

The Novels and Tales of Henry James. 24 vols. (novels, novellas, and short stories) 1907-09

Hawthorne (criticism) 1879

The High Bid (play) 1908

The Madonna of the Future, and Other Tales (short stories) 1879

“The Jolly Corner” (short story) 1908; first published in the journal The English Review

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Italian Hours (travel essays) 1909 The Outcry (novel) 1911 A Small Boy and Others (autobiography) 1913 Notes of a Son and Brother (autobiography) 1914 Notes on Novelists, with Some Other Notes (criticism) 1914 The Ivory Tower (unfinished novel) 1917 The Middle Years (unfinished autobiography) 1917 The Sense of the Past (unfinished novel) 1917 Within the Rim, and Other Essays (essays) 1918 The Letters of Henry James. 2 vols. (letters) 1920 Notes and Reviews (criticism) 1921 The Art of the Novel (criticism) 1934 The Notebooks of Henry James (notebooks) 1947 The Complete Plays of Henry James (plays) 1949

PRIMARY SOURCES HENRY JAMES (STORY DATE FEBRUARY 1868) SOURCE: James, Henry. “The Romance of Some Old Cloths.” In Great Ghost Stories: 34 Classic Tales of the Supernatural, compiled by Robin Brockman, pp. 16785. New York: Gramercy Books, 2002. The following excerpt is from a short story originally published February 1868 as “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” in the Atlantic Monthly.

The marriage was to all appearance a happy one, and each party obtained what each had desired—Lloyd ‘a devilish fine woman’, and Rosalind—but Rosalind’s desires, as the reader will have observed, had remained a good deal of a mystery. There were, indeed, two blots upon their felicity, but time would perhaps efface them. During the first three years of her marriage Mrs Lloyd failed to become a mother, and her husband on his side suffered heavy losses of money. This latter circumstance compelled a material retrenchment in his expenditure, and Rosalind was perforce less of a fine lady than her sister had been. She contrived, however, to carry it like a woman of considerable fashion. She had long since ascertained that her sister’s copious wardrobe had been sequestrated for the benefit of her daughter, and that it lay languishing in thankless gloom in the dusty attic. It was a revolting thought that these exquisite fabrics should await the good pleasure of a little girl who sat in a high chair and ate bread-

and-milk with a wooden spoon. Rosalind had the good taste, however, to say nothing about the matter until several months had expired. Then, at last, she timidly broached it to her husband. Was it not a pity that so much finery should be lost?— for lost it would be, what with colours fading, and moths eating it up, and the change of fashions. But Lloyd gave her so abrupt and peremptory a refusal, that she saw, for the present, her attempt was vain. Six months went by, however, and brought with them new needs and new visions. Rosalind’s thoughts hovered lovingly about her sister’s relics. She went up and looked at the chest in which they lay imprisoned. There was a sullen defiance in its three great padlocks and its iron bands which only quickened her cupidity. There was something exasperating in its incorruptible immobility. It was like a grim and grizzled old household servant, who locks his jaws over a family secret. And then there was a look of capacity in its vast extent, and a sound as of dense fullness, when Rosalind knocked its side with the toe of her little shoe, which caused her to flush with baffled longing. ‘It’s absurd,’ she cried; ‘it’s improper, it’s wicked’; and she forthwith resolved upon another attack upon her husband. On the following day, after dinner, when he had had his wine, she boldly began it. But he cut her short with great sternness. ‘Once for all, Rosalind,’ said he, ‘it’s out of the question. I shall be gravely displeased if you return to the matter.’ ‘Very good,’ said Rosalind. ‘I am glad to learn the esteem in which I am held. Gracious heaven,’ she cried, ‘I am a very happy woman! It’s an agreeable thing to feel one’s self sacrificed to a caprice!’ And her eyes filled with tears of anger and disappointment. Lloyd had a good-natured man’s horror of a woman’s sobs, and he attempted—I may say he condescended—to explain. ‘It’s not a caprice, dear, it’s a promise,’ he said—‘an oath.’ ‘An oath? It’s a pretty matter for oaths! and to whom, pray?’ ‘To Perdita,’ said the young man, raising his eyes for an instant, and immediately dropping them. ‘Perdita—ah, Perdita!’ and Rosalind’s tears broke forth. Her bosom heaved with stormy sobs—sobs which were the long-deferred sequel of the violent fit of weeping in which she had indulged herself on the night when she discovered her sister’s betrothal. She had hoped, in her better moments, that she had done with her jealousy;

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but her temper, on that occasion, had taken an ineffaceable hold. ‘And pray, what right had Perdita to dispose of my future?’ she cried. ‘What right had she to bind you to meanness and cruelty? Ah, I occupy a dignified place, and I make a very fine figure! I am welcome to what Perdita has left! And what has she left? I never knew till now how little! Nothing, nothing, nothing.’ This was a very poor logic, but it was very good as a ‘scene’. Lloyd put his arm round his wife’s waist and tried to kiss her, but she shook him off with magnificent scorn. Poor fellow! he had coveted a ‘devilish fine woman’, and he had got one. Her scorn was intolerable. He walked away with his ears tingling—irresolute, distracted. Before him was his secretary, and in it the sacred key which with his own hand he had turned in the triple lock. He marched up and opened it, and took the key from a secret drawer, wrapped in a little packet which he had sealed with his own honest bit of glazonry. Je garde, said the motto—‘I keep.’ But he was ashamed to put it back. He flung it upon the table beside his wife. ‘Put it back!’ she cried. ‘I want it not. I hate it!’ ‘I wash my hands of it,’ cried her husband. ‘God forgive me!’ Mrs Lloyd gave an indignant shrug of her shoulders, and swept out of the room, while the young man retreated by another door. Ten minutes later Mrs Lloyd returned, and found the room occupied by her little step-daughter and the nursery-maid. The key was not on the table. She glanced at the child. Her little niece was perched on a chair, with the packet in her hands. She had broken the seal with her own small fingers. Mrs Lloyd hastily took possession of the key. At the habitual supper-hour Arthur Lloyd came back from his counting-room. It was the month of June, and supper was served by daylight. The meal was placed on the table, but Mrs Lloyd failed to make her appearance. The servant whom his master sent to call her came back with the assurance that her room was empty, and that the women informed him that she had not been seen since dinner. They had, in truth, observed her to have been in tears, and, supposing her to be shut up in her chamber, had not disturbed her. Her husband called her name in various parts of the house, but without response. At last it occurred to him that he might find her by taking the way to the attic. The thought gave him a strange feeling of discomfort, and he bade his servants remain behind, wishing no witness in his quest. He reached the foot of the staircase leading to the

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topmost flat, and stood with his hands on the banisters, pronouncing his wife’s name. His voice trembled. He called again louder and more firmly. The only sound which disturbed the absolute silence was a faint echo of his own tones, repeating his question under the great eaves. He nevertheless felt irresistibly moved to ascend the staircase. It opened upon a wide hall, lined with wooden closets, and terminating in a window which looked westward, and admitted the last rays of the sun. Before the window stood the great chest. Before the chest, on her knees, the young man saw with amazement and horror the figure of his wife. In an instant he crossed the interval between them, bereft of utterance. The lid of the chest stood open, exposing, amid their perfumed napkins, its treasure of stuffs and jewels. Rosalind had fallen backward from a kneeling posture, with one hand supporting her on the floor and the other pressed to her heart. On her limbs was the stiffness of death, and on her face, in the fading light of the sun, the terror of something more than death. Her lips were parted in entreaty, in dismay, in agony; and on her blanched brow and cheeks there glowed the marks of ten hideous wounds from two vengeful ghostly hands.

GENERAL COMMENTARY RAYMOND THORBERG (ESSAY DATE SUMMER 1967) SOURCE: Thorberg, Raymond. “Terror Made Relevant: James’s Ghost Stories.” Dalhousie Review 47, no. 2 (summer 1967): 185-91. In the following essay, Thorberg considers James’s approach to writing ghost stories as an aesthetic, artistic experiment.

Henry James experimented with what he called the “ghost-story”, though with the apology of quotation marks, early in his career; and then after a hiatus of a decade and a half returned to active contribution to the genre through the 1890s and into the new century. This later phase or period divides also, with a number of stories of lesser merit like those of his earlier career dating from 1891-92 and followed now by a briefer pause; then “The Altar of the Dead” in 1895 initiated a list which includes besides itself such accomplishments as The Turn of the Screw, “The Beast in the Jungle”, and “The Jolly Corner”. In what may seem coincidence, the first half of the decade of the 1890s marks James’s all-out effort to conquer the theatre, ending with the Guy

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The ghost story as a type lends itself especially to exercises in the metering of comprehension, in the adjustment of shutters to let in exactly the desired amount of light. The genuine ghost must be made believably existent, yet not so familiar that he becomes accepted as simply part of the scheme of things. The terror that takes place in the mind must be treated in such fashion that it seems not wholly enclosed within this precinct and therefore the concern merely of abnormal psychology, but capable of objectifying itself, actually doing so under the force of the reader’s apprehension. Given the predilection that always remained with him, it is hardly to be accounted for by mere chance that James’s most significant period in the writing of ghost stories should have coincided with the great advance in his development of the dramatic method as applied to fiction. More clearly now, he saw the possibilities of the mind as a principal source of terror. The suggestion had of course always been present in an incident in the family history, the “vastation” experienced by his father when James was still a child. Also available in “Father’s ideas” was the notion of selfhood, with its imputation of guilt deriving from the individual’s separation and isolation. Reading of Hawthorne provided additional source and support for this—but in fact

James could hardly have escaped it, growing up as he did in the intellectual and moral climate of an America of Calvinist background and contemporary commitment to the democratic ideal. With some qualification to permit inclusion of The Turn of the Screw, James’s greatest ghost stories are those concerned with the isolating effects of obsession. James fully exploits the relation between guilt and terror to achieve the greater terror of the depths of the consciousness—a terror greater than any deriving from the offered external example, the specifically cited act. His attitude toward obsession is the opposite of that of Emerson, who with inadequate sanction from any realistic standpoint still approved of it as the guide for one’s life. James, as has frequently been pointed out, takes his place on the side of those writers of darker vision who could create an Ethan Brand or an Ahab. The Turn of the Screw is something of a special case among these stories, its terror meaningful in a different way, except in so far as all terror breaks through our defences to give insight into our nakedest selves. “The Altar of the Dead” shares with “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Jolly Corner” in having a central character under the control of an intense obsession. It is a powerful story. No one at all susceptible to James can deny the force of the brooding image of George Stransom at his altar. Yet a limitation exists because of the nature of his concerns, with the dead and with a perverse revenge; intermingled with the incense from the candles is the atmosphere of morbidity. By contrast the concerns of John Marcher and Spencer Brydon seem our own, however magnified in these stories by obsession. “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Jolly Corner,” among the ghost stories, perhaps reach us most nearly in the way the great novels do. It is John Marcher’s lot to be possessed by an idea of selfhood too strong to serve beneficially as it otherwise might. The experience which seems available to him seems also inadequate, and he will not settle for less, in his evaluation of his worth, than he deserves. He is an idealist, living for and in service to an abstract ideal of himself, his life, and his fate. The terms in which the ideal might be achieved are expressed no further, until the end of the story, than in the metaphor of the title. The lack of a definition eliminates any relatively easy solution, comparable, say, to that achieved in the assimilation of the culture of Europe by the American protagonists of the international stories. The result is the refusal by Marcher to settle for, in his estimate, a half-loaf;

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Domville disaster of 1895. But the lessons learned from the conditions of dramatic presentation stayed with him to show their influence in his fiction, in the emphasis on scene and also in the control of viewpoint and degree of awareness in his characters. In the early “The Art of Fiction”, the concept of point of view as chiefly a means of selection and interpretation of the material of one’s experience is considerably transcended, along with the relatively facile separation between subject and technique assumed in that essay. Of course, had it not been for his conservative views in regard to all kinds of art except his own, James might have seen that what he was doing had its parallel in painting from the Impressionists onward. But he was required to pay part of the price of his individual genius by the necessity of discovering many things very largely by himself, so that the habit sometimes persisted without the need. There might also be noted the increasing isolation that he felt from the rejection of his work by the general public, the loss of his sister and old friends, the awareness of aging; and the nature of the concern itself in the kind of ghost stories that interested him now, with their emphasis upon obsessions and upon internal rather than external terrors.

JAMES Ingrid Bergman and Heyward Morse in the 1959 television production of The Turn of the Screw.

and not until too late does he realize that the specific instance of May Bartram’s love has proved his estimate wrong, and that he has been wondrous only to himself. The development is that of the initiation into knowledge without the undergoing of experience; Marcher comes at last to a full knowledge of life without having in this sense lived it. It is an instance of consciousness grasping, not experience—because this has been excluded by his obsession—but only the void. The effect is to increase and sharpen but never to satisfy that consciousness. The story presents, of course, one of the most notable examples in fiction of the missed life. The external fact is simply that Marcher failed to marry the woman who was in love with him. Quite frequently this is treated both in actual life and in fiction as nothing more than comic. In other respects, Marcher seems in possession of all those perquisites which make for the comfortable existence. Numerous characters out of Zola, or Dickens, would of a certainty regard him with envy. Therefore it is not what happens, or does not happen, to him which is the basic concern of the story. The concern is rather Marcher’s own turn-

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ing away from outward experience and inward toward the mind. The horror which develops for him is self-created. And for the reader it exists in part from being taken along in Marcher’s realization, but in another and perhaps greater part in a growing awareness of the capabilities James established for the human consciousness. It is the limitlessness of these capabilities that causes one to shrink back from what he seems about to discover of possibility within himself. The absence of any concrete specification of what Marcher feels is to happen to him is necessary and appropriate; it does not owe to the Jamesian reluctance, irritating at times, as in the question of the object manufactured at Woollett, Massachusetts; nor does it owe to the intentional obscuring of what could be visible and concrete and clear, if artistic purpose allowed, as the evil in The Turn of the Screw. In “The Beast in the Jungle” the reader is not under the urge to try to see a little more specifically than the author permits—the non-specification exists for itself, is in no sense merely a concealment. The concreteness of the image evoked by the title of course arouses fear by itself; but also, by deriving from

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In “The Jolly Corner” the house is for Spencer Brydon the symbol of his consciousness; the action in the house is an adumbration of his explorations during a third of a century into that consciousness. Here James, like Hawthorne in “Young Goodman Brown”, externalizes, establishes in concrete form the product of the mind’s workings, and consequently a tight relationship between the two. In The American Henry James (New Brunswick, N. J., 1957), Quentin Anderson makes the point that it is a mistake to read the story as being about a man “who discovers what he would have been. What Spencer Brydon discovers is what he has been” (pp. 177-8). For the horror must remain superficial if “The Jolly Corner” is read as presenting alternate lives, one that Brydon did live and another that he did not. Thus the life that he did not live should become now merely an object of Brydon’s curiosity, to be satisfied by the co-operation of the apparitional world, as in Macbeth, which is willing to answer questions put to it if the proper formulae are employed, as Brydon might be credited with having done by his psychological preparations and physical probing of the house. Such inadequate reading of the story takes no account of the intensity of Brydon’s consciousness, of his great hunger for experience. This force proves that the life he actually lived in the external sense, in Europe, which for another person might have been sufficient, was not sufficient—the consequence being that he had engaged himself through all his years there in the construction of another life, in the mind, in the subconscious mind if you will. The Spencer Brydon of this existence is as real, indeed more real— for the reason that it is his inner and profounder self—than the one of his visible external career. The autobiographical relevance of the story has frequently been noted; the point might be emphasized that “The Jolly Corner” owes to James’s return to America in 1904-05 chiefly as the prepared and waiting fire owes to the match. It is testimony to the importance that James placed upon the life contained within the consciousness, especially in his later years, and which he manifests in so many ways in his writing. Specifically one might note the choice of themes and subjects, the movement towards the language of concepts rather than of images except in the creation of figures, and perhaps most important the greatly increased use of dramatization of point

of view as a basic means of fictional development. Brydon discovers in the apparition in the house what can be called his “other” self only by reason of James’s choice of point of view from which to tell the story. In a way the formula of presentation is the reverse of that of “The Beast in the Jungle”, while Marcher and Brydon are alike in that each is obsessively aware of his life as a sort of double existence, with the external and visible being by such virtue by no means the more real. One of the notable qualities of James is that, especially considering the age and society in which he lived and the kinds of periodicals in which so much of his work appeared, he is so seldom softheaded or sentimental or even to the slightest degree merciful. Unlike Emerson, he matches the possibilities open to man in his inner life by an insistence upon a responsibility, so to speak, with teeth in it. Man is free to choose his experience—James sees to it that economic and other similar conditions do not impair this freedom—but all experience is hazardous, and the encounter with evil is always possible, even probable. James is virtually as rigid on this as the most legalistic seventeenth-century New England Calvinist. Yet he offers an alternative which can lead to salvation—in of course a secularized version— while by no whit mitigating the encounter. His “American” heroes and heroines are made possible to be what they are by their right choice of alternatives, by their immersing themselves to the fullest in the kind of experience which James, with his values set upon culture, tradition, social relationships on a high level of sophistication, saw as best, as most completely identifying and expressing the human. Isabel Archer is at the head of a distinguished roster. James, to repeat, is seldom merciful—yet to these, in a sense, he is. He permits them the acceptance of their fates, in various kinds of renunciation, bringing a measure of peace. To the incomprehension of Henrietta Stackpole and Caspar Goodwood, Isabel goes back to Gilbert Osmond; Newman burns the letter; Milly Theale in all good intent and forgiveness provides the means for Merton Densher and Kate Croy to have their future. That her act destroys the possibility is the irony of their lives, not of hers. Implicit is a final achieved immunity as a consequence of having undergone all, given the terms of the story, that could have happened to them. The basic circumstance is otherwise with the obsessed protagonists of the ghost stories. While a Christopher Newman may stand in a position of openness to the hazards of life, the obsessed

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the area of the actively and physically violent, it emphasizes further the quality of the undefinable that awaits Marcher, to increase the effect of terror.

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protagonist of one of James’s ghost stories presents the extreme among his characters whose reaction to life is to redefine it in their own terms. Illustration may again be drawn from American characters in his fiction in general—those Americans whose smallness of soul manifests itself in ways owing to the American experience rather than to that of Europe. In James’s terminology they are “Unitarian”; or they are representative of the “New England conscience”. In an early sense of the word, revived in our own time with chief credit due perhaps to John Crowe Ransom, they are “puritans”, simplifying experience into preconceived, inadequate abstractions. They are invulnerable to life, having developed a hardened outer shell which saves them from knowing what is going on outside in any detail, remaining satisfied rather in their assurance that it is very probably immoral. Like them the obsessed figures of the ghost stories have set their lives in terms of abstraction and simplification; but unlike them they possess the greatest possible capacity for moral consciousness, for awareness of the opportunities and significance of the human situation. Thus James achieves the paradox of capacity for experience being negated by the specific means—the obsession itself—by which the obsessed protagonist seeks to live a fuller, more significant life than he might otherwise. The obsessions are themselves powerful, and in further contrast to the abstractions of the New England conscience, active. The direction that they lead, however, is inward, with greater penetration into and control of the consciousness as the distractions of noise and light from the outer world lose their relevance to the life that the obsessed protagonist is creating for himself. Yet it is not simply that nothing happens to these figures, even John Marcher; rather, what happens is the action of the mind turning inward upon itself. To describe the product of this, one might perhaps use the term anti-experience, as the physicists are beginning to speak more confidently of something they call anti-matter. But if it is escape from experience, at least from external experience, it is by no means escape without penalty. For one thing, the intensity of the protagonist’s awareness develops inevitably its dark and perverse aspects; and in several instances James corroborates Hawthorne’s belief that this can lead to the guilt involved in the violation by one person of the life of another. Chiefly, however, there is the guilt deriving from the knowledge that one has failed in the responsibility toward his own life, such

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responsibility being a secularized version of man’s duty, and met in the Jamesian system of values by the full acceptance of experience and complete immersion in it. The strength of the feeling of guilt is in measure to the capacity for consciousness—thus it is no accident that James’s most powerfully obsessed characters are also those most capable of the fullness of experience which their obsessions have deprived them of. If evil is linked with experience, equally guilt is linked with and measured by knowledge. Somehow Marcher’s flinging himself in agony on May Bartram’s grave at the end of “The Beast in the Jungle” is closer to us than the acceptant renunciations of Newman and Isabel Archer and Milly Theale; to us, in our time, as we reject the tragic solution no less than the sentimental, it strikes closer to the actualities of the human condition. For us the ultimate terror is that which is based on some distortion of the human, of which the sense of guilt is the indicator and proof. The terror invoked in these stories of James is, more truly than in Poe’s, the terror not so much of the world of external circumstance as of that consciousness which may be called the soul.

TITLE COMMENTARY “The Jolly Corner” PAMELA JACOBS SHELDEN (ESSAY DATE SPRING 1974) SOURCE: Shelden, Pamela Jacobs. “Jamesian Gothicism: The Haunted Castle of the Mind.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 7, no. 1 (spring 1974): 121-34. In the following essay, Shelden considers James’s use of Gothic conventions, centering on his use of the doppelgänger, or double, and other Gothic devices in “The Jolly Corner.”

I Many critics consider [Charles] Brockden Brown, [Edgar Allan] Poe, and [Nathaniel] Hawthorne the American heirs of the Gothic tradition in literature, born when Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto in 1764. Few, however, treat the supernatural tales of Henry James within this context. Typical Gothic conventions such as haunted castles, flickering candles, time-yellowed manuscripts, and dimly-lighted midnight scenes may, at first, appear rather remote from James’s world where the drama of consciousness, the

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Like his novels, the supernatural tales divide conveniently, if somewhat artificially, into three groups: the early, rather contrived, tales of the sixties and seventies; the middle group, including The Turn of the Screw (1898); and the late ones, when James adds to the surprising number and quality of his accomplishments such tales as “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) and “The Jolly Corner” (1908).2 In general, the richness of the individual tales keeps pace with James’s development in the novel form. In the early “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1868), for example, a dead woman’s strangling hands reach beyond the grave to resolve a jealous rivalry with her sister. As James continues to explore the possibilities of the terror tale, however, he places the emphasis upon the life contained within the consciousness, as opposed to the external circumstance. Although the narrator of “The Ghostly Rental” (1876) is not well integrated into the story (one thinks, by comparison, of the narrator of “The Friends of the Friends” or The Turn of the Screw), it is superior to “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” in its use of the point of view of a person who comes to appreciate the “vivid meaning” of a house that is “spiritually blighted” (p. 108). However, in James’s late supernatural tales, especially, the mind is seen as the principal source of terror. In “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Jolly Corner,” the horror is self-created as Marcher and Brydon become conscious of the dreadful potential within themselves. Of interest, also, are the Gothic echoes heard in several of James’s non-ghostly novels.3 In “The Friends of the Friends” (1896), a supernatural tale in which James makes use of the Gothic manuscript convention, a device which he later turns to advantage in The Turn of the Screw (1898), a deluded, jealous narrator charges that her fiancé has fallen in love with the memory of her dead friend and, indeed, that he is having an affair with her ghost. In The Wings of the Dove (1902), a similar charge reverberates with rich

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internal rather than the external condition, is the central concern. Indeed, William James, after reading Henry’s first ghostly tale, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1868), in the Atlantic Monthly, wired his brother that the tale was different in “tone” from Henry’s earlier efforts. According to William, the story, written “with the mind unbent and careless,” was “trifling,” especially for an author of Henry’s ability. 1 This criticism notwithstanding, James continued to work in the genre through the nineties and into the new century.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR VIRGINIA WOOLF ON JAMES’S GHOST STORIES

Henry James’s ghosts have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts—the bloodstained sea captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons. They have their origin within us. They are present whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange. The baffling things that are left over, the frightening ones that persist—these are the emotions that he takes, embodies, makes consoling and companionable. But how can we be afraid? As the gentleman says when he has seen the ghost of Sir Edmund Orme for the first time: “I was ready to answer for it to all and sundry that ghosts are much less alarming and much more amusing than was commonly supposed.” The beautiful urbane spirits are only not of this world because they are too fine for it. They have taken with them across the border their clothes, their manners, their breeding, their band-boxes, and valets and ladies’ maids. They remain always a little worldly. We may feel clumsy in their presence, but we cannot feel afraid. What does it matter, then, if we do pick up the Turn of the Screw an hour or so before bedtime? After an exquisite entertainment we shall, if the other stories are to be trusted, end with this fine music in our ears, and sleep the sounder. SOURCE: Woolf, Virginia. “Henry James’ Ghost Stories.” The Times Literary Supplement, no. 1040 (22 December 1921): 849-50.

potential since it carries profound moral implications in the novel. In speaking to Merton Densher, who is haunted by Milly Theale’s presence, Kate Croy accuses her lover of wanting no other love than Milly’s memory (XX, 405). Eventually, Densher’s consciousness of Milly’s goodness and own duplicity drives him to repudiate his relationship with Kate. Another example of the non-ghostly novel that makes use of Gothic conventions is The

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Portrait of a Lady (1881). Like Mrs. Radcliffe’s beautiful heroine in The Mysteries of Udolpho, the lovely, innocent Isabel Archer finds herself in the midst of intrigue and deceit as she struggles to assess the meaning of her experiences. In James’s novel, moreover, houses figure importantly. One recalls Gardencourt, the manor house which is haunted by a ghost that Isabel will see only after she has had “some miserable knowledge” (III, 64). The English dwelling, with its open, expansive gardens may be contrasted with the Palazzo Roccanera, the elaborate, convoluted home of the evil Gilbert Osmond—this ominous structure, with its weird eye-like windows, the emblem of Osmond’s terribly narrow consciousness, “the mansion of his own habitation” (II, 194). Later in the novel, Pansy Osmond, a passive victim of her father’s machinations, is committed to a Catholic convent, a confinement not unlike Claire de Cintre’s imprisonment in a Carmelite nunnery in The American (1877). The point, of course, is that James places his heroines in conventional Gothic settings—the secluded palace and the cloistered monastery—as he portrays innocents who are menaced by psychological, spiritual, and moral evils. Early in his career, indeed, James had demonstrated an attraction to the house metaphor, the American counterpart of the medieval castle, perhaps the Gothicist’s most promising and important symbol.4 In the supernatural tale “The Ghostly Rental” (1876), for example, the house is a “container” of the life within, a tangible symbol of the intangible psychological and spiritual evil that a father and daughter inflict on one another. Later, James’s interest in the metaphor is reflected in such works as The Other House (1896), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and the unfinished The Sense of the Past (1907). In Within the Rim and Other Essays, 1914-15, in fact, when James describes his outburst of activity in World War I and his aspirations for the future, he pictures himself in terms of the Gothic castle with its ascending turrets. “I found myself,” James writes, “before long building on additions and upper stories, throwing out extensions and protrusions, indulging even, all recklessly, in gables and pinnacles and battlements.”5

II That James should have been attracted to an exploration of the supernatural experience in his fiction comes as no surprise when one remembers that his family history is a veritable storehouse of

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such adventures. Although James never personally experienced a supernatural visitation, Henry Sr., his father, and William, his brother, offer accounts of such encounters.6 Conversely, while Alice, Henry’s sister, never underwent a “vastation” like her father, she suffered a nervous breakdown between 1867 and 1868, a period when she was plagued by horrifying fantasies. In her journal accounts of this time, Alice bears a striking resemblance to the Gothic victim who is also in terror of what he can neither understand nor control.7 But James himself was conscious of the occult experience. When his mother died, for example, he wrote that “Her death has given me a passionate belief in certain transcendent things. . . . One can hear her voice in . . . [the stillness].”8 We are further told that James was deeply affected by his brother’s promise to make contact with him six months after his death. As the appointed time approached, Henry was driven into a state of acute anxiety.9 Also relevant is James’s account of a nightmare in A Small Boy and Others in which James, struggling to defend himself from an invader who menaces him from behind a closed door, finally finds himself alone racing down the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre. The situation reverses itself when the haunted becomes the haunter. As James remarks, “. . . I, in my appalled state, was probably still more appalling than the awful agent. . . .”1 0 It is no coincidence then, that in “The Jolly Corner,” Spencer Brydon is also terrorized by an agent behind a closed door. However, unlike the figure in James’s dream-nightmare or Ralph Pendrel in James’s sketch of the unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past, Brydon is eventually overwhelmed by his pursuer. But “The Jolly Corner” offers yet another illustration of James’s use of fantasy to express his inner disturbance. In The American Scene (1907), when James describes his revisit to the United States after an absence of twenty years, he writes of his distress that his “birthplace”—specifically, Number Two, Washington Place—has vanished.1 1 In a sense, the house on the “jolly corner,” another birthplace located in New York, functions as the “commemorative tablet” whose loss James had lamented in The American Scene since for Brydon—an expatriot like James—it serves as an embodiment of the past and a commemorative for the future. In short, the supernatural tale provided a release for James as he eased himself of anxieties, much as terror literature had afforded a similar outlet for the eighteenth-century Gothicist. The dream itself, we are told, is the vehicle by which repressions are

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That James found the Gothic tradition a means of quelling personal fears and tensions is further borne out by his activities after the shock of his theatrical venture in 1895. About this period of failure, James remarks, “. . . I have the imagination of disaster—and see life indeed as ferocious and sinister.”1 3 Not coincidentally, thus, the powerful middle group of supernatural tales— among them, “The Friends of the Friends” (1896), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and “The Real Right Thing” (1899)—appear in the nineties after the failure of Guy Domville. In fact, the first entry in James’s Notebooks, one week after the opening of the play, contains the germ of The Turn of the Screw.1 4 To this extent, at least, James routs and exorcises his own “ghosts” in his tales of terror. Indeed, in the last few years, especially, it is generally acknowledged that the ambiguities, the unknowables, and the uncertainties which derive in large measure from man’s sense of his incalculable inner world are deeply woven into the Gothic fabric.1 5 In James’s case, when one adds to the données of the familial psychic disturbances, his own personal tensions, his attempts to follow William’s work in psychology,1 6 and his interest in the Society for Psychical Research,1 7 it is not surprising to discover that he employed the Gothic vocabulary to describe the enigmatic self. To further explore James’s use of Gothicism, I shall pay special attention to “The Jolly Corner” (1908), James’s last supernatural tale. In this work, certainly, the central Gothic metaphor—the house on the “jolly corner”—serves as the objective correlative of the psyche, while it also images the internal Doppelgänger. As the hero confronts the “other,” his mind is seen as haunted by itself—the Gothic devices, in turn, are merely emblematic of his psychological and spiritual condition.

III “The Jolly Corner” is the story of Spencer Brydon, an expatriate, who at the age of fifty-six returns to New York after an absence of thirtythree years in Europe to explore the “other” he might have become had he remained in America. He arrives ostensibly to supervise his “property”:

two houses, one which is being renovated into an apartment-house, and the other, his “birthplace, . . . his house on the jolly corner” (p. 727), which he wishes to preserve in its original form. Alice Staverton, an old-time, ever-faithful friend, who has foregone marriage to await patiently his return, acts as a buffer between the past and the present, neutralizing the complex discomfort of modern life. In fact, since Alice and Brydon supposedly share “communities of knowledge . . . of the other age,” they communicate splendidly—or so, at least, the hero trusts (p. 729). By the end of the first section, Alice, who had always wondered how Brydon might have been had he remained in America, tells him that she has seen his alter-ego in a dream “twice over.” Although he presses her to know what “the wretch” is like, she will tell him “some other time” (p. 738). As time passes, the impulse to know the “so differently other person,” crystallized by Alice’s remark and by Brydon’s newly-discovered “capacity” for business and his sense of construction, becomes so much an obsession that he habitually returns late at night to his “birthplace,” the “jolly corner” of his youth, to haunt the empty house with flickering candle in hand in search of the other self. He steals through the house “very much as he might have been met by . . . some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house” (p. 730). He tells no one, not even Alice, of the expeditions which he pursues with great concentration as the need to confront the “other” intensifies into a “morbid obsession”: “He knew what he meant and what he wanted . . . His alter-ego ‘walked’” and Brydon is determined to “waylay him and meet him” (p. 741). Interestingly, this impulse to provoke a confrontation is an extension of the chase motif—the villain’s pursuit of the fleeing victim—that figures importantly in Gothic literature. As in the Gothic tale, the chase occurs in the labyrinthine building. In Jame’s tale, in fact, the pattern is reinforced by jungle imagery, with the self as hunter and the alter-ego as hunted: Brydon, who had been a big game hunter on the Continent, “roamed, slowly, warily”; he stalked the alter-ego much as he would any “beast of the forest” since the “terms, the comparisons, the very practices of the chase . . . came . . . into play”; Brydon steps “back into shelter or shade” of the recesses of the house, “effacing himself behind a door or in an embrasure, as he had sought of old the vantage of rock and tree”; he holds his breath “living in the joy of the instant, the supreme suspense created by big game

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liberated. One has only to recall then that, like James’s “The Jolly Corner,” Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein were “born” following their authors’ dream-nightmares. As James indicates in The Art of the Novel, “The extraordinary is most extraordinary in that it happens to you and me, and it’s of value (of value for others) but so far as visibly brought home to us.”1 2

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alone”; he gains “to an extraordinary degree the power to penetrate the dusk of distances and the darkness of corners,” the instinctive response of the tracking man or beast; indeed, he wonders if he would have glared at these moments with “large shining yellow eyes,” having now gained the sense of “some monstrous stealthy cat” (pp. 741-42). In brief, although tradition has it that one is usually frightened by apparitions, he had “turned the tables and become himself, in the apparitional world, an incalculable terror” (p. 742). Quite unexpectedly, however, the situation reverses itself. On the occasion of the last, climactic visit to the house, Brydon feels himself “being definitely followed” (pp. 743-44). In the upper rooms of the house, he senses that the alter-ego has “‘turned’: that, up there, is what has happened—he’s the fanged or the antlered animal brought at last to bay” (p. 744). The “other” who had “been dodging, retreating, hiding” will fight, now that it is “worked up to anger.” Upon this discovery, “Brydon . . . tasted probably of a sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity.” Like the narrator of “The Ghostly Rental” and the figure in James’s dream-nightmare, Brydon, in the shadow of the grotesque, oscillates between joy and fear, “so rejoicing that he could . . . actively inspire that fear, and simultaneously quaking for the form in which he might passively know it” (p. 745). Yet, though this is a terrifying moment, Brydon does not confront the shape in evening dress until the end of the second section.

IV The universal implications of the first experience, as well as the second more horrifying situation, emerge only when the house is seen as an emblem of the victim’s interior landscape, the place where Brydon makes his way through the labyrinth, aided only by the flickering street light and the dim light of the candle which heighten the terror. In the semi-darkness—a fitting metaphor for internal confusion—Brydon tracks down, confronts, but fails to comprehend the meaning of the “ghost” which the victim, haunted by self, “scares up.” Appropriately, since the house functions as an objective correlative of the psyche, the “presence” haunts the individual rather than the place. That the house is a “container” of life is clear from the first section in which as Mrs. Muldoon, the housekeeper, leads Alice and Brydon on a tour, she precedes “them from room to room . . . pushing back shutters and throwing up sashes—all to show them as she remarked, how

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little there was to see.” There was little indeed to see in the “great gaunt shell,” filled with “great blank rooms” (p. 731, my italics). Although Brydon fails to recognize the “other” as an aspect of self (not comprehending, he will indeed see “little”), he confronts and repudiates the alter-ego since, in its grotesque ugliness, it is “little” as opposed to that which is noble or significant. But as Mrs. Muldoon reminds Alice, “The fact that there was nothing to see didn’t militate . . . against what one might see” (p. 731). Whereas the good lady refers only to the terror of the supernatural, Brydon will shortly experience the real terror of the psychic adventure. Unlike the housekeeper, however, he finds great personal significance in the house, which is, after all, emblematic of self (one recalls, certainly, that the tale begins with Brydon’s egostical assertion, “‘Every one asks me what I ‘think’ of everything.’” (p. 725, my italics): “He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight of the walls, mere shape of the rooms, mere sound of the floors” (p. 733, my italics). In this fashion, James underscores Brydon’s self-centeredness; he is like the “great gaunt shell,” filled with “great blank rooms” in which the self is all that matters. Alice, in fact, likens the empty house to “the death-mask of a handsome face” (p. 734)—her observation, an ironic anticipation of the figure Brydon finally confronts. Significantly, the woman’s selflessness may be juxtaposed to the man’s selfishness. Alice, who livingly “listened to everything,” suppresses her impression, producing “instead a vague platitude”: “Well, if it were only furnished and lived in—!” (pp. 733-34). She cherishes the hope that loving care will bring out its finer points, unlike Brydon who feels “it is lived in . . . [already] furnished” (p. 734). For Brydon, certainly, the structure houses only the self he might have been.1 8 As he tells Alice, “It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere within me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud.” To this, his protective mother-figure responds reassuringly, “I believe in the flower” (p. 736). So much is at least clear: whatever he has been, might have been, is, or will be, Alice Staverton loves and accepts Spencer Brydon under all conditions. Brydon, intrigued with self, pursues his “morbid obsession” to know himself. Assured of “calm proprietorship,” his is an “ample house which he visits from attic to cellar” (pp. 738-39). The “shell” throbs with life; he feels “the pulse of the great vague place” (p. 739)—“vague” perhaps, because there are always unchartable, nebulous regions of

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For all this, Brydon preferred “the open shutters. He opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed” (p. 742). Similarly, “he liked—. . . above all in the upper rooms!—. . . the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window panes, and scarcely less the glare of the streetlamps below, the white electric lustre. . . . This was human actual social: this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease . . . for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal. . . .” (pp. 742-43, my italics). Thus is foreshadowed the fact that when the confrontation occurs, when he is forced to face that which he is, Brydon will be unable to bear it. He contents himself with the “white electric lustre,” mere superficiality, though it is “coldly general and impersonal,” blithely seeking “support . . . mostly in the rooms at the wide front and the prolonged side”—and, certainly, he encounters himself in the outer part of the house—since “it failed him considerably in the central shades and the parts of the back” (p. 743). Because he revels in the “social” Brydon, it is indeed ironic that he is unable to accept or at least to recognize this aspect of the self when the final confrontation occurs. But the house, of course, is emblematic of the whole convoluted psyche. Its vast reaches are of especial interest, for here lives the alter ego Brydon seeks: But if he sometimes, on his rounds, was glad of his optical reach, so none the less often the rear of the house affected him as the very jungle of his

prey. The place was there more subdivided; a large “extension” in particular, where small rooms for servants had been multiplied, abounded in nooks and corners, in closets and passages, in the ramifications especially of an ample back staircase over which he leaned, many a time, . . . while aware that he might, for a spectator, have figured some solemn simpleton playing at hide-and-seek. (p. 743)

While playing at hide-and-seek with the “other,” the self that he might have been, he is at liberty, as he indicates, to think, feel, and act as he so blissfully and egotistically wills within the walls and frames of his own psyche. Most at home in the front of the house, he is equally proud that he does not retreat from the upper rooms as he moves forward like a medieval knight with sword, his light, in hand (p. 747). Upstairs, however, in the inner recesses or, in Brydon’s words, in “the more intricate upper rooms” (p. 746), the game finally becomes insupportable. Behind the closed door which he had left open lurks the “other”: “Ah this time at last they were, the two, the opposed projections of him, in presence; and this time, as much as one would, the question of danger loomed” (p. 749). The haunter is now the haunted. In this new role, Brydon approaches the closed door, terrified, knowing that if he should open it, he would confront the “other.” At this point, of course, Brydon reaches an impasse, resolving to abandon the chase, now that the seeker has become the sought. “I spare you and I give up,” he tells the alter ego. “I retire, I renounce—never on my honour, to try again. So rest for ever—and let me!” (p. 750). Having made peace with the past, having concluded that the “closing had practically been for him an act of mercy” (p. 752), he is prepared to “sacrifice” his “property”: “They might come in now, the builders, the destroyers—they might come as soon as they would” (p. 753). But in descending from the upper recesses, “he had the whole house to deal with, this fact was still there” (p. 753). In his flight of terror, “he stole back from where he had checked himself [the closed door]—merely to do so was suddenly like safety—and, making blindly for the greater staircase, left gaping rooms and sounding passages behind.” Here, Brydon retreats from the inner recesses of mind, the subconscious, those “sounding passages.” Yet, the house, a womb which contains life, holds more than Brydon anticipates: The house, withal, seemed immense, the scale of space again inordinate; the open rooms to no one of which his eyes deflected, gloomed in their shuttered state like mouths of caverns; only the high

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the self. Yet, it is just these inner recesses that Brydon wishes to explore: “He preferred the lampless hour and only wished he might have prolonged each day the deep crepuscular spell”; he watches “with his glimmering light: moving slowly, holding it high, playing it far, rejoicing above all . . . in open vistas, reaches of communication between rooms and by passages” (p. 739). The house, in short, an expression of the spiritual and psychic spheres, is more real to Brydon than the physical self: “He projected himself all day, in thought, . . . into the other, the real, the waiting life . . . that . . . began for him, on the jolly corner” (p. 740). Equally significant, since Brydon pursues the self that might have been, he “scares up” images of the past within the house. Thus the house is the “container” of life itself, a womb which holds, since it has yet to give birth to, the “other.” Brydon, in fact, likens the place to “some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge. The concave crystal held . . . this mystical other world” (p. 740).

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skylight that formed the drown of the deep well created for him a medium in which he could advance. . . . (p. 753)

As the metaphor of the mind, the house is indeed “immense”—the container of many selves, some of which are suppressed consciously and some unconsciously. Nevertheless, for Brydon, the building houses only the potential self of the past. By now, having descended two flights of stairs, Brydon is in the middle of the third, “with only one more left” (p. 753). Retreating from the subconscious to the external, outer self, he “recognized the influence of the lower windows of halfdrawn blinds, of the occasional gleam of streetlamps, of the glazed spaces of the vestibule.” Here, too, as he sinks “a long look over the banisters,” he sights “the marble squares of his childhood.” Those reminders of childhood, “the old black-andwhite slabs,” are comforting. More soothing still, “the closed door, blessedly remote now, was still closed—and he had only in short to reach that [the door] of the house” (pp. 753-54). At this juncture, however, the greatest shock awaits him. Ironically, the front of the house where he had found the most “support” is the scene of the keenest terror, since the “other” he might have been, the alter ego he had lost at the rear of the fourth floor, is not as terrifying as the self he finally confronts. At the bottom of the lowest staircase, the double doors of the vestibule stand wide open, though he had left these closed. Steeling himself to confront the shadowy figure of the past, the “other” he has been tracking, he sees instead a man dressed in evening clothes, “his planted stillness, his vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and white masking hands, his queer actuality of evening dress, of dangling double eye-glass, of gleaming silk lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watchguard and polished shoe” (p. 755). For Brydon, however, the figure represents neither the past he left upstairs nor the present: “A thousand times yes, as it came upon him nearer now—the face was the face of a stranger.” In short, he has been “‘sold’ . . . the waste of his nights had been only grotesque and the success of his adventure an irony” (p. 756). Although Brydon thinks it an irony that his adventure should end with the confrontation of one who is “evil, odious, blatant,” instead of the noble “other” he had envisioned, the irony is compounded since the face, which “was too hideous as his” (admitting this, Brydon still will not concede the identity), is an aspect of the self that “is.” So terrifying is this possibility that Bry-

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don can deal with it only by losing himself, falling unconscious in an attempt to repudiate it entirely. Alice, who had already seen the apparition twice, saw it in the early dawn at the moment it appeared to Brydon: “He didn’t come to me,” said Brydon, referring to the “other” who might have been. To this, Alice responds knowingly, “‘You came to yourself,’ she beautifully smiled” (p. 761). Whereas Brydon remains oblivious to her nuances, Alice plays the role of the clever protector, totally aware: “And it was as if, while her face hovered, he might have made out in it . . . some particular meaning blurred by a ‘smile’” (p. 760). That Brydon conjures up his vision, since he is haunted by his own mind, is suggested when he compares himself to a Pantaloon, “buffeted and tricked from behind by ubiquitous Harlequin” (p. 744). The Harlequin that eludes him—that remains, in a real sense, beyond his comprehension—is the repugnant self that he cannot acknowledge. Alice, for her part, immersed in Brydon’s fantasies and fears, is also haunted, though not terrified, by his vision. Like Poe’s William Wilson, then, Brydon “comes to” himself at the end when he confronts an aspect of the personality that he neither accepts nor recognizes as his own. Although he does not attempt to kill it, nonetheless, he falls unconscious as he tries to lose it. Unlike William Wilson, of course, Brydon’s vision is not of the moral self but of the self that is “unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility.” Yet the figure is dressed in evening wear like Brydon who hunts “on tiptoe, the points of his evening-shoes, from room to room” (p. 741). Moreover, the figure appears against the background of the open vestibule doors, the world without the house, since it represents the self that “is,” rather than the “other” of the past which Brydon leaves behind in the convoluted upper recesses. Whereas Brydon uses his monocle for charm and sophistication, the figure sports “a great convex pince-nez . . . for his poor ruined sight” (p. 762). However, because we are told that Brydon is that individual who has always been “more at ease . . . for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal,” clearly the double eyeglass only further serves to underscore the blindness to the selfish egoism. Conceding that “it had been the theory of many . . . persons . . . that he was wasting [his] life in a surrender to sensations” (p. 741), Brydon is that individual whose “‘thought’ would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only” himself (p. 725). In fact, the superficial self that he wishes to deny at the end is indicated quite

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Blissfully unaware, hence, Brydon visits the house, seeking the unknown self, oblivious to the empty reality of the self that “is.” Whereas Brydon speaks of his “selfish frivolous scandalous life” to Alice, her reply means little to him, “You don’t care for anything but yourself” (p. 737). In short, Brydon, who seeks to disprove the identity, refuses to acknowledge, before or after his vision, that the repugnant, selfish figure is the self that “is.” Instead, “the missing two fingers, which were reduced to stumps as if accidentally shot away,” are “proof” that the figure is a “stranger,” even though the reader is aware that Brydon had been an adventurer and big-game hunter (p. 756).1 9 So great is Alice’s love that she tells Brydon she has come to terms with the ghost, welcoming him because she recognizes him. Appropriately, the womb-like images of the house as a container of life recur in the third section in which Alice, as the all-forgiving, all-accepting mother figure, pillows and cradles Brydon’s head in her lap. The return to childhood is further suggested by the fact that Brydon is symbolically reborn as he regains consciousness on the “old black-and-white slabs” of his youth, his thoughts child-like in his desire for protection and security (p. 757). Alice comforts her child-love with the reassurance, “He isn’t—no, he isn’t—you!” (p. 762). Given the fact that Brydon does not understand what has taken place, that Alice’s and Brydon’s lines of communication rarely converge, the ending is at best ambiguous. Theirs is an ironic exchange. “He [the ‘ghost’] has been unhappy; he has been ravaged,” she explains. To this, Brydon responds, uncomprehendingly: “And haven’t I been unhappy? Am not I—you’ve only to look at me!—ravaged?” (p. 762). Although Alice justly observes that Brydon had come to himself in the morning hours, Brydon interprets the remark to mean his return to consciousness (p. 761). After declaring her love for Brydon, finally, Alice asks reasonably, “‘So why,’ she strangely smiled, ‘shouldn’t I like him?’” Unable to understand his plight, however, this remark only “brought Spencer Brydon to his feet. ‘You “like” that horrow—?’” (pp. 761-62). Their conversation is, in effect, typical of the pattern throughout: Brydon’s sole concern for self juxta-

posed to Alice’s generous offer of love. Unlike John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle” who has irrevocably forfeited his opportunity with May Bartram, Brydon is given another chance by Alice, but the reader has no assurance that Brydon will take advantage of her offer. In James’s A Passionate Pilgrim, the narrator advises the unhappy Clement Searle, “All that you have told me is but another way of saying that you have lived hitherto in yourself. The tenement’s haunted! Live abroad—take an interest.”2 0 Certainly, Brydon is haunted by himself, his “ghost,” a manifestation of the internal, rather than external, situation. The “turn of the screw,” the peculiar twist, is that the source of terror lies within: the aspect of a personality so terrifying that Brydon must repudiate it. Granted that the Gothic mode has come a long way from Manfred’s chase and pursuit of Isabel in the caves beneath the castle, the basic pattern is identifiable, although James, enjoying the advantage of another era, discovers new images and innuendoes in the Gothic vocabulary: the house as an emblem of the mind haunted by itself; its victim alienated from those around him, a lonely prisoner incapable of understanding or controlling his descent into his private maelstrom of terror; the chase as the self in pursuit of the “other” warring impulse; the victim’s terror as a correlative of the mind beset with images and haunted by itself where the ambiguities of existence are preserved by James’s dual realization of man’s strength and weakness conjoined. “We want it [the supernatural] clear, goodness knows,” James had said, “but we also want it thick, and we get the thickness in the human consciousness that entertains and records, that amplifies and interprets it.”2 1 As a result of his peregrination into self, Brydon discovers a horror which he fails to recognize as in any way related to himself. The apparition is but a projection of Brydon’s haunted mind—the situation, an ironic one, since as a wish-fulfillment turned rancid, Brydon “scares up” his own nightmare figure within his own haunted house.

Notes 1. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), I, 264. 2. For a collection that gathers the supernatural tales together, see Henry James, Stories of the Supernatural, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Taplinger, 1970). All references to the tales are to this collection, with pagination cited parenthetically. References to the novels are from The Novels and Tales of Henry James, 26 vols., including 2 posthumous vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1907-17), pagination cited parenthetically.

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early in the tale: at parties, Brydon “circulated, talked, renewed, loosely and pleasantly, old relations. . . . He was a dim secondary social success— and all with people who had truly not an idea of him. It was all mere surface sound: this murmur of their welcome . . . just as his gestures of response were extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little” (pp. 739-40, italics mine).

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3. See Martha Banta, “The House of the Seven Ushers and How They Grew: A Look at Jamesian Gothicism,” Yale Review, 57:1 (1967), 56-65. 4. Relevant is J. M. S. Tompkins’s observation that “the basis of Otranto is architectural and in this respect is the true starting point of the Gothic.” The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800 (1932; rpt. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 226. Also see Montague Summers who, in making a similar point, observes that the castle often becomes the actual protagonist in Gothic tales, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (London: The Fortune Press, 1938), pp. 189-91. 5. Henry James, Within the Rim and Other Essays, 1914-15 (London: W. Collins, [c. 1918]), pp. 19ff. 6. See Henry James, Sr., The Literary Remains, ed. with intro. William James (Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Literature House, 1970), pp. 59ff., and William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902), pp. 160ff. 7. See Alice James, Alice James: Her Brothers—Her Journal, ed. Anna Robeson Burr (1934; rpt. Boston: Milford House, 1972), pp. 181-82. Alice’s remarks are filled with the jungle imagery which pervades “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Jolly Corner.” 8. Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1947), p. 41. 9. Somerset Maugham, ed., “Introduction,” Tellers of Tales; 100 Short Stories from the United States, England, France, Russia and Germany (New York: Doubleday, 1939), pp. xxxv-xxxvi. 10. Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (New York: Scribner’s, 1913), p. 348. 11. Henry James, The American Scene (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 88ff. 12. Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1934), p. 257. 13. E. F. Benson, ed., Henry James: Letters to A. C. Benson and Auguste Monod (1930; rpt. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1969), p. 35. 14. James, The Notebooks, p. 178. 15. See, for example, Robert D. Hume, “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 282-90; Lowry Nelson, Jr., “Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel,” Yale Review, 52 (1962), 236-57; Francis Russell Hart, “The Experience of Character in the English Gothic Novel,” Experience in the Novel, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 83-105. 16. See, for example, The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (London: Macmillan, 1920), I, 180-81; Perry, I, 427-28; James, The Letters, II, 83; Alice James, Her Journal, p. 112. 17. For more documentation of James’s well-known interest in psychical phenomena, see Francis X. Roellinger, Jr., “Psychical Research and ‘The Turn of the Screw,’” AL, 20 (1949), 401-12. 18. So, too, critics who find in the tale a reverberation of James’s personal history suggest that the figure represents the self that might have been. See, for

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example, Christof Wegelin, The Image of Europe in Henry James (Dallas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1958) or Marius Bewley, The Complex Fate: Hawthorne, Henry James and Some Other American Writers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952). A somewhat different reading—which nonetheless also identifies the figure at the end as the self that might have been—is Saul Rosenzweig’s well-known psychoanalytic study, “The Ghost of Henry James” in Art and psychoanalysis, ed. William Phillips (New York: Criterion Books, 1957), pp. 89-111. For Rosenzweig, the apparition is James’s own “. . . ghost which [is] an apotheosis of his unlived life . . . ,” p. 109. The specter, thus, is typical of James: “Unlike the ghosts of other writers, the creatures of James’s imagination represent not the shadows of lives once lived, but the immortal impulses of the unlived life.” p. 104. 19. For further discussion of the figure as an aspect of the Brydon that “is,” see Floyd Stovall, “Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner,’” NCF, 12 (June 1957), 72-84, a reading which runs counter to many critical readings in which the figure at the end is seen as the Brydon who might have been, had not his absence in Europe saved him from becoming a man of business. 20. Henry James, A Passionate Pilgrim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), p. 37. 21. Henry James, “Preface to The Altar of the Dead,” The Art of the Novel, p. 256.

FURTHER READING Biography Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper Collins, 1985, 740 p. Abridged version of Edel’s five volume comprehensive biography of James’s life; revised with additional source material.

Criticism Akiyama, Masayuki. “James and Nanboku: A Comparative Study of Supernatural Stories in the West and East.” Comparative Literature Studies 22 (1985): 43-52. Explores parallels between the Kabuki dramas of Nanboku and James’s short fiction, especially East and West variations on the “revenge-beyond-the-grave” motif. Banta, Martha. “The House of Seven Ushers and How They Grew: A Look at Jamesian Gothicism.” Yale Review 57 (autumn 1967): 56-65. Highlights James’s Gothic consciousness in works such as The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of a Dove. ———. Henry James and the Occult: The Great Extension. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972, 273 p. Investigates James’s psychological modification of the Gothic tradition in his tales and novels. Beidler, Peter. Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: The Turn of the Screw at the Turn of the Century. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989, 252 p. Study of James’s novella that includes discussions of James’s use of the Gothic tradition and its motifs.

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Explores the notions of “self” and “other” in “The Jolly Corner.” Craig, J. A. “James’s The Bostonians.” Explicator 49, no. 2 (winter 1991): 100-101. Note on Gothic elements in James’s novel. Lustig, T. J. Henry James and the Ghostly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 317 p. Full-length study of the use of occultism and the supernatural in James’s fiction, arguing that the ghostly is a far more inclusive rubric in James’s work than the reader might expect.

a Gothic Geography, edited by Glennis Byron and David Punter, pp. 161-74. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Evaluates James’s treatment of repressed identity—in terms of sexual orientation and homosexual desire—as a “ghostly double” in “The Jolly Corner.” Schleifer, Ronald. “The Trap of the Imagination: The Gothic Tradition, Fiction and The Turn of the Screw.” Criticism 22, no. 4 (fall 1980): 297-319. Points out James’s debt in The Turn of the Screw to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and asserts that the novella anticipates the irony, laughter, and self-consciousness of the twentieth-century Gothic writings of Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Isak Dinesen, and Thomas Mann. Sklepowich, E. A. “Gossip and Gothicism in The Sacred Fount.” Henry James Review 2 (1981): 112-15.

Matheson, Neill. “Talking Horrors: James, Euphemism, and the Specter of Wilde.” American Literature 71, no. 4 (December 1999): 709-50.

Shows how expertly James used Gothic properties and places in the urbane Gothicism of the novel and its dynamics of social stigmatization.

Analyzes the use of Gothic tropes and indirect erotic language in The Turn of the Screw and argues that the novella comments on the homosexual scandal and trial involving Oscar Wilde.

Sweeney, Gerard M. “Henry James’s ‘De Grey’: The Gothic as Camouflage of the Medical.” Modern Language Studies 21, no. 2 (1991): 36-44.

Merivale, Patricia. “The Esthetics of Perversion: Gothic Artifice in Henry James and Witold Gombrowicz.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 93, no. 5 (October 1978): 992-1002. Compares James’s The Turn of the Screw and The Sacred Fount to Witold Gombrowicz’s “Gothic artist parables,” arguing that both are metaphysical detective stories and self-reflexive texts. Miall, David S. “Designed Horror: James’s Vision of Evil in The Turn of the Screw.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 39, no. 3 (December 1984): 305-27.

Offers a medical explanation for James’s supernatural in “De Grey: A Romance,” maintaining that the male line of the De Greys is infected with syphilis. Thorberg, Raymond. “Terror Made Relevant: James’s Ghost Stories.” Dalhousie Review 47 (1967): 185-91. Psychological reading of James’s ghost stories. Veeder, William. “The Nurturance of the Gothic: The Turn of the Screw.” Gothic Studies 1 (1999): 47-85. Asserts that the Gothic is a mechanism that was developed for society to heal their self-afflicted wounds.

Nettles, Elsa. “The Portrait of a Lady and the Gothic Romance.” South Atlantic Bulletin 39, no. 4 (1974): 7382.

Wiesenfarth, Joseph. “The Portrait of a Lady: Gothic Manners in Europe.” In Reading and Writing Women’s Lives: A Study of the Novel of Manners, edited by Bege K. Bowers and Barbara Brothers, pp. 119-40. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International Research Press, 1990.

Analyzes James’s appropriation and transformation of stock Gothic types and tropes, including the heroine in distress, the villain-hero, and the imprisoning castle.

Discusses James’s debt to George Eliot and his use of Gothic manners and the horror of respectability in The Portrait of a Lady.

Punter, David. “The Ambivalence of Memory: Henry James and Walter de la Mare.” In The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Vol. 2., pp. 47-66. Essex, England: Longman, 1996.

Willen, Gerald, ed. A Casebook on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. New York: Crowell, 1969, 325 p.

Compares The Turn of the Screw to Walter de la Mare’s short stories, emphasizing the psychological sophistication, use of the unconscious, and the concern with the past in the works of both writers.

Zablotny, Elaine. “Henry James and the Demonic Vampire and Madonna.” Psychocultural Review 3 (1979): 203-24.

Offers a reading of The Turn of the Screw based on Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Uncanny.”

Notes and critical essays on James’s most popular ghostly tale.

Focuses on James’s exploration of psychic vampirism in several of his ghost stories.

Rozenzweig, Saul. “The Ghosts of Henry James.” Partisan Review 11, no. 4 (fall 1944): 436-55. Psychological analysis of James’s ghosts that maintains that the ghosts point to the irrepressible unlived life. Salzberg, Joel. “The Gothic Hero in Transcendental Quest: Poe’s ‘Ligea’ and James’ ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 67 (1972): 108-14. Compares the heroes in ghostly tales by James and Edgar Allan Poe. Savoy, Eric. “Spectres of Abjection: The Queer Subject of James’s ‘The Jolly Corner.’” In Spectral Readings: Towards

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of James’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: American Writers; American Writers: The Classics, Vol. 1; American Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 1; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography and Resources, Vol. 2; British Writers, Vol. 6; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 1865-1917; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 104, 132; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 12, 71, 74, 189; Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, Vol. 13; DIS-

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Burleson, Donald. “Identity and Alterity in Henry James’ ‘The Jolly Corner.’” Studies in Weird Fiction 8 (fall 1990): 1-11.

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Covering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Exploring Short Stories; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 2; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Major 21stCentury Writers; Novels for Students, Vols. 12, 16, 19; Reference

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Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; Short Stories for Students, Vol. 9; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 8, 32, 47; Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 1; Twayne’s United States Authors; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vols. 2, 11, 24, 40, 47, 64; and World Literature Criticism.

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STEPHEN KING (1947 -)

(Full name Stephen Edwin King; has written as Steve King, and under pseudonyms Richard Bachman, John Swithen, and Eleanor Druse) American novelist, short story writer, novella writer, scriptwriter, nonfiction writer, autobiographer, and author of children’s books.

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tephen King is a prolific and immensely popular author of horror fiction. In his works, King blends elements of the traditional Gothic tale with those of the modern psychological thriller, detective, and science fiction genres. His fiction features colloquial language, clinical attention to physical detail and emotional states, realistic settings, and an emphasis on contemporary problems. His exploration of such issues as marital infidelity and peer group acceptance lend credibility to the supernatural elements in his fiction. King’s wide popularity attests to his ability to tap into his reader’s fear of and inability to come to terms with evil confronted in the everyday world.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947, to Donald Edwin King, a U.S. merchant marine, and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. His father abandoned the family when King was two years old. King, his brother, and his mother went to live with relatives in Durham, Maine, and

then to various other cities. They returned to Durham to stay in 1958. King was very close to his mother, who supported the family with a series of low-paying jobs and read to him often as a child. She later encouraged King to send his work to publishers. She died of cancer in 1973 without seeing the enormous success her son achieved as a writer. King published his first short story, “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber,” in Comics Review, in 1965. He also wrote his first full-length manuscript while still in high school. King received a scholarship to the University of Maine at Orono, where he majored in English and minored in speech. King has a deep political awareness, and was active in student politics and the anti-war movement; with the exception of his short story “The Children of the Corn,” he has avoided setting his stories in the 1960s and 1970s because of the painful and difficult issues associated with the time period. After his graduation in 1970, King was unable to secure a teaching position, and worked as a gas station attendant and in a laundry. On January 2, 1971, King married novelist Tabitha Jane Spruce; the couple has three children. King spent a short time teaching at the Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine, until the success of his first novel Carrie (1974) enabled him to focus on writing full time. In 1978 he was writer in residence and instructor at the University of Maine at Orono; this experience informed his Danse Macabre (1981), a series of essays about the horror

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genre. King suffered a serious health challenge on June 19, 1999, when he was struck by a van while walking alongside a road near his home. He sustained injuries to his spine, hip, ribs, and right leg. One of his broken ribs punctured a lung, and he nearly died. He began a slow progress towards recovery, cheered by countless cards and letters from his fans. King had also begun work on a writer’s manual before his accident, and the result, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), sold more copies in its first printing than any previous book about writing. In addition to King’s advice on crafting fiction, however, the book includes a great deal of autobiographical material. The author chronicles his childhood, his rise to fame, his struggles with addiction, and the 1999 accident that almost ended his life. While King has played with the idea of giving up publishing his writings, his legion of fans continues to be delighted that the idea has not yet become a reality. In 2004, under the pseudonym of Eleanor Druse, King published The Journals of Eleanor Druse: My Investigation of the Kingdom Hospital Incident. He has also continued with his “Dark Tower” series with the publication of The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla in 2003. King completed the final two installments of the series—The Dark Tower VI: The Songs of Susannah and The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower—in 2004.

The child, like the family’s cat before him, returns, but with sinister results. Other King novels cited for containing elements of the Gothic include The Dead Zone (1979), Christine (1983), Cycle of the Werewolf (1983), The Talisman (1984), Bag of Bones (1997), and Black House (2001).

CRITICAL RECEPTION Reviewers who have analyzed King’s novels often praise the rhythm and pacing of his narratives. Others praise the author for his ability to make the unreal seem entirely plausible. Critics who dismiss King’s work usually accuse him of being a formula writer, but his supporters assert that this is part of King’s talent, and praise his ability to adapt the Gothic and melodrama in popular literature for contemporary audiences. Heidi Strengell recounts King’s repeated use of the Gothic double in his oeuvre, and highlights the numerous forms that double assumes. Critics have also pointed to the influence of literary classics, especially Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick on King’s use of the Gothic. Jesse W. Nash, on the other hand, argues that King’s Gothic is particularly rooted in popular culture and his own life experiences and therefore represents a singular, postmodern interpretation of the genre.

MAJOR WORKS King’s fiction has extended into a variety of categories within the horror genre, including vampire and zombie stories, tales of possession, and incidents involving a character’s discovery of supernatural powers. He has also successfully branched out into science fiction, fantasy, and westerns. Most of his adult protagonists are ordinary, middle-class people who find themselves involved in some otherworldly nightmare from which they cannot escape. Many of his stories have elements of Gothic fiction. Most notable among these are ’Salem’s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977) and Pet Sematary (1983). ’Salem’s Lot centers on a series of mysterious deaths in a once-idyllic New England village. The Shining tells the tale of Jack Torrance, an alcoholic writer who brings his family to live in an empty mountain hotel for the winter. Demonized by the spirits that haunt the hotel, he tries to kill his wife and child but ultimately kills himself instead. In Pet Sematary, a college professor resurrects his young son, who is killed when he ventures onto a nearby highway, by burying him in his neighbor’s pet cemetery.

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PRINCIPAL WORKS Carrie: A Novel of a Girl with a Frightening Power (novel) 1974 ’Salem’s Lot (novel) 1975 The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (novel) 1976 Rage [as Richard Bachman] (novel) 1977 The Shining (novel) 1977 Night Shift (short stories) 1978; also published as Night Shift: Excursions into Horror, 1979 The Stand (novel) 1978; revised edition, 1990 Another Quarter Mile: Poetry (poetry) 1979 The Dead Zone (novel) 1979 The Long Walk [as Richard Bachman] (novel) 1979 Firestarter (novel) 1980 Cujo (novel) 1981 Roadwork: A Novel of the First Energy Crisis [as Richard Bachman] (novel) 1981

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Storm of the Century (screenplay) 1999

Creepshow (short stories) 1982

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (nonfiction) 2000

The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (novel) 1982

Black House [with Straub] (novel) 2001

Different Seasons (short stories and novellas) 1982

Dreamcatcher (novel) 2001

The Running Man [as Richard Bachman] (novel) 1982

Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales (short stories) 2002

Stephen King’s Creepshow: A George A. Romero Film [adapted from the stories in King’s collection] (screenplay) 1982

From a Buick 8 (novel) 2002

Christine (novel) 1983 Cycle of the Werewolf (short stories) 1983; also published as The Silver Bullet, 1985 Pet Sematary (novel) 1983

The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla (novel) 2003 The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah (novel) 2004 The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (novel) 2004 The Journals of Eleanor Druse: My Investigation of the Kingdom Hospital Incident [as Eleanor Druse] (novel) 2004

Cat’s Eye (screenplay) 1984 The Eyes of the Dragon (juvenile novel) 1984 The Talisman [with Peter Straub] (novel) 1984 Thinner [as Richard Bachman] (novel) 1984

PRIMARY SOURCES

Silver Bullet (screenplay) 1985

STEPHEN KING (ESSAY DATE 1982) SOURCE: King, Stephen. “October 4, 1957, and an Invitation to Dance.” In Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, pp. 1-15. New York: Everest House, 1982.

Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew (short stories) 1985 It (novel) 1986; first published in limited edition in Germany as Es, 1986

In the following excerpt, King comments on the dual nature of horror in popular literature and film.

Maximum Overdrive [writer and director] (screenplay) 1986 Misery (novel) 1987 The Tommyknockers (novel) 1987 The Dark Half (novel) 1989 The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of Three (novel) 1989 My Pretty Pony (children’s novel) 1989 Pet Sematary (screenplay) 1989 Four Past Midnight (novellas) 1990 The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands (novel) 1991 Needful Things (novel) 1991 Dolores Claiborne (novel) 1992 Gerald’s Game (novel) 1992 Nightmares and Dreamscapes (short stories, poem, and essay) 1993 Rose Madder (novel) 1995 Desperation (novel) 1996 The Regulators [as Richard Bachman] (novel) 1996 Bag of Bones (novel) 1997 The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (novel) 1997 The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (juvenilia) 1999 Hearts in Atlantis (novel) 1999

2 If there is any truth or worth to the danse macabre, it is simply that novels, movies, TV and radio programs—even the comic books—dealing with horror always do their work on two levels. On top is the “gross-out” level—when Regan vomits in the priest’s face or masturbates with a crucifix in The Exorcist, or when the raw-looking, terribly inside-out monster in John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy crunches off the helicopter pilot’s head like a Tootsie-Pop. The gross-out can be done with varying degrees of artistic finesse, but it’s always there. But on another, more potent level, the work of horror really is a dance—a moving, rhythmic search. And what it’s looking for is the place where you, the viewer or the reader, live at your most primitive level. The work of horror is not interested in the civilized furniture of our lives. Such a work dances through these rooms which we have fitted out one piece at a time, each piece expressing—we hope!—our socially acceptable and pleasantly enlightened character. It is in search of another place, a room which may sometimes resemble the secret den of a Victorian gentleman, sometimes the torture chamber of the Spanish Inquisition . . . but perhaps most frequently and

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most successfully, the simple and brutally plain hole of a Stone Age cave-dweller. Is horror art? On this second level, the work of horror can be nothing else; it achieves the level of art simply because it is looking for something beyond art, something that predates art: it is looking for what I would call phobic pressure points. The good horror tale will dance its way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew of—as both Albert Camus and Billy Joel have pointed out, The Stranger makes us nervous . . . but we love to try on his face in secret. Do spiders give you the horrors? Fine. We’ll have spiders, as in Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and Kingdom of the Spiders. What about rats? In James Herbert’s novel of the same name, you can feel them crawl all over you . . . and eat you alive. How about snakes? That shut-in feeling? Heights? Or . . . whatever there is. Because books and movies are mass media, the field of horror has often been able to do better than even these personal fears over the last thirty years. During that period (and to a lesser degree, in the seventy or so years preceding), the horror genre has often been able to find national phobic pressure points, and those books and films which have been the most successful almost always seem to play upon and express fears which exist across a wide spectrum of people. Such fears, which are often political, economic, and psychological rather than supernatural, give the best work of horror a pleasing allegorical feel—and it’s the one sort of allegory that most filmmakers seem at home with. Maybe because they know that if the shit starts getting too thick, they can always bring the monster shambling out of the darkness again. We’re going back to Stratford in 1957 before much longer, but before we do, let me suggest that one of the films of the last thirty years to find a pressure point with great accuracy was Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Further along, we’ll discuss the novel—and Jack Finney, the author, will also have a few things to say—but for now, let’s look briefly at the film. There is nothing really physically horrible in the Siegel version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers;1 no gnarled and evil star travelers here, no twisted, mutated shape under the facade of normality. The pod people are just a little different, that’s all. A little vague. A little messy. Although Finney never puts this fine a point on it in his book, he certainly suggests that the most horrible thing about “them” is that they lack even the

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most common and easily attainable sense of aesthetics. Never mind, Finney suggests, that these usurping aliens from outer space can’t appreciate La Traviata or Moby Dick or even a good Norman Rockwell cover on the Saturday Evening Post. That’s bad enough, but—my God!—they don’t mow their lawns or replace the pane of garage glass that got broken when the kid down the street batted a baseball through it. They don’t repaint their houses when they get flaky. The roads leading into Santa Mira, we’re told, are so full of potholes and washouts that pretty soon the salesmen who service the town—who aerate its municipal lungs with the life-giving atmosphere of capitalism, you might say—will no longer bother to come. The gross-out level is one thing, but it is on that second level of horror that we often experience that low sense of anxiety which we call “the creeps.” Over the years, Invasion of the Body Snatchers has given a lot of people the creeps, and all sorts of high-flown ideas have been imputed to Siegel’s film version. It was seen as an antiMcCarthy film until someone pointed out the fact that Don Siegel’s political views could hardly be called leftish. Then people began seeing it as a “better dead than Red” picture. Of the two ideas, I think that second one better fits the film that Siegel made, the picture that ends with Kevin McCarthy in the middle of a freeway, screaming “They’re here already! You’re next!” to cars which rush heedlessly by him. But in my heart, I don’t really believe that Siegel was wearing a political hat at all when he made the movie (and you will see later that Jack Finney has never believed it, either); I believe he was simply having fun and that the undertones . . . just happened. This doesn’t invalidate the idea that there is an allegorical element in Invasion of the Body Snatchers; it is simply to suggest that sometimes these pressure points, these terminals of fear, are so deeply buried and yet so vital that we may tap them like artesian wells—saying one thing out loud while we express something else in a whisper. The Philip Kaufman version of Finney’s novel is fun (although, to be fair, not quite as much fun as Siegel’s), but that whisper has changed into something entirely different: the subtext of Kaufman’s picture seems to satirize the whole I’mokay-you’re-okay-so-let’s-get-in-the-hot-tub-andmassage-our-precious-consciousness movement of the egocentric seventies. Which is to suggest that, although the uneasy dreams of the mass subconscious may change from decade to decade, the pipeline into that well of dreams remains constant and vital.

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fiction of Stephen King. This perpetuation reveals our inability to evolve past our base instincts, to purge them completely from the human psyche. The appearance and reappearance of the Gothic double also shows us that popular fiction provides a useful repository for our deepest fear—specifically the fear that each of us is capable of great evil.

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1. There is in the Philip Kaufman remake, though. There is a moment in that film which is repulsively horrible. It comes when Donald Sutherland uses a rake to smash in the face of a mostly formed pod. This “person’s” face breaks in with sickening ease, like a rotted piece of fruit, and lets out an explosion of the most realistic stage blood that I have ever seen in a color film. When that moment came, I winced, clapped a hand over my mouth . . . and wondered how in the hell the movie had ever gotten its PG rating.

GENERAL COMMENTARY HEIDI STRENGELL (ESSAY DATE SPRING 2003) SOURCE: Strengell, Heidi. “‘The Monster Never Dies’: An Analysis of the Gothic Double in Stephen King’s Oeuvre.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-Present) 2, no. 1 (spring 2003): . In the following essay, Strengell maintains that the use of the Gothic literary mechanism of the double is central to King’s works and serves as a symbol of the deep-seated fear of the average person’s capacity for evil.

In Danse Macabre (1981), his non-fiction study of the horror genre, Stephen King distinguishes three Gothic archetypes that embody the central issues with which the Gothic era was concerned. To be more precise, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) deals with “the refusal to take personal responsibility for one’s actions because of pride” (62); Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) portrays perverse or, in medical terms, abnormal and repressed sexuality as well as double standards of sexuality; and, finally, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) exploits the possibilities provided by the discovery of the human psyche during the Gothic period, that is, the question of the double. Taking this third archetype as the subject for this paper, I will show that one of the central issues in the Gothic era, namely the paradoxical existence of both good and evil in a single person, remains an important issue in the

I will begin by distinguishing the Gothic double from the terms related to it. Alongside Frankenstein’s monster, the Wandering Jew, and the Byronic vampire, David Punter sets a fourth Gothic character, the Doppelganger which, in his view, signifies “the mask of innocence” and which is found in, for instance, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (21). On another occasion, he refers to the novel as a record of a split personality (2), and since the terms are far from being identical, they need to be defined at the outset. The term Doppelganger is defined in The New International Webster’s Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language (1999) as “1 A person exactly like another; a double. 2 A wraith, especially of a person not yet dead” (378). Since the German equivalent, too, primarily assumes that the word refers to two separate entities, the term Doppelganger is rejected in this context, although it is widely used in literary criticism. The term split personality is not included in The New International Webster’s Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language, rightly so, because such a diagnosis is no longer considered scientifically valid. After Eugen Bleuler in the late nineteenth century coined the term schizophrenia to replace the old one, dementia procox, the lay public mistakenly understood it as an equivalent to the term split personality. The confusion of the terms meant that the lay term split personality became replaced in scientific usage by dissociative identity disorder (Kaplan, Sadock and Grebb 457). The latter includes various states and signifies a personality disorder in which the person is unaware of what his “other half” is doing. Whether Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde can be diagnosed as a dissociative disorder patient or possibly a borderline personality may occupy a few psychiatrists, but the term Gothic double will do for my purposes. Like Doppelganger, the word double calls upon ambiguous interpretations and needs therefore to be defined. My definition takes as a starting point the concept of personality. According to The New International Webster’s Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language, personality is: “1. That which constitutes a person; also, that which distinguishes

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This is the real danse macabre, I suspect: those remarkable moments when the creator of a horror story is able to unite the conscious and subconscious mind with one potent idea. I believe it happened to a greater degree with the Siegel version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but of course both Siegel and Kaufman were able to proceed courtesy of Jack Finney, who sank the original well.

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and characterizes a person; personal existence” (942). As the unity of the personality was endangered by Freudian notions, similarly, many Gothic narratives were consumed “by a paranoid terror of involution or the unraveling of the multiformed ego” (Halberstam 55). Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fittingly displays this juxtaposition of the smooth surface of Dr. Jekyll and that of the “dwarfish” (18), “ape-like” (27) Mr. Hyde. While Dr. Jekyll is pleasant and sophisticated, Mr. Hyde, stunted, crumpled, and ugly, is designed to shock. Indeed, the “Gothic effect depends upon the production of a monstrous double” (Halberstam 54). Thus, for my purposes, the term Gothic double refers to the essential duality within a single character on the further presumption that the duality centers on the polarity of good and evil. Like many of King’s works, Stevenson’s novella examines the conflict between the free will to do good or to do evil as well as the theme of hypocrisy. King believes the conflict between good and evil is the conflict between, in Freudian terms, the id and the superego and refers also to Stevenson’s terms: the conflict between mortification and gratification. In addition, King views the struggle both in Christian and mythical terms. The latter suggests the split between the Apollonian (the man of intellect, morality, and nobility) and the Dionysian (the man of physical gratification) (Danse 75). Influenced by James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), Stevenson wrote his novella in three days in 1886 (Punter 1; Danse 69). King expresses his admiration for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, regarding it as a “masterpiece of concision” (Danse 69, 80-81). Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the story of a Victorian gentleman who leads a secret life of vice, uses multiple narrators to relate the story of a man doomed by the chemical reproduction of his double. “Man is not truly one but two” says Dr. Jekyll, tormented by a sense of “the thorough and primitive duality of man” (Stevenson 70). Through chemical experimentation, he discovers a potion which dissociates the “polar twins” of the self, transforming his body into that of his other self (70). The other self, Mr. Hyde, allows Dr. Jekyll to satisfy his undignified desires untrammeled by moral scruples. Haunting the streets of London, this small and indescribably ugly character “springs headlong into the sea of liberty” which finally leads him to murder a respectable gentleman (75). Frightened, Dr. Jekyll determines never to use the potion again. However, the metamorphosis has become spontaneous, and, as King

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aptly notes, Dr. Jekyll “has created Hyde to escape the strictures of propriety, but has discovered that evil has its own strictures” (Danse 73). In the end, Dr. Jekyll has become Mr. Hyde’s prisoner, and Jekyll/Hyde’s life ends in suicide. Many of the themes of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde appear in King’s work. Like Dr. Jekyll, Reverend Lester Lowe of Cycle of the Werewolf bases his influence on moral superiority, and his high views of himself produce morbidity in his relations with his own appetites. Arnie Cunningham of Christine illustrates another angle of the werewolf myth even more clearly, that is, the werewolf as an innocent victim, predestinated to its destruction. While the Gage creature in King’s Pet Semetary constructs part of its maker, the dialectic between monster and maker is resolved in, for instance, Cycle of the Werewolf as a conflict in a single body. Gage Creed’s monstrosity in Pet Semetary depends upon the fragility of his father’s humanity, whereas the repulsive nature of the werewolf can only be known through the failed respectability of Reverend Lester Lowe. King characterizes Lowe as genuinely evil, whereas Jekyll, although a hypocrite and a self-deceiver, only desires personal freedom and keeps certain pleasures repressed. Punter points out that while Hyde’s behavior manifests an urban version of “going native,” Jekyll struggles with various pressures (3). Similarly, Lester Lowe who embodies social virtue takes great pleasure in his bloody nocturnal adventures. Thad Beaumont’s alter ego in The Dark Half expresses the violent part of the protagonist’s character, of which he himself is not constantly aware. Likewise, the degree to which Dr. Jekyll takes seriously his public responsibilities determines the “hidden-ness” of his desire for pleasure. Punter notes that since the public man must appear flawless, he must “hide” his private nature, to the extent of completely denying it (3). Defying all logic, Beaumont’s “dark half,” George Stark, has somehow come into existence, and Beaumont must literally face his dark half in a confrontation in which either Beaumont’s Jekyll or Stark’s Hyde has to die. The Drawing of the Three introduces a dissociative patient, Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker, who through Roland the Gunslinger and Eddie Dean’s intervention is able to merge her two personalities into the woman named Susannah Dean. Odetta developed a second personality as a young girl, when Jack Mort dropped a brick on her head. Her two personalities—the sophisticated and wealthy Odetta and the uneducated and vulgar Detta—lead separate lives, completely

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The dark halves of King’s Gothic doubles express unrestrained sexuality. Reverend Lester Lowe “wolf-rapes” Stella Randolph, and the shy Arnie Cunningham transforms into a vulgar senior citizen in the form of the beast; the sexually insatiable Detta Walker uses both foul language and teases men, whereas George Stark commits a sexually charged murder of Miriam Cowley—not to mention the rape-murders of Frank Dodd and the child murders of Carl Bierstone/Charles Burnside. Gothic monsters underline the meaning of decadence and are thus concerned with the problem of degeneration. Punter maintains that they pose, from different angles, the same question appropriate to an age of imperial decline: how much can one lose— individually, socially, nationally—and still remain a man? (1). The question has remained a central issue in the modern Gothic and in King’s fiction in particular. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published at a time when the problem of prostitution was receiving considerable public attention in England. As in Frankenstein and Dracula, the protagonist’s vice and decadence are once again sex-related, but also clearly sadistic—the serial killers, Frank Dodd (Dead Zone) and Charles Burnside (Black House), feature these sadistic traits in King. Stevenson had read W. T. Stead’s series of articles on child prostitution and was aware that the demand for child prostitutes was being stimulated by the sadistic tastes of the Victorian gentlemen (Clemens 123). More importantly, the theme is evoked at the outset of the novella when Mr. Hyde tramples on a young girl. The violation of the girl’s body is settled with a hundred pounds, which reinforces the prostitution motif. Also, the foggy night side of Mr. Hyde’s London gives a glimpse of the Victorian gentlemen’s subculture: “Once a woman spoke to him, offering, I think, a box of lights” (Stevenson 85)—clearly, she was offering something else. As in Black House where the Fisherman lusts for a young boy’s buttocks, the hints of sexual exploitation also suggest male victims, as for instance, in the scene in which Mr. Utterson, “tossing to and fro” on his “great, dark bed,” imagines Mr. Hyde blackmailing Dr. Jekyll. This dark “figure to whom power was given” would stand by Jekyll’s bedside, “and even at that

dead hour he must rise and do its bidding” (20). A disturbing novella, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde gave a detailed depiction of some upper-class gentlemen, but as Valdine Clemens notes, criticized moralistic middle-class sexual repression (for instance, the prevalent homosexual abuse in public schools and prostitution) and patriarchal power (124, 132). Arnie Cunninham of Christine perishes because of his desperate loneliness. An unattractive teenager who finds little solace at home or at school, Arnie falls in love with a 1958 Plymouth Fury. Possessed by the evil spirit of Christine’s earlier owner, Roland LeBay, Arnie is alienated from his family, best friend Dennis, and even his high school sweetheart Leigh Cabot. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Christine focuses on “humanity’s vulnerability to dehumanization” which coexists with the fear of internal evil: “the upsurge of the animal, the repressed unconscious, the monster from id,” or, as Douglas E. Winter points out, “the monster from the fifties” (137, 139; Danse 75). The novel also discusses the conflict between the will to do evil and the will to deny evil; the car becomes a symbol of the duality of human nature, as telling as the two sides of Henry Jekyll’s town house which bordered both a graceful Victorian street and a slumlike alley (Winter 139-140; Danse 75): “It was as if I had seen a snake that was almost ready to shed its old skin, that some of the old skin had already flaked away, revealing the glistening newness underneath” (Christine 57-58). As Christine magically returns to street condition, Arnie also begins to change, at first for the better, but then he matures beyond his years: “a teenage Jekyll rendered into a middle-aged Hyde” (Winter 140). In brief, although Stevenson’s classic finds no single counterpart in King, its motifs occur in several of King’s works.

The Werewolf Cycle of the Werewolf and The Talisman introduce us to another Stephen King double: the werewolf. Perhaps nowhere else in King’s fiction is the Gothic double more pronounced than in this figure. Beginning as a calendar, displaying twelve colored drawings by Bernie Wrightson with brief accompanying text by King, Cycle of the Werewolf evolved into a twelve-chapter novella. Each successive segment takes place on a specific holiday of the year, from January to December, relating the story of the recurring appearance of a werewolf in isolated Tarker’s Mills, Maine, and its

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unaware of each other. Since both are aspects of her self, she cannot become a whole until those “polar twins” are united in Susannah Dean. When the compassion of Odetta and the strength of Detta merge into Susannah, she becomes a worthy gunslinger on Roland’s team.

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destruction at the hands of a crippled boy. King defines the predestined nature of the disaster: “It is the Werewolf, and there is no more reason for its coming now than there would be for the arrival of cancer, or a psychotic with murder on his mind, or a killer tornado” (Werewolf 14). Although the werewolf arouses fear and suspicions, only in October do the residents take systematic action to defend themselves. Like “Salem’s Lot, Castle Rock, or Derry, Tarker’s Mills keeps its secrets, and, similarly, the residents of Tarker’s Mills embody all of the diversifying virtue and ugliness found in everyday people” (Larson 104). What is more, each of the werewolf’s victims expands the constant sense of isolation, due to the flaws in their physiques and in their characters (Collings, The Many Facets of Stephen King 80). As an illustration, the February victim, Stella Randolph, is isolated by her skewed romanticism and by her corpulence (80). However, this Valentine’s day the lonely old maid receives a visitor: “a dark shape—amorphous but clearly masculine” (Werewolf 21). King depicts Stella’s encounter with the werewolf in Gothic terms, combining dreams, sex, and death (21-24). He uses the com-

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mon French metaphor “orgasm is a little death” to reinforce the Gothic effect of the February section. Indeed, what takes the place of the Valentine figure is a “beast” with “shaggy fur in a silvery streak” (22) its breath “hot, but somehow not unpleasant” (23). Despite Berni Wrightson’s illustration of a lustful redhead embracing a werewolf, King never graphically describes the wolfrape and killing of the fat old maid, but veils it in quasi-romantic images that might have derived from John Keats’s classic poem, “The Eve of St. Agnes” (Reino 136). Like the wheel-chair bound protagonist Marty Coslaw, the Reverend Lester Lowe did nothing to deserve his destiny. Until May, he remains as unaware of the werewolf’s identity as anybody else in Tarker’s Mills. On the night before Homecoming Sunday, he has, however, a most peculiar dream. In his dream, Lowe has been preaching with fire and force, but has to break off, because both he and his congregation are turning into werewolves. Lester Lowe’s relief after the nightmare turns into knowledge when he opens the church doors next morning, finding the gutted body of Clyde Corliss.

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Although Reverend Lester Lowe shares a fate similar to that of Arnie Cunningham of Christine, he does not evoke fear and pity to the same extent. In the same way as his hypocritical predecessor in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Lester Lowe makes excuses for his behavior without fighting against it. In November, having found out that hunters have been sent out after the werewolf, he deliberately takes the role of the beast and defends himself by comparing the hunters with irrational animals. Ignoring the threat of these adult men, Marty Coslaw’s lined notepads, and his direct question—“Why don’t you kill yourself?” (Werewolf 108, 111; italics original)—the Reverend Lester Lowe (that is, the werewolf) is forced to analyze his situation. With hubris like that of Victor Frankenstein, he turns to God: “If I have been cursed from Outside, then God will bring me down in His time” (Werewolf 111; italics original). In other words, against the advice of his own creator, Stephen King, Reverend Lester Lowe readily lays the guilt on “God the Father” (Danse 62) and refuses to take responsibility for his actions or to fight his werewolf instincts. Moreover, blinded by his own logical reasoning, Lester Lowe succumbs to even greater evil by deliberately contemplating the murder of Marty Coslaw—this time both premeditated and in full possession of his senses (Werewolf 111). While many contemporary treatments tend to glamorize the virtues of evil, King’s approach is more traditional (Larson 106-107). Larson regards Reverend Lowe as a man unable to free himself from the overwhelming influence of evil, and he is eventually only able to do so through the aid of an outside agency, through the sympathy and concern of Marty Coslaw (107). Despite his fear of the werewolf, Marty recognizes the human being beneath the beast. While aiming his pistol with silver bullets towards the attacking werewolf, he says: “Poor old Reverend Lowe. I’m gonna try to set you free” (Werewolf 125). In the same way,

Mina Harker pities the vampire in Dracula: “The poor soul who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all” (367). Clearly, King’s allusion to this sentiment reinforces the moral tradition that has lain at the heart of the horror genre and has been much absent in contemporary horror fiction (Larson 108). Undoubtedly, King takes a traditional stand by letting evil perish in the end of the novella, thus, unlike Larson or Anthony Magistrale in The Moral Voyages of Stephen King (57-67), I argue that evil can often be conquered in King’s fiction. Although Jack Torrance of The Shining succumbs to evil and takes the mallet to attack his family, Dick Hallorann is able to resist the same evil influence of the hotel—similarly, Lowe could have acted otherwise. In The Talisman, we encounter Wolf, a slow-witted werewolf from the Territories. When he senses that the full moon is rising and that his instincts might lead him to hurt Jack Sawyer who has become his “herd” and whom he is thus expected to defend against all imaginable threats, this righteous creature takes measures to prevent possible accidents and locks up the herd, that is Jack Sawyer, in a shed for three days: “He Would Not Injure His Herd” (321). Unlike the godly Lowe who attempts to silence his crippled eye witness, the animal-like Wolf avoids killing people. Lowe considers his werewolf nature alien to his true self and allows this alien part to commit even grimmer crimes, which pushes him toward greater levels of moral corruption. Wolf, in contrast, lives by the laws of nature, takes into account the facts caused by his instincts, and respects himself. It is interesting to note, however, that while an evil impulse may be conquered the temptation toward evil is never entirely eliminated.

The Writer/His Pseudonym Another variation of the Gothic double in Stephen King’s work is Thad Beaumont/George Stark or the writer/his pseudonym. In the author’s note of The Dark Half, King expresses his gratitude to his pseudonym, Richard Bachman, maintaining that the “novel could not have been written without him.” In an interview with Walden Books (November/December 1989) and quoted in Magistrale, King acknowledged prior to the publication of The Dark Half that Richard Bachman is the darker, more violent side of Stephen King, just as Stark is the dark half of Thad Beaumont (The Second Decade 66). Remarkably, then, the Gothic double resides within the Gothic double, that is, the reality of the novel reflects reality. Undoubt-

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King refers to the werewolf in biblical terms as “the Beast” and “the Great Satan,” and in the Gothic manner the Beast can be anywhere or, even worse, anybody (Werewolf 45). Unlike a number of other monsters, werewolves, however, frequently arouse pity. Aptly, Collings states that the werewolf is more sinned against than sinning, and that the curse works in two ways: on the level of plot, it transforms an otherwise sensible man into a rapacious monster; on the level of theme and symbol, it divorces him from reality, isolating the person from society and from personal standards of morality (Facets 78).

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edly, both pseudonyms function as a dark alter ego for the artist, a chance to realize his most violent and pessimistic visions. Tony Magistrale notes that the details surrounding the union between Beaumont and Stark underscore King’s intimate relationship with Bachman. Furthermore, even information relevant to those trusted persons who knew, protected, and finally revealed King’s pseudonym corresponds to the fictional events that the reader discovers in The Dark Half (Decade 63-64). Like Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, whose transformation is occasioned by scientific explanation, King attempts to establish credibility by the means of medicine. Having suffered from constant headaches, the eleven-year-old Thad Beaumont is operated on, and, instead of a supposed brain tumor, a fetal twin is discovered in his brain. In addition to being Thad’s physical twin, George Stark has his origin in the writer’s imagination. Considering George “a very bad man,” Thad knows that he has “built George Stark from the ground up” (The Dark Half 155). The symbolic funeral of George Stark becomes a moral stand for Thad’s part, because he has both indulged his dark fantasies in Stark’s fiction and profited financially from his success (Magistrale, Decade 64). Wendy and William, Beaumont’s identical twins, underscore the symbiotic relationship of Stark and Beaumont. While responding with similar affection to these different looking men, Wendy and William sense their identical nature. Sharing identical fingerprints and a capacity for mental telepathy, it becomes more obvious that George has a right to feel insulted (The Dark Half 331). Not even Thad is able to make a clear distinction between himself and George: “Who are you when you write, Thad? Who are you then?” (The Dark Half 129; italics original). Since George constitutes an integral part of Thad’s psyche, he does not genuinely attempt to get rid of George. Elisabeth compares the relationship with alcohol or drug addiction, stating that Thad revealed George’s identity only through the force of circumstances: “If Frederick Clawson hadn’t come along and forced my husband’s hand, I think Thad would still be talking about getting rid of him in the same way” (The Dark Half 202). Indeed, this contradiction has resulted in alcohol addiction, a suicide attempt, and lifelike dreams. However, only as Stark threatens Beaumont’s immediate circle, does he realize the intimacy of their relationship and its fatal consequences. Starting as a thriller, the final confrontation of the two brothers and its victory for Thad

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receives a mythological explanation. Conducting human souls back and forth between the land of the living and the land of the dead, sparrows are able to distinguish the original brother from the dead one and to take the latter where he belongs. Nevertheless, Thad’s victory may prove of short duration, and he is referred to in a less pleasant context later in King: in Needful Things (1991) we learn that Thad Beaumont has broken up with his wife and in Bag of Bones (1998) that he has committed suicide.

The Serial Killer The serial killer also represents the modern counterpart of Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. The Dead Zone, for example, concerns the removal of masks, both political and psychological. The Gothic duality is displayed even in the novel’s central symbol, the wheel of fortune, which, apart from representing blind chance, reveals a second disc. Winter explains that at its heart is the Presidential Seal, a symbol of a different game of chance—politics—and its paradoxes (76). Focusing on the masquerade of politics, Greg Stillson, a Congressional candidate whose name is an intentional conjunction of “still” and “Nixon” (263), takes the Vietnamese masquerade-game of the “Laughing Tiger” a step further: “inside the beastskin, a man, yes. But inside the man-skin, a beast” (The Dead Zone 297). The Dead Zone also connects the fates—and masks—of Johnny Smith whose resemblance to Everyman is signaled in the prosaic simplicity of his name and Frank Dodd, the strangler-rapist whose identity is withheld until one of “Faithful John’s” psychic revelations. As a consequence of a car crash, Johnny lies in a coma for four and a half years. Awakening in May 1975 at the age of twenty-seven, he discovers that the world has changed: the war in Vietnam has ended, a Vice-President and President have resigned, Johnny’s girlfriend is married and has borne a child, Stillson has made his political move, and an unidentified rapist is killing young women in Castle Rock. Apart from regaining consciousness, Johnny has acquired occult powers of precognition and telepathy which both cause his estrangement from his past life and force him to take a moral stand: whether or not to stop Stillson and Dodd. Although this Faithful John serves the purpose of good, his Jekyll-and-Hyde mask (The Dead Zone 14) haunts his girlfriend Sarah Bracknell (later Sarah Hazlett) throughout the novel. While Johnny is comatose, the policeman Frank Dodd commits his brutal rapestranglings.

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When Alma Frechette appears, fate plays a decisive role in a genuinely Gothic manner, and, again, everybody must be suspected. Familiar with the killer, Alma does not suspect anything but wonders at his Little Red Riding Hood outfit (The Dead Zone 66). Before long, she is strangled at the moment of Dodd’s ejaculation. “Surely no hometown boy could have done such a dreadful thing,” states the pious narrator (The Dead Zone 68), and from then on almost two years pass without more killings. Significantly, Johnny Smith’s awakening from the coma coincides with the fourth murder. However, it takes deep self-exploration on the recovered Johnny’s part before he accepts the sheriff George Bannerman’s request to assist in the murder investigation. By acknowledging his psychic abilities and acting accordingly, Johnny humbles before fate. In King’s world, nobody escapes his destiny, and, at any rate, a welldeveloped brain tumor would cause Johnny’s death within a few months. However, by bearing responsibility for his next, Johnny prevents Greg Stillson’s presidency and its likely consequence, a nuclear war, as well as Frank Dodd from continuing his murder series. After all, the investigation turns out to be of short duration, since the deputy Frank Dodd commits suicide the same evening the two men meet at the police department. Remarkably, the childish face hides the Gothic mark of the beast (The Dead Zone 233), evil actions having their root in childhood. After gathered enough evidence, Bannerman and Smith visit

Dodd’s house and find him dead: “Knew, Johnny thought incoherently. Knew somehow when he saw me. Knew it was all over. Came home. Did this” (The Dead Zone 253). In other words, the two men are connected, and their interrelations are further reinforced by the nature of their mothers: the sexual neurotic, Henrietta Dodd, who “knew from the beginning” (The Dead Zone 252) and Vera Smith who marks her son with her religious frenzies: “God has put his mark on my Johnny and I rejoice” (The Dead Zone 61). The opening page of Cujo repeats the story of Frank Dodd, stating that “he was no werewolf, vampire, ghoul, or unnameable creature from the enchanted forest or from the snowy wastes; he was only a cop named Frank Dodd with mental and sexual problems” (Cujo 3). Like Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Frank Dodd personifies a victimized human being who does not “suit in his skin.” Although regarded as a respected resident of Castle Rock, Frank Dodd lacks identity and is perhaps therefore a master of disguise. A number of serial killers suffer from impotence except during their violent acts and are not considered genuinely males, but are despised as freaks and monsters. Charles Burnside a.k.a. Carl Bierstone and the Fisherman of Black House has all but one of these characteristics: born evil and without conscience, he justifies cruelty as an end in itself. Black House is a kind of sequel to The Talisman, both works being jointly authored by Peter Straub and Stephen King. A Victorian novel with allusions to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Dickensian characters, and references to Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain, Black House reads as a tale of horror or a detective story with a blend of thriller and fantasy (Gaiman 2). The narrative reintroduces the then twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer of The Talisman. Now this retired, burned out exLAPD homicide detective lives in the small Wisconsin town of French Landing—interestingly, in scenery resembling Tom Sawyer’s and Huckleberry Finn’s foggy riverside. Children are being abducted from French Landing by a cannibal named “The Fisherman” who has disguised himself as an Alzheimer’s patient in the local old people’s home and is aided in his dastardly misdeeds by a talking crow called “Gorg.” The Fisherman is a pawn in the hand of the Crimson King, evil monarch of End World, who attempts to abduct a wunderkind in order to annihilate the universe with his powers. Jack and a gang of philosophically inclined

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Joseph Reino maintains that the crimes seem to emerge from the blankness of the coma, as if they were merely the dark side of the otherwise sunny personality, and as if Frank was Johnny’s evil “other”—this pair thus possessing something like Edgar Allan Poe’s “bi-part soul” (67). Despite the grim verdict, King provides the character with a background which explains some of the hideous acts. While awaiting a young victim (Alma Frechette) to walk into his trap, Dodd’s mind is momentarily obsessed with an embarrassing childhood memory: a lesson in sexual education given by his abusive mother. When Frank was innocently playing with his penis, his mother, a huge woman, caught him in the act and began to shake him back and forth. Here King emphasizes parental responsibility for aberrant personality development, arguing that Frank “was not the killer then, he was not slick then, he was a little boy blubbering with fear” (The Dead Zone 65). Albeit somewhat simplistically, King underscores the significance of the formative years.

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The Fisherman himself is named after Albert Fish, a real-life child-killer and cannibal, whose crimes he imitates in the novel’s fictional world. In his study of the interrelationship between the reader and the novel, Edward Bullough states that a work of fiction has succeeded when the reader participates in the communication process so completely as to be nearly convinced that the art is reality (758). In Black House, the authors gap the bridge between the reader and the text by equating the reader with the narrator (a firstperson plural narration), by using the present tense, and even by letting the reader choose the story ending that best serves his purpose. Perhaps the otherwise too fantastic occurrences of the story become more realistic by these means, combined with King’s usual artillery: lifelike characters and initially realistic settings.

EDWIN F. CASEBEER ON THE INFLUENCE OF KING’S LIFE ON HIS WORKS

Overall, King’s canon is a quest. But his battle cry is not “excelsior!” The direction is downwards and the path is a spiral. Many of King’s characters experience life as a quest: Ben Mears of ’Salem’s Lot questing for self and conquering the vampire; The Tommyknockers’ Gardener questing for death and finding self; the comrades of The Stand marching against the Dark One and founding the New Jerusalem; the boys of It killing fear; and the boys of The Talisman killing death. The gunslinger of The Dark Tower series is, however, probably most typical of King: he seeks to understand what the quest itself is. His enemies become his friends, his guides his traitors, his victims those he has saved, and his now a then. Paradox; transformation; balancing the dualities, an emergent, tenuous, ever-fading, and ever-appearing balance—these are the duplicitous landmarks in the terrain of King’s work and his life. Both are open enough and fluent enough to mirror us and ours as we seek to make our own accommodations with modern monsters, personal meaninglessness, social chaos, physical decay, and death.

The serial killer turns out to be a tall, skinny, and senile old man (Black House 22). Although a soul brother to the other men who reside at the Maxton Elder Care Facility with his “sly, secretive, rude, caustic, stubborn, foul-tongued, meanspirited, and resentful” character (Black House 23), Charles Burnside hides his true self: Carl Bierstone is Burny’s great secret, for he cannot allow anyone to know that this former incarnation, this earlier self, still lives inside his skin. Carl Bierstone’s awful pleasures, his foul toys, are also Burny’s and he must keep them hidden in the darkness, where only he can find them. (Black House 26)

SOURCE: Casebeer, Edwin F. “Stephen King’s Canon: The Art of Balance.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, pp. 42-54. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

motor bikers called the Hegelian Scum take action to save the wunderkind, Ty Marshall, and arrest the Fisherman. Parodying the thriller formula, the narrator takes us to the murder scene of Irma Freneau: We are not here to weep. . . . Humility is our best, most accurate first response. Without it, we would miss the point, the great mystery would escape us, and we would go on deaf and blind, ignorant as pigs. Let us not go on like pigs. We must honor the scene—the flies, the dog worrying the severed

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foot, the poor, pale body of Irma Freneau, the magnitude of what befell Irma Freneau—by acknowledging our littleness. In comparison, we are no more than vapors. (Black House 35-36)

The secrets with which Charles Burnside indulges himself turn him into a loner, forcing him to hide his misdeeds. As a tool in the hands of a greater evil, Burnside takes his pleasure feeding on children who are not worth sending to the End-World to the Crimson King, a creature who ultimately hides beneath the Fisherman mask. Assisted by Gorg, the speaking crow, Charles Burnside addresses the End-World like a vassal or a stray dog fed with crumbs. While action is needed, the senior citizen undergoes a transformation. In Charles Burnside’s place is Carl Bierstone and something inhuman (Black House 111). The inhuman inside Burny’s head signifies Mr. Munshun, Crimson King’s close disciple and servant, a vampire-like figure. Nearing the end of his usefulness, Burny is at Mr. Munshun’s request forced to

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———. Stephen King as Richard Bachman. Mercer Island, Washington, Starmont House, 1985. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000 1995. Kaplan, Harold I., Benjamin J. Sadock, Jack A. Grebb. Kaplan and Sadock’s Synopsis of Psychiatry: Behavioral Sciences, Clinical Psychiatry. Baltimore, Maryland: Williams & Wilkins, 1994 (Seventh edition) 1972. King, Stephen. Black House. London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2001. ———. Carrie. New York: Pocket Books, 1999 1974. ———. Christine. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983 1983. ———. Cujo. New York: Signet, 1982 1981.

Conclusion The Gothic double of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde shares some traits with characters in King’s work. First, flawed humanity moves between the two poles of good and evil, causing contradiction and anguish to the subject. Second, the Gothic gnome, that is, the “dwarfish” and “ape-like” half of the personality is hidden at the cost of hypocrisy and oft hideous crimes. Therefore, a disguise is needed, which causes further tension and the fear of getting caught. Tension also intensifies from the constant threat of transformation. Monsters of the nineteenth century scare us from a distance while at the same time, as Halberstam notes, “We wear modern monsters like skin, they are us, they are on us and in us” (163). King, too, states that “the monsters are no longer due on Maple Street, but may pop up in our own mirrors—at any time” (Danse 252). Presumably, both convictions are based on two facts; good and evil can and do exist within a single person and, concomitantly, we are ultimately unable to evolve, to purge our baser selves from our psyche. King puts it straightforwardly: “Werewolf, vampire, ghoul, unnameable creature from the wastes. The monster never dies” (Cujo 4).

Works Cited

———. Cycle of the Werewolf. New York: Signet, 1985 1983. ———. Danse Macabre. New York: Berkley Books, 1983 1981. ———. The Dark Half. New York: Signet, 1990 1989. ———. The Dead Zone. New York: Signet, 1980 1979. ———. The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I. New York: Plume, 1988 1982. ———. On Writing. New York: Scribner, 2000. ———. Pet Semetary. New York: Signet, 1984. ———. The Talisman (with Peter Straub). New York: Berkley, 1985, 1984. Larson, Randall D. “Cycle of the Werewolf and the Moral Tradition of Horror.” In Schweitzer, Darrell (ed), Discovering Stephen King. Mercer Island, Washington: Starmont House, Inc., 1985: 102-108. Magistrale, Anthony, The Moral Voyages of Stephen King. Mercer Island, Washington: Starmont Studies, 1989. ———. Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992. The New International Webster’s Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language. Florida: Trident Press International, 1999, 1958. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror. A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Volume 2. The Modern Gothic. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 1996.

Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber & Faber, 1977.

Reino, Joseph. Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Semetary. Boston, Massachusetts: Twayne, 1988.

Bullough, Edward, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle.” In Adams, Hazard (ed) Critical Theory since Plato. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971: 758.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. London: Penguin Books, 1994, 1886.

Clemens, Valdine. The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from The Castle of Otranto to Alien. New York: State University of New York, 1999.

Tropp, Michael. Images of Fear: How Horror Stories Helped Shape Modern Culture (1818-1918). Jefferson, N. C.: McFarland and Co., 1990.

Collings, Michael R. The Many Facets of Stephen King. Mercer Island, Washington: Starmont House, 1985.

Winter, Douglas E. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. New York: Signet, 1986, 1984.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Penguin, 1994, 1897.

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take Ty Marshall, a promising breaker to an appointed meeting place. The term breaker is used for those slaves of Crimson King who break the beams leading to the Tower, thus aiming at the total annihilation of the universe. Driven by contradictory urges, this odd serial killer is afraid of the consequences of his actions (Black House 541), but, despite a deadly wound, still lusts for Ty Marshall’s “juicy buttocks.” Like the witch of “Hansel and Gretel,” he is reluctant to hand over his prey: “A good agent’s entitled to ten percent” (Black House 550). Only seldom can a parallel be drawn between a serial killer and a wicked witch from a fairy tale, which perhaps bears further witness to King’s genre blending.

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TITLE COMMENTARY

But a dream within a dream?” (482). If the common reality of sensuous, rational experience has no integral validity, then nothing exists for the questor to return to, the dreamer can never awake, and the mythic circle of separation and return is broken.

The Shining KENNETH GIBBS (ESSAY DATE 1986) SOURCE: Gibbs, Kenneth. “Stephen King and the Tradition of American Gothic.” Gothic New Series 1 (1986): 6-14. In the following essay, Gibbs assesses the influence of Herman Melville’s approach to the Gothic on King’s work, particularly The Shining.

In the foreword to Night Shift Stephen King names many well-known literary forebearers from whom he derives the Gothic techniques central to his fiction—among those mentioned are Bram Stoker, the Beowulf poet, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and, of course, Edgar Allan Poe; but he omits any reference to one major figure in American literature—Herman Melville. The omission seems justified, since, admittedly, Melville’s use of the Gothic in his fiction often seems peripheral to his central thematic concerns. For Poe, Gothic techniques are definitely a necessary adjunct to his artistic vision, and Poe is therefore the recipient of far more recognition as a master of the Gothic than is Melville. Yet, when the overall spirit behind King’s use of the Gothic in his major novels, especially The Shining, is compared with that of, for example, Melville’s MobyDick, such close parallels appear that Poe’s traditionally exclusive position at the fountainhead of American Gothic fiction may be profitably revalued. King’s affinity with Melville stems not only from their mutual dependence on standard Gothic techniques but from their employment of what Joseph Campbell refers to as the “monomyth” of “separation—initiation—return” (30) in relation to the achievement of transcendence in their fiction. Since Gothic literature has its roots in Romanticism, it shares the basic tenet of Romanticism that there is a division between the world we perceive with our senses and the intuitively apprehended world of the spirit. Whereas the mythic hero departs from his social world on his quest, the Romantic hero not only leaves society but also travels beyond the constraints of the physical world. If the Romantic artist has a strong penchant towards subjective idealism and feels that dreams may have greater reality than conscious, objective existence, the significance of the world of the senses can diminish until he, as does Poe, may plaintively wonder “Is all that we see or seem /

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In accord with the optimistic tenor of Emerson’s theories on transcendence, American writers have often been eager to commence the artistic quest beyond the phenomenal world. For example, Walt Whitman writes in “Passage to India”: “For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, / And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all” (347). In contrast to this trend, Melville’s Moby-Dick cautions that when the artist’s ship seeks to break through the containing masks of the phenomenal world, the voyage is captained by a madman who will sink the entire enterprise before a return from the outward journey is possible. But one character in Moby-Dick, Ishmael, does survive precisely because he balances Ahab’s desire to transcend the phenomenal worlds, the empirical world of masks, with a deep appreciation of the beauty and necessity of the opposing world of the senses. Ishmael has seen the whale from both sides, both as symbol of transcendence and as a physical, living entity, and he has learned to respect each side of the transcendental dialectic: “Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly, this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye” (480). Like the symbolic bifurcation of the whale’s vision, Ishmael views existence from a dual perspective; he skeptically and rationally investigates the actual, material world, discounting authorities who have not immediately experienced the whale, and he does intuit that there is a level of reality that exists beyond. Ishmael’s stance is somewhat akin to Whitman’s period of more sensual mysticism in “Song of Myself,” where he declares, “I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul” (42). In this perspective both the material and the spiritual worlds coexist, allowing the protagonist to complete the mythic journey from this world to the beyond and back. Poe, on the other hand, exemplifies in his art what David Halliburton identifies as “pure transcendence” (278). In “The Poetic Principle” Poe locates the source of the beautiful beyond the phenomenal world; “It [man’s sense of the beautiful] is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us—but a wild effort to reach the beauty above” (418). Once someone reaches such beauty above, he certainly would not willingly return to the far

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It should be noted that Poe not ony disregards the aesthetic importance of the material world but also struggles to reach the Beauty above with a “wild effort” [italics mine]. Contained in the drive toward pure transcendence is the potential for the wild monomanic fury found in the characters Ahab in Moby-Dick and Jack Torrence in The Shining. In both Melville and King, an attempt to break through the material world in order to reach the beyond carries with it the danger of an uncontrolled, unbalanced aggression toward elements of the physical world. A very succinct analysis of Poe’s approach to transcendence occurred during a lecture by Richard Wilbur, renowned poet and critic of Poe, when he responded to a question about the similarity between his poetry and Poe’s with the remark: . . . his [Poe’s] attitude toward poetry and toward the world is not mine at all. I’m not at all interested in writing a kind of poetry that annihilates the world so as to bring us closer to some sort of beyond. I’d rather proceed toward the beyond by way of a concrete world affectionately taken.

A key word in this quotation, “affectionately,” indicates that for Wilbur art must lovingly retain the “concrete world,” the world before us, while at the same time moving toward the beyond. In other words, both worlds must cohere in a mysterious unity of diversity; otherwise, the circle of separation and return is broken and all that is left is half an arc into the unknowable world beyond and an annihilation of the world as we know it. Richard Wilbur’s remarks do not specifically refer to Gothic art, and before proceeding further in this paper some understanding of what differentiates Gothic art from other forms of literary creativity is necessary. In the foreword to Night Shift, Stephen King defines the main constituent of Gothic art to be fear. And this fear occurs when the artist demonstrates that “. . . the good fabric

of things has a way of unraveling with shocking suddenness” (xi). The sense that another reality underlies the good fabric of the conventional, rationally perceived world can as easily initiate fear as it does joy. Entrance into the world beyond can be joyful as it is for Emerson in “Nature” when he becomes a transparent eyeball and bathes in the circulation of “Universal Being” (189) or fearful as it is to Ishmael when on the masthead he learns that entrance into that universal, oceanic state may be personally destructive. In the Gothic fiction of Melville and King, this fear of what may be in the beyond becomes closely analagous to a descent into that other world of the mind, the subconscious, where the dream existence may as easily be nightmarish as idyllic. Hence, for Gothic fiction the journey of separation—initiation— return often assumes a parallel psychological movement of separation from the rational, conventional mind, an initiation into the demonic potential of the subconscious, and a return back to rationality tempered with a sense of the energies of the subconscious. Since it is one of the functions of the Gothic artist to reveal the fears that arise once the threshold of the rational world is passed, his creative energy may itself be conceived as productive of fear. If the artist successfully completes the circular journey through fear back to the rational and conventional, his artistry may signify that both sides may be held in balance, a situation that accounts for Melville’s remark after completing Moby-Dick: “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb” (142). Since both creative energy and demonic force are often symbolized by fire, the Gothic artist must, as Ishmael so clearly demonstrates in Moby-Dick, not be consumed and confused by fire, but must master it and integrate its power productively, not destructively, with the rational, concrete world. In both the try-works of the Pequod and the cellar of the Overlook resides a burning core which is the primal manifestation of creative power. When first encountered in the Gothic tale that utilizes elements of the psychological journey into the subconscious, this power may seem wicked and evil, but this fearful sense of evil can be assimilated into the artistic vision in order to produce that balance of the subconscious and the conscious that reflects the completed cycle of the psychological quest. The images surrounding the advent of a positive outcome from the rending of the fabric of the material and rational world generally indicate that some sort of rebirth has occurred. As in the

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less desirable beauty before him. As illustrated in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the movement in Poe’s fiction is completely, and irrevocably, away from any contact with the material world, for Roderick Usher, the only character possessing knowledge of higher, spiritual, aesthetic principles, disappears and will never return to illuminate the terrified, uncomprehending narrator. The two worlds—the spiritual intuitions of Usher and the rational, skeptical proclivities of the narrator—do not harmoniously cojoin as they do in Ishmael’s character. Poe ends his tale with, as described by David Halliburton, a “fall from life as we know it to life as we know it not” (292).

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epilogue of Moby-Dick where Ishmael surfaces back into the conventional world charged with an understanding of the mysteries of the beyond, reentrance into this world by the protagonist signals a successful completion of the mythic journey. In contrast to Ishmael, who surfaces from the vortex of the Pequod’s descent, Roderick Usher disappears into the tarn at the end of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Nothing is reborn at the end of Poe’s fiction. Even A. Gordon Pym, who survives the events recorded in his tale, did not live to conclude his artistic rendering of the end of those events. Gordon V. Boudreau presents an interesting highlight on this discussion when he quotes D. H. Lawrence in his article “Of Pale Ushers and Gothic Piles: Melville’s Architectural Symbology”: “While ‘the rhythm of American art-activity is dual . . . a sloughing of the old consciousness’ and ‘the forming of a new consciousness underneath,’ there is ‘only the disintegrative vibration’ in Poe” (80). Boudreau’s study perceptively argues that in Melville the Gothic symbology ushers us into the presence of a new eschatology, in effect a rebirth of the new from the old. Poe, in contrast, presents us with a disharmony between the conventional attitudes of his narrator in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the esoteric knowledge of Usher; at the end of the narrative the narrator, unlike Ishmael, understands little more than at the beginning. This disharmony occurs because of Poe’s Gnostic-like tendency to annihilate the concrete world in order to reveal the beyond, tendency that violates the motif of rebirth as exemplified in Melville’s art. Other than as rebirth, the coupling of the beyond with the concrete world can be symbolically presented as an atonement between father and son. In The Shining and Moby-Dick, however, the father figures seek to violently rend the fabric of the material world and display little affection for the son. Both Ishmael, who rejects the onesided nature of the father figure Ahab’s quest, and Danny, who tricks his father into destruction, do not reach atonement with these father figures, but rather with a father surrogate whose black skin signifies the dark, sometimes terrifying mystery of the beyond. Both Ahab and Jack Torrence personify a state close to what Poe described as the “wild effort to reach the Beauty above,” and the fury and single-mindedness of their efforts preclude atonement. It is the son who completes the circular journey and forms a harmonious relationship with the beyond by entering into a parallel relationship with a dark character—Queequeg in Moby-Dick and Halloran in The Shining.

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A close inspection of the ending of The Shining reveals how close the symbolic parallels are between Melville and King. At the end of King’s novel, Danny is fishing like a rejuvinated fisher king for a “pink whale.” Then, “The tip of the fishing rod bent. Danny pulled it back and a long fish, rainbow-colored, flashed up in a sunny, winking parabola, and disappeared again” (447). The reference to whales obviously recalls Melville, but King’s use of the rainbow more seriously indicates his sympathy with Melville’s artistic concerns. Traditionally, the rainbow signifies the end of a destructive phase and the beginning of a new order. In Moby-Dick Melville expands the conventional use of the rainbow into a comprehensive symbol for artistic vision: For, d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clean air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. (480)

King’s The Shining ends with the rainbow, which, as in Moby-Dick, signifies a balance between the fogs, vapors, and doubts that well up from the subconscious, that area opened to view once the fabric of the rational and conventional parts, and the conscious mind, the instrument of the concrete world. When Danny’s fishing pole brings the rainbow fish from the waters of the subconscious up in one, graceful parabolic arc, he performs an act as representative of artistic harmony as Melville’s rainbow. And since the rainbow is an arc, the drawing of the rainbow fish up from the depths and down again illustrates the completion of the circular journey of myth and the artistic union of opposites. A detailed exploration of The Shining reveals that the novel contains more parallels to MobyDick than just the ending. Each novel investigates the nature of the artist’s creativity. Each envisions the artistic mind as split between two powers: on one side is a father figure, monomanic and destructive; on the other is a filial figure, receptive of ambiguity, interested in reconciliation, and harmoniously creative at the end of the narrative. Both Ishmael and Danny are protected by a dark man, whose function, so profoundly symbolized in the character of Queequeg, is to wed the youthful mind with the aphotic instinctual powers that roll like lava beneath the thin layer of rationality. In the basement of the Overlook fumes the raging volcanic furnace, centrally located as is the try-works on the Pequod. This is the center of creative energy which must be controlled, for “she

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While Jack becomes obsessed with the history of the Overlook that rests deep within the building, his son Danny is as deeply lost inside himself with Tony, his imaginary playmate, and the mysterious word “Redrum.” Both father and son are obsessed with the horror of murder that lies deep under their consciousness. D. H. Lawrence states in Studies in Classic American Literature that “Murder is a lust to get at the very quick of life itself, and kill it . . .” (80); hence, a tenuous but valid connection exists between Ahab and his quest to slay Moby Dick and Jack and his crazed, homicidal assults upon his son and George Hatfield. Ahab seeks to strike through the mask of the White Whale, and Jack seeks to strike through his son into the supernatural level that inhabits the Overlook. Although the spiritual manifestations of the Overlook are surrounded with references to Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” Jack Torrence is actually in Ahab’s symbolic world on a quest for some way to break through the mask of the rationally perceived world into the supernatural realm beyond. Danny, on the other hand, approaches the murderous areas within himself in a much more controlled way than his father’s mad use of force. Rather than using a rocque mallet, a weapon like Ahab’s harpoon that would smash into the other world, Danny observes the anagram “Redrum” in a mirror and deciphers its meaning by reflection. Reflection is a much more rational, balanced act than the method pursued by his father, for it unites the intellect, the mirror, with the object reflected, the subconscious impulses toward murder. The rocque mallet wielded by Jack Torrence has two sides—one hard, the other soft; but Jack chooses only one side—the hard. Like Ahab, he forsakes balance and succumbs to monomania. In the process Jack becomes the very thing he has always desperately sought to avoid; he becomes his father, a despicable drunkard with little, piglike eyes, who once beat Jack’s mother with a cane in tempo with the phrase, “‘I guess you’ll take your medicine now’” (224). Despite Jack’s pathetic protest that “‘You’re [his father] not in me at all’”

(227), the pulse beats in his forehead as it did when his father became mindlessly angry, the pig eyes set into Jack’s head, and his hand thirsts for the rocque mallet, a phallic weapon similar to his father’s cane, in order to give his son Danny “his medicine.” Jack’s madness occurs because he cannot deal adequately with the forces that surge beneath his conscious mind. One of the most prominent images in the novel, the wasp image, focuses on Jack’s inability to balance conscious control with subconscious impulses. Again recalling the foreword to Night Shift, the wasp nest that Jack uncovers beneath the roof of the Overlook is comparable to the frightening prospects revealed once the fabric of conventional reality is parted. Wasps, anti-creative insects whose nests hold venom, not honey, symbolize how radically Jack’s own mind has fallen from its creative potential to destruction. The brain-shaped wasp nest, or wasps themselves, always appear in conjunction with Jack’s mental disintegration; the image is there when Jack loses his temper with Danny and George Hatfield; it is present as Jack’s dipsomania returns; and, significantly, the image coheres around Jack’s attitudes toward his own father, who once exterminated a wasp nest while the youthful Jack watched in awe. And a strong connection between the wasp image and the maliciousness that begins to dominate Jack’s creative self is evidenced in lines such as “The moving wasp, having stung, moves on . . .” (189). Jack cannot control the wasp impulse within himself because he does not know how to assimilate the positive elements of his father. His father was both cruel and loving, yet Jack hopelessly muddles these two sides so that his art which should be productive, loving one might say, becomes perverted into a need to destroy. As Jack’s sanity deteriorates, he listens more intently to his father’s illusionary voice which connects art with murder: You have to kill him [Danny], Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves. Because they’ll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back and drag you down. (227)

According to Erich Neumann, an outstanding interpreter of Jungian psychology, the hero, the creative man, must battle against these negative aspects of the father and unite himself with the father’s positive qualities. In other words, the father must be split so that his destructive side can be eliminated and his creative side salvaged

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creeps.” The furnace’s “channeled destructive force” (15) is often equated with Jack Torrence’s vicious temper which strikes out at both his son Danny and his former student George Hatfield. Also, in the crates beside the furnace lies the whole sordid history of the Overlook, which Jack views as the factual source for a future great novel. Thus, in conjunction with the furnace resides the substance of Jack’s art.

KING Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of The Shining.

and integrated into the personality. In contrast to Jack’s failure to do this, Danny performs this necessary bifurcation of the father by acquiring as a surrogate father the nurturing and loving Dick Halloran, who, like Queequeg, fosters a productive association with the subconscious. Dick Halloran performs the service of awakening Danny to the affirmative nature of his gift— the shining. Since it is Danny’s shining that sets the supernatural forces of the Overlook into motion, his shining is associated with the artistic and creative talents of a writer of Gothic tales. Rightly employed, the shining would give insight into others (a necessary foundation for the novelist’s ability to develop character) and it releases the supernatural sensibilities so vital to a Gothic writer. Although Halloran concludes that Jack does not possess the shining, Jack certainly sees the same supernatural occurrences that Danny’s shining empowers him to see. But unlike Danny, he denies his gift. Just as his denial of his father only strengthens the father’s evil dominance, his ignorance of the potential of his shining leads to the upsurgence of its negative, evil side. The more insane Jack becomes, the more the affirmative

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creativity of the child turns into a diabolical threat to his artistry. Even his play The Little School is rewritten so that the young protagonist Gary Benson changes from a force for good against authority into a “monster masquerading as a boy” (259). Jack’s authority toward his son Danny likewise changes into the obsession that Danny’s greater imaginative powers impede his own. The supernatural occurrences at the hotel seem more dependent upon Danny than upon Jack; therefore, in order to convince himself that “It’s not you [Danny] they want,” Jack twistedly feels that he must insinuate himself into the service of the occult hierarchy of the hotel by sacrificing Danny. Danny, however, proves more powerful than his father. Before his confrontation with his mallet-swinging, murderous father, Danny discovers the identity of Tony, the imaginary playmate who always announces the arrival of Danny’s full shining powers. Again Danny looks into a mirror, that symbol of the rational mind, and sees that “the stamp on his features was that of his father” (420). This father figure is Tony, Danny’s alter ego which arises from Danny’s heretofore undisclosed middle name Anthony. At the moment of this

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Like Ishmael’s, Danny’s initiation into adulthood teaches him how to balance the positive features of the paternal nature with the imaginative energies that originate in the more subconsciously liberated area of childhood. Mark in ’Salem’s Lot follows essentially the same process when he discovers that Barlow, the vampire, speaks to him in “a friendly voice, amazingly like his father’s” (292). After both discern the true nature of this bogeyman/father and cause the horrifying figure to be purified in fire, each is united at the end of the novel with a new father figure and a new balance has been struck thereby between the conscious and the subconscious. Because Stephen King’s novels, especially The Shining, do not end in annihilation of conventional reality, but in rebirth symbology that signals harmony between the spiritual, the beyond, and this world, they reflect the spirit of the Gothic in Melville’s Moby-Dick. King’s basic artistic sympathies do not lie as closely to Poe’s aesthetic, where the Gothic vision necessitates the dropping of this world like a husk in order to reach the beyond, as they do in Melville’s where the Gothic vision harmonizes the rational, concrete world with a profound sense of the interpenetration of the sometimes beatific, sometimes horrifying, mysteries of another world.

Works Cited Boudreau, Gordon V. “Of Pale Ushers and Gothic Piles: Melville’s Architectural Symbology.” Emerson Society Quarterly 18 (1972). Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Cleveland: Meridian, 1956. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Writings. Ed. William H. Gilman. New York: New American Library, 1965.

Halliburton, David. Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973. King, Stephen. Foreword. Night Shift. New York: New American Library, 1976 xiv-xv. ———. ’Salem’s Lot. New York: New American Library, 1975. ———. The Shining. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Viking, 1961. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964. Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Prose and Poetry. Ed. W. H. Auden. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967. Wilbur, Richard. Lecture. Antiquarian Society. Worcester, MA, 21 Oct. 1980.

Pet Sematary JESSE W. NASH (ESSAY DATE SPRING 1997) SOURCE: Nash, Jesse W. “Postmodern Gothic: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.” Journal of Popular Culture 30, no. 4 (spring 1997): 151-60. In the following essay, Nash examines the influence of the popular culture representation of sensational literature and the Gothic tradition on King’s works, arguing that these influences led King to create a “postmodern Gothic.”

Although sympathetic critics have given it an impressive literary lineage, Stephen King’s novel Pet Sematary has resisted easy categorization. Mary Ferguson Pharr detects the influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but she notes that King’s work is the least self-conscious of many such variations (120). Tony Magistrale, in “Stephen King’s Pet Sematary: Hawthorne’s Woods Revisited” and in his book Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic, finds a strong affinity in theme and purpose with Nathaniel Hawthorne, among other New England and/or transcendentalist writers. Slavoj Zizek relates Pet Sematary to the tragedies of Sophocles (25-26). One need not, however, give King such a distinguished pedigree to appreciate Pet Sematary’s complexity or recognize its importance in contemporary popular culture. To do so, one might suggest, runs counter to the very spirit of King’s works. As he himself informs us in Douglas Winter’s Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, King’s primary sources for his novel are his own life experiences and fantasies, popular culture, and his reading of archaic burial lore (145-146, 150). In other words, the key to understanding Pet Sematary does not lie in the “classical” literary tradition so much as in popular culture itself and how

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discovery Danny understands that his is “a halfling caught between father and son, a ghost of both, a fusion” (421). This moment of revelation results in Danny’s birth into a whole self: “He seemed to be bursting through some placental womb . . .” (426). Now Danny directly experiences what King describes in his foreward to Night Shift as “that connection point between the conscious and the subconscious” where “the horror tale lives” (xix). Danny defeats the destructive side of his father by harmonizing the adult, conscious life with the horror that lies underneath. In effect, his shining has illuminated the fogs and vapors of horror. Danny next remembers the allimportant need for control and by reminding his own completely demonic father about the creeping temperature gauge on the hotel’s furnace, sends this negative father figure to destruction.

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popular culture appropriates, reworks, and represents more classical literary artifacts. Pet Sematary’s connection to Shelley’s Frankenstein in particular must be seen within the dynamics of a contemporary popular culture matrix. In Danse Macabre, King refers to Frankenstein as “caught in a kind of cultural echo chamber” (65). People are often less familiar with Shelley’s actual text than they are re-presentations of the figure of Frankenstein in popular culture. It is helpful to think of the echoes Frankenstein sets in motion in terms of Clifford Geertz’ notion of “webs of significance” (5). The webs in which King is enmeshed are not entirely those of Shelley; even when he shares webs of significance with Shelley, such as the problematic nature and popular fear of science and technology, his attitude in regard to those webs is entirely different. For example, in her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Shelley credits the ultimate origin of her novel to her husband’s and Lord Byron’s rather tabloid, sensationalistic discussions of “Dr. Darwin,” but she distances herself from those discussions, confessing that she does not know if they are accurate depictions of what Darwin had actually written or done (xxiv).

is a transformation or historical mutation of the traditional Gothic tale. Such a designation takes seriously King’s ties to the traditional Gothic genre but also recognizes the influence of the prevailing postmodernism of much of late twentieth century popular culture (see Collins). Such a designation has the added benefit of allowing us to determine what is gained and what is lost in King’s transformation of traditional literary forms. It will be suggested in this essay that King’s postmodern Gothic is more amenable to popular or mass sentiment than the traditional Gothic work, and thus King is more willing to tackle explicitly cultural issues as opposed to the traditional Gothic preoccupation with personality and character. In the process, King is able to launch a full frontal attack on the modern American experience, developing a powerful and consistent cultural critique, using the voices of those he understands to be typically marginalized in contemporary American society, the child, the adolescent, the ordinary Joe and Josephine of lower, middle, and rural America, the wise non-academic, and at least in the case of Carrie, Verena Lovett forcefully argues, the tabooed, menstruating woman (175).

In Frankenstein, Shelley’s focus is not on what is scientifically or realistically possible but rather the moral dilemmas of modern human beings. Pet Sematary, however, does want us to reconsider what is possible precisely because King is a child of the tabloid, the medical oddity, and archaic lore. Therefore, if King is rewriting Frankenstein, he is rewriting it from a vastly different personal, cultural, and historical perspective, and so much so, I would like to suggest, that Frankenstein and Pet Sematary no longer share the same genre.

What is lost in King’s mutation of the Gothic genre is more difficult to grasp, especially since his Gothic fiction is often more successful in portraying middle America than so-called “realistic” mainstream fiction (Nash 38), but the problematic nature of his postmodern mutation cannot be avoided. What is often lost in the gale of fright, supernatural menace, and cynical social commentary is a certain sense of textual logic, integrity, and purpose. Pet Sematary is a good instance of the dilemmas King’s postmodern Gothic poses. In that novel, King gives us a cast of characters whose actions and eventual fate are truly horrifying, but they are placed in a logically inconsistent fictional universe, a universe so supernaturally oppressive that they have no choice in the matter. Horror is achieved at the expense of logic, but with the loss of logic, the novel’s ability to address real problems in a real America is compromised. What we must eventually fear in King’s fiction is not the real world of oppressive parents and governments but the imaginary, but if this is the case, King’s work loses its critical edge, its power to engage American society. Thus, King’s greatest problem is a side effect of his greatest asset, his postmodernism, his privileging of folk, archaic, and popular traditions over that of scientific rationalism.

King’s novel is an example of what we might fruitfully think of as “postmodern Gothic,” which

This postmodern privileging of the popular and the archaic converges nicely in Pet Sematary.

In Pet Sematary, on the other hand, King revels in the tabloid and the sensational, using at one point in the novel the supposed authenticity of the Shroud of Turin as an argument against scientific rationalism and its debunking of the possibility of miracles (200). Along with “penis envy” and the “oedipal conflict,” the Shroud is one of those strange truths that Arnie Cunningham in Christine recognizes and to which he subscribes (24). Similarly, to emphasize his preference of the sensational over the purely realistic, King tells his readers in the introduction to Skeleton Crew that in The Thorn Birds his “favorite part was when the wicked old lady rotted and sprouted maggots in about sixteen hours” (21).

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Zizek’s description is lacking in two regards. First, the fantasy, as it is rooted in the popular imagination and the archaic religious mind, is based on a fear of the dead, and that fantasy is not that someone will “want” to come back from the dead but that someone or something will bring that person back. In Pet Sematary, it is not little Gage who wants to come back; it is his father who will not let him go. A second and perhaps even more significant aspect of this common fantasy is that it expresses a pre-scientific or superstitious fear that death is not final, that death can somehow be overturned, that one can be both dead and alive at the same time. The importance of this fear is that it flies in the face of what we know from our own experience and from what we know medically and scientifically. But it is precisely this superstitious fear that King privileges in his critique of the American family and society in Pet Sematary. The fear he evokes is not escapist; it is evoked in earnest. It is obvious from King’s comments in Winter’s work and his own Danse Macabre that he takes his novel, its social commentary, and its supernatural ambience seriously. Winter refers to King’s use of the supernatural as “rational supernaturalism,” in which the order and facade of everyday life is overturned (5-9). That is, King and his admirers tend to take his supernatural creations seriously, as more than literary creations, as in nineteenth century ghost stories. These supernatural beings represent a popular and archaic distrust of the scientific and the rational. In King’s hands, the supernatural and the fear it generates do not offer an escape from the rigors of culture, as in more traditional Gothic novels, but they offer an avenue by which a direct confrontation with the problematic nature of the modern American experience can be launched. More often than not, the object of the supernatural attack in King’s fiction, especially in Pet Sematary, is the modern family and its hapless

members. King’s postmodernism is nowhere more in evidence than in his insistent deconstruction of the “magic circle” that is the modern American family. An essential element of this deconstruction is King’s privileging of adolescent discourse over that of adults and rationalism. Adolescents must battle the supernatural because adults cannot or will not, as in IT. Even when the supernatural is not introduced, as in Rage, the adolescent is given a privileged place from which to speak, and to speak unchallenged. The enemy of such adolescents, of course, is that symbol of American modernism, the middle-class family. It is the family that makes of adolescence such a gruesome age. According to King, it is the sorry state of relationships within the family that makes the adolescent vulnerable to the enticements of the supernatural, especially in Christine. It is the fragile, illusory nature of the nuclear family that gets Louis Creed in trouble in Pet Sematary. But one could easily point out that King’s own “rage” in this instance is misplaced. The American family is not designed to prepare its young for battles with the supernatural. Whether or not such families do a good job of preparing their members for the adult world is another question, but that is not the focus of Pet Sematary or his other postmodern Gothic novels. The irony is somewhat incredible. The American family is judged to be inadequate because it does not prepare its members to deal with the imaginary. In King’s works, it is as if troubled, hypocritical families attract the attention of the supernatural. There is a logical problem, however, with King’s presentation in these novels, one that also plagues and eventually undermines the textual integrity of Pet Sematary. The supernatural in King’s fiction is rather catholic in its choice of families. In IT, the children of both “healthy” families and obviously dysfunctional ones are targeted. In Christine, Arnie Cunningham is an easy mark for the supernatural because of his rebellion against an overbearing mother and a weak father, but so is his friend Dennis who comes from a more normal and loving family. In Pet Sematary, ancient supernatural forces toy with the Creeds, a young family riddled with problems, but also with an older more mature family, their neighbors, the Crandalls. Thus, whether or not one comes from a healthy or a dysfunctional family makes little difference in the battle with the supernatural. So we have to wonder if, logically, the attack of the supernatural has anything to do with the health or structure of the American family. If this

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If Rabelais is the master preserver of popular culture’s history of unrestrained and subversive laughter, as Bakhtin argues (3-58), then Stephen King is the master of popular culture’s history of unrestrained, subversive, and thus unsettling fear. In the case of Pet Sematary, the fear in question is the primordial fear of the dead and the archaic forces associated with death and dying. Zizek is at least partly correct when he notes that the “fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture” is that “of a person who does not want to stay dead but returns again and again to pose a threat to the living” (22).

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is the case, we have to wonder what role a critique of the American family actually plays in the postmodern Gothic novel. The American family is not the source of the evil that threatens people, and it is not ultimately the family itself that attracts evil. More often than not, it is the child, the adolescent, and the “adolescing” adult, to use Erikson’s apt description (91), who attract evil because they are in rebellion against the adult world. King’s privileging of the discourse of adolescents and the discourse of fear traps him. The ultimate complaint of adolescents is that they are misunderstood by adults, but King’s monsters and supernatural beings seem to understand them well enough, that they are akin to monsters in their own right, giving awkward credence to what adults have feared all along, that their children are monsters, that they might want to eat their parents, as they do in both Salem’s Lot and Pet Sematary. In short, what King says he is doing in his novels is not what his novels actually do. In fact, his novels work so well as artifacts of popular culture because that old subversive fear that popular culture has preserved since archaic times is rarely challenged. But if the supernatural, the object of archaic and popular fear, is so catholic in its choice of families and individuals, what difference does family structure make? One can only assume that because King’s work is popular and postmodern, it must include an attack on adulthood and the family even if that attack has no logical place in the tale. One can go even further. In the battle with the supernatural, as we learn in IT, coming from a dysfunctional family may be to one’s benefit. Such contradictions especially complicate the narrative logic of Pet Sematary and Louis Creed’s symbolic role in that narrative. A physician, Creed moves his wife, two children, and cat from Chicago and the tyranny of his wife’s Jewish natal family to Ludlow, Maine, which is not as bucolic as it seems. Creed finds a father-figure in his older neighbor, Jud Crandall, but it is this father-figure who introduces him to the old Indian burial ground that lies just beyond the pet cemetery and who first suggests that he might use the burial ground to resurrect the cat Church. When he resurrects Church, Creed only learns what the town and Crandall have known for a long time: the dead do come back, but “changed,” if not psychotic. But this does not stop Creed from eventually burying his son and then his wife in the burial ground, bringing them both back but with horrifying consequences.

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It is clear from King’s own comments that it would be a mistake to think of Creed as a hero (Winter 145-54). King is actually quite critical of his protagonist. According to King, Creed “never ceases to be the rational man” (Winter 151). It is not clear, though, how Creed is a rationalist, and on this point, the inherent weaknesses in King’s postmodern Gothic resurface. More specifically, Creed is made to represent something he is not, rational. One does not have to be a clinical psychologist to realize early on in the novel that Creed is acting and behaving irrationally. Inside his new house, Creed experiences a “premonition of horror” (35). One might accuse Creed of being rational for not taking seriously that premonition, but of far more importance is Creed’s seemingly irrational avoidance of an everyday problem, the potentially dangerous location of his home near a road frequented by speeding trucks, and yet he takes no precautions to protect his two young children, Ellie and Gage, by erecting a fence. When the family cat Church is presumably killed by one of those trucks, Creed responds irrationally. He does not build a fence at that point, heeding a real warning; no, he considers resurrecting Church. So central is the cat to the health of his family—and thus the significance of the cat’s name—that Creed takes the cat to the old Indian burial ground and resurrects him. When Gage is killed by still another of those trucks, he, too, is resurrected in spite of how badly Church turns out. Gage goes on a killing spree, committing the ultimate atrocity, killing and cannibalizing his own mother. Still, Creed does not learn from his mistake. He takes the corpse of his wife to the old Indian burial ground and resurrects her. No, Creed is not a rational man, but that is because King as author will not let him be rational. As Natalie Schroeder cautions us, the causes of Creed’s behavior are ultimately “ambiguous” (137). By the time we are near the end of the novel, it is not clear if Creed acts as he does to protect the “magic circle” of his family, or once he has been introduced to the magic circle of the Pet Sematary and what lies beyond it, the magic circle of Little God Swamp, if it is not the powers of that other, more primordial magic circle guiding and pulling him. By the end of the novel, we know that the powers at work in the Indian burial ground have the ability to put Jud to sleep and thus block his possible interference with Creed’s plans to exhume and rebury Gage; they warn the older man to stay out of things (321). At roughly the same time, as Creed is exhuming his son’s

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Because we are in the midst of a postmodern Gothic universe in Pet Sematary, wherein the premonition is privileged over reason, where the dream should be taken seriously, and where ghosts have more authority than scientists, we might expect King’s portrayal of the ghost Victor Pascow to be less contradictory, but we would be wrong. Pascow dies in the infirmary while under Creed’s care. Before he dies, he issues a warning. “In the Pet Sematary,” he begins but falters and then eventually says, “It’s not the real cemetery” (7374). Later that night, now as a ghost, Pascow visits Creed again. With dried blood on his ghostly face, Pascow seems to Creed to be an “Indian” (83). His appearance is noteworthy. We are tempted to think of him as the representative of a more archaic, more natural form of religion, but Pascow’s warnings only seem to plant the seed of temptation in Creed’s mind. Creed fails to heed Pascow’s warnings, but Creed’s daughter, Ellie, does heed those warnings and yet, because she does heed those warnings, she actually contributes to a deepening of the tragedy that is unfolding in Ludlow. While in Chicago visiting her grandparents, and presumably under the influence of Pascow, Ellie dreams the truth about Church, that he has been killed (172). Back in Ludlow, after Gage’s death, she dreams that Creed, too, will die (300). On the plane trip back to her grandparents after the funeral, she dreams of Gage coming back and retrieving a scalpel from his father’s medicine bag (312). Pascow personally visits her dreams to warn her that her father is in danger (316). But Pascow’s warnings have a tragic consequence. Because of Ellie’s dreams, Rachel decides to make a return trip to Ludlow to check on her husband. Basically, Ellie and Pascow send Rachel to a rather gruesome death.

It is not clear if Pascow represents forces inimical to the Wendigo of the Indian burial ground or if he himself is an “Indian” spirit. In any case, the forces at work in Ludlow are so powerful that they can insure that Rachel and Ellie will be away when Creed exhumes and reburies Gage. And those forces can extend their power beyond the realm of Ludlow. There are sudden flight cancellations that make it possible for them to fly to Chicago with Rachel’s parents immediately after Gage’s funeral (295). When it becomes apparent that something is wrong in Ludlow, Rachel is able to get a ticket back to Ludlow, but it is in a roundabout, time-consuming fashion. She thanks “God” for saving her the last seats on the various legs of her flight back (326), but it is obvious that she is being kept out of the way until it is too late for either her or Creed. She, like her husband, has been carefully orchestrated from the very beginning and orchestrated in such a way that they cannot resist. In this postmodern Gothic novel, King weaves together archaic lore and myth and the postmodern rebellion against rationalism. In fact, the key to understanding Pet Sematary and appreciating its rich complexity lies in noting the tension in that text between the supernatural and the modern American experience. The ultimate symbol King uses to denote the Mystery of death in Pet Sematary is a circle or spiral (286), and the ultimate symbol of the modern American family, referred to cynically as a “magic circle” (121), is Church the family cat. The modern American family’s bonds are so fragile that it is held together by a pet, and when that pet is killed, those bonds are so threatened that a man of reason, Louis Creed, attempts the forbidden and what we normally think of as impossible. The problem with King’s postmodern Gothic universe is that in that universe Creed can resurrect his son. When King discusses Creed, he evaluates him as if he lived in our world and not in the Gothic world King has created for him. King’s momentary lapses in this regard indicate a greater problem with many postmodern Gothic artifacts of popular culture. It is a problem King shares with such diverse authors as Frank Miller, Dean Koontz, John Saul, and Anne Rice, to mention but a few. The very real problems these authors wish to address, such as the nature of the American family, child abuse, crime, and gender, are addressed in such mythologically-exaggerated worlds that those worlds become the problem to be overcome, and not the issues that first inspired them. In Pet Sematary, King has transformed the Gothic tale

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body, he feels the power of the “place” growing and calling out to him (323). Even earlier, Jud voices his fear that the “place” had arranged the death of little Gage (274-75), and he, too, can feel the power of the place growing (319). The driver of the truck which hits Gage cannot explain why he speeded up instead of slowing down. Something came over him, and he put the “pedal to the metal” (293). And Creed himself is put into a deep sleep while Gage returns to wreck havoc at the Crandall home (376). Because of the nature of the supernatural involvement in his world and its manifest power, Creed does not really have the freedom to be rational. What would it mean to be rational in the world of the Wendigo?

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in an exciting and truly horrifying fashion, but in doing so, he has made something so much more frightening that we forget to confront death. One of the things that holds the American family together, King tells us in Pet Sematary, is its fear and avoidance of death. Unfortunately, in the “flash” of the novel, the true horror of death, its mundane character and its very ordinariness, is lost, and that defeats King’s stated purpose in writing the novel. He tells Douglas Winter that he “had never had to deal with the consequences of death on a rational level” (147). The novel was to be such an exercise, but very quickly the novel ceased to be an investigation of death and funerals. As King tells Winter, when the ideas came for the novel, and they came very quickly, it was not the death of a cat or the possible death of his own son that triggered his emotional response. It was the possibility that they might come back from the dead (Winter 146). In this sense, King’s novel does not deal with death. It deals with a fear that replaces the fear of death, and that fear is the fear of the return of the dead. Such a replacement is a defense mechanism no doubt, and that is probably why King’s novel is so popular and why the ideas that form the basis for that novel are so persistent in folk and popular culture. Death may well be an issue the American family and society will not face, but then neither will Stephen King.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswosky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968. Collins, Jim. Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and PostModernism. New York: Routledge, 1989. Erikson, Erik H. Insight and Responsibility. New York: Norton, 1964. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973. King, Stephen. Carrie. New York: NAL, 1975.

Nash, Jesse W. “Gerald’s Game: The Art of Stephen King.” The New Orleans Art Review 11 (1990). Pharr, Mary Ferguson. “A Dream of New Life: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary as a Variant of Frankenstein.” The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Ed. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987. Schroeder, Natalie. “‘Oz the Gweat and Tewwible’ and ‘The Other Side’: The Theme of Death in Pet Sematary and Jitterbug Perfume.” The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Ed. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Bantam, 1981. Winter, Douglas. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. New York: NAL, 1986. Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MIT P, 1991.

FURTHER READING Criticism Egan, James. “Antidetection Gothic and Detective Conventions in the Fiction of Stephen King.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 5, no. 1 (summer 1983): 131-46. Surveys King’s use of Gothic elements throughout his oeuvre. ———. “‘A Single Powerful Spectacle’: Stephen King’s Gothic Melodrama.” Extrapolation 27, no. 1 (spring 1986): 62-75. Analyzes King’s use of the Gothic and melodrama. Hicks, James E. “Stephen King’s Creation of Horror in ’Salem’s Lot: A Prolegomenon towards a New Hermeneutic of the Gothic Novel.” In Consumable Goods: Papers from the North East Popular Culture Association Meeting, edited by David K. Vaughan, pp. 85-93. Orono, Maine: University of Maine National Poetry Foundation, 1987. Delineates King’s handling of the Gothic, horror, and the American pastoral in ’Salem’s Lot.

———. Christine. New York: Viking, 1983.

Hoppenstand, Gary, and Ray B. Browne, eds. The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987, 143 p.

———. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House, 1981. ———. IT. New York: Viking, 1983. ———. Pet Sematary. New York: Doubleday, 1983. ———. Rage. The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King. New York: NAL, 1986. ———. Salem’s Lot. New York: NAL, 1975. ———. Skeleton Crew. New York: NAL, 1985. Lovett, Verena. “Bodily Symbolism and the Fiction of Stephen King.” Gender, Genre and Narrative Pleasure: Popular Fiction and Social Relations. Ed. Derek Longhurst. London: Allen and Unwin, 1989. Magistrale, Tony. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s Gothic American. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988.

504

———. “Stephen King’s Pet Sematary: Hawthorne’s Woods Revisited.” The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Ed. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987.

A collection of essays on such topics as King’s use of allegory, his use of the grotesque as metaphor, and the symbolism of the automobile in his work. Keesey, Douglas. “‘Your Legs Must be Singing Grand Opera’: Masculinity, Masochism and Stephen King’s Misery.” American Imago: Studies in Pyschoanalysis and Culture 59, no. 1 (spring 2002): 53-71. Recounts the numerous instances of male suffering in Misery, and asserts that these episodes ultimately result in a triumph of masculinity. Magistrale, Anthony. “Art versus Madness in Stephen King’s Misery.” In The Celebration of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Tenth Anniversary International Conference on

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2

Examines the various roles art plays in the lives of the characters in Misery. Magistrale, Tony. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1988, 132 p. Collection of essays on such subjects as King’s treatment of technology, his use of social criticism, and the role of children in his works. Punter, David. “Problems of Recollection and Construction: Stephen King.” In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited and with an introduction by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, pp. 121-40. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Argues that in many of his works King sets up a universal “we” that in adulthood is able to overcome feelings of childhood inadequacy.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of King’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: American Writers Supplement, Vol. 5; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. 1, 17; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography and Resources, Vol. 2; Bestsellers 90:1; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 61-64; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 1, 30, 52, 76, 119, 134; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 12, 26, 37, 61, 113; Contemporary Popular Writers; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 143; Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1980; DISCovering Authors Modules: Novelists and Popular Fiction and Genre Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Junior Discovering Authors; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 5; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Major 21st-Century Writers; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 17, 55; Something about the Author, Vols. 9, 55; Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vols. 1, 2; and Writers for Young Adults Supplement.

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the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Donald E. Morse, Marshall B. Tymn, and Csilla Bertha, pp. 271-78. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992.

A Abaellino (Zschokke) 1: 499–500 Abartis, Caesarea 2: 115–20 The Abbess (Ireland) 3: 199 The Abbot (Scott) 3: 307, 310 Abbotsford 1: 502, 503, 504 “Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht” (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 395–96 Abercrombie, Dr. 1: 333–35 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner) 2: 293–94, (sidebar) 304 Beardsley, Aubrey and 2: 299

Faustian legend 2: 302 sexuality 2: 303 Abyss (motif) 3: 480–83 “Act 1” (Boaden) 1: 394–98 “Adam Bell” (Hogg) 2: 422 Addison, Agnes 1: 486–90 Addison, Augustan 1: 41, 44–45 “An Address to the Muses” (Baillie) 2: 67 “Address to the Reader” (Reeve) 1: 113–15 “Addresses to the Night” (Baillie) 2: 56 Adelgitha; or The Fruits of a Single Error (Lewis) 3: 44–45 Adventure fiction 3: 359 “An Adventure of Hardress Fitzgerald” (Le Fanu) 3: 7 “The Adventure of My Aunt” (Irving) 2: 452 “The Adventure of the German Student” (Irving) 2: 442–46 as ambiguous gothic 2: 452–53 burlesque 2: 454 parody 2: 458–59 psychological gothicism of 2: 450–51 sexual innuendo 2: 456–58 The Adventure of the Popkins Family” (Irving) 2: 452 The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (Smollet) 1: 1–2, 5 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 3: 158 “Advertisement” (Brown) 2: 155–56

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

“Advertisement to the History of Good Breeding” (Walpole) 3: 446 Aedes Walpolianae (Walpole) 3: 430, 446 Aestheticism 1: 107–8 in eighteenth-century Europe 1: 48–57 Wharton, Edith 3: 468–69 Wilde, Oscar 3: 487, 489, 493– 99, 511–16 African American experience 1: 108, 118–27, 180–92; 3: 146–48 After Dark (Collins) 2: 220 “After Holbein” (Wharton) 3: 459 “The Aftermath of Gothic Fiction” (Lovecraft) 1: 260–64 “Afterward” (Wharton) 3: 459, 468, 469, 471 “Afterword: Reflections on the Grotesque” (Oates) (sidebar) 3: 179 “Against Gothic” (Clery) 3: 437–42 “Against Nature” (Oates) 3: 182 Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (Brownmiller) 1: 216 Agapida, Fray Antonio. See Irving, Washington The Age of Innocence (Wharton) 3: 458, 459–60, 483 “Age of Lead” (Atwood) 2: 11 Aikin, John 1: 2, 4–7, (sidebar) 7, 46 Ainsworth, William Harrison (sidebar) 1: 94, 95

525

SUBJECT INDEX

The Subject Index includes the authors and titles that appear in the Author Index and the Title Index as well as the names of other authors and figures that are discussed in the Gothic Literature set. The Subject Index also lists literary terms and topics covered in the criticism. The index provides page numbers or page ranges where subjects are discussed and is fully cross referenced. Page references to significant discussions of authors, titles, or subjects appear in boldface; page references to illustrations appear in italic.

SUBJECT INDEX

AL AARAAF, TAMERLANE, AND MINOR POEMS

Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (Poe) 3: 187 “Alastor” (Shelley, P.) 1: 24 The Albigenses (Maturin) 3: 74, 79–81, 84 Alcott, Louisa May Angel in the House 1: 203–4 compared to Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 175 social violence 1: 197–206 Alcuin (Brown) 2: 153–54, 159 The Alhambra (Irving) 2: 442 Alias Grace (Atwood) 2: 2–3 “Alice Doane’s Appeal” (Hawthorne) 2: 371 “Alkmene” (Dinesen) 2: 276 “‘All She Said Was “Yes”’” (Jackson) 1: 277 “All Souls” (Wharton) 3: 467, 468, 469, 471, 473–74 Allegory 1: 69–73 Allston, Washington (sidebar) 1: 522, 523, 524 Alnwick 1: 494–96 “The Altar of the Dead” (James) 2: 466–67 The Ambassadors (James) 2: 462 Ambiguous Gothic Irving, Washington 2: 453–55 The Island of Dr Moreau 1: 164 Mysteries of Winterthurn 3: 176 psychoanalysis 2: 412–17 “Der Sandmann” 2: 412 “Ambitious Nature of Man” (Godwin) 2: 324–27 The American (James) 2: 462, 472 American Appetites (Oates) 3: 165 American culture 3: 168–77 “American Female Gothic” (Showalter) 1: 210–20 American Gothic (painting) 1: 73, 73–74 American Gothic tradition 1: 57–74 Brown, Charles Brockden 2: 156–62 compared to medieval literature 2: 298–99 cultural identity in 1: 121–27 vs. European Gothic tradition 1: 57–65; 2: 156–58 Faulkner, Wiliam 2: 298–305 fear 1: 65 feminist literary theory 1: 210–19 founding authors 1: 2; 2: 158 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 1: 212–15 grotesques 2: 300–301 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 368–77 historiography of 1: 68–69 iconography of 2: 301 Irving, Washington 2: 443, 446–51, 451–55 King, Stephen 2: 494–99

526

Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 168–84 Otherness in 1: 67–74 painting and 1: 518–25 patterns 2: 301–3 psychological horror 2: 299 Rice, Anne 3: 279–85 Salem witch trials 1: 62–65 Southern Gothic 2: 300–306 theological debate in 3: 277–78 women writers 1: 210–19 See also Gothic movement American International Pictures 1: 429 “American Literature—Dr. Channing” (Hazlitt) (sidebar) 2: 163 American Mineralogical Society 2: 165 American Psycho (Ellis) 1: 36–38 American realism, Gross Clinic (painting) 1: 519 American Review and Literary Journal 2: 162–64 The American Scene (James) 2: 472 “An Analysis of The Monk and Its German Sources” (Conger) 2: 349–54 Ancient literature 1: 16 Andrézel, Pierre. See Dinesen, Isak Andriano, Joseph 2: 411–19 Anecdotes of Painting (Walpole) 3: 446–47 “The Angel at the Grave” (Wharton) 3: 468 Angel in the House 1: 131, 203–4 The Angelic Avengers (Dinesen) 2: 258, 263 The Animals in That Country (Atwood) 2: 2 Animism 3: 243–44 “Ann Radcliffe” (Scott) (sidebar) 3: 238 Anne of Geierstein (Scott) 3: 311, 312, 315 “Anne Rice: Raising Holy Hell, Harlequin Style” (Ingebretsen) 3: 277–86 Antebellum period 1: 180–92, 520 Anti-Catholicism. See Catholicism The Antiquary (Scott) 1: 96–97; 3: 299, 314 Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome (Collins) 2: 201–2, 206–10 Anxiety. See Fear “An Apology for The Monk” (A Friend to Genius) 3: 48–51 Appel, Alfred 2: 300–301 The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories (du Maurier) 2: 279 “L’Apres-midi-d’un faune” (Faulkner) 2: 293 Apuleius 1: 20–21 Arbus, Diane 1: 215 Archetypes Gothic fiction 3: 464–65

King, Stephen 2: 485 “Pomegranate See d” 3: 464–66 Prometheus 3: 338–42 “Der Sandman” 2: 413–14 Architecture 1: 40–41, 52, 475–76, 486–506; 2: 252–55 Alnwick renovation 1: 494–96 American 1: 497–505 castles 1: 492–94 Cottingham, L. N. (sidebar) 1: 497 European history 1: 490–96; 3: 142–43 gargoyles 1: 482 Gilmor, Robert III 1: 502–5 Glen Ellen 1: 504 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 2: 344–49 Gothic revival 1: 477–78, 486– 89, 497–505 in Gothic Wood 1: 73–74 grotesques 1: 483 houses 3: 143–44 imagination in 1: 483–84 inclusion of the ugly 1: 483 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry 1: 498–99 as metaphor 1: 69–70, 72; 2: 242–45, 301, 344–48 as motif 3: 315–16 naturalism and 1: 482–83 nineteenth-century attitude toward 1: 487–88 in Northanger Abbey 2: 41–45 origins 1: 480 physical restrictions 1: 481–82 relationship to literature 1: 480–86, 497–505 religious buildings 1: 510–11, 511–13 repetition 1: 484–85 Romantic attitude toward 1: 486–87, 488 Scott, Sir Walter 3: 315–16 spiritual world and 1: 482 Strawberry Hill 1: 58, 502–3; 3: 430, 442, 447–48 as sublime 1: 55–56 supernatural and 1: 481, 484; 3: 315 Wadsworth, Daniel 1: 499 written histories 1: 497–98 Aristocracy Decadent Aristocrat 3: 189 “The Fall of the House of Usher” 3: 221 family curse and 1: 294–96 vampires 1: 344, 350 Wharton, Edith 3: 448, 466–68 Armadale (Collins, Wilkie) 1: 88 Armageddon in films 1: 430 Art 1: 506–26 Christianity and 1: 507

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

THE BETROTHED

B Bachman, Richard. See King, Stephen Backsheider, Paula 1: 410 A Backward Glance (Wharton) 3: 469, 476–80 Bag of Bones (King) 2: 482 Bailey, Thomas Aldrich 1: 504–5 Baillie, Joanna 2: 49, 49–77 compared to Wollstonecraft, Mary 2: 63 on human nature 2: 51–54, 56–57 madness as theme 1: 340–41 obituary (sidebar) 2: 55 principal works 2: 50–51 on utopia 2: 63–65 witchcraft 2: 69–73 Baillie, John 1: 56 Bailyn, Bernard 1: 121–22 Baldick, Chris 3: 84–91, 219–20 “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (Wilde) 1: 34 The Ballad of Reading Gaol,and Other Poems (Wilde) 3: 488, 499 Balzac, Honoré de 3: 100–103 Banshees (musical group) 1: 470–71 Baptiste, Jean 1: 291–92 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia (Aikin) 1: 2, 4–7, (sidebar) 7, 46; 3: 24–25, 443 “The Barber of Duncow” (Hogg) 2: 422 Barker, Clive 1: 287–90, (sidebar) 411 Barker, Martin 2: 184 Barkham, John 2: 282–83 Barnaby Rudge (Dickens) 2: 252 Barnes, Djuna 2: 188 “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville) 3: 108 compared to “The Fall of the House of Usher” 3: 122–23 Gothic language 3: 124 landscape motif 3: 123–24 modernity of 3: 122–24 Basil (Baillie) 2: 50, 54 Basil: A Story of Modern Life (Collins) 2: 205, 214 Basilique de Saint-Denis 1: 479 “The Battle of Evermore” (song) 1: 463 Baudelaire, Charles 3: 99–100 Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda 1: 480–86 “The Beach of Falesá” (Stevenson) 3: 360–61 Beardsley, Aubrey 2: 299 “The Beast in the Jungle” (James) 2: 466–70, 471 Beating fantasy 3: 329, 330 Beattie, James 1: 50, 51, 220 “The Beauties” (Walpole) 3: 446

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (Oates) 3: 165 Beckett, Samuel 1: 31, 38–39 Beckford, William 2: 79, 79–102 Fonthill Abbey 2: 85–86 Henley, Samuel and 2: 87–88 homosexuality 2: 87, 98 Oriental tales 1: 260–61; 2: 88–89 principal works 2: 81 self-identity 2: 95–101 “Becoming an Author in 1848: History and the Gothic in the Early Works of Wilkie Collins” (Heller, Tamar) 2: 205–10 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (sidebar) 1: 377 “Bela Lugosi’s Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Either: Goth and the Glorification of Suffering in Rock Music” (Hannaham) 1: 468–73 Belinda (Edgeworth) 1: 207 Bell, Currer. See Bronte¨, Charlotte Bell, Ellis. See Bronte¨, Emily The Bell Jar (Plath) 1: 215–16 Bell, Michael Davitt 2: 451–56 “The Bell Tower” (Melville) 3: 108, 110–11, (sidebar) 111, 113 La Belle Dame sans Merci (Keats) 1: 19 Bellefleur (Oates) 3: 163–65, 177, 179 American culture 3: 172–74, 178 American Gothic tradition 3: 172–74 castle as Gothic convention 3: 172 sexuality 3: 173 Beloved (Morrison) 3: 136 Atwood, Margaret on 3: 149 Echo mythology 3: 140 excerpt (sidebar) 3: 151 ”Foreword” 3: 137–38 ghosts 3: 138 house in 3: 144–47 as slave narrative 3: 146–47 trauma in 3: 150–60 Belshazzar’s Feast (painting) 1: 524 Benedict, Williston R. 2: 429–32 “Benito Cereno” (Melville) 3: 108, 113, 119–22 “Berenice” (Poe) 3: 189, 203–4 Bergman, Ingrid 2: 468 “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 399 Berkman, Sylvia 2: 283–84 Berry, Mary 3: 430–31 Bertram; or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (Maturin) 1: 337–38, 407–8, 499, 500; 3: 74, 84 Bessborough, Lady 2: 85–86 The Betrothed (Scott) 3: 311, 314

527

SUBJECT INDEX

Middle Ages attitude toward 1: 507–12 religious influence on 1: 512–13 sculpture 1: 475–76, 511–17 “The Art of Fiction” (James) 2: 467 The Art of the Novel (James) 2: 473 Arthur Mervyn (Brown) 2: 154, 159–62, 168 “Artist of the Beautiful” (Hawthorne) 2: 381 Arvin, Newton 3: 111–19, 118 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) 2: 293–95, 304 Askew, Alice and Claude 1: 362, 365 “Aspects of the Supernatural in the Shorter Fiction of James Hogg” (Mack) 2: 425–28 The Assassins (Oates) 3: 164 “The Assassins” (Shelley, P.) 1: 9–12 The Assignation (Oates) 3: 179–80 Astoria; or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains (Irving) 2: 442–43 “At Home All Was Blood and Feathers: The Werewolf in the Kitchen—Angela Carter and Horror” (Wisker) 2: 182–90 “At the Tourist Centre in Boston” (Atwood) 2: 9 The Athenaeum (periodical) 3: 393 “Atrophy” (Wharton) 3: 471 “Atwood Gothic” (Mandel) 2: 5–10 Atwood, Margaret 2: 1, 1–24 on Beloved 3: 149 portrayal of women 2: 189 principal works 2: 3–4 “Atwoodian Gothic: From Lady Oracle to The Robber Bride” (Howells) 2: 10–17 Auerbach, Nina 1: 203–4, 361–76; 3: 20 Austen, Jane 1: 74–76, 80–81, 221–22; 2: 25, 25–47, 236 Atwood, Margaret and 2: 3 principal works 2: 27 Radcliffe, Ann and 2: 36–40 Austen-Leigh, R. A. 2: 32 Austen-Leigh, William 2: 32 “Austen’s Sense and Radcliffe’s Sensibility” (Conger) 2: 35–40 “The Author in the Novel: Creating Beckford in Vathek” (Gill) 2: 95–101 “Automata” (Hoffmann). See “Die Automate” (Hoffmann) “Die Automate” (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 395 “Aylmer Vance and the Vampire” (Askew) 1: 362, 365 Azemia (Beckford) 2: 80

SUBJECT INDEX

BEUMEIER, BEATE

Beumeier, Beate 2: 194–200 Beutel, Katherine Piller 3: 138–42 “Bewitched” (Wharton) 3: 457, 459 “Beyond Blood: Defeating the Inner Vampire” (Valente) 3: 415–27 “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud) 1: 87 Bhabba, Homi 3: 151–52 Bierce, Ambrose 1: 198, (sidebar) 199 The Big Sleep (Chandler) 1: 36 The Big Sleep (film) (Faulkner) 2: 294 Bildungsroman 2: 246–48 Billy Budd (Melville) 3: 109, 111–12 Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (Beckford) 2: 79 “The Birds” (du Maurier) 2: 280, 283–84 The Bird’s Nest (Jackson) 1: 276 Birkhead, Edith 1: 16–21, (sidebar) 3: 246 “The Birthmark” (Hawthorne) 2: 365, 375 “Black Andie’s Tale of Tod Lapraik” (Stevenson) 3: 360 The Black Book (Morrison) 3: 146 “The Black Cat” (Poe) 3: 188–89, 189, 213 The Black Dwarf (Scott) 3: 307, 315 Black House (King) 2: 482, 487, 491–93 The Black Robe (Collins) 2: 202, 217–26 Black Venus (Carter) 2: 180, 183 Black Water (Oates) 3: 165 “The Blackness of Darkness: E. A. Poe and the Development of the Gothic” (Fiedler) 3: 205–11 Blackstone, William 1: 224–25 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1: 25 review of Die Elixiere des Teufels 2: 391–92 review of Melmoth the Wanderer (sidebar) 3: 98 Blair, Hugh 1: 45 Blair, Robert 1: 53 Blake, William engravings of (sidebar) 1: 487 influence on Faulkner, William 2: 306–12 Prometheus mythology 3: 339 Blatty, W. P. 1: 450 Bleak House (Dickens) 2: 229–30, 237, 242–45 Bleiler, E. F. 1: 351; 2: 85–89, 393–401 The Blind Assassin (Atwood) 2: 2–3, 3

528

The Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne) 2: 364, 371 Blixen, Tania. See Dinesen, Isak Blood Canticle (Rice) 3: 264 Blood Is Not Enough (Datlow) 1: 366–67 A Bloodsmoor Romance (Oates) 3: 163–65, 177 American culture 3: 178 compared to Little Women 3: 175 fetishism 3: 174 heroines 3: 174–75 “Bloodstains” (Oates) 3: 180–81, 182–83 “The Bloody Chamber” (Carter) 2: 182, 187 The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Carter) 2: 180–83, 187–88, 199 Bloom, Harold 3: 337–42 “Blue-Bearded Lover” (Oates) 3: 179–80 Bluebeard’s Egg (Atwood) 2: 11 Blues (music) 1: 369, 464 The Bluest Eye (Morrison) 3: 135–36, 144, 148 Blythe, David Gilmour 1: 524 Boaden, James 1: 394–98, (sidebar) 399, 413–15 “Bodies” (Oates) 3: 183 Bodily Harm (Atwood) 2: 11, 189 The Body Snatcher (film) 1: 400 “The Body-Snatcher” (Stevenson) 3: 360 Boileau, Etienne 1: 515–16 Boileau, Nicolas 1: 41, 44, 148 “The Bold Dragoon” (Irving) 2: 449 Booker Prize 2: 2 The Bookman (periodical) (sidebar) 3: 405 Borges, Jorges Luis 2: 9; 3: 179 Bosch, Hieronymous 3: 53–60 The Bostonians (James) 2: 462 Botting, Fred 1: 21–30, 48–57; 2: 215–17; 3: 348–56 “The Bottle Imp” (Stevenson) 3: 360, 362–64 “A Bottle of Perrier” (Wharton) 3: 459, 467, 468, 471 Boulger, James 3: 92 Bowen, Elizabeth 1: 173–79, (sidebar) 333 Bowen’s Court (Bowen) 1: 173–79 Boz. See Dickens, Charles “Boz’s Gothic Gargoyles” (Hollington) (sidebar) 2: 252 Bracebridge Hall; or, The Humorists: A Medley (Irving) 2: 442, 447, (sidebar) 450 Bradbury, Ray (sidebar) 1: 172 Braddon, May Elizabeth 1: 354 Brantly, Susan C. 2: 269–78

The Bravo of Venice (Lewis) 3: 43–44 Brennan, Matthew C. 3: 372–82 Breve fra Afrika (Dinesen) 2: 258 Brewster, David 1: 334 “The Bridal of Polmood” (Hogg) 2: 437 The Bride of Lammermoor (Scott) 1: 25; 3: 300, 312, 314 The British Critic (periodical) 2: 327 Brockway, James (sidebar) 2: 191 Bromley Contingent 1: 470–71 Bronte¨, Charlotte 2: 103, 103–30 compared to Bronte¨, Emily 2: 104 compared to Wharton, Edith 3: 480 depravity 2: 115 Gothic conventions 2: 108–9, 111–13, 121–27 heroines 2: 107–14 influence of Lewis, Matthew Gregory 2: 122–27 principal works 2: 105 Bronte¨, Emily 1: 262–63, 331; 2: 131, 131–51 compared to Bronte¨, Charlotte 2: 104 influence of Byron, Lord George Gordon 2: 145 principal works 2: 133 Brook Farm 2: 364 Brooke-Rose, Christine 2: 410 Bross, Addison 2: 299 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevski) 1: 315 Brown, Charles Brockden 1: 2; 2: 153, 153–78 American Gothic tradition 2: 156–62 compared to Schiller, Friedrich (sidebar) 2: 171 detective fiction 1: 250–51 Godwin, William and 2: 168, 170–72, (sidebar) 171 principal works 2: 155 protagonists 2: 159–62 Brown, Jane K. 2: 354–62 Brown, Marshall 2: 354–62 The Brownie of Badsbeck (Hogg) 2: 422, 437–38 “The Brownie of the Black Haggs” (Hogg) 2: 422, 428 Brownmiller, Susan 1: 216 Buch Annette (Goethe) 2: 341 “Bulletin” (Jackson) 1: 271–72 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 1: 2, 12–16, 14, (sidebar) 15, 262–63 Burke, Edmund 1: 55, 97, 107–8, 110–13, 149 on French Revolution 3: 350–51

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO: A STORY

C C. 3. 3. See Wilde, Oscar Cabbalism 1: 254–55 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (film) 1: 419 Calder, Jenni 1: 131 Caleb Williams (Godwin) 1: 2, 81, 87; 2: 321–24, 335 compared to Wieland; or, The Transformation 2: 168, 170–71 doubles 3: 369 as early detective fiction 1: 249–50 European Gothic tradition 2: 337–38 as evil 2: 327 Gothic narrative 2: 330–37 influence of French Revolution 1: 78–80 influence on Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 339 motifs 2: 333–34 narrative structure 3: 86 Poe, Edgar Allan on 3: 212 as political commentary 3: 212–13 preface 2: 324 review 2: 327–30 social injustice in 1: 22–23 Calhoon, Kenneth S. 2: 344–49 Calvinism in horror fiction 3: 277 Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 91–96

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 2: 429–31 sublime 3: 91–96 “Calvinism and Gothicism: The Example of Brown’s Wieland” (Gilmore) 2: 170–77 The Calvinist Temper in English Poetry (Boulger) 3: 92 Cambrio-Britons (Boaden) 1: 413–15 Candid Reflections . . . on what is commonly called the Negroe-Cause, by a Planter (Long) 1: 208 Cannibalism 2: 237 “The Canterville Ghost” (Wilde) 3: 487–88 Capitalism, Wharton, Edith 3: 467–75 Capon, William 1: 403 Capote, Truman 1: 66, 70, 2: 304 Captain Bonneville (Irving) 2: 443 “Cardillac the Jeweller” (Hoffmann). See “Das Fräulein von Scuderi” “The Cardinal’s Third Tale” (Dinesen) 2: 267–68 “Carmilla” (Le Fanu) 1: 31, 139, 352–58; 3: 2–5 doubles 1: 382 dreams 1: 329–30 mother-child relationship 1: 382–84 narrative structure 3: 271 power of women 1: 355–58; 3: 18–21 as supernatural horror tale 3: 22–27 vampire-victim relationship 1: 356–57; 3: 19–20 victimization of women 1: 355–58; 3: 17–21 women in nineteenth century 3: 16–21 Carmilla and 12 Other Classic Tales of Mystery (Le Fanu) 3: 3–5 “Carmilla and the Gothic Legacy: Victorian Transformations of Supernatural Horror” (Geary) 3: 21–27 “Carnival” (Dinesen) 2: 264–65 Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales (Dinesen) 2: 258 Carrie (King) 2: 481 Carrion Comfort (Simmons) 1: 366 Carso, Kerry Dean 1: 496–506 Carter, Angela 2: 179, 179–200 fairy tales 2: 185–86 fantasy 2: 183–90, 197–99 fetishism 2: 184–85 gender construction 2: 199 humor 2: 185 literary influences of 2: 188 portrayal of women 2: 183–85

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

principal works 2: 181 psychological horror 2: 183–89 on Rice, Ann (sidebar) 3: 267 sexuality as theme 2: 184–89 Carwin the Biloquist (Brown) 2: 160, 161, 169–70 “The Caryatids: an Unfinished Tale” (Dinesen) 2: 264–65, 269 Casebeer, Edwin F. (sidebar) 2: 492 “The Cask of Amontillado” (Poe) 3: 188, 189, 197–98 Castle (Gothic convention) 1: 251, 284–85 Barker, Clive 1: 287–90 Bellefleur 3: 172 Bleak House 2: 242–45 The Castle of Otranto 1: 402; 2: 301; 3: 196–97 feminist literary theory 1: 211 King, Stephen 1: 284–90 Little Dorrit 2: 252–53 Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale 3: 128–32 Morrison, Toni 3: 136 The Mysteries of Udolpho 1: 226 Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 194–97 Radcliffe, Ann 2: 252 See also Haunted house Castle Dangerous (Scott) 3: 307, 311, 315 The Castle of Andalusia (O’Keeffe) 1: 406–7 The Castle of Otranto: A Story (Walpole) 1: 57–58, 459; 2: 36, 299–300; 3: 449 authorship of 3: 434–35, 437, 444–46 castle as Gothic convention 1: 402; 2: 301; 3: 196–97 “counterfeit” Gothic in 3: 451–52 critical reception of 3: 442–52 doubles in 3: 369 excess as theme 3: 355 family murder 2: 310–11 ghosts 3: 451–52 heroine in 2: 138, 144 influence of Strawberry Hill 1: 503 influence on Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 501 influence on Dracula 3: 395– 404 influence on Pierre; or, The Ambiguities 3: 115 labyrinth in 3: 197 mysterious portrait in 1: 252, 254; 2: 252; 3: 25, 199 as original Gothic literature 1: 1–2, 402; 2: 116; 3: 431 political elements 3: 450 preface 3: 338–40, 432–34, 449 prophecy in 3: 200 review 3: 435, 436–37 Scott, Sir Walter on 3: 432

529

SUBJECT INDEX

as political writer (sidebar) 1: 30 on the sublime 1: 148–50; 3: 91–92 Burlesque 2: 298, 452–54 Burns, Robert 1: 18 Burns, Sarah 1: 518–25 Burwick, Frederick 1: 332–42 “The Bus” (Jackson) 1: 268 “A Bus Along St. Clair: December” (Atwood) 2: 6 Butler, Judith 1: 379, 384 Butler, Marilyn (sidebar) 3: 328 By the North Gate (Oates) 3: 164 Byron, Lord George Gordon 1: 2, 240–43, (sidebar) 241; 3: 342 Clairmont, Claire and 3: 344–46 influence on Bronte¨, Emily 2: 145 lampoon of The Monk 3: 51–52 on Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3: 36, (sidebar) 42 romantic heroes of 1: 24, 253– 54; 2: 299 Shelley, Mary and 3: 344 on Vathek (sidebar) 2: 95

SUBJECT INDEX

CASTLE OF WOLFENBACH; A GERMAN STORY

servants 2: 299–300 subversive nature of 3: 437–42, 448 supernatural 3: 449–51 Castle of Wolfenbach; a German story (Parsons) 1: 2, 7–9, 96 The Castle Spectre (Lewis) 1: 402; 3: 32, 37 German romantic influence 1: 408 ghosts 1: 338 inspiration for 3: 34–36 literary influences on 3: 42 madness 1: 338 as model for Gothic melodrama 3: 41–43 nationalism 1: 412 “To the Reader” 3: 34–36 The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (Radcliffe) 1: 2; 3: 231–32, 239–340 Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors (Walpole) 3: 446 Catharine,or the Bower (Austen) 2: 32–33 Cathedrals. See Religious buildings “Catherine Morland’s Gothic Delusions: A Defense of Northanger Abbey” (Glock) (sidebar) 2: 37 Catholicism Collins, Wilkie 2: 217–26 Martineau, Harriet 2: 218 Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 87– 88, 94–96 misogyny and 2: 221 Rice, Anne 3: 279 Cat’s Eye (Atwood) 2: 2, 11–13 “The Cenci” (Shelley, P.) 1: 24 Chamber’s Cabinet Cyclopedia (Shelley) 3: 320 Chambers, Sir William 1: 405 Chandler, Helen 3: 417 Chandler, Raymond 1: 36 “Chapter 1” (Bronte¨, E.) 2: 133–35 “Chapter 1” (Brown) 2: 156 “Chapter 1” (du Maurier) 2: 281–82 “Chapter 14” (Austen) 2: 27–31 “Charles” (Jackson) 1: 265–66, 269 “Charles Brockden Brown and the Invention of the American Gothic” (Fiedler) 2: 156–62 “Charles Dickens and Mrs. Radcliffe: A Farewell to Wilkie Collins” (Coolidge Jr.) (sidebar) 2: 237 “Charlotte Bronte¨’s Lucy Snowe” (Waring) (sidebar) 2: 121 “Charlotte Bronte¨’s ‘New’ Gothic” (Heilman) 2: 107–14 Charnas, Suzy McKee 1: 368–169

530

Chase (motif) Faulkner, William 2: 301–2 James, Henry 2: 473–74 Shelley, Mary 3: 339 Chekhov, Anton 1: 2 Chesterton, G. K. 3: 366, 368 “A Child is Being Beaten” (Freud) 3: 329 Child, Lydia Marie 1: 187–88 Childbirth 1: 216 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron) 1: 24 Children punishment of 2: 239–40 relationship to mother 1: 377–81 in ’Salem’s Lot 1: 372 “The Children of the Corn” (King) 2: 481 A Child’s Garden of Verses (Stevenson) 3: 359–61 The Chimes (Dickens) 2: 230 de Chirico, Giorgio 1: 147 Chorley, H. F. (sidebar) 2: 137 “Christabel” (Coleridge) 1: 19, 24, (sidebar) 48 Christianity art and 1: 507 The Sphinx 3: 498–99 Wharton, Edith 3: 470–71 Christine (King) 2: 482 castle in 1: 285–86 compared to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 2: 487 family 2: 501 film 2: 488 werewolf myth 2: 486 A Christmas Carol (Dickens) 2: 229–30 A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (Irving) 2: 442 The Circle Game (Atwood) 2: 1–2, 3, 8 Citizen Kane (film) 1: 437 Civilisation and its Discontents (Freud) 1: 90; 3: 372 Clairmont, Claire 3: 344–46 Clara Howard (Brown) 2: 154, 162 Clark, Robert 1: 58 Cleishbotham, Jedediah. See Scott, Sir Walter Cleland, John 1: 50 Clendenning, John 2: 446–51 Clery, E. J. on Baillie, Joanna 2: 54–61 on The Castle of Otranto: A Tale 3: 437–42 value of Gothic fiction in 18th century 1: 220–28 Clover, Carol 3: 284 Cobb, Palmer (sidebar) 2: 412 The Cock and Anchor (Le Fanu) 3: 1, 7–10, 16 Cock Lane ghost 1: 18

The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (Sedgwick) 1: 72; 2: 10 Cole, Thomas 1: 524 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1: 2, 18–19, 24, (sidebar) 48, 236–41 ghosts 1: 337 on The Mysteries of Udolpho 3: 245–46 review of The Monk 3: 46–48 sea stories 1: 251 Collected Stories of William Faulkner (Faulkner) 2: 294, 307–8 Collins, Wilkie 1: 88–89; 2: 201, 201–28,219 anti-Catholicism 2: 218–26 curse narratives 1: 298–300 detective fiction 2: 216 development of writing style 2: 205–10 Dickens, Charles on (sidebar) 2: 223 Eliot, T. S. on (sidebar) 2: 215 Gothic conventions 2: 215–17 principal works 2: 202 sensation fiction 2: 211–15, 218–19, 223–26 Collins, William 1: 18, 53–54 Colman, George 1: 403 Come Along with Me (Jackson) 1: 276 Comedy. See Humor “The Company of Wolves” (Carter) 2: 182, 186, 187 “The Composition of Northanger Abbey” (Emden) 2: 31–35 Confessional novels 3: 211–17 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (DeQuincey) 1: 331 The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (Melville) 3: 108–9 Conger, Syndy McMillen 2: 35–40, 136–46, 349–54 Conrad, Joseph 1: 31–32 Convent stories 2: 223–24 Coolidge, Archibald C. Jr. (sidebar) 2: 237 Cooper, Alice 1: 469–70, 470 Cooper, James Fenimore 1: 2, 58; 3: 206 Corliss, Richard 1: 437–38 Corman, Roger 1: 443–46 Cottingham, L. N. (sidebar) 1: 497 “Councillor Krespel” (Hoffmann). See “The Cremona Violin” Count Basil (Baillie) 2: 50, 63, 65 Count Dracula (character) 1: 166–69, 342–55, 362–63, 424, 3: 417 characterization of 3: 405–10 compared to psychic vampires 1: 365–66

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

DISGUISE

D Dacre, Charlotte 1: 208–10 “The Daemon Lover” (Jackson) 1: 269–70 Dagover, Lil 1: 419 “Daisy” (Oates) 3: 180, 181, 183–84 Daisy Miller (James) 2: 462 The Damnation Game (Barker) 1: 289–90 Danse Macabre (King) 2: 481–82, 483–85, 485–86

“Daphne du Maurier and Gothic Signatures: Rebecca as Vamp(ire)” (Horner and Zlosnik) 2: 284–91 Dark Dreams (Derry) 1: 429–30 The Dark Half (King) 2: 486, 489–90 The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla (King) 2: 482 The Dark Tower VI: The Songs of Susannah (King) 2: 482 The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (King) 2: 482 Datlow, Ellen 1: 366–67 Davenport, Basil (sidebar) 2: 285 Davenport-Hines, Richard Treadwell 1: 490–96 David Copperfield (Dickens) 2: 248 Davis, Alexander Jackson (sidebar) 1: 491, 497, 499–501, 503–4 Day, William Patrick 2: 312–13, 317; 3: 178 “De Grey: A Romance” (James) 2: 462, 463 De Monfort (Baillie, Joanna) 2: 50, 54–56, 58–60 review of (sidebar) 2: 68 social progress of 2: 62–66 De Profundis (Wilde) 3: 488 Deacon Brodie,or the Double Life (Stevenson) 3: 368 “The Dead” (Oates) 3: 179 The Dead Zone (King) 2: 482, 490–91 “Death by Landscape” (Atwood) 2: 11 Decadence movement 3: 487, 489 Decadent Aristocrat (Gothic convention) 3: 189 “The Decay of Lying” (Wilde) 3: 493 “Dedication” (Goethe) 2: 343–44 DeFoe, Daniel 3: 212 Degeneration Machen, Arthur 1: 169–71 Stevenson, Robert Louis 1: 158–60 Stoker, Bram 1: 166–69 Wells, H. G. 1: 162–66 Wilde, Oscar 1: 160–62 Deleuze, Gilles 3: 226–27 “The Deluge at Norderney” (Dinesen) 2: 257–58, 267–68, 272 Delusion and Dream (Freud) 1: 326–27 Demon and Other Tales (Oates) 3: 167–68 Demonic possession 1: 328, 430 “Demons” (Oates) 3: 164 Dennis, John 1: 148–49 DeQuincey, Thomas 1: 331 Derrickson, Teresa 1: 197–207 Derrida, Jacques 1: 154–55; 3: 350 Derry, Charles 1: 429–30

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

A Description of Strawberry Hill (Walpole) 3: 442 Desire (theme) 2: 194–99 Detective fiction 1: 36–37 Caleb Williams 1: 249–50 Collins, Wilkie 2: 216 Edgar Huntly or Memoir of a Sleep-Walker 1: 250–51 The Murders in the Rue Morgue 1: 250–51 Mysteries of Winterthurn 3: 175–77 “Development of a Child” (Klein) 1: 381 Devil 1: 313; 2: 434–36; 3: 198 “The Devil and Anne Rice” (Rice and Gilmore) (sidebar) 3: 278 “The Devil and Tom Walker” (Irving) 2: 442 “The Devil in Manuscript” (Hawthorne), witchcraft 2: 371 “The Devil Sings the Blues: Heavy Metal, Gothic Fiction and ‘Postmodern’ Discourse” (Hinds) 1: 461–68 The Devil’s Elixir (Hoffmann). See Die Elixiere des Teufels Devlin, James E. 2: 456–58 “Diagnosing the ‘Sir Walter Disease’: American Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature” (Carso) 1: 496–506 Diamond, Cora 3: 515–16 Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethe) 2: 344 Dickens, Charles 2: 229, 229–56 cannibalism 2: 237 childhood memories (sidebar) 2: 237 on Collins, Wilkie (sidebar) 2: 223 Eliot, T. S. on (sidebar) 2: 215 Gothic conventions 2: 251–55 humor 2: 234–41 imagery 2: 242–45 principal works 2: 231 “Dickens’ Gloomiest Gothic Castle” (Ronald) 2: 242–45 Dinesen, Isak 2: 257, 257–78 European Gothic tradition 2: 261–68, 271 horror specialist 2: 283–84 imagination 2: 262–63, 268 Kierkegaard, Søren and 2: 272 on “The Monkey” 2: 276 portrayal of women 2: 264–68 principal works 2: 259 supernatural 2: 263 “‘Dirty Mama’: Horror, Vampires, and the Maternal in Late Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fiction” (Michelis) 1: 376–85 Disguise (theatrical device) 1: 406–7

531

SUBJECT INDEX

“counterfeit” Gothicism of 3: 397–404 supernatural 1: 358–59 Count Robert of Paris (Scott) 3: 300, 311 Covent Garden (theater) 1: 389 Cox, Jeffrey 2: 62 Craft, Christopher 3: 284 Crayon, Geoffrey. See Irving, Washington The Crayon Miscellany (Irving) 2: 442 “The Cremona Violin” (Hoffmann) 2: 388 Cresserons, Charles de. See Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan The Cricket on the Hearth (Dickens) 2: 230 The Critic (periodical) (sidebar) 3: 125 “The Critic as Artist” (Wilde) 3: 507 A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (Blair) 1: 45–46 The Critical Review (periodical) 3: 434–35, 444 Critique of Judgement (Kant) 1: 150 Crosman, Robert 2: 308–10 Cross, Wilbur 2: 368 Crowe, Catherine 3: 24 Cry to Heaven (Rice) 3: 263–64 Cujo (King) 2: 491 Cultural identity 1: 121–27, 171–79 Curse narratives Baptiste, Jean 1: 291–92 haunted house 1: 290–300 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1: 292–95 “The Curse of Ancient Egypt” (Carter) (sidebar) 3: 267 The Curse of Frankenstein (film) 1: 428, 446 Curtis, Ian 1: 471–73 Cycle of the Werewolf (King) 2: 482, 486, 487–89

SUBJECT INDEX

DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL

Do with Me What You Will (Oates) 3: 164 “Doge und Dogaressa” (Hoffmann) 2: 398 The Dolliver Romance (Hawthorne) 2: 376 “Dolph Heyliger” (Irving) 2: 449 Dombey and Son (Dickens) 2: 230, 251–52 Domestic fiction 1: 265–69 “Don’t Look Now” (du Maurier) 2: 280 Doppelgänger definition 2: 485 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1: 305; 2: 391–92, 399–400, 414, 431 James, Henry 2: 473–77 A Legend of Montrose 3: 314 in nineteenth-century literature 1: 232–33 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 183–84 Old Mortality 3: 314 Persona (film) 1: 429 The Picture of Dorian Gray 1: 160–62 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 1: 158–60 “Dorian Gray and the Gothic Novel” (Poteet) 3: 504–9 Dostoevski, Fyodor 1: 2, 315–16; 2: 433–34 “The Double as Immortal Self” (Rank) 1: 310–16 “‘Double Born’: Bram Stoker and the Metrocolonial Gothic” (Valente) 1: 33 Double Persephone (Atwood) 2: 1–2, 8 Doubleday, Ellen 2: 289 Doubleday, Neal Frank 2: 368–78 Doubles (literary device) Beckett, Samuel and 1: 38–39 Caleb Williams 3: 369 “Carmilla” 1: 382–84 The Castle of Otranto 3: 369 definition 2: 485–86 Dinesen, Isak 2: 272–73 “The Fat Boy” 2: 236 Foucalt, Michel 3: 350 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 1: 26; 3: 338–42, 350 The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents 3: 369 King, Stephen 2: 485–93 Lacan, Jacques 3: 350 Lives of the Twins 3: 178 Melmoth the Wanderer 1: 27 in modern literature 1: 32–35 Nemesis 3: 178 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 178 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 1: 29 Snake Eyes 3: 178 Soul/Mate 3: 178

532

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3: 368–69, 372, 374–81 as supernatural self 1: 310–16 Twin Peaks (television show) 1: 453–54 Vathek 3: 369 The Woman in White 2: 216 See also Doppelgänger Dougherty, Stephen 3: 218–28 Douglas, Mary 1: 132–33 Douglas, Sir George 2: 432 Douglass, Frederick “Down, Satan!” (Barker) 1: 287–88 Doyle, Arthur Conan 1: 365 Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret (Hawthorne) 2: 376 “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (Hawthorne) 2: 364, 375 “Dr. Jekyll and the Emergence of Mr. Hyde” (Miyoshi) 3: 365–70 Dracula (character). See Count Dracula Dracula (film) 1: 424, (sidebar) 425; 3: 417 Dracula (Stoker) 1: 31, 33–34, 358–59; 3: 385–87 American Psycho and 1: 37 Anglo-Irish identity 1: 171–79 characterization of Count Dracula 1: 342–44; 3: 405–10 characters as Irish allegory 3: 415–27 “counterfeit” Gothic in 3: 397–404 critical reception 3: 386–87 degeneration 1: 166–69 dreams 1: 168, 330 eroticism in 1: 136–38 film adaptations 1: 446–47 influence of The Castle of Otranto 3: 395–404 mythology 1: 166–69 narrative structure 3: 270–71 review 3: 393–95, (sidebar) 405 sensationalism 3: 393 Summers, Montague on (sidebar) 3: 395 victims in 1: 133–36 as Victorian text 1: 128–40 Dracula’s Guest (Stoker) 3: 386–93, 401 Drama 1: 389–91, 401–15 character development 1: 405–6 Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 499–500 disguise in 1: 406–7 Gothic motifs in 1: 401–9 importance of 1: 26–27 influence of German romantic playwrights 1: 407–9 landscape as motif 1: 402–5

Lewis, Matthew Gregory 1: 338, 402, 408, 412; 3: 32, 34– 36, 37, 41–43 Maturin, Charles Robert 1: 337–38, 407–8, 499, 500; 3: 74, 84–85 nationalism 1: 412 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 164 repetition in 1: 407 sociopolitical ideology 1: 410–15 stage design 1: 404–5 vampire plays 1: 348–49 Wilde, Oscar 3: 488, 495–97 See also specific names of plays The Drawing of the Three (King) 2: 486–87 The Dream (Baillie) 2: 58 “The Dreamers” (Dinesen) 2: 258 Dreams Dracula 1: 168, 330 horror films 1: 415–16 Jung, Carl G. 1: 329 Myers, F. W. H 1: 330–31 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 2: 431–32 psychology of 1: 326–32 role in Gothic fiction 1: 329– 32; 2: 253 Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents (Beckford) 2: 79–80, 87, 89, 97–98 Drury Lane theater 1: 389 Druse, Eleanor. See King, Stephen du Maurier, Daphne 2: 115, 118, 279, 279–92 Doubleday, Ellen and 2: 289 horror 2: 283–84 Jung, Carl G. and 2: 289 principal works 2: 280 self-identity 2: 289–90 vamp vs. femme fatale 2: 285–86 Dunbar, William 1: 121–22 “The Dungeon” (Oates) 3: 183, 184 “The Dutchess at Prayer” (Wharton) 3: 463 Duthie, Peter 2: 61–67 Dyer, Richard 2: 188

E Eakins, Thomas 1: 519 “The Early Gothic Novel” (Lovecraft) (sidebar) 3: 443 The East Indian (Lewis) 3: 38 “Echoes” (Dinesen) 2: 258 “Edgar Allan Poe” (Lawrence) (sidebar) 3: 203

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

“THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER”

“Epistle to Thomas Ashton from Florence” (Walpole) 3: 446 The Epistolary Intrigue (Lewis) 3: 37–38 “The Erl-King” (Goethe). See “Der Erlkonig” (Goethe) “The Erl-King. From the German of Goethe. Author of the Sorrows of Werter” (Scott) (sidebar) 2: 350 “The Erl-King’s Daughter” (Scott) 3: 293–94 “Der Erlkonig” (Goethe) (sidebar) 2: 350 Eroticism in Dracula 1: 136–38 homoeroticism 3: 274–75 vampires 3: 274–76 See also Sexuality Essay on Sepulchres (Godwin) 1: 98, 101 An Essay on the Sublime (Baillie) 1: 56 “Ethan Brand” (Hawthorne) 2: 365, 374 Ethan Frome (Wharton) 3: 457–58 Ethics of the Sexual Difference (Irigaray). See Ethique de la difference sexuelle Ethique de la difference sexuelle (Irigaray) 1: 90–91 Ethwald (Baillie) 2: 58 Europe, eighteenth century aestheticism in 1: 48–57 attitude toward architecture 1: 486–87, 488; 3: 142–43 copyright laws 1: 95 function of literary criticism 1: 95–96 as impetus for Gothic movement 1: 1, 30–31 marriage laws 1: 224–26 role of women 2: 63–65 value of Gothic fiction 1: 221– 27; 3: 23–24 “European Disruptions of the Idealized Woman: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and the Marquis de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine” (Wright) 3: 61–70 European Gothic tradition 1: 74–104, 3: 124–25 vs. American Gothic tradition 1: 57–65; 2: 156–58 Caleb Williams 2: 337–38 development of Gothic fiction 1: 260–64 Dinesen, Isak 2: 261–68, 271 Faulkner, William 2: 298–305 feminist literary theory of 1: 86–91 French Revolution and 1: 74–85 German Romanticism 2: 271–72

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 378– 79; 3: 125 influence on Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 188, 194–95 Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 84–91 Melville, Herman 3: 118–22 nationalism in 1: 93–102, 158– 71; 2: 240 Romanticism 1: 249–58 See also Gothic movement The Europeans (James) 2: 462 “The Eve of St. Agnes” (Keats) 1: 19, 24 Evil eye (superstition) 1: 307 Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder (Fielding) 3: 24–25 “Excerpt from a letter dated 3 March 1886” (Symonds) (sidebar) 3: 365 Excess (theme) 3: 352–55, 355 The Exorcist (Blatty) 1: 450 The Exorcist (film) 1: 450–51 “Expedition to Hell” (Hogg) 2: 424–25 Expensive People (Oates) 3: 164, 178 “Extract from a note appended to a letter on December 9, 1838” (Beckford) 2: 83–85 Eyes (motif) 3: 472–73 “The Eyes” (Wharton) 3: 457, 459, 472–73

F A Fable (Faulkner) 2: 294 “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic” (Savoy) 1: 66–74 The Fair Maid of Perth (Scott) 3: 312–13 Fairy tales 2: 13, 185–86 “The Fall of the House of Clennam: Gothic Conventions in Little Dorrit” (Jarrett) 2: 251–55 “The Fall of the House of Usher” (Poe) 1: 71–72; 3: 188–89, 196 aristocracy 3: 221 castle in 3: 194–97 compared to “Bartleby the Scrivener” 3: 122–23 family curse in 2: 221 family murder 2: 311 film adaptation 3: 224 haunted house in 3: 225–26 madness in 3: 204 miscegenation 3: 221–27 slavery 3: 223

533

SUBJECT INDEX

“Edgar Allan Poe” (Lovecraft) (sidebar) 3: 219 Edgar Huntly or Memoir of a Sleep-Walker (Brown) 1: 250–51; 2: 154, 159–60 Edgeworth, Maria 1: 207, (sidebar) 3: 306 The Edible Woman (Atwood) 2: 1, 9 Edinburgh Journal of Science, 1: 334–35 Edinburgh (Scot’s) Magazine, 1: 25 Edmundson, Mark 1: 520 “Edward Randolph’s Portrait” (Hawthorne) 2: 370 Edwards, Jonathan 3: 277–78 The Effusions of Sensibility; or, Letters from Lady Honoria Harrowhart to Miss Sophonisba Simper (Lewis) 3: 37–38 Egan, James 3: 168–78 Ehrengard (Dinesen) 2: 258 “The Eighteenth-Century Psyche: The Mysteries of Udolpho” (Williams) 3: 252–60 Elbert, Monika 3: 466–75 Elder, Marjorie 2: 382–86 Elinor and Marianne (Austen) 2: 25, 33 Eliot, T. S. (sidebar) 2: 215 Die Elixiere des Teufels (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 394, 405 compared to The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 2: 431 doppelgänger 2: 391–92, 400 influence of The Monk 3: 40–41 uncanny 1: 304 Elizabethan literature 1: 17 Ellis, Bret Easton 1: 36–38 Ellis, S. M. (sidebar) 3: 6 Elwin, Malcolm 3: 368 Emden, Cecil S. 2: 31–35 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 3: 468, 470, 472, 474 “Emily’s Demon-Lover: The Gothic Revolution and The Mysteries of Udolpho” (Graham) 3: 249–52 Emma (Austen) 2: 26–27, 32 Emmeline,or, the Orphan of the Castle (Smith) 1: 96 “Endicott and the Red Cross” (Hawthorne) 2: 370 Enfield, William 3: 246–49 The English Review, 2: 85 Enigmatic code 1: 319–20 Enlightenment 1: 48–57, 67 An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (Godwin) 1: 22; 2: 321–23, 330–31, 334; 3: 212

SUBJECT INDEX

“THE FALL RIVER AXE MURDERS”

“The Fall River Axe Murders” (Carter) 2: 182–83 “Fame” (Jackson) 1: 266 Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott (Hogg) 2: 422 Family in horror films 1: 420–22 Jackson, Shirley 1: 265–82 King, Stephen 2: 501–3 Twin Peaks (television show) 1: 455–56 “Family” (Oates) 3: 164 Family curse (Gothic convention) 1: 290–300; 3: 221 The Family Legend (Baillie) 2: 58 Family murder (Gothic convention) 2: 216, 311 “Family Portraits” (Baptiste) 1: 291–92, 292 “Famine Country” (Oates) 3: 181, 183, 184 Famous Imposters (Stoker) 3: 402 Fanshawe: A Tale (Hawthorne) 2: 364, 379 “Fantasia of the Library” (Foucault) 1: 92 Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Hoffmann) 2: 393, 395 Fantasmagoriana (Shelley) 1: 25 Fantastic (genre) definition 1: 128–29 Dinesen, Isak 2: 270–71 Dracula 1: 139 Gebir 1: 257–58 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 168–77, 180 Fantasy (Gothic element) 2: 183–90, 197–99 “The Fat Boy” (Dickens) 2: 235–38 Fatal Revenge; or The Family of Montorio (Maturin) 3: 73–74, 84, 92–93 Faulkner, William 2: 293, 293–320 chase in 2: 301–2 grotesques 2: 301 influence of Beardsley, Aubrey 2: 299 influence of Blake, William 2: 306–12 principal works 2: 295–96 Southern Gothic 2: 297–305 Wandering Jew 2: 302 “Faulkner’s Miss Emily and Blake’s ‘Sick Rose’: ‘Invisible Worm,’ Nachträglichkeit, and Retrospective Gothic 2: 306–12 Faust (character) 2: 156–57, 299 See also specific works “Faust and the Gothic Novel” (Brown, J. and M.) 2: 354–62 Faust: Ein Fragment (Goethe) 2: 342, 349–53 Faust II (Goethe) 2: 342, 354–61

534

Faust: Part I (Goethe). See Faust—Der Tragödi erster Teil Faust—Der Tragödi erster Teil (Goethe) 2: 341–42, 343–44, 354–61 Fear 2: 10 “All Souls” 3: 473–74 architecture as representation 2: 344–48 comedy and, in films 1: 435 of death 1: 400–401 Gothic response to 1: 1–2 vs horror 3: 237–38, 463 King, Stephen 2: 495, 504 in literary history 1: 16–21, 65 The Marble Faun 2: 383–84 nationalism and 1: 93–102 Radcliffe, Ann 2: 336 of Rice, Anne (sidebar) 3: 278 Scott, Sir Walter 3: 309–13 sublime and 1: 110–13, 148–49 See also Horror; Psychological horror; Supernatural The Feast of All Saints (Rice) 3: 263–64 Fedorko, Kathy A. 3: 476–85 Female Gothic 1: 210–19 freaks 1: 215–16 Radcliffe, Ann 3: 252–59 Shelley, Mary 3: 327–33 “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother” (Moers) (sidebar) 3: 338 “Female Sexuality” (Freud) 1: 378 Feminist literary theory 1: 86–91, 108–9 American Gothic tradition 1: 210–19 “Taming a Tartar” 1: 203–6 Wharton, Edith 3: 459–60, 480–82 Femme fatale, 2: 139, 285–86 “Die Fermate” (Hoffmann) 2: 397 Ferriar, John 1: 207 Fetishism 2: 184–85; 3: 174 Fiedler, Leslie 1: 66–67, 212, 520 on American Gothic tradition 2: 298–305 on Brown, Charles Brockden 2: 156–62 on Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 205–11 Fielding, Henry 1: 490; 3: 24–25 Fielding, Penny 1: 38 Films, horror 1: 398–401, 415–52 American International Pictures 1: 429 Armageddon 1: 430 comedy and fear 1: 435 Corman, Roger 1: 443–46 demonic 1: 430 Dracula films 1: 446–47 family portrayal in 1: 420–22 German 1: 429, 430–31, 439 Hammer Films 1: 428–29, 435, 440, 445–47

history of development 1: 425–39 Japanese 1: 428 King, Stephen 1: 398–401 Lang, Fritz 1: 429, 431 monsters 1: 416–17, 427–30, 442 Poe, Edgar Allan 1: 429, 444–45 popularity of 1: 415 psychological thrillers 1: 438 science fiction 1: 427–29 Surrealist movement and 1: 416 television and 1: 431–32 zombie films 1: 443 See also specific names of films Fingal (Macpherson) 1: 97–98 Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (Carter) 2: 180, 183–85, (sidebar) 191 First Impressions (Austen) 2: 25, 32, 33 First Love: A Gothic Tale (Oates) 3: 165 Fisher, Bejamin F. IV 3: 128–32 Five Sermons on the Errors of the Roman Catholic Church (Maturin) 3: 92, 95 Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling (Godwin) (sidebar) 2: 330, 331 Flight (motif). See Chase (motif) Folklore, vampire 1: 344–45, 349, 353 Fontaine, Joan 2: 119 Fonthill Abbey 2: 85–86 Forbes, Esther 1: 62–65 “’A Forced Solitude’: Mary Shelley and the Creation of Frankenstein’s Monster” (Tillotson) 3: 342–48 “Foreword” (Morrison) 3: 137–38 “A Forgotten Creator of Ghosts: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Possible Inspirer of the Brontës” (Kenton) (sidebar) 3: 22 The Fortunes of Nigel (Scott) 3: 298, 311, 313 The Fortunes of Perkin Warbek (Shelley) 3: 320 The Fortunes of Torlough O’Brien (Le Fanu) 3: 7, 10–15 “Foucault in the House of Usher: Some Historical Permutations in Poe’s Gothic” (Dougherty) 3: 218–28 Foucault, Michel 1: 92, 145–46 doubles in 3: 350 family curse in 1: 295–96; 3: 221

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

GENRES

as social philosophy 1: 255 supernatural 3: 336–37 “Frankenstein, or the New Prometheus” (Bloom) 3: 337–42 Fraser, Graham 1: 38–39 “Das Fräulein von Scuderi” (Hoffmann) 2: 398 Fredolfo: A Tragedy (Maturin) 3: 74, 84–85 “Das fremde Kind” (Hoffmann) 2: 397 French authors 1: 2; 3: 97–103 French Revolution 1: 74–85, 410; 3: 350–52 French Ways and Their Meaning (Wharton) 3: 476, 479 Freund, Karl 1: 437 Freud, Sigmund 1: 70–71, 87, 90; 3: 372 beating fantasy 3: 329 demonic possession 1: 328 dream interpretation 1: 326–32 ghost stories 3: 462–63 on humor 2: 18 on hysteria 3: 243 Jung, Carl G. and 1: 329 Nachträglichkeit 2: 310 Oedipal complex 1: 377–79, 380, 384 pre-oedipal 1: 377–79 on “Der Sandmann” 2: 402–3, 408–9, 413 on the sublime 1: 152–53 uncanny 1: 301–10, 454, (sidebar) 2: 308 See also Psychoanalysis Friedkin, William 1: 450–51 A Friend to Genius (critic) 3: 48–51 “The Friends of the Friends” (James) 2: 471, 473 Frisch, Shelley L. 2: 408–11 “From Otranto to Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner’s Gothic Heritage” (Kerr) 2: 297–306 “From the Sublime to the Uncanny: Victorian Gothic and Sensation Fiction” (Milbank) 1: 86–92 The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton) 3: 463 Fugitive Verses (Baillie) 2: 49 “The Fullness of Life” (Wharton) 3: 458 Furnier, Vincent. See Cooper, Alice “Further Confessions” (Oates) 3: 180 Fuseli, Henry 1: 519, 520 Fuss, Diana 1: 72–73

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

G Gamer, Michael 3: 442–54 A Garden of Earthly Delights (Oates) 3: 164 The Garden of Earthly Delights (painting) 3: 56 Gardiner, H. W. 3: 379 Garner, Margaret 3: 146–47 Gaslight (film) 1: 339–40 Geary, Robert F. 3: 21–27 Gebir (Landor) 1: 257–58 Gender identity Klein, Melanie on 1: 379–81 pre-oedipal stage 1: 377–79 vampires 1: 382–84; 3: 275, 281–85 Gender relations Northanger Abbey 1: 221–22 “Taming a Tartar” 1: 199–200 Villette 2: 122–27 Gender roles 3: 476–80 Genres adventure fiction 3: 359 Ambiguous Gothic 2: 412–17, 453–55; 3: 176 Bildungsroman 2: 246–48 comic Gothic 2: 17–23 confessional novels 3: 211–17 convent stories 2: 223–24 curse narratives 1: 290–300 detective fiction 1: 36–37, 249–51; 2: 216; 3: 175–77 domestic fiction 1: 265–69 doppelgänger 1: 158–60, 305; 2: 391–92, 399–400, 414, 431, 473–377, 485 fantastic 1: 128–29; 3: 168–77, 180 female Gothic 1: 210–19; 2: 20, 36; 3: 252–59, 327–33 ghost stories 2: 6–8, 11, 229, 230, 364, 395, 462–64, 466– 71, (sidebar) 471; 3: 181, 459, 461–62, 466–75 historical novels 1: 58–65; 2: 400 horror 1: 261–62; 2: 481–504 Jacobin 1: 78 mystery 2: 249 novel of manners 2: 247–48 Oriental 1: 260–61; 2: 88–89, 96 romances 1: 49–52, 129–33, 220–26, 249–58, 501–2; 2: 115–20, 213–17, 368–77, 380–81; 3: 6–15 satire 3: 283 sea stories 1: 251–52; 3: 205–11 sensation fiction 1: 87–91, 354; 2: 211–15, 218–19, 223– 26, 431, 447; 3: 5–6 slave narratives 1: 183–92; 3: 146–48

535

SUBJECT INDEX

Fountainville Forest,a Play, in Five acts, as Performed at the Theatre-Royal Covent-Garden (Boaden) 1: 394–98, 413 Foxfire (Oates) 3: 165 The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Nussbaum) 3: 510 “Fragment of a Novel” (Byron) 1: 240–43 Frank, Frederick S. 2: 89–95, (sidebar) 3: 434 Frankenstein (film) (sidebar) 1: 416, 432–35, 440–42 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (Shelley) 1: 2, 25–27, 31; 2: 116; 3: 319–21, 343 as autobiography (sidebar) 3: 328, 342–47 birth metaphor (sidebar) 3: 338 British politics in 3: 348–55 compared to Caleb Williams 3: 339 compared to Pet Sematary 2: 500 compared to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3: 371 compared to “The Bell Tower” (sidebar) 3: 111 compared to Wonderland 3: 169–70 doubles in 3: 338–42, 350 dramatization of 1: 26 enigmatic code 1: 319–20 excess in 3: 352–55 female body 3: 330 feminist literary theory of 1: 108 film adaptation of 1: 422–25, 440–42 French Revolution 1: 82–85; 3: 350–52 heroine in 2: 138 as horror classic 1: 261–62 influence of St. Leon 2: 323 influence on Interview with a Vampire 3: 280 influences on 3: 321 loneliness in 3: 342–47 Milton, John in 3: 341 monster 3: 335–36, 339–42, 348–55 morality of 3: 335–36 narrative structure 3: 86 Promethean mythology 3: 338–442 psychoanalysis of 1: 322–24, 331 Scott, Sir Walter on 3: 336–37, (sidebar) 349 Shelley, Percy Bysshe on 3: 335–36

SUBJECT INDEX

“A GENUINE BORDER STORY”

Southern Gothic 2: 297–305; 3: 178 sportive Gothic 2: 447–51, 451–53 television Gothic 1: 452–59 terror-romances 1: 249–58 travel narrative 3: 107–8 urban Gothic 1: 129, 130–33, 139 vampire fiction 3: 266–76 Westerns 3: 205–6 See also Gothic movement “A Genuine Border Story” (Hogg) 2: 427 Getatore (superstition) 1: 308–9 “The Ghost of Edward” (Baillie) 2: 59 “The Ghost of Fadon” (Baillie) 2: 60 Ghost stories Atwood, Margaret 2: 6–8, 11 “Die Automate” 2: 388, 395 Dickens, Charles 2: 229, 230 Freudian analysis 3: 462–63 James, Henry 2: 462–64, 466– 71, (sidebar) 471 “Legends of the ProvinceHouse” 2: 364 “Night-Side” 3: 181 Wharton, Edith 3: 459, 461– 63, 466–75, 482 Wilde, Oscar 3: 488 Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (Le Fanu) 3: 1 The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (Wharton) 3: 466 “The Ghostly Rental” (James) 2: 461, 463, 471–72 Ghosts 1: 18 Beloved 3: 150–60 Cambrio-Britons 1: 413–15 The Castle of Otranto: A Story 3: 451–52 The Castle Spectre 1: 338 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1: 337 hallucinations 1: 333–41 Morrison, Toni 3: 138 Shelley, Mary on 3: 321–24 Wharton, Edith 3: 460–62, 466–75 See also Grotesques; Supernatural Ghosts (Wharton) 3: 457, 459, 460–62 “Ghosts in the Machines: The Haunted Castle in the Works of Stephen King and Clive Barker” (Oakes) 1: 283–90 “The Giant Woman” (Oates) 3: 180 The Giaour (Byron) (sidebar) 2: 95 Gibbs, Kenneth 2: 494–99 Giddens, Anthony 1: 130–31 Gide, André 2: 423

536

Gil Blas (Le Sage) 1: 334 Gill, R. B. 2: 95–101 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 1: 109, 212, (sidebar) 213, 214–15 Gilmor, Robert III 1: 502–5 Gilmore, Michael T. 2: 170–77 Gilmore, Mikal (sidebar) 3: 278 “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (Leiber) 1: 364–65, 367 Girouard, Mark 1: 490 Glen Ellen (house) 1: 504 “Glenallan” (Bulwer-Lyton) 1: 12–16 Glock, Waldo S. (sidebar) 2: 37 Go Down, Moses (Faulkner) 2: 294 Gobineau, Arthur de 3: 222 “Goblin Market” (Rossetti) (sidebar) 1: 143 “The Goblin Who Stole a Sexton” (Dickens) 2: 231–34 Goddu, Teresa A. 1: 180–97, 520 Godwin, William 1: 2, 20, 81, 87; 2: 321, 321–39 canonization of writers 1: 98 compared to Brown, Charles Brockden (sidebar) 2: 171 confessional style of 3: 211–13 on cultural nationalism 1: 99, 101 detective fiction 1: 249–50 on government 3: 350–51 influence of DeFoe, Daniel 3: 212 influence of Richardson, Samuel 3: 212–13 influence of the French Revolution 1: 78–80 influence on Brown, Charles Brockden 2: 168, 170–72 influence on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym 3: 213–17 necromancy 2: 326–27 philosophy of 2: 330–37 Poe, Edgar Allan on (sidebar) 2: 328; 3: 212 “Preface” to Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling (sidebar) 2: 330 principal works 2: 323–24 Shelley, Mary and 3: 319, 339, 345–46 social injustice 1: 22–23 sorcery 2: 325 supernatural 2: 324–27 witchcraft 2: 325–26 Wollstonecraft, Mary and 2: 322 “The Godwinian Confessional Narrative and Psychological Terror in Arthur Gordon Pym” (Markley) 3: 211–18 “Godwin’s Necromancy” (Poe) (sidebar) 2: 328 “Godwin’s Things As They Are” (The Monthly Review) 2: 327–30

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1: 2; 2: 341, 341–62 architecture 2: 344–49 Lewis, Matthew Gregory and 2: 349–53 märchen 2: 396 translation of “Der Erlkonig” (sidebar) 2: 350 uncanny 1: 308 Goethe’s Faust: Part II (Goethe). See Faust II Goethe’s Roman Elegies (Goethe) 2: 341 Goetz of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand (Goethe). See Goetz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand Goetz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (Goethe) 2: 341 “The Gold Bug” (Poe) 3: 206 The Golden Ass (Apuleius) 1: 20–21 The Golden Bowl (James) 2: 462 “The Golden Pot” (Hoffmann). See “Der goldene Topf” “Der goldene Topf” (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 402, 415 interpretations of 2: 393–97 supernatural 2: 412 Golem (film) 1: 434–35 Gondal (imaginary island) 2: 131, 132 Goodness, nature of 3: 510–11 Goodrich, Samuel 2: 364 Gorey, Edward (sidebar) 1: 510 Goth (music) 1: 470–73 Gothic (term) architecture 3: 142 Bronte¨, Charlotte and 2: 104–5 definition 1: 507; 2: 10–11, 113–14 negative connotations of 1: 40–42, 507; 2: 297–98 Oates, Joyce Carol on 3: 178–80 Gothic America (Goddu) 1: 520 “Gothic and Decadence: Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen” (Punter) 1: 158–71 “Gothic and Romance: Retribution and Reconciliation” (Sage) 3: 6–16 “The Gothic Arsenal of Edith Wharton” (Murray) 3: 462–66 “The Gothic Caleb Williams” (Rizzo) 2: 337–38 “Gothic Drama as Nationalistic Catharsis” (Hoeveler) 1: 410–15 “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution” (Paulson) 1: 74–86 “The Gothic Formula of ‘Bartleby’” (Ryan) 3: 122–24

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

A HAUNT OF FEARS

social history of 1: 48–57 television 1: 452–60 Victorian period and 1: 61–62, 86–91 visual arts 1: 475–526 women’s lack of recognition 1: 212 See also American Gothic tradition; European Gothic tradition; Genres; specific topics “Gothic Origins” (Botting) 1: 48–57 “Gothic Plot in Great Expectations” (Loe) 2: 245–51 “Gothic Possibilities in Moby-Dick” (Fisher) 3: 128–32 “Gothic Pyrotechnics” (Brockway) (sidebar) 2: 191 “Gothic Repetitions: Toni Morrison’s Changing Use of Echo” (Beutel) 3: 138–42 Gothic revival American 1: 497–505 architecture 1: 477–78, 486– 89, 497–505 Davis, Alexander Jackson (sidebar) 1: 491 England vs. United States 1: 488–89 “Gothic Spaces, The Political Aspects of Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (Weissberg) 3: 142–50 “The Gothic Spirit” (Ranger) 1: 401–11 “The Gothic Text: Life and Art” (Fedorko) 3: 476–85 “Gothic Transformations: Isak Dinesen and the Gothic” (James, S.) 2: 261–69 “The Gothic Unity of Godwin’s Caleb Williams” (Graham) 2: 330–37 “The Gothic Vathek: The Problem of Genre Resolved” (Frank) 2: 89–95 “The Gothic Wilde” (Lawler) 3: 493–502 Governor General’s Award 2: 1, 3 Graham, Kenneth 2: 330–37; 3: 249–52 Graham’s Magazine, (sidebar) 2: 369 “The Grave” (Blair, R.) 1: 53 Graveyard poetry 1: 52–55 Gray, Thomas 3: 446 “The Great Carbuncle,” 2: 374 Great Expectations (Dickens) 2: 229–30, 247, 252 as Bildungsroman 2: 246–48 cannibalism 2: 237 Gothic plot 2: 248–51 as novel of manners 2: 247–48 punishment of children 2: 239–40

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

The Great God Pan (Machen) 2: 169–70 The Greater Inclination (Wharton) 3: 457 Green, Howard 2: 261 “Green Tea” (Le Fanu) 1: 335–36; 3: 2 Greg, W. R. 2: 120–21 “The Grey Champion” (Hawthorne) 2: 370 Griffin, Susan M. 2: 217–28 Griffith, Clark 3: 202–5 Grimké, Sarah 1: 182 Gross Clinic (painting) 1: 519 Gross, Louis S. 1: 57–66 “The Grotesque and the Gothic” (Appel) 2: 300–301 Grotesques 1: 19 American Gothic tradition 2: 300–301 architecture 1: 483 Carter, Angela 2: 190–94 definition 2: 300 sublime and 2: 300 techno-gothic 2: 68–72 See also Ghosts Guattari, Felix 3: 226–27 Guy Deverell (Le Fanu) 3: 1–2 Guy Domville (James) 2: 462, 466–67, 473 Guy Mannering (Scott) 3: 306–7, 310–14

H Halberstam, Judith 1: 197–99, 205; 2: 234 Hale, Sarah J. 1: 211–12 Halloween (Burns) 1: 18 Hallucinations 1: 333–41 The Hamlet (Faulkner) 2: 294 Hammer Films 1: 428–29, 435, 440, 445–47 The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood) 2: 1–2, 11, 13 Hannah, Barbara 3: 380 Hannaham, James 1: 468–73 The Happy Prince (Wilde) 3: 488 Hardy, Thomas 1: 34–35 The Harlem Book of the Dead (Van Der Zee) 3: 146 Harlequin formula 3: 281–83 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, (sidebar) 2: 55 Hartman, Geoffrey 2: 302 Haslam, John 1: 338–39 Haslam, Richard 3: 91–97 Hassan, Ihab 2: 301, 302 A Haunt of Fears (Barker) 2: 184

537

SUBJECT INDEX

“Gothic Genealogies: Dracula, Bowen’s Court, and Anglo-Irish Psychology” (Ingelbien) 1: 171–80 “The Gothic Imaginary: Goethe in Strasbourg” (Calhoon) 2: 344–49 “Gothic in the Horror Film 1930-1980” (Punter) 1: 439–52 “Gothic Letter on a Hot Night” (Atwood) 2: 8 “Gothic Libraries and National Subjects” (Lynch) 1: 92–102 Gothic literature. See Gothic movement “Gothic Motifs in the Waverly Novels” (Le Tellier) 3: 305–16 Gothic movement abnormal psychology 1: 332–41 aestheticism 1: 48–57, 107–8 African American experience 1: 108, 180–92 American vs. European 1: 57– 65; 2: 156–58 Antebellum period 1: 180–92 art 1: 506–26 cannibalism 2: 237 character types 1: 20; 2: 298– 302, 403–7 compared to modernism 1: 30–39 “counterfeiting” 3: 397–404, 451–52 demonic women in fiction 2: 14–16 drama 1: 26–27, 401–15 evolution of 1: 40–47 Faustian legend 2: 156–57, 299 films 1: 415–52 French authors 1: 2 French Revolution 1: 74–85, 410 Irish authors 1: 38 language of 1: 38–39 libraries in 1: 92–102 as masculine endeavor 1: 523 medieval in 1: 49–51, 61, 511–13 music 1: 461–73 1990s 1: 520 origins 1: 1–2, 30–31; 2: 116, 189 overviews 1: 1–102 performing arts 1: 389–474 poetry of 1: 18–20, 24, 52–55 reader appreciation 1: 4–5 relationship of architecture to literature 1: 480–86, 497–505 romances vs. novels 1: 49–52 Romanticism and 1: 2, 21–29, 42–45; 2: 271, 494; 3: 124, 308–9 Russian authors 1: 2 Scottish writers 1: 2

SUBJECT INDEX

THE HAUNTED CASTLE

The Haunted Castle (Railo) 1: 284 “The Haunted Chamber” (Radcliffe) 3: 233–37 Haunted house (Gothic convention) “The Fall of the House of Usher” 3: 225–26 The House of Seven Gables 1: 292–94 symbolism of family curse 1: 290–300 See also Castle (Gothic convention) “Haunted Houses I and II” (Mighall) 1: 290–301 The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (Dickens) 2: 230 “The Haunted Palace” (Poe) 3: 223–24 Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (Oates) 3: 163–64, 180, 184 The Haunting (film) 1: 281 “A Haunting Back: Harriet Jacobs, African-American Narrative, and the Gothic” (Goddu) 1: 180–97 The Haunting of Hill House (Jackson) (sidebar) 1: 464 film adaptation 1: 281 loneliness in 1: 273–74 supernatural 1: 274–75 To Have and Have Not (film) (Faulkner) 2: 294 Hawkins, Anthony Hope 1: 130 “Hawthorne and the Gothic Romance” (Lundbland) 2: 378–82 Hawthorne, Julian (sidebar) 3: 503 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 363, 363–86 curse narratives 1: 292–95 European Gothic tradition 2: 378–79; 3: 125 Goodrich, Samuel and 2: 364 influence of German Romanticism 2: 379 influence of Maturin, Charles Robert 2: 374 influence of Radcliffe, Ann 2: 376 influence on James, Henry 2: 462–63 mysterious portrait and 2: 370 Poe, Edgar Allan on (sidebar) 2: 369, 379 principal works 2: 365–66 spiritualism 2: 379–80 witchcraft 2: 371–73 “Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun: A Gothic Structure” (Elder) 2: 382–86 “Hawthorne’s Use of Three Gothic Patterns” (Doubleday) 2: 368–78 The Hay Wain (painting) 3: 55

538

Hazlitt, William (sidebar) 2: 163, (sidebar) 3: 298 The Heart of Midlothian (Scott) 3: 292 fear 3: 310 mystery 3: 308 robbers 3: 313 violence 3: 311–12 “Heat” (Oates) 3: 178 Heat: And Other Stories (Oates) 3: 165 Heavy metal music compared to Gothic novel 1: 461–67 Led Zeppelin I 1: 461 Satanism 1: 463–65 sexuality in lyrics 1: 462–63 subversive nature of 1: 466–67 Hedonism 3: 512–15 Heilman, Robert B. 2: 107–14 “The Hellbound Heart” (Barker) 1: 288–89 Heller, Tamar 2: 205–10 Heller, Terry 2: 312–19 Helyer, Ruth 1: 36–37 Henley, Samuel 2: 87–88 Hennelly, Mark M. Jr 3: 51–61 Henriquez (Baillie) 2: 58 “Henry James’ Ghost Stories” (Woolf) (sidebar) 2: 471 Heredity. See Family curse (Gothic convention) A Heritage of Horror (Pirie) 1: 445 Heroes 1: 24; 2: 299 Byronic (sidebar) 1: 241, 253–54 doubles and 1: 313 in drama 1: 405–6 Melville, Herman 3: 116 solitude 1: 253–54 Heroes and Villains (Carter) 2: 180, 188 Heroines A Bloodsmoor Romance 3: 174–75 of Bronte¨, Charlotte 2: 107–14 The Castle of Otranto 2: 138, 144 of Dinesen, Isak 2: 264–68 in drama 1: 405–6 femme fatale 2: 139 Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus 2: 138 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 1: 214–15 The Italian 2: 138, 139 Jane Eyre 2: 115–20, (sidebar) 116 Justine 3: 64, 67–69 Little Dorrit 2: 253 madness 1: 339–41 Melmoth the Wanderer 2: 138– 41, 144 Melville, Herman 3: 115–16 The Monk 2: 138–39; 3: 64–67

“The Monkey” 2: 274–75 The Mysteries of Udolpho 2: 138, 139, 144; 3: 254–59 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 183 Radcliffe, Ann 1: 221–24; 3: 64 in Rebecca 2: 118–19, 285–90 submissiveness 2: 138 Wuthering Heights 1: 138–45 See also Women “Heroines of Nineteenth-Century Fiction” (Howells) (sidebar) 2: 116 Herzog, Werner 1: 430–31 Hibbert, Samuel 1: 334, 336–37, 338 Hieroglyphic Tales (Walpole) 3: 431 The High Bid (James) 2: 462 Hill, Leslie 1: 376 The Hill of Dreams (Machen) 1: 170–71 Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall 1: 461–68 Historical novels 1: 58–65; 2: 400 Historiography 1: 68–69 The History of Caliph Vathek: An Arabian Tale (Beckford). See Vathek History of English Poetry (Wharton) 1: 54 A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (Irving) 2: 441–42 A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Irving) 2: 442–43 Hitchcock, Alfred 1: 435, (sidebar) 436, 437, 447–48 Hoeveler, Diane Long 1: 410–15; 3: 327–35 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1: 2; 2: 387, 387–420 Cobb, Palmer on (sidebar) 2: 412 compared to Shelley, Mary 3: 330 doppelgänger 1: 305; 2: 391–92, 399–400, 414, 431 Gide, André and 2: 423 influence of Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3: 40–41 influence on Hogg, James 2: 431 märchen 2: 395, 397 musical life 2: 387, 398 principal works 2: 388–89 psychological horror 2: 411–17 Scott, Sir Walter on (sidebar) 2: 392, 401, 407 uncanny guest 1: 302–4; 2: 403–11 “Hoffmann’s Uncanny Guest: A Reading of ‘Der Sandmann’” (Prawer) 2: 401–8

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

“INTERRACIAL SEXUAL DESIRE IN CHARLOTTE DACRE’S ZOFLOYA”

in Wuthering Heights 1: 262–63 zombie films 1: 443 See also Fear; Psychological horror; Supernatural “The House” (Jackson) 1: 280 The House and the Brain (Bulwer-Lytton) 1: 262–63 House at Hawk’s End (Nicole) 2: 120 The House by the Churchyard (Le Fanu) 3: 1–2, 5 The House of Mirth (Wharton) 3: 457–358, 459–60, 481 The House of Raby; Or, Our Lady of Darkness (Hooper) 1: 296–98, 300 The House of Seven Gables (Hawthorne) 2: 364–65, 380 family curse 1: 294–95 haunted house 1: 292–94 mysterious portrait 2: 370 witchcraft 2: 373 The House of the Vampire (Viereck) 1: 363 “How Readers Make Meaning” (Crosman) 2: 308–10 Howe, S. G. 1: 296 Howells, Coral Ann 2: 10–17 Howells, William Dean (sidebar) 2: 116, 462 “Howe’s Masquerade” (Hawthorne) 2: 369 Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 1: 125–26 Human nature 2: 51–54, 56–57 Hume, David 2: 95, 99–100 Hume, Marilyn 2: 146–50 Humor Carter, Angela 2: 185 Dickens, Charles 2: 234–41 in early Gothic literature 2: 298 and fear, in films 1: 435 Irving, Washington 2: 451–54 Lady Oracle 2: 17–23 “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” 2: 447–48 The Magic Toyshop 2: 185 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 2: 433–34 Hurd, Richard 1: 42–46, 54–55; 3: 449–50 Hysteria as deception 2: 69–73 feminist literary theory 1: 211 Freud, Sigmund on 3: 243 See also Madness

I “I and My Chimney” (Melville) 3: 114

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

I Lock the Door upon Myself (Oates) 3: 165 “’I Wants to Make Your Flesh Creep’: Notes toward a Reading of the Comic-Gothic in Dickens” (Wolfreys) 2: 234–42 “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber” (King) 2: 481 Identity crisis, “Der Sandmann,” 2: 412–17 Illustrations of madness: exhibiting a singular case of insanity and a no less remarkable difference in medical opinion: developing the nature of the assailment,and the manner of working events; with a description of the tortures experienced by bomb-bursting, lobster-cracking, and lengthening of the brain (Halsam) 1: 338–39 “‘I’m in the Business Too’: Gothic Chivalry, Private Eyes, and Proxy Sex and Violence in Chandler’s The Big Sleep” (Rzepka) 1: 36 Imagery in Bleak House 2: 242–45 Melville, Herman 3: 113–14 music 3: 114 tower 3: 113–14 Imagination 2: 262–63, 268 Imogen (Godwin) 1: 411 The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde) 3: 488 In a Glass Darkly (Le Fanu) 1: 335–36; 3: 2 “In Cold Blood” (Capote) 1: 66 In the Circles of Fear and Desire (Day) 2: 312–13, 317 “In the Region of Ice” (Oates) 3: 183 Incest. See Sexuality, incest Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) 1: 185–92 The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (Carter) 2: 180, 195–99 Ingebretsen, Edward J. 3: 277–86 Ingelbien, Raphael 1: 171–80 Ingemann, Bernhard Severin 2: 272–73 An Inland Voyage (Stevenson) 3: 359 Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers (Abercrombie) 1: 333–34 Insanity. See Madness Intentions (Wilde) 3: 488, 493, 504, 507 Interlunar (Atwood) 2: 11 The Interpretations of Dreams (Freud) 1: 326–28 “Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya” (Mellor) 1: 207–10

539

SUBJECT INDEX

“Hoffmann’s Weird Tales” (Literary World), 2: 392–93 “Hogg” (Saintsbury) (sidebar) 2: 429 Hogg, James 1: 2, 28–29, 80; 2: 421, 421–39 compared to Dostoevski, Fyodor 2: 433–34 influence of Hoffmann, E. T. A. 2: 431 influence on Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 213 poetry 2: 421–23, 427 principal works 2: 423–24 Scott, Sir Walter and 2: 421– 22, 432–33 supernatural 2: 422–23, 425– 28, 431–32 Hogle, Jerrold E. 3: 395–405 Hollington, Michael (sidebar) 2: 252 “The Hollow of the Three Hills” (Hawthorne) 2: 364, 366–68, 371 Holt, Victoria 2: 115, 119–20 “Homely Gothic” (Botting) 2: 215–17 Homosexuality 1: 72–73 Beckford, William 2: 87, 98 in “The Monkey” 2: 273–76 See also Sexuality Hooper, Jane Margaret 1: 296–98, 300 Hope, Anthony. See Hawkins, Anthony Hope “Hop-Frog: Or, the Eight Chained Orang-Outangs” (Poe) 3: 189 Horace 1: 41 “Le Horla” (Maupassant) 1: 314 Horner, Avril 2: 284–91 Horror architecture as representation 2: 344–48 Calvinist motifs in 3: 277 Dinesen, Isak 2: 283–84 drama 1: 390 films, 1930-1980 1: 439–51 films, American 1: 398–401, 415–39 films, German 1: 429, 430–31, 439 films, Japanese 1: 428 Lewis, Matthew Gregory (sidebar) 3: 62 in The Mysteries of Udolpho 1: 225–26 Oates, Joyce Carol on (sidebar) 3: 179 pornography and 2: 187–88; 3: 284 science fiction films 1: 427–29 slavery as 1: 181–92, 520 television 1: 390–91, 431–32 vs. terror 3: 237–38, 463 Wharton, Edith 3: 463–66

SUBJECT INDEX

“THE INTERRUPTED CADENCE”

“The Interrupted Cadence” (Hoffmann). See “Die Fermate” “An Interview with Angela Carter” (Carter and Katsavos) 2: 181–82 Interview with the Vampire (Rice) 1: 369–70; 3: 263–65 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 280 theological debate in 3: 278–85 See also Vampire Chronicles “The Intoxicated” (Jackson) 1: 271, 272 “Introduction: The Art of Haunting” (Burns, S.) 1: 518–25 “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” (Wood) 1: 415–25 Introduction to The Best Tales of Hoffmann (Bleiler) 2: 393–401 Introduction to The Castle of Otranto (Gamer) 3: 442–54 Introduction to The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story and The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (Frank) (sidebar) 3: 434 Introduction to Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (Butler, M.) (sidebar) 3: 328 Introduction to Gothic Art (Martindale) 1: 506–11 Introduction to Gothic Sculpture 1140-1300 (Williamson) 1: 511–18 Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer (Baldick) 3: 84–91 Introduction to Plays on the Passions (Duthie) 2: 61–67 “Introductory” (Birkhead) 1: 16–21 “Introductory Discourse” (Baillie) 2: 51–54, 56–57, 62, (sidebar) 68 Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner) 2: 302 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (film) 1: 442 Iphigenia in Tauris (Goethe). See Iphigenie auf Tauris Iphigenie auf Tauris (Goethe) 2: 341 Ireland, W. H. 3: 199 Irigaray, Luce 1: 90–91 “Irving and the Gothic Tradition” (Clendenning) 2: 446–51 Irving, Henry 3: 400–401 Irving, Washington 1: 262; 2: 379, 441, 441–60 Ambiguous gothic 2: 453–55 American Gothic tradition 2: 443, 446–55 burlesque 2: 452–54 compared to Radcliffe, Ann 2: 453–55

540

compared to Scott, Sir Walter 2: 453 humor 2: 451–52 innovator of sportive Gothic 2: 447–51, 451–53 parody 2: 448–49, 453, 458–59 principal works 2: 443 the sublime 2: 452 use of sexual innuendo 2: 456–58 “Irving’s ‘Adventure of the German Student’” (Devlin) 2: 456–58 “Irving’s German Student” (Lupack) 2: 458–59 “Irving’s Use of the Gothic Mode” (Ringe) (sidebar) 2: 450 Irwin, Joseph James (sidebar) 3: 62 Island Nights’ Entertainments (Stevenson) 3: 360 The Island of Dr Moreau (Wells) 1: 162–66, 163 Island of Lost Souls (film) 1: 441–42 “Isle of the Devils” (Lewis) 1: 208 “The Isle of Voices” (Stevenson) 3: 360 IT (King) 2: 501 The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (Radcliffe) 2: 36; 3: 232, 243 doubles in 3: 369 heroine in 2: 138, 139 women’s education 3: 239–40, 242–44 Italy: With Sketches of Spain and Portugal (Beckford) 2: 80 Ivanhoe (Scott) 3: 308, 310, 312

J Jackson, Shirley 1: 264–82, (sidebar) 464 house theme 1: 280–82 loneliness theme 1: 272–78 marriage reflected in fiction 1: 266 misanthropy theme 1: 278–80 science fiction 1: 271–72 supernatural 1: 264, 267–72, 274–75 Jacobs, Harriet 1: 185–92 Jaffe, Aniela 3: 465 “James Boaden” (Temple) (sidebar) 1: 399 James, Henry 1: 31, 129; 2: 214–15, 461, 461–80 compared to Lewis, Matthew Gregory 2: 446–47 doppelgänger 2: 473–77 ghost stories 2: 462–64, 466– 71, (sidebar) 471

Gothic conventions 2: 470–77 house metaphor 2: 472–77 Howells, William Dean and 2: 462 influence of Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 462–63 principal works 2: 464–65 supernatural 2: 463–64, 470–73 Wharton, Edith and 3: 459, 483 James, M. R. 1: 38 James, Sibyl 2: 261–69 “Jamesian Gothicism: The Haunted Castle of the Mind” (Shelden) 2: 470–78 Jameson, Fredric 1: 146–47, 466–67 Jane Austen and her Art (Lascelles) 2: 32 “Jane Austen’s Gothic Architecture” (Lamont) 2: 41–46 Jane Eyre (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 103–5, 111, (sidebar) 121 Gothic conventions 2: 108–9 heroines (sidebar) 2: 116 masculine tone 2: 114–15 as prototype for modern Gothic 2: 115–20 Jane Eyre (film) 1: 119 Jane Talbot (Brown) 2: 154, 162 “Janice” (Jackson) 1: 269 Jarrett, David 2: 251–55 Jazz (Morrison) 3: 140–41 Jentsch, E. 1: 301–2 The Jewel of Seven Stars (Stoker) 3: 386 Jewsbury, Geraldine (sidebar) 2: 207 “Joanna Baillie and Charlotte Dacre” (Clery) 2: 54–61 Johnson, Diane 1: 217–19 Johnson, Greg 3: 178–85 Johnson, Heather 2: 190–94 Johnson, Samuel 1: 50–51 “The Jolly Corner” (James) 2: 461, 463–64, 466–77 “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu” (Ellis) (sidebar) 3: 6 “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu” (Rolleston) 3: 5–6 Joshi, S. T. 1: 264–83 “A journal entry of October 15, 1821” (Byron) (sidebar) 3: 42 Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (Lewis) 3: 32–33 The Journal of Julius Rodman (Poe) 3: 206 Journal of Natural Philosophy (Nicholson) 1: 336 The Journal of Sir Walter Scott (Scott) 3: 299

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

A LEGEND OF MONTROSE

K Kael, Pauline 1: 437 Kafka, Franz 3: 170 Kant, Ïmmanuel 1: 150–55 Karloff, Boris (sidebar) 1: 416, 434–35; 3: 353 Karpinski, Joanne B. 1: 68 Kater Murr (Hoffmann) 2: 403 Katsavos, Anna 2: 181–82 Keats, John 1: 2, 19, 24, (sidebar) 2: 171 Kemble, John Philip 1: 403 Kenilworth (Scott) 3: 297, 310, 312 Kenton, Edna (sidebar) 3: 22 Kerenyi, Karl 3: 465 “Kerfol” (Wharton) 3: 459, 471, 474 Kerr, Elizabeth M. 2: 297–306 Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 1: 185–86 Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751 (Stevenson) 3: 359–60 Kierkegaard, Søren 2: 272 Kilgour, Maggie 1: 67 “Kilmeny” (Hogg) 2: 423, 427 Kincaid, James 2: 236–37 King, Stephen 2: 481, 481–505 American Gothic tradition 2: 494–99 castle in 1: 284–90 compared to Shelley, Mary 2: 500 compared to Stevenson, Robert Louis 2: 485–87 doubles in 2: 485–93 families, American 2: 501–3 fear 2: 495, 504 on film adaptation of The Shining 1: 219

horror films 1: 398–401 influence of Melville, Herman 2: 494–99 principal works 2: 482–83 quest in (sidebar) 2: 492 serial killers 2: 490–93 supernatural 2: 501–4 vampires 1: 371–73; 3: 270 “The King’s Betrothed” (Hoffmann). See “Die Königsbraut” Kirland Revels (Holt) 2: 119–20 Kiss Me Again, Stranger (du Maurier), review of 2: 282–83 Klein, Melanie 1: 317–25 Lacan, Jacques on 1: 381 on mother 1: 379–81 Oedipal complex 1: 380 Klein Zaches (Hoffmann) 2: 405 Knapp, Steven 1: 144 Knickerbocker, Diedrich. See Irving, Washington Kollin, Susan 1: 36 “Die Königsbraut” (Hoffmann) 2: 400–401 Kotzebue, August von 1: 407–9 Kristeva, Julia 2: 287; 3: 482 Kroker, Arthur 1: 147 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge) 1: 19, (sidebar) 48

L Labyrinth (Gothic convention) 3: 197–98 Lacan, Jacques 1: 317, 381; 3: 350 LaCapra, Dominick 3: 152–55, 158 “The Lady of the House of Love” (Carter) 2: 182, 199 The Lady of the Lake (Scott) 3: 290, 306 Lady Oracle (Atwood) 2: 2, 3, 10 as comic Gothic 2: 17–23 compared to Cat’s Eye 2: 12 excerpt (sidebar) 2: 18 literary conventions in 2: 11–13 Lady Susan (Austen) 2: 33 Lady Windermere’s Fan (Wilde) 3: 488, 495 “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” (Wharton) 3: 458, 467, 471 The Lair of the White Worm (Stoker) 3: 386 Lamb, Mary 1: 100 Lamont, Claire 2: 41–46 “Landing in Luck” (Faulkner) 2: 293 Landor, Walter Savage 1: 257–58 Landscape (motif) “Bartleby the Scrivener” 3: 123–24

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

The Castle of Otranto 1: 402 in drama 1: 402–5 Moby-Dick; or, The Whale 3: 113 Radliffe, Ann 1: 403; 3: 113 Lang, Fritz 1: 429, 431 Langbaum, Robert 2: 262 Langhorne, John 3: 435 Langstaff, Launcelot. See Irving, Washington Lanone, Catherine 3: 97–104 Laplanche, Jean 2: 310–11 Lascelles, Mary 2: 32 Lasher (Rice) 3: 264 The Last Days of Pompeii (Bulwer-Lytton) (sidebar) 1: 15 The Last Man (Shelley) 3: 320 Last Tales (Dinesen) 2: 258 “The Later Years, 1820-1824” (Lougy) 3: 76–84 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry 1: 498–99 “The Laugh” (Wharton) 3: 478 Laurencin, Marie 2: 261 Lawler, Donald 3: 489, 493–502 Lawrence, D. H. (sidebar) 3: 203 Lay of the Last Minstrel (Scott) 1: 487; 3: 290 Lay Sermons (Hogg) 2: 427 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 1: 31, 89–90, 139; 3: 1, 1–29, (sidebar) 6 abnormal psychology in 1: 335–36 development of vampire 1: 353–58 doubles in 1: 382–84 dreams 1: 329–30 historical romances 3: 6–15 influence of (sidebar) 3: 22 influence on Stoker, Bram 1: 358 marriage of 3: 17–18 principal works 3: 3 sensation fiction 1: 354; 3: 5–6 women in 3: 16–17 Le Guin, Ursula K. (sidebar) 1: 291 Le Sage, Alain René 1: 334 Le Tellier, Robert Ignatius 3: 305–16 Leatherdale, Clive 3: 405–15 Led Zeppelin (musical group) 1: 461–62, 463 Led Zeppelin I (music recording) 1: 461, 462 Ledwon, Lenora 1: 452–60 Lee, Sophia 1: 115–18, (sidebar) 119 A Legend of Montrose (Scott) architecture motif 3: 315 doppelgänger 3: 314 fear 3: 310

541

SUBJECT INDEX

The Journals of Eleanor Druse: My Investigation of the Kingdom Hospital Incident (King) 2: 482 The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Atwood) 2: 2, 6, 11 A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (Radcliffe) 3: 232 Joy Division (musical group) 1: 471–73 Jude the Obscure (Hardy) 1: 35 Jung, Carl G. 2: 147, 412 dream interpretation 1: 329 du Maurier, Daphne and 2: 289 Freud, Sigmund and 1: 329 individuation 3: 481 psychological horror 3: 463 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3: 373–74 Justine (Sade) 3: 61–69

SUBJECT INDEX

“THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW”

mystery in 3: 307 violence 3: 312 “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (Irving) 2: 441–43, 447, 447–48, 457 Legends. See Mythology Legends of Angria (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 103 “Legends of the Province-House” (Hawthorne) 2: 364 Leiber, Fritz 1: 364–65 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Goethe) 2: 341 “Leixlip Castle” (Maturin) 3: 75–76 “Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood” (Freud) 1: 152 Lerner, Gerda 3: 17 Leroux, Gaston 1: 2 Lestat (character) 1: 369–70; 3: 269–70, 271–76, 280–83 A Letter from Xo Ho,a Chinese Philosopher at London, to His Friend Lien Chi at Peking (Walpole) 3: 446 Letter to Katharine de Mattos: 1 January 1886 (Stevenson) (sidebar) 3: 373 “A Letter to Richard Woodhouse on September 21, 1819” (Keats) (sidebar) 2: 171 Letter to Sir Walter Scott (Edgeworth) (sidebar) 3: 306 “Letter to Wilkie Collins on September 20, 1862” (Dickens) (sidebar) 2: 223 Letters (correspondence) du Maurier, Daphne 2: 289–90 Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3: 37–38 Walpole, Horace 3: 429, 431–32 See also specific letters Letters from Africa (Dinesen). See Breve fra Afrika (Dinesen) Letters of Horace Walpole (Walpole) 3: 429 The Letters of Oscar Wilde (Wilde) 3: 504–5 Letters on Chivalry and Romance (Hurd) 1: 42–46, 54–55; 3: 449–50 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (Scott) 1: 334, 335, 337, 338 Letters on Natural Magic (Brewster) 1: 334 Lévy, Maurice 3: 193–202 Lewes, George Henry 1: 300 Lewis, Matthew Gregory 1: 2, 48, 76–79, 81, 86–87, 402; 3: 31, 31–71 Byron, Lord George Gordon on 3: 36, (sidebar) 42

542

compared to Bosch, Hieronymous 3: 53–60 compared to James, Henry 2: 446–47 compared to Rice, Anne 3: 279 German romantic influence 1: 408 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von and 2: 349–53 heroines 2: 138–39, 144, 297–98 influence of 3: 40–45 influence on Bronte¨, Charlotte 2: 122–27 influence on Hoffmann, E. T. A. 3: 40–41 letters of 3: 37–38 madness as theme 1: 338; 3: 203 marriage of 3: 36 mastery of horror (sidebar) 3: 62 on The Mysteries of Udolpho 3: 39 nationalism 1: 412 plagiarism 3: 61 principal works 3: 33 racial phobia of 1: 208 Sade, Marquis de and 3: 61–69 Scott, Sir Walter on 3: 36 Shelley, Percy Bysshe and 3: 59–60 wasted talent of 3: 355 Lewis, W. S. 3: 447 Libraries 1: 92–102 Life among the Savages (Jackson) 1: 266–67 Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Laplanche) 2: 310–11 “Life and I” (Wharton) 3: 470, 476–78, 482–84 Life before Man (Atwood) 2: 2 “Ligeia” (Poe) 3: 188, 189 animated tapestry in 3: 200 castle in 3: 194–95 madness in 3: 204 Light in August (Faulkner) 2: 293–94, 302, 304 Lionel Lincoln (Cooper) 1: 58–62 Literary criticism, function of 1: 95–96 Literary Women: The Great Writers (Moers) 1: 210–11 Literary World, 2: 392–93 “The Little Antiquary” (Irving) 2: 452 Little Dorrit (Dickens) 2: 229–30, 251–55 “The Little Photographer” (du Maurier) 2: 284 Little Women (Alcott) 3: 175 Lives of the Necromancers; or, An Account of the Most Eminent Persons in Successive Ages, Who Have Claimed for Themselves, or

to Whom Has Been Imputed by Others, the Exercise of Magical Power (Godwin) 2: 324–27 Lives of the Novelists (Scott) 3: 313 Lives of the Twins (Oates) 3: 165, 178 Livre des Métiers (Boileau) 1: 515–16 Loe, Thomas 2: 245–51 Loneliness (theme) 1: 272–78; 3: 342–47 Long, Edward 1: 208 The Long Story (Beckford). See The Vision Longinus (philosopher) 1: 148–49 “The Looking Glass” (Wharton) 3: 467–68, 471 “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” (Wilde) 3: 487 Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories (Wilde) 3: 488 “The Lottery” (Jackson) 1: 272–73, (sidebar) 464 Lougy, Robert 3: 76–84 Louis (character) 1: 369–70; 3: 268–70, 280–84 as narrator 3: 271 sexuality of 3: 274–75 Love (Carter) 2: 180 Love and Death in the American Novel (Fiedler) 1: 67, 212, 520; 2: 298–303 Lovecraft, H. P. 1: 260–64, 261 on Poe, Edgar Allan (sidebar) 3: 219 supernatural (sidebar) 1: 260 on Walpole, Horace (sidebar) 3: 443 Loved and Lost (Le Fanu) 3: 17 “The Lovely Night” (Jackson) 1: 268–69 “The Lover’s Tale” (Maturin) 3: 77–78, 87, 90 Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Nussbaum) 3: 511 “The Loves of the Lady Purple” (Carter) 2: 183–84, (sidebar) 191 The Loving Spirit (du Maurier) 2: 279 Lubbock, Percy 3: 436–37 “Lucky to Get Away” (Jackson) 1: 266 “Luella Miller” (Wilkins-Freeman) 1: 365 Lugosi, Bela 1: 424, (sidebar) 425; 3: 353, 417 Lukacs, George 1: 58; 2: 209 Lundblad, Jane 2: 378–82 Lupack, Barbara Tepa 2: 458–59 Lynch, David 1: 454–56 Lynch, Deidre 1: 92–102 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 1: 153 “Lyttil Pynkie” (Hogg) 2: 422

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

MEMNOCH THE DEVIL

M

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

Medieval literature compared to American Gothic tradition 2: 298–99 horror as theme 1: 16–17 Meigs, J. Aitken 3: 218–19 “Meister Martin der Küfner und seine Gesellen” (Hoffmann) 2: 398–99 Méliès, George 1: 426 Mellard, James M. 2: 306–12 Mellor, Anne K. 1: 207–10 Melmoth réconcilié (Balzac) 3: 100–103 Melmoth, Sebastian. See Wilde, Oscar Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin) 1: 2, 31, 80, 87; 2: 254; 3: 73–74, 76, 297 as autobiography 3: 77 Calvinism 3: 91–96 compared to The Picture of Dorian Gray 3: 504–9 European Gothic tradition 3: 84–91 evil 1: 462 Gothic conventions in 1: 27–29 heroine in 2: 138–41, 144 influence on Fanshawe: A Tale 2: 379 labyrinth in 3: 197 mysterious portrait 1: 252; 3: 506–7 narrative structure 3: 77–78, 86–87, 98–99 “Preface” (sidebar) 3: 85 psychological horror in 1: 27–28 religion in 3: 79, 87–89 review (sidebar) 3: 98 sadism 3: 199 sequel to 3: 100–103 sublime 3: 91–96 “Melville and the Gothic Novel” (Arvin) 3: 111–19, 118 Melville, Herman 1: 143–44; 3: 107, 107–33 compared to Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 122–23 European Gothic tradition 3: 118–22 Gothic influence on 3: 111–16 imagery 3: 113–14 influence on King, Stephen 2: 494–99 monsters 3: 116 music imagery 3: 114 mysterious portrait convention 3: 114–15 principal works 3: 109–10 “Melville’s Use of the Gothic Tradition” (Shetty) 3: 118–22 Memnoch the Devil (Rice) 3: 264, 273–74 See also Vampire Chronicles

543

SUBJECT INDEX

“The Macabre and the Unexpected” (Barkham) 2: 282–83 MacAndrew, Elizabeth 3: 465 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 3: 447 Machen, Arthur 1: 169–71 Mack, Douglas S. 2: 425–28 Macpherson, James 1: 20, 97–98 MacPherson, Jay (sidebar) 3: 111 Mad Love (film) 1: 437 “Mad Monkton” (Collins) 1: 298–300 “Mademoiselle de Scuderi” (Hoffmann). See “Das Fräulein von Scuderi” Madness Bertram 1: 337–38 The Castle Spectre 1: 338 Gaslight 1: 339–40 as Gothic theme 1: 339–41; 2: 67–68 heroines 1: 339–41 Matthews, James Tilly 1: 338–39 Maupassant, Guy de 1: 314 Orra 1: 340–41 Poe, Edgar Allan 1: 314–15; 3: 202–5 Witchcraft 2: 72–73 “The Yellow Wallpaper” 1: 214–15 See also Hysteria Magic. See Sorcery The Magic Toyshop (Carter) 2: 180, 182, 183–85 Magistrale, Tony 3: 124–28 “Main Street” (Hawthorne) 2: 375 “The Making of a Genre” (Prawer) 1: 425–39 “The Making of the Count” (Leatherdale) 3: 405–15 Malin, Irving 2: 300–302 “The Man of the Crowd” (Poe) 3: 198 Mandel, Eli 2: 5–10 “Manfred” (Byron) 1: 24 Mangan, James Clarence 3: 82, 83 Mansfield Park (Austen) 2: 26–27, 32 Manuel (Maturin) 3: 74, 77, 84 The Marble Faun (Faulkner) 2: 294, 376 The Marble Faun (Hawthorne) 2: 363–65, 371–73, 382–85 Märchen (literary myth) 2: 394–95, 397 Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (Melville) 3: 108 “Markheim” (Stevenson) 3: 360, 368 Markley, A. A. 3: 211–18

Marmion (Scott) 3: 290, 306, 309, 312 The Marne (Wharton) 3: 458 Marriages and Infidelities (Oates) 3: 164, 180 Martindale, Andrew 1: 506–11 Martineau, Harriet 2: 218 “Mary Burnet” (Hogg) 2: 427–28 “Mary Shelley and Gothic Feminism: The Case of ‘The Mortal Immortal’” (Hoeveler) 3: 327–35 Marya (Oates) 3: 164 The Masque of Red Death (film) 1: 444 “The Masque of the Red Death” (Poe) 3: 188–89, 204, 224 The Master Flea (Hoffmann) 2: 397 The Master of Ballantrae (Stevenson) 3: 360 Mathilda (Shelley) 3: 330 “Matthew Gregory Lewis” (Montague) 3: 36–46 Matthews, James Tilly 1: 338–39 “Maturin and the ‘Calvinist Sublime’” (Haslam) 3: 91–97 Maturin, Charles Robert 1: 2, 80, 87, 337–38; 3: 73, 73–105 Catholicism 3: 87–88, 94–96 compared to Don Quixote 3: 82 compared to Wilde, Oscar 3: 504–9 death of 3: 81–82 German romantic influence 1: 407–8 heroines 2: 138–41, 144 influence of Romantic poets 3: 82 influence on Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 499 influence on French authors 3: 97–103 influence on Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 374 labyrinth convention 3: 197 on Melmoth the Wanderer (sidebar) 3: 85 portrayal of women 3: 80 principal works 3: 74 religion and 3: 79, 81 Scott, Sir Walter and 3: 82–83 use of Gothic conventions 1: 27–29 Maupassant, Guy de 1: 314 “Mayfair Witches” series (Rice) 3: 263–65 Maynard, Temple J. (sidebar) 1: 399 “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (Hawthorne) 2: 364 McCullers, Carson 1: 215; 2: 298, 300 McDowill, Margaret 3: 464

SUBJECT INDEX

MEMOIRS OF CARWIN THE BILOQUIST

Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (Brown) 2: 171–72, 176 Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (Brown) 2: 170 Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Es., R. A. (Collins) 2: 201, 205–10 “The Merry Men” (Stevenson) 3: 360 The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (Stevenson) 3: 360 “The Metamorphosis” (Oates) 3: 179 Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (Baillie) 2: 60 “Metzengerstein” (Poe) 3: 189, 199–200 Miall, David S. 3: 238–45 Michelis, Angelica 1: 376–85 “The Midnight Mass” (Collins) 2: 218 Mighall, Robert 1: 290–301 Milbank, Alison 1: 86–92 Miles, Robert 1: 411 The Milesian Chief (Maturin) 1: 27; 3: 73–74, 83, 84, 85 Milton, John 2: 170–76; 3: 339, 341 “The Mines of Falun” (Hoffmann). See “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” “The Minister’s Black Veil” (Hawthorne) 2: 364 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Scott) 3: 290 “The Mirror and the Cameo: Margaret Atwood’s Comic/Gothic Novel, Lady Oracle” (Vincent) 2: 17–24 A Mirror for Witches (Forbes) 1: 62–65 “Mirrored Worlds and the Gothic in Faulkner’s Sanctuary” (Heller, Terry) 2: 205–10 Mirroring (literary convention) 2: 312–18 Misanthropy 1: 278–80 Miscegenation 3: 218–19, 221–27 Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (Aiken, Barbauld) 1: 2, (sidebar) 7 Miscellaneous Plays (Baillie) 2: 50 Mishra, Vijay 1: 143–57 Misogyny 2: 221 “Miss Braddon” (James, H.) 2: 214–15 “Miss Jeromette and the Clergyman” (Collins) 2: 203–4 The Mist (King) 1: 286–87 Mitchell, S. Weir (sidebar) 1: 213, 213–14 Miyoshi, Masao 3: 365–70

544

Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale (Melville) 3: 107–9 Captain Ahab as Gothic villain 3: 126–27 castle in 3: 128–32 compared to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym 3: 206–8 compared to The Shining 2: 494–99 film adaptation 3: 129 landscape motif 3: 113 mysterious portrait in 3: 114 review (sidebar) 3: 125 “The Modern American Horror Movie—Text and Subtext” (King) 1: 398–401 Modern Novel Writing; or, The Elegant Enthusiast (Beckford) 2: 80 Modernism 1: 30–39, 109 Moers, Ellen 1: 210–11, 215, (sidebar) 3: 338 Mogen, David 1: 68 Mona Lisa 1: 32–33 Monasteries. See Religious buildings The Monastery (Scott) 3: 314 The Monk (Lewis) 1: 2, 48, 76–79, 81, 86–87; 3: 32–33, 66 as advocate of virtue 3: 48–51 compared to Justine 3: 61–69 compared to paintings of Bosch, Hieronymous 3: 54–60 compared to Villette 2: 122–27 excess in 3: 355 heroine in 2: 138–39; 3: 64–67 indecency of 3: 46–48 influence of Faust: Ein Fragment 2: 349–53 influence on Die Elixiere des Teufels 3: 40–41 Lord Byron’s lampoon of 3: 51–52 madness as theme 3: 203 as original Gothic literature 2: 116 “The Preface” 3: 34 publishing history 3: 39–40 as sensational fiction 3: 31 sexuality 1: 463 Monk, Samuel H. 1: 148, 152 “The Monkey” (Dinesen) 2: 259–61, 269 doubles in 2: 272–73 Gothic conventions 2: 263–68 heroine in 2: 274–75 homosexuality 2: 273–76 monsters 2: 267 reader response 2: 276–77 “The Monk’s Gothic Bosh and Bosch’s Gothic Monks” (Hennelly) 3: 51–61

“’The Monster Never Dies’: An Analysis of the Gothic Double in Stephen King’s Oeuvre” (Strengell) 2: 485–93 Monsters ambivalence toward 1: 417 as cultural symbols 1: 198–99 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 1: 25–26, 83–85, 255; 3: 335–36, 339–42, 343, 348–55 horror films 1: 416–17, 427– 30, 442 Karloff, Boris 1: 434–35 Melville, Herman 3: 116 “The Monkey” 2: 267 Pet Semetary 2: 486 sexuality of 2: 188 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3: 370–72 in “Taming a Tartar” 1: 199– 207 techno-gothic grotesques 2: 68–72 See also Vampires; Werewolves “Monte Verità” (du Maurier) 2: 284 The Monthly Review (periodical) 2: 327–30; 3: 51, 444–45 The Moonstone (Collins) 2: 201, (sidebar) 207 “‘More Demon than Man’: Melville’s Ahab as Gothic Villain” (Magistrale) 3: 124–28 Moretti, Franco 2: 234 Morrison, Toni 1: 108; 3: 135, 135–61 on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 3: 158 American Africanism 1: 118–27 castle convention 3: 136 Echo mythology 3: 138–41 ghosts 3: 150–60 inspiration for Beloved 3: 137–38 oral tradition 3: 147 portrayal of women 3: 139–41, 147–48 principal works 3: 136 Pulitzer Prize 3: 135 supernatural 3: 138–42, 148–49 Morse, Heyward 2: 468 “The Mortal Immortal: A Tale” (Shelley) 3: 330–33 Mosses from an Old Manse (Hawthorne) 2: 364–65, 379, 381 Mothers Freud, Sigmund on 1: 377–79 Klein, Melanie on 1: 379–81 power of 3: 480–84

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

NIXON, RICHARD

Lewis, Matthew Gregory on 3: 39 as original Gothic literature 2: 116 Psyche mythology 3: 252–56 sublime theme in 3: 313 suspense narrative of 3: 249–52 women’s education 3: 239–43 Mysteries of Winterthurn (Oates) 3: 163–65, 175–78 The Mysterious Mother (Walpole) 3: 431, (sidebar) 434 The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Dickens) 2: 230 Mysticism 1: 254–55 Mythology Carter, Angela 2: 188–89 Dracula 1: 166–69 Echo 3: 138–41 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 338–42 horror films 1: 445–47 märchen 2: 394–95 motherhood (sidebar) 3: 338 Prometheus 3: 338–42 Psyche 3: 252–56 sexuality 2: 188–89 The Sphinx 3: 498 vampire 3: 266–76 Wharton, Edith 3: 465, (sidebar) 467 Mythology of the Secret Societies (Roberts) 1: 79

N Nachträglichkeit (deferred action) 2: 310 Nachtstüke (Hoffmann) 2: 397 “Naked” (Oates) 3: 182 “Napoleon and the Spectre” (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 105–7 “Narrative and Psychology in Gothic Fiction” (Punter) 1: 317–26 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Poe) 1: 118, 251; 3: 204, 207 biographical analysis of 3: 205–11 compared to Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale 3: 206–8 history of critical reception 3: 189–90 influence of Godwin, William 3: 211–17 as Western novel 3: 205–6 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass) 1: 183–85 Nash, Jesse W. 2: 499–504 National Book Award 3: 163–64

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

Nationalism drama 1: 412 European Gothic tradition 1: 93–102, 158–71; 2: 240 Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 83 Native Son (Wright) 1: 180 Naturalism 1: 129–30, 482–83 Naylor, Gloria 3: 142 Necromancy 2: 326–27, (sidebar) 328 Nemesis (Oates) 3: 165, 178 Neoclassicism 1: 50–55 “Never Bet the Devil your Head” (Poe) 3: 198 New American Gothic (Malin) 2: 301–2 “New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History” (Lerner) 3: 17 “New Life for an Old Tradition: Anne Rice and Vampire Literature” (Wood, M.) 3: 266–76 The New Magdalen (Collins, Wilkie) 1: 88 The New Monthly Magazine, 2: 428–29 “New Novels: The Moonstone: A Romance” (Jewsbury) (sidebar) 2: 207 “New Publications, with Critical Remarks: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” (The New Monthly Magazine) 2: 428–29 “A New Year’s Eve Adventure” (Hoffmann). See “Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht” Newgate novels (sidebar) 1: 94 Newton, Judith 3: 17, 21 Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens) 2: 230 Nicholson, Jack 2: 498 Nicholson, William 1: 336 Nicolai, Friedrich 1: 336–37 Nicole, Claudette 2: 115, 120 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1: 147; 3: 470 Night of the Living Dead (film) 1: 442–43 Night Side: Eighteen Tales (Oates) 3: 163–65, 170, 180–84 Night Thoughts (Young) 1: 53 Nightmare (Gothic element) “The Company of Wolves” 2: 187 Gorey, Edward (sidebar) 1: 510 horror films 1: 415–16 Nightmare (painting) 1: 519 Nights at the Circus (Carter) 2: 180, 182, 185–86, 197–99 “Night-Side” (Oates) 3: 181 The Night-Side of Nature (Crowe) 3: 24 Nightwood (Barnes) 2: 188 Nixon, Richard 1: 369

545

SUBJECT INDEX

relationship to children 1: 377–81 Wharton, Edith and 3: 476–77, 483–84 The Mountain Bard: Consisting of Ballads and Songs, Founded on Facts and Legendary Tales (Hogg) 2: 422 Movie-Made America (Sklar) 1: 438 “The Moving Finger” (Wharton) 3: 458 “Mr Adamson of Laverhope” (Hogg) 2: 426–27 “Mr. Jones” (Wharton) 3: 459 “Mrs. Ann Radcliffe: The Craft of Terror” (Varma) (sidebar) 3: 253 “MS. Found in a Bottle” (Poe) 3: 188, 202 Murder in the Dark (Atwood) 2: 10, 11, 17 Murders in the Rue Morgue (film) 1: 418–19 Murders in the Rue Morgue (Poe) 1: 250–51 Murdoch, Iris 3: 510–11 Murnau, F. W. (sidebar) 1: 451 Murphy, Dennis Jasper. See Maturin, Charles Robert Murray, Margaret P. 3: 462–66 Music 1: 391, 461–73 blues 1: 464 Bromley Contingent 1: 470–71 Goth 1: 470–73 heavy metal 1: 461–67 imagery 3: 114 punk 1: 470–73 rock 1: 461–62, 469–73 See also specific names of musical groups, songs and albums My Heart Laid Bare (Oates) 3: 165 “My Life with R. H. Macy” (Jackson) 1: 265 Myers, F. W. H 1: 330–31 Mysteries 2: 249; 3: 306–8 The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe) 1: 2, 80–81, 92–93; 2: 25, 59; 3: 231–33, 255 castle convention in 1: 226 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor on 3: 245–46 compared to Billy Budd 3: 111–12 compared to Twin Peaks 1: 455 Enfield, William on 3: 246–49 “The Haunted Chamber” 3: 233–37 heroine in 1: 221–24; 2: 138, 144; 3: 254–59 horror 1: 225–26 influence on Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 501 influence on Northanger Abbey 2: 34–40

SUBJECT INDEX

“’NO MORE THAN GHOSTS MAKE’”

“’No More Than Ghosts Make’: The Hauntology and Gothic Minimalism of Beckett’s Late Work” (Fraser) 1: 38–39 No Name (Collins, Wilkie) 1: 88 The Nocturnal Minstrel (Sleath) 1: 98 Northanger Abbey (Austen) 1: 74–76, 80–81; 2: 25–31, 236 architecture 2: 41–45 compared to The Blind Assassin 2: 3 gender relations 1: 221–22 Gothic extravagance in (sidebar) 2: 37 influence of The Mysteries of Udolpho 2: 34–40 revision of 2: 31–35 sensibility in 2: 36–40 Northanger Novelists 1: 7 Nosferatu (film) 1: 450, (sidebar) 451 Nostalgia 1: 69 The Notebooks of Henry James (James) 2: 473 Nothing Sacred (Carter) 2: 180 “Novel Notes: Dracula” (The Bookman), (sidebar) 3: 405 Novel of manners, Great Expectations, 2: 247–48 ““The Novel of Suspense’: Mrs. Radcliffe” (Birkhead) (sidebar) 3: 246 Novels. See Genres “Novels of the Season” (Whipple) 2: 114–15, 135–36 “The Nuns of Magwan” (Collins) 2: 218, 219–20 Nussbaum, Martha C. 3: 510–11 “Nussknacker und Mausekönig” (Hoffmann) 2: 396–97 “Nutcracker and the King of Mice” (Hoffmann). See “Nussknacker und Mausekönig” “Nymph of the Fountain” (Beckford) (sidebar) 2: 84

O O. Henry Award 3: 164 Oakes, David A. 1: 283–90 Oates, Joyce Carol 1: 216–17; 3: 163, 163–86 American Gothic tradition 3: 168–84 compared to Alcott, Louisa May 3: 175 doppelgänger 3: 183–84 fantastic 3: 168–77 on Gothic 3: 178–80 heroines 3: 183 on horror (sidebar) 3: 179

546

Kafka, Franz and 3: 170 National Book Award 3: 163–64 O. Henry Award 3: 164 otherness as theme 3: 170, 183 principal works 3: 165–66 Southern Gothic 3: 178 on The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3: 370–72 Observations on Maniacal Disorders (Pargeter) 1: 339 O’Connor, Flannery (sidebar) 1: 68, 69, 215; 2: 304 O’Connor, William Van 3: 118 “October 4, 1957, and an Invitation to Dance” (King) 2: 483–85 Ode on Melancholy (Keats) 1: 19 Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands (Collins, William) 1: 18 “Ode to Fear” (Collins, William) 1: 53–54 Oedipal complex 1: 377–79, 380, 384 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Rich) 1: 216 O’Keeffe, John 1: 406–7 “Olalla” (Stevenson) 3: 368 The Old Curiosity Shop (Dickens) 2: 229–30, 252 The Old English Baron (Reeve) (sidebar) 1: 112, 113–15, 115, 2: 252 Old Mortality (Scott) doppelgänger 3: 314 fear 3: 309–10 violence 3: 312 “An Old Woman’s Tale” (Hawthorne) 2: 364 Oldstyle, Jonathan. See Irving, Washington Oliphant, Margaret 2: 211–14 Oliver Twist (Dickens) 2: 230, 239–40, 248 O’Malley, Patrick 1: 35 The Omen (film) 1: 422 Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (Melville) 3: 108, 114, 119 “On Fable and Romance” (Beattie) 1: 50 “On Frankenstein” (Shelley, P.) 3: 335–36 “On Ghosts” (Shelley) 3: 321–24 “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror, with Sir Bertrand, A Fragment” (Aiken, Barbauld) 1: 4–7, (sidebar) 7, 46 “On the Relative Simplicity of Gothic Manners to Our Own” (Walpole) 3: 446

“On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition” (Scott) (sidebar) 2: 392, (sidebar) 3: 349 “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (Radcliffe) 3: 237–38 “On the Uncanny” (Freud) 1: 70–71, 87 On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (King) 2: 482 “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts” (Jackson) 1: 279 Oral tradition Morrison, Toni 3: 147 supernatural as theme 1: 17–18 Oriental tales 1: 260–61; 2: 88–89, 96 Orlok, Count (character) 1: 450 Ormond (Brown) 2: 153–54, 159–61 Orra (Baillie, Joanna) 1: 340–41; 2: 50, 56, 58, 59–60 Osceola. See Dinesen, Isak Osmyn the Renegade (Maturin) 3: 76 Ossian (Macpherson) 1: 20, 45–46 The Other House (James) 2: 472 “Other Themes” (Railo) 1: 249–60 Otherness (theme) 1: 67–74 in American Gothic paintings 1: 521–25 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 170, 176, 183 “The Others” (Oates) 3: 179–80 “Our Library Table” (Chorley) (sidebar) 2: 137 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens) 2: 229–30, 237 “Our Vampire, Our Leader: Twentieth-Century Undeaths” (Auerbach) 1: 361–76 Out of Africa (Dinesen) 2: 257–58 The Outcry (James) 2: 462 “The Oval Portrait” (Poe) 1: 252–53; 3: 189, 192–95, 199 “Owen Wingrave” (James) 2: 463 “Oxford’s Ghosts: Jude the Obscure and the End of the Gothic” (O’Malley) 1: 35

P Pain 1: 110–13 “The Painter’s Adventure” (Irving) 2: 452 Painting 1: 475–76, 518–25; 3: 53–60, 447 See also specific names of paintings Pandora (character) 3: 271 Paradise Lost (Milton) 2: 170–76; 3: 339, 341

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

POETRY

author’s defense of 3: 492–93 compared to Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 504–9 degeneration 1: 160–62 doubles in 1: 34 Hedonism 3: 512–15 morality 3: 510–16 mysterious portrait convention 1: 253; 3: 488, 494–95, 506–7 review 3: 502–4 supernatural 3: 511–15 themes 1: 162 Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Melville) 1: 143–44; 3: 108–9 music imagery 3: 114 mysterious portrait conventiion 3: 114–15 symbolism in 3: 115 tower imagery 3: 113 Pierson, William 1: 497 The Pilgrims of the Sun (Hogg) 2: 422–23, 427 “Pillar of Salt” (Jackson) 1: 268 The Pirate (Scott) 3: 292, 297, 315 architecture motif 3: 315 buccaneers 3: 313 fear 3: 310 mystery in 3: 300–304, 307 superstition 3: 314 Pirie, David 1: 445 “The Pit and the Pendulum” (Poe) 3: 189, 198–99 Planche, J. R. 1: 348–49 Plath, Sylvia 1: 215–16 Playing in the Dark (Morrison) 1: 108 Plays on the Passions (Baillie). See A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy “A Plea for Sunday Reform” (Collins) 2: 218 “The Pleasure Principle” (Freud) 1: 90 “Poe and Hoffmann” (Cobb) (sidebar) 2: 412 “Poe and the Gothic” (Griffith) 3: 202–5 “Poe and the Gothic Tradition” (Lévy) 3: 193–202 Poe, Edgar Allan 1: 2, 71–72; 2: 311; 3: 187, 187–230 American Africanism and 1: 118 animated tapestry convention 3: 199–200 Blythe, David Gilmour and 1: 524 castle convention 3: 194–97 Cole, Thomas and 1: 524 compared to Melville, Herman 3: 122–23

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

compared to Stevenson, Robert Louis 3: 365 on Cooper, James Fenimore 3: 206 cultural identity in 1: 126–27 decadent aristocrat convention 3: 189 detective fiction 1: 250–51 devil 3: 198 on Godwin, William (sidebar) 2: 328 horror films 1: 429, 444–45 influence of European Gothic tradition 3: 188, 194–95, 202, 211–13 influence of Hogg, James 3: 213 influence of Walpole, Horace 2: 310–11 influence on Gothicism 1: 31 labyrinth convention 3: 197–98 Lawrence, D. H. on (sidebar) 3: 203 Lovecraft, H. P. on (sidebar) 3: 219 madness as theme 1: 314–15; 3: 202–5 on Mosses from an Old Manse 2: 379 mysterious portrait convention 3: 199 mysticism 1: 254–55 Otherness of 1: 523–24 principal works 3: 190 prophecy convention 3: 200 sadism 3: 198–99 transcendence 2: 494–96 on Twice Told Tales (sidebar) 2: 369 Wandering Jew (Gothic convention) 3: 198 Poems (Wilde) 3: 487 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (Bronte¨, C. and Bronte¨, E.) 2: 103, 132 Poems. by Edgar Allan Poe (Poe) 3: 187 Poems: Wherein It Is Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners (Baillie) 2: 49–50, 56 The Poetic Mirror; or, The Living Bards of Britain (Hogg) 2: 422 “Poetics of the Uncanny: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Sandmann’” (Frisch) 2: 408–11 Poetry ballads 1: 258 Graveyard school 1: 52–55 Hogg, James 2: 421–23, 427 Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 187–88, 189 Romanticism and 3: 369

547

SUBJECT INDEX

“The Parasite” (Doyle) 1: 365 Pargeter, William 1: 339 Parisi, Peter 3: 284 Parker, John Henry 1: 477–80 “Parodied to Death: The Postmodern Gothic of American Psycho” (Helyer) 1: 36–37 Parody 2: 448–49, 458–59 Parsons, Mrs. Eliza 1: 2, 7–9 “Part II: Sections I and II, and Part IV: Sections V, VI, VIII, and IX” (Burke) 1: 110–13 Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Hawthorne) 2: 382 The Passion of New Eve (Carter) 2: 180, 190–94 A Passionate Pilgrim (James) 2: 477 Pater, Walter 1: 32–33 “The Pathology of History” (Gross) 1: 57–66 Patriarchy Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome 2: 206–10 The Magic Toyshop 2: 185 Wharton, Edith 3: 476–80 Patterns (literary convention) 2: 301–3, 368–77 Pattison, Robert 1: 463, 464–65 Paulson, Ronald 1: 74–86 “The Pavilion on the Links” (Stevenson) 3: 360 Peabody, Sophia 2: 364 Peck, Gregory 3: 129 Peeping Tom (film) 1: 447–48 Penny dreadful 1: 2 Percy, Thomas 1: 54 Peregrine Pickle (Smollet) 1: 50 The Perfectionist (Oates) 3: 164 Peri Hypsous (Longinus) 1: 148–49 Perkins, Anthony 1: 437 Persona (film) 1: 429 Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (Irving, H.) 3: 400–401 Persuasion (Austen) 2: 25–27, 32, 42 Perversity, sexual 2: 186, 288 Pet Sematary (King) 2: 482, 486, 499–504 Petersen, Karen 2: 261 Peveril of the Peak (Scott) 3: 292, 297, 311, 315 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Burke) 1: 107, 110–13 Physiognomy 1: 107 The Piazza Tales (Melville) 3: 108, 110–11 The Pickwick Papers (Dickens) 2: 229–34, 235, 237 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde) 1: 31, 37–38; 3: 487–89, (sidebar) 503 aestheticism 3: 494–95

SUBJECT INDEX

THE POISONED KISS AND OTHER STORIES FROM THE PORTUGUESE

Scott, Sir Walter 3: 289–90, 293–94 supernatural themes 1: 18–20 Walpole, Horace 3: 446 Wilde, Oscar 3: 487, 488, 497– 99, 499 See also specific titles and authors The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (Oates) 3: 164, 170, 180 Polanski, Roman 1: 449 Polidori, John 1: 243–49, 262, 344–47, 345, (sidebar) 362 Political ideology. See Sociopolitical ideology “The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s” (Clery) 1: 220–28 “Pomegranate See d” (Wharton) 3: 457, 459, 461, 470, 471 female archetypes 3: 464–66 female mythology (sidebar) 3: 467 as ghost story 3: 463–65 Pornography American Psycho 1: 37 horror and 2: 187–88; 3: 284 The Magic Toyshop 2: 184–85 psychological horror and 2: 187–88 The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History 2: 187–88 See also Sexuality The Portable Faulkner (Faulkner) 2: 294 Porte, Joel 3: 277 Portrait, mysterious (Gothic convention) The Castle of Otranto 1: 252; 2: 252, 254; 3: 25, 199 “Family Portraits” 1: 292 The House of Seven Gables 2: 370 Little Dorrit 2: 254 Melmoth the Wanderer 1: 252; 3: 199, 506–7 Melville, Herman 3: 114–15 The Oval Portrait 1: 252–53 The Picture of Dorian Gray 1: 253; 3: 488, 494–95, 506–7 Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 199 Rossetti, Christina 1: 252–53 terror-romanticism and 1: 252–53 The Portrait of a Lady (James) 2: 462, 471–72 The Possessed (Dostoevski) 1: 315 “The Possibility of Evil” (Jackson) 1: 275–76 The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (Dickens). See The Pickwick Papers Postman, Neil 1: 455

548

“Postmodern Gothic: Desire and Reality in Angela Carter’s Writing” (Neumeier) 2: 194–200 “Postmodern Gothic: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary” (Nash) 2: 499–504 Postmodernism Carter, Angela 2: 188 Jameson, Fredric on 1: 466–67 Pet Sematary 2: 500–504 sublime 1: 147–48 Poteet, Lewis J. 3: 504–9 Powell, Michael 1: 447–48 “The Power of Allusion, the Uses of Gothic: Experiments in Form and Genre” (Johnson, G.) 3: 178–85 Power Politics (Atwood) 2: 1, 9 Prawer, S. S. 1: 425–39; 2: 401–8 “The Preceptor as Fiend: Radcliffe’s Psychology of the Gothic” (Miall) 3: 238–45 “Preface” (Godwin) (sidebar) 2: 330 “Preface” (Lewis) 3: 34 “Preface” (Maturin) (sidebar) 3: 85 “Preface” (Wharton) 3: 460–62, 472, 474 “Preface to Wuthering Heights” (Bronte¨, C.) (sidebar) 2: 147 The Prelude (Wordsworth) 1: 21 Prest, Thomas Preckett 1: 349 Price, Vincent 1: 444–45 Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 2: 26–27 The Prince of Angola (Ferriar) 1: 207 The Prisoner of Zenda (Hawkins) 1: 130 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Hogg) 1: 80; 2: 421–23, 427 bad grammar in 2: 428–29 Calvinism 2: 429–31 compared to Die Elixiere des Teufels 2: 431 criticism of 2: 432 Devil as divine 2: 434–36 dreams 2: 431–32 German Romanticism and 2: 432 as greatest Scottish book 2: 432–38 narrative structure 3: 86 publication history 2: 429 Saintsbury, George on (sidebar) 2: 429 Scottish influence in 1: 28–29; 2: 436–37 supernatural 2: 423, 431–32 The Professor (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 103–4, 107, 122 The Progress of Romance (Reeve) 1: 51–52

“Prologue and Act 1, Scene 1” (Siddons) 1: 398 Prophecy (Gothic convention) 3: 200 “The Prophetic Pictures” (Hawthorne) 2: 364, 370 “Providence and the Guitar” (Stevenson) 3: 361 Psycho (film) 1: 437, 447–48 Psychoanalysis 1: 70–71, (sidebar) 2: 308 Ambiguous Gothic 2: 412–17 beating fantasy 3: 329, 330 of Beloved 3: 150–60 The Castle of Otranto 1: 322 dreams 1: 326–29 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 1: 322–24 Klein, Melanie 1: 317–25, 379–81 LaCapra, Dominick 3: 152–55, 158 object-relations psychology 1: 319, 321 “A Rose for Emily” 2: 310–11 symbolism 1: 321–22 See also Freud, Sigmund Psychological horror American Gothic tradition 2: 299 Carter, Angela 2: 183–89 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 2: 411–17 Jung, Carl G. 3: 463 The Marble Faun 2: 383–84 Melmoth the Wanderer 1: 27–29 Mosses from an Old Manse 2: 365 pornography and 2: 187–88 psychological thrillers 1: 438 “Young Goodman Brown” 2: 365 See also Horror Psychology abnormal 1: 332–41 Gil Blas 1: 334 interpretation of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson) 3: 373–81 in Night Side: Eighteen Tales 3: 180–84 supernatural and 1: 232 Pugin, A. W. 1: 487 Pulitzer Prize Morrison, Toni 3: 135 Wharton, Edith 3: 458, 459 Punch (periodical) 2: 218, 226 Punk music 1: 470–73 Punter, David 1: 158–71, 317–26, 439–52; 3: 278 The Purcell Papers (Le Fanu) 3: 1–2, 6–7, 9–10, 12 Purcell, Reverend Francis. See Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan Purinton, Marjean D. 2: 67–76

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

A REVIEW OF DRACULA, BY BRAM STOKER

“Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis” (Spencer) 1: 127–43 “Puss-in-Boots” (Carter) 2: 182 Putzel, Max (sidebar) 2: 304

Q

R “Race and the Gothic Monster: The Xenophobic Impulse of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Taming a Tartar’” (Derrickson) 1: 197–207 “Race, Labor, and the Gothic Western: Dispelling Frontier Myths in Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind” (Kollin) 1: 36 Race relations 1: 108 Alcott, Louisa May 1: 200 in early American literature 1: 118–27 Gobineau, Arthur de 3: 222 interracial desire 1: 207–10 miscegenation 3: 218–28 in The Shadow Knows 1: 218 in “Taming a Tartar” 1: 200– 203, 205–6 in Zofloya 1: 208–10 Radcliffe, Ann 1: 20, 80–81; 3: 231–62 animism 3: 243–44 Austen, Jane and 2: 36–40 Birkhead, Edith on (sidebar) 3: 246 castle in 2: 252 compared to Irving, Washington 2: 453–55 compared to Scott, Sir Walter 3: 310 compared to Walpole, Horace 2: 36 fear 2: 336 female Gothic 3: 252–59 feminist literary theory and 1: 86 founder of Gothic genre 1: 2 Gothic veil 1: 455

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

Rebecca (du Maurier) 2: 118–19, 279–80 “Chapter 1” 2: 281–82 film adaptation 1: 437 heroine as vampire 2: 286–90 melodrama (sidebar) 2: 285 symbolism 2: 284–91 vamp vs. femme fatale 2: 285–86 Rebecca (film) 1: 437 “Recent Novels” (The Spectator), 3: 393–94 “Recent Novels” (The Times, London) 3: 394–95 “Recent Novels: Villette” (Greg) 2: 120–21 “Recent Popular Novels: The Woman in White” (Dublin University Magazine) 2: 211 The Recess; Or, A Tale of Other Times (Lee) 1: 115–18, (sidebar) 119, 126 Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaca Batalha (Beckford) 2: 80 “The Reconstruction of the Gothic Feminine Ideal in Emily Bronte¨’s Wuthering Heights” (Conger) 2: 136–46 “Recovering Nightmares: Nineteenth-Century Gothic” (Thomas, R.) 1: 326–32 Redburn: His First Voyage (Melville) 3: 107, 108, 112, 114, 119 Redgauntlet (Scott) 3: 299, 307, 311 Reeve, Clara 1: 51–52, 80, (sidebar) 112, 113, 113–15; 2: 252 “Reflections of Excess: Frankenstein, the French Revolution, and Monstrosity” (Botting) 3: 348–56 “Reflections on the Grotesque” (Oates) (sidebar) 3: 179 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke) 1: 97; 3: 350–51 The Reivers (Faulkner) 2: 294 “The Relationship of Gothic Art to Gothic Literature” (Bayer-Berenbaum) 1: 480–86 Religious buildings 1: 510–13 “The Renaissance, and Jacobean Gothic” (Parker) 1: 477–80 “The Renegade” (Jackson) 1: 270–71, 277 Repetition (theatrical device) 1: 407 Repulsion (film) 1: 449 The Return of the Vanishing American (Fiedler) 2: 304–5 Reversals (literary device) 1: 23, 26 A review of Dracula, by Bram Stoker (The Athenaeum), 3: 393

549

SUBJECT INDEX

“Queen of May” (Jackson) 1: 266 The Queen of the Damned (Rice) 3: 263–64 See also Vampire Chronicles The Queen’s Wake, 2: 422 Quentin Durward (Scott) 3: 311, 313 Quest (Gothic convention) 2: 473–74, (sidebar) 492

heroines 1: 221; 2: 138, 144; 3: 64 influence on Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 501 influence on Gothic fiction 3: 40 influence on Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 376 influence on Melville, Herman 3: 111–16 influence on Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 194–95, 202 influences on 3: 232 landscape as motif 1: 403, 404; 3: 113 legacy of (sidebar) 3: 253 Lewis, Matthew Gregory on 3: 39 library in 1: 92–93 mysterious portrait 1: 252 obsoleteness of 2: 452 patterns in 2: 301 principal works 3: 233 Scott, Sir Walter on (sidebar) 3: 238 sublime as theme 1: 87; 3: 313 supernatural 1: 332–33 Wollstonecraft, Mary and 3: 239 on women’s education 3: 238–44 Radical Innocence (Hassan) 2: 301, 302 Railo, Eino 1: 249–60, 284 Raising Demons (Jackson) 1: 267–68 The Rambler (Johnson) 1: 50–51 Rambles Beyond Railways (Collins) 2: 218, 219 Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (Shelley) 3: 320 Ranger, Paul 1: 401–11 Rank, Otto 1: 310–16 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (Hawthorne) 2: 365, 375 “Rat Krespel” (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 397 Rathbone, Basil 3: 353 Die Räuber (Schiller) (sidebar) 1: 275 “The Raven” (Poe) 3: 189 “Ravenna” (Wilde) 3: 497 Raven’s Wing (Oates) 3: 179 Rayner (Baillie) 2: 58 “The Readerhood of Man” (Brooks-Rose) 2: 410 “Reading Rooms: M. R. James and the Library of Modernism” (Fielding) 1: 38 “The Real Right Thing” (James) 2: 473 The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Diamond) 3: 515–16

SUBJECT INDEX

A REVIEW OF MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHITE WHALE

A review of Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale (The Critic), (sidebar) 3: 125 A review of Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe (Coleridge) 3: 245–46 Review of The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe (Enfield) 3: 246–49 “Review of New Books: Twice Told Tales” (Graham’s Magazine), (sidebar) 2: 369 A review of The Castle of Otranto: A Story (Langhorn) 3: 435 A review of The Castle of Otranto: A Story (Lubbock) 3: 436 A review of The Castle of Otranto: A Story(The Critical Review), 3: 434–35 “A review of The Monk” (Coleridge) 3: 46–48 A review of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde(The Times), 3: 364–65 Reynolds, David S. 1: 520 Rhode, Eric 1: 437 Rice, Anne 3: 263, 263–87 American Gothic tradition 3: 279–85 author’s fears (sidebar) 3: 278 Catholicism 3: 279 compared to Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3: 279 Harlequin formula and 3: 281–83 principal works 3: 265–66 rewriting vampire mythology 3: 266–76 self-consciousness of (sidebar) 3: 267 vampires of 1: 369–71 Rich, Adrienne 1: 216 Richardson, Samuel 3: 212–13 Richter, David H. 3: 278–79 Rieger, James 1: 346 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge) 1: 19, 251 Der Ring des Polykrates (Schiller) 1: 306–7 The Ring of Polykrates (Schiller). See Der Ring des Polykrates Ringe, Donald A. (sidebar) 2: 450 “Rip Van Winkle” (Irving) 2: 441–43, 449–50, 457 Riquelme, John Paul 1: 30–40 The Rise of Life on Earth (Oates) 3: 165 Rizzo, Betty 2: 337–38 “The Roads Round Pisa” (Dinesen) 2: 269 Rob Roy (Scott) 3: 292, 297, 299–300, 312 The Robber Bride (Atwood) 2: 2, 10, 13, 213–17

550

“The Robber Bridegroom” (Atwood) 2: 11 “Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (Brennan) 3: 372–82 Roberts, Bette 3: 279 Roberts, J. M. 1: 79 Robertson, Fiona 3: 297–305 Rock (music) 1: 469–70 Rock music 1: 469–73 The Rocky Mountains; or, Scenes, Incidents, and Adventures in the Far West (Irving) 2: 442 Roderick Hudson (James) 2: 462 Roettgen Pieta (carving) 1: 484 “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (Hawthorne) 2: 364 Rogers, Samuel 2: 85 Rokeby (Scott) 3: 290, 306 Rolleston, T. W. 3: 5–6 “The Romance Feeling” (Summers) 1: 40–48 “’Romance of a Darksome Type’: Versions of the Fantastic in the Novels of Joyce Carol Oates” (Egan) 3: 168–78 “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (James) 2: 462, 463, 465–66, 471 The Romance of the Forest (Radcliffe) 1: 2; 2: 252; 3: 232, 239–40, 246 “The Romance of the Impossible” (Hawthorne) (sidebar) 3: 503 Romances Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 368– 77, 380–81 Jane Eyre as prototype 2: 115–20 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 3: 6–15 vs. novels 1: 49–52 as reflection of female oppression 1: 220–26 revival of 1: 129–30 The Robber Bride 2: 213–17 Scott, Sir Walter 1: 501–2 sea stories 1: 251–52 terror-romance 1: 249–58 urban Gothic and 1: 130–33 The Woman in White 2: 216 “Romancing the Shadow” (Morrison) 1: 118–27, 520–21 “Romantic Supernaturalism: The Cast Study as Gothic Tale” (Burwick) 1: 332–42 “Romantic Transformations” (Botting) 1: 21–30 Romanticism African American experience 1: 119–27 cabbalism and 1: 254–55 drama 1: 258, 390 European Gothic tradition 1: 249–58; 2: 271–72

German 1: 407–9; 2: 271, 379, 411–12, 432 Gothic heroes in 1: 24 Gothic movement and 1: 2, 21–29, 42–45; 2: 271, 494; 3: 124, 308–9 Gothic revival and 1: 486–89 grotesques 2: 300 Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 82 opposition within movement 1: 255–56 poetry 3: 369 “Romanticism and the Gothic Revival” (Addison) 1: 486–90 Romiero (Baillie) 2: 58 Römishe Elegien (Goethe) 2: 341 Ronald, Ann 2: 242–45 The Rose and the Key (Le Fanu) 1: 89 “A Rose for Emily” (Faulkner) 2: 293–95, 296–97, 306–12 Rose, Jacqueline 1: 380 Ross, Marlon 1: 101 Rossetti, Christina (sidebar) 1: 143, 252–53 Ruskin, John 2: 300 Russian authors 1: 2 Ryan, Steven T. 3: 122–24 Rymer, James Malcolm 1: 349 Rzepka, Charles 1: 36

S “The Sacrifice” (Oates) 3: 180–81, 182, 184 Sade, Marquis de 3: 61–69, 249 The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (Carter) 2: 180, 187–88, 199 Sadism 3: 198–99 Sage, Victor 3: 6–16 Saint-Germain, Count (character) 1: 367–68 Saintsbury, George (sidebar) 2: 429 ’Salem’s Lot (King) 2: 482, 499 family 2: 502 influence of Watergate scandal 1: 371 vampires 1: 371–73; 3: 270 Salmagundi; or, The Whim-whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others (Irving) 2: 441–42 Salomé (Wilde) 3: 487, 489, 495–97 “Salvator Rosa” (Hoffmann). See “Signor Formica” Sampson, George 1: 102 Sanctuary (Faulkner) 2: 293–94, 312–18 Sanders, Scott P. 1: 68

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

SEXUALITY

letter from Edgeworth, Maria (sidebar) 3: 306 on Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3: 36 literary legacy and 1: 92–93, 96–97, 102 Maturin, Charles Robert and, 3: 82–83 mystery and 3: 298–304, 306–8 on Nicolai, Friedrich 1: 336–37 popularity in America 1: 501 principal works 3: 292–93 on Radcliffe, Ann (sidebar) 3: 238 romances 1: 501–2 Romantic attitude toward architecture 1: 487 Southern Gothic 2: 303 supernatural 3: 313–16, (sidebar) 349 translation of Goethe (sidebar) 2: 350 Wavery Novels 3: 289–92, 297–304, 305–16 Scottish writers 1: 2 Sculpture 1: 475–76, 514–17 Sea stories 1: 251–52; 3: 205–11 A Season of Dreams (Appel) 2: 300–301 “Secrecy, Silence, and Anxiety: Gothic Narratology and the Waverly Novels” (Robertson) 3: 297–305 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 1: 72; 2: 10 “A Select Party” (Hawthorne) 2: 373–74 Self-identity of Beckford, William 2: 95–101 doubles as supernatural 1: 310–16 of du Maurier, Daphne 2: 289–90 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 183 “Der Sandmann” 2: 412–17 Senf, Carol A. 1: 342–61; 3: 16–21 Sensation fiction 1: 87–91 German 2: 431 Irving, Washington 2: 447 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 1: 354; 3: 5–6 The Woman in White 2: 211– 15, 218–19, 223–26 “Sensation Novels” (Oliphant) 2: 211–14 Sense and Sensibility (Austen) 2: 25–27, 32, 33 The Sense of the Past (James) 2: 472 Sensibility 2: 36–40 The Separation (Baillie) 2: 58 Septimius Felton (Hawthorne) 2: 376

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

The Serapion Brethren (Hoffmann). See Die Serapionsbrüder Die Serapionsbrüder (Hoffmann) 2: 392–93, 397–401, 402–3, 405 Serial killers, King, Stephen 2: 490–93 A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy (Baillie) 2: 50–51, 51–60 authorship of 2: 54–55 modern critical reception 2: 65–67 review (sidebar) 2: 68 social progress in 2: 61–65 “Seven Gothic Tales” (Brantly) 2: 269–78 Seven Gothic Tales (Dinesen) 2: 257–61, 269–71, (sidebar) 270 “Seven Gothic Tales: The Divine Swank of Isak Dinesen” (Updike) (sidebar) 2: 270 Several Perceptions (Carter) 2: 180 Sex Pistols (musical group) 1: 470–71 Sexual innuendo 2: 456–58 Sexuality 1: 30 Absalom! Absalom! 2: 303 American South 2: 303 Bellefleur 3: 173 Black House 2: 482 Carter, Angela 2: 184–89 fetishism 2: 184–85; 3: 174 heavy metal lyrics 1: 462–63 incest 2: 310–11; 3: 329–30 interracial 1: 207–10 The Monk 1: 463 monsters 2: 188 mythology and 2: 188–89 perversion 2: 186, 311 pre-oedipal stage 1: 377–79 Rebecca 2: 286–90 “A Rose for Emily” 2: 310–11 The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History 2: 187–88 Salomé 3: 496–97 Sanctuary 2: 315–17 The Shadow Knows 1: 217–18 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 2: 482; 3: 375–76 vampires 1: 350–51, 357, 368, 370 Victorian attitudes 1: 132, 137, 207 in Victorian Gothic 1: 87–91 Wharton, Edith 3: 478–79, 483–84 of Wilde, Oscar 3: 488 See also Eroticism; Homosexuality; Pornography

551

SUBJECT INDEX

“The Sand-man” (Hoffmann). See “Der Sandmann” “Der Sandmann” (Hoffmann) 2: 388–91 as Ambiguous Gothic 2: 412 archetypes 2: 413–14 compared to “The Mortal Immortal: A Tale” 3: 330 Freud, Sigmund on 2: 402–3, 408–9, 413 identity crisis 2: 412–17 narrative structure 2: 401–7 ncanny guest in 1: 302–4; 2: 403–11 reader response 2: 397, 410–11 Sartoris (Faulkner) 2: 294 Satanism 1: 463–65 See also Devil Satire 3: 283 Savage, Jon 1: 471 Savoy, Eric 1: 66–74 Scarborough, Dorothy 1: 36 The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne) 2: 363–65 symbolism 2: 376 witchcraft 2: 372–73 “Scheme for Raising a large Sum of Money by Message Cards and Notes” (Walpole) 3: 446 Schiller, Friedrich von 1: 152, 274, (sidebar) 275 compared to Brown, Charles Brockden (sidebar) 2: 171 influence on Gothic drama 1: 407–9 uncanny 1: 306–7 Scholes, Robert 3: 249 Schopenhauer, Arthur 1: 152–53 Schreck, Max 1: 450 Scott, Sir Walter 1: 2, 262, 335; 3: 289, 289–317 Abbotsford 1: 502 anonymity 3: 290 antiquarianism influence on 1: 25 architecture motif and 3: 315–16 on The Castle of Otranto 3: 432, 443–44 compared to Irving, Washington 2: 453 compared to Radcliffe, Ann 3: 310 on Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 336–37, (sidebar) 349 Gilmor, Robert III and 1: 503 on Gothic ambiguity 2: 453 on hallucinations 1: 334, 338 Hazlitt, William (sidebar) 3: 298 on Hoffmann, E. T. A. (sidebar) 2: 392, 401, 407 Hogg, James and 2: 421–22, 432–33

SUBJECT INDEX

SEXUALITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Sexuality and Its Discontents (Weeks) 1: 138 The Shadow (Gothic convention) 2: 146–50 Shadow Dance (Carter) 2: 180 The Shadow Knows (Johnson) 1: 217–19 “Shadow—A Parable” (Poe) 3: 190–92 Shadows on the Grass (Dinesen) 2: 267 Shakespeare, William, influence of 1: 98 Shelden, Pamela Jacobs 2: 470–78 Shelley, Mary 1: 2, 31, 261–62; 3: 319, 319–35 attitude toward female body 3: 329–33 Byron, Lord George Gordon and 3: 344 chase motif and 3: 339 Clairmont, Claire and 3: 344–46 compared to Hoffmann, E. T. A. 3: 330 compared to King, Stephen 2: 500 education of 3: 345–46 female Gothic 3: 327–33 film adaptation of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 1: 432–33 Frankenstein as autobiography (sidebar) 3: 328 on ghosts 3: 321–24 Godwin, William and 2: 323; 3: 319, 339, 345–46 heroines 2: 138; 3: 327–33 incest 3: 329–30 influence of the French Revolution 1: 82–85 loneliness 3: 342–47 Polidori, John and 3: 344 principal works 3: 321 Shelley, Percy Bysshe and 3: 319–21, (sidebar) 328, 344–46 social philosophy 1: 255 use of Gothic elements, 1: 25 Wollstonecraft, Mary and 3: 319, 328–29, 342 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1: 2, 9–12, (sidebar) 76, 82–83 Clairmont, Claire and 3: 344–46 on Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 335–36 Lewis, Matthew Gregory and 3: 59–60 Polidori, John and 3: 344 Shelley, Mary and 3: 319–21, (sidebar) 328, 344–46 The Shepherd’s Calendar (Hogg) 2: 425–28, 427–28 Shetty, Nalini V. 3: 118–22 Shilling shocker 1: 2

552

The Shining (film) 1: 69, 219, 498 The Shining (King) 2: 482, 494–99 Shirley (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 104, 110–11 “Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror” (Joshi) 1: 264–83 Showalter, Elaine 1: 210–20 A Sicilian Romance (Radcliffe) 1: 2, 398; 2: 254; 3: 232 The Sicilian Romance,or, The Apparition of the Cliffs, An Opera, by Henry Siddons (Siddons) 1: 398, 412, 412–13 “The Sick Rose” (Blake) 2: 306–12 Siddons, Henry 1: 398, 412–13 The Siege of Salerno (Maturin) 3: 76 “The Signalman” (Dickens) 2: 230 “Signor Formica” (Hoffmann) 2: 399–400 Simmons, Dan 1: 366 “Sinister House” (Davenport) (sidebar) 2: 285 Sioux, Siouxsie 1: 470–71 “Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” (Aiken, Barbauld) 1: 2, 5–7, (sidebar) 7, 46–47; 3: 24–25 “Sir Edmund Orme” (James) 2: 463 “Sir Walter Scott” (Hazlitt) (sidebar) 3: 298 The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Irving) 2: 441–42, 447–49, (sidebar) 450 Sketches by Boz (Dickens) 2: 230, (sidebar) 252 Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparations (Hibbert) 1: 334, 336–37, 338 “A Skilled Hand Weaves a Net of Horror” (Berkman) 2: 283–84 Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Halberstam) 1: 197–99 Sklar, Robert 1: 438 Skywalk (Brown) 2: 153 Slave narratives 1: 183–92; 3: 146–48 Slavery American creativity and 1: 520–21 “The Fall of the House of Usher” 3: 223 Garner, Margaret 3: 146–47 as horror 1: 181–92, 520 Sleath, Eleanor 1: 98 A Small Boy and Others (James) 2: 472 Smith, Alexander 2: 225 Smith, Charlotte 1: 96 Smith, Iain Crichton 2: 432–38 Smith, Rosamond. See Oates, Joyce Carol Smollet, Tobias 1: 1–2, 5, 20, 50 Snake Eyes (Oates) 3: 165, 178 Snitow, Ann 3: 281–82

The Snow-Image, and Other Tales (Hawthorne) 2: 365 “The Snowstorm” (Oates) 3: 180, 183 Social criticism 3: 458, 466–75 Social history 1: 48–57; 2: 61–67 Social philosophy 1: 255 “Socialized and Medicalized Hysteria in Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft” (Purinton) 2: 67–76 Sociopolitical ideology in drama 1: 410–15 Soldier’s Pay (Faulkner) 2: 294, 299 Solstice (Oates) 3: 183 Son of Frankenstein (film) 3: 353 Son of the Morning (Oates) 3: 164, 168, 170–72, 177 Song of Solomon (Morrison) 3: 136, 138–39 Sorcery 2: 325 The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe). See Die Leiden des jungen Werthers “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (Wilde) 3: 495 Soul/Mate (Oates) 3: 165, 178 The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner) 2: 294 South, American and Gothic tradition 2: 302–5 South, European and terror-romanticism 1: 256–57 Southam, B. C. 2: 32 Southern Gothic 2: 297–305; 3: 178 The Sovereignty of God (Murdoch) 3: 510–11 Spargo, R. Clifton 3: 150–60 Spark, Muriel 3: 338 The Spectator (periodical) 3: 393–94 “The Spectre Bridegroom” (Irving) 2: 448–49 Spectres. See Ghosts; Grotesques “Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein” (Atwood) 2: 4–5 Spencer, Kathleen L. 1: 127–43 The Sphinx (Wilde) 3: 497–99 “The Sphinx without a Secret” (Wilde) 3: 490–92 Spiritualism 1: 482; 2: 379–80 “The Split Second” (du Maurier) 2: 284 The Spoils of Poynton (James) 2: 472 Sportive Gothic 2: 447–51, 451–53 The Spy (periodical) 2: 422 “The Squaw” (Stoker) 3: 386 St. Irvyne (Shelley, P.) 1: 24 St. James Gazette (periodical) 3: 502–4 St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (Godwin) 2: 321–23

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

TABLETOP OF THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS

“The Stout Gentleman” (Irving) 2: 442 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 1: 182–83, 185–90; 3: 223 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson) 1: 31, 314; 3: 359–61, (sidebar) 365 as autobiography 3: 368 compared to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 371 compared to works of King, Stephen 2: 485–87 critical reception 3: 361, 366 dedication of (sidebar) 3: 373 degeneration 1: 158–60 doubles in 3: 368–69, 372, 374–81 film adaptation 3: 368 Jung, Carl G. 3: 373–81 monster 3: 370–72 review 3: 364–65 sexuality 2: 487; 3: 375–76 Victorian morality and 3: 370–72 The Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson (Elwin) 3: 368 “Strange Stories by a Nervous Gentleman” (Irving) 2: 452, 455 “Strange Stories: Irving’s Gothic” (Bell) 2: 451–56 A Strange Story (Bulwer-Lytton) (sidebar) 1: 15, 263 “Strangers in Town” (Jackson) 1: 277 Strawberry Hill (castle) 1: 58, 502–4; 3: 430, 442, 447–48 Strawberry Hill Press 3: 446 Strengall, Heidi 2: 485–93 “The Strength of Backward-Looking Thoughts” (Davenport-Hines) 1: 490–96 “The Student from Salamanca” (Irving) 2: 442 Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Pater) 1: 32–33 “A Study in Puppydom” (St. James Gazette), 3: 502–4 Sublime 1: 55–56, 87–91, 143–55 architecture as 1: 55–56 vs. beautiful 1: 107–8 Burke, Edmund on 1: 148–50; 3: 91–92 fear and 1: 110–13, 148–49 grotesques and 2: 300 Irving, Washington 2: 452 Kant, Immanuel on 1: 150–55 in Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 91–96 Radcliffe, Ann 1: 87; 3: 313 Suger of St. Denis (sidebar) 1: 478, 506, 508 “Suger of St. Denis” (World Eras), (sidebar) 1: 478 Sula (Morrison) 3: 148

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

Summers, Montague 1: 40–48; 3: 36–46, (sidebar) 395 The Sundial (Jackson) 1: 277–78, 279–81 Sunset Boulevard (film) 1: 437–38 Supernatural 1: 231–33; 2: 10–11 architecture and 1: 481, 484 “Carmilla” 3: 26–27 The Castle of Otranto: A Story 3: 449–51 Count Dracula 1: 342–44, 358 Dinesen, Isak 2: 263 doubles and 1: 310–16 dreams 1: 327 fantastic novels 1: 128–29 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 336–37 Godwin, William on 2: 324–27 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 378 history in Gothic literature 3: 22–27 Hogg, James 2: 422–23, 425– 28, 431–32 Jackson, Shirley 1: 264, 267– 72, 274–75 James, Henry 2: 463–64, 470–73 King, Stephen 2: 501–4 Lovecraft, H. P. (sidebar) 1: 260 Morrison, Toni 3: 138–42, 148–49 oral tradition 1: 17–18 The Picture of Dorian Gray 3: 511–15 poetry 1: 18–20 psychology and 1: 232, 332–41 Scott, Sir Walter 3: 313–16, (sidebar) 349 urban Gothic 1: 139 Wharton, Edith 3: 457, 458– 59, 470–75 See also Fear; Ghosts; Horror; Psychological horror Superstition evil eye 1: 307 getatore 1: 308–9 Scott, Sir Walter 3: 314–16 vampires 1: 345, 348–49 “Superstition” (Hogg) 2: 422, 427 Surfacing (Atwood) 2: 2, 3, 6–8, 11 Surrealist movement 1: 416 Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Atwood) 2: 3, 7 Swithen, John. See King, Stephen Symonds, John Addington (sidebar) 3: 365

T Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins (painting) 3: 54

553

SUBJECT INDEX

St. Ronan’s Well (Scott) 3: 292, 308, 311 “Stairway to Heaven” (song) 1: 464 “Stephen King and the Tradition of American Gothic” (Gibbs) 2: 494–99 “Stephen King’s Canon: The Art of Balance” (Casebeer) (sidebar) 2: 492 Stevenson, Robert Louis 1: 31, 314; 3: 359, 359–84, (sidebar) 373 compared to King, Stephen 2: 485–87 compared to Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 365 degeneration 1: 158–60 principal works 3: 361–62 Stoker, Bram 1: 32–34, 127–40, 358–59, 364; 3: 385, 385–428 characterization of Count Dracula 3: 405–10 “counterfeit” Gothicism 3: 397–404 cultural identity in Dracula 1: 171–79 degeneration 1: 166–69 development of Count Dracula 1: 342–44 dreams 1: 330 influence of Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 1: 358 influence of Walpole, Horace 3: 395–404 Irish allegory in Dracula 3: 415–27 Irving, Henry and 3: 400–401 principal works 3: 387 “Stoker’s Counterfeit Gothic: Dracula and Theatricality at the Dawn of Simulation” (Hogle) 3: 395–405 Stone, Edward 2: 309 Storm and Stress movement 2: 349–53 “Storms” (Hogg) 2: 425–26 “The Story of a Lie” (Stevenson) 3: 361 The Story of a Lie,and Other Tales (Stevenson) 3: 360 “The Story of Prince Alasi and the Princess Firouzkah” (Beckford) 2: 88 “The Story of Prince Barkiarokh” (Beckford) 2: 88 “The Story of Princess Zulkais and the Prince Kalilah” (Beckford) 2: 88 “The Story of the Young Italian” (Irving) 2: 455 “The Story of the Young Robber” (Irving) 2: 447, 448, 452 “A Story Replete with Horror” (Benedict) 2: 429–32

SUBJECT INDEX

“THE TALE OF GUZMAN’S FAMILY”

“The Tale of Guzman’s Family” (Maturin) 3: 77, 87, 90 “The Tale of Stanton” (Maturin) 3: 77–78 The Tale of the Body Thief (Rice) 3: 264 See also Vampire Chronicles “Tale of the Indians” (Maturin) 3: 77–78 “Tale of the Spaniard” (Maturin) 3: 77–78, 93–94 A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) 2: 230 Tales of a Traveller (Irving) 2: 442, 447, 452–53 Tales of the Dead (Shelley) 1: 25 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (Poe) 3: 198–99 Tales of the Wars of Montrose (Hogg) 2: 422 Tales of Wonder (Lewis) 3: 32 The Talisman (King) 2: 482, 487–89 The Talisman (Scott) 3: 307–8, 310, 312, 315 Taltos (Rice) 3: 264 Tam O’Shanter (Burns) 1: 18 Tamerlane, and Other Poems (Poe) 3: 187 “Taming a Tartar” (Alcott) Angel in the House 1: 203–4 feminist literary theory 1: 203–6 gender relations 1: 199–200 monster 1: 199–207 race relations 1: 200–203, 205–6 “The Tapestried Chamber” (Scott) 3: 294–97 Tapestry, animated (Gothic convention) 3: 199–200 Tar Baby (Morrison) 3: 136, 138 Techno-Gothic 2: 68–73 Television 1: 452–60 “The Tell-Tale Heart” (Poe) 3: 188–89, 213 “The Temple” (Oates) 3: 167–68 The Temptation of Saint Anthony (painting) 3: 57 The Tenants of Malory (Le Fanu) 3: 10 Terror. See Fear “Terror Made Relevant: James’s Ghost Stories” (Thorberg) 2: 466–70 Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy) 1: 34–35 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (film) 1: 422–25 “Textualising the Double-Gendered Body: Forms of the Grotesque in The Passion of New Eve” (Johnson) 2: 190–94 them (Oates) 3: 163

554

Theology debate in Gothic tradition 3: 277–78 “Theorizing the (Gothic) Sublime” (Mishra) 1: 143–57 “A Theory of Knowledge” (Oates) 3: 181–82, 184 “They Eat Out” (Atwood) 2: 9 Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (Godwin). See Caleb Williams “The Third Baby’s the Easiest” (Jackson) 1: 265–66 “This is a photograph of Me” (Atwood) 2: 8 Thomas, Ronald R. 1: 326–32 Thompson, G. R. 2: 301 Thorberg, Raymond 2: 466–70 Thoreau, Henry David 3: 468, 469, 472, 474 “Thrawn Janet” (Stevenson) 3: 360 “The Three Graves: A Fragment of a Sexton’s Tale” (Coleridge) 1: 236–41 The Three Imposters (Machen) 1: 170 The Three Perils of Man; or War, Women, and Witchcraft (Hogg) 2: 422 The Three Perils of Woman; or Love, Leasing, and Jealousy (Hogg) 2: 427 “Tibby Hyslop’s Dream” (Hogg) 2: 428 “The Tiger’s Bride” (Carter) 2: 182 Tillotson, Marcia 3: 342–48 The Times, London, review of Dracula, 3: 394–95 “To the Editor of the St. James Gazette” (Wilde) 3: 492–93 “To the Reader” (Lewis) 3: 34–36 “Tobias Martin, Master Cooper and His Men” (Hoffmann). See “Meister Martin der Küfner und seine Gesellen” The Token (Goodrich) 2: 364 Tom Jones (Fielding) 1: 490 The Tomb of Ligeia (film) 1: 444 The Tommyknockers (King) 1: 287 Torquato Tasso (Goethe) 2: 341 A Tour on the Prairies (Irving) 2: 442–43 “Toward a History of Gothic and Modernism: Dark Modernity from Bram Stoker to Samuel Beckett” (Riquelme) 1: 30–40 Tracy, Spencer 3: 368 Transcendence 2: 494–96 “The Transcendental Economy of Wharton’s Gothic Mansions” (Elbert) 3: 466–75 Transcendentalism 3: 468, 470–71, 472, 474 “The Transformation” (Shelley) 3: 324–26

“The Translation” (Oates) 3: 180, 184 “Translation from an Ancient Chaldee MS” (Hogg) 2: 422 “Translator’s Preface” (Walpole) 3: 432–34 “Trauma and the Specters of Enslavement in Morrison’s Beloved” (Spargo) 3: 150–60 Travel narratives 3: 107–8 “The Travelling Companion” (Stevenson) 3: 368 Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (Stevenson) 3: 359 Treasure Island (Stevenson) 3: 359–60 “The Trial for Murder” (Dickens) 2: 230 “Tricks with Mirrors” (Atwood) 2: 6 “The Triumph of Night” (Wharton) 3: 459, 468, 471–73 The Tryal (Baillie) 2: 50, 63, 66 The Turn of the Screw (James, H.) 1: 31; 2: 461–68, 468, 471, 473 Turner, Nat 1: 181–82 “Turtle-God” (Oates) 3: 183 Twain, Mark 1: 125–26; 3: 158 Twice-Told Tales (Hawthorne) 2: 364, (sidebar) 369 Twin Peaks (television show) 1: 453–59, 457 “Twin Peaks and the Television Gothic” (Ledwon) 1: 452–60 “Twins” (Oates) 3: 178 Twister (film) 1: 69 Twitchell, James P. 1: 344, 351 Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (Melville) 3: 108

U “The Ugly-Pretty, Dull-Bright, Weak-Strong Girl in the Gothic Mansion” (Abartis) 2: 115–20 Uncanny 1: 454 Freud, Sigmund 1: 301–9, 454 guest 1: 302–4; 2: 403–11 repetition and 1: 305–6 Schiller, Friedrich von 1: 306–7 television Gothic and 1: 454–56 “The Uncanny” (Freud) 1: 301–10, (sidebar) 2: 308 “’Uncanny Drives’: The Depth Psychology of E. T. A. Hoffmann” (Andriano) 2: 411–19 Uncanny guest (Gothic convention) 1: 302–4; 2: 403–11

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

WALPOLE, HORACE

V Valente, Joseph 1: 33; 3: 415–27 Valperga (Shelley) 3: 320 The Vampire Armand (Rice) 3: 264 “The Vampire as Gothic Villain” (Senf) 1: 342–61 Vampire Chronicles (Rice) 1: 369–70; 3: 262–65 eroticism 3: 274–76 Harlequin formula 3: 283 narrative structure 3: 271–72 as revisionist vampire mythology 3: 266–76 See also specific titles of books Vampire fiction 3: 266–76 “The Vampire in Literature” (Summers) (sidebar) 3: 395 The Vampire Lestat (Rice) 3: 263–64 See also Vampire Chronicles The Vampire; or, the Bride of the Isles (Planche) 1: 348 The Vampire Tapestry (Charnas) 1: 368–169 Vampires 1: 32–33, 233, 342–87, 3: 266–76 as aristocracy 1: 344, 350 “Carmilla” 1: 353–58, 382–84; 3: 19–20 Count Dracula 1: 166–69, 342– 44, 358–59, 362–64, 424, 3: 405–10, 417 drama 1: 348–49 Edwardian 1: 363 eroticism 3: 274–76 folklore 1: 344–45, 349, 353 gender identity 1: 382–84; 3: 275, 281–85 “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” 1: 364–65

Jewish characteristics of 2: 287 King, Stephen 1: 371–73; 3: 270 “The Lady of the House of Love” 2: 188 Lestat 1: 369–70; 3: 269–76, 280–83 literary history of 1: 255 Louis 1: 369–70; 3: 268–70, 271, 274–75, 280–84 Mona Lisa 1: 32–33 1980s movies 1: 372 Nixon, Richard and 1: 369 parasitism 1: 351–52, 356, 365 psychic 1: 362–67 Rebecca 2: 286–90 revisionist mythology 3: 266–76 Rice, Anne 1: 369–71; 3: 262– 76, 280–84 Saint-Germain, Count 1: 367–68 sexuality of 1: 350–51, 357, 368, 370 superstition 1: 345, 348–49 The Vampyre. A Tale 1: 243–29, 344–47 Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (Rymer or Prest) 1: 349–52 women 1: 352–58, 364–67; 3: 19–20 See also Monsters; Rice, Anne; Stoker, Bram The Vampyre. A Tale (Polidori) 1: 243–49, 262, 344–49, (sidebar) 362 Van Der Zee, James 3: 146 Varma, Devendra P. (sidebar) 3: 253, 463 Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (Rymer or Prest) 1: 349, 349–52 Vathek (Beckford) 2: 79–81 author’s personae in 2: 96–101 criticism of 2: 91 doubles in 3: 369 as Gothic tale 2: 89–94 influence on The Giaour (sidebar) 2: 95 inspiration for 2: 83–85 as Oriental tale 1: 260–61; 2: 88–89, 96 review 2: 85, (sidebar) 86 unauthorized translation 2: 81–83, 88 writing of 2: 87–89 Veidt, Conrad 1: 419 “Verging on the Gothic: Melmoth’s Journey to France” (Lanone) 3: 97–104 Vertigo (film) 1: 435

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

Victimization “Carmilla” 1: 355–58 Dracula 1: 133–36 of women 1: 355–58; 2: 185, 188–89; 3: 327–33 Victorian period 1: 61–62, 86–91 Angel in the House 1: 131, 203–4 cultural attitudes 1: 131–33 Dracula and 1: 128–40, 166–69 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and 3: 370–72 Viereck, George Sylvester 1: 363 Villette (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 103–4 compared to The Monk 2: 122–27 Gothic conventions 2: 108, 111–13, 121–27 review 2: 120–21, (sidebar) 121 as reworking of The Professor 2: 122 Vincent, Sybil Korff 2: 17–24 Violence American Psycho 1: 36–38 The Castle of Otranto 2: 310–11 “The Fall of the House of Usher 2: 311 Oates, Joyce Carol on 1: 217 O’Connor, Flannery (sidebar) 2: 168 Scott, Sir Walter 3: 311–11 social 1: 197–206 against women 1: 218–19; 2: 185, 188–89 “A Virtuoso’s Collection” (Hawthorne) 2: 374 The Vision (Beckford) 2: 79 Visual arts 1: 475–526, 480–86 La Volonté de savoir (Foucalt) 1: 295–96 Von Deutscher Baukunst (Goethe) 2: 344 Voyagers to the West (Bailyn) 1: 121–22

W Wadham College Chapel 1: 477–78 Wadsworth, Daniel 1: 499 “Waiting for Shilo” (MacPherson) (sidebar) 3: 111 Walden (Thoreau) 3: 468, 470, 474 Waller, Gregory 3: 269 Walpole, Horace 1: 31, 80; 2: 297, 299–300; 3: 429, 429–55 Berry, Mary and 3: 430–31 compared to Radcliffe, Ann 2: 36 excess as theme 3: 355 Gray, Thomas and 3: 446

555

SUBJECT INDEX

Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh (Le Fanu) 1: 89–90; 3: 1–3, 5, 16–17 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 1: 185–90; 3: 223 The Uncommercial Traveller (Dickens) 2: 238–39 “Der unheimliche Gast” (Hoffmann) 2: 402 Unholy Loves (Oates) 3: 164 Unknown Pleasures (music recording) 1: 472 The Unvanquished (Faulkner) 2: 294 Updike, John (sidebar) 2: 270 Urban Gothic 1: 129, 130–33, 138–40 Urfaust (Goethe) 2: 357 Utopia 2: 63–65

SUBJECT INDEX

WANDERING JEW

heroines 2: 138, 144 influence of Hurd, Richard 3: 449–50 influence on Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 501 influence on Gothic genre (sidebar) 3: 443 influence on Melville, Herman 3: 115 influence on Poe, Edgar Allan 2: 310–11 influence on Stoker, Bram 3: 395–404 legacy of 1: 57–58 letters of 3: 429, 431–32 literary form of 1: 459 mysterious portrait in 1: 252; 2: 252, 254; 3: 25, 199 originator of Gothic literature 1: 1–2, 402; 2: 116 patterns in 2: 301 poetry of 3: 446 principal works 3: 432 prophecy in 3: 200 psychoanalysis of 1: 322 singularity of 3: 447 Strawberry Hill 1: 58, 502–3; 3: 430, 447–48 Strawberry Hill Press 3: 446 Wandering Jew (Gothic convention) Faulkner, William 2: 302 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 373–74 “The Man of the Crowd” 3: 198 Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 74 “The Mortal Immortal: A Tale” 3: 330 precursor for Count Dracula 3: 402 Warfel, Harry R. 2: 164–70 Waring, Susan M. (sidebar) 2: 121 Washington Square (James) 2: 462 Watching (motif) 3: 471 Watergate scandal 1: 371 Watt, James 1: 411 Waverly Novels 3: 289–92, 297–316 See also specific titles in series Waverly; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (Scott) 1: 2; 3: 289–90, (sidebar) 306 fear, 3: 309, 310 mystery in 3: 306 supernatural 3: 313–14 violence 3: 312 We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Jackson) 1: 278, 280–82 We Were the Mulvaneys (Oates) 3: 165 Weeks, Jeffrey 1: 138 Wein, Toni 2: 121–29 Weir of Hermiston (Stevenson) 3: 360

556

Weissberg, Liliane 3: 142–50 Weld, Theodore 1: 182 “Welldean Hall” (Hogg) 2: 437 Welles, Orson 1: 437; 2: 119 Wells, H. G. 1: 162–66 Werewolves The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories 2: 188 Christine 2: 486 King, Stephen 2: 487–89 See also Monsters Werke (Goethe) 2: 344–48 Wesley, John 1: 17–18 Westerns (novels) 1: 36; 3: 205–6 Whale, James 1: 422–25 Wharton, Edith 3: 457, 457–86 abyss in 3: 480–83 aestheticism 3: 468–69 on American writers 3: 468–69 aristocracy 3: 448, 466–68 autobiographies 3: 476–84 capitalism 3: 467–75 Christianity 3: 470–71 compared to Bronte¨, Charlotte 3: 480 cultural elitism of 3: 468–69 European heritage 3: 468–69 feminist literary theory 3: 459–60 gender roles 3: 476–80 ghost stories 3: 461–75, 482 ghosts 3: 460–62, 466–75 horror 3: 463–66 James, Henry and 3: 459, 483 mythology 3: 465, (sidebar) 467 Nietzsche, Friedrich and 3: 470 patriarchy 3: 476–80 principal works 3: 460 Pulitzer Prize 3: 458, 459 realism 3: 468 relationship with mother 3: 476–77, 483–84 sexuality 3: 478–79, 483–84 social criticism 3: 458 supernatural 3: 457, 458–59, 470–75 Thoreau, Henry David 3: 468, 469 Transcendentalism 3: 468, 474 as woman writer 3: 478, 480 Wharton, Thomas 1: 54 What I Lived For (Oates) 3: 165 “What is Gothic About Absalom, Absalom!” (Putzel) (sidebar) 2: 304 “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (Oates) 1: 216–17; 3: 164, 179 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Stories of Young America (Oates) 3: 164 Whipple, E. P. 2: 114–15, 135–36 A Whisper of Blood (Datlow) 1: 366–67

White Goddess 3: 211 White-Jacket: or, The World in a Man-of-War (Melville) 3: 108, 115 “Who Is Heathcliff? The Shadow Knows” (Hume, M.) 2: 146–50 “Why Is Your Writing So Violent?” (Oates) 1: 217 Wicke, Jennifer 3: 396 Widdicombe, Toby 3: 468 “The Widows” (Oates) 3: 180, 183 Wieland; or, The Transformation (Brown) 2: 153–55, 159–61, 167 compared to Caleb Williams 2: 168, 170–71 influence of Paradise Lost 2: 170–76 introduction to 2: 155–56 Keats, John on (sidebar) 2: 171 as original Gothic literature 2: 116 review 2: 162–64 “Wieland; or, The Transformation” (Warfel) 2: 164–70 The Wild Irish Boy (Maturin) 3: 73, 83, 84, 94 The Wild Palms (Faulkner) 2: 294 Wilde, Oscar 1: 31, 34; 3: 487, 487–518 aestheticism 3: 487, 489, 493– 99, 511–16 compared to Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 504–9 Decadence movement 3: 487 defense of The Picture of Dorian Gray 3: 492–93 degeneration 1: 160–62 ghost stories 3: 488 influence on The House of the Vampire 1: 363 morality of 3: 509–16 principal works 3: 489–90 sexual misconduct charge 3: 488 Wilder, Billy 1: 437–38 Wilderness Tips (Atwood) 2: 11 “Wilkie Collins and Dickens” (Eliot) (sidebar) 2: 215 Wilkins-Freeman, Mary E. 1: 365 “William Beckford and Vathek” (Bleiler) 2: 85–89 “William Wilson” (Poe) 3: 189, 213, 215 Williams, Anne 1: 67, 69; 3: 252–60 Williamson, Paul 1: 511–18 Willing to Die (Le Fanu) 3: 17 Willis, Paul 1: 465 Wilson, J. J. 2: 261 The Wind (Scarborough) 1: 36 The Wings of the Dove (James) 2: 462, 471 Winter’s Tales (Dinesen) 2: 258 Wise Children (Carter) 2: 186 Wisker, Gina 2: 182–90

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

ZSCHOKKE, HEINRICH

power in nineteenth century 1: 356–58; 3: 16–21 pre-oedipal stage 1: 377–79 as puppets 2: 183–85 romance as reflection of oppression 1: 220–26 Sanctuary 2: 317–18 “Taming a Tartar” 1: 203–6 vampires 1: 352–58, 364–67; 3: 19–20 victimization of 1: 355–58; 2: 185, 188–89; 3: 327–33 in Victorian England 1: 131– 33, 203–5; 2: 63–65; 3: 20–21 violence against 1: 218–19; 2: 185, 188–89 White Goddess 2: 303 Willing to Die 3: 17 as writers 3: 478, 480 See also Heroines “Women and Power in ‘Carmilla’” (Senf) 3: 16–21 Women; or Pour et contre (Maturin) 3: 74, 79, 81, 83, 84, 95–96 Women, Power, and Subversion (Newton) 3: 17, 21 Wonderland (Oates) 3: 164–65, 177, 183 American culture 3: 168–70 American Gothic tradition 3: 168–70 compared to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 169–70 as Southern Gothic 3: 178 “Wonderlands” (Oates) 3: 178–79 Wood, Grant 1: 73–74 Wood, Martin J. 3: 266–76 Wood, Robin 1: 415–25 Woodstock (Scott) 3: 311, 315 Woolf, Virginia (sidebar) 2: 471 “The Wool-Gatherer” (Hogg) 2: 422, 438 Wordsworth, William 1: 21 “A Work of Genius: James Hogg’s Justified Sinner” (Smith) 2: 432–38 World Eras, (sidebar) 1: 478 “Worldly Goods” (Jackson) 1: 267 Worringer, Wilhelm 1: 481 “Wrapping Workhouse” (Dickens) 2: 238–39 Wren, Sir Christopher 1: 40–41 Wright, Angela 3: 61–70 Wright, Richard 1: 180 “Writer and Humanitarian” (Irwin) (sidebar) 3: 62 The Writing of Fiction (Wharton) 3: 464, 468, 470, 476, 479–80 Wuthering Heights (Bronte¨, E.) 2: 131–33, 264 “Chapter 1” 2: 133–35 dream interpretation in 1: 331

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 2

film adaptation 2: 142 Healthcliff as The Shadow 2: 146–50 heroine in 2: 138–45 immorality of 2: 135–36 influence of Gothic on 2: 136– 38, 145 preface (sidebar) 2: 147 review (sidebar) 2: 137 spiritual horror 1: 262–63 Wylder’s Hand (Le Fanu) 1: 89; 3: 1–2 Wyler, William 2: 142

X Xenophobia 1: 93–94

Y Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn 1: 367–68 Yeats, W. B. 1: 31–32 “The Yellow Mask” (Collins) 2: 202, 217–26 “The Yellow Mask, the Black Robe, and the Woman in White: Wilkie Collins, Anti-Catholic Discourse, and the Sensation Novel” (Griffin) 2: 217–28 “The Yellow Wallpaper” (Gilman) 1: 109, 212–15, (sidebar) 213 Yoknapatawpha novels 2: 297–306 You Are Happy (Atwood) 2: 5–6, 8 You Can’t Catch Me (Oates) 3: 165 You Must Remember This (Oates) 3: 164–65 Young, Edward 1: 53 “Young Goodman Brown” (Hawthorne) 2: 363, 365, 372–73, 378

Z Zanoni (Bulwer-Lytton) (sidebar) 1: 15 Zastrozzi (Shelley, P.) 1: 24 Zgorzelski, Andrzej 1: 128 Zlosnik, Sue 2: 284–91 Zofloya (Dacre) 1: 208–10 Zombie (Oates) 3: 165 Zschokke, Heinrich 1: 499–500

557

SUBJECT INDEX

“The Witch of Fife” (Hogg) 2: 423 Witchcraft Godwin, William 2: 325–26 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 371–73 Victorian attitudes 1: 132–33 Witchcraft (Baillie) 2: 50, 58, 69–73 The Witching Hour (Rice) 3: 264 With Shuddering Fall (Oates) 3: 164–65, 178 “‘Withered, Wrinkled, and Loathsome of Visage’: Reading the Ethics of the Soul and the Late-Victorian Gothic in The Picture of Dorian Gray” (Womack) 3: 509–17 Within the Rim and Other Essays, 1914-15 (James) 2: 472 Wolfreys, Julian 2: 234–42 Wollstonecraft, Mary 1: 83, 221, 223 compared to Baillie, Joanna 2: 63 Godwin, William and 2: 322 Radcliffe, Ann and 3: 239 Shelley, Mary and 3: 319, 328– 29, 342 Womack, Kenneth 3: 489, 509–17 Woman and the Demon (Auerbach) 3: 20 The Woman in White (Collins, Wilkie) 1: 88–89; 2: 201–2, 211 Gothic conventions in 2: 215–17 review 2: 211 as sensation fiction 2: 211–15, 218–19, 223–26 A Woman of No Importance (Wilde) 3: 488 Woman’s Record (Hale) 1: 211–12 Women 1: 210–29 American Gothic writers 1: 210–19 artists 2: 261 attraction to Gothic 2: 11, 189 demonic (fictitious) 2: 14–16 education of 3: 238–44 eighteenth-century marriage laws 1: 224–26 female body 3: 329–33 Gothic portrayal of 1: 108–9; 3: 465 Gothic writers, lack of recognition 1: 212 hysteria as deception 2: 69–73 interracial sexual desire 1: 207–10 Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 80 Morrison, Toni 3: 139–41, 147–48 mythology 3: 465

GOTHIC LITERATURE A Gale Critical Companion

GALE CRITICAL COMPANION ADVISORY BOARD

Barbara M. Bibel Librarian Oakland Public Library Oakland, California

Mary Jane Marden Collection Development Librarian St. Petersburg College Pinellas Park, Florida

James K. Bracken Professor and Assistant Director University Libraries The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio

Heather Martin Arts & Humanities Librarian University of Alabama, Sterne Library Birmingham, Alabama

Dr. Toby Burrows Principal Librarian The Scholars’ Centre University of Western Australia Library Nedlands, Western Australia Celia C. Daniel Associate Librarian, Reference Howard University Washington, D.C. David M. Durant Reference Librarian Joyner Library East Carolina University Greenville, North Carolina Nancy Guidry Librarian Bakersfield Community College Bakersfield, California

Susan Mikula Director Indiana Free Library Indiana, Pennsylvania Thomas Nixon Humanities Reference Librarian University of North Carolina, Davis Library Chapel Hill, North Carolina Mark Schumacher Jackson Library University of North Carolina Greensboro, North Carolina Gwen Scott-Miller Assistant Director Sno-Isle Regional Library System Marysville, Washington Donald Welsh Head, Reference Services College of William and Mary, Swem Library Williamsburg, Virginia

Preface ............................................................. xix Acknowledgments .......................................... xxiii Chronology of Key Events ............................. xxxiii

VOLUME 1 Gothic Literature: An Overview Introduction ..................................................... 1 Representative Works ....................................... 2 Primary Sources ................................................ 4 Overviews ....................................................... 16 Origins of the Gothic ..................................... 40 American Gothic ............................................ 57 European Gothic ............................................ 74 Further Reading ............................................ 104 Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ John Aikin (1747-1822) and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld (1743-1825) ................................. 7 On the Subject Of ѧ Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) .............................................. 15 On the Subject Of ѧ Edmund Burke (1729?-1797) ............................................. 30

On the Subject Of ѧ Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) ............................. On the Subject Of ѧ Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) .............................................. On the Subject Of ѧ Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) .............................................. On the Subject Of ѧ William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) ............................

Society, Culture, and the Gothic Introduction ................................................. Representative Works ................................... Primary Sources ............................................ Overviews ..................................................... Race and the Gothic .................................... Women and the Gothic ............................... Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ Clara Reeve (1729-1807) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Sophia Lee (1750-1824) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Ray Bradbury (1920-) .................................................... On the Subject Of ѧ Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) and “The Yellow Wallpaper” ..............................................

48 68 76 94

107 109 110 127 180 210 228

112 119 143 172 199

213

v

CONTENTS

Foreword by Jerrold E. Hogle ............................ xiii

CONTENTS

Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures Introduction ................................................. Representative Works ................................... Primary Sources ............................................ Overviews ..................................................... Haunted Dwellings and the Supernatural ... Psychology and the Gothic ......................... Vampires ....................................................... Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron (1788-1824) ............... On the Subject Of ѧ H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) ............................... On the Subject Of ѧ Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-) .................................................... On the Subject Of ѧ Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and “The Uncanny” .......... On the Subject Of ѧ Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ John William Polidori (1795-1821) .............................. On the Subject Of ѧ Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) ..............................

Performing Arts and the Gothic Introduction ................................................. Representative Works ................................... Primary Sources ............................................ Drama ........................................................... Film ............................................................... Television ...................................................... Music ............................................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ James Boaden (1762-1839) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Clive Barker (1952-) .................................................... On the Subject Of ѧ Boris Karloff (1887-1969) and Frankenstein ................ On the Subject Of ѧ Bela Lugosi (1882-1956) and Dracula ........................ On the Subject Of ѧ Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ F. W. Murnau (1888-1931) and Nosferatu ..................... On the Subject Of ѧ Shirley Jackson (1919-1965) ............................................

231 233 236 249 264 301 342 385

241 260 275 291

480 486 506 525

478 487 491 497 510 522

308 333

Author Index .................................................. 531

362

Title Index ...................................................... 535

377

389 391 394 401 415 452 461 473

399 411 416 425

Subject Index .................................................. 545

VOLUME 2 Margaret Atwood 1939Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, critic, and author of children’s books Introduction ..................................................... 1 Principal Works ................................................ 3 Primary Sources ................................................ 4 General Commentary ...................................... 5 Title Commentary .......................................... 17 Further Reading .............................................. 24 Sidebars: From the Author: An excerpt from Lady Oracle ................................................ 18

436 451 464

Visual Arts and the Gothic Introduction ................................................. 475 Representative Works ................................... 476 Primary Sources ............................................ 477

vi

Overviews ..................................................... Architecture .................................................. Art ................................................................. Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ Suger of St. Denis (1081-1151) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ William Blake (1757-1827) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Alexander Jackson Davis (1803-1892) .................................. On the Subject Of ѧ L. N. Cottingham (1787-1847) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Edward Gorey (1925-2000) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Washington Allston (1779-1843) ............................................

Jane Austen 1775-1817 English novelist Introduction ................................................... Principal Works .............................................. Primary Sources .............................................. Title Commentary .......................................... Further Reading .............................................. Sidebars: About the Author: “Gothic Extravagance” in Northanger Abbey ..................................

25 27 27 31 46

37

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 3

49 50 51 54 61 76

55 68

William Beckford 1760-1844 English novelist and travel writer Introduction ................................................... 79 Principal Works .............................................. 81 Primary Sources .............................................. 81 Title Commentary .......................................... 85 Further Reading ............................................ 101 Sidebars: From the Author: An excerpt from “Nymph of the Fountain,” written c. 1791 ...................................................... 84 About the Author: An early review of Vathek ....................................................... 86 About the Author: Byron notes Vathek as a source for oriental elements in The Giaour ....................................................... 95

Charlotte Brontë 1816-1855 English novelist and poet Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: William Dean Howells lauds the title character of Jane Eyre .................................................. About the Author: Susan M. Waring praises Villette .........................................

Emily Brontë 1818-1848 English novelist and poet Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................

103 105 105 107 114 129

116 121

131 133 133 135

Further Reading ............................................ 150 Sidebars: About the Author: H. F. Chorley’s negative response to Wuthering Heights .................................................... 137 About the Author: Charlotte Brontë’s Preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights ................................... 147

Charles Brockden Brown 1771-1810 American novelist, essayist, and short story writer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: William Hazlitt assesses Brown’s literary talent .............. About the Author: John Keats on Wieland ...................................................

Angela Carter 1940-1992 English novelist, short story writer, nonfiction writer, scriptwriter, and author of children’s books Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: James Brockway on Carter’s “Gothic Pyrotechnics” in Fireworks .................................................

Wilkie Collins 1824-1889 English novelist, short story writer, travel writer, and playwright Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Geraldine Jewsbury on the beauty of The Moonstone ............ About the Author: T. S. Eliot on Collins and Charles Dickens ................. About the Author: Charles Dickens remarks to Wilkie Collins on Collins’s talent ......................................................

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 3

153 155 155 156 162 177

163 171

179 181 181 182 200

191

201 202 203 205 211 228

207 215

223

vii

CONTENTS

Joanna Baillie 1762-1851 Scottish poet, playwright, editor, and critic Introduction ................................................... Principal Works .............................................. Primary Sources .............................................. General Commentary .................................... Title Commentary .......................................... Further Reading .............................................. Sidebars: About the Author: An excerpt from a death notice in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine ................................................... About the Author: An early reviewer applauds Baillie’s talent ...........................

CONTENTS

Charles Dickens 1812-1870 English novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, and essayist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Archibald C. Coolidge Jr. on Dickens’s childhood memories and the Gothic ...................... About the Author: Michael Hollington on “Dickensian Gothic” ........................

Isak Dinesen 1885-1962 Danish short story writer, autobiographer, novelist, playwright, and translator Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: John Updike on Dinesen’s “Divine Swank” in Seven Gothic Tales .............................................

Daphne du Maurier 1907-1989 English novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, and editor Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Basil Davenport on Rebecca as a melodrama .........................

William Faulkner 1897-1962 American novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and essayist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Max Putzel on Faulkner’s Gothic ...................................

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229 231 231 234 242 255

237

William Godwin 1756-1836 English philosopher, novelist, essayist, historian, playwright, and biographer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Edgar Allan Poe reviews Godwin’s Lives of the Necromancers ........................................... From the Author: An excerpt from the Preface to Fleetwood ................................

321 323 324 327 338

328 330

252

257 259 259 261 278

270

279 280 281 282 291

285

293 295 296 297 306 319

304

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749-1832 German poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer, essayist, critic, biographer, memoirist, and librettist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: From the Author: Sir Walter Scott’s translation of Goethe’s “Der Erlkonig” (“The Erl-King”) .....................................

Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-1864 American novelist, short story writer, and essayist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Edgar Allan Poe reviews Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales ... About the Author: Herman Melville reviews Mosses from an Old Manse .........

E. T. A. Hoffmann 1776-1822 German short story writer, novella writer, novelist, and music critic Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................

341 342 343 344 349 362

350

363 365 366 368 382 385

369 380

387 388 389 391 401 419

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James Hogg 1770-1835 Scottish poet, novelist, short story and song writer, journalist, editor, playwright, and essayist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: George Saintsbury on The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner ..................................

421 423 424 425 428 438

Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Edwin F. Casebeer on the influence of King’s life on his works ......................................................

482 483 485 494 504

492

Author Index .................................................. 511 Title Index ...................................................... 515 Subject Index .................................................. 525

430

VOLUME 3 Washington Irving 1783-1859 American short story writer, essayist, historian, journalist, and biographer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Donald A. Ringe on Irving’s Gothic .......................................

Henry James 1843-1916 American novelist, short story and novella writer, essayist, critic, biographer, autobiographer, and playwright Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Virginia Woolf on James’s ghost stories ..............................

441 443 444 446 456 459

450

461 464 465 466 470 478

471

Stephen King 1947American novelist, short story writer, novella writer, scriptwriter, nonfiction writer, autobiographer, and author of children’s books Introduction ................................................. 481

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 1814-1873 Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, journalist, and editor Introduction ..................................................... 1 Principal Works ................................................ 3 Primary Sources ................................................ 3 General Commentary ...................................... 5 Title Commentary .......................................... 16 Further Reading .............................................. 27 Sidebars: About the Author: S. M. Ellis on Le Fanu’s horror fiction ............................. 6 About the Author: Edna Kenton on Le Fanu’s legacy ....................................... 22

Matthew Gregory Lewis 1775-1818 English novelist, playwright, diarist, prose writer, and poet Introduction ................................................... Principal Works .............................................. Primary Sources .............................................. General Commentary .................................... Title Commentary .......................................... Further Reading .............................................. Sidebars: About the Author: Lord Byron on “Monk” Lewis .......................................... About the Author: Joseph James Irwin on Lewis’s mastery of horror and terror .........................................................

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31 33 34 36 46 70

42

62

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Sidebars: About the Author: Sir Walter Scott on Hoffmann’s talent and mental state ..... 392 About the Author: Palmer Cobb on Hoffmann’s genius ................................. 412

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Charles Robert Maturin 1780-1824 Irish novelist and playwright Introduction ................................................... 73 Principal Works .............................................. 74 Primary Sources .............................................. 75 General Commentary .................................... 76 Title Commentary .......................................... 84 Further Reading ............................................ 104 Sidebars: From the Author: An excerpt from Maturin’s Preface to Melmoth the Wanderer ................................................... 85 About the Author: An excerpt from an early review of Melmoth the Wanderer ................................................... 98

Herman Melville 1819-1891 American novelist, short story writer, and poet Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Jay MacPherson on Melville’s “The Bell Tower” and Frankenstein ............................................ About the Author: Excerpt from an early review of Moby-Dick ......................

Toni Morrison 1931American novelist, essayist, playwright, critic, author of children’s books, and editor Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: From the Author: An excerpt from the conclusion of Beloved .............................

Joyce Carol Oates 1938American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, playwright, author of children’s books, nonfiction writer, and poet Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................

x

107 109 110 111 118 132

111 125

135 136 137 138 142 160

151

163 165 167 168 178

Further Reading ............................................ 185 Sidebars: From the Author: Oates’s “Reflections on the Grotesque” ................................. 179

Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849 American short story writer, poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and critic Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: D. H. Lawrence on the purpose of Poe’s tales ..................... About the Author: H. P. Lovecraft on Poe’s literary innovations ......................

Ann Radcliffe 1764-1823 English novelist, poet, and journal writer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Sir Walter Scott on Radcliffe’s talent ..................................... About the Author: Edith Birkhead on Radcliffe and the Gothic ........................ About the Author: Devendra P. Varma on Radcliffe’s legacy ...............................

Anne Rice 1941American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Angela Carter on Rice’s self-consciousness ........................ From the Author: Rice on her fears .........

187 190 190 193 205 228

203 219

231 233 233 238 245 260

238 246 253

263 265 266 277 286

267 278

Sir Walter Scott 1771-1832 Scottish novelist, poet, short story writer, biographer, historian, critic, and editor Introduction ................................................. 289

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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 1797-1851 English novelist, editor, critic, short story and travel writer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Marilyn Butler on Shelley’s life and its impact on Frankenstein ............................................ About the Author: Ellen Moers on motherhood, the Female Gothic, and Frankenstein ............................................ About the Author: Sir Walter Scott on Frankenstein and the use of the supernatural in fiction ...........................

Robert Louis Stevenson 1850-1894 Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and playwright Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: John Addington Symonds on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ...... From the Author: Stevenson’s dedication in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde .......................

Bram Stoker 1847-1912 Irish novelist, short story writer, and essayist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................

292 293 297 317

Sidebars: About the Author: Montague Summers on the enduring nature of Dracula ........ 395 About the Author: An excerpt from an early review of Dracula ..................... 405

298

Horace Walpole 1717-1797 English novelist, biographer, memoirist, historian, essayist, playwright, and letter writer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Frederick S. Frank on The Mysterious Mother ....................... About the Author: Sir Walter Scott offers high praise for Walpole and The Castle of Otranto ..................................... About the Author: H. P. Lovecraft on Walpole’s influence on the Gothic ........

306

319 321 321 327 335 356

328

338

349

359 361 362 364 382

365 373

385 387 387 393 427

429 432 432 434 454

434

435 443

Edith Wharton 1862-1937 American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and autobiographer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Annette Zilversmit on Wharton’s “Pomegranate Seed” .......

457 460 460 462 485

Oscar Wilde 1854-1900 Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, critic, poet, and short story writer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Julian Hawthorne on The Picture of Dorian Gray .................

487 489 490 493 502 517

467

503

Author Index .................................................. 523 Title Index ...................................................... 527 Subject Index .................................................. 537

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Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: William Hazlitt on Scott’s achievements as a writer of prose ....................................................... About the Author: Maria Edgeworth, in a letter to Sir Walter Scott, 1814 .......

Gothic initially—Walpole saw it as a combination of the supernatural “ancient” and the more realistic “modern” romance—have made it unstable from the start and so have led it to “expatiate” widely and wildly (Walpole’s own word in his 1765 Preface) and hence to carry its volatile inconsistency into every form it has assumed, from its beginnings in mid-eighteenth century England to its current profusion throughout the Western world at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Yet what are the traits that hold “the Gothic” together, if only just barely, as it spreads itself like one of its specters or monstrosities across literary, dramatic, and other audio-visual forms? As the following essays and excerpts show, all truly Gothic stories or stagings take place, at least part of the time, in some sort of antiquated (sometimes falsely antiquated) space, be it a castle, ruin, crumbling abbey, graveyard, old manor house or theater, haunted wilderness or neighborhood, cellar or attic full of artifacts—or aging train station, rusted manufacturing plant, or outdated spaceship. This space, reminiscent of medieval “Gothic” castles or churches but often existing long after those in more modern recastings of their features, threatens to overwhelm and engulf protagonists (including readers or viewers) in the setting’s vastness, darkness, and vaguely threatening, even irrational, depths. That is usually because this space is haunted or invaded by some form of ghost,

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These very useful Critical Companion volumes offer a wide range of historical accounts about, literary excerpts from, and critical interpretations of a long-standing mode of fiction-making that has come to be called “the Gothic.” Though this label has most often been attached to “terrifying” or “horrific” pieces of prose fiction ever since Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (the founding text of this form, first published in 1764) added the subtitle A Gothic Story to its Second British Edition of 1765, the hyperbolic and haunting features of this highly popular, but often controversial, mode have proliferated across the last twoand-a-half centuries in an increasing array of forms: novels, prose “romances,” plays, paintings, operas, short stories, narrative and lyric poems, “shilling shocker” tales, newspaper serials and crime-reports, motion pictures, television shows, comic books, “graphic” novels, and even video games. That variety of presentation is what now makes “the Gothic” the best phrase for describing this ongoing phenomenon. It has proven to be a set of transportable features more than it has been a single genre. Its variations are not so much similar in compositional form as they are inclined to share certain settings, symbols, situations, psychological states, and emotional effects on readers or audiences, all of which appear at least somewhat in The Castle of Otranto but have gone on to vary greatly in their manifestations over time. The incompatible generic ingredients of the

FOREWORD

specter, or monster, a frightening crosser of the supposed boundaries between life and death, natural and supernatural, or “normal” and “abnormal.” Usually this figure betokens some hidden “primal crime” buried from sight ages ago or having occurred in the recent past, the truth about which at least seems to lie in the darkest depths, or deepest darkness, of the antiquated space. Gothic protagonists and their readers or viewers, faced with this haunting in such a setting, are thus pulled back and forth (like the Gothic as a mode) between older and newer states of being, longing to escape into the seeming safety of one or the other but kept in a tug-of-war of terrifying suspense between the powers of the past and the present, darkness and daylight, insane incoherence and rational order. At the same time, the extreme fictionality of all these elements is so emphasized in the melodramatic exaggeration of Gothic description and characterizations that the threats in these situations are made to seem both imminent (about to appear) and immanent (sequestered within) and yet safely distant, at least for readers or audiences. As in the “scary movies” of more recent times, many of which employ or derive from the Gothic, the spectators of such fictions can experience the thrill of fear that the threats really arouse and at the same time feel entirely safe from those threats because it is all so obviously artificial and unlikely to become real or lead to real consequences. Any fiction that does not have all these basic features to some extent is not really “Gothic” through and through, although many adjacent fictions (such as those of Charles Dickens or Herman Melville or most films directed by Alfred Hitchcock or M. Night Shyamalan) use pieces of the Gothic to arouse some of the suggestions and effects associated with it. Even when fictions are thoroughly Gothic, however, as are the ones most emphasized in these volumes, they can vary widely across a continuum between terror and horror. Near the end of her life and career, Ann Radcliffe, arguably the most influential British author of Gothic romances in the turbulent 1790s (including The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian), composed a dialogue “On the Supernatural in Poetry” that appeared posthumously with her last novel, Gaston de Blondeville, in 1826. There her fictional interlocutors make a clear distinction between devices that invoke “the terrible” (a suspenseful uncertainty about hidden possibilities that could be violent or repulsive or supernatural but rarely appear in such extreme forms) and blatant descriptions that

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expose “the horrible” (the unambiguously violent, deadly, grotesque, and even horrifically supernatural, so much so that the line between what is “sanctioned” and “forbidden” has been crossed without a doubt). Radcliffe herself, as her novels show, clearly prefers the suggestiveness of terror, to the point where her violence is more potential than actual and the apparently supernatural is always explained away, as is the case with many of her successors in Gothic writing. She thereby places herself and her imitators squarely in the tradition of the “sublime” defined as the safely fearful or awesome by Edmund Burke in his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Gothic “horror,” by contrast, became most epitomized in Radcliffe’s time by Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), filled as it is, not just with a vociferous anti-Catholicism that Radcliffe shares, but with explicit sexual intercourse, incestuous rape and murder, the brutal dismembering of a tyrannical nun by a mob, and the physical appearance of Satan himself as homosexually seductive. The blatantly stagey hyperbole of Lewis’s style makes all this less immediate than it might otherwise be, but it also defines the “horrible” extreme of the Gothic continuum that locates the mere potentiality of “terror” at its opposite end. It thus helps establish a polarity across which the Gothic has played ever since, as it wafts between, say, Daphne du Maurier’s Radcliffean Rebecca (1938) and William Peter Blatty’s horrific The Exorcist (1971) and their ongoing imitators of both types. The Gothic is set off from other forms of fiction by its Walpolean features but also demarcated within itself by its leanings at times towards “terrific” suspense, on the one hand, and graphic “horror,” on the other. The two come together mostly in extreme cases such as Stoker’s original novel Dracula (1897), where suspenseful intimations about the Count’s vampiric nature in “sublime” Transylvania give way to his graphic gorging of himself with the blood of a married woman before witnesses in Victorian London, after which he breaks all “normal” gender boundaries by drawing the same woman to his breast to suck up his own already vampiric blood. It is this whole range of Gothic possibilities that the following excerpts and accounts explore, since this anamorphic (or self-distorting) and metamorphic (or shape-shifting) form of fiction has been pulled between these extremes, we now see, from its earliest manifestations. The tension between the terrifying and the horrible in the Gothic, moreover, has developed

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As supernatural levels of being have become increasingly doubted in the post-Renaissance world of the West, the terrors or horrors generated from within have become a staple of the Gothic and projected onto its haunted settings, just as much as older beliefs in seductive Satan-figures have continued to be in the vein of The Monk, The Exorcist, or Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (19762001). The most debated Gothic story in Western history may be Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw

(1898), in which the highly repressed governess of two children in a castellated old estate-house is convinced she sees the ghosts of her predecessor, Miss Jessel, and Jessel’s lower-class lover, Peter Quint, but may just as likely be projecting them onto the estate-world she observes as she sublimates her own desires for an absentee Master far above her in social station. Even today, as parts of these volumes show, readers and viewers cannot be sure when they begin Gothic tales or films— though they often find out in “twist” endings (in such pictures as The Sixth Sense and The Others)— whether the haunting specters they see are the delusions of characters or unambiguously otherworldly, outside any psychological point of view. We sometimes long for the comfort of supernatural visitations but fear how much this longing comes from irrational psychic forces in ourselves and others, and the Gothic plays on and explores these apprehensions, as it has for over two hundred years. But this last point demands a fuller answer to the most lingering question about the conflicted oddity that is the Gothic as it multiplies into all the forms explored in these volumes: Why do we have this malleable symbolic mode in AngloEuropean Western culture and its former colonies, and why does this anamorphic form, torn as it is between extremes (supernatural/realistic, horrible/ terrifying, really frightening/merely fictional, ontological/psychological, and others), persist from The Castle of Otranto in the 1760s through Frankenstein and Dracula to films, novels, and video games of today, some of which keep repeatedly adapting some of those older stories for new audiences? Numerous answers are offered in the definitional and interpretive essays that follow, as well as in some Gothic tales themselves, here excerpted at their most indicative moments. But I would like to begin the discussion by suggesting the most overriding reasons why the Gothic has arisen and why it persists as a cultural formation clearly needed, as well as wanted, by Western readers and audiences. To begin with, “the Gothic” comes about at a time in the West when the oldest structures of Christian religiosity (including Roman Catholicism) and social hierarchies seemingly predetermined to the advantage of hereditary aristocrats (symbolized by their castles or estate-houses) are starting to fragment and decay, as in Walpole’s principal Ghost (who appears initially in pieces), even as these receding forms hang on as standard grounds of being in the minds of many. At such a time, the older symbols of power seem increas-

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into another continuum of symbolic possibilities—the “psychological” versus “ontological” or supernatural Gothic—especially since 1800. If Radcliffe’s heroines in the 1790s think themselves into states of fear that are finally based on associations of ideas not corroborated by the outside world, it is a small step from there to the projection of a whole state of mind into an external space that is vast, dark, and threatening more because of drives inside the observer than its own separate features. Hence the tormenting Spirits that rise in the Higher Alps at the bidding of the title character in Lord Byron’s Gothic verse-drama Manfred (1817) are, as he admits, “The mind, the spirit, the Promethean spark, / The lightning of my being” as much as anything else. At about the same time, though, Dr. John Polidori, Byron’s personal physician and occasional lover, forecasts the late Victorian coming of Dracula with his Byronic novella The Vampyre (1819), in which the predatory Lord Ruthven seems threatening at first only in the suspicious thoughts of the hero (Aubrey) until the latter faces the horror that his own sister “has glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE,” which Ruthven turns out to have been for centuries. In this latter case, Gothic monstrosity is granted the ontological state of being quite outside any observer, a distinct existence confirmed from multiple points of view, as in Stoker’s Dracula. Throughout the nineteenth century, starting with the Romantic era of Byron and Polidori, the Gothic careens incessantly between the strictly psychological, where ghosts or monsters are more mental than physical, and the unabashedly supernatural in which an other-worldly horror violently invades the space of the self from outside its boundaries. When both are involved, though, the nineteenth century tilts more often towards rooting the supernatural in the psyche. That is certainly the case in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), now the most famous Gothic tale in history, where the half-fantastic creature composed from multiple carcasses is mostly an outsized sewing-together of his creator’s most repressed, libidinous, and boundary-crossing impulses.

FOREWORD

ingly hollowed out, like the ruins of medieval Gothic structures, while they also seem locations that vaguely harbor historical foundations for human minds newly liberated by the rational and scientific Enlightenment that is overthrowing the older orders by degrees in the eighteenth century. In this situation, while beliefs about the selfdetermining (rather than strictly hereditary) individual start to gain ascendancy and give greater weight to personal psychology over predetermined roles, Westerners face an existential anxiety about where they really come from and the orders to which they belong when the bestknown external indicators of those groundings are becoming empty repositories, realms filled up with the nostalgic desires projected into them more than the metaphysical and cultural certainties once manifested by them. As Leslie Fiedler has shown by exposing the basis of the American Gothic in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), this uprooted, yet rootseeking, condition for Westerners around 1765 makes them hover between longings for past securities, though these are also seen as primitively irrational and confining, and longings for rebellion against those patriarchal schemes, which simultaneously produce a sense of guilt about the overthrow of those “fathers,” making that revolution a sort of “primal crime.” Guilt, after all, is what Walpole’s Prince Manfred feels when he finds that his own grandfather once murdered the original founder of Otranto and usurped its birthright from the latter’s heirs, the same way as the rising middle class of the eighteenth century (the main readership of the Gothic as time went on) probably felt about gradually decimating the very power-bases it now sought to occupy in place of the aristocracy. In addition, Fiedler writes, this sense of haunted guilt and uncertainties about middle-class entitlement raised “the fear that in destroying the old ego-ideals of Church and State, the West has opened a way for the inruption of darkness: for insanity and the disintegration of the self.” The Gothic of Walpole and its acceleration by the 1790s in Radcliffe and Lewis come about, since fictions always respond to the needs of their audiences, to address and symbolize this cultural and psychological condition of early capitalist and pre-industrial modernity. That is why the early Gothic places both desires for lost foundations and fears about the irrational darkness lying outside the limits of newly enlightened reason in the same antiquated spaces and their mysterious depths, which Gothic characters from Manfred to Lewis’s monk then seek to penetrate

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or recover and escape or destroy so as to construct a sense of identity that is somehow both grounded and self-determined. The Gothic is a powerful symbolic indicator, then, of the social and psychic contradictions out of which the modern Western self emerged and keeps emerging, and we need and want it, I would argue, to keep retelling that story that is so basic to our modern sense of ourselves. The story has kept developing in the West, however, and the Gothic has developed with it. As the ideological belief in personal self-making becomes even more accepted towards the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the individual mind comes to be viewed as the dynamic, but also anxious, site of its own “ghosts” and increasing depths. Ann Radcliffe and many of her contemporaries accept the basic premises of empirical psychology, which claims (since John Locke in the 1690s, anyway) that the human mind begins as a near-vacancy and gradually accumulates and organizes the memories it retains (hence the “ghosts”) of earlier and more recent sense-perceptions. Adult observations in later life are therefore colored by the associations of previous, and now ghost-like, impressions that are applied to the intake of newer phenomena. Terry Castle can consequently see in The Female Thermometer (1995) that the Radcliffean Gothic turns landscapes as well as characters into “spectralized” thoughts within reflective states of mind that make nature seem already painted (and thus filtered by perceivers) and people already colored by older sayings and texts about their “types.” To observe at any moment in the Gothic from the 1790s on is to call attention, at least some of the time, to the lenses of perception and the gradually accumulated psychic layers of associated memories that are projected onto any object contemplated or produced by the perceiving self. Ruins and old houses, as well as Frankenstein-ian creatures, are now filled with dark indications of deep past threats because the mind transfers its own layers of developing perceptions, as well as middle-class guilt, into what it sees and thus confronts its own “doubling” there, its deepest internal memories reembodied in perceptions of external depths now haunted by mental ghosts. When Victor Frankenstein first sees the face of his finished creature in Mary Shelley’s Gothic book, he falls into a regressive dream in which the mottled visage of his fabrication from dead bodies becomes linked to his longing for his own deceased mother, whose corpse he preconsciously has seen himself re-embracing while

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It is no wonder, then, that the Gothic comes to be torn constantly between terror and horror, on one level, and the psychological and the clearly supernatural, on another. Terror offers the uneasy comfort that what we fear, being mentally constructed for the most part, could be non-existent in the end (as in Radcliffe’s conclusions), except in our own minds. Such solipsism, however, can also be seen as a myopic middle-class or even aristocratic avoidance of the violent upheavals and even greater displacements of older orders brought on by the exploding mercantile and industrial economies—and the racist imperialism that went with them—in the nineteenth century. Consequently, this era’s Gothic invasions of the isolated psyche by “horror,” the external violence and many forms of non-middle-class “ugliness” that cannot be wished away as mere thought, force this counter-awareness on audiences, albeit through extreme fictionality, increasingly so in the form of the vampire made prominent by Polidori. By the time of the serialized Varney the Vampire (1847), usually attributed to Thomas Peckett Prest, and the many stagings of vampire plays in Victorian England, France, and America, this Gothic monster can symbolize many potential invaders of middle-class security simultaneously, from vengeful old aristocrats to foreign and racial “others” to diseases of the blood made more virulent by urban growth, foreign tourism, and the expansion of prostitution. The nineteenth century in the West, we can say, needs the Gothic to carry out and fictively obscure the cultural hesitation at the time between middle-class withdrawal into increasing private spaces, including sheer thought (which thereby confronts its own deep irrationalities), and the need of the same people to face the horrors of growing cities and empires with their illnesses, “unclean” impoverished laborers, exploited women, and enslaved “colored” races.

What the Gothic does in part, among its reaction to these changes, is to increase the struggle between its psychological and supernatural tendencies. First, it becomes the source of many symbols for the concept of the “unconscious” that Sigmund Freud, building on many others, brought into wide prominence by the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. Especially insofar as the Gothic has gradually become a realm of mental projection and of the mind forced back to the beginnings and hauntings of its own development, it has provided the archaic depths, dim repositories, memory-traces, accumulations of memories layer upon layer, and primal states (including regressions back to “mother” or sheer vacancy) from which Freud and his contemporaries craft their description of the unconscious and its sublimation by pre-conscious and conscious levels of thought. In the early twentieth century, the Gothic therefore comes to be seen as primarily psychological in the sense of psychoanalytic, as long having manifested in its haunted spaces and the mental quandaries of its characters the processes of thought described by Freud, even though it is more accurate to say that the Gothic first helped make Freud’s schemes conceivable and expressible. Back in Freud’s formative period, though, the assertion of the human species’s long physical evolution by Charles Darwin and others from the 1850s on challenges the layerings of personal consciousness with a biologically historical progression beyond, yet still working inside, individual people. The Gothic reacts by reinvoking its old invasions of supernatural, or at least trans-individual, forces to show psychological projections running up against pervasive external drives that may really control the psyche after all. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) may seem to suggest a psychological bifurcation in the Victorian self, with Jekyll as internalized superego and Hyde as raging libido, but the Doctor’s attempts to control this internal split finally cannot prevent the “troglodytic” emergence of all that remains primitively devolved in his superficially evolved condition. Even more dramatically, Stoker’s Count Dracula arouses and enacts unconscious libidinal desires by being a devolved, “child-brain” force supernaturally driving across centuries that invades “civilized” England with all the diseases and the racial and animalistic “others” that the supposedly evolved want to keep distant from themselves and cannot. The Turn of the Screw plays out an undecidability between the dominance of the psychological and

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FOREWORD

he tries to make life out of death without the biological involvement of a woman. By 1820 at least, the Gothic has become the fictional locus where outward quests for self-completion now are seen as mainly inward probings through the archaic layers of the self. Gothic “objects,” from antiquated locations to other people to mere things, have thus become manifestations of the perceiver’s own growing depths of thought in which the desire for pre-rational foundations is actually pursuing “the mother” conceived of as the initial interplay of self and other that produces the confused beginnings, later repressed, of all thought, sensation, and memory.

FOREWORD

the power of the supernatural because the nineteenth-century West in its final years needs ways to articulate that it is frantically at odds with itself over what to believe about the deepest foundations of life. The Gothic from its beginnings and as it evolves with the cultural changes around it, in other words, turns out to be the modern Western world’s most striking, if most conflicted, symbolic method for both confronting and disguising its own unresolved struggles with incompatible beliefs about what it means to be human. Walpole’s Castle starts the tradition by leaving its readers caught where most of them already were: between longings for a fading hierarchical order underwritten by supernatural assurances (“ancient romance”) and desires for greater selfdetermination based on free re-imaginings of uprooted older perceptions (“modern romance”). Radcliffe and Lewis, during the revolutionary 1790s, help readers confront and prevent cultural dissolution by offering reassurances that spectral perceptions of danger to the self can finally control the terror those specters produce and shocking revelations at the same time that current upheavals are but symptoms of multiple irrationalities that established religion and governments have tried to repress only to force them towards more extreme violence. Frankenstein offers a condemnation and a celebration of the scientific and industrial advances puzzled over by its readers, along with symbols for the unsettled debate over whether life is externally infused (by, say, some ultimate Father) or internally generated (primarily within the mother whom Victor both remembers and tries to forget). Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula both blame individual free will for inviting its underlying depravities into consciousness and point to attacks on the evolved Anglo race by “devolved” levels of humanity from other times and places. In extreme forms of expression that allow us to perceive or avoid such levels in our thinking, the Gothic holds up to us our conflicted conservative and progressive tendencies in the full cry of their unresolved tug-of-war in our culture and in ourselves. Our hesitation between psychological and supernatural causes for events or

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between inherited and self-determined foundations of identity or between feeling controlled by our pasts and asserting our capacities to alter ourselves decisively in the present: all these stillactive antinomies of modern existence are what the Gothic is fundamentally generated to articulate and to obscure. Over one hundred years after Stoker’s Dracula, of course, the kinds of tendencies we are torn between have changed somewhat, as the more recent Gothic certainly shows. We both want to transcend, even forget, and want to throw ourselves fully into the past (or is it fully past?) condition of slavery and racism that haunts the history of America in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). We want to preserve childhood innocence and see it as really filled with dark drives to be conquered and controlled in Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and Daniel Mann’s Willard (1982) as well as The Exorcist and its “prequels” and sequels on film. We paranoiacally want to find evidence of old conspiracies that explain our current confusions of values and see them as but the imaginings of diseased nostalgic minds in the quite Gothic X-Files television series (1993-2002) or the four Alien films (1979-97) full of Gothic echoes. Still, the Gothic, as the accounts and excerpts in these volumes will reveal in fuller detail, remains one of the key ways we come to terms, while also avoiding direct confrontation, with the betwixtand-between, regressive-progressive, seemingly predetermined-hopefully undetermined nature of modern life. The Gothic is complex and tangled in its proliferations, but fairly simple in its aims: it allows us to play with our inexplicable and haunted modern lives in some fictional safety while concurrently helping us give shape and form to the conflicted beings we really are. I therefore invite our readers to enjoy and ponder the following descents into the Gothic maelstrom of pleasure and fear that reveals so much about modern Western existence. —Jerrold E. Hogle, Ph.D. University of Arizona

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In response to a growing demand for relevant criticism and interpretation of perennial topics and important literary movements throughout history, the Gale Critical Companion Collection (GCCC) was designed to meet the research needs of upper high school and undergraduate students. Each edition of GCCC focuses on a different literary movement or topic of broad interest to students of literature, history, multicultural studies, humanities, foreign language studies, and other subject areas. Topics covered are based on feedback from a standing advisory board consisting of reference librarians and subject specialists from public, academic, and school library systems. The GCCC is designed to complement Gale’s existing Literary Criticism Series (LCS), which includes such award-winning and distinguished titles as Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (NCLC), Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism (TCLC), and Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC). Like the LCS titles, the GCCC editions provide selected reprinted essays that offer an inclusive range of critical and scholarly response to authors and topics widely studied in high school and undergraduate classes; however, the GCCC also includes primary source documents, chronologies, sidebars, supplemental photographs, and other material not included in the LCS products. The graphic and supplemental material is designed to extend the usefulness of the critical essays and

provide students with historical and cultural context on a topic or author’s work. GCCC titles will benefit larger institutions with ongoing subscriptions to Gale’s LCS products as well as smaller libraries and school systems with less extensive reference collections. Each edition of the GCCC is created as a stand-alone set providing a wealth of information on the topic or movement. Importantly, the overlap between the GCCC and LCS titles is 15% or less, ensuring that LCS subscribers will not duplicate resources in their collection. Editions within the GCCC are either singlevolume or multi-volume sets, depending on the nature and scope of the topic being covered. Topic entries and author entries are treated separately, with entries on related topics appearing first, followed by author entries in an A-Z arrangement. Each volume is approximately 500 pages in length and includes approximately 50 images and sidebar graphics. These sidebars include summaries of important historical events, newspaper clippings, brief biographies of important figures, complete poems or passages of fiction written by the author, descriptions of events in the related arts (music, visual arts, and dance), and so on. The reprinted essays in each GCCC edition explicate the major themes and literary techniques of the authors and literary works. It is important to note that approximately 85% of the essays reprinted in GCCC editions are full-text, meaning

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PREFACE

The Gale Critical Companion Collection

PREFACE

that they are reprinted in their entirety, including footnotes and lists of abbreviations. Essays are selected based on their coverage of the seminal works and themes of an author, and based on the importance of those essays to an appreciation of the author’s contribution to the movement and to literature in general. Gale’s editors select those essays of most value to upper high school and undergraduate students, avoiding narrow and highly pedantic interpretations of individual works or of an author’s canon.

Scope of Gothic Literature Gothic Literature, the fourth set in the Gale Critical Companion Collection, consists of three volumes. Each volume includes a detailed table of contents, a foreword on the subject of Gothic literature written by noted scholar Jerrold E. Hogle, and a descriptive chronology of key events throughout the history of the genre. The mainbody of volume 1 consists of entries on five topics relevent to Gothic literature and art, including 1) Gothic Literature: An Overview; 2) Society, Culture, and the Gothic; 3) Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures; 4) Performing Arts and The Gothic; and 5) Visual Arts and the Gothic. Volumes 2 and 3 include entries on thirty-seven authors and literary figures associated with the genre, including such notables as Matthew Gregory Lewis, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Bram Stoker, as well as entries on individuals who have garnered less attention, but whose contributions to the genre are noteworthy, such as Joanna Baillie, Daphne du Maurier, Washington Irving, Edith Wharton, and Oscar Wilde.

Organization of Gothic Literature A Gothic Literature topic entry consists of the following elements: • The Introduction defines the subject of the entry and provides social and historical information important to understanding the criticism. • The list of Representative Works identifies writings and works by authors and figures associated with the subject. The list is divided into alphabetical sections by name; works listed under each name appear in chronological order. The genre and publication date of each work is given. Unless otherwise indicated, plays are dated by first performance, not first publication. • Entries generally begin with a section of Primary Sources, which includes essays, speeches,

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social history, newspaper accounts and other materials that were produced during the time covered. • Reprinted Criticism in topic entries is arranged thematically. Topic entries commonly begin with general surveys of the subject or essays providing historical or background information, followed by essays that develop particular aspects of the topic. For example, the Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures entry in volume 1 of Gothic Literature begins with a section providing primary source material that demonstrates gothic themes, settings, and figures. This is followed by a section providing topic overviews, and three other sections: Haunted Dwellings and the Supernatural; Psychology and the Gothic; and Vampires. Each section has a separate title heading and is identified with a page number in the table of contents. The critic’s name and the date of composition or publication of the critical work are given at the beginning of each piece of criticism. Unsigned criticism is preceded by the title of the source in which it appeared. Footnotes are reprinted at the end of each essay or excerpt. In the case of excerpted criticism, only those footnotes that pertain to the excerpted texts are included. • A complete Bibliographical Citation of the original essay or book precedes each piece of criticism. • Critical essays are prefaced by brief Annotations explicating each piece. Unless the descriptor “excerpt” is used in the annotation, the essay is being reprinted in its entirety. • An annotated bibliography of Further Reading appears at the end of each entry and suggests resources for additional study. In some cases, significant essays for which the editors could not obtain reprint rights are included here. A Gothic Literature author entry consists of the following elements: • The Author Heading cites the name under which the author most commonly wrote, followed by birth and death dates. Also located here are any name variations under which an author wrote. If the author wrote consistently under a pseudonym, the pseudonym will be listed in the author heading and the author’s actual name given in parenthesis on the first line of the biographical and critical information. Uncertain birth or death dates are indicated by question marks.

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• The Introduction contains background information that introduces the reader to the author that is the subject of the entry. • The list of Principal Works is ordered chronologically by date of first publication and lists the most important works by the author. The genre and publication date of each work is given. Unless otherwise indicated, plays are dated by first performance, not first publication. • Author entries are arranged into three sections: Primary Sources, General Commentary, and Title Commentary. The Primary Sources section includes letters, poems, short stories, journal entries, and essays written by the featured author. General Commentary includes overviews of the author’s career and general studies; Title Commentary includes in-depth analyses of seminal works by the author. Within the Title Commentary section, the reprinted criticism is further organized by title, then by date of publication. The critic’s name and the date of composition or publication of the critical work are given at the beginning of each piece of criticism. Unsigned criticism is preceded by the title of the source in which it appeared All titles by the author featured in the text are printed in boldface type. However, not all boldfaced titles are included in the author and subject indexes; only substantial discussions of works are indexed. Footnotes are reprinted at the end of each essay or excerpt. In the case of excerpted criticism, only those footnotes that pertain to the excerpted texts are included. • A complete Bibliographical Citation of the original essay or book precedes each piece of criticism. • Critical essays are prefaced by brief Annotations explicating each piece. Unless the descriptor “excerpt” is used in the annotation, the essay is being reprinted in its entirety. • An annotated bibliography of Further Reading appears at the end of each entry and suggests resources for additional study. In some cases, significant essays for which the editors could not obtain reprint rights are included here. A list of Other Sources from Thomson Gale follows the Further Reading section and provides references to other biographical and critical sources on the author in series published by Gale.

Indexes The Author Index lists all of the authors featured in the Gothic Literature set, with references to the main author entries in volumes 2 and 3 as well as commentary on the featured author in other author entries and in the topic volumes. Page references to substantial discussions of the authors appear in boldface. Authors featured in sidebars are indexed as well. The Author Index also includes birth and death dates and cross references between pseudonyms and actual names, and cross references to other Gale series in which the authors have appeared. A complete list of these sources is found facing the first page of the Author Index. The Title Index alphabetically lists the titles of works written by the authors featured in volumes 2 and 3 and provides page numbers or page ranges where commentary on these titles can be found. Page references to substantial discussions of the titles appear in boldface. English translations of foreign titles and variations of titles are cross-referenced to the title under which a work was originally published. Titles of novels, plays, nonfiction books, films, and poetry, short story, or essay collections are printed in italics, while individual poems, short stories, and essays are printed in roman type within quotation marks. The Subject Index includes the authors and titles that appear in the Author Index and the Title Index as well as the names of other authors and figures that are discussed in the set. The Subject Index also lists hundreds of literary terms and topics covered in the criticism. The index provides page numbers or page ranges where subjects are discussed and is fully cross referenced.

Citing Gothic Literature When writing papers, students who quote directly from the GL set may use the following general format to footnote reprinted criticism. The first example pertains to material drawn from periodicals, the second to material reprinted from books. Markley, A. A. “The Godwinian Confessional Narrative and Psychological Terror in Arthur Gordon Pym.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 4, no. 1 (spring 2003): 4-16; reprinted in Gothic Literature: A Gale Critical Companion, vol. 3, ed. Jessica Bomarito (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006), 29-42. Mishra, Vijay. “Theorizing the (Gothic) Sublime,” in The Gothic Sublime (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 19-43; reprinted in Gothic Literature: A Gale Critical Companion, vol. 1, ed. Jessica Bomarito (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006), 21117.

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• A Portrait of the Author is included when available.

PREFACE

Gothic Literature Advisory Board The members of the Gothic Literature Advisory Board—reference librarians and subject specialists from public, academic, and school library systems—offered a variety of informed perspectives on both the presentation and content of the Gothic Literature set. Advisory board members assessed and defined such quality issues as the relevance, currency, and usefulness of the author coverage, critical content, and topics included in our product; evaluated the layout, presentation, and general quality of our product; provided feedback on the criteria used for selecting authors and topics covered in our product; identified any gaps in our coverage of authors or topics, recommending authors or topics for inclusion; and analyzed the appropriateness of our content and presentation for various user audiences, such as high school

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students, undergraduates, graduate students, librarians, and educators. We wish to thank the advisors for their advice during the development of Gothic Literature

Suggestions are Welcome Readers who wish to suggest new features, topics, or authors to appear in future volumes of the Gale Critical Companion Collection, or who have other suggestions or comments are cordially invited to call, write, or fax the Product Manager. Product Manager, Gale Critical Companion Collection Thomson Gale 27500 Drake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535 1-800-347-4253 (GALE) Fax: 248-699-8054

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Copyrighted material in Gothic Literature was reproduced from the following periodicals: Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), v. 2, spring, 2003. Copyright © 2003 Americana: The Institute for the Study of American Popular Culture. Reproduced by permission.—American Transcendental Quarterly, v. 9, March 1, 1995; v. 1, 2001. Copyright © 1995, 2001 by The University of Rhode Island. Both reproduced by permission.—Arizona Quarterly, v. 34, 1978 for “The Gothic Formula of ‘Bartleby’” by Steven T. Ryan. Copyright © 1978 by Arizona Board of Regents, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Bucknell Review, v. XII, May, 1964. Reproduced by permission.—Col-

lege English, v. 27, March 1, 1966 for “Dr. Jekyll and the Emergence of Mr. Hyde” by Masao Miyoshi. Republished in The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians, New York University Press, 1969, University of London Press, 1969. Copyright © 1966 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Comparative Literature Studies, v. 24, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—Costerus, v. I, 1972. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Critical Survey, v. 15, September, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Critical Survey. Republished with permission of Critical Survey, conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.— Dalhousie Review, v. 47, summer, 1967 for “Terror Made Relevant: James’s Ghost Stories” by Raymond Thorberg. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, March 1, 2001 for “The Gothic IMAGINARY: Goethe in Strasbourg” by Kenneth S. Calhoon. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Dickens Quarterly, September 1, 1989; v. 16, September 1, 1999. Copyright © 1989, 1999 by the Dickens Society. Both reproduced by permission.—Dickens Studies Newsletter, v. VI, September 1, 1975. Copyright © by the Dickens Society. Reproduced by permission.—Dickensian, September 1, 1977 for “The Fall of the House of Clennam: Gothic Conventions in Little Dorrit” by

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors wish to thank the copyright holders of the excerpted criticism included in this volume and the permissions managers of many book and magazine publishing companies for assisting us in securing reproduction rights. We are also grateful to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library, the Library of Congress, the University of Detroit Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/ Kresge Library Complex, and the University of Michigan Libraries for making their resources available to us. Following is a list of the copyright holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this edition of Gothic Literature. Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let us know.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

David Jarrett. Reproduced by permission of the author.—The Edgar Allan Poe Review, v. IV, spring, 2003 for “The Godwinian Confessional Narrative and Psychological Terror in Arthur Gordon Pym” by A.A. Markley. Copyright © 2003 The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.— Eighteenth-Century Fiction, v. 15, January 1, 2003. Copyright © 2003 Eighteenth-Century Fiction, McMaster University. Reproduced by permission.—ELH, v. 48, autumn, 1981; v. 59, spring, 1992; v. 70, winter, 2003. Copyright © 1981, 1992, 2003 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All reproduced by permission.—ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, v. 18, 1972 for “Poe and the Gothic Tradition” by Maurice Lévy. Translated by Richard Henry Haswell. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the translator.—European Romantic Review, v. 13, June 1, 2002 for “Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya” by Anne K. Mellor. Copyright © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals—Faulkner Journal, v. II, fall, 1986. Copyright © 1987 by Ohio Northern University. Reproduced by permission.—German Life and Letters, v. XVIII, 1964-1965. Copyright © 1964-1965 Basil Blackwell Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Blackwell Publishers.—Gothic. New Series, v. I, 1986; 1987; v. II, 1987. Copyright © 1986, 1987 by Gary William Crawford. All reproduced by permission of the author.—Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, v. X, August 1, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by the Institute for Evolutionary Psychology. Reproduced by permission.— Journal of Popular Culture, v. 13, 1979; v. 26, winter, 1992; v. 30, spring, 1997. Copyright © 1979, 1992, 1997 Basil Blackwell Ltd. All reproduced by permission of Blackwell Publishers.— Literature/Film Quarterly, v. 21, 1993. Copyright © 1993 Salisbury State College. Reproduced by permission.—Malahat Review, 1977 for “Atwood Gothic” by Eli Mandel. Copyright © The Malahat Review, 1977. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of the author.— Mississippi Quarterly, v. XLII, summer, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by Mississippi State University. Reproduced by permission.—Modern Fiction Studies, v. XVII, summer, 1971; v. 46, fall, 2000. Copyright © 1971, 2000 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Both reproduced by permission.—Mosaic, v. 35, 2002; v. 35, March 1, 2002. Copyright © Mosaic 2002. All acknowledgment of previous publication is herewith made.—Narrative, v. 12, January 1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by the Ohio State University. Reproduced by permission.—The Nation and The Athenaeum, v. XXXIII, May 26, 1923. Copyright 1923 New

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Statesman, Ltd. Reproduced by permission.—New York Times Book Review, March 8, 1953 for “The Macabre and the Unexpected” by John Barkham. Copyright 1953, renewed 1981 by The New York Times Company. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of John Barkham.—Papers on Language and Literature, v. 20, winter, 1984; v. 37, winter, 2001. Copyright © 1984, 2001 by The Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Both reproduced by permission.— Princeton University Library Chronicle, v. XLIV, spring, 1983 for “A Story Replete with Horror” by Williston R. Benedict. Copyright © 1983 by Princeton University Library. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, v. 9, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by the American Conference on Romanticism. Reproduced by permission.—Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1994. Copyright © 1994 The Review of Contemporary Fiction. Reproduced by permission.—Review of English Studies, v. XIX, 1968. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—The Saturday Review of Literature, v. XVIII, September 24, 1938 for “Sinister House,” by Basil Davenport. Copyright © 1938, renewed 1966 Saturday Review Magazine, © 1979 General Media International, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—Studies in American Fiction, v. 7, spring, 1979. Copyright © 1979 Northeastern University. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, v. 39, autumn, 1999. Copyright © 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in the Literary Imagination, v. VII, spring, 1974. Copyright © 1974 Department of English, Georgia State University. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in the Novel, v. IX, summer, 1977. Copyright © 1977 by North Texas State University. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in Romanticism, v. 40, spring, 2001. Copyright 2001 by the Trustees of Boston University. Reproduced by permission.— Studies in Scottish Literature, v. XXVIII, 1993. Copyright © G. Ross Roy 1993. Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Studies in Short Fiction, v. 21, fall, 1984. Copyright © 1984 by Studies in Short Fiction. Reproduced by permission.— Studies in Weird Fiction, spring, 1990; winter, 1994; v. 24, winter, 1999. Copyright © 1990, 1994, 1999 Necronomicon Press. All reproduced by permission of the author.—Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Transactions of the Eighth International Congress on the Enlightenment III, v. 305, 1992 for “The Gothic Caleb Williams” by Betty Rizzo. Copyright © 1992 University of Oxford. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Victorian Newsletter, fall, 2002 for “Who Is Heathcliff? The Shadow Knows” by Marilyn Hume. Reproduced by permission of

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Copyrighted material in Gothic Literature was reproduced from the following books: Andriano, Joseph. From Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—Atwood, Margaret. From The Animals in That Country. Atlantic-Little Brown Books, 1969. Copyright © 1968 by Oxford University Press (Canadian Branch). All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, in Canada by Oxford University Press.—Auerbach, Nina. From Our Vampires, Ourselves. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Baldick, Chris. From an Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer. Edited by Douglas Grant. Oxford University Press, 1989. © Oxford University Press 1968, Introduction and Select Biography © Chris Beldick 1989. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.— Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda. From The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. Copyright © 1982 by Associated University Presses, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Bell, Michael Davitt. From The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation. The University of Chicago Press, 1980. Copyright © 1980 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Bleiler, E. F. From “Introduction: William Beckford and Vathek,” in Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, The Vampyre. Edited by E.F. Bleiler. Dover Publications, 1966. Copyright © 1966 by Dover Publications, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Botting, Fred. From Gothic. Routledge, 1996. Copyright © 1996 Fred Botting. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Botting, Fred. From “Reflections of Excess: Frankenstein, the French Revolution, and Monstrosity,” in Reflections of Excess: Frankenstein, the French Revolution and Monstrosity. Edited by Allison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest. Routledge, 1993. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis, the editor, and author.—Botting, Fred. From Gothic. Routledge, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Fred Botting. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the pub-

lisher and the author.—Brantly, Susan C. From Understanding Isak Dinesen. University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Copyright © 2002 University of South Carolina Press. Reproduced by permission.—Brennan, Matthew C. From The Gothic Psyche: Disintegration and Growth in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. Camden House, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by the Editor and Contributors. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Brown, Jane K. and Marshall Brown. From “Faust and the Gothic Novel,” in Interpreting Goethe’s Faust Today. Edited by Jane K. Brown, Meredith Lee, and Thomas P. Saine. Camden House, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Camden House, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—BulwerLytton, Edward George. From “Glenallan,” in Gothic Tales of Terror. Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain. Taplinger Publishing Company, Inc., 1972. Copyright © 1972 selection and original material by Peter Haining. Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Burns, Sarah. From Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America. University of California Press, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by The Regents of the University of California. Reproduced by permission.— Casebeer, Edwin F. From “Stephen King’s Canon: The Art of Balance,” in A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction. Edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison. University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by the University of South Carolina. Reproduced by permission.—Clery, E. J. From “The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s,” in Reviewing Romanticism. Edited by Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis. MacMillan Academic and Professional Ltd., 1992. Editorial matter and selection Copyright © Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis, 1992. Text Copyrights © Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd, 1992. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Clery, E. J. From Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley. Northcote House Publishers, Ltd., 2000, 2004. Copyright © 2000 and 2004 by E. J. Clery. Reproduced by permission.—Clery, Emma. From “Against Gothic,” in Gothick Origins and Innovations. Edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage. Rodopi, 1994. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Conger, Syndy M. From “An Analysis of The Monk and Its German Sources,” in Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans: An Interpretive Study of the Influence of German Literature on Two Gothic Novels. Edited by Dr. James Hogg. Institut Fur Englische Sprache Und Literatur, 1977. Copyright © 1976 by Syndy M. Conger. Reproduced by permission.—Conger, Syndy McMillen. From “The Reconstruction of the Gothic Feminine

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the publisher and author.—West Virginia University Philological Papers, v. 42-43, 1997-1998. Reproduced by permission.—Wordsworth Circle, v. 31, summer, 2000; v. 34, spring, 2003. Copyright © 2000, 2003 Marilyn Gaull. Both reproduced by permission of the editor.

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Ideal in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights,” in The Female Gothic. Edited by Juliann E. Fleenor. Eden Press, 1983. Copyright © 1983 Eden Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the author.— Davenport-Hines, Richard. From Gothic. North Point Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Richard Davenport-Hines. Reprinted by permission of North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC. In the United Kingdom, Canada and the British Commonwealth by the author.—Dinesen, Isak. From “The Monkey,” in Seven Gothic Tales. Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Inc., 1934; The Modern Library 1939. Copyright © 1934 by Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Inc. Renewed 1961 by Isak Dinesen. Reproduced by permission of the Rungstedlund Foundation. In the United States by Random House, Inc.—du Maurier, Daphne. From Rebecca. Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1938. Copyright 1938 Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc. Renewed 1965 by Daphne du Maurier Browning. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd., London on behalf of The Chichester Partnership.—Duthie, Peter. From Plays on the Passions. Broadview Press, Ltd., 2001. Copyright © 2001 Peter Duthie. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Faulkner, William. From “A Rose for Emily,” in Collected Stories of William Faulkner. Vintage International, 1995. Copyright 1930, renewed 1958 by William Faulkner. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. In the United Kingdom by the Literary Estate of William Faulkner.—Fedorko, Kathy A. From Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton. The University of Alabama Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 The University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Fiedler, Leslie. From Love and Death in the American Novel. Revised edition. Stein and Day, 1966. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Leslie Fiedler.—Fisher, IV, Benjamin F. From “Gothic Possibilities in Moby-Dick,” in Gothick Origins and Innovations. Edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage. Rodopi, 1994. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Frank, Frederick S. From “The Gothic Vathek: The Problem of Genre Resolved,” in AMS Studies in Eighteenth Century: Vathek and the Escape from Time: Bicentenary Revaluations. Edited by Kenneth W. Graham. AMS, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by AMS Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Freud, Sigmund. From The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. Penguin, 2003. Translation and editorial matter Copyright © 2003 by David McLintock. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd. In the United States and the Philippines by the Literary Estate of David McLintock.—Frisch, Shelley L. From “Poetics of the Uncanny: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Sand-

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man,’” in The Scope of the Fantastic: Theory, Technique, Major Authors. Edited by Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearce. Greenwood Press, 1985. Copyright © 1985 by The Thomas Burnett Swann Fund. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.—Gamer, Michael. From an Introduction to The Castle of Otranto. Edited, with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Gamer. Penguin Books, 2001. Editorial matter copyright © Michael Gamer, 2001. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Geary, Robert F. From “Carmilla and the Gothic Legacy: Victorian Transformations of Supernatural Horror,” in The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in Literature. Edited by Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 Bowling Green State University Press. Reproduced by permission.—Goddu, Teresa A. From Gothic America: Narrative, History, and the Nation. Columbia University Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.—Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. From Faust: Part One. Translated by David Luke. Oxford University Press, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by Oxford University Press. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Graham, Kenneth W. From “Emily’s Demon-Lover: The Gothic Revolution and The Mysteries of Udolpho,” in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression. Edited by Kenneth W. Graham. AMS Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by AMS Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Griffith, Clark. From “Poe and the Gothic,” in Papers on Poe: Essays in Honor of John Ward Ostrom. Edited by Richard P. Veler. Chantry Music Press, Inc., 1972. Copyright © 1972 by Chantry Music Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of Clark Griffith.—Gross, Louis S. From Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland to Day of the Dead. UMI Research Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989 Louis Samuel Gross. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Hannaham, James. From “‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Either’: Goth and the Glorification of Suffering in Rock Music,” in Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art. Edited by Christoph Grunenberg. MIT Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Reproduced by permission of The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.—Haslam, Richard. From “Maturin and the ‘Calvinist Sublime,’” in Gothick Origins and Innovations. Edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage. Rodopi, 1994. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Heilman, Robert B. From “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘New’ Gothic,” in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad: Essays

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Gothic,” in The Female Gothic. Edited by Juliann E. Fleenor. Eden Press, 1983. Copyright © 1983 by Eden Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Johnson, Greg. From Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Twayne Publishers. Reproduced by permission of Thomson Gale.— Keats, John. From “A letter to Richard Woodhouse on September 21, 1819,” in Selected Letters of John Keats, Revised Edition. Edited by Grant F. Scott. Harvard University Press, 2002. Copyright © 1958 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1986 by Herschel C. Baker, the Executor of the author Hyder Edward Rollins. Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Harvard University Press.—Kerr, Elizabeth M. From “Otranto to Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner’s Gothic Heritage,” in William Faulkner’s Gothic Domain. National University Publications, Kennikat Press, 1979. Copyright © 1979 by Kennikat Press Corp. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of the author.—King, Stephen. From “The Modern American Horror Movie—Text and Subtext,” in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. Everest House, 1982, Berkeley Books, 2001. Copyright © 1981 by Stephen King. All other rights expressly reserved. Used by permission of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. In North America with permission of the author.—King, Stephen. From Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. Everest Publishing Group, 1982. Copyright © 1981 by Stephen King. All other rights expressly reserved. Used by permission of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. In North American with permission of the author.—Lamont, Claire. From “Jane Austen’s Gothic Architecture,” in Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition. Edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani and Peter Davidson, with Jane Stevenson. Rodopi, 1995. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Lanone, Catherine. From “Verging on the Gothic: Melmoth’s Journey to France,” in European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760-1960. Edited by Avril Horner. Manchester University Press, Mancheter, UK, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Manchester University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Lawler, Donald. From “The Gothic Wilde,” in Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. Edited by C. George Sandulescu. Colin Smythe, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by The Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco. Reproduced by permission.—Le Tellier, Robert Ignatius. From Sir Walter Scott and the Gothic Novel. Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 The Edwin Mellen Press.

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Collected in Memory of James T. Hillhouse. Edited by Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. University of Minnesota Press, 1958. Copyright © 1958 by the University of Minnesota. Renewed 1986 by Robert Charles Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Heller, Tamar. From Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic. Yale University Press, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Yale University. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Hoeveler, Diane Long. From “Mary Shelley and Gothic Feminism: The Case of ‘The Mortal Immortal,’” in Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein: Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley’s Birth. Edited by Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O’Dea. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Associated University Presses, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Hoffmann, E. T. A. From an Introduction to The Best Tales of Hoffmann. Edited by E. F. Bleiler. Dover Publications, Inc., 1967. Copyright © 1967 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Hoffmann, E. T. A. From “The Sand-Man,” in The Best Tales of Hoffmann. Edited and with an introduction by E. F. Bleiler. Translated by J. T. Bealby. Dover Publications, Inc., 1967. Copyright © 1967 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Hogle, Jerrold E. From “Stoker’s Counterfeit Gothic: Dracula and Theatricality at the Dawn of Simulation,” in Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis, and the Gothic. Edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith. MacMillan Press Ltd., 1998. Selection and editorial matter Copyright © William Hughes and Andrew Smith, 1998. Text Copyright © Macmillan Press Ltd., 1998. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Horner, Sue and Zlosnik, Avril. From “Daphne du Maurier and Gothic Signatures: Rebecca as Vamp(ire),” in Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality. Edited by Avril Horner and Angela Keane. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Manchester University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and authors.—Howells, Coral Ann. From Margaret Atwood. Macmillan Press Ltd., 1996. Copyright © 1996 Coral Ann Howells. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Ingebretsen, Edward J. From “Anne Rice: Raising Holy Hell, Harlequin Style,” in The Gothic World of Anne Rice. Edited by Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Reproduced by permission.—James, Sibyl. From “Gothic Transformations: Isak Dinesen and the

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All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.— Leatherdale, Clive. From Dracula: The Novel and the Legend: A Study of Bram Stoker’s Gothic Masterpiece. Third Edition. Desert Island Books, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Clive Leatherdale. Reproduced by permission.—Lougy, Robert E. From Charles Robert Maturin. Bucknell University Press, 1975. Copyright © 1975 by Associated University Presses, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Mack, Douglas S. From “Aspects of the Supernatural in the Shorter Fiction of James Hogg,” in Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition. Edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani and Peter Davidson, with Jane Stevenson. Rodopi, 1995. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.— Magistrale, Tony. From “‘More Demon than Man’: Melville’s Ahab as Gothic Villain,” in Spectrum of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Sixth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Edited by Donald Palumbo. Greenwood Press, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Donald Palumbo. Reproduced by permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.— Martindale, Andrew. From Gothic Art. Thames and Hudson, 1967. Copyright © 1967 Thames and Hudson Ltd, London. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Maturin, Charles Robert. From “Leixlip Castle,” in Gothic Tales of Terror: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain, Europe, and the United States, 1765-1840. Edited by Peter Haining. Taplinger Publishing Company, Inc., 1972. Selection and original copyright © 1972 by Peter Haining. Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Miall, David S. From “The Preceptor as Fiend: Radcliffe’s Psychology of the Gothic,” in Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and Their Sisters. Edited by Laura Dabundo. University Press of America, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by University Press of America, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Mighall, Robert. From A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford University Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 Robert Mighall. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Milbank, Alison. From “From the Sublime to the Uncanny: Victorian Gothic and Sensation Fiction,” in Gothick Origins and Innovations. Edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage. Rodopi, 1994. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Mishra, Vijay. From The Gothic Sublime. State University of New York Press, 1994. Copyright © 1994 State University of New York. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the State University of New York Press.—Morrison, Toni. From Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage Books, 1993. Copyright © 1992 by

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Toni Morrison. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.—Morrison, Toni. From Beloved. Vintage Books, 2004. Copyright © 1987, 2004 by Toni Morrison. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.—Neumeier, Beate. From “Postmodern Gothic: Desire and Reality in Angela Carter’s Writing,” in Modern Gothic: A Reader. Edited by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith. Manchester University Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Manchester University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Oates, Joyce Carol. From “Temple,” from Demon and Other Tales. Necronomicon Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by The Ontario Review, Inc. Reproduced by permission of The Ontario Review, Inc.— Oates, Joyce Carol. From The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Pennyroyal Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the University of Nebraska Press.—Oates, Joyce Carol. From “Afterword: Reflections on the Grotesque,” in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque. Dutton, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by The Ontario Review, Inc. Used by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. In the United Kingdom by John Hawkins & Associates, Inc.— Polidori, John. From “The Vampyre: A Tale,” in The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. Edited by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick. Oxford University Press, 1997. Editorial Matter Copyright © 1997 by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Prawer, S. S. From Caligari’s Children: the Film as Tale of Terror. Da Capo Press, 1989. Copyright © 1980 S. S. Prawer. Reproduced by permission of the author.— Punter, David. From The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Vol. 2. Longman, 1996. Copyright © 1996 Addison Wesley Longman, Ltd. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education Limited.—Punter, David. From The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Vol. 2. Longman, 1996. Copyright © 1996 Addison Wesley Longman Limited. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education Limited.— Punter, David. From “Narrative and Psychology in Gothic Fiction,” in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/ Transgression. Edited by Kenneth W. Graham. AMS, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by AMS Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Radcliffe, Ann. From “The Haunted Chamber,” in Gothic Tales of Terror, Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain. Edited by Peter Haining. 1972. Taplinger Publishing Company, Inc., 1972. Selection and original material copyright © Peter Hain-

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Frankenstein’s Monster,” in The Female Gothic. Edited by Juliann E. Fleenor. Eden Press, 1983. Copyright © 1983 by Eden Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of Marcia Tillotson.—Valente, Joseph. From Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. University of Illinois Press, 2002. Copyright © 2001 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.—Vincent, Sybil Korff. From “The Mirror and the Cameo: Margaret Atwood’s Comic/Gothic Novel, Lady Oracle,” in The Female Gothic. Edited by Juliann E. Fleenor. Elden Press, 1983. Copyright © 1983 Eden Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Warfel, Harry R. From Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist. 1949. University of Florida Press, 1949. Copyright © 1949 University of Florida. Renewed 1977 by Jean Dietze. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Weissberg, Liliane. From “Gothic Spaces: The Political Aspects of Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” in Modern Gothic: A Reader. Edited by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith. Manchester University Press, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Manchester University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Wharton, Edith. From The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. Scribner, Simon & Schuster, 1973. Copyright © 1973 by William R. Tyler. Reproduced by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Macmillan and the Literary Estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/Loomis Agency.—Williams, Anne. From Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Williamson, Paul. From an Introduction to Gothic Sculpture 1140-1300. Edited by Nikolaus Pevsner. Yale University Press, Pelican History of Art, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by Paul Williamson. Reproduced by permission.—Wisker, Gina. From “At Home All Was Blood and Feathers: The Werewolf in the Kitchen—Angela Carter and Horror,” in Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Clive Bloom. Pluto Press, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by Lumiere (Cooperative) Press Ltd. Reproduced by permission.— Wolfreys, Julian. From “‘I Wants to Make Your Flesh Creep’: Notes toward a Reading of the Comic-Gothic in Dickens,” in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys. Palgrave, 2000. Selection and editorial matter © Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, 2000. Preface and Chapter 3 © Julian Wolfreys, 2000. Chapter 10 © Ruth Robbins, 2000.

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ing, 1972. Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Railo, Eino. From The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. Routledge, 1927. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—Ranger, Paul. From Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast: Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750-1820. The Society for Theatre Research, 1991. Copyright © 1991 Paul Ranger. Reproduced by permission.—Rank, Otto. From “The Double as Immortal Self,” in Beyond Psychology. E, Hauser, 1941. Copyright © 1941 by Estelle B. Rank. Renewed 1969 by Estelle B. Simon. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of the author.—Robertson, Fiona. From Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction. Clarendon Press, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Fiona Robertson. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Sage, Victor. From Le Fanu’s Gothic: The Rhetoric of Darkness. Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Victor Sage. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Savoy, Eric. From “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic,” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Edited by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy. University of Iowa Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by the University of Iowa Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Senf, Carol A. From The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Reproduced by permission.—Shelley, Percy Bysshe. From “The Assassins,” in Gothic Tales of Terror. Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain. Copyright © 1972 selection and original material copyright by Peter Haining. Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Shetty, Nalini V. From “Melville’s Use of the Gothic Tradition,” Studies in American Literature: Essays in Honour of William Mulder. Edited by Jagdish Chander and Narindar S. Pradhan. Oxford University Press, 1976. Copyright © Oxford University Press 1976. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press India, New Delhi.—Showalter, Elaine. From Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Clarendon Press, 1991. Copyright © 1991 Elaine Showalter. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Summers, Montague. From The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. The Fortune Press, 1938. Reproduced by permission.—Thomas, Ronald R. From Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious. Cornell University Press, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.—Tillotson, Marcia. From “‘A Forced Solitude’: Mary Shelley and the Creation of

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Chapters 1, 2, 4-9, 11, 12 © Palgrave Publishers Ltd, 2000. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Womack, Kenneth. From “‘Withered, Wrinkled, and Loathsome of Visage’: Reading the Ethics of the Soul and the LateVictorian Gothic in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys. Palgrave, 2000. Selection and editorial matter © Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, 2000. Preface and Chapter 3 © Julian Wolfreys, 2000. Chapter 10 © Ruth Robbins, 2000. Chapters 1, 2, 4-9, 11, 12 © Palgrave Publishers Ltd, 2000. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Wood, Martin J. From “New Life for an Old Tradition: Anne Rice and Vampire Literature,” in The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in Literature. Edited by Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Reproduced by permission.—Wood, Robin. From “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Edited by Robin Wood and Richard Lippe. Festival of Festivals, 1979. Copyright © Robin Wood, Richard Lippe, and Festival of Festivals. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Wright, Angela. From “European Disruptions of the Idealized Woman: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and the Marquis de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine,” in European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760-1960. Edited by Avril Horner. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK, 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Manchester University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.

Photographs and Illustrations in Gothic Literature were received from the following sources: A Description of Strawberry Hill, by Horace Walpole, frontispiece.—Abbotsford, home of Sir Walter Scott, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.— Ainsworth, William Harrison, photograph. © Getty Images.—Allston, Washington, photograph. The Library of Congress.—American Gothic, painting by Grant Wood, 1930, photograph. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago. Reproduced by permission.—Atwood, Margaret, photograph by Christopher Felver. Copyright © Christopher Felver/Corbis.—Austen, Jane, engraving.—Baillie, Joanna, photograph. © Hulton-Deutsch/Corbis.— Balshazzar’s Feast, painting by Washington Allston, ca. 1817-1843. © The Detroit Institute of Arts/Bridgeman Art Library.—Beckford, William, photograph. © Michael Nicholson/Corbis.—Bergman, Ingrid and Heywood Morse in the 1959 film

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adaptation of Turn of the Screw by Henry James, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Bierce, Ambrose, drawing by J. J. Newbegin, 1896.—Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, engraving. © Hulton Getty/ Liaison Agency.—Brontë, Charlotte, illustration. International Portrait Gallery.—Brontë, Emily, painting by Bramwell Brontë.—Brown, Charles Brockden, print.—Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Burke, Edmund, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Capote, Truman, photograph. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis.—Carter, Angela, photograph. © Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission.—Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole, c. 1790, illustration.— Castle of Wolfenbach; a German Story, by Eliza Parsons, 1793, title page.—Christine, movie still, photograph. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—Collins, William Wilkie, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Cooper, Alice, performing on the In Concert television show on November 24, 1972, photograph. © Bettmann/ Corbis.—Dickens, Charles, photograph. Hesketh Pearson.—Dinesen, Isak, photograph. Corbis-Bettmann.—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Spencer Tracy as Dr. Jekyll, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.— Dracula, Helen Chandler, as Mina Seward, with Bela Lugosi, as Count Dracula, photograph. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.— Dracula’s Guest, written by Bram Stoker, title page.—du Maurier, Daphne, photograph. © Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.—Faulkner, William, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1831, illustration. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe, illustration. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Gargoyle of 15th Century Spanish Building, photograph. © Manuel Bellver/Corbis.—Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, c. 1890, photograph.—Godwin, William, painting by James Northcote. From Vindication of the Rights of Women, by William Godwin, 1802.— Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, illustration. © Corbis.—Hawthorne, Nathaniel, photograph.—Hoffmann, E. T. A., photograph. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—Hogg, James, photograph. © Rischgitz/ Getty Images.—Irving, Washington, photograph. The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.—James, Henry, photograph.—Jane Eyre, Orson Welles as Edward Rochester, with Joan Fontaine as Jane Eyre, photograph. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—King, Stephen, photograph. Corbis-Bettmann.—Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, photograph.—Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving, illustration. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Lewis, Matthew Gregory, photograph by H. W. Pickersgill.—Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, title page. © Getty

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poster. © A.I.P./The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents, by Ann Radcliffe, 1797 edition, title page.—The Mysteries of Udolpho, frontispieces by Ann Radcliffe.—The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, written by Edgar Allan Poe, title page. Special Collections Library, University of Michigan. Reproduced by permission.—The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story, by Clara Reeve, 1778, illustration.—The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times, by Sophia Lee, 1786, title page.—The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1980, photograph. © Warner Bros./The Kobal Collection.—The Sicilian Romance; or, The Apparition of the Cliffs, an Opera, by Henry Siddons, 1794, title page.—The Table of the Seven Deadly Sins, painting by Hieronymous Bosch, c. 1480-1490, Northern Renaissance, photograph. © Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis.—The Temptation of Ambrosio, from Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk, illustration.—The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins, title page. Special Collections Library, University of Michigan. Reproduced by permission.—Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, by William Godwin, title page.—Twin Peaks, scene from the television series by David Lynch, 1990, photograph. © Corbis Sygma.—Veidt, Conrad and Lil Dagover in the 1920 silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, photograph. © John Springer/Corbis.—von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, photograph. © Bettmann/ Corbis.—Waddy, F., satirical caricature in “Once a Week,” 1873. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—Walpole, Horace, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Wharton, Edith, 1905, photograph. The Library of Congress.— Wieland; or, The Transformation, by Charles Brockden Brown, Philadelphia, David McKay, Publisher, 1881, title page.—Wilde, Oscar, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, movie poster, photograph. © CinemaPhoto/Corbis.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Images.—Lovecraft, H. P., photograph.—Lugosi, Bela, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Maturin, Charles Robert, photograph. © The Granger Collection, New York.—Melville, Herman, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Morrison, Toni, photograph. Copyright © Nancy Kazerman/ ZUMA/Corbis.—Nave of Basilique de Saint-Denis, June 19, 1996, photograph. © Robert Holmes/ Corbis.—Nightmare, painting by Henri Fuseli, 1791. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—Nosferatu, Max Schreck (Count Orlok) standing on deck of ship, 1922, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—O’Connor, Flannery, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Oates, Joyce Carol, photograph. © Nancy Kaszerman/Corbis.— Peck, Gregory, photograph. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—Poe, Edgar Allan, photograph.—Polidori, John William, painting by F. G. Gainsford, c. 1816, photograph. © The Granger Collection, New York.—Psycho, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) approaching the motel, photograph. © Underwood and Underwood/Corbis.—Reeve, Clara, photograph. © Getty Images.— Rice, Anne, photograph. © Mitchell Gerber/Corbis.—Roettgen Pieta, wood carving, c. 1300, photograph. © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.— Schiller, Friedrich von, engraving. The German Information Center.—Scott, Sir Walter, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, illustration.—Son of Frankenstein, with Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Bela Lugosi, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Stevenson, Robert Louis, engraving. The Library of Congress.—Stoker, Bram, photograph. © HultonDeutsch Collection/Corbis.—The Castle Spectre, by Matthew Gregory Lewis, illustration. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—The Fall of the House of Usher, directed by Roger Corman, photograph. © A.I.P./The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—The Haunting, 1963, movie still. © MGM/The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—The Island of Dr. Moreau,

1220

● Suger of Saint Denis is born in Saint Denis, France.

■ Construction of the Cathedral of Amiens in France.

1127

■ Master Elias of Dereham begins designing the Salisbury Cathedral in England.

■ Abbot Suger of Saint Denis begins redesigning the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis in France.

1151 ● Abbot Suger of Saint Denis dies on 13 January in St. Denis, France.

C. 1163 ■ Construction of the current Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris in France.

1245 ■ Construction of the current Westminster Abbey in London, England.

C. 1329 ■ Andrea Pisano begins his bronze sculptures for the Baptisery in Florence, Italy.

1485 C. 1175 ■ Construction of the current Canterbury Cathedral in England.

■ Hieronymus Bosch completes the painting Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins.

C. 1600-01 C. 1194 ■ Construction of the current Cathedral of Notre Dame at Chartres (also known as Chartres Cathedral) in France.

■ William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is staged.

C. 1606 ■ William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is staged.

C. 1211 ■ Construction of the current Cathedral of Notre Dame de Rheims (also known as Rheims Cathedral) in France.

1717 ● Horace Walpole is born on 24 September in London, England.

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1081

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1727

1762

■ Daniel Defoe’s An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions is published.

● James Boaden is born on 23 May at White Haven in Cumberland, England.

1729

● Joanna Baillie is born on 11 September in Bothwell, Lanarkshire, Scotland.

● Edmund Burke is born on 12 January in Dublin, Ireland.

1764

● Clara Reeve is born on 23 January in Ipswich, Suffolk, England.

● Ann Radcliffe is born on 9 July in London, England.

1742

■ Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is published.

■ Batty and Thomas Langley’s Ancient Architecture Restored and Improved is published.

1770 ● James Hogg is born in Ettrick, Selkirkshire, Scotland.

1749 ● Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is born on 28 August in Frankfurt, Germany.

1771 ● Charles Brockden Brown is born on 17 January in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1750 ● Sophia Lee is born in London, England. ■ Horace Walpole and Richard Bentley begin designing Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s residence in Twickenham, England.

● Sir Walter Scott is born on 15 August in Edinburgh, Scotland.

1772 1753 ■ Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom is published.

● Samuel Taylor Coleridge is born on 21 October in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England.

1773 1756 ● William Godwin is born on 3 March in Wisbeach, England.

■ John Aikin and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld’s Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, by J. and A. L. Aikin is published.

1775

1757 ● William Blake is born on 28 November in London, England.

● Matthew Gregory Lewis is born on 9 July in London, England.

■ Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is published.

● Jane Austen is born on 16 December in Steventon, Hampshire, England.

1776 1759 ● Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller is born on 10 November in Marbach, Germany.

● Ernst Theodor Wilhelm (later E. T. A.) Hoffmann is born on 24 January in Königsberg, Germany.

1760

1777

● William Beckford is born on 29 September in London, England.

■ Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue. A Gothic Story is published.

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1791

■ Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue is published as The Old English Baron.

■ Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest is published.

1779

1792

● Washington Allston is born on 5 November in South Carolina.

● Percy Bysshe Shelley is born on 4 August in Field Place, Sussex, England.

1780

■ Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects is published.

● Charles Robert Maturin is born on 25 September in Dublin, Ireland.

1793 1781 ■ Henry Fuseli completes the painting The Nightmare.

■ Mrs. Eliza Parsons’s Castle of Wolfenbach; A German Story is published.

1794 1783

■ James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest is produced.

● Washington Irving is born on 3 April in New York City.

■ J. C. Cross’s The Apparition is produced.

■ Sophia Lee’s The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times is published.

1786

■ William Godwin’s Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams is published. ■ Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance; Interspersed with some pieces of Poetry is published.

■ The unauthorized translation of William Beckford’s Vathek is published as An Arabian Tale.

■ Henry Siddons’s The Sicilian Romance; or, The Apparition of the Cliff is produced.

1787

1795

● Lewis Nockalls Cottingham is born on 24 October at Laxfield, Suffolk, England.

● John William Polidori is born on 7 September in England.

■ William Beckford’s Vathek is published.

1788 ● George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron is born on 22 January in London, England.

1789 ■ James Cobb’s The Haunted Tower is produced. ■ George Colman the Younger’s The Battle of Hexham is produced.

1790 ■ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: Ein Fragment is published. ■ Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance is published.

1796 ■ Marquis von Grosse’s Genius (Horrid Mysteries) is published. ■ Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance is published.

1797 ● Horace Walpole dies on 2 March in London, England. ● Edmund Burke dies on 9 July in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England. ● Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley) is born on 30 August in London, England. ■ Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Castle Spectre: A Drama is produced.

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1778

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1798

1806

■ Regina Maria Roche’s Children of the Abbey is published.

■ Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor is published.

■ The first volume of Joanna Baillie’s A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy is published.

1807 ● Clara Reeve dies on 3 December in Ipswich, Suffolk, England.

■ Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or, The Transformation is published.

1808

1799

■ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust—Der Tragödie erster Teil (Faust: Part One) is published.

■ Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker and the first volume of Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 are published.

1800 ■ Washington Allston completes the painting Tragic Figure in Chains. ■ The second volume of Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 is published.

1809 ● Edgar Allan Poe is born on 19 January in Boston, Massachusetts.

1810 ● Charles Brockden Brown dies on 22 February in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ■ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Zastrozzi, A Romance is published.

1802

1811

■ The second volume of Joanna Baillie’s A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy is published.

■ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance is published.

1812 ● Charles Dickens is born on 7 February in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England.

1803 ● Edward Bulwer-Lytton (Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer) is born on 25 May in London, England. ● Thomas Lovell Beddoes is born on 30 June in Clifton, Shropshire, England. ● Alexander Jackson Davis is born on 24 July in New York City.

■ The third volume of Joanna Baillie’s A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy is published. ■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt is published.

1813

1804 ● Nathaniel Hawthorne is born on 4 July in Salem, Massachusetts.

■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale is published.

1805

1814

● William Harrison Ainsworth is born on 4 February in Manchester, England.

● Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is born on 28 August in Dublin, Ireland.

● Friedrich von Schiller dies on 9 May in Weimar, Germany.

■ Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since is published.

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1821

● Charlotte Brontë is born on 21 April in Thornton, Yorkshire, England.

● John William Polidori commits suicide on 27 August in London, England.

■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto the Third is published.

■ Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater is published.

■ Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep is published.

1822

■ Jane Scott’s The Old Oak Chest is produced.

● E. T. A. Hoffmann dies on 25 June in Berlin, Germany.

1817

● Percy Bysshe Shelley drowns on 8 July in the Gulf of Spezia near Lerici, Italy.

● Jane Austen dies on 18 July in Winchester, Hampshire, England. ■ Washington Allston begins the painting Belshazzar’s Feast. ■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Manfred, A Dramatic Poem is published. ■ E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman”) is published.

1818 ● Matthew Gregory Lewis dies on 16 May during a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean from Jamaica to England. ● Emily Brontë is born on 30 July in Thornton, Yorkshire, England. ■ Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion is published. ■ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is published.

1819 ● Herman Melville is born on 1 August in New York City. ■ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci is produced. ■ Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. is published.

1823 ● Ann Radcliffe dies on 7 February in England. ■ Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein is produced.

1824 ■ William Wilkie Collins is born on 8 January in London, England. ● Sophia Lee dies on 13 March in Clifton, England. ● Lord Byron dies on 19 April in Cephalonia, Greece. ● Charles Robert Maturin dies on 30 October in Dublin, Ireland. ■ Catherine Gore’s The Bond, a Dramatic Poem is produced. ■ James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is published. ■ Washington Irving’s Tales of a Traveller is published.

1825 ■ James Fenimore Cooper’s Lionel Lincoln; or, The Leaguer of Boston is published.

■ John William Polidori’s The Vampyre; a Tale is published.

1826

1820

1827

■ John Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems is published.

● William Blake dies on 12 August in London, England.

■ Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer is published.

■ Thomas Moore’s The Epicurean. A Tale is published.

■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Glenallan is published.

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1816

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1830

1842

● Christina Rossetti is born on 5 December in London, England.

■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni is published. ● Ambrose Bierce is born on 24 June in Horse Cave Creek, Meigs County, Ohio.

1832 ● Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dies on 22 March. ● Sir Walter Scott dies on 21 September in Abbotsford, Scotland. ■ Architect Alexander Jackson Davis completes Glen Ellen, the Baltimore, Maryland residence of Robert Gilmor III.

1843 ● Henry James is born on 15 April in New York City. ● Washington Allston dies on 9 July in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ■ A. W. N. Pugin’s Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England is published.

1844

1834 ● Samuel Taylor Coleridge dies on 25 July in England.

● William Beckford dies on 2 May in England.

1845 1835 ● James Hogg dies on 21 November in Scotland.

■ Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is published. ■ Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales by Edgar A. Poe and The Raven and Other Poems are published.

1836 ● William Godwin dies on 7 April in London, England. ■ Thomas Cole completes the painting Ruined Tower.

1837 ■ Charles Dickens’s Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club is published under the pseudonym Boz. ■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales is published.

1846 ■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Lucretia; or, The Children of Night is published. ■ Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Dvoinik: Prikliucheniia gospodina Goliadkina (The Double: A Poem of St. Petersburg) is published.

1847 ● L. N. Cottingham dies on 13 October in London, England. ● Bram Stoker is born on 8 November in Clontarf, Ireland. ■ Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. An Autobiography is published under the pseudonym Currer Bell.

1838 ■ Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist is published. ■ Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is published.

1839 ● James Boaden dies on 16 February in England.

■ Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. ■ Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, written by either Thomas Peckett Prest or James Malcolm Rymer, is published.

1848

1840

● Emily Brontë dies on 19 December in Haworth, Yorkshire, England.

■ Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque is published.

■ Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man, and The Ghost’s Bargain is published.

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1857

● Thomas Lovell Beddoes commits suicide on 26 January in Basel, Switzerland.

■ Wilkie Collins’s The Dead Secret is published. ■ Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit is published.

● Edgar Allan Poe dies on 7 October in Baltimore, Maryland.

■ G. W. M. Reynolds’s Wagner the Wehr-wolf is published.

1850

1859

● Robert Louis Stevenson is born on 13 November in Edinburgh, Scotland.

● Washington Irving dies on 28 November in Irvington, New York.

■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is published.

1860

1851 ● Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley dies on 1 February in Bournemouth, England. ● Joanna Baillie dies on 23 February in Hampstead, England. ■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, a Romance is published.

● Charlotte Perkins Gilman is born on 3 July in Hartford, Connecticut. ■ Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White is published. ■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of Monte Beni is published.

1861

■ Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is published.

■ Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself is published under the pseudonym Linda Brent.

1852

1862

■ Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly is published.

1853 ■ Charlotte Brontë’s Villette is published under the pseudonym Currer Bell.

● Edith Wharton is born on 24 January in New York City. ■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story is published.

1864

■ Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is published.

● Nathaniel Hawthorne dies on 19 May in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

C. 1854

■ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh is published.

● Oscar Wilde is born on 16 October in Dublin, Ireland.

1870

1855 ● Charlotte Brontë dies on 31 March in Haworth, Yorkshire, England.

● Charles Dickens dies on 9 June in Rochester, Kent, England.

1872 ■ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly is published.

1856 ● Sigismund Solomon Freud (later Sigmund Freud) is born on 6 May in Freiberg, Moravia, Czechoslovakia.

1873

■ Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales is published.

● Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu dies on 10 February in Dublin, Ireland.

● Edward Bulwer-Lytton dies on 18 January in Torquay, Devonshire, England.

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1849

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1882

1894

● William Harrison Ainsworth dies on 3 January.

● Robert Louis Stevenson dies on 3 December in Apia, Samoa.

● Bela Lugosi is born Béla Ferenc Dezsö Blask¢ on 20 October in Lugos, Hungary.

● Christina Rossetti dies on 29 December in London, England.

1885

■ Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light is published.

● Karen Christentze Dinesen, who later wrote under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, is born on 17 April near Copenhagen, Denmark.

1896 ■ H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Possibility is published.

1886 ■ Guy de Maupassant’s “La Horla” (“The Horla”) is published Le Gil Blas.

1897

■ Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is published.

● William Faulkner is born on 25 September in New Albany, Mississippi. ■ Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published.

1887 ● William Henry Pratt (later Boris Karloff) is born on 23 November in London, England.

1888

1898 ■ Henry James’s The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End is published.

● Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe (later F. W. Murnau) is born on 28 December in Bielefeld, Westphalia, Germany.

1899

1889

● Alfred Hitchcock is born on 13 August in London, England.

■ Wilkie Collins dies on 23 September in London, England.

● Elizabeth Bowen is born on 7 June in Dublin, Ireland.

1900 1890 ● Howard Phillips Lovecraft is born on 20 August in Providence, Rhode Island. ■ Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is published.

● Oscar Wilde dies on 30 November in Paris, France.

1904 ■ Arthur Machen’s “The Garden of Avallaunius” is published.

1891 ● Herman Melville dies on 28 September in New York City. ■ Oscar Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories is published.

1906 ■ Algernon Blackwood’s The Empty House and Other Ghosts is published.

1892

1907

● Alexander Jackson Davis dies on 14 January in West Orange, New Jersey.

● Daphne du Maurier is born on 12 May in London, England.

■ Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is published.

■ George Sylvester Viereck’s The House of the Vampire is published.

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1922

■ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, produced by the Selig Polyscope Company, is released.

■ Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, directed by F. W. Murnau, is released.

1909

1924

■ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, produced by the Nordisk Company, is released.

■ Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks), directed by Paul Leni and Leo Birinsky, is released.

1910

1925

■ Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de L’Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera) is published.

● Edward Gorey is born on 22 February in Chicago, Illinois.

■ Frankenstein, directed by J. Searle Dawley, is released.

● (Mary) Flannery O’Connor is born on 25 March in Savannah, Georgia.

1911

1927

■ Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome is published.

■ Algernon Blackwood’s The Dance of Death, and Other Tales is published.

1912 ● Bram Stoker dies on 20 April in London, England.

1914 ● Ambrose Bierce disappears c. 1 January in Mexico and is presumed dead.

1916 ● Henry James dies on 28 February in London, England.

1929 ● Ursula K. Le Guin is born on 21 October in Berkeley, California.

1930 ■ William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and “A Rose for Emily” are published.

1931 ● Chloe Ardelia Wofford (later Toni Morrison) is born on 18 February in Lorain, Ohio.

1919

● F. W. Murnau dies on 11 March in Santa Barbara, California.

● Shirley Jackson is born on 14 December in San Francisco, California.

■ Dracula, directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi in the title role, is released.

■ Sigmund Freud’s “Das Unheimlich” (“The Uncanny”) is published.

■ Frankenstein, directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as the monster, is released. ■ M, directed by Fritz Lang, is released.

1920 ● Ray Bradbury is born on 22 August in Waukegan, Illinois. ■ Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World, directed by Carl Boese and Paul Wegener, is released. ■ Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), directed by Robert Wiene, is released.

■ William Faulkner’s Sanctuary is published.

1932 ■ Murders in the Rue Morgue, directed by Robert Florey, is released. ■ White Zombie, directed by Victor Halperin, is released. ■ William Faulkner’s Light in August is published.

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1908

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1933

1940

■ King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper, is released.

● Angela Carter is born on 7 May in London, England.

■ The Invisible Man, directed by James Whale, is released.

■ Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is released.

■ Island of Lost Souls, directed by Erle C. Kenton, is released.

1941

1934

● Howard Allen O’Brien (later Anne Rice) is born on 4 October in New Orleans, Louisiana.

■ Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales is published.

1943 1935 ● Charlotte Perkins Gilman commits suicide on 17 August in Pasadena, California. ■ Bride of Frankenstein, directed by James Whale, is released.

■ I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, and The Seventh Victim, all produced by Val Lewton, are released.

1945 ■ The Body Snatcher, directed by Robert Wise, is released.

1936 ■ Walter de la Mare’s Ghost Stories is published.

■ Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover, and Other Stories is published.

■ William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is published.

■ H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature is published.

■ H. P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” is published.

1947 ● Stephen King is born on 21 September in Portland, Maine.

1937 ● H. P. Lovecraft dies on 15 March in Providence, Rhode Island. ● Edith Wharton dies on 11 August in St. Bricesous-Foret, France.

1949 ■ Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris is published.

■ Edith Wharton’s Ghosts is published.

1952 1938 ● Joyce Carol Oates is born on 16 June in Lockport, New York.

● Clive Barker is born on 5 October in Liverpool, England.

■ Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is published.

1955

1939

■ Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find is published.

● Sigmund Freud dies on 23 September in London, England.

1956

● Margaret Atwood is born on 18 November in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

● Bela Lugosi dies on 16 August in Los Angeles, California.

■ Son of Frankenstein, directed by Rowland V. Lee, is released.

■ Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, is released.

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1968

■ The Curse of Frankenstein, directed by Terence Fisher, is released.

■ Margaret Atwood’s The Animals in That Country is published.

1959

■ Night of the Living Dead, directed by George A. Romero, is released.

■ Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is published.

■ Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman Polanski, is released.

■ The Mummy, directed by Terence Fisher, is released.

1969

■ The Twilight Zone is first televised.

● Boris Karloff dies on 2 February at Midhurst in Sussex, England.

1960

■ Led Zeppelin’s first two self-titled albums are released.

■ The Fall of the House of Usher, directed by Roger Corman, is released. ■ Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is released.

1962 ● William Faulkner dies on 6 July in Byhalia, Mississippi. ● Isak Dinesen dies on 7 September in Rungsted, Denmark.

1970 ■ Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut album is released. ■ Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is published. ■ Night Gallery is first televised.

1971 ■ Richard Matheson’s Hell House is published. ■ Alice Cooper’s Killer is released.

1963

■ Black Sabbath’s Paranoid is released.

■ Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is published. ■ The Birds, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is released. ■ The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise, is released.

1972 ■ Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing is published. ■ Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is published. ■ Alice Cooper’s School’s Out is released.

1964 ● Flannery O’Connor dies on 3 August in Milledgeville, Georgia. ■ The Addams Family is first televised.

1973 ● Elizabeth Bowen dies on 22 February in London, England.

■ The Munsters is first televised.

■ The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin, is released.

1965

1974

● Shirley Jackson dies on 8 August in North Bennington, Vermont.

■ Angela Carter’s Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces is published.

1966

■ The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, directed by Tobe Hooper, is released.

■ Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! is released.

■ Young Frankenstein, directed by Mel Brooks, is released.

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1957

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1975

1983

■ Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot is published.

■ Stephen King’s Pet Sematary is published.

■ They Came from Within, directed by David Cronenberg, is released.

■ New Order’s Power, Corruption, and Lies is released.

1976 ■ Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle is published. ■ Carrie, directed by Brian De Palma, is released. ■ The Omen, directed by Richard Donner, is released. ■ Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is published.

1984 ■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Mysteries of Winterthurn is published.

1986 ■ Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart is published. ■ Siouxsie and the Banshees’s Tinderbox is released.

1977 ■ Stephen King’s The Shining is published. ■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Night Side: Eighteen Tales is published.

■ Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera is produced.

1987 1978

■ Toni Morrison’s Beloved is published.

■ Dawn of the Dead, directed by George A. Romero, is released.

■ The Smiths’s Louder than Bombs is released.

1979

1988

■ Bauhaus’s 12-inch single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” is released.

■ Toni Morrison is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved.

■ Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is published.

1989

■ Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures is released. ■ ’Salem’s Lot, directed by Tobe Hooper, is televised.

● Daphne du Maurier dies on 19 April in Cornwall, England. ■ Pet Sematary, directed by Mary Lambert, is released.

1980 ● Alfred Hitchcock dies on 29 April in Los Angeles, California. ■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Bellefleur is published.

1990 ■ Twin Peaks is first televised.

■ The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, is released.

1992

1981

● Angela Carter dies on 16 February in London, England.

■ Stephen King’s Danse Macabre is published.

■ Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, is released.

■ Siouxsie and the Banshees’s Juju is released.

1982

1993

■ Joyce Carol Oates’s A Bloodsmoor Romance is published.

■ Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride is published.

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2000

■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque is published.

● Edward Gorey dies on 15 April in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

■ Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Kenneth Branagh, is released.

■ Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is published.

1996 ■ Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace is published.

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JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU (1814 - 1873)

(Also wrote under the pseudonyms Charles de Cresserons and Reverend Francis Purcell) Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, journalist, and editor.

L

e Fanu is a major figure among Victorian-era authors of Gothic and supernatural fiction. Critics praise his short stories and novels for their suggestive and detailed descriptions of physical settings, powerful evocation of foreboding and dread, and convincing use of supernatural elements. In addition to Le Fanu’s mastery of these Gothic conventions in his fiction, his works are also admired for their insightful characterizations and skilled use of narrative technique. Scholars have observed that Le Fanu’s subtle examinations of the psychological life of his characters distinguish his works from those of earlier Gothic writers.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Born in Dublin, Le Fanu was the second of three children of a Protestant clergyman. He began writing poetry as a teenager and was privately educated by tutors until entering Trinity College, Dublin, in 1833. There Le Fanu studied law, although he never practiced; instead he launched a joint career in journalism and litera-

ture. He contributed regularly to the Dublin University Magazine and gained recognition for his short stories and his ballads “Phaudrig Crohoore” and “Shamus O’Brien.” Between 1838 and 1840 Le Fanu wrote short stories and poetry under the pseudonym Reverend Francis Purcell; these works were posthumously collected as The Purcell Papers (1880). In 1839 Le Fanu bought three Dublin periodicals and combined them to form the Evening Mail, a conservative publication in which many of his early works appeared. During this period he published two historical novels, The Cock and Anchor (1845) and The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien (1847), as well as his first collection of short stories, Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851). These early works were virtually ignored by both critics and the reading public. Le Fanu married Susanna Bennett in 1844, and they became a prominent couple in Dublin social and cultural circles. Le Fanu was considered a brilliant conversationalist and was a popular member of society until his wife’s death in 1858. His anguish caused him to withdraw from his companions, who labeled him the “Invisible Prince.” During this time Le Fanu produced the four novels for which he is best known: The House by the Churchyard (1863), Wylder’s Hand (1864), Uncle Silas (1864), and Guy Deverell (1865). In addition, he became the editor of the Dublin University Magazine in 1859, and, in 1861, assumed its proprietorship

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as well. Le Fanu continued managing and editing the publication until a few months before his death in 1873.

MAJOR WORKS In his earliest short stories, primarily those collected in Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery and The Purcell Papers, Le Fanu only occasionally displayed the inventive use of the supernatural and psychological character studies that distinguish his most esteemed works. The five longer stories in the later collection In a Glass Darkly (1872) are widely acknowledged as his best work in the genre. In these stories Le Fanu combined many of the themes and techniques of traditional Gothic literature with those of modern psychological fiction. Le Fanu used the recurring character Dr. Martin Hesselius, a German physician specializing in mental disorders, to introduce each narrative as a case history illustrating both supernatural and psychological phenomena. This technique allowed Le Fanu to successfully link the stories and to explore the psychology of his characters. For example, in “Green Tea” Hesselius reports the case of Reverend Jennings, whose habit of drinking strong green tea causes him to see a small, black, talking monkey that torments him with its blasphemous chatter until he ultimately commits suicide. Critics have also expressed high praise for “Carmilla,” in which Hesselius suggests a connection between the bloodlust of a female vampire and lesbian sexual desires. In these and others works of the supernatural, Le Fanu rarely depended on the stock devices of Gothic literature—such as isolated castles, forlorn landscapes, and maniacal villains—to further his eerie plots. Rather than relying on these clichéd tropes of prior fiction, he generally opted for subtlety and mystery, and routinely left incidents in his stories unexplained for the purpose of heightening suspense. Additionally, unlike much earlier horror fiction, there are no actual ghosts in Le Fanu’s supernatural works; instead his characters are frequently haunted by phantasms that are solely the creations of their imaginations. Lastly, his stories generally feature a first person mode of narration designed to convey an individual’s progressively developing experience of terror. This narrative technique, coupled with Le Fanu’s realistic settings, skillfully imbued with a sense of menace, are thought to lend credibility to his supernatural stories and contribute to their dramatic impact. Of Le Fanu’s fourteen novels, The House by the Churchyard, Wylder’s Hand, Uncle Silas and Guy De-

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verell are generally considered his finest. These works are characterized by the taut construction and psychological insight that inform the stories of In a Glass Darkly. While not a work of supernatural or even classically Gothic fiction, The House by the Churchyard is pervaded with a sense of chilling gloom, and is thought to represent an intermediate stage between Le Fanu’s earlier historical novels and his later tales of mystery. The work also marks his first attempt at psychological analysis of character. Wylder’s Hand is regarded as the most uncomplicated of Le Fanu’s mysteries, and is sometimes referred to as his masterpiece. Featuring fewer characters than his previous novels, the work concentrates on establishing a fully realized psychological portrait of Wylder. The title figure of Uncle Silas, perhaps Le Fanu’s best-known work, is an ominous figure who subtly calls upon the tradition of the murderous Gothic villain. Praised for its clear narrative and lucid structure, this novel is often regarded as the first psychological thriller. In it, Le Fanu deftly manipulates levels of suspense, gradually elevating the reader’s anticipation and sense of horror as the brutal Silas intimidates his increasingly frightened niece and ward, Maud. Guy Deverell, the last of Le Fanu’s critically acclaimed novels, is likewise noted for its mysterious atmosphere and finely delineated, realistic characterizations.

CRITICAL RECEPTION During his lifetime, Le Fanu’s works were moderately successful, although they received scant critical attention. With the appearance of Uncle Silas, however, some reviewers complained that Le Fanu had exceeded the boundaries of Gothic mystery writing and charged him with sensationalism. Following Le Fanu’s death, his reputation suffered a gradual decline as readers and critics lost interest in his realistic and psychological mode of Gothic narrative. In the 1920s, however, the prominent ghost-story writer M. R. James (see Further Reading) drew attention to Le Fanu by writing introductions to several reissued volumes of his out-of-print works. V. S. Pritchett (see Further Reading) and Elizabeth Bowen (see Further Reading) later wrote essays championing Le Fanu as one of Gothic literature’s foremost figures. After the reassessments of Le Fanu made by these and other late twentieth-century scholars, interest in Le Fanu grew, with commentators identifying him as a significant transitional figure in the Gothic tradition whose use of psychological horror is considered a key contribution to the

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PRINCIPAL WORKS “Phaudrig Crohoore” (ballad) 1837; published in the journal Dublin University Magazine The Cock and Anchor, Being a Chronicle of Old Dublin City. 3 vols. [as Charles de Cresserons] (novel) 1845; also published as The Cock and Anchor, 1895 The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien; A Tale of the Wars of King James [as Charles de Cresserons] (novel) 1847 “Shamus O’Brien” (ballad) 1850; published in the journal Dublin University Magazine Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (short stories) 1851 The House by the Churchyard. 3 vols. (novel) 1863 Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh. 3 vols. (novel) 1864 Wylder’s Hand. 3 vols. [as Charles de Cresserons] (novel) 1864 Guy Deverell. 3 vols. (novel) 1865 All in the Dark. 2 vols. (novel) 1866 The Tenants of Malory: A Novel. 3 vols. (novel) 1867 Haunted Lives: A Novel. 3 vols. (novel) 1868 A Lost Name: A Novel. 3 vols. (novel) 1868 Checkmate. 3 vols. (novel) 1871 Chronicles of Golden Friars. 3 vols. (novel) 1871 The Rose and the Key. 3 vols. (novel) 1871 *In a Glass Darkly. 3 vols. (short stories) 1872 Willing to Die. 3 vols. (novel) 1873 The Purcell Papers, with a Memoir by Alfred Perceval Graves. 3 vols. (short stories) 1880 The Watcher and Other Weird Stories (short stories) 1894 The Poems of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [edited by A. P. Graves] (poetry) 1896 *

This collection includes the short stories “Green Tea” (first published in the journal All the Year Round, October, 1869) and “Carmilla” (first published in the journal Dark Blue, December 1871 to March 1872).

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genre. Additionally, several of Le Fanu’s major works, including the novel Uncle Silas and the short story “Carmilla,” have also been singled out for reappraisal. While he is not generally wellknown today as a novelist, Le Fanu continues to be noted as an innovative and masterful writer of psychological horror stories and as a pivotal figure in the history of supernatural fiction.

JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU (STORY DATE DECEMBER 1871-MARCH 1872) SOURCE: Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. “Carmilla.” In Carmilla and 12 Other Classic Tales of Mystery, pp. 288-97. New York: Penguin, 1996. The following excerpt is from chapter 4 of “Carmilla,” a short story first published serially in the journal Dark Blue from December 1871 to March 1872.

Her Habits—A Saunter I told you that I was charmed with her in most particulars. There were some that did not please me so well. She was above the middle height of women. I shall begin by describing her. She was slender, and wonderfully graceful. Except that her movements were languid—very languid—indeed, there was nothing in her appearance to indicate an invalid. Her complexion was rich and brilliant; her features were small and beautifully formed; her eyes large, dark, and lustrous; her hair was quite wonderful, I never saw hair so magnificently thick and long when it was down about her shoulders; I have often placed my hands under it, and laughed with wonder at its weight. It was exquisitely fine and soft, and in colour a rich very dark brown, with something of gold. I loved to let it down, tumbling with its own weight, as, in her room, she lay back in her chair talking in her sweet low voice, I used to fold and braid it, and spread it out and play with it. Heavens! If I had but known all! I said there were particulars which did not please me. I have told you that her confidence won me the first night I saw her; but I found that she exercised with respect to herself, her mother, her history, everything in fact connected to her life, plans, and people, an ever-wakeful reserve. I dare say I was unreasonable, perhaps I was wrong; I dare say I ought to have respected the solemn injunction laid upon my father by the stately lady in black velvet. But curiosity is a restless and unscrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another. What harm could it do anyone to tell me what I so ardently desired to know? Had she no trust in my good sense or honour? Why would she not believe me when I assured her, so solemnly, that I would not divulge one syllable of what she told me to any mortal breathing?

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There was a coldness, it seemed to me, beyond her years, in her smiling melancholy persistent refusal to afford me the least ray of light. I cannot say we quarreled upon this point, for she would not quarrel upon any. It was, of course, very unfair of me to press her, very ill-bred, but I really could not help it; and I might just as well have let it alone. What she did tell me amounted, in my unconscionable estimation—to nothing. It was all summed up in three very vague disclosures: First.—Her name was Carmilla. Second.—Her family was very ancient and noble. Third.—Her home lay in the direction of the west. She would not tell me the name of her family, nor their armorial bearings, nor the name of their estate, nor even that of the country they lived in. You are not to suppose that I worried her incessantly on these subjects. I watched opportunity, and rather insinuated than urged my inquiries. Once or twice, indeed, I did attack her more directly. But no matter what my tactics, utter failure was invariably the result. Reproaches and caresses were all lost upon her. But I must add this, that her evasion was conducted with so pretty a melancholy and deprecation, with so many, and even passionate declarations of her liking for me, and trust in my honour, and with so many promises that I should at last know all, that I could not find it in my heart long to be offended with her. She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, “Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die— into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.” And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek.

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Her agitations and her language were unintelligible to me. From these foolish embraces, which were not of very frequent occurrence, I must allow, I used to wish to extricate myself; but my energies seemed to fail me. Her murmured words sounded like a lullaby in my ear, and soothed my resistance into a trance, from which I only seemed to recover myself when she withdrew her arms. In these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts about her while such scenes lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence. This I know is paradox, but I can make no other attempt to explain the feeling. I now write, after an interval of more than ten years, with a trembling hand, with a confused and horrible recollection of certain occurrences and situations, in the ordeal through which I was unconsciously passing; though with a vivid and very sharp remembrance of the main current of my story. But, I suspect, in all lives there are certain emotional scenes, those in which our passions have been most wildly and terribly roused, that are of all others the most vaguely and dimly remembered. Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever.” Then she has thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling. “Are we related,” I used to ask; “what can you mean by all this? I remind you perhaps of some one whom you love; but you must not, I hate it; I don’t know you—I don’t know myself when you look so and talk so.” She used to sigh at my vehemence, then turn away and drop my hand. Respecting these very extraordinary manifestations I strove in vain to form any satisfactory

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I could boast of no little attentions such as masculine gallantry delights to offer. Between these passionate moments there were long intervals of common-place, of gaiety, of brooding melancholy, during which, except that I detected her eyes so full of melancholy fire, following me, at times I might have been as nothing to her. Except in these brief periods of mysterious excitement her ways were girlish; and there was always a languor about her, quite incompatible with a masculine system in a state of health. In some respects her habits were odd. Perhaps not so singular in the opinion of a town lady like you, as they appeared to us rustic people. She used to come down very late, generally not till one o’clock, then she would take a cup of chocolate, but eat nothing; we then went out for a walk, which was a mere saunter, and she seemed, almost immediately, exhausted, and either returned to the schloss or sat on one of the benches that were placed here and there, among the trees. This was a bodily languor in which her mind did not sympathise. She was always an animated talker, and very intelligent. She sometimes alluded for a moment to her own home, or mentioned an adventure or situation, or an early recollection, which indicated a people of strange manners, and described customs of which we knew nothing. I gathered from these chance hints that her native country was much more remote than I had at first fancied.

GENERAL COMMENTARY T. W. ROLLESTON (REVIEW DATE 26 FEBRUARY 1887) SOURCE: Rolleston, T. W. “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.” Irish Fireside 1, no. 9 (26 February 1887): 133. In the following excerpt, Rolleston offers a laudatory estimation of Le Fanu’s skill as an author of sensation novels, noting particularly The House by the Churchyard.

Le Fanu was a poet as well as a novelist, and he was a poet as a novelist. Unfortunately his powers, though great, were limited, or rather he chose to exercise them too much in one particular groove. In taking up a novel of Le Fanu’s we enter a region of mystery and terror, the region whose secrets such writers as Wilkie Collins, the late Hugh Conway, and too many others, have devoted themselves to bringing to light. But Le Fanu is incomparably superior to any of these. Where, in the best of them, do we find his wit, his learning, his sense of beauty, his passion, his mastery of language, his creative power? His characters in his best books are real human beings, in whom we can take interest apart from the tale in which they figure. . . . Of all [Le Fanu’s] works The House by the Churchyard seems to us to exhibit the richest and most varied power. For intensity of excitement nothing can match Uncle Silas. And yet in Uncle Silas one feels that Le Fanu has adopted a métier, and narrowed the sphere of his art. He defended this novel in express terms against the charge of sensationalism, and it certainly contains much that the usual sensational novel does not aim at. But on the whole it must be confessed that it and most of the author’s other productions aim at working on the nerves, not on the spirit of the reader. This, however, cannot be said of The House by the Churchyard. It is true that in the latter the main interest is of a sinister kind, centering upon the fortunes of a criminal, and linked with circumstances of physical horror. But though such is the motive of the story, and such it must appear in any bare narration of the plot, yet there is so much beauty and dignity in some of the characters, so much pathos and noble passion, so much healthy humour and mirth, and vivid description of simple things and people, that the dark thread which runs through the whole fabric is rarely seen. The picture which this book gives of Irish society about the middle of the eighteenth century, is as brilliant an example as could well be found of the imaginative power which can revive a past epoch, and make it seem as real to us as our own. The plot is simple enough, although enveloped in mystery until near the end. . . . Artists in general, writers of fiction. included, may be divided into two classes—those who make the main interest of their work centre on what is high, lovable, beautiful; and those who seek to impress us with revelations of the sinister, the malignant, the appalling. All great artists belong to the first order, nor is there any other way of being great than theirs. Le Fanu, on the whole, and

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theory—I could not refer them to affectation or trick. It was unmistakably the momentary breaking out of suppressed instinct and emotion. Was she, notwithstanding her mother’s volunteered denial, subject to brief visitations of insanity; or was there here a disguise and a romance? I had read in old story books of such things. What if a boyish lover had found his way into the house, and sought to prosecute his suit in masquerade, with the assistance of a clever old adventuress? But there were many things against this hypothesis, highly interesting as it was to my vanity.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR S. M. ELLIS ON LE FANU’S HORROR FICTION

[Le Fanu] at different times was a writer of ballads voicing the aspirations and romance of Irish national life; a journalist expressing High Tory views; an historical romance writer; a writer of squibs and satires; a fine poet; and a supreme author of ghost stories and novels of murder and mystery. In these last categories he is pre-eminent, and his success is almost entirely achieved by his art of suggesting evil presences and coming horrors. Very rarely is there an actual, visible ghost in his stories. His was not the old school of traditionary apparitions, in white or grey, with blue fire, clanking chain, and wailing cry. His spectres—far more terrible—are in the brain of the haunted. Demoniacal possession, and the resultant delusional apparition, or concrete crime—these are the bases of Le Fanu’s finest stories. For the actual details of a murder it is true he had rather a morbid partiality, and spared no particulars about the wounds and blood and the aspect of the mangled or strangled corpse. Like Ainsworth, he was distinctly macaberesque, and both seem to have had a sort of flair for scenes of human torture and physical pain. There is a description in Torlogh O’Brien of the death of a man by the strappado which makes painful reading, so particular are the details of the agony. But, after all, this is merely realism, and realism is not unknown or unprofitable to romance writers of to-day. However realistic Le Fanu may be, there is over all his scenes of horror a softening veil of romance and mystery; and if Death is all too prominent in his books—why so it is, unhappily, in real life, and Le Fanu’s chief exemplar is but a reminder of that inexorable enemy from whom no poor mortal may escape at the last.

VICTOR SAGE (ESSAY DATE 2004) SOURCE: Sage, Victor. “Gothic and Romance: Retribution and Reconciliation.” In Le Fanu’s Gothic: The Rhetoric of Darkness, pp. 29-40. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. In the following essay, Sage illustrates how Le Fanu departs from the typical Gothic formula in his historical romances.

When we come to the two historical romances which Le Fanu wrote in the 1840s, the rhetorical situation is somewhat different from that of The Purcell Papers. The evidentiary mode—the home of dark epiphany—has to go, and plot—the plot of History—must take its place. It was not really possible in the 1840s to write a historical romance that had a ‘national’ character, without responding to the work of Scott.1 To emulate Scott, you had to find a way of doing the opposite of what Le Fanu had done so brilliantly in The Purcell Papers: you had to imply that two or more different traditions were one. The whole sweep of Waverley, the panorama created by its rhetorical fiction of ‘centrality’, suggests that if you look at history from a certain vantage-point, it all makes sense and leads into the present. And that meant introducing some kind of fictional détente, some notion of negotiation, even perhaps of mutual recognition, between hostile, or traditionally opposed, parties, within the parameters of a single language or, at least, a single text. The most striking example of this structure is the way the Jacobite cause is finally dismissed as outmoded by the modern political state in Redgauntlet, which is done by giving the violence and the romanticism of Jacobite conspiracy enough room and textual presence to allow it to become an anachronism and give way (‘historically’, i.e. by the choice of the characters) to the ‘modern’ (Hanoverian) political state.

SOURCE: Ellis, S. M. “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.” The Bookman 51, no. 301 (October 1916): 1521.

judging him by his most powerful and impassioned work, belongs to the second order. But in this order he stands high, he stands among the

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highest; and he stands there, in spite of a too diffuse and erratic manner of conducting his plots, mainly by virtue of his splendour of style and imagination. And he has traits of the higher school which ennoble his work, and make the ineffaceable impression which it leaves in our memory something better than a haunting horror.

But in these romances, although he adopts the overview method, Le Fanu reads Scott as romantic, not realist.2 And he adopts a number of conventions to produce textual unity, which keep on breaking down and getting threatened. He adopts a sentimental register, which is broken into by the grotesque; and he adopts a historical

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the romance version, the Gothic effect—a moment that defies narrative extension—is subdued to sentimental and heroic plot-convention.5

This latter point can be illustrated quite succinctly. The Fortunes of Torlough O’Brien (1847) recycles several of the stories from The Purcell Papers, but in each case, their Gothic or uncanny elements have been removed. For example, Turlogh O’Brien in Chapters 50 and 51, disguised as a pedlar, is captured by the Protestant forces and his enemy, Garrett. This incident is recycled from the short story ‘An Adventure of Hardress Fitzgerald’ from The Purcell Papers. There, it took place with the background of the (first, I take it) siege of Limerick. In the romance, Torlough O’Brien, it is transferred to just before the battle of Aghrim (Aughrim), three years later. In each case, the plot is the same: a resentful soldier betrays his Protestant masters, and the prisoner, Fitzgerald in the story (or O’Brien, in the romance) is given a weapon with which he kills his jailor and escapes. Here is the Gothic epiphany of the story, which violates the decorum of the Scott model:

Rewriting like this is evidently a response to the dominance of a certain rhetorical mode in the historical romance. There is a struggle to retain and yet occlude, and alter, the language of the grotesque; and the uncanny is also more interestingly evident in a number of places. These examples amount to a much more ambiguous and interestingly personal inflection of a tension between the the legalistic framing devices of the ‘old Gothic’ (already fully developed and updated by Le Fanu, in a strikingly effective fashion, as we have seen) and the quite different conventions of historical overview in Scott’s new historical romance.

As I arose and shook the weapon and the bloody cloth from my hand, the moon, which he had foretold I should never see rise, shone bright and broad into the room, and disclosed, with ghastly distinctness, the mangled features of the dead soldier; the mouth, full of clotting blood and broken teeth, lay open; the eye, close by whose lid the fatal wound had been inflicted, was not, as might have been expected, bathed in blood, but had started forth nearly from the socket, and gave to the face, by its fearful unlikeness to the other glazing orb, a leer more hideous and unearthly than fancy ever saw.3

This is a moment of revenancy: the ‘other world’ shows through, here, in a flash of imagination (i.e. ‘superstition’) beyond mere ‘fancy’; so that for the reader the ‘leer’ is asserted and denied in the same phrase. This is the chiaroscuro effect: attention is paid to the lighting of the scene. The corpse of Captain Oliver is resurrected here for a moment, in a pocket of the uncanny that is most undecorous from the Scott point of view: it exists in tension with the boy’s own adventure story of Hardress Fitzgerald.4 But the epiphany also harnesses a political point: Captain Oliver is a (power-mad, vengeful) Protestant Williamite and the narrative pursues the adventure of a dauntless Catholic rebel. This incident is recycled in The Fortunes of Torlough O’Brien. But in the romance, Torlough O’Brien merely gets back his charger from the rascally Garrett and rides to Aughrim to join Sarsfield’s cavalry unit, an engagement in which he is wounded. In

The Cock and Anchor (1845): Gothic instabilities PLOT VERSUS RHETORIC The plot of this novel is reconciliatory, crossing the divide between Catholic and Protestant; but the divisions in Irish culture which associate themselves with the overcoded epiphanies of a demonic rhetoric in The Purcell Papers are portrayed as fully established in the social system, and seem to have a more powerful and pervasive position in the immediately post-civil War society, in the anti-Whig argument of this first novel, The Cock and Anchor. The roots of Le Fanu’s Gothic are close to satire.6 Here again the plot is a sentimental crossing of the boundaries between Catholic and Protestant traditions. We are now in the early eighteenth century, about 1710. Edmond O’Connor, the handsome young Milesian, and soldier in exile, has fallen in love with the daughter of the unpleasant Whig baronet, Sir Richard Ashwoode (i.e. wood that is, or has become, unsound). O’Connor has returned to Ireland from the Continent, to ask for Mary Ashwoode’s hand. His love is returned by Mary, but Sir Richard Ashwoode, is determined, for economic reasons, that his daughter, Mary, should marry the ancient, foppish Whig peer, Lord Aspenly (even more unsound wood). O’Connor’s friend, Mr Audley appeals on his behalf, to Sir Richard, offering a dowry, but is waved aside. Another friend, an old soldier, Major O’Leary, then intervenes and fights a duel with Lord Aspenly, who afterwards rejects the marriage. After a paroxysm of fury, Sir Richard dies. Meanwhile, his son and heir, Mary’s brother, Sir Henry, is also deeply in in the hands of moneylenders.

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discourse which exists in tension with very unScott-like outbreaks of the Gothic and the uncanny.

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O’Connor happens by chance to save his life, which he repays with rank treachery by acting as an agent for his father against O’Connor’s interests in the marriage. Reduced by gambling debts to desperation, his own cynical marriage plans having fallen through, Sir Henry falls victim to a plot to ensnare him and forges a cheque in the name of a dastardly villain, Nicholas Blarden, the penalty for which is death. Sir Henry has publicly and savagely beaten Blarden at Smock Alley theatre for daring to approach his sister, and Blarden has sworn revenge; now, he is in Blarden’s hands and Blarden’s revenge on him is to have Mary in marriage, having hired a rascally clergyman to perform the ceremony, and take over Morley Court, where she is being kept a prisoner. In a long sequence of pastiche-Gothic suspense, Mary (the imprisoned heiress) escapes with her resourceful maid, Flora Guy, and they manage to travel to safety at her uncle, Old Oliver Trench’s estate in the country at Ardgillagh. Sir Henry is hanged. O’Connor finally returns and finds Mary, and but too late. She has fallen ill and died.

(Catholic) cathedral-building in stone. This building is a part of this book’s subdued, but insistent allegory about the unsound forests—the rottenness of the ‘present’ (i.e. 1710; 1845 is a discreetly silent layer here), Whig-dominated, house—of Ireland, to which it acts as a counterpoint.8 It has been left behind, ‘narrowing the street with a most aristocratic indifference to the comforts of the pedestrian public’ (4) and the luxury and fancy of its charming old woodwork may suggest a lost tradition of benign patrician rule: sound aristocracy and religious tolerance—which opposes itself to the brutal and ruinous combination of commercial exploitation and penal law which claim to be ‘modern’.

RHETORIC We first see O’Connor at the ramshackle inn which gives to the novel its title. This wooden structure (like the Carbrie in Torlough O’Brien) acts as a site of ‘irregularity’, of picturesque, a rambling building vaguely reminiscent of ecclesiastical architecture in the medieval Catholic tradition:

‘Nevertheless—over-ridden, and despised, and scattered as we are, mercenaries and beggars abroad, and landless at home—still something whispers in my ear that there will come at last a retribution, and such a one as will make this perjured, corrupt, and robbing ascendancy a warning and a wonder to all after times. Is it a common thing, think you, that all the gentlemen, all the chivalry of a whole country—the natural leaders and protectors of the people—should be stripped of their birthright, ay, even of the poor privilege of seeing in this their native country, strangers possessing the inheritances which are in all right their own; cast abroad upon the world; soldiers of fortune, selling their blood for a bare subsistence; many of them dying of want; and all because for honour and conscience’ sake they refused to break the oath which bound them to a ruined prince. Is it a slight thing, think you, to visit with pains and penalties such as these, men guilty of no crimes beyond those of fidelity and honour!’9

The front of the building, facing the street, rested upon a row of massive wooden blocks, set endwise, at intervals of some six or eight feet, and running parallel at about the same distance, to the wall of the lower story of the house, thus forming a kind of rude cloister or open corridor, running the whole length of the building. The spaces between these rude pillars were, by a light frame-work of timber, converted into a succession of arches; and by an application of the same ornamental process, the ceiling of this extended porch was made to carry a clumsy but not unpicturesque imitation of groining. Upon this open-work of timber . . . rested the second story of the building; protruding beyond which again, and supported upon projected beams whose projecting ends were carved into the semblance of heads hideous as the fantastic monsters of heraldry, arose the third story, presenting a series of tall and fancifully-shaped gables, decorated, like the rest of the building, with an abundance of grotesque timber-work.7

This stretch of picturesque is a mini-allegory: a political set-piece. ‘Cloisters’, ‘groining’, ‘fantastic monsters’ and ‘grotesque timber-work’ all suggest the anti-utilitarian past, an earlier tradition of

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It is in this inn that the Jacobite plot is first developed; we witness an encounter between Edmond O’Connor and a stranger, Captain O’Hanlon, who turns out to be an old friend of O’Connor’s father. O’Hanlon gives two speeches in O’Connor’s room, the first of which is addressed to the spirit of his deceased old friend and comrade-in-arms, Richard O’Connor:

This ominous speech suggests the more retributive context of this romance, in this early eighteenth-century period. After the Civil War of the 1690s and the Williamite settlement, Ireland is now a betrayed house, the flower of whose Catholic aristocracy, or even middle class, have been driven from their land by the new interest, a cold-hearted company of rulers emblemised, and, briefly, led, by Lord Wharton. It turns out that O’Hanlon was one of the highwaymen who set about young O’Connor, on the road to the inn, mistaking his identity for that of a Whig messenger:

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Catholic reviewers objected to the way this plot is handled, and the bloodthirstiness of one of the conspirators, a Catholic priest, when they capture O’Connor who has strayed innocently into the grounds of Finiskea House in Phoenix Park, a house they are occupying, and threaten to execute him as a spy.1 1 But it is not only Captain O’Hanlon’s prejudice, as a Catholic exile, that represents Wharton as corrupt. Later in the novel, there is an interesting scene inside Dublin Castle, in which the text dramatises a conversation between Swift, Addison and Wharton. The text allows us to witness the way in which a patter of double-talk and blackmail is operating at the top of the social system. Swift is casually blackmailed by Wharton: He paused, but Swift remained silent. The lord lieutenant well knew that an English preferment was the nearest object of the young churchman’s ambition. He therefore continued— ‘On my soul, we want you in England—this is no stage for you. By——— you cannot hope to serve either yourself or your friends in this place.’ ‘Very few thrive here but scoundrels, my lord,’ rejoined Swift. ‘Even so,’ replied Wharton with perfect equanimity—‘it is a nation of scoundrels—dissent on the one side and popery on the other. The upper order harpies, and the lower a mere prey—and all equally liars, rogues, rebels, slaves, and robbers. By——— some fine day the devil will carry off the island bodily. For very safety you must get out of it. By——— he’ll have it.’1 2

We catch a glimpse of the Gothic irony about ‘superstition’ here, and the retributive plot rears its head briefly. In his cynical frankness, Wharton jokes in the language of ‘superstition’, describing with ironical accuracy the culture he has himself created. It is the Devil’s work. Wharton has Swift in his power here, and the process of corruption and cynicism in Ireland, in which the good and heroic are preyed upon by the merely manipulative, is portrayed as beginning at the top of the political system. Wharton is described ironically as ‘a steady and uncompromising Whig, upon whom, throughout a long and active life, the stain

of inconsistency had never rested . . .’.1 3 By contrast, when a country prebendary at a gathering Dublin castle looks upon Swift’s face, he finds a ‘countenance, full, as it seemed, of a scornful, merciless energy and decision, something told him that he looked upon one born to lead and command the people . . .’ (I, 267).1 4 The text suggests that noble and natural (i.e. patrician) leaders, everywhere in this Whigdominated Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, are in thrall to mercenary and manipulative interests. What price now the old oak of the ‘Cock and Anchor’ which has lasted so long? The Williamite Settlement led to a drastic reduction in the numbers of old estates that were in Catholic hands. The bitter conditions created by the penal code partly explain this romance’s tone and its code of ‘unsound timber’. The novel’s most recent editor, Jan Jedrejewski, sees the Wharton scene in Dublin Castle as a rather weak piece of historical realism, judging it by the standards of Scott, because Le Fanu had simply based it on a pamphlet by Swift.1 5 But Joseph Spence argues, rightly, I think, that this scene is crucial to the intellectual structure of the novel because Le Fanu’s anti-Whig polemic does not commit itself to being antiHanoverian. Le Fanu is careful not to praise, blame, or even mention, Wharton’s successor, Ormonde, when he could have done. Seen in this light, the novel’s ‘even-handedness’ is in tension with its rhetorical energy, a conflict which follows on from the ironical connection between ‘superstition’ and the theme of Williamite guilt in The Purcell Papers. This tension associates itself in the text with undercurrents of the Gothic—the grotesque and uncanny. These are strange times, the text argues, which generate an exotic undergrowth of shabby blackmailers, grotesque money-lenders, and rascally parasitic lawyers, low types who creep into the lowest rungs of professions to leech off foolish or desperate Whig aristocrats and their wastrel offspring. The villain of the novel, Nicholas Blarden, is a kind of Gothic echo of Wharton’s joke about the devil (‘old Nick’, as his friends refer to him) who drives the second-half of this plot in his relentless squeezing of young Sir Henry Ashwoode and pursuit of his sister, Mary. Old Sir Richard, likewise, has his creepy shadow, Mr Craven, who is a mixture of stereotypes: The bell pealed and the knocker thundered, and in a moment a servant entered, and announced Mr Craven—a spare built man, of low stature, wearing his own long, grizzled hair instead of a wig—having a florid complexion, hooked nose, beetle brows, and long-cut, Jewish, black eyes, set

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I took you for one who we were informed would pass that way, and about the same hour—one who carried letters from a pretended friend—one whom I have long suspected, a half-faced, coldhearted friend, carried letters, I say, from such a one to the castle here; to that malignant, perjured reprobate and apostate, the so-called Lord Wharton—as meet an ornament for a gibbet as ever yet made feast for the ravens.1 0

the air himself were thundering at the casement; then again the blue dazzling lightning glared into the room and gave place to deeper darkness.

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close under the bridge of his nose—who stepped with a velvet tread into the room. An unvarying smile sate upon his lips, and about his whole air and manner there was a certain indescribable sanctimoniousness, which was rather enhanced by the puritan plainness of his attire.1 6

Pah! that lightning smells like brimstone. Sangue d’un dua, I hear something in the room.

The demonising rhetoric of this figure is made up of two Dickensian stereotypes: the oldfashioned theatrical figure of the Puritan hypocrite, and the almost immemorial figure of the Jewish usurer. ‘Craven’ means coward, principally, but it also connotes ‘pleading’ (cf. Miles Garrett’s ‘I crave your pardon’ in Torlough O’Brien) and Mr Craven is a lawyer, a professional pleader. It is implied that his ‘lowness’ is a combination of low church, low class, and low race. This anti-puritan, anti-Semitic caricature is the beginning of a long line of figures associated with the Whiggification of society in Le Fanu’s later romances. Indeed this anti-Whig novel is really a template for many of those later texts, whose anti-Semitism reaches its apotheosis in The Tenants of Malory.1 7 I have no space here to scrutinise the nuances of the rhetoric, constantly shading into darkness, the grotesque and the uncanny, in which a number of minor characters (servants and hangers-on) are encased in this text.1 8 But there is also another concealed Gothic story which deserves comment, because it simply looks an excrescence at first sight. In a characteristically roundabout and backhanded way, it again sets Catholic ‘credulity’ (superstition) against Whig rationalism. This is the curious rewrite of the ‘Locked Room Mystery’ in II, v, which is inset into Sir Richard Ashwoode’s death. The retributive Gothic is mediated through the ‘superstitious’ witness, the Italian, forger and hanger-on, Parucci. Whole passages here are recycled from The Purcell Papers. Parucci pushes open the door of the baronet’s dressing-room and encounters ‘A candle, wasted to the very socket . . .’ but still burning on the table beside the ‘huge hearse-like bed . . .’ (II, 53). Parucci seems to have heard Sir Richard speaking, in the next room, and he asks himself who could possibly have been with the baronet: ‘What made him speak; nothing was with him— pshaw, nothing could come to him here—no, no, nothing.’ As he thus spoke, the wind swept vehemently upon the windows with a sound as if some great thing had rushed against them, and was pressing for admission, and the gust blew out the candle; the blast died away in an lengthened wail, and then again came howling and rushing up to the windows, as if the very prince of the powers of

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Yielding to his terrors, Parrucci stumbled to the door opening upon the great lobby, and with cold and trembling fingers drawing the bolt, sprang to the stairs and shouted for assistance in a tone which speedily assembled half the household in the chamber of death.1 9

This is a flash of Gothic. This wind was used to very good effect later by M. R. James. The undermining of the witness’s full credibility yields the required ambiguity between natural and supernatural explanations. But this is not just a detached ‘formal’ property of the Gothic genre here, incongrously and perhaps wilfully thrust into a historical romance about the Williamite Settlement. There is a retributive logic: Parucci is a conventional materialist—hence his expressions of contempt—but here the irrational has taken him back to his Catholic roots and stimulated his imagination, and the supernatural ambiguities of the shorter fiction are left for the reader to respond to as an equilibrium of competing explanations.2 0

Coda: readerly darkness: The Fortunes of Torlough O’Brien (1847) PLOT We must go back to the summer of 1689. [In The Fortunes of Torlough O’Brien] King James II has left the throne of England and removed himself to France, and the Prince of Orange has entered London and occupied the throne of England. Ireland is in a state of anarchy, under the violently discriminatory rule of James’s deputy, the Earl of Tyrconnel, who (in the eyes of many) has set about creating a Catholic state. The Irish Parliament has been disbanded. The countryside is full of ‘rapparees’, armed bandits who tend to be discharged soldiers from James’s armies. Old Sir Hugh Willoughby, a Protestant peer and the current occupant, when the novel opens in 1689, of Glindarragh Castle, a large rambling fortified house in County Limerick, is accused on a charge of treason, trumped up by his cousin, Miles Garrett of Lisnamoe. The time-serving Garrett who is a justice of the peace, is an apostate from Protestantism to Catholicism and his main concern in life is simple: to acquire Glindarragh for himself. He tries what he thinks of as the honourable way—by asking for the hand of Grace Willoughby, Sir Hugh’s beautiful daughter, but

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Garrett calls on ‘motley thousands’ (97) of rapparees who besiege Glindarragh, on the pretext of seeking some allegedly stolen cattle. There is a pitched battle just before which, during the initial parlay, Garrett makes sure the name of King James is audibly insulted by the hot-tempered and outraged Willoughby, thus providing the charge of treason. Eventually, the castle is taken and Willoughby and his daughter are at the mercy of Garrett and his rapparees. Grace Willoughby has already been rescued once from the clutches of a particularly ugly and grotesque rapparee, called Desmond Hogan, by an unknown and handsome dragoon, who is recognised by her old nurse as Torlogh Dhuv, or ‘Dark Torlough’, a scion of the ancient O’Brien family, who are the real owners of Glindarragh castle. The ancient Gaelic prophecy says that when the one with the shamrock mark on his brow is seen on Glindarragh Bridge, then the O’Briens will return to Glindarragh. It seems that the O’Briens were driven out at the dissolution of the monasteries and that the Willoughby family was subsequently given the castle by the ‘old queen’, Elizabeth. Just at the moment of Garrett’s triumph, Torlogh O’Brien appears with a troop of dragoons and takes over from him. O’Brien thus, for the first time, enters what is arguably his own property. He quarters his men at the castle and takes personal charge of Garrett’s prisoners, escorting them himself to Dublin for the trial. It is plain that the honourable and kindly O’Brien has no sympathy for Garrett and every sympathy for Willoughby and his daughter, despite the fact that they are, technically, his enemies.2 1 James II enters Dublin, and we catch a glimpse of his Privy Council tetchily discussing Willoughby’s case. In Dublin, thanks to the machinations of Garrett and his associates, who manipulate one of the key witnesses into betraying Willoughby, the trial goes against the old man. O’Brien, having declared himself to Grace Willoughby and been accepted, helps her to plead secretly with James himself for her father’s life, but the King rejects her plea and her father is thrown into jail to await execution.

However, Garrett discovers that the Glindarragh estate has been set up in such a way that it will revert, not to the state, but to another party on Sir Hugh’s death. It is imperative therefore that he not be hanged, while they search for the deed and destroy it. So Sir Hugh obtains a temporary reprieve, which is reported with teasing irony. Meanwhile O’Brien has been obliged to rejoin his unit. He fights with Sarsfield’s cavalry all the way through from Boyne Water to the battle of Aughrim where he is wounded, and we find him lying in the vaults of St Mary’s Abbey towards the end of the book, very weak, but protected from the incursions of Protestant Williamite soldiery by a ragged crew of rapparees. Garrett, who has in the meantime characteristically turned coat and become a Williamite, and is an officer in the Protestant forces, has been overtaken by history and fails in his project. Glindarragh is eventually reclaimed by O’Brien with Grace Willoughby as his bride and the old man carries on in residence, as the current but temporary owner. Garrett is finally killed by Ned Ryan, one of his neighbouring rapparees, in a skirmish after a cattle raid. The villain is thrown into a ravine, and his corpse is found by children picking ‘frahans’ (whortleberries). RHETORIC I am deliberately simplifying the plot in the above summary to reveal its main lines. It is clear that this plot is again reconciliatory, and that the story is sympathetic, in the manner of earlier writers of Irish romance, Lady Morgan and Charles Maturin, to ‘the O’s and the Mac’s’, the ancient Catholic (but also pagan) nobility of Ireland who were the original owners of the land. Willoughby, the doughty old Whig peer (a rather rare character in Le Fanu: a good (i.e. a high-toned) Whig, and O’Brien, the Milesian who resembles a ‘Moorish prince’, come to recognise one another because they share a common trait: honour. They are both true Irishmen, whatever their religious persuasions, family histories, and ancestral claims to the same piece of property. This sentimental convention is, in a sense, a class recognition. Garrett, the ambitious villain, is a hypocrite opportunist who is born ‘low’. He is typical of the ‘New Interest’. There is a range of minor characters who occupy the place of other stereotypes hovering between the fictional and the historical. Another ‘low’ character, Old Tisdal, the respectable tenant of Glindarragh’s manor farm at Drumgunniol, and follower of Sir Hugh, who betrays him and testifies against him, is a

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the old man violently rejects him. Garrett, however, has acquired influence with Tyrconnel himself: it appears that Old Sir Hugh’s wife, Lady Willoughby, who is now half-imprisoned in obscurity somewhere in Dublin, has had an affair with Tyrconnel, a fact which allows Garrett to blackmail him into accepting the charge of treason, despite its evident flimsiness.

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highwayman turned Puritan, whose pious exterior masks his murderous past. This again, though not simple hypocrisy, is an important version of ‘lowness’ which Le Fanu will exploit in the villains, and sometimes, in a twist of expectations, the sympathetic characters, of his later romances.2 2 THE NEW FRAME: THE MAGIC MIRROR The Prologue of this text is a rhetorical feat, which goes some way towards providing Le Fanu with a solution to the conflict between the Gothic (i.e. the indirect and retributory) use of ‘attestation’ he has invented for the short story in The Purcell Papers, and the pressure of the historical romance towards panorama and overview, which implies a ‘central’ narrative voice, a more stable, or at least a more visible, relationship between implied author and reader: In the summer of the year 1686, at about ten o’clock at night, two scenes were passing, very different in all the accidents of place, plot, and personage; and which although enacted, the one in London, and the other near it, yet exercised an influence upon the events and persons of our Irish story, so important and so permanent, that we must needs lift the curtain from before the magic mirror, which every author, in virtue of his craft, is privileged to consult, and disclose for a minute the scenery and forms which flit across its mystic surface.2 3

At first sight, this device is simply mechanical: it is evidently a dramatic way of providing a ‘backstory’ for the novel’s plot, whose main action begins in 1689. But it has certain oddities about it, which are in excess of this function. What is a curtain doing in front of the ‘mirror’? The reader is metaphorically in the dark: a member of the audience at a fairground show, or perhaps a fantasmagoria.2 4 And the author? A mixture of Gypsy Rose Lee, Hecate from Macbeth, and the Master of Ceremonies at a peepshow. Narration is a kind of prophecy about the past. We stare into the essence of the scene, and we watch while its ‘forms’— characters shorn of names and all but the accidental properties of their clothing, bearing, and environment—act out a proleptic dumbshow of the novel’s narrative. But we are not just metaphorically in the dark. This process plainly teases the reader with their very distance from the images in front of them; our (modern) position of almost total ignorance and helplessness is mocked by the insistent intimacy of this partial realisation. How for example can we (even the early-nineteenth-

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century reader) identify whether these ‘forms’ are ‘fictions’ or representations of historical characters? In the chamber into which we are looking, there burns a large lamp, which sheds through its stained-glass sphere a soft, rose-coloured light on all the objects which surround it; and eight wax lights, flaring and flickering in the evening breeze which floats lightly in at the open windows, tend an additional distinctiveness to the forms that occupy the room. These are four in number: two lean over a table, which stands near the window, and seem to be closely examining a map, which nearly covers the board over which they stoop—the one sharpfeatured, sallow, somewhat slovenly in his attire, his short cloak hanging from his shoulder, and his high-crowned hat (then an obsolete fashion) dangling in his hand, leans over the outspread plan, and with eager gestures and rapid enunciation, and yet with a strange mixture of deference, appears to harangue his listening companion. He is a strong, square-built man, somewhat perhaps, beyond the middle age, gravely and handsomely dressed—his huge perriwig swings forward and rests his chin upon his jewelled hand, and fixes upon the chart before him a countenance bold and massive, in which the strong lines of sense and sensuality are strikingly combined.2 5

We are placed in the position of one who must deduce from the signs the meaning of this scene. The ‘chart’—as in a stage play—indicates planning, if not conspiracy. But the text tells us nothing directly. Our sensory targets are confined to the visual sign—the sound has effectively been turned off. The figures are seen from a distance, and with an uncertainty that represents our own ignorance in advance—the first form ‘appears to harangue’ the second, for example—of its actual appearance. The first of these figures is a fiction: it is the villain of this novel, Miles Garrett, whose clothes and manners betray his lowly origins and his country fashions. The second figure is the brother of Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, and is a historical figure. (The emphasis on ‘He’ may convey a clue to an Irish reader of the 1840s, but it is a rhetorical gamble, which looks more like teasing to me.) It might be supposed that the next chapter would begin by explaining all this. But no such revelation follows. How do I know this? Because after 144 pages, or twenty chapters, the author suddenly adds a series of ‘casual’ afterthoughts: . . . this was the very individual whom Sir Hugh had that day pointed out to his daughter as the “lay priest”, and brother to the Earl of Tyrconnell, while the procession was passing beneath the

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The fictional Garrett then, in the magic-mirror image, is setting up the first stage of his plan to gain Glindarragh castle—hence the map. The rest of the first magic-mirror scene is an equally unknowable mixture of fictional plot and historical fact: Pacing to and fro, and sometimes pausing half abstractedly at this table, looking for a moment at the outspread paper, and betraying the absence, and, perhaps, the agitation of his mind by his wandering gaze and the restless drumming of his knuckles on the table; then turning again to resume his rapid walk across the floor, and stealing occasionally a hurried and uneasy look towards a figure who sits alone upon a sofa in the obscurest part of the chamber, is seen a man of commanding stature and lofty mien, though somewhat tending to corpulence, richly dressed in a suit of dark velvet, sparkling with jewels, his neckcloth and ruffles fluttering with splendid point, having in his countenance a certain character of haughty command, according well with the high pretensions of his garb.

We are plunged again into the activity of deduction or guesswork. This must be ‘Lying Dick Talbot’, the Earl of Tyrconnel himself, a historical figure of great importance. The implication is that he is aware of the conspiracy which his brother is entering into with Miles Garrett, but is too distracted to find it of interest. That is because of his apparently guilty interest in the fourth ‘form’: Another figure remains to be described, it is that toward which the regards of him we have just examined are so often turned: the form is that of a female, seated, as we have said, upon a sofa, and wrapped in a close travelling cloak, the hood of which falls over her face, so that, excepting she is tall, and possesses hands and feet of singular beauty and slimness, we can pronounce nothing whatever of her personnel—she is evidently weeping, her dress shows the vibration of every sob, and the convulsive clasping of her small hands, and the measured beating of her tiny foot upon the floor, betoken her inward anguish.2 7

This is Lady Willoughby, a fictional character, whose affair with Tyrconnell has become known to Garrett, who in his turn intends to use this knowledge as a means of convicting her husband, Sir Hugh Willoughby, of treason and thus gaining the object of his desire, the possession of Glindarragh castle in Limerick, the Willoughby seat.

Again, I infer this from having read the novel. I could not actually ‘deduce’ it from what is in front of me, so completely is it reduced to the bare ‘forms’ and ‘figures’ of the magic mirror’s images. It intrigues me, of course; but the mirror reveals a drama I am explicitly forbidden at this stage to enter, and, indeed, for much of the novel to come. To read at this point is to enter the space of darkness. And yet the author—the showmanprophet—teases me mercilessly with my own efforts to infer meaning from the text in front of me, which he is in the act of creating: Lo! there must have been some sudden sound at the door! They all start and look toward it—the lean gentleman, in the shabby suit, clutches his map; his brawny companion advances a pace; the tall aristocrat arrests his walk, and stands fixed and breathless; while the lady shrinks further back, and draws her hood more closely over her face. Their objects, then, must be secret. It is, however, a false alarm, they resume their respective postures and occupations—and so leaving them, we wave the wand which conjured up the scene, and in a moment all is shivered, clouded, and gone.2 8

The frustration of that hackneyed old picturesque opening device of ‘the hypothetical observer’ becomes explicit here, as the narrator turns the parodic screw on the melodrama of the early Victorian reader’s expectations, fed on a diet of Ainsworth, Reynolds, Dickens, Eugène Sue, and Sir Walter Scott. What is interesting are the expressionistic lengths to which Le Fanu is prepared to go and what he is prepared to risk to gain his effect of readerly ‘darkness’. The frame is an assimilation of reading—and specifically, the state of expectation—to the early cinema, and the darkness that descends between each scene. No sooner is the mirror ‘wiped’, than a second scene appears, just as obscure as the first. This time the referencepoints are more obviously ‘Gothic’; we seem to be in an undercroft or even burial vault of some kind: . . . it represents the dim vistas of a vaulted chamber, spanned with low, broad arches of stone, springing from the stone floor. Two blazing links, circled with a lurid halo from the heavy damps which hang there, in thin perpetual fog, shed a dusky, flickering glare upon the stained and dripping roof, and through the dim and manifold perspective of arches, until it spends itself in vapoury darkness. (3)

One thinks here of the numerous underground scenes (often Catholic—Rookwood, or Guy

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windows of the Carbrie; let us add too, that this is the identical person whom we described in the earliest chapter of this book as leaning over a certain map, in company with Miles Garrett, upon a soft summer’s night in the year 1686, in a rich saloon in London.2 6

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Fawkes, for example) in Harrison Ainsworth’s novels, much read at this time; and of the Jacobite climax to Scott’s The Black Dwarf, which takes place in an underground chapel. But here we are treading the line of the frame, not the text proper: there is little clue as to what is happening. In fact, the rhetoric works hard to deny us information, undermining the reader’s position of privilege once again, so that the ‘fitful glow’ of the turpentine torches acts as a metaphor for our state of knowledge as much as it ‘illuminates’ the characters before us: A group of some seven or eight figures stands in the fitful glow of this ruddy illumination—gentlemen of wealth and worship, it would seem, by the richness of their garb: some are wrapt in their cloaks, some are booted, and all wear their broadleafed, low-crowned hats. Strong lines and deep shadows mark many a furrowed and earnest face. This is no funereal meeting, as the place would seem to indicate—no trappings of mourning are visible, and the subject of their conversation, though deep and weighty, is too earnest and energizing for a theme of sorrow; neither is there, in the faces or gestures of the assembly, a single indication of excitement or enthusiasm. The countenances, the attitudes, the movements of the group, all betoken caution, deliberation, and intense anxiety. From time to time are seen, singly, or in couples, or in groups of three, other forms in the shadowy distance, as richly dressed, gliding like ghosts through the cloistered avenues, and holding with themselves, or one another anxious debate.2 9

All we are allowed to know from the text is that this is the summer of 1686. One year, that is, after the failure of the Monmouth rebellion. We are somewhere near London. I infer from the atmosphere that this is the beginning of the real rebellion against James II by leading Protestants who had grown tired of watching the transformation of England into a catholic state, a move which eventually led to the invitation to the Prince of Orange to invade their country and which was to lead to civil war in Ireland. There is a touch of irony about the odd use of ‘wealth and worship’ in the above (does ‘worship’ here refer to religion, or ‘adulation based on’, or even ‘of’, material prosperity? This is precisely the ambiguity of the demonic Vanderhausen, from ‘Schalken the Painter’) which suggests that the leading interests here might well be ‘the New Interest’ of the Whigs. This is no romantic, Jacobite conspiracy, for a lost kingdom; but a serious, worldly, and above all feasible affair. The scene is suddenly animated: And now, a tall and singularly handsome man, in gorgeous military uniform, turning from an elder

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personage in a velvet cloak, to whom he has been deferentially listening, moves a pace or two toward the detached parties, who walk slowly up and down, as we have described, and raising his plumed hat, he beckons them forward; and so they come, and must with the rest; whereupon the elder gentleman, in the velvet cloak, draws forth a letter, and with a brief word or two of preface, as would seem, reads it for the rest, pausing from time to time to offer and receive remarks. This over, he says something further, whereupon he and all the rest raise their hats for a moment, and then he shows the letter to one of the company nearest himself, who takes it, looks to the end, and then to the beginning, and so passes it on to another, and so from hand to hand it goes, until again it first reaches him who first produced it; and then, with the same solemn and earnest looks and air, they, one by one, take leave, shake hands, and glide away, until the old gentleman in the cloak, and one other remain. Then he in the cloak holds the corner of the momentous letter to the flaring link, and now it floats to the ground in flame, and now all that remains of the mysterious paper, is a light black film, coursed all over by a thousand nimble sparkles.3 0

I am obliged to guess here. Among these shades of the obscure and dead, I take the leading conspirators to be the young Duke of Marlborough, second-in-command of James’s army and a known plotter, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, who had already been imprisoned in the tower for fomenting the Monmouth rebellion. This fateful letter is a draft of the invitation to William, Prince of Orange, son-in-law to King James, to invade the country and oust James from the throne. Either that, or it is James’s reply. But Le Fanu would then have had to have moved it forward by two years because that did not occur until 1688, so I assume that this scene in the summer of 1686 perhaps represents the solemn undertaking to invite, rather than William’s acceptance. Hence, everyone is given the opportunity to comment, finally, on the wording, and then health is wished to the enterprise and loyalty and respect are expressed towards the Protestant Prince, the arrangement is checked, sealed by handshakes, and this copy of the letter destroyed. The nature of the image and what it represents is interesting. The Gothic vault is a fiction: the condensation of a set of underground political actions into a set of ‘forms’, not an attempt to portray realistically those actions. The reader’s attempts to identify are kept at bay by the technique of (what we would call in modern jargon) defamiliarisation. This is worthy of Pinewood Studies or Hollywood. Le Fanu shows he would have probably written for the movies if he had lived in the

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And, I think secondly, through the metaphor of ‘forms’ or ‘figures’, normally a temporary rhetorical device, he re-introduces a chiaroscuro effect into the frame of the fiction itself. This replaces, or shifts into a different form his earlier rhetoric of ‘attestation’. It clearly assimilates the reading process to that of drama: and yields a space between the reader and the text, a kind of ‘stage’ on which the text performs itself, a nonmimetic plane, on which a complete mingling can take place between the discourses of history and fiction.

Notes 1. See Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge, 1992). See also on Scott’s successors, A. Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel, 1840-1880 (London, 1978), 14-31. 2. For equivocations between realist and romantic readings of Scott, see Duncan, op. cit., 62. And see note 12, for bibliography. For the evidence Le Fanu thought of Scott as a romantic writer, see the Preface to Uncle Silas, ed. V. Sage (Harmondsworth, 2000), 3-4, and the commentary on this in relation to other Victorian readings of Scott in the Introduction, ix-xiii. 3. Le Fanu, The Purcell Papers, III, 217. 4. See his insistence on ‘lowering’ Maturin’s effects in their correspondence, Ratchford and McCarthy, eds, op. cit., passim. 5. Le Fanu, The Fortunes of Colonel Torlough O’Brien, Dublin, 1847, 217. 6. In this case, Swift’s own. See The Cock and Anchor, Ulster editions and Monographs 9, (Gerrard’s Cross) 2001, ed. J. Jedrzewski, whose view of the novel is that Le Fanu was writing ‘against himself’ in this novel. See Intro., xviii. 7. Le Fanu, The Cock and Anchor (Dublin, 1845), 2-3. 8. This politicising of the ‘picturesque’ is an important theme which Purcell has established at the outset of The Purcell Papers, in his comments on the analogy

between the ancient forests of Ireland, and the depleted condition of the genealogical trees of great Catholic families. Later, the notion of ‘waste’ is made into a sub-plot in Uncle Silas; in his desperate need for money Silas begins to burn his patrimony, the ‘grand old timber’ on the estate for charcoal. The bitter conditions created by the penal code at this time in Ireland partly explain the tone of this romance and its code of ‘unsound timber’: ‘The social and economic effects of the penal code must have been very considerable. Family life was disrupted in many ways: Catholic fathers were estranged from Protestant heirs; bitter disputes were caused by the activities of ‘discoverers’ within the family. As the Catholic class diminished in numbers and influence, they were more and more cut off from the social life of the countryside. Uncertainty of tenure discouraged investment in land improvement and led to the cutting of timber for immediate profit.’ A New History of Ireland, Oxford, 1986, Vol. IV, eds T.W. Moody and W.E. Vaughan, Chapter I, 20. 9. Le Fanu, op. cit., I, 20-1. 10. Le Fanu, ibid., I, 22-3. 11. See Jedrzejewski, Appendix, 476-8. 12. Le Fanu, op. cit., I, 271. 13. Le Fanu, ibid., I, 263. 14. Le Fanu, ibid., I, 267. 15. Jedrzewjski, op. cit., Introduction, xvi-xvii., and 416, note 4. Spence, op. cit., 314. For other aspects of the novel’s analysis and its connection to the Gothic of Maturin, see also Spence, 348-9. 16. Le Fanu, op. cit., I, 202. 17. See Paul Hopkins, ‘An Unknown Annotated Copy of The Tenants of Malory: J. Sheridan Le Fanu Regrets Some Anti-Semitic Expressions’, Long Room, 30 (1985), 32-5. 18. Two examples I would briefly point to, however. Gordon Chancey, Blarden’s lawyer has a dangerously languid nature and sleepy, glittering eyes. These eyes will become those of ‘Carmilla’, fifty years later. The other example is Black Martha, the demonic female servant of Old Mr Audley. She is the first example in Le Fanu of the ‘unconscious hypocrite’, whose compulsive, but totally concealed, interior, insists on emerging, in a splendid, purely theatrical soliloquy towards the end of the book. See below for further commentary on this. For a political analysis of this incident, see Spence, op. cit., 348. When Jedrzejewski, calls Le Fanu’s characters ‘puppets’, he is disappointed, using Scott’s rounded historical realism as an evaluative criterion, but if seen as a kind of combination of Gothic and political satire, these characters are comic as well as violent and threatening. Their artifice is that of the stage, but shifted into the novel. 19. Le Fanu, op. cit., II, 55-6. 20. The textual presentation of the incident and its equivalent effects in The Purcell Papers anticipate Le Fanu’s very clear statement to Bentley about how he conceived of a rhetoric of’explanation’in his texts. See Walter C. Edens, op. cit., 238: ‘The 3rd Vol. [The

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twentieth century. The Reader of the 1840s is invited to think of this as a version of the Fantasmagoria—a kind of magic-lanthern show of resurrected apparitions. Le Fanu has appropriated this literal phenomenon for its metaphorical value in alluding to the process of reading. The conceit sets the reader outside the text, and is an elaborately new form of framing and distancing, while ostensibly whipping up, the reader’s responses. It establishes the dark space we enter when we read—the space of ignorance and ‘superstition’ and secrecy, which is there to be manipulated and preyed upon by the fictional text.3 1 Le Fanu continues to insert, in other words, even in the leisurely overview of the romance genre, his estrangement of the reader from the text.

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Haunted Baronet] is a story in equilibrium—between the natural and the super-natural. The supernatural phenomena being explainable on natural theories— and people left to choose what solution they please.’ 21. Le Fanu is using the biography of Patrick Sarsfield in this novel for ‘reconciliatory’ purposes. See Piers Wauchope, Patrick Sarsfield and the Williamite War (Dublin, 1992). See the incidents at Birr castle (Offaly) reported in this book, which Le Fanu seems to have used as a model for the fictional Glindarragh castle plot, and the generous and just behaviour of O’Brien to his enemies, 50-3, 124, 170,186, and 242. 22. Paul Dangerfield in The House by the Churchyard straddles both low and high and is a fake gentleman, with a murderous past. Likewise, Walter Longcluse, in Checkmate is another mask for another personality in a past of bloodshed and murder. Both these are Gothic versions of the Double, who begin with Tisdall, the Ainsworthian ex-highwayman who conceals his past under a mask of pious puritanism. But Bryerly in Uncle Silas, and, to a lesser extent, Mr Dawe, in The Rose and The Key are inverted ‘low’ characters. 23. Le Fanu, op. cit., 1. 24. For the relation between this early form of cinema and the Gothic, see Terry Castle, ‘The Spectralising of the Other in The Myseries of Udolpho’, in The New Eighteenth Century, eds Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York and London, 1987), 231-54. For a more extended account, see also the more detailed and extended background in ‘Phantasmagoria and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie’ in The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, 140-67. For some further, more recent comment, see Thomas Ruffles, Life after Death in the Cinema, unpublished PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, 2001. 25. Le Fanu, ibid., 2. 26. Le Fanu, ibid., 144. 27. Le Fanu, ibid., 3. 28. Le Fanu, ibid., 3. 29. Le Fanu, ibid., 3-4. 30. Le Fanu, ibid., 4. 31. Cf Terry Castle’s description of the ambiguities of the fantasmagoria as a badge of the Enlightenment: It was never a simple mechanistic model of the mind’s workings. Technically speaking, of course, the image did fit nicely with postLockeian notions of mental experience; nineteenth century empiricists frequently figured the mind as a kind of magic-lanthern, capable of projecting the image-traces of past sensation onto the internal ‘screen’ or backcloth of the memory. But the word phantasmagoria, like the magic lanthern itself, inevitably carried with it powerful atavistic associations with magic and the supernatural. To invoke the supposedly mechanistic analogy was subliminally to import the language of the uncanny into the realm of mental function. The mind became a phantom-zone—given over, at least potentially, to spectral presences and haunting obsessions. A new kind of daemonic possession became possible. (Castle, (1995) op. cit., 144 (my italics))

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Le Fanu is using the fantasmagoria here in the opposite way, not ‘subliminally’, but as a conscious and elaborate rhetorical analogy with the craft of the novelist, which allows him to exploit the ambiguities of ‘superstition’ which Castle describes so beautifully here, for his own (quasi-political) purposes. He frames his novel explicitly as a phantasmagoria in language, which immediately introduces another layer of representation.

TITLE COMMENTARY “Carmilla” CAROL A. SENF (ESSAY DATE 1987) SOURCE: Senf, Carol A. “Women and Power in ‘Carmilla.’” Gothic New Series 2 (1987): 25-33. In the following essay, Senf considers the characterization of women as both victims and victimizers in “Carmilla.”

Although Joseph Sheridan LeFanu (18141873) wrote eighteen books and numerous short stories, he is remembered today primarily as a writer of Gothic tales, such as Uncle Silas and “Carmilla.” In “Carmilla,” the most overtly supernatural of these Gothic tales, the title character is actually a centuries old vampire, who—unlike Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason or George Eliot’s Bulstrode, characters who resemble the vampire—literally returns from the grave and sustains her unnatural existence by drinking human blood. Despite the presence of the supernatural in “Carmilla,” however, LeFanu uses the vampire motif primarily to focus on the condition of women’s lives during the time that he wrote. Revealing that women are neither the angels often portrayed in sentimental Victorian fiction, household management manuals, and periodical literature nor the devils of either Gothic novels or sensation novels, “Carmilla” demonstrates that women’s lives are complex and varied. Sometimes victims of outright exploitation, women are also powerful victimizers as well. A survey of LeFanu’s works reveals a number of the sweet and passive women so common to nineteenth-century popular fiction. For example, his first novel, The Cock and Anchor, includes a young woman whose father is willing to sacrifice her to save himself from debt and whose brother will give her in marriage to a monster to avoid social and financial embarrassment. Even more extreme is Maud Ruthyn (in Uncle Silas) whose uncle is willing to murder her for her inheritance. Often LeFanu—as he does in “Carmilla,” Uncle

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In fact, there are so many victimized women in LeFanu’s work that Michael Begnal observes that LeFanu’s women are tragic figures because they “perceive the inequities which exist in their own situations and in the society around them yet they are powerless to effect any significant change” (72). Similarly William Veeder also focuses on LeFanu’s women characters: Although men as well as women suffer from repression in “Carmilla,” LeFanu chooses female protagonists because he agrees with clear-sighted Victorians that woman in particular is stunted emotionally. “Carmilla” is part of that High Victorian self-examination which called into question literary and social conventions and the moral orthodoxies underlying them. (198)

The problem with both of these views is that, in seeing women only as victims, they ignore both the literary evidence—the powerful Carmilla and some of LeFanu’s other competent women (including Miss Darkwell in All in the Dark, Laura Challys Gray in Haunted Lives, and Ethel Ware of Willing to Die)—and the facts of historical reality. The feminist historian Gerda Lerner addresses this historical reality in her essay, “New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History.” Although Lerner’s observations about power refer specifically to the United States, they are applicable to all nations and all cultures: Women have for centuries been excluded from positions of power, both political and economic, yet as members of families, as daughters and wives, they often were closer to actual power than many a man. If women were among the exploiters, if some women were dissatisfied with their limited opportunities, most women were adjusted to their position in society and resisted efforts at changing it. (351)

In addition, the unique facts of Victorian history are addressed by Judith Newton who, using manuals and periodical literature as background for her reading of women’s fiction in Women,

Power, and Subversion, demonstrates that some women in the nineteenth century had a great deal of power: The debate over the “woman question,” in addition to its mass production of theories about women’s “mission,” “kingdom,” or “sphere,” gave an emphasis to the subject of women’s power, and in particular to their influence, which was historically unprecedented. One has only to take manuals addressed to genteel women in the late eighteenth century and lay them alongside those written for middle-class women some sixty to seventy years later to see a deepening tension over women’s power begin to manifest itself. (2)

As Newton suggests, the woman question was on many minds during the nineteenth century. Therefore, LeFanu, who was both a writer of fiction and a working journalist, could hardly have ignored the question of women’s power and influence. Besides the general nineteenth-century interest in women’s issues, there may be personal reasons for LeFanu’s preoccupation with the power of his women characters. The first is an unhappy marriage. Although LeFanu’s wife was reputedly a quiet and inoffensive woman, McCormack notes that the marital difficulties about which LeFanu wrote in his diary affected the entire family and adds that LeFanu’s mother-inlaw, undoubtedly aware of these troubles, made the following bitter observation when she recorded her daughter’s death in the family prayerbook: My darling Susy died at No. 18 Merrion Square Wednesday 28 April 1858 suddenly. She was laid with her beloved father and two brothers in the vault at Mount Jerome near Dublin beloved and bitterly lamented by those who knew her loving and attractive nature. (134-35)

Whatever the reason for their marital unhappiness, LeFanu apparently felt like the victimized party. In addition to a feeling of victimization that may have led him to identify with oppressed groups, he was extremely close to his mother; and that relationship may be the most important reason for his sympathetic identification with women. McCormack notes that both Joseph and his brother were attached to their mother and that she was Joseph’s only confidante until her death in 1861 (121). In addition, Nelson Browne’s study indicates that LeFanu’s mother was an extremely complex woman and cites as proof the Memoir of T. P. LeFanu, which contains a bibliography of her works (11). Because she was a social activist and a

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Silas, Loved and Lost, and Willing to Die—uses young unmarried women as narrators. As W. J. McCormack observes in Sheridan LeFanu and Victorian Ireland, “the hysterical and untrustworthy” narrator of Willing to Die, LeFanu’s last novel, “is the culmination of a series of female narrators, beginning with the inexperienced and . . . sexless Maud Ruthyn and including Edith Aubrey of Loved and Lost and the naive victim of lesbianism and vampirism in ‘Carmilla’” (243).

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woman of some power both within the family and outside it, LeFanu’s mother may have been a source of his interest in the power that women have. “Carmilla appears to divide women into two separate groups—the powerless and the potentially powerful. The powerless group includes young peasant women who are simply food for Carmilla; Laura’s two governesses, gentlewomen apparently down on their luck; and Laura who, although descended from an aristocratic family, is forced to live in comparative retirement for financial reasons. All are victims or potential victims. Powerful women include Carmilla, the aristocratic seducer, and Carmilla’s mother, who appears to be even more powerful than Carmilla herself. That women are often victims is easily seen in Laura, the naive young narrator. A typical Victorian heroine, Laura is presented as an “everywoman” figure. For example, she is nameless for the first part of the story, and the reader never does learn her last name. She is interested in the subjects that were expected to be the center of a young woman’s life—parties and the opportunities they represented for meeting eligible young men. Furthermore, even though she mentions in the first paragraph that her father is English and later that her mother is from an old Hungarian family,1 these specific details do little to individualize her; and additional information, such as her pride in her rationalistic education (she mentions, for example, that she was “studiously kept in ignorance of ghost stories, of fairy tales” [399]), serves only to reinforce her typicality. Indeed the only thing that makes Laura unique is her perverse relationship with Carmilla; and that relationship will leave her drained and ultimately dead. The relationship begins when Laura is a small child—too young to recognize either the sexual overtones of the vampire’s embrace or the fact that such an embrace is ultimately deadly. Nonetheless, Laura is terrified by Carmilla’s first visit, and she becomes more frightened when her father (the source of power and authority in her world) laughs at her fears. Two decades later the memory remains strong: I remember my father coming up and standing at the bedside, and talking cheerfully, and asking the nurse a number of questions, and laughing very heartily at one of the answers; and patting me on the shoulder, and kissing me, and telling me not to be frightened, that it was nothing but a dream and could not hurt me.

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But I was not comforted, for I knew the visit of the strange woman was not a dream; and I was awfully frightened. (400, LeFanu’s italics)

Such patronizing treatment of a six-year-old child is perhaps understandable, but the same kind of condescension is more disturbing when she is a grown woman, for it reveals her father’s inability to see her as a person. In fact, continuing to laugh off her questions when she asks what the doctor had revealed about her illness (caused by Carmilla’s repeated nocturnal visits), her father fails to give her information that might enable her to protect herself: “‘Nothing; you must not plague me with questions,’ he answered, with more irritation than I ever remember him to have displayed before” (440). This refusal to divulge the doctor’s suspicions may be the result of his rationalism or a misguided desire to protect her, but it leaves the ignorant Laura vulnerable to another attack. Lonely and ignorant, she is ready prey for Carmilla. Furthermore, by constructing a partial genealogy of Laura’s family, one that includes only the female line, LeFanu suggests that other women have been similarly victimized. Laura reveals that her mother was from an old Hungarian family and that the picture of the Countess Mircalla (the real name, of which Carmilla is an anagram) of Karnstein came from her mother’s family. In addition, LeFanu suggests that Laura’s mother may also have been a victim of vampire attack, for Laura hears her voice in a dream—“Your mother warns you to beware of the assassin” (432)—right before she awakes to discover a blood-drenched Carmilla at the foot of her bed; and Laura’s father tells the general that his wife was “maternally descended from the Karnsteins” (442-43, my italics), a family now extinct. That Carmilla is a distant ancestor of Laura’s mother, another woman who may have succumbed to vampire attack, leads the reader to infer that Laura is simply the last in a long line of victims. The genealogy of victims seems to extend beyond Laura’s mother, however, for even the powerful Carmilla reveals enigmatically that she had been almost assassinated (the word links her to the warning Laura receives), wounded in the breast after her first ball; and she seems to be surrounded by women who control her. Laura mentions, for example, that Carmilla’s mother “threw on her daughter a glance which . . . was not quite so affectionate as one might have anticipated from the beginning of the scene” (407); and Laura’s governess later describes a third woman . . . who

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During the day Carmilla woos Laura with words and actions, behavior that the lonely girl describes as being “like the ardor of a lover”: . . . it embarassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one forever.” (461)

Carmilla’s nightly visits are less subtle than her daytime seduction. Nonetheless her power over Laura remains indirect: Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. (432)

In fact, this “attack,” which is Carmilla’s most overt show of power over Laura, is described in terms of love instead of aggression. Although Carmilla’s power over Laura is quite subtle, the relationship between vampire and victim reveals a great deal about the power and powerlessness of women. While the vampire does have the power of life and death over its apparently helpless victim, the vampire is itself subject to a number of constraints. For example, it is able to move only at night and (apparently LeFanu’s invention) it has to use anagrams of its original name. On the other hand, the seemingly weak Laura has a significant kind of power—that of telling other women about their condition. Although the prologue suggests that she tells her story to Dr. Hesselius, she actually tells it to another woman, “a town lady” (416). Even though it is too late for Laura—the prologue reveals that she has died—it may not be too late for the woman to whom she writes. Thus, writing is a way of demonstrating a new kind of power to manipulate people and events.2 There are sinister undertones as well, however, if one thinks about the way that vampires are created: Laura is both Carmilla’s victim and someone who—more likely than not—will become a vampire in her turn. Even Carmilla had been a victim of vampire attack when she too was young and innocent.

In using the vampire motif to focus on certain aspects of women’s lives, LeFanu follows a familiar pattern. The vampire, which had been a staple of English literature since the beginning of the nineteenth century, had been used metaphorically by other Romantic writers. James Twitchell’s The Living Dead observes that writers used the vampire “to express various human relationships, relationships that the artist himself had with family, with friends, with lovers, and even with art itself” (4). A dead body that drinks the blood of its human victims to sustain its existence, the vampire is a metaphor in “Carmilla” for certain aspects of women’s lives. Both vampires and women are parasitic creatures the one only by nature, the other by economic necessity. Both are dead, the one literally, the other legally. Both are defined primarily by their physiology rather than by their intelligence or emotions. Finally, however, both have a latent power to influence the lives of others. (In addition, unlike their demonic counterparts, women gained more overt power as the century progressed, with the passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts in the 1870s and 1880s, the opening of Girton College, and the entry of women into the professions.) As a vampire, Carmilla is a literal parasite, one that the reader sees standing at the foot of Laura’s bed drinking the blood of her sleeping victim. However, LeFanu links this biological parasitism and the economic dependence that was virtually mandated for women during most of LeFanu’s lifetime, for Carmilla is the idle guest of her victims’ families in addition to being a literal bloodsucker. For example, her mother establishes this relationship on at least two separate occasions, when she asks Laura’s father and the general to take charge of her daughter. Although this kind of traditional feminine behavior might be justified in Carmilla who is—after all—a creature from the past Laura apparently has no plans for a life outside her father’s home either even though she is aware of her family’s financial situation: A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great way. Eight or nine hundred a year does wonders. Scantily enough ours would have answered among wealthy people at home . . . But, in this lonely and primitive place, where everything is marvelously cheap, I really don’t see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, or even luxuries. (397)

Laura makes no mention of what she plans to do after her father’s death, and one must wonder whether she has been adequately provided for.

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was gazing all the time from the carriage window, nodding and grinning derisively toward the ladies, with gleaming eyes and large white eyeballs, and her teeth set as if in fury” (409). These references suggest that others may hold the same kind of power over Carmilla that she holds over Laura.

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Besides being parasites, vampires and women can be described as dead. Carmilla has been literally dead for centuries, but Laura lives a kind of half-life because she has no intellectual or spiritual life of her own. Her conversation is full of the cliches and platitudes of her day, of sentimental beliefs in romantic love, of obligations to family and friends, and of the excitement of parties. Finally both vampires and women are defined primarily by their physiology. A vampire is a creature motivated exclusively by its need for blood; and the reader sees Carmilla as this kind of vampire. However, as a woman, she is also repeatedly described as beautifully languid, apparently passive in almost all ways. Having learned that such useless and ornamental behavior is desirable for women, Laura’s father, the general, and Laura herself see this languor as attractive. Laura in fact describes Carmilla as “the prettiest creature I ever saw” and as “absolutely beautiful” (409). Since the other characters rarely question Carmilla about either her past‘or her family, Le Fanu suggests that it is enough for women to be physically attractive. After all, what are they to do except attend the kind of masked ball that General Spielsdorf describes so they can attract suitable husbands? Acting as a surrogate mother, Carmilla seems to be teaching Laura to be exactly like her (that the relationship begins when the motherless Laura is a child is further indication of Carmilla’s motherly role), for Laura becomes more and more languid as Carmilla’s visits increase. A great deal of critical energy has been devoted to the lesbianism in “Carmilla” and also to LeFanu’s supposed homosexuality,3 but it is equally likely that he uses the relationship between vampire and victim, mother and child to reveal how women learn to become languid and ornamental parasites. Isolated and vulnerable, women are trained (as LeFanu suggests, by other women—mothers and surrogate mothers) to be beautiful and passive. As LeFanu shrewdly reveals, however, some women ultimately learn to use this very passivity to gain power over others while still others—such as Carmilla’s mother—learn to manipulate others directly. Carmilla, in fact, is much more aware of the manner in which women can use their passivity to manipulate others. She may not have control over her own mother, but she knows that women can manipulate others; and she is able to wrap Laura and her father and General Spielsdorf around her little finger. Furthermore, she confesses to Laura that romantic love, an emotion that many Victorians believed could be used to soften

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the most aggressive man and a virtue associated with women, could be used to gain power over others: You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know, you must come with me, loving, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. (426, LeFanu’s italics)

Thus LeFanu reveals that women—even those who appear weak or delicate—may have the power to manipulate others. What these women are not trained to do is to understand themselves and the world around them, much less to attempt to change that world. However, LeFanu reveals that the men in the story who attempt to change their world through violence are equally ineffectual.4 The fact that their violent destruction of Carmilla seems not to work may be LeFanu’s way of saying that a problem that has evolved over centuries can not be eradicated in an instant. Although Laura’s narrative relates Carmilla’s destruction in graphic detail, she concludes with the acknowledgement that Carmilla “returns to memory with ambiguous alternations . . . and often from a reverie I have started fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door” (465). Carmilla and everything that she stands for (a leisured and pampered feudal existence that depends on the subtle exploitation of others) thus continue to exist; and Laura’s dreamy remembrance of Carmilla recognizes this fact. (That the preface points to Laura’s death also suggests that she is finally destroyed by these forces and perhaps that she has switched from victim to victimizer.) Nina Auerbach observes in Woman and the Demon that Carmilla resembles the Victorian ideal for good women, “Dickens’ motherly angels . . . except that this angel proceeds to bite the child sharply in the breast” and adds that the “conceit of the Good Angel of the race has turned literal and become demonic, for Carmilla . . . has a vampire’s power to survive generations, her cannabalistic loves keeping her face intact” (106-7). Woman and the Demon focuses on powerful images of women in Victorian fiction, but it doesn’t probe the real social reasons for this fear and awe. At the time LeFanu was writing, however, many women were insisting on greater power for themselves; and the issue of greater rights and responsibilities for women was constantly before the public eye. Others—including writers in the Gothic tradition and the group known as the

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both stories of “a lesbian entanglement, a story of the sterile love of homosexuality expressed through the analogy of vampirism” (129). Begnal argues:

Newton’s preface reminds feminist critics of the necessity of exploring women’s power as well as their oppression:

LeFanu’s purpose is not to attack . . . homosexuality, but rather to comment on the selfdestruction of a total submission to sexuality. Just as Carmilla will drain the life’s blood from her prey, so too will lust destroy the moral and physical lives of its victims. (44)

For our experience of the magnitude and the complexity of the forces against us in the present seems to be prompting still another alteration in our reading of the past: a renewed sense . . . that it is women’s power as well as their oppression which we must explore. . . . (xx)

Because “Carmilla” reveals that there are many methods of acquiring power, some of them both more legitimate and more humane than others and shows that women can be victimizers as well as victims, it serves as a healthy alternative view to an occasionally simplistic feminist approach to both history and literature. Women prior to the twentieth century were not simply passive victims of masculine oppression Indeed, some women were extremely powerful; and some of them used their power against other women. Recognizing the reality, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu uses a Gothic motif to paint a balanced picture of women’s lives in “Carmilla.”

4. Waller is wrong to argue that Laura survives because of the men in the story: . . . the old men of this rural world—doctor, father, General, scholar, Baron, priest— destroy the . . . female creature who has threatened their young women; through their alliance of social, religious, and scientific authority, these men reaffirm the power and the validity of a patriarchal ruling class that can only see female sexuality as an abberration. (53) If anything, “Carmilla” suggests that women gain power over men.

Works Cited Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. Begnal, Michael. Joseph Sheridan LeFanu. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1971. Browne, Nelson. Sheridan LeFanu. London: Arthur Barker, 1951.

Notes 1. Veeder also notes this fact, observing that “Laura is unnamed for forty pages, is never given a last name, and is not located specifically in time because she is everyperson—all men and women in every era who overdevelop the conscious” (199). However, Laura is an everywoman, not an everyperson. Her father’s careful protection of her, her secluded life, her innocence of the world are all more characteristic of women during the nineteenth century than of men. 2. In The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson, Terry Eagleton focuses on writing as a manifestation of female powerlessness: The letter in Clarissa, then, is the site of a constant power struggle. For Clarissa herself, writing, like sexuality, is a private, always violable space, a secret enterprise fraught with deadly risk. In an oppressive society, writing is the sole free self-disclosure available to women, but it is precisely this which threatens to surrender them into that society’s power. The Harlowes wrest writing materials from Clarissa in what she explicitly terms an ‘act of violence.” (49)

Eagleton, Terry. The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982. LeFanu, Joseph Sheridan. “Carmilla.” Seven Masterpieces of Gothic Horror. Ed. Robert Donald Spector. New York: Bantam, 1963. 397-465. Lerner, Gerda. “New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History.” Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays. Ed. Bernice A. Carroll. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1976. 349-56. McCormack, W. J. Sheridan LeFanu and Victorian Ireland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Newton, Judith. Women, Power, and Subversion. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1981. Twitchell, James B. The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1981. Veeder, William. “Carmilla: The Arts of Repression.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22 (1980): 197-223. Waller, Gregory A. The Living and the Undead: From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986.

However, writing can also be an act of power, of telling the truth. In “Carmilla,” Laura shares her experience with another woman and provides that woman with the power of shared experience. 3. Among the studies that focus on perverse love in “Carmilla” are Veeder, Begnal, and Twitchell. For example, Twitchell compares “Carmilla” and Christabel, calling

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sensation novelists—drew people’s attention to the power that women already had.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR EDNA KENTON ON LE FANU’S LEGACY

Surely the unmitigated famelessness of Sheridan Le Fanu can be ranked among the outstanding curiosities of literature. One of the literal “best sellers” of the 1860-1880’s, he has disappeared even from cursory addenda to Victorian literary history. Author of some of the really remarkable ghost stories of our literature, he is remembered today only by the “occultists”—the people, by the way, who really recognize a really ghostly tale. You will find his “Green Tea”, his “Carmilla” and his “The Room in the Dragon Volonte” referred to still in occult literature. . . . Curious are the fates of little books and little writers—most curious of all sometimes when they are called great. Le Fanu was not a great writer, but he wrote a few great ghost stories. And even as the “sensation” author of Uncle Silas, The House by the Churchyard, Checkmate and Wylder’s Hand, to mention no others of a list of famous fifty years ago, his unqualified passing within a half-century’s short span is hardly comprehensible. . . . For Le Fanu, better than most of his lurid school, could “write”; more than others of his school, with the exception of BulwerLytton, he was “occult”; his backgrounds were distinguished, they were thick with medieval lore and his pages were whimsical as well as lurid. SOURCE: Kenton, Edna. “A Forgotten Creator of Ghosts: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Possible Inspirer of the Brontës.” The Bookman 69, no. 5 (July 1929): 528-34.

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FURTHER READING Biography McCormack, W. J. Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, 310 p. An extensively detailed biography of Le Fanu.

Criticism Achilles, Jochen. “Fantasy as Psychological Necessity: Sheridan Le Fanu’s Fiction.” In Gothick Origins and Innova-

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tions, edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage, pp. 150-68. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.

Biographical and critical study. Includes a bibliography of Le Fanu’s works.

Elucidates Le Fanu’s use of Gothic motifs to produce psychological effects in his supernatural novels and short fiction.

Gates, Barbara. “Blue Devils and Green Tea.” Studies in Short Fiction 24 (1987): 15-23. Concentrates on the theme of suicide in Le Fanu’s short stories.

Andriano, Joseph. “‘Our Dual Existence’: Loving and Dying in Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla.’” In Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction, pp. 98105. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Howes, Marjorie. “Misalliance and Anglo-Irish Tradition in Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 47, no. 2 (September 1992): 164-86.

Argues that the vampire in “Carmilla” is not a symbol of sterile lesbianism, but rather an iconic representation of death.

Stresses the Anglo-Irish political context of Le Fanu’s novel Uncle Silas, while studying the work’s representation of female sexuality.

Barclay, Glen St. John. “Vampires and Ladies: Sheridan Le Fanu.” In his Anatomy of Horror: The Masters of Occult Fiction, pp. 22-38. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978.

James, M. R. Prologue and Epilogue of Madam Crowl’s Ghost, and Other Tales of Mystery, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, edited by M. R. James, pp. vii-viii, 265-77. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1923.

Concentrates on motifs of vampirism and lesbianism in Le Fanu’s short stories. Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda. “Uncle Silas, by J. S. Le Fanu.” In The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Literature and Art, pp. 107-19. London: Associated University Presses, 1982. Discusses the style of Le Fanu’s major novel within the context of Gothic literature and architecture. Begnal, Michael H. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1971, 87 p. Survey of Le Fanu’s fiction that considers his place within the Victorian and nineteenth-century Gothic literary traditions. Benson, E. F. “Sheridan Le Fanu.” Spectator 146, no. 5356 (21 February 1931): 263-64. Appraises the tales collected as In a Glass Darkly, focusing on Le Fanu’s method of creating atmosphere and building suspense. Bleiler, E. F. Introduction to Best Ghost Stories of J. S. Le Fanu, edited by E. F. Bleiler, pp. v-xi. New York: Dover, 1964. Surveys Le Fanu’s use of the supernatural in his fiction. Bowen, Elizabeth. Introduction to Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh, pp. 7-23. London: The Cresset Press, 1947. Analyzes in detail the style, plot, characters, and setting of Uncle Silas. Briggs, Julia. “Ancestral Voices, The Ghost Story from Lucian to Le Fanu.” In Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story, pp. 25-51. London: Faber, 1977. Favorably locates Le Fanu in the context of other ghost story writers of the 1860s and 1870s. Argues that Le Fanu’s works are distinguished by his “intuitive understanding and vivid portrayal of fear, guilt, and anxiety.” Browne, Nelson. Sheridan Le Fanu. London: Barker, 1951, 135 p. Book-length critical survey of Le Fanu’s fiction and poetry. Brownell, David. “Wicked Dreams: The World of Sheridan Le Fanu.” Armchair Detective 9, no. 3 (June 1976): 19197. Considers the overall effectiveness of Le Fanu’s mystery and supernatural fiction. Ellis, S. M. “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.” In his Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu, and Others. 1931. Reprint edition, pp. 140-91. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968.

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Considers Le Fanu among the “first rank” of ghost story writers and appraises the strengths and weaknesses of his work. Mangum, Teresa. “Sheridan Le Fanu’s Ungovernable Governess.” Studies in the Novel 29, no. 2 (summer 1997): 214-37. Probes Sheridan’s characterization of aggressive, sexually ambiguous, and perverse governesses in his novels Uncle Silas and A Lost Name, as well as in his Gothic short fiction. Melada, Ivan. Sheridan Le Fanu. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987, 142 p. Biographical and critical overview of Le Fanu’s life and works. Michelis, Angelica. “‘Dirty Mama’: Horror, Vampires, and the Maternal in Late Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fiction.” Critical Survey 15, no. 3 (September 2003): 5-22. Examines Le Fanu’s symbolic treatment of mother and vampire in his short story “Carmilla,” and its connection to anxiety and the theories of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. Milbank, Alison. “Doubting Castle: The Gothic Mode of Questioning.” In The Critical Spirit and the Will to Believe: Essays in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Religion, edited by David Jasper and T. R. Wright, pp. 10419. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Discusses the theme of religious doubt in Le Fanu’s novels and short stories. Nale˛cz-Wojtczak, Jolanta. “Uncle Silas: A Link between the Gothic Romance and the Detective Novel in England.” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: An International Review of English Studies 12 (1980): 157-67. Characterizes Uncle Silas as a transitional work in the tradition of the English novel that occupies a pivotal place between the eighteenth-century Gothic romance and late nineteenth-century mystery and detective novels. ———. “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the New Dimensions of the English Ghost Story.” In Literary Interrelations: Ireland, England and the World, edited by Wolfgang Zach and Heinz Kosok, pp. 193-98. Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1987. Explores the ways in which Le Fanu’s interest in Irish folklore, Swedenborgian ideas, and psychology brought expanded possibilities to the English ghost story tradition.

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Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood, pp. 1-68. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980.

Focuses on Le Fanu’s device of presenting the supernatural stories of In a Glass Darkly as factual accounts.

Detailed examination of Le Fanu’s short fiction that explores his development as a writer while analyzing individual stories, including “Green Tea” and “Carmilla.”

Penzoldt, Peter. “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873).” In The Supernatural in Fiction, pp. 67-91. London: Peter Nevill, 1952. Discusses Le Fanu’s importance to the history and development of the Gothic novel. Pritchett, V. S. “An Irish Ghost.” In The Living Novel & Later Appreciations. Revised edition, pp. 121-28. New York: Random House, 1964. Praises the style and narrative technique of Le Fanu’s short stories and contends that because he had primarily a “talent for brevity” Le Fanu never achieved the same level of success in his novels as he did in his short stories. Scott, Ken. “Le Fanu’s ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant.’” Lock Haven Review, no. 10 (1968): 25-32. Treats themes of love and death in “The Room in the Dragon Volant.” Shroyer, Frederick. Introduction to Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, pp. v-xviii. New York: Dover, 1966. Presents a general overview of Uncle Silas, outlining the elements that contribute to the novel’s atmosphere of terror and claiming the work to be one of the best Gothic novels ever written. Signorotti, Elizabeth. “Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in ‘Carmilla’ and Dracula.” Criticism 38, no. 4 (fall 1996): 607-32. Interprets Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a patriarchal response to Le Fanu’s rendering of an empowered female vampire in “Carmilla.” Stoddart, Helen. “‘The Precautions of Nervous People Are Infectious’: Sheridan Le Fanu’s Symptomatic Gothic.” Modern Language Review 86, no. 1 (January 1991): 1934. Assesses the paranoia motif of “Green Tea” and “Carmilla” in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis. Sullivan, Jack. “‘Green Tea’: The Archetypal Ghost Story” and “Beginnings: Sheridan Le Fanu.” In his Elegant

Sullivan, Kevin. “Sheridan Le Fanu: The Purcell Papers, 1838-40.” Irish University Review 2, no. 1 (spring 1972): 5-19. Explores themes of terror and humor in The Purcell Papers. Sweeney, St. John. “Sheridan Le Fanu, the Irish Poe.” Journal of Irish Literature 15, no. 1 (January 1986): 3-32. Considers the prose style and plot structures of Le Fanu’s short stories, concluding that Le Fanu was not simply the Irish version of Edgar Allan Poe. Veeder, William. “Carmilla: The Arts of Repression.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22, no. 2 (summer 1980): 197-223. Studies the theme of emotional repression in “Carmilla,” considering the work as “part of the High Victorian selfexamination which called into question literary and social conventions and the moral orthodoxies underlying them.” Wagenknecht, Edward. “Sheridan Le Fanu.” In Seven Masters of Supernatural Fiction, pp. 3-21. Westwood, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991. Interpretive essay focusing on Le Fanu’s supernatural novels and stories. Also features several plot summaries and commentary by additional critics.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Le Fanu’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 21, 70, 159, 178; DISCovering Authors Modules: Popular Fiction and Genre Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 9, 58; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers, Vol. 4; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 14; and Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 1.

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Orel, Harold. “‘Rigid Adherence to Facts’: Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly.” Eire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 20, no. 4 (winter 1985): 65-88.

MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS (1775 - 1818)

English novelist, playwright, diarist, prose writer, and poet.

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ewis is best known as the author of The Monk (1796), a notorious eighteenth-century novel of horror that is considered one of the greatest examples of English Gothic fiction. Unlike Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, his predecessors in the Gothic school who created genteel novels of suspense, Lewis emphasized the graphic and the sensational. The Monk’s blend of overt sexuality and terror created a scandal in England, and its author, branded licentious and perverse, came to be known solely as “Monk” Lewis. While the lurid elements of Lewis’s work are still controversial, modern critics acknowledge his talent as an innovative writer of prose and verse who contributed to the Gothic literary tradition as well as the development of the English Romantic movement.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Lewis was born into a wealthy and socially prominent London family. His mother and father separated while he was young, and his attempts to remain on good terms with both parents created an emotional strain that endured throughout his life. Some biographers contend, in fact, that this stress resulted in an emotional immaturity

that manifested itself in Lewis’s work. Although Lewis displayed a talent for writing at an early age and was encouraged to write by his mother, his father urged him to pursue a diplomatic career instead. After graduation from Oxford in 1794, Lewis became an attaché to the British Embassy in Holland, an assignment he despised. To ease his boredom, Lewis wrote The Monk during a ten week period. The notoriety that accompanied The Monk’s publication in 1796 made Lewis a financially successful, if infamous, author. Led by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, contemporary critics labeled Lewis’s tale of Ambrosio, the wayward monk, immoral and obscene. Lewis had recently been elected to the House of Commons, and The Monk proved so controversial that, in order to retain his position, he was required to issue an expurgated edition. Shortly therafter, Lewis left politics and began writing drama. In the years before his death, Lewis spent most of his time on the Jamaican estates he had inherited, which were maintained by slaves. By all accounts, Lewis was a compassionate man who advocated the abolition of slavery and retained his plantations solely at the request of his slaves, who feared the financial responsibility of freedom. During his final trip to Jamaica, Lewis tried desperately to improve the living conditions of his slaves. Despite his efforts, he was able to implement little change and, despondent, decided to return home. By the time Lewis boarded a ship for England, he had already

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developed yellow fever. He died several days later. His crew prepared to bury him at sea, but as they lowered the casket, its shroud caught in the wind and the coffin sailed slowly back to Jamaica.

MAJOR WORKS The Monk’s protagonist, Ambrosio, who is a monk as well as a foundling of mysterious past and parentage, has risen to the position of abbot of the Capuchins, becoming a well-respected figure in medieval Madrid, revered by the populace. At the monastery, a young novitiate named Rosario approaches Ambrosio and reveals that he is actually a woman named Matilda de Villanges, whose love for Ambrosio has led her to disguise herself in order to be nearer to him. The two consummate a sexual relationship, though Ambrosio later feels remorse and disgust for his actions. After his interlude with Matilda, while visiting the nearby convent of St. Clare, Ambrosio discovers that Agnes, a nun, desires to elope with her lover, Don Raymond de las Cisternas. The monk discloses this information to Mother St. Agatha, prioress of the convent, who punishes Agnes by imprisoning her in a dungeon beneath the convent. Later, Ambrosio travels to the house of the ailing Donna Elvira Dalfa and there falls in love with her young daughter, Antonia. With the aid of Matilda and her knowledge of black magic, the monk summons a demon so that he might violate the girl. Ambrosio returns to Donna Elvira’s house, kills her, and abducts Antonia, now unconscious through the action of a magical potion. In the meantime, Agnes’s brother, Lorenzo, accuses Mother St. Agatha of murdering his sister and wins a warrant for her arrest. An angry mob forms in response to the accusation, and the crowd razes the convent, murdering the prioress and many innocent nuns. Amid the chaos, Lorenzo enters the convent grounds in search of his sister. When he finds her she is close to death and clutching the decaying body of her dead child. Hearing the screams of a young girl nearby, Lorenzo discovers Antonia’s ravished and stabbed body and observes her attacker, Ambrosio, as he flees; later he notifies the Inquisition of Ambrosio’s crimes. Ordered to be burned at the stake, Ambrosio, at the urgings of Matilda, makes a pact with Satan, exchanging his soul for freedom. The devil appears and saves him from the flames of the Inquisition, only to reveal that in killing Donna Elvira and raping Antonia, he has mur-

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dered his own mother and committed incest with his sister. The story ends as the monk’s forfeit soul is cast into hell. Scholars observe that the thematic character of The Monk departs somewhat from that of the traditional Gothic novel. While it favors the evocation of grotesque horror rather than the rendering of a sentimental theme of justice based upon divine Providence, Lewis’s novel nevertheless presents a critique of human vice and explores the conflict between religion and human sexuality. This conflict is dramatized in the character of Ambrosio through the juxtaposition of the monk’s pride and destructive sexual appetite with the innocent virtue of Antonia and the forthrightness of Lorenzo. Many commentators note, however, that the dullness of the novel’s virtuous characters fails to match the depth and complexity of Ambrosio and Matilda, and instead locate evidence of the novel’s primary theme in the psychological exploration of its fallen protagonist and his accomplice. Likewise, many have observed that Matilda’s strong will and intelligence make her far more compelling than her counterpart Antonia, despite her manipulative behavior and demonic nature. Others have commented on Lewis’s attempts to establish an unsettling parallel between the violence of the riotous mob in his novel and that of the French Revolution, or on his deft integration of legends and folk tales, such as those of the Bleeding Nun and the Wandering Jew, in order to illicit terror and add universal appeal to his story. Of Lewis’s plays, the best known is The Castle Spectre (1797), a Gothic production that met the current demand for melodrama, spectacle, and two-dimensional characterization. Although it helped establish Lewis as one of the era’s most popular playwrights, The Castle Spectre is largely overlooked by modern critics. In 1801, Lewis published Tales of Wonder, a collection of poems dealing with the supernatural that also includes works by Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey. Lewis also composed poetry that he included in his plays and later published, as well as two novels that never enjoyed the success or notoriety of The Monk. He ceased writing fiction in 1812, when his father died and left him a great deal of money. Lewis’s posthumously-published Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (1834) recounts his voyages to Jamaica, inspections of the plantations, and plans for change. Written in lively prose, the Journal reveals Lewis as a sensitive and perceptive observer of the

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directions, . . . [can] very clearly be related to and are in effect resultant from the genius, often morbid and wayward, yet ever vital and compelling, of Matthew Gregory Lewis.”

CRITICAL RECEPTION With the exception of the Journal, Lewis’s works were ignored from the time of his death until the twentieth century, when critics began to recognize Lewis’s influence on the Romantic movement. When it was first published, The Monk created a considerable stir and earned Lewis instant fame, even infamy, as its author. Labeled obscene by a cast of critics, including Coleridge— who acknowledged that despite its immorality the novel was the “offspring of no common genius”—it was nevertheless extremely popular, and went through five editions before the end of the century. The controversy that the first edition sparked prompted Lewis to expurgate certain passages from these later printings, though scholars now agree that his changes were largely superficial. Early critics emphasized the lewdness and irreligion of the work, especially of a scene in which Antonia reads an edited version of the Bible given to her by her mother, and maintained that The Monk was a product of the revolutionary atmosphere of the late eighteenth century. In the twentieth century critics reevaluated the influence of the work on the writers of the Romantic movement. Modern scholars have since observed that The Monk represents a successful synthesis of the techniques and materials used by Gothic horror writers, leading many to take a renewed interest in the work. Recent critics have applied the tools of psychological criticism to The Monk, examining its sexual imagery and applying biographical information about Lewis’s childhood development and psyche to understanding the novel. Later studies have probed the conflict between sexuality and religion and the juxtaposition of violence and passion within the novel. Angela Wright traces parallels between The Monk and the Marquis de Sade’s novel Justine, noting that the two works influenced one another in significant ways, including in their narrative technique and portrayal of heroines. Montague Summers asserted that Lewis “introduced new and essential features both by his prose works, his verse and his dramas into the Gothic novel, upon which he exercised so tremendous, one might almost say so illimitable, an influence” and declared that “the vast imaginative force derived from Lewis which energized and inspired numerical novels and impelled the incidence of romance in particular

PRINCIPAL WORKS The Monk: A Romance. 3 vols. (novel) 1796 Village Virtues: A Dramatic Satire. In Two Parts (play) 1796 The Castle Spectre: A Drama. In Five Acts (play) 1797 The Twins; or, Is It He, or His Brother? A Farce in Two Acts (play) 1799 The East Indian: A Comedy. In Five Acts (play) 1800 Adelmorn, the Outlaw: A Romantic Drama, in Three Acts (play) 1801 Tales of Wonder; Written and Collected by M. G. Lewis. 2 vols. [with Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey] (poetry) 1801 Alfonso, King of Castile: A Tragedy, in Five Acts (play) 1802 The Captive: A Scene in a Private Mad-House (play) 1803 Rugantino; or, The Bravo of Venice. A Grand Romantic Melo-Drama, in Two Acts (play) 1805 Adelgitha; or, The Fruits of a Single Error. A Tragedy, in Five Acts (play) 1806 The Wood Daemon; or, The Clock Has Struck. A Grand Romantic Melo-Drama, in Two Acts (play) 1807 Romantic Tales. 4 vols. (poetry and prose) 1808 Twelve Ballads, the Words and Music by M. G. Lewis (poetry) 1808 Venoni, or, The Novice of St. Mark’s: A Drama, in Three Acts (play) 1809 Timour the Tartar: A Grand Romantic Melo-Drama, in Two Acts (play) 1811 Poems (poetry) 1812 The Harper’s Daughter; or, Love and Ambition: A Tragedy (play) 1813 The Isle of Devils. A Historical Tale, Founded on an Anecdote in the Annals of Portugal (poem) 1827 Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (diary) 1834

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natural world. Though it is seldom read today, critics who have studied the work consider it one of Lewis’s greatest achievements.

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PRIMARY SOURCES

But yet for those who kindness show, Ready through fire and smoke to go.

MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS (POEM DATE 1796) SOURCE: Lewis, Matthew Gregory. “Preface.” In The Monk: A Romance. 1796. Third edition, pp. iii-v. London: J. Bell, 1797. In the following poem, a preface to his well-known novel first published in 1796, Lewis addresses his work, minimizing both its merit and his own talent.

Again, should it be asked your page, “Pray, what may be the author’s age?” Your faults, no doubt, will make it clear, I scarce have seen my twentieth year, Which passed, kind Reader, on my word, While England’s throne held George the Third. Now then your venturous course pursue: Go, my delight!—Dear book, adieu!

Imitation of Horace, Ep. 20.—B. 1. Methinks, Oh! vain ill-judging book, I see thee cast a wishful look, Where reputations won and lost are In famous row called Paternoster. Incensed to find your precious olio Buried in unexplored port-folio, You scorn the prudent lock and key, And pant well bound and gilt to see Your volume in the window set Of Stockdale, Hookham, or Debrett. Go then, and pass that dangerous bourn Whence never book can back return: And when you find, condemned, despised Neglected, blamed, and criticised, Abuse from all who read you fall, (If haply you be read at all) Sorely will you your folly sigh at, And wish for me, and home, and quiet. Assuming now a conjuror’s office, I Thus on your future fortune prophesy:— Soon as your novelty is o’er, And you are young and new no more, In some dark dirty corner thrown, Mouldy with damps, with cobwebs strown, Your leaves shall be the book-worm’s prey; Or sent to chandler-shop away, And doomed to suffer public scandal, Shall line the trunk, or wrap the candle! But should you meet with approbation, And some one find an inclination To ask, by natural transition, Respecting me and my condition; That I am one, the enquirer teach, Nor very poor, nor very rich; Of passions strong, of hasty nature, Of graceless form and dwarfish stature; By few approved, and few approving; Extreme in hating and in loving; Abhorring all whom I dislike, Adoring who my fancy strike; In forming judgments never long, And for the most part judging wrong; In friendship firm, but still believing Others are treacherous and deceiving, And thinking in the present æra That friendship is a pure chimæra: More passionate no creature living, Proud, obstinate, and unforgiving;

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MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS (ESSAY DATE 1798) SOURCE: Lewis, Matthew Gregory. “To the Reader.” In The Castle Spectre: A Drama. In Five Acts, pp. 100-03. London: J. Bell, 1798. In the following essay, Lewis addresses readers of The Castle Spectre, informing them of the inspirations for his narrative and characters, and defending his work against negative criticism.

Many erroneous assertions have been made respecting this Drama; some, that the language was originally extremely licentious; others, that the sentiments were violently democratic; and others again, that if Mr. Sheridan had not advised me to content myself with a single Spectre, I meant to have exhibited a whole regiment of Ghosts. To disprove these reports I have deviated from the usual mode of publishing Plays, as performed, and have printed mine almost verbatim, as originally written. Whether it merited the above accusations, the reader has now had an opportunity of judging for himself. I must just mention that the last line of the Piece is altered, and that in the Second Scene of the Fifth Act, The Friar was made to stick in the door-way, whereas he now makes his exit without difficulty. Other charges, however, have been brought against me on better grounds, and I must request the reader’s patience while I say a few words respecting them. To originality of character I make no pretence. Persecuted heroines and consciencestung villains certainly have made their courtesies and bows to a British audience long before the appearance of “The Castle Spectre;” the Friar and Alice are copies, but very faint ones, from Juliet’s Nurse, and Sheridan’s Father Paul, and Percy is a mighty pretty-behaved young gentleman with nearly no character at all. I shall not so readily give up my claim to novelty, when I mention my misanthropic Negro: He has been compared to Zanga; but Young’s Hero differs widely from what I meant in Hassan. Zanga’s hatred is confined to one object; to destroy the happiness of that object is his sole aim, and his vengeance is no sooner acG O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3

“Lorsque l’on peut souffrir, sure que ses douleurs “D’aucun mortel ne font jamais couler les pleurs, “On se desinteresse à la fin de soi-même; “On cesse de s’aimer, si quelqu’un ne nous aime!”

But though Hassan’s heart is changed by disappointment and misfortune, that heart once was feeling and kind; nor could he hate with such inveteracy, if he had not loved with extreme affection. In my opinion this character is not Zanga’s; but this I must leave to the public decision. I may, however, boldly, and without vanity, assert, that Motley is quite new to the Stage. In other plays the Fool has always been a sharp knave, quick in repartee, and full of whim, fancy, and entertainment; whereas my Fool (but I own I did not mean to make him so) is a dull, flat, good sort of plain matter of fact fellow, as in the course of the performance Mr. Bannister discovered to his great sorrow. That Osmond is attended by negroes is an anachronism, I allow; but from the great applause which Mr. Dowton constantly received in Hassan (a character which he played extremely well), I am inclined to think that the audience was not greatly offended at the impropriety. For my own part, I by no means repent the introduction of my Africans: I thought it would give a pleasing variety to the characters and dresses, if I made my servants black; and could I have produced the same effect by making my heroine blue, blue I should have made her. In the Friar’s defence, when he most ungallantly leaves Angela in the cavern to shift for herself, I can only plead the necessity of the case. Stay where he was he could not; go he must at any rate: I trundled him off in the best way that I could; and, for the sake of the public, I heartily wish that way had been better. With regard to his not meeting Osmond in his flight, a little imagination will soon conquer that difficulty: It may be supposed, that as he lost his way in coming, he lost it again in going; or, that he concealed himself

till the Earl had passed him; or, that he tumbled down and broke his neck; or, that he. . . . did any thing else you like better. I leave this matter entirely to the reader’s fancy. Against my Spectre many objections have been urged: one of them I think rather curious. She ought not to appear, because the belief in Ghosts no longer exists! In my opinion, this is the very reason why she may be produced without danger; for there is now no fear of increasing the influence of superstition, or strengthening the prejudices of the weak-minded. I confess I cannot see any reason why Apparitions may not be as well permitted to stalk in a tragedy, as Fairies be suffered to fly in a pantomime, or Heathen Gods and Goddesses to cut capers in a grand ballet; and I should rather imagine that Oberon and Bacchus now find as little credit to the full as the Cock-lane Ghost, or the Spectre of Mrs. Veal. Never was any poor soul so ill-used as Evelina’s, previous to her presenting herself before the audience. The Friends to whom I read my Drama, the Managers to whom I presented it, the Actors who were to perform in it—all combined to persecute my Spectre, and requested me to confine my Ghost to the Green-Room. Aware that without her my catastrophe would closely resemble that of the Grecian Daughter, I persisted in retaining her. The event justified my obstinacy: The Spectre was as well treated before the curtain as she had been ill-used behind it; and as she continues to make her appearance nightly with increased applause, I think myself under great obligations both to her and her representative. But though I am conscious that it is very imperfect, I shall not so far offend my own feelings, or insult the judgment of the public, which has given it a very favourable reception, as to say that I think my Play very bad. Had such been my opinion, instead of producing it on the stage, or committing it to the press, I should have put it behind the fire, or, throwing it into the Thames, made a present of it to the British Scombri. Still its success on the stage (great enough to content even an author) does not prevent my being very doubtful as to its reception in the closet, when divested of its beautiful music, splendid scenery, and, above all, of the acting, excellent throughout. Without detracting from the merits of the other performers (to all of whom I think myself much indebted for their respective exertions), I must here be permitted to return particular thanks to Mrs. Jordan, whose manner of sustaining her character exceeded my most sanguine hopes, and in whose

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complished, than he repents its gratification. Hassan is a man of violent passions, and warm feelings, whose bosom is filled with the milk of human kindness, but that milk is soured by despair; whose nature was susceptible of the tenderest affections, but who feels that all the chains of his affections are broken for ever. He has lost every thing, even hope; he has no single object against which he can direct his vengeance, and he directs it at large against mankind. He hates all the world, hates even himself; for he feels that in that world there is no one that loves him.

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hands my heroine acquired an importance for which she was entirely indebted to the talents of the actress.

GENERAL COMMENTARY MONTAGUE SUMMERS (ESSAY DATE 1938) SOURCE: Summers, Montague. “Matthew Gregory Lewis.” In The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. 1938. Reprint edition, pp. 202-38. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964. In the following excerpt from his influential study of Gothic literature first published in 1938, Summers surveys Lewis’s fictional and dramatic works and asserts that Lewis had tremendous influence upon other authors who wrote in the Gothic tradition. He was a child, and a spoiled child, but a child of high imagination. . . . He had the finest ear for the rhythm of verse I ever heard—finer than Byron’s. . . . He was one of the kindest and best creatures that ever lived. SIR WALTER SCOTT Lewis was a good man. I would give many a Sugar Cane Monk Lewis were alive again! BYRON

“Names, madam! names! Whoever heard of such names as mine?—names, madam, that have ever been my horror, my abomination . . . think ma’am, think of my two—two ugly names! Matthew! Gregory! Heavens, madam! not content with permitting my helpless infancy to be outraged by the name of Matthew, you, without a murmur, permitted the additional infliction of Gregory! Twofold barbarity ma’am; I repeat, two-fold barbarity!” Thus Lewis delighted in quizzing his mother, who used to become earnest and explanatory, “Why, really my dear, Matthew being the name of your father, and Gregory the name of ———” “Barbarity, ma’am, two-fold barbarity!” and so well did he use to act his imaginary grievance that Mrs. Lewis never perceived the joke, nay, more she often expressed her surprise that a sensible young man, like her son, could make so much of a trifle. All the while, perhaps his vehement expostulations had a grain of truth in their fret and fume for Lewis, indeed, felt a particular aversion to his own Christian names, and frequently avowed a decided preference for his sobriquet “Monk.” Matthew Gregory Lewis was born in London, July 9th, 1775, being the eldest son of Matthew Lewis and Frances Maria, the third daughter of Sir

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Thomas Sewell, K. G., Master of the Rolls, 176484. The Lewises, who were an ancient house, not only possessed extensive West Indian property, as did the Sewells, but also a fine estate in the immediate neighbourhood of the Sewell seat, Ottershaw Park, Surrey. Hence an acquaintance sprung up between the two families and this at length ripened into the closer relationship of marriage. At this time Matthew Lewis occupied the position of Deputy-Secretary at War, in which office he was ever held to have acquitted himself with the strictest probity and honour. Of a tall and commanding person, stately, and in his manners formal even to coldness, his was a nature more like to be respected than loved. Nor can it be denied that he was ill-matched when on February 22nd, 1773, he led Fanny Sewell to the altar. She married when very young, and her artless simplicity of character was scarcely improved by a secluded girlhood, without companionship or regular culture. Her beauty, indeed, was very remarkable, and upon her introduction to London life the lovely bride was warmly, it may even be too warmly admired by the votaries of foppery and fashion. None the less, there was also a grave and serious, even a devout side to her character, which further exhibited itself hereditarily in her elder son and his absorption with the supernatural. For example, one of her favourite works for more studious reading was Joseph Glanvil’s Saducismus Triumphatus,1 and this she happened to possess in the first complete edition, 8vo, 1681, with Faithorne’s two plates, the frontispiece depicting King Saul and the Witch of Endor and the panelled illustration of several apparitions,2 the Dæmon of Tedworth; “the villainous feats of that rampant hagg Margaret Agar of Brewham”; the Somersetshire witch, Julian Cox; and other visions and sorceries. Over these engravings the young Mat used to pore with fearful interest, For in the wax of a soft infant’s memory Things horrible sink deep and sternly settle.

It is significant, too, that a considerable portion of Lewis’ childhood was passed at Stanstead Hall, Essex, a very ancient mansion, the family seat of a near relation on his father’s side. A certain wing of the Hall had long been disused and closed, owing, it was said, to ghostly hauntings. There was, in particular, one magnificent apartment, the “Cedar Room,” which the domestics expressly stipulated no one should be required to enter after dusk. The huge and strangely carved folding-doors gave on to a large landing, and in after years Lewis often recalled how when he was taken to bed at night and the moon shone palely

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Illustration from The Castle Spectre.

through the painted oriel upon the sombre portals, with a quick glance of terror over his shoulder he hastened his steps, clinging closer to his companion’s hand lest the leaves should fly apart and there stalk forth some grisly phantom of the dark, some bleeding apparition or carious skeleton. He added that to these dim memories he actually ascribed some of the most striking episodes in his famous play, The Castle Spectre. In the Life, Letters and Literary Remains of Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton,3 by his Son, we are told that at Knebworth “two wings that contained apartments known by the name of ‘The Haunted Chambers,’ together with the whole character of the house, in itself a romance, powerfully and permanently influenced Lord Lytton’s whole charcater. There were mysterious trap-doors and hiding-places, and in particular a kind of oubliette called ‘Hell-hole.’ As a child Lord Lytton was immensely impressed by the house, and himself in a letter recalled these early memories in vivid phrase: “I remember especially a long narrow gallery adjoining the great drawing-room (and hung with faded and grim portraits) which terminated in rooms that were called ‘haunted.’ . . . How

could I help writing romances when I had walked, trembling at my own footsteps, through that long gallery, with its ghostly portraits, mused in those tapestried chambers, and peeped, with bristling hair, into the shadowy abysses of Hell-hole?”4 . . . . . The summer vacation of 1791 Matthew Lewis spent in Paris. He did not meet his mother as she had already returned to London, but in a letter dated September 7th, he speaks of a farce, The Epistolary Intrigue, which he has written, and the script of which he submits for her opinion. He has also commenced a novel, and composed a number of verses. This earliest essay of fiction, which was to be in the form of letters, rejoiced in the farcical mock-sentimental title The Effusions of Sensibility; or, Letters from Lady Honoria Harrowheart to Miss Sophonisba Simper, “a Pathetic Novel in the Modern Taste, being the first literary attempt of a Young Lady of tender feelings.” The only portion which was ever printed occupies some nine and twenty pages (241-270) of the Second Volume of The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, 1839. It is extremely amusing and often very witty, amply sufficing to show that

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Lewis had a keen sense of humour. The first letter which describes the Lady Honoria’s departure for Portman Square from the antique towers and verdant bowers of Dunderhead Castle, the sensation she caused at the Duchess of Dingleton’s ball, and the jealousy of Lady Mountain Mapletree, is written in a most mirthful vein and the adroit parody of such conventional openings is indeed a remarkable achievement for a boy of sixteen. Whether the author could have completely sustained the burlesque is another matter, a question it were unjust to inquire. Although he spoke of finishing it before his return to England, he does not appear to have carried the design beyond the second volume.

disagreeable task, since he hated encroaching on a bounty which had never failed and never shown itself less than most liberal and kind. Accordingly he could but endeavour to furnish these extra subsidies from the profits of his pen. The point is important. Not only does it show Lewis in a most amiable and unselfish light, but it also reveals the motive which made him turn so early to literature. He was no dilettante, no coxcombical undergraduate with the sophomore’s eternal itch for scribbling, but a worker, a practical writer whose output meant, if not bread and butter, at any rate the complement of strawberry jam, and that not for himself but for the mother whom he loved so tenderly and so well.

His farce, The Epistolary Intrigue, which he had written with the chief character Caroline intended for Mrs. Jordan, was refused by two managers, Lewis of Drury Lane, and Harris of Covent Garden, and he expresses himself in a letter to his mother as greatly mortified. None the less, not to be lightly discouraged, he set to work upon and in the same year had ready a comedy, The East Indian, which, however, was not to be produced until the spring of 1799. He also translated a play which he called Felix. This was never printed and cannot certainly be identified, but it may well be Les Deux Amis5 (1770) of Beaumarchais. In writing to his mother from Oxford he promises that he will bring this with him when he comes down, so that it may be sent to Lewis of the Lane, but he adds: “I have begun something which I hope, and am indeed certain, will, hereafter, produce you a little money; though it will be some time before it is completed from the length of it, and the frequent interruption, and necessity of concealment, I am obliged to use in writing it. It is a romance, in the style of the ‘Castle of Otranto.’ . . . I have not yet quite finished the first volume.” This romance, if completed, was never published, but Lewis subsequently founded upon these chapters the famous Castle Spectre.

Matthew Gregory was intended by his father for the diplomatic service, and since for this career a knowledge of German was not merely useful but well-nigh essential, he proceeded to Weimar in the summer of 1792 in order to acquire the language of the country. After a tedious journey, and much suffering from sea-sickness during the crossing from Harwich to Helvoet, Lewis arrived at the capital of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach on July 27th, 1792. Here the English Ambassador, to whom he carried personal letters of introduction, was Sir Brooke Boothby, Bart., himself a poet, and well known as a friend of the Edgeworths and the Lichfield literary circle. Weimar, although a small town, was at that period, the reign of Duke KarlAugust, one of the most illustrious in Europe, owing to the presence at the ducal court of Goethe,7 who had in the previous year been appointed Director of the State Theatre; Schiller8 ; Johann Gottfried Herder, first preacher in the town church; the romantic Wieland; and many other literary and artistic figures of great fame. Indeed, within three days of his arrival Lewis writes to his mother that he has been introduced not only to the original Iphigenia, the fair court-singer, Corona Elisabeth Wihelmina Schröter, but even to “M. de Goethe, the celebrated author of Werter,” adding the jest “so you must not be surprised if I should shoot myself one of these fine mornings.” Of Werther three translations had already appeared in England9 ; the first, a version through the medium of the French, in 1779, when it proved a huge success, new editions appearing at intervals until 1795; the second, this time from the author’s text, in 1786; and the third in 1789. With one, perhaps with all of these, Lewis was familiar. He determined to read the original too. Eager and enthusiastic in his very first letter, July 30th, he says “I am now knocking my brains against German, as hard as ever I can. . . . As to my own

It will not escape remark that young Lewis commenced author, translated plays, wrote a farce, composed a comedy, and employed himself upon a novel with the object of earning money for his mother. She seems at this time to have shown herself hysterical and exacting, but he never reproaches her for so frequent demands upon his purse;6 at the most he remarks in an Oxford letter that if he enjoyed a fixed income he would gladly act as her banker, but since he had not as yet been made any settled allowance by his father, to him he was obliged to apply to meet her requirements, and this was a humiliating and

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That Matthew Gregory’s residence in Weimar at a most impressionable age should have had a lasting influence upon his whole life, should have moulded his taste, directed his interests, and formed his literary style is a thing neither to be wondered at nor regretted. His enthusiasm directly inspired Scott, Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge, although the latter was ungenerous enough to gird at the very poetry to which he owed not a little of his own stimulation.1 0 How vitally German Romanticism energized our literature and what it lent us need not be emphasized at this point, since these correspondences are amply discussed in another chapter, but undervalued and underrated—nay, even jeered and fleered—as the work of Lewis has been, the fact remains that his mystery and terror and his German sensationalism (I do not burke the phrase) for many years permeated English romance, and they have even to-day left us a legacy in the pages of many applauded and popularly approved writers, who with all their striving and pains do not possess a spark of that genius, which dark, fantastic and wayward as it may have shown, was undoubtedly his. . . . At the end of April, 1794, had appeared Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, which Lewis commenced reading before he set out on his journey and finished immediately after his arrival at the Hague. It is, he cries, “in my opinion, one of the most interesting books ever published.” It is significant, however, that he regarded the first nine chapters, as comparatively insipid, and yet these very passages with their exquisite descriptions of mountain scenery are among the finest of Mrs. Radcliffe’s work. His imagination, however, was set afire by the lone Castle amid the far Appenines, those awful halls of dread where the dark Montoni was lord of life and death. Once more inspired to continue his own romance “in the style of The Castle of Otranto,” he set to work to

extricate the dying man from his difficulties, but finding himself unable to carry the story further, he was soon obliged yet again to lay it on one side.1 1 Not to be baffled, he wisely determined to begin altogether anew, on an entirely fresh track and this time things went smoothly, for on September 23rd. he triumphantly asks his mother: “What do you think of my having written, in the space of ten weeks, a romance of between three and four hundred pages octavo? I have even written out half of it fair. It is called The Monk, and I am myself so much pleased with it that, if the booksellers will not buy it, I shall publish it myself.” Two months after, his last letter from the Hague, November 22nd, tells Mrs. Lewis that he will not send her the manuscript of The Monk since he prefers to hand it to her himself when they meet in London. “For my own part, I have not written a line excepting the Farce, and The Monk, which is a work of some length, and will make an octavo volume of 420 pages. There is a great deal of poetry inserted,” and so as a bonne bouche he encloses a copy of the “Inscription in an Hermitage” which occurs in Chapter II. (In the printed text of The Monk there are some few trifling variants.) As Lewis signed his octosyllabic Preface, Imitation of Horace, Epistles, Book I, Ep. 20, “Hague, Oct. 28th, 1794,” we may assume that he then completed his fair copy, and his pages were ready for the press. Lewis’ father now recalled him to England, and in December Matthew Gregory was back in London. He spent the Christmas of 1794 at Devonshire-place. Very soon he set about finding a publisher for his romance, nor did he experience much difficulty in the quest. In March, 1796,1 2 The Monk was first published, in three volumes, duodecimo, by John Bell, 148 Oxford Street, at nine shillings. It was re-issued in April1 3 at half a guinea, whilst in October of the same year appeared a second edition, so designated on the title-page. The third, fourth, and fifth editions, all severally distinguished on their titles, followed in 1797, 1798, and 1800. In the fourth and fifth editions the title was changed to Ambrosio, or The Monk. Bell’s advertisement, however, on the last leaf of The Castle Spectre, published, octavo, early in 1798, runs: “In a few Days will be published, By Joseph Bell, No. 148, Oxford Street, The Fourth Edition, With considerable Additions and Alterations, Of The Monk, A Romance, In Three Volumes. By M. G.

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nonsense, I write and write, and yet do not find I have got a bit further.” The fact was that he could not conclude the second volume of the romance ‘in the style of the Castle of Otranto’ which had so long occupied his thoughts. As he himself declared, “an infernal dying man” clogged his pen, and finish him off he could not. “He has talked for half a volume already,” is the plaint of the poor author. This moribund but verbose gentleman was to make his appearance as the “pale and emaciated” Reginald in The Castle Spectre, who certainly refuses to expire and is exceedingly loquacious.

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Lewis, Esq. M. P. Author Of The Castle Spectre, Etc. Price 10s. 6d.” . . . . . It might seem difficult to decide whether it was Ann Radcliffe or Matthew Gregory Lewis who exerted the more powerful effect upon the temper and shaping of the Gothic Novel as it went its varied course, and since actually the influence of the former was far greater than that of the author of The Monk, it may appear a paradox to say that none the less it was the latter upon whom contemporary writers of fiction the more closely modelled certain prominent aspects of their work. The reason for this lies in the very practical consideration that the romances of Lewis were found to be far easier to copy, although we may add that the prentice pens showed themselves apter to reproduce and even to exaggerate his faults rather than to exhibit a tithe of his vigour and power, fastening upon his weakness and unable to reach after his strength. The followers of both Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis are legion, and very often the imitation is not only confined to theme, characters, incidents, all of which are repeated again and again in a hundred chapters with exemplary fidelity, but there are also very distinct verbal echoes to be heard, dialogue at second-hand which merely differs from the original by a bombast word inserted here and there, or a phrase dropped out for the worse. In all essentials, it must be emphasized, Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis differ very widely from one another. They have certain romantic subjectmatter in common, but so entirely opposite are their several methods of approach and treatment that although casually they may appear at some points to contact this similarity is extremely superficial and proves but a deceptive glamour of resembling. Both employ picturesque properties, convents, castles, the Holy Office. Such a figure as the austere and stately Abbess of San Stephano in The Italian, although altogether improbable and exceptional, is barely possible; such a figure as Lewis’ domina of S. Clare, Mother St. Agatha, is altogether chimerical, fantastic, and absurd. Lewis recked nothing of Mrs. Radcliffe’s suspense, her sensibility, her landscape pictures which are not the least lovely passages of her genius. Indeed, he pronounced these uncommonly dull, and fervently wished that they had been left out, and something substituted in their room.1 4 Certes, The Mysteries of Udolpho influenced him, but not so much as he thought and liked to make himself believe. Mrs. Radcliffe shrank from the dark diablerie of Lewis; his matricides, incests, rapes,

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extremely shocked her; never did she admit his mouldering cerements and atomies; his Paphian encounters would have cruddled her very ink. Her terrors were spiritual, and for that reason her influence has most clearly shown itself in the writings of those authors whose natural reserve and a certain delicacy of talent would not have tolerated the high colouring and eroticism of The Monk. By his very violence, his impassioned realism, Lewis is widely separated from Mrs. Radcliffe and her school. It is the more pity that these two great writers have been so frequently and so erroneously confounded, and their work all lumped together as if they had exhibited precisely the same characteristics, developed the same style, and elaborated the same sensationalism. It is true that in their own day many minor novelists with a curious lack of perception repeatedly endeavoured to combine Udolpho and The Monk in their pages, to make one peerless heroine of Emily and Antonia, to bring an Ambrosio Montoni upon the scene, but these attempts were fore-doomed to failure; the pieces do not fit; there are awkward creaking joints, and untenoned mortises, discrepancy, contradictions even and incongruity both in the narrative and the springs of action. The expert cook would have disdained to serve up so ill dressed an olio. The shrewder intelligencies were more quick to model their story either upon Mrs. Radcliffe or upon Lewis alone without commixture. The novels which directly derive from The Monk are in themselves so numerous a company that rather than set down a large quota of parallel passages from a dozen writers it will be best to examine here in some detail two or three of the more important as a sample of the stuff. Other novels will be more conveniently noticed under their respective authors. Charlotte Dacre, “better known as Rosa Matilda,” was a professed disciple of The Monk, and her Zofloya; or The Moor, A Romance of the Fifteenth Century, 3 vols., 1806, 1 5 shows that she had learned her lesson well. . . . . . In Germany “the arch-priest of ultra-German romanticism,” as he has been called, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776-1822),1 6 amply showed the influence of Lewis in one of his most powerfully fantastic tales, Die Elixiere des Teufels (1816),1 7 of which an English translation appeared 2 vols., 1824, as The Devil’s Elixir. For example, the first chapter of The Monk commences: “Scarcely

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When a stranger makes inquiry concerning the crowds the answer is returned: “Can you possibly be ignorant that Ambrosio, Abbot of this monastery, pronounces sermon in this church every Thursday?” In Hoffmann’s novel Medardus is a Capuchin,1 8 and his sermons are crowded in similar fashion, a fact which ministers inordinately to his vanity. Thus: “An hour before the bells for assembling, the most aristocratic and cultured portion of the town’s inhabitants crowded into the monastery church, no very large building, to hear the sermon of Brother Medardus.”1 9 A number of other passages might be instanced especially since in The Monk the painting of the Madonna which Ambrosio so admired is drawn from Matilda, so in Die Elixiere, des Teufels Medardus hears the confession of an unknown lady who acknowledges a forbidden yearning, and suddenly cries: “Thou thyself, Medardus, art the consecrated being whom I so unspeakably love!” The Capuchin is racked with concupiscence. “An impulse, till now never known, almost raged in my bosom. A passionate desire to behold her features—to press her to my heart—to perish at once in delight and despair—wholly took possession of me!” In agony he flies to kneel before the altar of S. Rosalia, which is crowned by a picture of the Saint. “In this picture which had never particularly struck me before, I now at once recognized the likeness of my beloved! Even her dress resembled the foreign habit of the unknown!”2 0 It may be further remarked that in The Monk Antonia “Knelt before a statue of St. Rosolia [sic] her patroness, and sang a ‘Midnight Hymn.’” The adventures of Die Elixiere des Teufels differ considerably, of course, from those of The Monk in many ways, but generally it may be remarked that Monk Medardus corresponds to Ambrosio, Euphemia to Matilda, and Aurelia to Antonia. It has been said by J. T. Bealby that Die Elixiere des Teufels can “scarcely be read without shuddering,” and he further describes it as a “dark maze of human emotion and human weakness—a mingling of poetry, sentimentality, rollicking humour, wild remorse, stern gloom, blind delusion, dark insanity, over all which is thrown a veil steeped in the fantastic and the horrible.”2 1 . . . . . The Castle Spectre is the most famous and the most typical specimen of all Gothic melodramas. It must not indeed be judged from a purely

literary point of view, for there are then very many quite palpable faults at which it is easy enough to smile with critical disdain. It has not, for example, the poetry and extraordinary power of Maturin’s Bertram, but little imagination can be required to appreciate how upon the stage Lewis’ scenes proved supremely effective. Personally, of all dramas, this “crusted grizzly skeleton melodrama” as my old friend Chance Newton who knew and loved it used to call The Castle Spectre, is the one I should most like to see, but unhappily the last revival in London was, more than half a century ago, at the Gaiety Theatre, for two matinée performances on May 5th and 12th, 1880, when John Hollingshead was giving “Palmy Day Neglected Dramas.”2 2 . . . The scene is Conway Castle, now in possession of the villainous Earl Osmond, a usurper, who has caused his brother, Earl Reginald, and his brother’s wife, to be murdered some sixteen years before. Unknown to his master, however, Kenric, major-domo of the Castle and Osmond’s trusted accomplice, a character curiously compounded of greed, cruelty, pity and remorse, aided Earl Reginald, whom he has immured in a dungeon of the Castle, a secret prison of which he alone has the key. The rightful heiress of Conway, a mere babe, was scarcely saved from Osmond’s wrath, but at length at Kenric’s prayers she was concealed in a villager’s cottage, where she grew to be the lovely Angela. She was wooed, and gave her heart to the peasant Edwy, who is none other than Percy, Earl of Northumberland. Osmond, knowing this and fearing that if she were to wed so powerful a supporter his guilt would be discovered, reclaims her from her rustic guardian, and, enraptured by her charms, designs himself to marry her, giving out that she has been discovered to be the daughter of Sir Malcolm Mowbray, long since deceased. Angela rejects his suit with scorn, whilst Earl Percy who has penetrated to the Castle to bear her thence, is recognized and held in confinement by Osmond. By a stratagem he escapes, and gathers his forces. Meanwhile Osmond compels Angela to keep her chamber, the Cedar Room, until the morrow when he threatens to espouse her by force. Here Kenric visits her and tells her that Earl Reginald, her father, still lives. They are surprised by Osmond who overhears the tale. Angela, however, is encouraged by a vision of her mother. Father Philip, who is her friend, contrives her escape from the Cedar Room by a subterranean passage, which leads them out through the vaults where she meets her father. Osmond and his minions burst in upon them, but at this very moment

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had the abbey bell tolled for five minutes, and already was the church of the Capuchins thronged with auditors.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR LORD BYRON ON “MONK” LEWIS

with a frantic gesture is about to cut down Reginald, the Spectre suddenly rises between them, and as he staggers back distraught, Angela stabs him with her poniard. He is borne away about to breathe his last, soothed by the forgiveness of his long injured and suffering brother.

Lewis was a good man, a clever man, but a bore, a damned bore, one may say. My only revenge or consolation used to be, setting him by the ears with some vivacious person who hated Bores, especially Me. de Stael, or Hobhouse, for example. But I liked Lewis: he was a Jewel of a Man had he been better set. I don’t mean personally, but less tiresome; for he was tedious, as well as contradictory, to every thing and every body.

I am very well aware that this bald outline can only give a poor idea of the effectiveness of the play, but even in the reading it does not require much visualization to see how skilfully the incidents have been managed and how admirably adapted they are to impress an audience. I would not seem to labour this point repeatedly, but it is distressing to read such ineptitudes as “we cannot to-day esteem Lewis any other than a mediocre dramatist intent upon the cheapest of effects.”2 3

Being short-sighted, when we used to ride out together near the Brenta in the twilight in Summer, he made me go before to pilot him. I am absent at times, especially towards evening; and the consequence of this pilotage was some narrow escapes to the Monk on horseback. Once I led him into a ditch, over which I had passed as usual forgetting to warn my convoy. Once I led him nearly into the river, instead of on the moveable bridge which incommodes passengers; and twice did we both run against the diligence, which, being heavy and slow, did communicate less damage than it received in its leaders, who were terrassé’d by the charge. Thrice did I lose him in the gray of the Gloaming, and was obliged to bring to to his distant signals of distance and distress. All the time he went on talking without intermission, for he was a man of many words.

In various footnotes to the printed play,2 4 and in a little appendix addressed “To The Reader,” Lewis quite candidly draws attention to several hints he has adopted and in some cases improved. Thus in Act II, Scene I, the animated portrait of The Castle of Otranto suggested a striking bit of business; the escape of Earl Percy comes from a German play whose main incident was a similar escape of Ludwig, a Landgrave of Thuringia. When he wrote Motley’s song, Lewis remembered Burgoyne’s “Historical Romance” Richard Cœur de Lion.2 5 The circumstance of Father Philip concealing himself in the bed and thus frightening Alice is from The Mysteries of Udolpho, where Emily and old Dorothée are alarmed when they visit at midnight the lone chamber where the Marchioness de Villeroi died.2 6 In the Romance it brings forward a terrific scene. In the Play it is intended to produce an effect entirely ludicrous.2 7 Earl Reginald concealed in a secret vault may be a variation of the theme of A Sicilian Romance, where the Marquis of Mazzini imprisons his first wife in a subterranean abode belonging to the southern buildings of the castle of Mazzini, and gives out that she is dead. Lewis admired Marsollier’s play Camille, ou le Souterrain2 8 (1791) founded upon this very situation which is derived from the Adèle et Theodore (1782) of Madame de Genlis.

Poor fellow, he died, a martyr to his new riches, of a second visit to Jamaica— “I’ll give the lands of Deloraine Dark Musgrave were alive again!” that is I would give many a Sugar Cane Monk Lewis were alive again! SOURCE: Byron, George Gordon, Lord. “A journal entry of October 15, 1821.” In The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Vol. V, edited by Rowland E. Prothero, 1821. Reprint edition, p. 418. New York: Octagon Books, 1966.

Percy who has gained admittance with his followers drives back the assassins, and when Osmond

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The Castle Spectre was most harshly criticized by those who were jealous of the young author’s genius and success. Genest, who is always very severe on Lewis, is bound to allow that “Osmond, Father Philip, and Alice are very good characters— but the great run which this piece had, is a striking proof that success is a very uncertain criterion of merit.”2 9 It was said that Father Philip was copied from Sheridan’s Father Paul; that Hassan was closely modelled on Zanga. In fact, that Os-

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In 1804 Lewis published with J. F. Hughes of Wigmore Street what is perhaps the most popular of his lesser works, The Bravo of Venice, “a Romance, Translated from the German” of Zschokke’s Abœllino, der grosse Bandit (1794). The brief dedication to the Earl of Moira3 2 is dated from Inverary Castle, October 27th, 1804. The fifth edition of The Bravo of Venice appeared in 1807. This tale is also the first number3 3 of The Romancist and Novelist’s Library, 1839, and there were constant reprints until the end of the century. In some of the later editions the form of the story is slightly altered, but although some minor details are perhaps more closely knit and the pace correspondingly quickened, the narrative can hardly be considered in every respect improved.

Lewis has pretty freely adapted from Zschokke as the fancy took him, and not without much profit to his pages. It cannot be needful to do more than remind ourselves very briefly of the theme of so famous a story. The riddling intrigue turns upon the disguise of the Neapolitan Count Rosalvo, who presents himself in Venice as Count Flodoardo, desirous of serving the Republic. He also fills the rôle of the mysterious and terrible Abellino, a monster of ugliness and ferocity, in which character he is able to penetrate the haunts of the banditti who are terrorizing Venice, and to unmask the conspirators who are plotting her downfall. As Flodoardo he wins the love of the Doge’s fair niece, Rosabella of Corfu; she clings to him even when she believes Flodoardo to be the murderous Bandit; as Rosalvo he weds her and is acclaimed the saviour of the City. Additions were also made by Lewis who in the Advertisement writes: “I have taken some liberties with the original—Every thing that relates to Monaldeschi (a personage who does not exist in the German romance), and the whole of the concluding chapter (with the exception of a very few sentences) have been added by myself.” The Critical Review, Series the Third, Vol. V, No. 3, July, 1805, devoted an article of several pages (pp. 252-6) to a detailed examination of The Bravo of Venice, although the writer confessed he was so inured as now to be able “to turn over the leaves of a Germanico-terrific Romance with an untrembling hand.” He allowed that “The history of the Bravo of Venice is interesting, the language glows with animation, and the denouement is rapid and surprising.” “Novels have commonly been divided into the pathetic, the sentimental and the humorous; but the writers of the German school have introduced a new class, which may be called the electric. Every chapter contains a shock; and the reader not only stares, but starts, at the close of every paragraph; so that we cannot think the wit of a brother-critic farfetched, when he compared that shelf in his library, on which the Tales of Wonder, the Venetian Bravo, and other similar productions were piled, to a galvanic battery. Mr. Lewis possesses a fertile imagination and considerable genius: we would therefore advise him to quit the beaten track of imitation. “‘Ohe! jam satis est!’ We have had enough of ghastly visages, crawling worms, death’s heads and crossbones. When we first visited Mrs. Salmon’s waxwork, Mother Shipton’s sudden kick startled us, and we were terrified at the monster who darts from the corner cupboard to devour Andromeda; but we can now visit this scene of wonders

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mond should be attended by negroes was an anachronism and yet Lewis was bold enough to protest “I by no means regret the introduction of my Africans.” He comically added that black servants gave a pleasing variety to the characters, “and could I have produced the same effect by making my heroine blue, blue I should have made her.” Against the Spectre ridiculous objections were urged. “She ought not to appear because the belief in Ghosts no longer exists.” It was bruited abroad that if Sheridan had not advised the author to content himself with a single Spectre, his purpose was “to have exhibited a whole regiment of Ghosts.” The managers, the actors, the friends to whom the play was read, all begged Lewis to confine the Ghost to the Green-room. He persisted, and “The Spectre was as well treated before the curtain as she had been ill-used behind it.” The two apparition scenes were greeted with tumultuous appluase. Lewis quite candidly and very properly adds that if he with mock-modesty declared he thought The Castle Spectre very bad, what would such an avowal be save to insult the judgement of the public “which has given it a very favourable reception. . . . Still its success on the stage (great enough to content even an author) does not prevent my being very doubtful as to its reception in the closet, when divested of its beautiful music, splendid scenery, and above all, of the acting, excellent throughout.”3 0 None the less, The Castle Spectre was greeted with avidity by the reading public, and ran through no less than seven editions in 1798, whilst an eighth edition appeared in 1799, and a tenth edition in 1803.3 1 The prolific Miss Sarah Wilkinson was not ill-advised when she turned the popular The Castle Spectre into a prose romance (1820). . . . . .

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without terror or alarm, and if we affect surprise, it is merely in compliment to the woman, who exhibits them, that she may not be disappointed of her grin.” This is something more than severe, even a little ill-natured, for I do not think any reader could disentangle the thread of The Bravo of Venice, and he is certainly not to be envied whose interest is not held fast until the very end of this fascinating romance. Naturally when once we know the secret we peruse these chapters a second time with interest and with keenest admiration of the workmanship, but we cannot reasonably expect the same thrill. . . . . . In the winter of 1804 there occurred an unhappy difference between Lewis and his father, which caused the former, at least, great pain and anxiety. The facts may be briefly told. The elder Mr. Lewis had commenced an acquaintance and maintained no very proper intimacy with a lady of fashion and ton, Mrs. R———, who after being a constant visitor to Devonshire Place, presently not only became an inmate of the house but was recognized as mistress of the establishment, where her son Frederick also made his home. Mr. Lewis’ two daughters were now married, but Matthew could not help expressing his displeasure, not so much perhaps in words as by actions at seeing another woman installed in his mother’s room. Mr. Lewis took pepper in the nose upon his son’s eminently correct attitude, and with great severity informed him that he was no longer welcome under the paternal roof. It is true that Matthew occasionally visited the house, but only to be subjected to extreme mortification and open slights. At one period the father most wickedly and dishonourably curtailed his son’s income by one half, contrary to his solemn promise and pledge. However the injustice, one is pleased to know, was not of long continuance, for Mr. Lewis soon came to a sense of his own gross misbehaviour in this regard, and Matthew’s allowance was restored to the proper figure, as had been expressly engaged. A complete reconciliation between father and son, owing to the elder man’s obstinacy and sullen brooding temper, could not be effected for some years. Matthew certainly had need of literary success to support him under these domestic trials. In 1806 he published, 8vo, a tragedy Adelgitha; or The Fruits of a Single Error, which ran into no less than three editions during the one year, and reached a fifth edition in 1817. The play, which

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had thus already won its way into popular favour, was not produced until Thursday, April 30th, 1807, when it was given at Drury Lane with Mrs. Powell in the title-rôle; Henry Siddons, Robert Guiscard, Prince of Apulia; Elliston, Lothair; Raymond, Michael Ducas; and Mrs. H. Siddons, Imma. The scene, Otranto. The year, 1080. Lewis himself quite frankly acknowledged that the quasi-historical background of Guiscard and Michael of Byzantium is a flam. He had constructed his plot, sketched his characters, and then last of all fitted them into a striking framework, allowing stage pictures of “a Gothic room,” “a splendidly illuminated Gothic hall,” wherein an ancient minstrel strikes his harp, a grove terminated by a cloister which gives scope for that procession of nuns Lewis so loved to present. Adelgitha, who is the wife of Guiscard, when very young had been seduced by George of Clermont, the fruit of the amour being Lothair, whom she represents to her husband as an orphan. Michael Ducas, Emperor of Byzantium, driven into exile by rebels, seeks the shelter of Guiscard’s court, and here Lothair, who has risen to high honour by his valour and virtues, falls in love with the Princess Imma. Whilst Guiscard is absent waging war on behalf of Ducas, this latter attempts to win Adelgitha, and when she rejects his disloyal suit with scorn, he threatens to expose her secret which has become known to him. Immediately after Guiscard’s return she resolves to acquaint him with the whole, relating her story as having happened to another. A very powerful and wellwritten scene follows in which Guiscard shows himself implacable and relentless in his anger against the unnamed deliquent. Adelgitha now implores Michael Ducas to return the letters which he holds and which prove her first unchastity. Mockingly he refuses, whereupon in a tumult of passion she drives a dagger to his heart. Lothair, who by the treachery of the dead emperor, is already suspect of being Adelgitha’s lover, is accused of the murder, but as he is led to execution she avows the whole. After a struggle of agony her husband out of his tender love forgives, whereupon exclaiming: I’m happy! Guiscard, Guiscard! thus I thank thee And next reward thee thus!

she embraces him for the last time, and stabs herself. Adelgitha is a very fine tragedy, and fully deserved the favour with which it was received by

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During half a century and more, criticism of Lewis, such as it is, obvious and facile to the last degree, for the most part hardly seems to have gone beyond The Monk, and hence it has been necessary to consider both the romances and the ballads, and the plays at some length, since consciously or unwittingly he introduced new and essential features both by his prose works, his verse and his dramas into the Gothic novel, upon which he exercised so tremendous, one might almost say so illimitable, an influence. It is, I think, more useful for the purpose of our survey specifically to indicate (as indeed I have already done) the vast imaginative force derived from Lewis which energized and inspired numerical novels and impelled the incidence of romance in particular directions, rather than at this one point by summarizing to present what must necessarily become a vague, undefined, and in many respects incomplete and inadequate analysis of both those prominent characteristics and the many undercurrents of supernatural suggestion, which eddying fainter and fainter, it may be, through channels now brackish, now fair, until almost lost or sublimated in the chaotic spate of modern fiction, can none the less very clearly be related to and are in effect resultant from the genius, often morbid and wayward, yet ever vital and compelling, of Matthew Gregory Lewis.

Notes 1. “Saducismus Triumphatus: Or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches And Apparitions. . . . By Joseph Glanvil late Chaplain in Ordinary to his Majesty, and Fellow of the Royal Society. With a Letter of Dr. Henry More on the same Subject.” The more usual spelling (of later editions) is Sadducismus Triumphatus. The earliest draft, Philosophical considerations touching Witches and Witchcraft, was published 1666. Dr. E. A. Baker, History of the English Novel, Vol. V (1934), p. 208, describes Saducismus Triumphatus as a “chamber of horrors,” which this fine work most certainly is not. Nor do I conceive that a rather flippant and wholly unapt label would have been very acceptable to the great and profoundly philosophical divine who was the author. 2. “King Saul and the Witch of Endor” was reproduced in my History of Witchcraft and Demonology, 1926, p. 178. The panelled illustration of several apparitions was reproduced as the frontispiece to my Geography of Witchcraft, 1927. 3. Two volumes, 1883. Vol. I, chapter iv, pp. 32-8. 4. Unfortunately the haunted rooms were pulled down in 1812, when, after the death of Richard Warburton Lytton, December, 1810, Mrs. Bulwer (now Bulwer-

Lytton) settled at Knebworth, but resolved to demolish three sides of the great quadrangle and confine the house to the fourth side. The haunted rooms, however, are minutely described in a little story by Miss James, entitled Jenny Spinner; or, The Ghost of Knebworth House, which was never published, but of which a few copies only were printed and preserved at Knebworth. 5. Used by the elder Colman in his The Man of Business, produced at Covent Garden, January 29th, 1774; and translated by C. H. as The Two Friends, or, The Liverpool Merchant, 8vo, 1800. 6. Many of Mrs. Lewis’ difficulties were due to a number of persons who imposed upon her, and whose avidity she satisfied when in fact unable to supply their wants, had such even been genuine and well founded. See The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, 1839, Vol. I, p. 67. 7. Goethe had been invited to Weimar, where he took up his residence, November 7th, 1775, by the Duke. He died here March 22nd, 1832. 8. Actually Schiller had been appointed to a Professorship at Jena in 1789, which he resigned in 1799. 9. T. M. Carré, Goethe en Angleterre (1920), Chapter I; also Bibliographie de Goethe en Angleterre, Chapter I. Further, see the article by A. E. Turner in the Modern Language Review, Vol. XVI (July-October), 1921, pp. 364-70. 10. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2 vols., London, 1817; Vol. II, p. 28. 11. In his fuliginous book with the fierce title La Carne, La Morte e il Diavolo nella letteratura romantica! (discreetly and appropriately translated, be it noted, into English as The Romantic Agony) Signor Mario Praz, amongst other errors in reference to Lewis, confuses The Monk with the first unfinished romance (see p. 60 of The Romantic Agony, English translation by Angus Davidson, 1933). I might hesitate, however, to suggest that Signor Praz is at fault, since Mr. Wyndham Lewis, in Men Without Art, p. 175, in reference to The Romantic Agony, spoke of “This gigantic pile of satanic bric-abrac, so industriously assembled, under my directions by Professor Praz.” This was repeated by Mr. Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element, p. 206. But Signor Praz wrote hotly to The Times Literary Supplement, August 8th, 1935, “to point out” that Mr. Wyndham Lewis’ words were “grossly misleading.” He added: “I am afraid I must disclaim the honour of being ranked as his disciple, sorry as I am to deprive him of this satisfaction.” Actum est de Mr. Wyndham Lewis! After all it does not in the least matter who is responsible for such disjointed gimcrack as The Romantic Agony. The Sosii were celebrated booksellers in Rome. Lewis aptly has “Stockdale, Hookham, or Debrett.” 12. Monthly Magazine or British Register, March, 1796. The List of new publications. In The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, 1839, Vol. I, p. 151, there is a bad blunder in regard to The Monk: “The first and greatest era in the literary life of Lewis was the publication of ‘Ambrosio, or The Monk,’ which event took place in the summer of 1795.” Several writers have repeated the error that 1795 is the date of the first edition of The Monk. Thus Elton, A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830, 1912, Vol. I, p. 215. Railo, The Haunted Castle, 1927, p. 89. Rudolf Schneider, Der Mônch in der englischen Dichtung bis auf Lewis’s “Monk,” 1795, 1927, p. 168. Herr Brauchli, Der englische Schauerroman um

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crowded houses. The music was composed by Michael Kelly. . . . . .

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1800, 1928, pp. 200, 235, 254. Miss J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800, 1932, p. 278. E. A. Baker, The History of the English Novel, Vol. V (1934), p. 205. Both Baker, who is responsible for an edition of The Monk (1907), and Railo fall into a further mistake when they assert that the original title of Lewis’ romance was Ambrosio, or The Monk. 13. Monthly Magazine or British Register, April, 1796. I have generally used the copy of The Monk which belonged to Francis Douce (1757-1834), and which is preserved in the Bodleian Library, Shelfmark, Douce: L. 307. This contains some interesting contemporary notes and cuttings. 14. Lewis in a letter from The Hague to his mother, May 18th, 1794. Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, Vol. I, p. 123. 15. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, June, 1806, 13s. 6d. There is a reprint in the volume of Zofloya with an Introduction by the present writer, 1927. 16. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Leben und Nachlass, “von J. G. Hitzig, herausg. von Micheline Hoffmann, geb. Rorer,” 5 vols., Stuttgart, 1839. See also Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, von Z. Funck [G. Kunz], Leipzig, 1836. 17. The first volume was completed in less than a month. The second volume (after a considerable interval) was finished before the end of 1815. The work is, as Hoffmann himself avowed, something disjointed. 18. It should be said that in 1812 Hoffmann paid a visit to the Kapuziner-Kloster at Bamberg, and was extremely impressed by what he saw and by the conversation of a venerable friar, Father Cyrillus. See Erinnerungen, p. 60, sqq. 19. The Devil’s Elixir. From the German of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Blackwood and Cadell, 1824, Vol. I, p. 78. 20. Ibid., pp. 87, 89. S. Rosalia “born of the royal blood of Charlemagne,” is the especial patroness of Palermo. Major feast, September 4th. I suppose the name was suggested to Lewis by a certain picturesqueness and beauty. The Saint was not, however, a martyr, as Hoffmann (p. 89) represents. 21. E. T. W. Hoffmann, Weird Tales. A new translation by J. T. Bealby. 2 vols., Nimmo, 1885. Vol. I, Biographical Notice, p. xlviii. 22. J. D. Beveridge acted Earl Osmond; J. B. Johnstone, Earl Reginald; Crawford, Percy; J. L. Shine, Father Philip; W. Elton, Motley; T. Squire, Kenric; Miss Louise Willes, Angela; Mrs. Leigh, Alice; and Miss Hobbes, the Spectre. See John Hollingshead’s Footlights, 8vo, 1883; also Clement Scott and Cecil Howard, Edward Leman Blanchard, 2 vols., 1891; Vol. II, p. 501, n. 5. 23. J. R. A. Nicoll, A History of Late Eighteenth Century Drama, 1927, p. 100. This writer with rather heavy wit talks of the Spectre as “an exceedingly solid ghost.” 24. 8vo, Printed for J. Bell, 1798; pp. 28, 41, 58, 69, and 100-3. 25. From the French of M. J. Sedaine. Produced at Drury Lane, October 24th, 1786. The original music by Grétry was arranged by Thomas Linley. This work proved exceedingly popular. Another adaptation from Sedaine, Richard Cœur de Lion, by Leonard Macnally, produced at Covent Garden, October 16th, 1786, was not so successful.

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26. 1794; Vol. IV, chapter lv. 27. Note by Lewis. The Castle Spectre, 8vo, 1798, p. 58. 28. Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, Vol. II, pp. 60-1. 29. Some Account of the English Stage, 1832, Vol. VII, pp. 332-3. 30. The Castle Spectre, 8vo, 1798, p. 103. 31. It was continually reprinted throughout the nineteenth century and appears in very many collections; for example, Cumberland’s British Theatre, Vol. XV, 1827, “Printed from the Acting Copy”; Dicks Standard Plays, No. 35. 32. Francis Rawdon Hastings, first Marquis of Hastings and second Earl of Moira, 1754-1826. 33. Price 2d. J. Clements, 21 and 22 Little Pulteney Street, Regent Street.

TITLE COMMENTARY The Monk SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (REVIEW DATE FEBRUARY 1797) SOURCE: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “A review of The Monk.” The Critical Review 19 (February 1797): 194-200. In the following excerpt from a review of The Monk, Coleridge acknowledges Lewis’s genius but objects to what he perceives as The Monk’s indecency, immorality, and irreligious air.

[Cheaply] as we estimate romances in general, we acknowledge, [The Monk: a Romance], the offspring of no common genius. . . . Ambrosio, a monk, surnamed the Man of Holiness, proud of his own undeviating rectitude, and severe to the faults of others, is successfully assailed by the tempter of mankind, and seduced to the perpetration of rape and murder, and finally precipitated into a contract in which he consigns his soul to everlasting perdition. The larger part of the three volumes is occupied by the underplot, which, however, is skilfully and closely connected with the main story, and is subservient to its development. The tale of the bleeding nun is truly terrific; and we could not easily recollect a bolder or more happy conception than that of the burning cross on the forehead of the wandering Jew. . . . But the character of Matilda, the chief agent in the seduction of Antonio, appears to us to be the author’s master-piece. It is, indeed, exquisitely imagined, and as exquisitely supported. The whole work is distinguished by the variety and impressiveness of

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All events are levelled into one common mass, and become almost equally probable, where the order of nature may be changed whenever the author’s purposes demand it. No address is requisite to the accomplishment of any design; and no pleasure therefore can be received from the perception of difficulty surmounted. The writer may make us wonder, but be cannot surprise us. For the same reasons a romance is incapable of exemplifying a moral truth. . . . As far, therefore, as the story is concerned, the praise which a romance can claim, is simply that of having given pleasure during its perusal; and so many are the calamities of life, that he who has done this, has not written uselessly. The children of sickness and of solitude shall thank him.—To this praise, however, our author has not entitled himself. The sufferings which he describes are so frightful and intolerable, that we break with abruptness from the delusion, and indignantly suspect the man of a species of brutality, who could find a pleasure in wantonly imagining them; and the abominations which he pourtrays with no hurrying pencil, are such as the observation of character by no means demanded, such as ‘no observation of character can justify, because no good man would willingly suffer them to pass, however transiently, through his own mind.’ The merit of a novelist is in proportion (not simply to the effect, but) to the pleasurable effect which he produces. Situations of torment, and images of naked horror, are easily conceived; and a writer in whose works they abound, deserves our gratitude almost equally with him who should drag us by way of sport through a military hospital, or force us to sit at the dissecting-table of a natural philosopher. . . . Figures that shock the imagination, and narratives that mangle the feelings, rarely discover genius, and always betray a low and vulgar taste. Nor has our author indicated less ignorance of the human heart in the management of the principal character. The wisdom and goodness of providence have ordered that the tendency of vicious actions to deprave the heart of the perpetrator, should diminish in proportion to the greatness of his temptations. Now, in addition to constitutional warmth and irresistible opportunity, the monk is impelled to incontinence by friendship, by compassion, by gratitude, by all that is amiable, and all that is estimable; yet in a few weeks after his first frailty, the man who had

been described as possessing much general humanity, a keen and vigorous understanding with habits of the most exalted piety, degenerates into an uglier fiend than the gloomy imagination of Danté would have ventured to picture. Again, the monk is described as feeling and acting under the influence of an appetite which could not co-exist with his other emotions. The romance-writer possesses an unlimited power over situations; but he must scrupulously make his characters act in congruity with them. Let him work physical wonders only, and we will be content to dream with him for a while; but the first moral miracle which he attempts, he disgusts and awakens us. Thus our judgment remains unoffended, when, announced by thunders and earthquakes, the spirit appears to Ambrosio involved in blue fires that increase the cold of the cavern; and we acquiesce in the power of the silver myrtle which made gates and doors fly open at its touch, and charmed every eye into sleep. But when a mortal, fresh from the impression of that terrible appearance, and in the act of evincing for the first time the witching force of this myrtle is represented as being at the same moment agitated by so fleeting an appetite as that of lust, our own feelings convince us that this is not improbable, but impossible; not preternatural, but contrary to nature. The extent of the powers that may exist, we can never ascertain; and therefore we feel no great difficulty in yielding a temporary belief to any, the strangest, situation of things. But that situation once conceived, how beings like ourselves would feel and act in it, our own feelings sufficiently instruct us; and we instantly reject the clumsy fiction that does not harmonise with them. These are the two principal mistakes in judgment, which the author has fallen into; but we cannot wholly pass over the frequent incongruity of his style with his subjects. It is gaudy where it should have been severely simple; and too often the mind is offended by phrases the most trite and colloquial, when it demands and had expected a sterness and solemnity of diction. A more grievous fault remains,—a fault for which no literary excellence can atone,—a fault which all other excellence does but aggravate, as adding subtlety to a poison by the elegance of its preparation. Mildness of censure would here be criminally misplaced, and silence would make us accomplices. Not without reluctance then, but in full conviction that we are performing a duty, we declare it to be our opinion, that The Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale.

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its incidents; and the author every-where discovers an imagination rich, powerful, and fervid. Such are the excellencies;—the errors and defects are more numerous, and (we are sorry to add) of greater importance.

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The temptations of Ambrosio are described with a libidinous minuteness, which, we sincerely hope, will receive its best and only adequate censure from the offended conscience of the author himself. The shameless harlotry of Matilda, and the trembling innocence of Antonia, are seized with equal avidity, as vehicles of the most voluptuous images; and though the tale is indeed a tale of horror, yet the most painful impression which the work left on our minds was that of great acquirements and splendid genius employed to furnish a mormo for children, a poison for youth, and a provocative for the debauchee. Tales of enchantments and witchcraft can never be useful: our author has contrived to make them pernicious, by blending, with an irreverent negligence, all that is most awfully true in religion with all that is most ridiculously absurd in superstition. He takes frequent occasion, indeed, to manifest his sovereign contempt for the latter, both in his own person, and (most incongruously) in that of his principal characters; and that his respect for the former is not excessive, we are forced to conclude from the treatment which its inspired writings receive from him. . . . If it be possible that the author of these blasphemies is a Christian, should he not have reflected that the only passage in the scriptures [Ezekiel, Chap. xxiii], which could give a shadow of plausiblity to the weakest of these expressions, is represented as being spoken by the Almighty himself? But if he be an infidel, he has acted consistently enough with that character, in his endeavours first to inflame the fleshly appetites, and then to pour contempt on the only book which would be adequate to the task of recalming them. We believe it not absolutely impossible that a mind may be so deeply depraved by the habit of reading lewd and voluptuous tales, as to use even the Bible in conjuring up the spirit of uncleanness. The most innocent expressions might become the first link in the chain of association, when a man’s soul had been so poisoned; and we believe it not absolutely impossible that he might extract pollution from the word of purity and, in a literal sense, turn the grace of God into wantonness. We have been induced to pay particular attention to this work from the unusual success which it has experienced. It certainly possesses much real merit, in addition to its meretricious attractions. Nor must it be forgotten that the author is a man of rank and fortune.—Yes! the author of The Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR!—We stare and tremble.

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The poetry interspersed through the volumes is, in general, far above mediocrity.

A FRIEND TO GENIUS (REVIEW DATE APRIL 1797) SOURCE: A Friend to Genius. “An Apology for The Monk.” The Monthly Mirror 3 (April 1797): 210-15. In the following essay, the psuedonymous critic maintains that The Monk advocates virtue, rather than—as many reviewers have contended—vice.

It is with no inconsiderable pain that I have remarked the numerous attacks which have been made by the host of critics on the ingenious author of The Monk, for the supposed vicious tendency of that excellent romance. The author is universally allowed to be endowed with nature’s best gift, genius, and in the work before us is generally acknowledged to discover throughout an imagination, rich, powerful, and fervid. This able writer is, however, attacked on a point which, I am sure, must make him feel little satisfaction in the applause which his genius commands. It is asserted by almost all the critics who have sat in judgment on this admirable performance, that its tendency is to deprave the heart, to vitiate the understanding, and to enlist the passions in the cause of vice. Differing as I do with these censors, as to this and other objections, I wish, through the medium of your impartial publication, to rescue his production from this undeserved obloquy. I have not the pleasure of Mr. Lewis’s acquaintance, and I know not how this apology may be received on his part, but the defence of genius is the common cause of all men of the least pretensions to literature; and every person who can enjoy works of taste, has the right of rescuing them from unmerited attacks. I should, as little as the critics, wish to be the apologist of vice, or the defender of lasciviousness; but justice requires that error, and error of such magnitude, as it regards Mr. Lewis’s character, should be detected and exposed. The error of the principal objection to this romance, viz. that of its vicious tendency, appears to me entirely to arise from inaccuracy of observation of the author’s work, of the human heart, and of the meaning of the word tendency. It is not a temporary effect, produced upon the imagination or the passions, by particular passages, which can fairly be cited as the tendency of the work; we must examine what are the probable general results from the whole, and not judge from these partial and fleeting effects.

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There are many other moral lessons which are inculcated by the work in the strongest manner; the tendency, therefore, i. e. the general effect likely to result, is favourable to the cause of virtue and morality. We are however told, that “the temptations of Ambrosio are described with a libidinous minuteness, which leaves the painful impression of great acquirements and splendid genius, employed to furnish poison for youth, and a provocative for the debauchee.” [Critical Review, for February, 1797.] If this were the case, I must give up my author in part, though still the tendency of the whole would be good. But I deny the fact. I request that the character and circumstances

of Ambrosio may be seriously considered. To a man of strong understanding, austerity of manners, and great self command, strong temptations must be offered. If the author had made the Monk sink under a slight temptation, he would have offended against the laws of probability, and shocked the reason of his readers. I ask if it be possible to describe such temptations as were calculated to seduce such a man, with greater delicacy and decorum than our author has done: and I will take for example the strongest instances—the conclusion of chapter 2. vol. I p. 253 of vol. 2. and his attack on Antonia in p. 36 and 37 of vol. 3. The answer, I am persuaded, must be—No! Highly coloured as these passages are, I maintain that no heart but one already depraved, could rise from them, if the preceding part of the work had been perused, with the least impurity. The mind that could draw food for vicious appetites from this work, must have made no little progress in the paths of profligacy and debauchery; so strong are the entrenchments erected before the heart, by the general tendency, of the work. The previous part is calculated to prevent all the evil which may arise from warmth of description, by the interest we take in observing the gradual progress of vice in Ambrosio’s bosom, and the hatred we of course must feel for this insiduous adversary. The work can be read only by three descriptions of persons; either those whose minds, by habitual vice, are prepared to turn every the least hint to the purposes of food for their depraved appetites, or as incitements to their dormant desires, which require stimulants; or those who are wavering between vice and virtue, whose minds may be led to either, by interesting their passions strongly for one or the other; or else, young, innocent, and undepraved persons. The first deserve not notice: purity itself would be poison to their hearts, and the modestest allusion would excite depraved ideas. The passions of the second will be, I contend, excited more strongly to virtue than to vice by The Monk, because the horrors consequent on his vicious conduct are so strongly pourtrayed, as to destroy the momentary effect, if any were produced, of the passages which are rather warm in description. The last, from the very supposition of their being yet innocent and unpolluted, and in consequence ignorant, can not have improper ideas excited, or their passions roused to vice; as, in the first place, they will not be able to understand as much as our knowing critics, nor can the confused notions of felicity which may be excited destroy the purity of their minds,

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In this view, I maintain, this beautiful romance is well calculated to support the cause of virtue, and to teach her lessons to man. I am not old enough to have my heart steeled against the effects of the strongest of the human passions, nor young enough to riot in lascivious description, or wanton in the regions of obscene imagery. I can feel as disgusted as the critics with such defects; but I entreat these grey bearded gentleman to consider again whether there are any such images in the work before us. The lessons of virtue which I see in the Monk, are striking and impressive. In the character of Ambrosio we see a man delineated of strong passions, which have been for a long period subdued by as strong resolution; of a natural disposition to virtue, but, like all other men, with some portion of vice, which has been fostered by the situation into which his fate had thrown him; he is haughty, vindictive, and austere. The greatest error of which he is guilty, is too great a confidence in his own virtue, too great a reliance on his own hatred of vice. We are taught by his conduct that this unbounded confidence, by blinding the mind as to the real consequences which result, lays the foundation for vice, and opens an easy road to great excesses. We have again a very forcible illustration in Ambrosio, a man of the strongest understanding and the highest powers of reason, of the danger of receding even in the least from the path of virtue, or giving way in the slightest degree to the insidious approaches of vice. C’est te premier pas qui coute, is a truth long established, and is well illustrated in the present instance. We see and feel strongly this danger, and the lesson is the more forcible, in proportion to the strength of understanding which is shown in the Monk. We learn that when once a man ventures into the pool of vice, that he plunges deeper and deeper till he is completely overwhelmed. These are striking and impressive lessons.

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or the effect of the moral lessons inculcated. The writer of this paper felt not a single loose idea excited by the warmest passages, so perfectly had he imbibed the moral lessons which the author has so forcibly brought forward. The critics themselves seem aware of this tendency of the work, and therefore endeavour to deprive the author of the defence, by roundly asserting that “a romance is incapable of exemplifying moral truth; and that he who could rise superior to all earthly temptation, and whom the strength of the spiritual world alone would be adequate to overwhelm, might reasonably be proud, and would fall with glory” As applied to The Monk, there are two errors in this assertion. The reader of this romance has no reason to imagine, till the greater part of the mischief has been done, that any but earthly temptations are used against the hero. The fall of Ambrosio is precisely that which would happen to any man of a similar character, assailed as he was by the fascinating arts of a woman, skilled in exciting the strongest passions, and endowed with the most attractive charms. We see the gradual progress she makes in undermining his virtue by merely human means. His feelings, his gratitude, and finally the strong desires of human nature are all combined to ensure his fall. But still the temptations appear to be no more than human. We see where a man of truly virtuous principles would have commenced resistance; we observe and lament his first deviation from the path of virtue; and cannot withhold our wishes that he may remain firm when the first disposition to yield manifests itself. Matilda appears to be merely a woman, though a woman of the greatest charms, and of an extraordinary character; but still there is nothing improbable or unnatural in the means of temptation, nothing that a man of a strong mind and pure virtue would not have resisted. The lesson therefore is taught and deeply imbibed before the discovery of supernatural agency is made, and that discovery does not and cannot eradicate the morality before inculcated. Nor is it true in general that moral truth cannot be conveyed in romance. The general sense of mankind is against the critics in this assertion. From the earliest ages fiction, and incredible fiction, has been thought a proper vehicle for moral instruction, from the fables of Æsop, to the tales, allegories, and visions of modern days. The religion itself which these gentlemen profess inculcates the notion that Lucifer is the author of all our vicious propensities, and that he is the continual seducer of man. An allegorical representa-

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tion of this being visibly interfering is no more therefore than adopting popular belief, and turning it to the purposes of instruction. It is no more improbable, on the notion of this great tempter, that a man should yield to his agency, when he himself assumes the human figure, than when he is supposed, as he is, to inhabit the bodies of all the vicious, and supply the crafty and artful with the means of operating on inferior minds. We do not the less blame Eve, because we are told that she yielded to the temptation of the serpent. As to the minor objections made to the conduct of parts of the story, and defects of style and description, I feel not myself called on to defend, my object not being to establish the literary but moral excellence of the work. The only remaining objection which I shall attempt to answer is that “our author has contrived to make his romance pernicious, by blending, with an irreverent negligence, all that is most awfully true in religion, with all that is most ridiculously absurd in superstition. He takes frequent occasion, indeed, to manifest his sovereign contempt for the latter, both in his own person and in that of his principal characters; and that his respect for the former is not excessive we are forced to conclude from the treatment which its inspired writers receive from him.” In support of this observation we have a garbled passage quoted by the critics, in which the author has noticed with too much warmth, we must confess, some of the passages of the bible, which are undoubtedly improper for the eye of a young female. It is not fair to quote this passage without adding the eulogiums which the author has passed on the morality of the sacred writings, both in that passage and others in the work, Whether the author be or be not a Christian, is not the inquiry, but whether there be any foundation for the observation made on the indecency of some parts of our religious code; this the critics are obliged to allow is the case in one instance, viz. Ezekiel chap. 23. There are also other examples which must be in the eye of every man who has react these writings with attention. The indiscriminate perusal of such passages as occur, in which every thing is called by its vulgar name, in which the most luxuriant images are described, as in Solomon’s Song, must certainly be improper for young females. So fully aware were the Jews of this truth, that they prohibited the reading of Solomon’s Song, till a certain age, when the passions are in subjection. The warmth of expression is too great, but we may pardon this, since we see a desire of preventing the mischievous effects of

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I have thus, Sir, endeavoured to shew that the attacks made on Mr. Lewis are unfounded, and that when the critic stares and trembles to find the author of The Monk a legislator, his horror is not reasonable; and that with propriety we may apply to those men who can drink vice at the fountain of the Monk, the expression of this very critic: “The most innocent expressions may become the first link in the chain of association, when a man’s soul has been poisoned and depraved by the habit of reading lewd and voluptuous tales; and we believe it not absolutely impossible that he might extract pollution from the word of purity, and turn the grace of God into wantonness.” I hope I have succeeded in showing, that “the author has not endeavoured to inflame the fleshly appetites, and then to pour contempt on the only book which would be adequate to the task of reclaiming them.” If I have not failed in this object, I shall feel a satisfaction in having employed a leisure horror in a task so delightful as rescuing from disgrace, in my opinion unmerited, a man of such talents, taste, and brilliancy of imagination, as the author of The Monk. I hope this attempt will not be displeasing to him who is the most concerned, nor fail of its effect on the public mind. My motives are, however, pure; I know I am as great an enemy to licentiousness as the critics them selves, and I trust I have shewn thyself A FRIEND TO GENIUS.

THE MONTHLY REVIEW (REVIEW DATE AUGUST 1797) SOURCE: A review of The Monk. The Monthly Review 23 (August 1797): 451. In the following review, the critic discusses the literary sources for The Monk and adds that obscenity “pervades and deforms the whole organization of this novel.”

[The Monk] has a double plot. The outline of the monk Ambrosio’s story was suggested by that of the Santon Barsisa, in the Guardian: the form of temptation is borrowed from the Devil in Love of Cazotte; and the catastrophe is taken from the Sorcerer. The adventures of Raymond and Agnes are less obviously imitations; yet the forest-scene near Strasburgh brings to mind an incident in Smollet’s Ferdinand Count Fathom: the bleeding Nun is described by the author as a popular tale of the Germans; and the convent-prison resembles the inflictions of Mrs. Radcliffe. This may be called plagiarism; yet it deserves some praise. The great art of writing consists in selecting what is most stimulant from the works of our predecessors, and in uniting the gathered beauties in a new whole, more interesting than the tributary models. This is the essential process of the imagination, and excellence is no otherwise attained. All invention is but new combination. To invent well is to combine the impressive. Of the poetry, we have been best pleased with the Water-Ring, and with Alonzo the brave and the fair Imogene, the latter of which is written in a manner much resembling and little inferior to the Lenardo and Blandine of Bürger. A vein of obscenity, however, pervades and deforms the whole organization of this novel, which must ever blast, in a moral view, the fair fame that, in point of ability, it would have gained for the author; and which renders the work totally unfit for general circulation.

MARK M. HENNELLY, JR. (ESSAY DATE 1987) SOURCE: Hennelly, Jr., Mark M. “The Monk’s Gothic Bosh and Bosch’s Gothic Monks.” Comparative Literature Studies 24, no. 2 (1987): 146-64. In the following essay, Hennelly interprets the artistic significance and utility of the “Gothic machinery” in The Monk by comparing Lewis’s use of these devices to that of painter Hieronymous Bosch, noting similarities between the two and commenting on the possible sources for their works. Oh! wonder-working Lewis! monk, or bard, Who fain wouldst make Parnassus a churchyard! Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow, Thy muse a sprite, Apollo’s sexton thou!

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even the most generally excellent productions.— The author, so far from deserving to be stigmatized as an enemy to Christianity, appears to me to be acting as one of its best friends, when he endeavours to prevent the mischief which may ensue from mixing what may be improper for young minds, with the rest of a work so generally excellent in its morality, so pure in its doctrines. The mischief which might be produced would be the greater, because of the reverence with which young persons are generally, taught to regard the sacred writings. The impressions of such images as are blamed, would be the more deeply engraven on the mind, as they believe that nothing can be learned there but purity and innocence. I should have thought that these critics might have overlooked an error into which they themselves have fallen to a still greater excess: for they cannot allow the moral tendency of the romance to plead the pardon of two or three passages, which appear to them to be too luxuriant, and too replete with wanton imagery.

(55), the reader presumably is also guilty of complicity in his voyeurism and his compulsion to strip Antonia, although, ambiguously, Antonia’s false modesty needs to be stripped away to reveal her natural self. Similarly, when Agnes “took the veil” to become a nun, she symbolizes her unnatural “seclusion from the world” and reinforces her mother’s crime of “immuring so charming a girl within the walls of a cloister” (51).3

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Whether on ancient tombs thou tak’st thy stand, By gibb’ring spectres hailed, thy kindred band; Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page, To please the females of our modest age; All hail, M.P.! from whose infernal brain Thin-sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train, At whose command ‘grim women’ throng in crowds, And kings of fire, of water, and of clouds, With ‘small gray men,’ ‘wild yagers,’ and what not, To crown with honour thee and Walter Scott; Again all hail! if tales like thine may please, St. Luke alone can vanquish the disease, Even Satan’s self with thee might dread to dwell, And in thy skull discern a deeper hell. Lord Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 1809 (117, ll. 265-82)

Following the lead of Byron’s early lampoon of The Monk (1896), criticism has remained generally unkind to what it considers the novel’s Gothic bosh or absurd machinery. In fact, Nina da Vinci Nichols’s recent appraisal concludes that the “mechanical grotesqueries” (200) in The Monk “hold no symbolic value, evoke no mystery, intimate no hidden identity” (204), and thus the novel clearly does “not integrate [its machinery] with the theme” (187).1 And yet Lewis’s preoccupation with voyeurism and penetrating prefabricated veils of repression and hyprocrisy suggests that the “gibb’ring spectres” lurking in his Gothic machine may have a significant, if ambivalent, tale to tell. And this tale begins in the novel’s introit or first chapter, which offers a series of suggestive vignettes that unfold like some surreal triptych in the Madrid Cathedral. The “crowds” that Byron derides initially flock to the Cathedral, betraying secular and especially sexual rather than spiritual motives, since they treat the service as if it were a “play” performance and since “the women came to show themselves, the men to see the women” (35).2 This lonely crowd also confuses the “true devotion” of religious love with the indoctrinated idolatry of violent power and with fear because “superstition reigns with despotic sway . . . in Madrid” (35). And the crowd’s overriding “curiosity” to see the celebrated Monk Ambrosio reflects the obsessive sin of the “prying eye” (109) whose exposed voyeurism more particularly reveals the related concerns of Byron’s “deeper hell” and da Vinci Nichols’s “hidden identity.” For instance, Antonia’s natural “features were hidden” so scrupulously “by a thick veil,” and “her bosom was [so] carefully veiled” that Lorenzo is artificially aroused and begs to be allowed “to remove the gauze” from her face (37-39). Since Lorenzo is “our hero”

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Next, Lorenzo’s portentous dream in “the gothic obscurity of the church” reveals the shared extent of his own and Ambrosio’s ambivalent desires as his marriage ceremony with Antonia, conducted by the Monk, is abortively interrupted by a savage ravisher. Thus, “half-hoping, halffearing,” Lorenzo passively watches as his Nemesis enacts the dreamer’s about-to-be sanctified lust and prefigures Ambrosio’s own later rape of Antonia, his unknown sister. At the same time, the schizoid vertical polarities of the Cathedral collapse, and the ravisher falls through the floor to the fiery vaults foretold in Ambrosio’s sermon, while, naked, Antonia ascends through the “vaulted roof” toward a heavenly choir (52-54). Not having learned the severity of his own repressed and then projected desires, Lorenzo indulges in yet more voyeurism when minutes later he and Don Christoval agree to return to the Cathedral that night and secretly spy on the young nuns who must “take off their veils” before confession. “The gaze of such impure eyes” is ultimately punished when Lorenzo finds himself leering at his own unveiled sister, who is secretly receiving a love letter. At this point, Don Christoval cries, “What, your sister? Diavolo! Then somebody, I suppose, will have to pay for our peeping” (55-56), thus previewing the ambiguous value of symbolic stripteases of both body and soul throughout the novel. The point of recounting these episodes from Chapter One is not only to remark that such a preoccupation with cloistered innocence, repressed sexuality, violent rebellion, and an enforced ambiguity between sacred and profane values recurs throughout The Monk, but also to emphasize that, contrary to prevalent criticism, the novel offers an integrated or at least repeated coordination of its Gothic machinery, especially the sense of place or space, and its Gothic visions. But for a fuller understanding of this coordination, we must ask why Lewis chose a Madrid cathedral and its adjoining “burial ground common” (228) to both the Capuchin monastery and the convent of St. Clare as the primary symbolic machines for transmitting his Gothic visions.

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There may, however, be yet another possible reason for his choice of Madrid, one revealed in G. B. Street’s chatty 1914 account of Gothic Architecture in Spain, namely, that although there are really “no old churches,” still “there is one great attraction to me in Madrid, and only one— the Picture Gallery” (1:279), or Museo del Prado, the famous home of the more enigmatic canvases of Hieronymous Bosch, which Philip II brought to Madrid from the Netherlands around 1560. Philip hung twelve in his palace and treasury and twelve in his hunting lodge at El Prado. In 1574 the nine most significant were secretly “hidden away in his monastery stronghold, the Escorial” (Fraenger 8). Since that time, the name of Bosch and the Madrid repositories have become nearly synonymous. And the bizarre Gothic machinery in these works seems so close to the symbolic machinery in Lewis’s novel that a survey of Bosch and the relevance of what Carl Justi calls “the most important of his works” (48)—his paintings of The Table of Wisdom (c. 1475-85), The Hay Wain (c. 1485-90), The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 14851505), and The Temptation of Saint Anthony (c. 1505-16)—should place The Monk’s Gothic bosh in the proper clarifying context of Bosch’s Gothic monks.4 Of course, unless fresh evidence is uncovered, it will always remain debatable whether or not Lewis actually studied Bosch’s canvases and exorcised their eerie spirit in The Monk. It does seem clear, however, that the haunting cor-

respondences between the work of the painter and the novelist at the least reveal them to be “kindred spirits.” Bosch spent his entire life in his birthplace (which also gave him his name), the Dutch city of ’s-Hertogenbosch, close to what is now the border of Belgium. This is significant because, besides Lewis’s journeys to the continent in 1791 and 1792, which may well have introduced him to the art and architecture of Madrid, he spent much of 1794 at The Hague in the Netherlands serving as a staff member of the British embassy, but also writing The Monk (Irwin 18-22). And this locale too would have provided him with access to other examples of Bosch’s art which were collected in the Low Countries at sites like The Hague, Rotterdam, and Brussels. Significantly, Bosch’s visual perspective itself had been nurtured by the great Gothic Cathedral of St. John in his native town, and the curious gargoyles sitting on its roof buttresses perhaps turn up even more transmogrified in his own monastic and satanic grotesques (Gibson 14-16). In fact, like Lewis, Bosch too is often regarded as merely a faiseur de diables, and both were probably influenced by the notorious Malleus Maleficarum, or Witches’ Hammer (1494), which schematically outlines the relationship between Satan and succubi, like Matilda, who use their sexual charms to debase and then damn ascetics. Thus, and again prefiguring Lewis, Bosch’s work repeatedly excoriates the veiled evils of monastic life, particularly the lust of monks and the hypocritical virginity of nuns, perhaps recalling Saint Paul’s second letter to Timothy in which he decries the doomed city of man as a Vanity Fair where clerics are “lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having the form of godliness, but denying the power thereof. . . . For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts” (II Tim. 3:4-4, Fraenger 20). It is further relevant that in 1947 Wilhelm Fraenger published a revolutionary study of Bosch’s work that drastically revises the older view of him as primarily a painter of devotional altar pieces, but sees him rather as a practising member of the Adamites or Brethren of the Free Spirits, who allegedly indulged in religious rituals of free love, reflecting their desire to return to a state of prelapsarian innocence.5 Thus Fraenger’s Bosch emerges as a kind of complex Fra Lippo Lippi whose work manifestly preaches a gospel of the spirit while latently promoting the enjoyment of the flesh. In Fraenger’s own words, Bosch “freed medieval art from its subjection to the church

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Perhaps it was because Spanish Gothic cathedrals, partially due to the prevalent Moorish influence, are uniquely known for “their rejas or wrought iron screens,” which seem to be part of the same tradition as the Hispanic love of cloaks and fans (Sitwell 139), all of which promote an atmosphere of veiled, partial concealment. It is certainly also true that, as with the Church of San Lorenzo opening Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (itself clearly a critical response to The Monk), the Latin flavoring here helps season the novel’s exposé of repressed fiery passion. Moreover, Spain is the native home of the Inquisition so dear to Lewis and other Gothicists; in fact, in Melmoth the Wanderer “all Spain is but one great monastery” (143) policed by the Inquisition. And yet in 1796, there was no Gothic cathedral in Madrid, only the Jesuit church of San Isidro el Real, which John Harvey describes as “a grim monument of the severest classicism” whose presence “startlingly suggests the portals of a prison” (198-201). But, of course, Lewis may simply have appropriated this relevant suggestion of repression and then altered it to suit his own Gothic specifications.

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Hieronymous Bosch’s Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins, c. 1480-1490.

and, in the phantom world that he made his own creative domain, distorted the fear of God, which the church kept under control, into a terrifying pandemonium of lust.” Thus he dramatizes “a new religious will to life, which clashed with the tradition of the church” and offered “the road to salvation of a religious doctrine of love, a mystery of eroticism” (15). Although art historians disagree on the validity of such a thesis, there can be little doubt that Fraenger honestly confronts the central paradox of Bosch’s art, which seems simultaneously to scourge and sanctify sensual pleasures. And this, of course, is also the central paradox of The Monk. Equally relevant is Fraenger’s attention to Bosch’s manipulation of his onlooker’s voyeuristic tendencies as his paintings stereoscopically focus on both sensual degradation and sexual innocence by setting “a trap for the viewer’s eye” (42) at almost every point on its visual quest through the optical mine fields Bosch’s canvases become. What Fraenger at one point calls Bosch’s “pupillary magic” (270) is perhaps nowhere more evidently relevant to The Monk than in The Table of Wisdom, once known as The Seven Deadly Sins.

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On this forboding tabletop, Bosch presents a central sphere whose outer circumference displays a sevenfold pageantry illustrating each sin and whose inner circumference recreates Christ’s emergence from His sarcophagus within the image of the Eye of God itself, which is captioned, “Beware, Beware, God sees.” Flanking this central circle in each corner of the table hang smaller spheres limning the four last things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. As with each of Bosch’s pertinent works, we can only mention a fraction of the relevant detail here, but the provocative conversion of the Beatific Vision into a Divine Voyeur commands the viewer’s own attention in much the same way as human voyeurism captivates and involves the reader of The Monk. In fact, the bottom scroll warns us of God’s ubiquitous, veiled presence: “I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end shall be” (Deut. 32:20). What God sees, of course, is a reflection of the viewer’s own collective experiences in the cartoonish allegories of the Seven Deadly Sins, which, like The Monk, feature follies from every rank of life including hypocritical monks and nuns. Thus the outer macrocosm of the earth and the inner

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More particularly, the tableau of Death reminds us of the psychomachia staged during Ambrosio’s execution vigil since dire Death and his satanic familiar seem at least as potent as the dour friars and nuns in the picture. This kind of doubling ironically implies that even the Church itself must invoke such spiritual horrors to frighten the departing soul to heaven, if the induced despair doesn’t first precipitate the sinner, like Ambrosio, to hell. As Agnes cries apropos of the Draconian nuns who guard her, “they think themselves holy, while they torture me like fiends! . . . ’tis they who threaten me with eternal perdition!” (356). Moreover, in the vignette of Hell itself, which illustrates the particular punishment of each Deadly Sin, the burning towers stoked by demons recall the flaming convent torched by the demonic crowd in The Monk, and the nude female whose genitals are appropriately covered by a verminous toad is paradoxically reminiscent of the imprisoned and “half naked” (355) Agnes “who felt the bloated toad . . . dragging his loathsome length along my bosom” (395). The implication here is that, although Agnes’s concupiscence may be less noxious in the viewer’s eyes than that of Bosch’s fleshly sinner, still her punishment identically fits her crime since she admits “I violated my vows of chastity,” which Ambrosio rephrases as “you have defiled the sacred habit by your impurity” (71, 70). Next, The Hay Wain triptych at the Escorial (another version survives in the Museo del Prado) presents two outer wings illustrating the Wayfarer or earthly Pilgrim travelling, much like Raymond, through a treacherous terrain of stylized robbers, executions, and sensual peasants, each of which, in different ways, anticipates the sensuous saraband depicted on the inner panels. Here an allegorical procession, praising folly like the Cathedral crowd in The Monk, quite literally “worships” hay or meaningless mercenary goods (Gibson 70,

73) and is flanked by smaller panels of Paradise and Hell, just as the images of “the garden and cemetery” (335) dominate monastic life in the novel. In fact, the eye’s pilgrimage through these three panels and their visual snares traces a kind of typically Gothic W pattern as it sinks through Paradise, ascends to the crest of the wagon, and then plummets again through the topography of Hell. In this sense, it is significant that both Paradise and Hell are similarly structured according to analogous vertical levels, suggesting that the fall of innocence is as naturally inherent to both conditions as the repeated intrusion of the serpent. Both innocence and experience, according to Lewis’s contemporary Blake, are “the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul” (Blake 171). Thus, as our eye descends through the planes of Paradise, it is as if we are psychonauts exploring the rough underbelly of embowered innocence. Adam and Eve first appear gracefully unclothed; then Eve cautiously veils herself with a figleaf during the temptation, and finally both are shamefully veiled upon being driven from the Garden. In Hell, although the figleaf is replaced first by the emblematic toad and then by the coiling serpent, the viewer’s sense of the dialectic between innocence and experience is much the same, only darkened because of the infernal chromatic scale. Together both panels remind us that The Monk similarly moves from the monastery garden to Ambrosio’s concluding inferno in a valley landscaped like Jehosaphat. In the central panel, the symbolic bower of bliss crowning the hay wagon is complete with both a resident angel and serpentine demon, but the attitudes of the lovers suggest that the latter has won the day as they are about to “make hay.” This kind of visual pun, so dear to Bosch, implies that here Luxuria, or Queen Lust, dominates the other Deadly Sins emblemized in the procession, as the seductress Matilda seems to dominate so much of the central action in The Monk. In fact, when Ambrosio is stung as he “stopped to pluck one of the roses” for Matilda in the monastery garden, his hand “swelled to an extraordinary size.” The consequent sexual implications of his fall and the repeated poison-passion analogy suggest not only that “concealed among the roses” (92) of every innocent garden is a serpent, even if it is only the serpent of mutability, but also that the fall can always be a prelude to “extraordinary” self-development. Furthermore, the swarthy devils and burning towers in Hell and the secular prelates and worldly monks and nuns at the Hay festival suggest the mise en scène of Lorenzo’s

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microcosm of the eye coincide here, just as the image of the mirror, repeatedly associated with the sin of Superbia, may remind us not only that Lewis’s own “passion for mirrors” (Irwin 26) is reflected in the magic glass exposing the bathing Antonia to Ambrosio, but also that Pride personified in Ambrosio controls each of its satellite pecadillos like Beatrice’s lust, Baptiste’s thieving avarice, Donna Rodolpha’s envy of Agnes, Mother Agatha’s raging anger, the parody of sloth in the “soporific draught” (321) which symbolizes the embowered Antonia as “the prey of ennui” (305), and even Flora’s comically gluttonous feasting on fowl on Friday (314-15).

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dream, besides the religious danse macabre of “grotesque attitudes” in the Procession of St. Clare, which precedes the burning of the convent (336). More generally, though, the sense of déja vù one feels when examining these uncanny panels is due to their strange Gothic intermixture of tones, which ineffably blends the blessed and bestial into a kind of consecrated cartoon like The Monk. In this sense, both viewer and reader feel much as Agnes does upon awakening in her crypt: “my senses were so bewildered, and my brain so dizzy, that I strove in vain to arrange the strange images which floated in wild confusion before me” (384). At any rate, the paradoxes of the garden that Lewis and Bosch similarly dramatize are the primary focus of the triptych of The Garden of Earthly Delights, which flanks the central panel of the Earthly Paradise again with side panels of Eden and Hell. As in The Monk, the painting’s visual challenge involves its questioning ambivalence toward love and sensual fulfillment. That is, does the canvas, like a traditional allegory of the Bower of Bliss, warn us, with Keats that we “dwell with Beauty—Beauty that must die?” This Et in Arcadia Ego motif was popularly rendered during the Renaissance in ivory miniatures exposing entwined lovers or an inviting nude female, behind whom lurks a decomposing grim reaper (Gibson 87-88) whose memento mori punishes the initial voyeurism much as the veiled, rotten corpse of the Bleeding Nun rebukes Raymond’s fascination with Agnes (170). On the other hand, does the painting suggest that sensual fulfillment leads to Hell only if, like Lorenzo, one is guiltily programmed by orthodoxy to view pleasure as precipitating a sinful fall from the graceful innoncence of Paradise? The canvas’s provocative marriage of heaven and hell seems to support both readings, and in this sense it closely resembles The Monk. More specifically, it again prefigures the “voluptuous tranquility” of the “abbey-garden” (7374) where Matilda first visually tempts Ambrosio with the “beauteous orb” of her “half exposed” breast (87). And the ocular geometry of the central pool of nude female bathers surrounded by the frenzied cavalcade of male voyeurs makes us wonder whether Bosch means to pluck out our eye or to glorify its gifts.6 As Walter S. Gibson contends, Bosch’s Earthly Paradise probably owes much of its landscaping to the Romance of the Rose (83-87), and Lewis’s version is clearly in the same romance tradition: “Fountains, springing from the basons [sic] of white marble, cooled the air with perpetual showers, and the walls were entirely

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covered by jessamine, vines, and honeysuckles. . . . a gentle breeze breathed the fragrance of orange-blossoms along the alleys, and the nightingale poured forth her melodious murmur from the shelter of an artificial wilderness” (73). Lewis even includes a “hermitage” or “rustic grotto” nestled in “the bosom of this little grove” where Matilda and Ambrosio hold their trysts and where similarly, in the lower right foreground of Bosch’s hortus conclusus, a hirsute Adam and Eve peep out from their cover. Fraenger again finds such a grotto to be of central importance to the Adamite cult which saw “Adam as the Christlike bearer of revelation, the underground cave as Paradise, and ritual nakedness associated with markedly religious love, which was regarded as innocent and above all sensuality, and was usually called ‘angelic love’” (19). We must remember, however, that the Hell panel restages this scenario like some monstrous immorality play, where the reign of Queen Lust becomes a reign of terror. The romance motif of “the music of the flesh” (Gibson 98) is here particularly punished, and the naked figure crucified on the serpent-entwined harp reminds us that Matilda beguiles Ambrosio’s senses with her harpplaying, which suggestively “proves her a perfect mistress of the instrument” (95). Again and by now almost predictably, crumbling, burning towers overlay Bosch’s topsy-turvy Gehenna structured partially like a Gothic monastery and Inquisition chamber, where the prisoners are judging their hypocritical judges and where a monkish confessor sodomistically ruts with his penitent and simultaneously reads about unpardonable sins from his confession manual. At the same time, a lascivious sow in a nun’s habit, recalling Matilda’s religious disguise, clutches a naked prelate and urges him to consign his estate to the priory as well as his soul to the pit. This quantitative approach to religion recalls Jacintha’s comic concern with simony when she “purchased as many pardons from the pope as would buy off Cain’s punishment” (313). Finally, the Prince of Darkness himself is here reminiscent of the winged Satan and his eagle familiars which alternately punish Ambrosio (420), since Lucifer is depicted as an insatiable bird of prey with a chamber pot, who engorges himself on one victim as he vents others into even lower depths of the infernal sewer from which peeps a parody of our first parents in their paradisal cave in the center panel. Thus love quite literally “pitches his mansion in the place of excrement,” and yet the combined effect of all three panels is closer to Crazy Jane’s

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‘Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul,’ I cried! . . . . . ‘For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.’ (254-55, ll. 7-8, 17-18)

Finally, Fraenger reminds us that “Bosch’s favorite theme [is] the temptation of St. Anthony” (305). And the painter’s renditions of this theme are very relevant to our understanding of the temptations of Ambrosio in The Monk, who clearly identifies with the sense-plagued saint: “St Anthony had withstood all seductions to lust, then why should not he? Besides, St. Anthony was tempted by the devil . . .” (103). Thus, much more than their common Franciscan order link Bosch’s and Lewis’s frairs, not the least of which being that Antonia (Ambrosio’s sister) is the feminine form of Anthony. Fraenger’s masterful analysis of Bosch’s late treatment of his otherworldly recluse, which hangs in the Prado, is especially perceptive in contrasting St. Anthony’s external visual serenity with what the landscape reveals as tumultuous internal visions rivaling Ambrosio’s: “the images generated by his unconscious instinctual drives usually represent masked and disguised sexuality” (307). These drives are especially personified in that “unknown brother” who peeps at Bosch’s meditative monk from the pool before him like the dark paraclete in Lorenzo’s dream: “With its cry of ‘In vain!’ this unexpectedly emerging self seeks to unmask the saint’s ascetic effort as worthless self-deception and hopeless effort, since neither mortification of the flesh nor contemplative sublimation has been able to overcome his inborn nature” (308). Much more famous and pertinent, however, is The Temptation of Saint Anthony triptych (c. 14851505), now in Lisbon, which grotesquely revises the hagiographical legends recounting Anthony’s attack by demons while he was praying near a desert sepulchre, their second attack when they toss him skyward and allow him to fall battered back to earth, and his final test by the Devil Queen whose apparent compassion veils her carnal temptations. Thus, as Lewis’s Ambrosio presents his reader with a kind of visual ambrosia, so too Bosch’s Anthony fascinates our voyeuristic curiosities and is perhaps even a symbolic self-portrait of his creator (Justi 55). In Fraenger’s words, Bosch “has called upon the four elements, plunging them into spooky tumult in which sexuality intertwines with the trefoil of idolatry, magic, and

sodomy and serves above all to excite the roving eye” (346). And relevantly it was during Bosch’s life that the Humanists began to question the real value of Anthony’s brand of cloistered and solipsistic innocence (Gibson 152), as Lewis later does with Ambrosio’s “total exclusion from the world” which prevents him from knowing “in what consists the difference of man and woman” (44) and which repressively precludes even “the opportunity to be guilty” (47)—at least until such repression spawns instinctual rebellion. More particularly, Anthony’s vertical double exposure in the upper and lower sections of the right panel clarifies the similar trajectory of Ambrosio’s fall, suggesting that the self-denying ascetic who overreaches human limits ultimately disembodies himself to less than human proportions as his pride goes before his fall. Furthermore, the burning monastery in the central panel is again relevant to the inferno which engulfs the convent and suggests the metaphoric context of the disease of ergotism or St. Anthony’s fire, one of whose symptoms is satanic hallucinations (Gibson 145). The Black Mass offered next to the obelisk recalls Matilda’s and Ambrosio’s devil worship. But more significantly, at the center of the main panel is the parodic willow hag with her spectral infant and ghastly paramour, dubbed the “virgin” and noble “young man” (Fraenger 391), who seem disturbing prototypes of the cadaverous Agnes, her dead child, and the diseased Raymond. Finally, in the right panel, when the Devil Queen tries to veil her nudity with assumed modesty, Anthony’s consequent resistance to this enforced voyeurism only drives his averted glance to the devil’s obscene banquet being prepared in the lower left foreground, which seems to offer the anchorite only more fascinating sexual and satanic indelicacies, just as Ambrosio is driven from the affected modesty of Matilda to the artificially conditioned modesty of Antonia and finally to the black magic of Satan. In sum, whether or not Bosch’s Anthony is indicted as Fraenger argues, his temptations, like Ambrosio’s, appear self-conceived, and his demons and their familiars seem to be as much mentors as tormentors. Thus, like the ambiguous vertical extremes in Lorenzo’s dream, Bosch’s ambivalent presentation of Anthony’s descent helps prepare us for Lewis’s ultimate presentation of Ambrosio’s climactic rise and fall in the last paragraph of The Monk (41920): “The daemon continued to soar aloft, till reaching a dreadful height, he released the sufferer. Headlong fell the monk through the airy waste; the sharp point of a rock received him; and

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major argument to her bishop (in Yeats’s poem, not Lewis’s own popular “Crazy Jane Ballad”):

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he rolled from precipice to precipice, till, bruised and mangled, he rested on the river’s banks.” Subsequently, for “six miserable days did the villain languish. On the seventh a storm arose: . . . the waves overflowed their banks; they reached the spot where Ambrosio lay, and when they abated, carried with them into the river the corse of the despairing monk.” These prolonged final moments of Ambrosio broadcast several significantly mixed extratextual and textual allusions which finally enlarge Lewis’s indictment of voyeurism into the Gothic dialectical vision of the human condition, which Byron’s Manfred summarizes as “Half dust, half deity, alike unfit / To sink or soar” (393, I, ii, 40-41).7 For example, besides its rather remarkable resemblance to Bosch’s depiction of St. Anthony’s satanically controlled descent, Ambrosio’s fall recalls Adam’s fall from grace and Lucifer’s from heaven in Paradise Lost, and “his broken and dislocated limbs” suggest the consequent selfdivision which St. Anthony, Adam, and Satan all, at least symbolically, suffer. His wracked limbs may even conjure associations with Christ’s crucifixion, and certainly the Abbot’s early promise and sanctity render him as a figure of Christ before he devolves into an Antichrist. Furthermore, the seven day ordeal implies a chaotic parody of Creation (much as when “Universal Darkness buries All” at the end of Pope’s The Dunciad, 584, IV, 655), although the cleansing river and storm may also refer to Noah’s purging and purifying final flood. But then again the wrathful environment here also connotes the apocalyptic Dies Irae traditionally associated with the Valley of Jehosaphat. Moreover, the plague of insects which drink Ambrosio’s blood as “they fastened upon his sores, darted their strings into his body, and covered him with their multitudes” seems at first glance almost a parasitic parody of his own violation of Antonia, and thus his punishment befits his crime. It also, however, represents one of several reversals of the legends of St. Ambrose documented in Jacobus de Voragine’s medieval collection of the lives of the saints, The Golden Legend, which certainly influenced Bosch. Voragine describes not only how Ambrose was destined for greatness when, as a child, a swarm of bees flew into his mouth and then soared away toward heaven, but also how he affected paganism and whoremongering to avoid the honor of election to a bishop, how he prophesied his sister would one day kiss him earnestly when he attained an episcopacy, and how he was especially versed in exorcising demons (24-33)—all of which

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legends seem parodied in Ambrosio’s insect attack, sin of incest, and demonic idolatry. Besides such paradoxically mixed allusions to sacred writings, there are other profane, classical allusions to the various tortures of Tartarus, especially the frustrations of Tantalus and Sisyphus since, though “a burning thirst tormented” Ambrosio, he “strove in vain to drag himself towards” the nearby river. The classical motif is rendered more relevant when “the eagles of the rock tore his flesh piecemeal, and dug out his eyeballs with their crooked beaks,” since these predators seem to be grotesque exaggerations of the “tame linnet” which, while Ambrosio watched, “nibbled” Antonia’s breast “in wanton play” as she “strove in vain to shake off the bird from its delightful harbour” (269). On the other hand, of course, their persecution recalls the plight of Prometheus and suggests the titanic scope of Ambrosio’s rebellion against God. Finally, his symbolic blinding directly implies Oedipus’s sin of incest, besides providing a final chastisement of his voyeurism. Moreover, placed as it is at the very end of the novel, like Melmoth the Wanderer’s fall from the sea cliff, Ambrosio’s unrepentant tragic downfall radically rejects (rather than reinforces) the sense of Providential order and renewal which the Duke of Medina’s political “prudence and moderation” (378) and the social contracts of the final marriages seem to establish. Thus, like Fortinbras at the end of Hamlet, Medina apparently insures that “order and tranquility once more prevailed through Madrid” (377), and yet the reader’s actual response to the novel’s political and social sense of retributive justice may share more with Elvira’s earlier conclusions: “in a world so base, so perfidious and depraved, her heart swelled with the bitterness of apprehension” (277). As Lewis himself once observed in a letter to his mother, “in my opinion, the acuteness of pleasure in this world bears no proportion to the acuteness of pain” (Peck 222). Again, then, Ambrosio resembles Bosch’s ambiguous monk because his diabolic punishment cannot be easily judged and, in fact, casts serious doubts on any facile, reductive reading of the novel as Lewis’s self-indulgence in Gothic machinery. In this context, when Ambrosio languishes “execrating his existence” after his fall, his possibly sympathetic Angst repeats the earlier existential agonies of Antonia and Agnes, just as the splintered selves of Bosch’s Anthony are personified throughout the unspeakable practices fragmenting his canvases. Agnes’s recalled notes from

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In sum, just as hints of St. Anthony’s damnation darken the tone of Bosch’s canvases, so too the Gothic machinery of Ambrosio’s climactic damnation casts a retrospective pall over The Monk’s several ambivalent soliloquies in a Spanish cloister. It reminds us of Ambroisio’s tongue-

in-cheek remark that the “sepulchre seems to me to be Love’s bower” (366) and of Medina’s more cynical echo from As You Like It: “men have died, and worms have ate them, but not for love” (381). It even reminds us of the profound sense of Gothic ruin which the many “objects of mortality” (367) and “images of corruption” (368), like “graves, and tombs, and skeletons” (366), instill in the novel. Ultimately, it may remind us that whether we take pride in, or feel pity for, Ambrosio’s capital punishment, our response entraps us in bogs of moral ambiguity as deep and sticky as those in Bosch’s work, since if we self-righteously exult in the Monk’s torture, we grow like the sadistic Prioress or ironically like the brutal mob whose “barbarous vengeance” wrongfully punishes her. On the other hand, if we forgive Ambrosio as Agnes forgives Mother St. Agatha (395), our kindness seems a form of wilfull blindness, and our pardon may almost criminally betray an inner weakness. Thus neither a sense of retributive justice, nor a sense of forgiveness seems entirely defensible here. Even though the Inquisitorial ministers of God pardon the Abbot’s unpardonable sin, his preemptive despair makes a mockery of that pardon and of his own opportunistic faith. And when we consider that Satan thus appears to have “triumphed” (418) in his battle with God over Ambrosio’s soul, or at least that God must depend on Satan as His Executioner, the novel’s assault on Divine Providence and Omnipotence seems equally disturbing. As a matter of fact, the counterpointing energies in Lewis’s Gothic romance, as in Bosch’s Gothic art, create an honest doubt and healthy skepticism that are ultimately more redemptive than the warped value systems both artists condemn. Lord Holland meant gently to lament such iconoclasm in Lewis some years after his friend’s death, but actually reveals the strength of Lewis’s (and Bosch’s) appeal: “his mind was vitiated with a mystical, though irreligious, philosophy; his taste in reading, writing, and thinking, corrupted by paradox; and his conversation disfigured by captious perverseness in controversy” (Peck 176). Thus, like Bosch’s work, The Monk accommodates both God and ghosts, recalling Shelley’s rather dismayed description of the way Lewis and Byron equated both forms of Gothic machinery, while he himself believed only in unholy spirits. While “Apollo’s Sexton” (Byron’s name for Lewis) rationally may have disbelieved in either, imaginatively the “many mysteries of his trade” in The Monk demanded both. In Shelley’s words, “We talk of

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the underground (390-97) in her “subterraneous dwelling” partially reinforce this ultimate tone of Gothic existentialism,8 which outlasts the questionable nature of her marital bliss. They also tend to duplicate Bosch’s painted notes from his underground charnel and carnal houses. Thus Agnes is nearly “driven by despair to madness” when she finds herself “in silence and fortitude” forced to “drag on a miserable existence” in the subterranean torture chamber which also “terminated my sweet babe’s short and painful existence.” In fact, so memorable is this solitary confinement that her subsequent and almost absurd “sudden transition from misery to bliss” seems illusory; and her earlier captivity, like Ambrosio’s final moments, becomes an existential paradigm of the prevalent human condition in the novel: “So lately a captive, oppressed with chains, perishing with hunger, suffering every inconvenience of cold and want, hidden from the light, excluded from society, hopeless, neglected, and, as I feared, forgotten.” Consequently, her long-awaited marriage to Raymond (like the union of Bosch’s Willow Hag and Noble Young Man) and Lorenzo’s to Virginia hardly provide a happilyever-after romance closure. Rather, they are like Theodore and Isabella’s warped wedding at the end of The Castle of Otranto when, after the mayhem of Walpole’s Gothic excess, the sober ceremony simply provides the bereaved Theodore with a receptive ear for his lamenting the loss of Matilda, that is, “the society of one, with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul” (106). Here, too, the nuptials are suitably somber since Lorenzo’s feeling for Virginia “partook not of the ardent character which had marked his affections for Antonia” (399). And like Bosch’s black humor, Lewis’s sense of absurdity, which Walpole sadly lacks, makes Agnes’s marriage more sardonic than somber since she ominously suggests to Raymond that her premarital sexuality shall be replaced with complete marital chastity: “the more culpable have been the errors of your mistress, the more exemplary shall be the conduct of your wife” (398). Thus the veil prematurely removed would now seem to become a chastity belt locked forever, thereby perpetuating the repressive value systems which have plagued everyone in the novel.

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Ghosts. Neither Lord Byron nor M. G. L. seems to believe in them; and they both agree, in the very face of reason, that none could believe in ghosts without believing in God. I do not think that all persons who profess to discredit these visitations, really discredit them; or, if they do in the daylight, are not admonished, by the approach of loneliness and midnight, to think more respectfully of the world of shadows” (Shelley 147). But Shelley slights Lewis’s uncompromising intellectual integrity, for his Gothic vision, like Bosch’s, insists upon our remaining open to conflicting solutions to the human dilemma. Although both raise our eyebrows, these kindred spirits also open our eyes to the radical tolerance of “the innocent eye” or dialectical condition of “alert suspense” that their brother Gothicist,9 Sir Herbert Read, ultimately advocates: “For in the end I have put all in doubt / God, man; earth, heaven: I live on in alert suspense. / I believe in my unbelief” (“The Golden Disc,” 242, ll. 91-93). Or as Lewis confessed to his mother after finishing The Monk, “I prefer knowing the whole, or nothing; for I have an admirable talent for tormenting myself, and the truth can never be worse, tha[n] what I imagine when left to myself” (Peck 216).

Notes 1. Several other critical responses have also addressed the problem of formal unity and the relevance of Gothic machinery in The Monk. Brooks and Grudin find an historical and philosophical unity in the novel, but for different reasons. The former believes “the novel can in fact be read as one of the first and most lucid contextualizations of life in a world where reason has lost its prestige, yet the Godhead has lost its otherness; where the Sacred has been reacknowledged but atomized, and its ethical imperatives psychologized” (249). The latter, on the other hand, sees The Monk reflecting “pre-enlightenment” rather than postenlightenment ideas: “Unwilling to rely solely on the shopworn machinery of castles, armor and crypts, [Lewis] created a Gothic atmosphere with a fidelity that Walpole and Radcliffe never achieved. His novel recreates a world that is theologically as well as physically archaic” (144). Other relevant studies argue sporadically that Lewis’s manipulation of reader response helps to coordinate his otherwise disparate material. For instance, Lydenberg’s pertinent treatment of narrative “ambivalence” in The Monk finds that “Lewis’ repeated ironic undercutting of the trappings of Gothic fiction, which he nevertheless persists in employing to maximum effect, reveals the same tentativeness which leads him to affect a flippancy and indifference towards all literary activity” (65). Kiely feels that “it is almost as though Lewis had played an unfair trick on the reader by endowing his Gothic stereotypes with life at unexpected and fatal moments” (114). And lastly Punter insists that, “above all,” Lewis “wants the reader to see essentially private faults exposed mercilessly on a more or less public

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stage, and he wants to mock his confused reactions. For Lewis, at all points, tries to be more cynical than his audience, and to dominate it by means of this cynicism” (92). 2. All future page references to The Monk are from the Evergreen edition and are included in the text. 3. For an excellent general discussion of the Gothic imagery of veils and surfaces, see Sedgwick. 4. The interested reader should consult Justi’s entire discussion of “The Works of Hieronymous Bosch in Spain.” 5. I am using Putnam’s edition of Fraenger because it is a “complete edition” (506) of Fraenger’s work on Bosch, including revisions of his seminal 1947 study and his later analyses of individual paintings. This Putnam edition also provides large illustrative plates and numerous helpful close-ups of detail from all of the paintings discussed in this essay. For a judicious evaluation of Fraenger’s controlling hypothesis and its place in Bosch studies, see Patrik Reuterswärd’s Postscript (499-506). 6. See MacAndrew for a discussion of this garden as “a distortion of the devices of the Sentimental novel” (92-93). 7. For other brief treatments of Ambrosio’s final “downfall,” see Gose (37-38), Fogle (43-44), Kiely (117), and Hallie (78-79). 8. Brooks also implies an existential reading of the novel (262-63). For an account of the relationships between Gothicism and Existentialism, see Hennelly’s discussion of “Gothic Existentialism” with special reference to Melmoth the Wanderer (particularly 666-71). 9. The Innocent Eye is the relevant title of Read’s autobiography. For an example of Read’s interest in Gothicism, see his Introduction to Wilhelm Worringer’s architectural study, Form in Gothic, where he not only defends Gothic machinery, but also finds in it a dialectical temper close to his own: “Gothic art must no longer be the romantic predilection of the traveller and archaeologist: it takes its place as the highest and most accurate expression of a great phase in the history of European culture.” Consequently, Worringer’s analysis of Gothic architectural psychology “necessarily makes demands on the reader: it exacts a close attention and a ‘willing suspension’ of prejudice” (xii).

Works Cited Blake, William. Engraved and Etched Writings. William Blake’s Writings. Ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Vol. 2. Brooks, Peter. “Virtue and Terror: The Monk.” English Literary History 40 (1973): 249-63. Byron, George Gordon Lord. Byron: Poetical Works. Ed. Frederick Page. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970. da Vinci Nichols, Nina. “Place and Eros in Radcliffe, Lewis, and Brontë.” The Female Gothic. Ed. Juliann E. Fleenor. Montreal and London: Eden Press, 1983. 187-206. de Voragine, Jacobus. The Golden Legend. Trans. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1941. Fogle, Richard Harter. “The Passions of Ambrosio.” The Classic British Novel. Ed. Howard M. Harper, Jr. and Charles Edge. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1972. 36-50.

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Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. Three Gothic Novels. ed. E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1966. 1-106.

Gibson, Walter S. Hieronymous Bosch. New York and Washington: Praeger, 1973.

Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1956.

Gose, Elliott B. Imagination Indulged: The Irrational in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1972. 27-40. Grudin, Peter. “The Monk: Matilda and the Rhetoric of Deceit.” Journal of Narrative Technique 5 (1975): 136146. Hallie, Philip P. The Paradox of Cruelty. Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1969. 63-84 passim. Harvey, John. The Cathedrals of Spain. New York: Hastings House, 1957. Hannelly, Mark M., Jr. “Gothic Existentialism in Melmoth the Wanderer.” Studies in English Literature 21 (1981): 665-79. Irwin, Joseph James. M. G. “Monk” Lewis. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Justi, Carl. “The Works of Hieronymous Bosch in Spain.” Bosch in Perspective. Ed. James Snyder. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972. 98-117. Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Monk. Ed. Louis F. Peck. Intro. John Berryman. New York: Evergreen Book, 1959. Lydenburg, Robin. “Ghostly Rhetoric: Ambivalence in M.G. Lewis’ The Monk.” Ariel 10 (1979): 65-78. MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1979. 86-93. Maturin, Charles Robert. Melmoth the Wanderer. Intro. William F. Axton. Lincoln: Univ. Nebraska Press, Bison Book, 1961. Peck, Louis. A Life of Matthew G. Lewis. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961. Pope, Alexander. Poetical Works. Ed. Herbert Davis. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the present day. London and New York: Longman, 1980. 60-97 passim. Read, Herbert. Collected Poems. New York: Horizon Press, 1966. ———. The Innocent Eye. New York: Holt, 1947. ———. Trans., ed., and intro. Form in Gothic. By Wilhelm Worringer. rev. ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1957. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel.” PMLA 96 (1981): 255-70. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck. 10 vols. London: Ernest Benn and New York: Gordian Press, 1965. Vol. 6. Sitwell, Sacheverell. Gothic Europe. New York: Holt, 1969. Street, George Edmund. Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain. Ed. Georgiana Goddard King. 2 vols. New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1914. Vol. 1.

ANGELA WRIGHT (ESSAY DATE 2002) SOURCE: Wright, Angela. “European Disruptions of the Idealized Woman: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and the Marquis de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine.” In European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760-1960, edited by Avril Horner, pp. 39-54. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. In the following essay, Wright traces parallels between The Monk and the Marquis de Sade’s novel Justine and maintains that the two works influenced one another in significant ways, including in their narrative technique and portrayal of heroines.

Matthew Gregory Lewis and the Marquis de Sade are, in their own rights, well-researched authors. Lewis is rightfully accorded a prominent position in critical surveys of the English Gothic novel due to his notorious production The Monk (Miles 1993; Kilgour 1995; Botting 1996; Punter 1996); the Marquis de Sade has also recently been afforded a great deal of critical and biographical attention (Lever 1991; Schaeffer 1999). What is less well documented, however, is the mutually influential relationship under which both authors’ work flourished. The tracing of Matthew Lewis’s numerous ‘borrowed’ sources in The Monk began swiftly after the novel’s publication. In 1797, for example, an article in the Monthly Review took pleasure in identifying in The Monk a number of plot motifs taken from, amongst other sources, Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom, Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772), and numerous German romances. The review, however, was surprisingly favourable of these ‘borrowings’. It argued: This may be called plagiarism, yet it deserves some praise. The great art of writing consists in selecting what is most stimulant from the works of our predecessors, and in uniting the gathered beauties in a new whole, more interesting than the tributary models. This is the essential process of the imagination, and excellence is no otherwise attained. All invention is but new combination. To invent well is to combine the impressive. (Anon. 1797b: 451, n. 23)

Such accusations of lightly veiled plagiarism, coupled with the extensive documentation of Lewis’s familiarity with and translations of German terror literature, have haunted the publication history of The Monk to such an extent that we are now inclined to read it as a Barthesian tis-

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Fraenger, Wilhelm. Hieronymous Bosch. Trans. Helen Sebba. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1983.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR JOSEPH JAMES IRWIN ON LEWIS’S MASTERY OF HORROR AND TERROR

The Gothic novel has been reborn in the last half of the twentieth century, but it did not really need rediscovery, since M. G. Lewis’s Monk has been almost continuously in print since its first publication in 1796. The new Gothic novel owes a debt to it and to its nineteen-year-old author, Matthew Gregory Lewis, better known by his nickname “Monk,” for the new novel can hardly be written without some imitation, conscious or unconscious, of the old one. Monk brought terror literature to a high state of accomplishment in the approximately fifteen years in which he flourished as a writer. Although he did not try to write another novel, he worked on terror plays and terror poems in which he perfected three genre techniques that have become so traditional that they are almost the only methods used to present the pleasurable thrills of horror and of terror. Although the dominance of The Monk has obscured Lewis’s other literary works, he wrote not only terror plays, such as his very popular Castle Spectre, but also legitimate tragedies and comedies, some of which were acted before enthusiastic audiences in spite of the unkind remarks of his critics and which are examples of the dramatic taste of the late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century British theater. Despite such drama, Lewis was at his best in the horrific and the spectacular. SOURCE: Irwin, Joseph James. “Writer and Humanitarian.” In M. G. “Monk” Lewis, pp. 11-34. Boston: Twayne, 1976.

sue of other stories, rather than search for coherency of themes. This chapter, however, will begin by tracing the mutual influences which the texts of de Sade and Lewis shared, and conclude by charting the reciprocity of themes and ideas between Lewis and de Sade. Matthew Lewis published The Monk in 1796, subsequent to some time spent in Paris. While he was in Paris in the summer of 1791, he acquired

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and read the second edition of the Marquis de Sade’s novel Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, published in that same year. The reading of Justine undoubtedly influenced Lewis’s subsequent novelistic creation, for The Monk sent the English Gothic novel in a radical new direction, on account of the terrors to which its pious female characters are subjected. The Monk, indeed, bears far more comparison with de Sade’s libertine novels than with the English Gothic novel form because, as many critics have noted, it is a novel that focuses entirely upon the revelatory aspect of narrative. In this way, it clearly maps on to de Sade’s project of ‘tout révéler’, or ‘the revelation of all’. Having acknowledged that de Sade’s creation Justine was undoubtedly a source of inspiration for Lewis, the latter part of this chapter will chart how, in return, Lewis’s novel appears to have influenced de Sade’s third and final reprise of the story of Justine. Significantly, Lewis’s The Monk was translated into French for the first time in 1797 under the simple title of Le Moine.1 The publication date of this first translation is significant, for 1797 also marked the year in which, after a lapse of six years, de Sade revised the notorious Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, into a third and final edition entitled La Nouvelle Justine. Crucially, Lewis’s novel lies between the second and third editions of de Sade’s creation, and, I would argue, provided a stimulus for de Sade’s comprehensive thematic revisions. The first edition of de Sade’s novel, Les Infortunes de la vertu, was written during his imprisonment in the Bastille between 1787 and 1788. Les Infortunes recounts the story of a pious and innocent girl named Justine, who, upon the death of her parents, is thrown out onto the streets from the convent where she has been living. She has an older sister called Juliette who is licentious by nature and who resolves to maintain herself by prostitution; to the fervently religious Justine, however, this is a fate worse than death. She resolves to earn her living through honesty and charity, but in the cruel world that de Sade depicts, she soon discovers that honesty and virtue are worthless commodities. Her starkly depicted naivety make her a victim of constant rape and torture from the figureheads of the institutions in which she places her faith. This first edition of de Sade’s novel was a modest two hundred pages in length and was described by its author as a ‘conte philosophique’ or ‘philosophical tale’. De Sade never published Les Infortunes and it did not see the light of day until 1930, when it was edited by Maurice Heine. De Sade’s

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Such Gothic additions to de Sade’s novel clearly influenced some of the scenarios in Lewis’s novel. For example, the sepulchral location of Antonia’s rape by Ambrosio in The Monk bears a strong resemblance to the underground seraglio in the Sainte-Marie-des-Bois monastery where Justine is raped and tortured. Besides locational and atmospheric resemblances, there are also clear thematic parallels between Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, The Monk, and de Sade’s subsequent La Nouvelle Justine. One of the most striking themes which is shared by both authors lies in the brutal collation of their novelistic heroines with idolized versions of the Madonna. It was through this key coupling of their heroines with the Madonna that Lewis and de Sade launched a critique of the privileging of such iconography in religion. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger has famously commented on the portrayal of women as visions that: ‘Women watch themselves being looked at . . . The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight . . .’ (1972: 47). According to Berger, then, there is little or no distinction between this ‘sight’, conjured by the female to flatter the male, and becoming an ‘object of vision’. The word ‘vision’ is of vital importance in the way that the heroines of both The Monk and the various versions of Justine are portrayed. At the beginning of their novels, Lewis and de Sade both establish a discourse of spectacle in which both characters and readers are compelled to participate. Lewis’s novel The Monk signals its participation in this complicitous spectatorial discourse on the very first page, where an audience is gathered

at the Church of the Capuchins to hear the eponymous monk Ambrosio preach: Scarcely had the Abbey-Bell tolled for five minutes, and already was the Church of the Capuchins thronged with Auditors. Do not encourage the idea that the Crowd was assembled from motives of piety or thirst of information . . . The Women came to show themselves, the Men to see the Women: Some were attracted by curiosity to hear an Orator so celebrated; Some came because they had no better means of employing their time till the play began; Some, from being assured that it would be impossible to find places in the Church; and one half of Madrid was brought thither by expecting to see the other half. (Lewis 1980: 7)

By establishing at the very beginning of this novel unstable connections between female beauty, male desire and religion, the novel immediately establishes the themes that it wishes to undermine. The narrator’s stark honesty at the beginning of the novel provides a sharp contrast to the characters’ own lack of motivational awareness. It also, however, forces the reader into a passive position where there is no mystery to be worked out. Everything is on display in The Monk: sexual desire, hypocrisy and naivety are all presented to us, forcing us into a spectatorial position. Such a revelatory beginning to The Monk bears comparison with de Sade’s second edition of Justine in 1791. In Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, Justine as first-person narrator is coaxed by her otherwise silent auditors at one point in the narrative to continue her revelation of all the horrors that have been forced upon her. Her delicacy makes her pause and consider the effects of the story on her audience. However, the audience, being comprised of her libertine sister Juliette and her lover de Corville, urges her to recount all: Mais comment abuser de votre patience pour vous raconter ces nouvelles horreurs? N’ai-je pas déjà trop souillé votre imagination par d’infâmes récits? Dois-je en hasarder de nouveaux? Oui, . . . dit Monsieur de Corville, oui, nous exigeons de vous tous ces détails, vous les gagez avec une décence qui en émousse toute l’horreur; (de Sade 1986: III 240) (But how can I abuse your patience by relating these new horrors? Have I not already more than soiled your imagination with infamous recitations? Dare I hazard additional ones? ‘Yes, . . .’ Monsieur de Corville put in, ‘yes, we insist upon these details, you veil them with a decency that removes their edge of horror;’ (Seaver and Wainhouse 1991: 670)2

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second edition, Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, published in 1791, retained the first-person narrative of the previous edition but redoubled the narrative of the heroine’s distresses, and embodied much more salacious detail. It is this second edition of the novel that Lewis would have bought and read in Paris. Both Maurice Heine and Béatrice Didier have described the evolution between these first two versions as the progression from a simple tale to that of a romantic Gothic novel due to the subsequent additions of underground cells, macabre moments and reveries (Didier 1976: 106). In addition, Heine has drawn parallels between the trope of the ‘explained supernatural’ in Ann Radcliffe’s novels, and de Sade’s frequent and abrupt alternations between Gothic scenarios and their rational explanations (Heine 1973: III 36).

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Every tiny detail of libertinism, horror and misfortune must be recounted in this novel, and contrary to de Corville’s justifications, Justine’s narrative does not gloss over the horror of the repeated violations. Although the first-person narrator, Justine, has reservations about revealing all, in contrast to Lewis’s later anonymous narrator, the reader of both tales is none the less compelled to adopt the same prurient role, having duly been warned by the narrators of the horrors that await. In relation to The Monk, David Punter has demonstrated how Lewis ‘tries constantly to challenge his audience, to upset its security, to give the reader a moment of doubt about whether he may not himself be guilty of the complicated faults attributed to Ambrosio’ (Punter 1996: I 79), and Punter’s argument here is equally applicable to de Sade’s Justine. If de Sade’s and Lewis’s narrative techniques are both brutally revelatory, then their portrayal of their heroines are similarly so. Berger’s use of the term ‘vision’ is of vital importance in the way that the heroines of both The Monk and the various versions of Justine are characterized. At the beginning of their novels, Lewis and de Sade both immediately create very pictorial images of their heroines. These images establish the heroines as modest, virginal, religiously devout and naive. Such textual characterizations are knowingly situated within an eighteenth-century literary tradition which equated feminine beauty and distress. In Les Malheurs de la vertu, for example, there is a moment when Justine describes the effect that her distress has on the monk Antonin: La violence de mes mouvements avait fait disparaître les voiles qui couvraient mon sein; il était nu, mes cheveux y flottaient en désordre, il était inondé de mes larmes; j’inspire des désirs à ce malhonnête homme (de Sade 1986: III 291) (The violence of my movements had disturbed what veiled my breast, it was naked, my dishevelled hair fell in cascades upon it, it was wetted thoroughly by my tears; I quicken desires in the dishonest man) (Seaver and Wainhouse 1991: 720)

Here, Justine’s self-depiction creates a tableau of distressed beauty which is, however, knowingly eroticized, revealing the tale’s French literary heritage. For example, in Diderot’s earlier novel La Religieuse (1780), the heroine Suzanne Simonin is similarly aware of the effect that she has on her male persecutors. 3 This earlier heroine does, however, admit to some possible complicity on her own part, stating: ‘Je suis une femme, peutêtre un peu coquette, que sais-je?’ (Diderot 1961:

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178) or ‘Perhaps I am slightly flirtatious, who knows? I am a woman’ (my translation). Diderot’s Suzanne appears in many ways to be the French literary precursor to de Sade’s Justine in her knowing admission of the desire she inspires in her persecutors. As such, she provides literary inspiration for both de Sade’s and Lewis’s critique of religion in her persecution by monks, and also in her confused couplings of her own beauty and distress with the desire that they inspire. Such equations of beauty and distress inform, in turn, the construction of the English Gothic novel. The opening chapter of Ann Radcliffe’s 1791 The Romance of the Forest (Radcliffe 1992) contains a similar scene. Here, through the focalization of a Monsieur La Motte, the heroine Adeline’s features are described as having ‘gained from distress an expression of captivating sweetness’ and her clothes are described as having been ‘thrown open at the bosom, upon which part of the hair had fallen in disorder’ (Radcliffe 1992: 7). However, the crucial difference lies between the knowing eroticization provided by the female first-person narrators in the French novels, and the male-focalized third-person narratives that create these tableaux in the English Gothic novels.4 Our introduction to one of the principal female victims of The Monk, Antonia, confirms the spectatorial role into which Lewis’s narrator forces us. When Antonia’s veil is dislodged as she passes in the Church, we discover ‘a neck which for symmetry and beauty might have vied with the Medicean Venus’ (Lewis 1980: 9). What is more, through the focalization of the hero Lorenzo, she is also compared to an ‘Hamadryad’. This choice of comparison is particularly telling and ironic: in Greek mythology, the Hamadryad is a tree nymph who dies when the tree dies. Inextricably bound in a symbiotic relationship, there is no autonomous existence for this creature. Desire is ineffably linked to the dual commodities of beauty and virginity in The Monk. Antonia is awarded attributes by her several admirers which can only be associated with purity. Therefore, once she is raped towards the end of the novel, she must die. Stripped of her perfect virginity, her most precious commodity in the eyes of the male, Antonia becomes as nothing. Later in the novel, when Antonia has been fatally raped by the Monk Ambrosio, who claims that he has been seduced into violently raping her because of her perfect virginal beauty, she becomes simply a mirror who reflects his crimes. Ambrosio reproaches Antonia for his crime as follows:

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Once Antonia’s virginal integrity is shattered, her fragmented image mirrors Ambrosio’s crime alone. The reproaches with which he loads her here are reminiscent of the blame that both Diderot’s Suzanne and de Sade’s second Justine inflict upon themselves. In all three cases, it is not the male authority figure to blame, but the female’s irresistible beauty. Antonia’s ‘angel look’ reminds Ambrosio of his irrecoverable sin, and shame and remorse subsume his previous identity as the pious, confident and irreproachable monk. Antonia cannot survive the loss of her innocence in the textual space that this novel offers her precisely because of the unreality of her construction. In the eyes of the male characters, she is attributed solely the properties of virginal beauty, and, when this is taken from her, she mirrors only what passion has led Ambrosio to. Her death is a direct indictment of her textual establishment as an icon of modesty in the eyes of the male characters. Maggie Kilgour has commented that in the cases of both Ambrosio and Lorenzo, ‘the attainment of sexual fantasies produces disgust, while the enlightened attempt to demystify only produces a deeper darkness’ (1995: 160). This ‘deeper darkness’, as Robert Miles has suggested, is a consequence of the ‘taboo territory’ that their desire inhabits (1993: 27). This ‘taboo territory’ lies in the sublimation of their sexual fantasies within artistic representations of women. Thus far, Lewis’s novel has not really destabilized the connections between femininity, modesty and religion. If anything, it has reinforced them with the brutal death of Antonia. However, bearing in mind Teresa de Lauretis’s point that ‘to perform the terms of the production of woman as text, as image, is to resist identification with that image’ (1984: 36), we will now turn our attention to the second female image in The Monk, offered by the demon lover Matilda. Matilda is important in this novel precisely because she seduces Ambrosio through his own constructions of the idealized female. By this, I refer to his key idealization of femininity as being necessarily equated with

the Virgin Mary. When he has preached a particularly pious sermon, the monk Ambrosio returns to his cell to worship a portrait of the Madonna that hangs there. He congratulates himself on being above fleshly temptation: ‘I must accustom my eyes to Objects of temptation, and expose myself to the seduction of luxury and desire. Should I meet in that world which I am constrained to enter some lovely Female, lovely . . . as you Madona . . . !’ As he said this, He fixed his eyes upon a picture of the Virgin, which was suspended opposite to him: This for two years had been the Object of his increasing wonder and adoration. He paused, and gazed upon it in delight. ‘What beauty in that countenance!’ He continued after a silence of some minutes; ‘How graceful is the turn of that head! What sweetness, yet what majesty in her divine eyes! . . . Oh, if such a creature existed, and existed but for me! . . . Fool that I am! Whither do I suffer my admiration of this picture to hurry me? Away, impure ideas! Let me remember, that Woman is for ever lost to me. Never was mortal formed so perfect as this picture . . . What charms me, when ideal and considered as a superior being, would disgust me, become Woman and tainted with all the failings of Mortality. (Lewis 1980: 41)

Ambrosio’s use of the words ‘charm’ and ‘disgust’, in reference to the Virgin and Woman, indicate his differing perceptions of the iconized Madonna and the reality of Womanhood. Women to him are tainted and impure: their presence threatens to taint him. It is gradually revealed to Ambrosio, however, that the image of the Madonna that hangs in his room, a painting that he venerates, is in fact a portrait of Matilda. Matilda herself, hitherto disguised as a novice, effects this shattering revelation. Matilda’s declaration of love for Ambrosio occurs in parallel with her revelation of her true gender to him: she controls Ambrosio’s responses and interests, just as she has controlled his desire for this portrait of the alleged Madonna. Equally, the gender-switch which she effects also disrupts Ambrosio’s ‘normative’, heterosexual, desire for the portrait. When Matilda, having nursed the dying Ambrosio back to health, gradually reveals her true identity as the woman portrayed in the portrait, Ambrosio’s confusion over the idolized Madonna and the sexualized female is complete, and he falls prey to her desire. Ambrosio and Matilda embark upon a passionate sexual relationship where the monk’s lust is given full vent upon her willing body. Their sexual relationship also involves their collusion in order to conceal it from the rest of

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What seduced me into crimes, whose bare remembrance makes me shudder? Fatal witch! Was it not thy beauty? Have you not plunged my soul into infamy? Have you not made me a perjured Hypocrite, a Ravisher, an Assassin! Nay, at this moment, does not that angel look bid me despair of God’s forgiveness? Oh! When I stand before his judgement throne, that look will suffice to damn me! You will tell my Judge, that you were happy, till I saw you; that you were innocent, till I polluted you! (Lewis 1980: 385)

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once she has secured Ambrosio. It is only when Matilda discards submission that she, as the double of the Madonna portrait, no longer satisfies. This thematic enjambment is fully explored by Julia Kristeva in her essay ‘Stabat Mater’ where she questions the supremacy of images of the Madonna in Western culture. She locates Mary and the Lady as: ‘the focal point of men’s desires and aspirations. Moreover, because they were unique and thus excluded all other women, both the Lady and the Virgin embodied an absolute authority the more attractive as it appeared removed from paternal sternness’ (1986: 170). When Matilda transgresses the boundary of ideal, feminine behaviour and becomes masterful, she no longer doubles the Madonna portrait and consequently no longer mirrors Ambrosio’s desires. She ceases to represent his image of an ideal love, and is thus replaced with Antonia, another virginal object. None the less, it is Matilda who is responsible in this novel for destabilizing the equation of woman and modesty, and, as such, she occupies an important space. By portraying Ambrosio’s fatal passion as being so linked to his love of the Madonna, Lewis also effectively critiques the location of the Virgin Mary as an icon in Western culture.

Illustration from The Monk.

the monastery. However, when Matilda begins to dominate their machinations, and coldly to plan their hypocrisy, Ambrosio begins to become disillusioned with her: Left to himself He could not reflect without surprize on the sudden change in Matilda’s character and sentiments. But a few days had past, since She appeared the mildest and softest of her sex, devoted to his will, and looking up to him as a superior Being. But now she assumed a sort of courage and manliness in her manners but ill calculated to please him . . . what she gained in the opinion of the Man, She lost with interest in the affection of the Lover. (Lewis 1980: 231-232)

In order to remain sexually appealing to Ambrosio, Matilda should remain ‘submissive’ and, consequently, in his eyes, feminine. Ambrosio desires a reinforcement of the distinctions between male and female: he looks for someone to affirm his ideal of himself as a ‘superior being’ and confirm his elevated status in society. Matilda initially secures Ambrosio to herself by her very self-positioning as gentle and submissive. In order to continue to remain in his favour, such posturing should be maintained, but Matilda discards it

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This critique offered by Lewis seems to be supported by a significant addition that he made to the ending of the second edition of the novel. Following the outraged reception of the first edition of The Monk in 1796, Lewis added an extra passage to the ending of the second, third and fourth editions of the novel.5 In the first edition, the villainous monk Ambrosio is dashed to pieces and left to rot at the foot of a mountain by Lucifer, as a suitable punishment for his various crimes. The second edition kept that conclusion, but added a more moral note as the final closure to the tale: Haughty Lady, why shrunk you back when yon poor frail one drew near? Was the air infected by her errors? Was your purity soiled by her passing breath? Ah! Lady, smooth that insulting brow: stifle the reproach just bursting from your scornful lip: wound not a soul, that bleeds already! She has suffered, suffers still. Her air is gay, but her heart is broken: her dress sparkles, but her bosom groans. Lady, to look with mercy on the conduct of others, is a virtue no less than to look with severity on your own. (Lewis 1796: III 314-315)

Recent editors of The Monk have chosen largely to ignore this addition, only acknowledg-

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In this novel, a critique of the masculine tendency to veil the reality of the female presence is offered on several levels. One of these levels is the equation of the female form with artistic, religious representations of it. As Jerry Hogle has argued, ‘all passionate desire in this book is really aroused, intensified, and answered by images more than objects or bodies, by signifiers more often than by signifieds or referents.’ (1997: 1) The ‘Haughty Lady’ of this second edition, contrasted with the ‘poor frail one’ does not need a specific identity. Rather, she appears to signify the idealized versions of the Madonna, offered throughout this novel in various images, portraits and representations of women. She is also specifically contrasted with the ‘poor frail one’ who may represent the wronged heroines of this novel, wronged because of their unwitting similarities to the Virgin Mary. In all, The Monk offers three core models of femininity that are both indebted to previous literary representations and intended to disrupt them. The first, Antonia, is a clear embodiment of previous literary representations drawn from, amongst others, Diderot, de Sade and Radcliffe. The second model, Agnes, who like Diderot’s Suzanne is a nun who cannot disentangle herself from her orders, provides a remarkable representation of what happens when the flesh-and-blood reality of motherhood is neglected. The tale of her illegitimate baby, left to die on her chest as a ‘suitable’ punishment by her convent for fornication, is grotesquely realized. Finally, although Matilda is, as the Monthly Review noted in 1797, remarkably similar to Jacques Cazotte’s devil Biondetta in The Devil in Love, she remains none the less a remarkable and unique indictment of the roles played by male desire in the previous models. Her ability to gender-switch, to posture submission when required, and her mimicry of the Madonna all undermine previous literary constructions of femininity. The character of Matilda incorporates Suzanne Simonin’s knowledge of her effect on

men and parodies the earlier Justine’s naivety in Lewis’s endeavour to untangle the links between femininity, desire and the Madonna. In his critical work ‘Idée sur les romans’, first published in 1800 as a preface to Les Crimes de l’amour, the Marquis de Sade praised Lewis’s The Monk for being superior, in every respect, to the brilliantly imaginative novels of Ann Radcliffe. Paradoxically, however, it was also in this same work that de Sade famously disclaimed his authorship of Justine, an assertion which he persisted in repeating throughout his life. In this essay, he protested, ‘I have never written any such immoral works, and I never shall’ (1970: 63, my translation). Given that de Sade had only recently published his third edition of his Justine tale, La Nouvelle Justine, his critical and literary personae appear to be clearly at odds with each other. De Sade the public author, who writes with such authority in ‘Idée sur les romans’ on Richardson, Lewis and Radcliffe, clearly wanted to dissociate himself from his own literary efforts. Perhaps such vehement denial was due to the fact that Alexandre-Louis de Villeterque identified the Justine novels as de Sade’s and subsequently calumniated them in the Journal des arts, des sciences et de littérature (de Villeterque 1800). However, de Sade’s very obvious admiration of Matthew Lewis in his own critical essay does appear to undermine his self-distancing from the immoral works of Justine. La Nouvelle Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, suivi de l’histoire de Juliette, sa soeur was a work of ten volumes, with a hundred obscene engravings. It was supposedly printed ‘in Holland’ in 1797, although it was actually typeset in Paris by de Sade’s publisher Nicolas Massé. However, JeanJacques Pauvert, one of the co-editors of de Sade’s complete works, has raised justifiable questions about the date, 1797, and the order of publication of La Nouvelle Justine and L’Histoire de Juliette. He argues that the third Justine followed an earlier 1796 version of Juliette in August 1800 (de Sade 1986: VIII 18). This third reprisal of the story tripled the length of the second edition, and added yet more persecution and torture. Given Pauvert’s correction of the dates of La Nouvelle Justine, it appears highly probable that some of the much-admired Matthew Lewis’s methods of inscribing virtue in distress had an impact on de Sade’s revisions. In this third edition, for the first time the character Justine is denied the first-person narrative voice and the entire story is told in the third person. It is equally as important to note that this third version of the novel is not a Gothic novel. As Didier has noted,

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ing its existence in a note upon the text. However, if we take into consideration the themes that we have just been exploring, it appears to offer a thematically tighter conclusion. By dwelling on the external appearances of two seemingly diametrically opposed female characters, named only ‘Haughty Lady’ and ‘yon poor frail one’, the author himself has cast two nameless women into stereotypical positions. However, Lewis has at the same time undermined this by his appeal for our compassion, and for external appearances to be mistrusted.

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with this third Justine we witness an ‘explosion’ of the Gothic novel (1976: 106). Whereas in the previous two editions we had some sympathy for the unfortunate heroine, here, instead, the thirdperson narrator makes us entirely complicit in his mockery of Justine. Like the narrative voice at the beginning of The Monk which urges us not to encourage the idea that piety attracts people to church, de Sade’s narrator in this final edition mocks the ineffectual piety of Justine. At one point, for example, he castigates religion for promoting self-interest (1986: 100); later he relentlessly pursues Justine for crying when her religious consolation is revealed to be illogical by the Comte du Bressac, stating that tears are ‘la ressource du faible, en se voyant ravir la chimère qui le consolait’, or ‘the resource of a weak person, when they have their last source of consolation torn away’ (1986: 141, my translation). In this final, more picaresque edition, de Sade finally achieved exactly the disruption of the idolized feminine form which he wished.6 What his libertine characters pursue with such violence are females who idolize the Madonna with such force that they are unwittingly seen to dress like her, and shown to act with a concomitant naivety that is breathtaking. Why was de Sade so haunted by this tale that he revised it twice over the space of ten years? As with Lewis’s novel, some of the answers lie in the portrayal of virtue in distress, and with the essential linkage of that virtue to religious piety. The narrator himself justifies this assumption on the very second page of this third edition, where he states that ‘Il est essentiel que les sots cessent d’encenser cette ridicule idole de la vertu, qui ne les a jusqu’ici payés que d’ingratitude’ (1986: IV 26). ‘It is essential that fools stop worshipping this ridiculous idol of virtue, which until now has only repaid them with ingratitude’ (my translation). What is interesting here is the deliberate confusion about the subject of de Sade’s attack. Virtue as a concept is what he most wishes to denigrate for his readers; but equally, one could conclude that the ‘ridiculous idol of virtue’ could be his character Justine, made famous through the previous two editions of the novel, and clearly associated with both purity and religion. In all three editions, Justine’s beauty is compared to that of Raphael’s beautiful virgins. Like Lewis, then, de Sade makes implicit connections between Justine, virginity and painting. However, in contrast, his project is clearly stated at the very beginning of

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the tale. He wishes to use the character Justine to teach moralists a violent lesson about idolizing virtue. The subsequent linking of this virtue to specifically Catholic institutions such as monasteries display a disgust with the artifices and ornaments of the Catholic Church. De Sade’s atheistic castigation of the ritualistic worship of artifices in the Catholic Church is remarkably similar to Lewis’s Anglican-Protestant condemnation of the sensuality of this worship. The trajectory of the unfortunate adventures of Justine involves successive encounters with different institutions. The foremost of these institutions in each edition is a monastery called SainteMarie-des-Bois where Justine goes to confess and be comforted by the monks. Justine’s naivety, coupled with her religious fervour, makes her a desirable prey for the libertine monks who run this monastery, and want to admit her to their seraglio. A very detailed passage in the third edition, La Nouvelle Justine, describes Justine’s confession: Justine, éblouie par les illusions de son ardente piété, n’entend rien, ne voit rien, et se prosterne; . . . Justine, immobile, fermement persuadée que tout ce qu’on lui fait n’a d’autre but que de la conduire pas à pas vers la perfection céleste, souffre tout avec une indicible résignation; pas une plainte . . . pas un mouvement ne lui échappe; son esprit était tellement élevé vers les choses célestes, que le bourreau l’eût déchirée sans qu’elle eût seulement osé s’en plaindre. (de Sade, 1986: IV 249-250) (Overcome by the illusions of her boundless piety, Justine hears nothing, sees nothing and kneels down; . . . motionless, certain that everything that she is subjected to has no other aim than to lead her step by step to celestial perfection, Justine suffers everything with an ineffable resignation; not one complaint passes her lips . . . not one movement comes from her; so much was her spirit transported on to a higher plane that her tormentor might have ripped her to pieces without her once even daring to protest.) (my translation)

This description situates Justine firmly on the side of innocence and piety, whilst simultaneously destroying this picture of innocence by describing the libertine monks’ desecration of her. Thus fixed in her adoration of the Virgin Mary, Justine becomes blind to the immediate danger posed by the monks who lasciviously watch her devotions and undress her. De Sade firmly makes the point in this edition of the novel that it is precisely Jus-

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Both Matthew Lewis and the Marquis de Sade embarked upon disrupting the collation of the venerated Madonna and women. They both used fairly brutal methods to destabilize these connections in their texts. Lewis portrayed one lascivious monk who falls prey to a lustful demon who deliberately postures herself as the Madonna. De Sade’s relentless destabilization comes through the successive and ever-more-brutal revision of a rape scene in a monastery where the heroine becomes so lost in her devotions to the Madonna that she forgets the real dangers which surround her. In de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine we, as readers, are brutally taught of the follies of Justine’s posturing by being forced to laugh at both her innocence and devotion. Lewis’s The Monk conveys its message in slightly different terms—one of these terms, as I have argued, lies in the addition of the ‘Haughty Lady’ to the subsequent editions, the other term is by teaching Ambrosio through damnation that the ideal and the real, such as the Madonna, doubled by Matilda and Antonia, must remain forever separate. In the words of Angela Carter: ‘Even if it is the dream made flesh, the real, once it becomes real, can be no more than real’ (Carter 1982: 201).

Notes 1. Anon. 1797a. Although this four-volume edition is translated anonymously, it has been identified, and is widely acknowledged on library catalogues, as having been translated by four different translators: namely, Jacques-Marie Deschamps, Jean-Baptiste Desprès, Pierre Vincent Benoist and Pierre Bernard Lamare. 2. Where available, I have used authoritative translations of de Sade’s works. However, in the case of La Nouvelle Justine and ‘Idée sur les romans’, where no translations have been available, I have used my own. These instances are marked in the body of the text. 3. As Peter France has documented, Diderot in fact wrote La Religieuse in 1760. However, it was published in the

Correspondance littéraire in 1780, though a teasing set of letters, which describe the circumstances of composition, had been made public in 1770 (France 1983: 37). The Monthly Magazine noted in December 1797 the translation of La Religieuse: ‘Two novels have been translated from the French of Diderot, with considerable vivacity, “The Nun” and “James the Fatalist”: in each of these works are some masterly delineations of character, but the pen of Diderot is not remarkable for its chastity’ (Anon. 1797c: 518). 4. For a fuller exploration of the similarities and differences between The Romance of the Forest and de Sade’s second Justine, see Clery 1994. Clery discusses the similar plot motifs of both novels, but demonstrates the two novels’ entirely different philosophical approaches. 5. Lewis, of course, reserved the most significant changes to the text for the fourth edition of the novel, Ambrosio, or The Monk: A Romance (1798). However, the crucial addition to the ending is present from the second edition. The British Library carries an annotated copy of the third edition owned by Lewis where he wrote in the vital changes to be made. The copy makes for interesting reading not only because of the corrections, but also because of the bitter asides that Lewis has scribbled in. For example, a scribbled footnote to his ‘Imitation of Horace’ epigraph ‘And when you find, condemned, despised, / Neglected, blamed, and criticised.’ bitterly records of the novel’s reception ‘Neglected it has not been, but criticised enough of all conscience’ (BL: C.28. b 4-6: iv). 6. I would justify my use of the term ‘picaresque’ for this final edition of the novel because the overarching am of the novel, thanks to the editorial inventions, is to satirize virtue, and its embodiment in the naive character of Justine, whose travels take her from master to master.

References Anon. (1797a) Le Moine, traduit de l’anglais, 4 vols, Paris, Maradan. Anon. (1797b) Monthly Review, 23. Anon. (1797c) Monthly Magazine, December. Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing, Harmondsworth, Penguin. Botting, F. (1996) Gothic, London, Routledge. Carter, A. (1982) The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Harmondsworth, Penguin [1972]. Cazotte, J. (1772) Le Diable amoureux. Nouvelle espagnole, Naples and Paris, n.p. Clery, E. J. (1994) ‘Ann Radcliffe and D. A. F. de Sade: thoughts on heroinism’, Women’s Writing, 1:2. Diderot, D. (1961) La Religieuse, Paris, Armand Colin [1780]. Didier, B. (1976) Sade: Une écriture du désir, Paris, Denoel/ Gonthier. France, P. (1983) Diderot, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Heine, M. (1973) ‘Le Marquis de Sade et le roman noir’, in A. Le Brun and J.-J. Pauvert (eds) Oeuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade, 16 vols, Paris, Société Nouvelle des Editions Pauvert.

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tine’s obsession with the Virgin Mary, her fervent piety, which delivers her so easily to the cruelties of the monks of Sainte-Marie-des-Bois. Justine adopts the posture of the Virgin Mary, and the posturing incites the monks’ violent desires. What the monks wish to attain, apart from sexual gratification, is the violent destruction of this virginal image by reminding Justine of her all too mortal qualities. Her innocence here appears to owe more to Lewis’s portrayal of Antonia (who is shrouded in both a ‘bandage of ignorance’ as well as a ‘veil of innocence’ (1980: 264)) than to the more wordly wise characterizations of Justine in the two previous versions of de Sade’s own text.

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Hogle, J. ‘The Ghost of the Counterfeit—and the Closet—in The Monk’, in Romanticism on the Net 8 (November 1997) . Kilgour, M. (1995) The Rise of the Gothic Novel, London, Routledge. Kristeva, J. (1986) ‘Stabat Mater’, trans. L. Roudiez, in T. Moi (ed.) The Kristeva Reader, Oxford, Blackwell. de Lauretis, T. (1984) Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Lever, M. (1991) Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, Paris, Fayard. Lewis, M. G. (1796) The Monk; a Romance, 2nd edn, 3 vols. London, J. Bell. ———. (1797) The Monk; a Romance, 3rd edn, annotated copy: BL c.175. l13. 3 vols, London, J. Bell. ———. (1798) Ambrosio, or The Monk; A Romance, London, J. Bell. ———. (1980) The Monk; a Romance ed. H. Anderson, Oxford, Oxford University Press [1796]. Miles, R. (1993) Gothic Writing: A Genealogy, London, Routledge. Punter, D. (1996) The Literature of Terror, 2nd edn, 2 vols, London and New York, Longman. Radcliffe, A. (1992) The Romance of the Forest: Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry, ed. C. Chard, Oxford, Oxford University Press [1791]. de Sade, D. A. F. (1970) ‘Idée sur les romans’, Paris, Ducros. ———. (1986) Oeuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade, eds A. Le Brun and J.-J. Pauvert, 16 vols, Paris, Société Nouvelle des Editions Pauvert [1800]. ———. (1991) Three Complete Novels and Other Writings, trans. R. Seaver and A. Wainhouse, London, Arrow. Schaeffer, N. (1999) The Marquis de Sade: A Life, London, Hamish Hamilton. de Villeterque, A.-L. (1800) Journal des arts, des sciences et delittérature, 22 October.

FURTHER READING Bibliography Frank, Frederick S. “The Monk: A Bicentenary Bibliography.” Romanticism on the Net 8 (November 1997): . Frank states: “[d]esigned to be consulted sequentially, the bibliography conducts a census of contemporary and historical criticism appearing in books, monographs, scholarly journals, and doctoral dissertations, with the eleven individual sections containing complete and compendious data except for Section VII, ‘Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Editions of The Monk’ and Section IX, ‘Chapbooks, Shilling Shocker Condensations, and Plagiarized Abridgements of The Monk,’ which are selectively compiled and annotated.”

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Biography Peck, Louis F. A Life of Matthew G. Lewis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961, 331 p. Comprehensive biography of Lewis.

Criticism Birkhead, Edith. “The Novel of Terror: Lewis and Maturin.” In The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance, pp. 63-93. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company Publishers, 1921. A chapter from what is considered one of the first significant studies of the Gothic movement, in which Birkhead centers on the terrifying, evocative, and melodramatic elements of Lewis’s works. Blakemore, Steven. “Matthew Lewis’s Black Mass: Sexual, Religious Inversion in The Monk.” Studies in the Novel 30, no. 4 (winter 1998): 521-39. Argues that in The Monk Lewis subverts traditional religious and gender roles. Gose, Eliot B., Jr. “The Monk.” In Imagination Indulged: The Irrational in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, pp. 27-40. Montreal, Quebec and Kingston, Ontario: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1972. Undertakes a psychoanalytic survey of The Monk, noting its “unresolved tensions” of “sexual conflict, violated taboos, and self-destructive impulses.” Grudin, Peter. “The Monk: Matilda and the Rhetoric of Deceit.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 5, no. 2 (May 1975): 136-46. Assesses the “formal coherence” of The Monk, claiming that evidence for its structural unity exists in an interpretation of Matilda as a demonic being. Hogle, Jerrold E. “The Ghost of the Counterfeit—and the Closet—in The Monk.” Romanticism On the Net 8 (November 1997): . Maintains that “Lewis’ daemonic novel has the shocking force in our culture that it still does, not because of the sexual license or the use of German sources in it so fervently attacked at the time, but because it enacts and thus partially exposes a particular cultural agenda of both its time and today that underlies and motivates what I call ‘the ghost of the counterfeit’ in the rise of the Gothic during the later eighteenth century.” Jones, Wendy. “Stories of Desire in The Monk.” ELH 57, no. 1 (spring 1990): 129-50. Illustrates how the narrative structure of The Monk and its social and political stance are related and declares that Lewis offers in his novel “a defense of the concept of individual desire and of the right to articulate that desire in both speech and action.” Kauhl, Gudrun. “On the Release from Monkish Fetters: Matthew Lewis Reconsidered.” Dutch Quarterly Review 19, no. 4 (1989): 264-80. Examines the motif of transgression as both a psychological and a political fact in The Monk.

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Investigates “Lewis’s ambivalence toward his authorial responsibility” as moral judge in The Monk.

Studies works by Ann Radcliffe and Lewis’s The Monk “to show that an analysis of the thematic attention to surfaces changes the traditional view of the Gothic contribution to characterization and figuration in fiction.”

Mulman, Lisa Naomi. “Sexuality on the Surface: Catholicism and the Erotic Object in Lewis’s The Monk.” Bucknell Review 42, no. 1 (1998): 98-110. Focuses on “Lewis’s use of . . . objects (precisely the veil, mirror, lamp, rosary, face) as sites of religious, aesthetic, and social anxiety rather than substitutive or fetishized sexual desire.” Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 96, no. 2 (March 1981): 255-70.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Lewis’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 39, 158, 178; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 11, 62; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; and Supernatural Fiction Writers.

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Lydenberg, Robin. “Ghostly Rhetoric: Ambivalence in M. G. Lewis’ The Monk.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 10, no. 2 (April 1979): 65-79.

CHARLES ROBERT MATURIN (1780 - 1824)

(Also wrote under the pseudonym Dennis Jasper Murphy) Irish novelist and playwright.

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aturin is remembered primarily for his novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), which is considered among the finest examples of Gothic fiction in the English language. By virtue of its complicated revenge plot, seemingly supernatural phenomena, and use of landscape to create an atmosphere of horror and suspense, Melmoth the Wanderer is strongly reminiscent of the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis. Critics distinguish it from the works of these earlier writers, however, by its attention to the psychology of despair and the torments of religious doubt. More popular in France than in England or Ireland, Melmoth the Wanderer exercised a great influence on nineteenth-century French writers. Maturin’s most notable French admirer, Honoré de Balzac, was so impressed with the novel that he wrote a sequel to it entitled Melmoth reconcilié.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Maturin was born in Dublin, where he spent most of his life. He graduated from Trinity College in 1800 and in 1803 was ordained a minister of the Church of England. After a brief apprentice-

ship as curate of the county parish of Loughrea, Galway, where he became familiar with the Irish peasantry that he later wrote about in such novels as The Wild Irish Boy (1808) and The Milesian Chief (1812), Maturin went to St. Peter’s Church in Dublin, where he served as curate for the rest of his life. Although Maturin greatly preferred the fashionable St. Peter’s to the rural parish in Loughrea, he found it impossible to support his wife and family on his meager salary. In order to supplement his income, he embarked on a literary career. Fearful of jeopardizing his chances for advancement within the Church, Maturin published his first three novels, Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio (1807), The Wild Irish Boy, and The Milesian Chief, under the pseudonym of Dennis Jasper Murphy.

MAJOR WORKS While critics consider Lewis’s influence evident in the abundance of horrible details in Fatal Revenge, they attribute the rational denouement of the story to Radcliffe’s influence. Critics consistently complain that Maturin’s attempt to “explain away” the miraculous events of the story results in a disproportion between cause and effect that gives the novel, in the words of the critic Niilo Idman (see Further Reading), an “air of charlatanism.” Nevertheless, Fatal Revenge is considered superior to The Wild Irish Boy and The

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Milesian Chief, which are seldom included in critical discussions of Maturin’s works. In 1814, Maturin sent Sir Walter Scott the manuscript of his first drama, Bertram; or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (1816), a play that unites the Byronic hero and the Gothic villain in a single character. Scott was so impressed with the play that he referred Maturin to Lord Byron, who belonged to the committee that selected plays for production at London’s Drury Lane Theater. Through Byron’s influence, Drury Lane produced Bertram in 1816. Although the play’s immediate success prompted Maturin to drop the pseudonym he had used for his first three novels and identify himself, his newfound literary recognition ultimately proved a disaster. Convinced that Bertram was the beginning of a brilliant dramatic career, he recklessly spent his profits and plunged deeply into debt. His subsequent plays, Manuel (1817) and Fredolfo (1819), were dismal failures, and to add to his difficulties, Bertram’s irreverent sentiments were imputed by ecclesial officials to Maturin himself, and he lost any chance of being promoted within the Church. Maturin resumed his career as a novelist with Women; or, Pour et contre (1818), for which he temporarily abandoned the Gothic idiom. A satire on the religious views of a narrow middle-class Calvinist sect, Women reflects Maturin’s opposition to religious fanaticism and is today considered an insightful analysis of Evangelicalism. Maturin returned to the Gothic form in the novel that is viewed as his masterpiece, Melmoth the Wanderer. Based on the Wandering Jew and Faust legends, Melmoth the Wanderer tells the story of a seventeenth-century scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a prolonged life. The novel’s structure is complex, consisting of five interlocking tales. In Maturin’s novel The Albigenses (1824), an historical romance modeled on the works of Scott, he treats the theme of religious fanaticism.

PRINCIPAL WORKS Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio. 3 vols. [as Dennis Jasper Murphy] (novel) 1807 The Wild Irish Boy [as Dennis Jasper Murphy] (novel) 1808

CRITICAL RECEPTION With the exception of Bertram, none of Maturin’s works was a critical or popular success during his lifetime. Nineteenth-century critics generally considered Maturin a talented but injudicious writer, whose novels and plays were marred by excesses of horror. Critical reaction to Melmoth the Wanderer in the nineteenth century was mixed: while some reviewers denounced Maturin’s presentation of the diabolical Melmoth as impious, others praised the novel for its graphic descrip-

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tions of horror and suffering. Later nineteenthcentury commentators frequently attributed Maturin’s lack of critical acclaim to the diminishing popularity of Gothic fiction. Critics writing around the turn of the twentieth century applauded Melmoth’s emotional intensity, and modern commentators support this opinion. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics have focused largely on Melmoth the Wanderer, and some critics have asserted that Maturin’s reputation as a Gothic novelist has overshadowed his importance as a proponent of Irish regional literature. Some commentators argue that the impact of Melmoth the Wanderer derives primarily from Maturin’s examination of human responses to terror and oppression. Douglas Grant (see Further Reading) terms Maturin a “brilliant psychologist of the perverse” whose interest in extreme emotional states anticipated the psychological novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka. In addition to its investigation of human psychology, Melmoth the Wanderer is also lauded for its analysis of the spiritual consequences of religious fanaticism. William F. Axton (see Further Reading), for example, distinguishes Melmoth the Wanderer from earlier Gothic novels because of its “compelling statement of the grand theme of perverted faith.” Today Maturin is generally regarded as the unjustly forgotten author of one of the finest Gothic novels in English. Melmoth the Wanderer is said to have influenced the work of such diverse writers as Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Alexander Pushkin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Oscar Wilde. The breadth of the novel’s appeal attests to its enduring interest.

The Milesian Chief: A Romance. 4 vols. [as Dennis Jasper Murphy] (novel) 1812 Bertram; or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (play) 1816 Manuel (play) 1817 Women: or, Pour et contre (novel) 1818 Fredolfo: A Tragedy (play) 1819 Melmoth the Wanderer. 4 vols. (novel) 1820 The Albigenses (novel) 1824

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CHARLES ROBERT MATURIN (STORY DATE 1825) SOURCE: Maturin, Charles Robert. “Leixlip Castle.” In Gothic Tales of Terror, Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain, edited by Peter Haining. 1972. Reprint edition, pp. 271-85. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, Inc., 1973. The following excerpt is from a short story first published in the collection The Literary Souvenir or Cabinet of Poetry and Romance in 1825. The first portion of the excerpt contains Maturin’s brief commentary on the story, and the last portion comprises the story’s conclusion. The incidents of the following tale are not merely founded on fact, they are facts themselves, which occurred at no very distant period in my own family. The marriage of the parties, their sudden and mysterious separation, and their total alienation from each other until the last period of their mortal existence, are all facts. I cannot vouch for the truth of the supernatural solution given to all these mysteries; but I must still consider the story as a fine specimen of Gothic horrors, and can never forget the impression it made on me when I heard it related for the first time among many other thrilling traditions of the same description. —C.R.M. . . . . .

Lady Maxwell survived Sir Richard forty years, living to the great age of ninety-six; and, according to a promise, previously given, disclosed to a descendent with whom she had lived, the following extraordinary circumstances. She said that on the night of the 31st of October, about seventy-five years before, at the instigation of her ill-advising attendant, she had washed one of her garments in a place where four streams met, and peformed other unhallowed ceremonies under the direction of the Collogue, in the expectation that her future husband would appear to her in her chamber at twelve o’clock that night. The critical moment arrived, but with it no lover-like form. A vision of indescribable horror approached her bed, and flinging at her an iron weapon of a shape and construction unknown to her, bade her ‘recognize her future husband by that.’ The terrors of this visit soon deprived her of her senses; but on her recovery, she persisted, as has been said, in keeping the fearful pledge of the reality of the vision, which, on examination, appeared to be incrusted with blood. It remained concealed in the inmost drawer of her cabinet till the morning of the separation. On that morning, Sir Richard Maxwell rose before daylight to join a hunting party—he wanted a knife for some accidental purpose, and, missing his own, called to Lady Maxwell, who was still in bed, to

lend him one. The lady, who was half asleep, answered, that in such a drawer of her cabinet he would find one. He went, however, to another, and the next moment she was fully awakened by seeing her husband present the terrible weapon to her throat, and threaten her with instant death unless she disclosed how she came by it. She supplicated for life, and then, in an agony of horror and contrition, told the tale of that eventful night. He gazed at her for a moment with a countenance which rage, hatred, and despair converted, as she avowed, into a living likeness of the demon-visage she had once beheld (so singularly was the fated resemblance fulfilled), and then exclaiming, ‘You won me by the devil’s aid, but you shall not keep me long,’ left her—to meet no more in this world. Her husband’s secret was not unknown to the lady, though the means by which she became possessed of it were wholly unwarrantable. Her curiosity had been strongly excited by her husband’s aversion to his countrymen, and it was so stimulated by the arrival of a Scottish gentleman in the neighbourhood some time before, who professed himself formerly acquainted with Sir Richard, and spoke mysteriously of the causes that drove him from his country—that she contrived to procure an interview with him under a feigned name, and obtained from him the knowledge of circumstances which embittered her after-life to its latest hour. His story was this: Sir Richard Maxwell was at deadly feud with a younger brother; a family feast was proposed to reconcile them, and as the use of knives and forks was then unknown in the Highlands, the company met armed with their dirks for the purpose of carving. They drank deeply; the feast, instead of harmonizing, began to inflame their spirits; the topics of old strife were renewed; hands, that at first touched their weapons in defiance, drew them at last in fury, and in the fray, Sir Richard mortally wounded his brother. His life was with difficulty saved from the vengeance of the clan, and he was hurried towards the seacoast, near which the house stood, and concealed there till a vessel could be procured to convey him to Ireland. He embarked on the night of the 31st of October, and while he was traversing the deck in unutterable agony of spirit, his hand accidentally touched the dirk which he had unconsciously worn ever since the fatal night. He drew it, and, praying ‘that the guilt of his brother’s blood might be as far from his soul, as he could fling that weapon from his body,’ sent it with all his strength into the air. This instrument he found secreted in the lady’s cabinet, and whether he really believed her to

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have become possessed of it by supernatural means, or whether he feared his wife was a secret witness of his crime, has not been ascertained, but the result was what I have stated. The reparation took place on the discovery:— for the rest, I know not how the truth may be, I tell the Tale as ’twas told to me.

GENERAL COMMENTARY ROBERT LOUGY (ESSAY DATE 1975) SOURCE: Lougy, Robert. “The Later Years, 1820-1824.” In Charles Robert Maturin, pp. 64-87. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1975. In the following essay, Lougy surveys the events that took place during Maturin’s final years, and analyzes the works that he composed during this period.

Even at the time of Fredolfo’s failure, and as early as September 1818, Maturin was already thinking about—if not actually engaged in writing—a new drama and also a romance. The drama, however, was never published and was not produced until six years after Maturin’s death. The manuscript of this drama, entitled Osmyn the Renegade (also known as The Siege of Salerno), had been given to Edmund Kean for his perusal, and he had for unknown reasons refused to return it. Between the years of 1821-1822, it disappeared in London and was not recovered until late in 1825 by William, Maturin’s eldest son. It was almost five more years before the play was successfully produced in Dublin. Mrs. Maturin realized 300 pounds from the production, but it was never published and only brief excerpts, quoted by Alaric Watts, have ever appeared in print. The romance on which Maturin was working was Melmoth the Wanderer. He had received from Constable an advance of 500 pounds for Melmoth sometime in 1819 and was thus fairly solvent at the time of Fredolfo’s failure. In August, 1820, Melmoth was published, and it remains today the one work for which Maturin is best known. Balzac attested to Maturin’s genius and to the greatness of his most famous work by placing Melmoth alongside of Moliere’s Don Juan, Goethe’s Faust, and Byron’s Manfred as one of the four supreme allegorical figures in modern European literature. After reading Melmoth, one feels that it was a work that was always within Maturin, waiting for the proper conjunction of time and circumstances

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to appear. He drew, of course, upon other literary sources, especially Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Milton’s Lucifer; yet Melmoth remains wholly Maturin’s—his genius and style are indelibly marked throughout it. Using the legend of the Wandering Jew and the legend of Faust, he creates a unique work of art sharing only the broadest and most general similarities with its sources. Although thematically related to some of Maturin’s own writings as well as to the writings of others (for example, Lewis’ The Monk and Godwin’s St. Leon), Melmoth finally denies comparison and demands that we cope with it on its own terms. And like the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels, most of de Sade, and the writings of Celine, the terms established by Melmoth are neither easy nor pleasant to recognize or accept. There is no evidence to suggest that Maturin was even remotely insane while writing Melmoth; on the contrary, his letters during this period are perfectly lucid and coherent, and his last novel, The Albigenses, is certainly not the work of an obsessed or demented mind. Yet, one has the feeling that Maturin, in writing Melmoth, calls forth a reality that is so powerful, yet so grotesque, so cruel, and so foreign to Maturin’s daily existence, that the dividing line between genius and madness is throughout it very thin. (Indeed, a contemporary account of him during the time he was writing this novel suggests that he was virtually obsessed by his creation.) And Maturin himself frequently alluded to his own creativity in terms of witchcraft—of how he wanted his reader to “sit down by my magic Cauldron, mix my dark ingredients, see the bubbles work, and the spirits rise.” The danger, of course, in evoking spirits is that one can never be certain whether he can control them or of the price they will demand from him. The dangers would appear to be multiplied when one calls upon the spirits in their own territory, as Maturin seems to have done in Melmoth. For to write such a novel is to probe those areas of knowledge, both “the visions of another world” and the darkest recesses of the human psyche, which strain the endurance of the mind, and to cross, perhaps irrevocably, forbidden boundaries. The writer then becomes isolated from the world around him, having used the incantatory power of the word to bring forth a reality that borders on the irrational and the insane. He is at once the possessor of secrets he will share with those readers who dare to sit down by his “magic Cauldron” and also possessed by those demons whose presence his art will reveal.

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The tale is important for the background and history it gives us of Melmoth, but also for the emotional intensity with which Maturin once again deals with poverty. Like Manuel, this part of Melmoth is written with such vividness and force of feeling that Maturin’s own life shines forth from every page. There are many instances within this story of strong correspondences to Maturin’s own experiences—Walberg’s feelings of guilt for his inability to provide for his family, his pressing anxieties of how he will get food for them, his squandering of the little money they did have, and his fears of going insane from worry. Most fascinating, however, is the relationship drawn between Walberg and his father. During those times when he himself did not know where the next meal was coming from, Maturin must have, in spite of himself, harbored strong resentment

towards his father, who, in his financial ruin, had pulled down his son and his son’s family with him. The guilt that this feeling undoubtedly gave rise to seems to be artistically expiated by Maturin in this tale. During one scene in which the family is seated at the dinner table, with barely enough to eat, Walberg grabs some food from his father’s hand and gives it to his children, and later, when “the sufferings of his children seemed to inspire him with a kind of wild resentment,” Walberg actually raises his arm against his father, “the deaf old man, who was sluggishly devouring his sordid meal.” After Walberg recovers from his sickness and finds his father by his side, he is stricken with remorse and begs him for forgiveness. Thus we see Maturin externalizing the agony of his own sufferings, venting his hostilities toward his father, and yet simultaneously expiating his guilt and creating for his tale an ending that he must have hoped would find a parallel in his own life. But as fascinating as the autobiographical implications of the tale make it, it is but a small part of the novel. Melmoth is composed of five tales, the second of which, “The Spaniard’s Tale,” contains within it the last three tales. In turn, all five tales are contained within a larger frame-story centering around John Melmoth, a descendant of Melmoth the Wanderer. While taking care of a sick uncle during the year 1818, John Melmoth comes across a portrait inscribed “John Melmoth, anno 1646.” He is told that the man in the portrait is a distant ancestor who, according to legend, is still alive. John later comes across an old manuscript whose contents form the basis of the first tale, “The Tale of Stanton.” The next day, John, while observing a shipwreck on the rocks near the coast, hears a horrible laugh from a man also watching the disaster and recognizes him as the man in the portrait. Frightened, John tries to ascend some rocks, loses his footing, and falls into the water. He awakens in his uncle’s house to discover that he has been rescued by the sole survivor of the shipwreck, a Spaniard by the name of Alonzo Moncada. Upon learning John Melmoth’s name, Alonzo becomes extremely agitated, and then he tells John the “Tale of the Spaniard.” This tale forms all but the few final pages of the novel and contains within itself the “Tale of the Indians,” “The Tale of Guzman’s Family,” and “The Lover’s Tale.” Melmoth’s structure is tightly organized and possesses an almost geometrical symmetry. The organizational pattern, appropriately described by one critic as resembling a child’s set of toy boxes that fit into one another, serves several purposes.

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It is possible that Maturin, too, perceived in himself latent traces of insanity or, at least, interests that went beyond what most would call normal, and that he alluded to them in Melmoth. In his preface to the 1820 edition, Maturin states that “the original from which the Wife of Walberg is imperfectly sketched is a living woman, and long may she live.” The “living woman” is almost certainly Maturin’s own wife and the Wife of Walberg is Ines, from “The Tale of Guzman’s Family.” The tale itself is one of the mildest in Melmoth, and the role of Melmoth himself is minimal. The story revolves around Guzman, a wealthy merchant of Seville, whose sister had long ago incurred his wrath by eloping with a German Protestant musician named Walberg. When Guzman thinks that he is about to die, he invites his sister and her family to Seville and establishes them in luxury and wealth, although he refuses to see them. Walberg invites his parents to come from Germany to live with them and for a time, all live happily and comfortably. But when Guzman dies, it is discovered that he has left all of his money to the Church, and so the Walbergs are left penniless. In the midst of poverty and despair, the son sells his blood to a surgeon, the daughter is almost tempted into prostitution, and Walberg becomes virtually insane with worry. During this time, he is visited by Melmoth, but like the others whom Melmoth seeks out, Walberg refuses the terms Melmoth demands in order to help him. Finally the original will, in which Guzman bequeathed all of his money to his sister, is discovered, but not before Walberg almost commits murder. Eventually he recovers from his sickness and the family returns to Germany to live prosperously.

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First of all, it provides Maturin with a means of maintaining a tight aesthetic control over his material; and, given the nature of the world he creates in Melmoth—one filled with cruelty, insanity, torture, and death—such control is imperative. In some respects, Melmoth resembles a nightmare contained within a structure that, in its formal preciseness, serves to bring order out of chaos and a strange and haunting beauty out of subjects that are in themselves anything but beautiful. Secondly, the organization makes it possible for Maturin to explore his themes through the techniques of analogy and juxtaposition. For example, Maturin explores the nature of religious persecution in the “Tale of the Spaniard” and the “Tale of the Indians,” the nature of love in the “Tale of the Indians” and “The Lover’s Tale,” and the different aspects of cruelty and insanity in “The Tale of Stanton,” the “Tale of the Spaniard,” and the “Tale of the Indians.” Melmoth’s presence in all of the tales creates a continuity by establishing a larger plot structure that links the tales together and by suggesting those common bonds of humanity that exist among characters otherwise separated by both chronology and nationality. Melmoth’s history and character are revealed throughout the novel by persons who have met or heard of him and also by Melmoth’s own brief visitations. It is in the “Tale of the Indians” that Melmoth, through his relationship with Immalee, takes on an independent character and importance of his own. Not only does Maturin’s technique of gradually revealing Melmoth increase the fear and mystery that surround him, but it is also appropriate that we meet Melmoth in this fashion, since for much of the novel he is primarily an observer, a man who periodically visits persons whom he believes might be willing to exchange their destiny for his own. Not until “The Lover’s Tale,” the last tale in the novel, do we fully discover the nature of Melmoth’s destiny. An Irishman, Melmoth had become attracted to astrology and the occult sciences during a trip to Poland and had been “promised . . . the knowledge and power of the future world—on conditions that are unutterable.” Like Faust, Melmoth agreed to give up his soul to diabolic powers in exchange for profound and prophetic knowledge; and he can be released from this pact only if, in the course of 150 years, he can find someone willing to trade places with him. But although his search lasts the full 150 years and takes him to the darkest and most horrible regions of suffering humanity, he is unsuccessful in his quest: “I have

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traversed the world in the search, and no one, to gain the world, would lose his own soul.” Melmoth is never the immediate cause of suffering—those persons he encounters have suffered not at the hands of some superhuman power, but at the hands of other human beings. In this respect, Melmoth comes to represent those dark truths that men tend to bestow upon a demonic or diabolic world in order to mitigate their own sense of guilt or inadequacy. He is at once apart from and privy to the innermost secrets and hidden deeds of all men; he is a man who has the power to range the earth and to probe the fears and anxieties of other, yet is incapable of gaining power over them or of learning the secrets of his own heart. What distinguishes Melmoth from Maturin’s previous characters is the ambivalence of his emotions and the complex relationship that develops between Melmoth and Immalee. Although at first he views her as a means to escape his destiny he soon falls in love with her; as a consequence, his existence becomes more tormented, yet more beautiful. Immalee, having been raised on an island and knowing only beauty and peace, is an Eve surrounded by depravity, a figure of innocence and beauty in the midst of corruption and evil. By initiating her into the evils of this world, Melmoth buries his own heart deeper in cynicism and despair and thus cuts himself off from the possibilities of redemptive love. Maturin’s depiction of the way in which Immalee’s innocence and simple faith work upon Melmoth contains some of his very best writing, as he allows Melmoth to rediscover emotions long buried within him. For one brief moment, when he pleads with Immalee to stay, salvation is within his reach, but the moment of reawakening eludes him, and the full implications of it escape that intellect for which he sold his soul. Immalee does not stay and the secret remains hidden. Love, for Maturin, is redemptive in that it opens the heart to emotions that bring man closer to his fellow beings and to God. Immalee says to Melmoth that “he who is without a God must be without a heart,” and the converse of this is also true. He whose heart is closed to love is also separated from God. Like Faust, Melmoth is always within reach of God’s salvation, for God’s mercy and forgiveness are infinite and require only faith on man’s part to be bestowed. His pact with the Devil does not remove Melmoth from God’s grace, but his own cynicism and hardness of heart do.

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For Maturin, most men worship not the Christian God of love and compassion, “the God of smiles and happiness,” but a harsh and sadistic deity, “the God of groans and blood.” Employing religion as a mask behind which he may enact his basest desires, man perverts the meaning of the worship he engages in and creates a religion of hate and violence. Again in Melmoth Maturin explores the ways in which sadism and masochism arise from man’s imposition of a system of unnatural and narrow constraints; the Inquisition is a symbol of the institutionalization of such cruelty. Early in their relationship, Melmoth shows Immalee two representative religions—in one flagellation and asceticism are practiced, and in the other torture and persecution. For Maturin, these two expressions of “religion” are inextricably related. The antithesis of Christianity in this novel is represented not by Melmoth, but by a parricide and lay-brother among the ex-Jesuits. His particular theology represents Maturin’s final expression of anger and sorrow at what has become of the religion embodied by the Sermon on the Mount: “Mine is the best theology—the theology of utter hostility to all beings whose sufferings may mitigate mine.” Melmoth the Wanderer must be read as a religious work. H. P. Lovecraft in his Supernatural Horror in Literature, although critical of Melmoth’s structure, nevertheless recognizes its religious quality, “a pulse of power undiscoverable in any previous work of this kind—a kinship to the essential truth of human nature, and understanding of the profoundest sources of actual cosmic fear, and a white heat of sympathetic passion on the writer’s part. . . .” In Melmoth, “Fear is taken out of the realm of the conventional and exalted into a hideous cloud over mankind’s very destiny.” Dante’s Hell has been brought above ground and we see it through the eyes of its inhabitants rather than through the eyes of an observer. At the end, as we hear of Melmoth being pulled down to Hell by demons, the ultimate consequences of cynicism and despair are brought home to bear. In order to present this vision, Maturin had to himself descend more deeply into the Hell within, into the depths of cruelty and horror, and must have been both frightened and fascinated by that curiosity that drove him to write, for example, of two lovers being starved to death in an underground dungeon, or of a man dreaming of being burned alive during an auto-da-fé. And although

there may be signs of an abnormal imagination in Melmoth, such as led reviewers to speak of Maturin as a genius either mad or diabolic, if we try to dismiss such writing too easily, we are reminded, as Maturin wants us to be, of the normal world in which we live, a world in which autosda-fé, wars, Dachau and Auschwitz do exist, a world presided over by normal kings, queens, politicians, and generals. And we are perhaps forced to reconsider our definitions of madness. Maturin, however far his mind might have traveled into “the dark regions of romance,” faced a more immediate and mundane world of unpaid bills and pressing creditors. In 1821, after having lived three years on the 500 pounds he received as an advance for Melmoth, he was once again without money, “distrained for taxes,” and “under ejectment for rent.” It was considerably longer than he anticipated before he published his next, and last, romance, The Albigenses. In the meantime, a long blank-verse poem entitled The Universe appeared in 1821 with Maturin listed as its author and dedicated to Coleridge “by his sincere admirer, the Author.” The poem’s authorship became a matter of immediate dispute when a Mr. James Wills claimed that he had written the poem and had been persuaded by Maturin, who had been advanced £500 for a poem he could not finish, to allow him to publish it under his name. It is possible that Maturin had asked Wills to finish the poem—or perhaps even to write all of it—but it is extremely unlikely that he had been advanced such a large sum of money. Whatever the true facts of the controversy are, the poem is at best mediocre and provides no evidence whatsoever of the presence of Maturin’s particular genius and talents within it. The reception of Melmoth seems to have driven Maturin into a deeper seclusion and consequently little is known of his public life during his last years. He had succeeded in alienating himself from his Church superiors even before Melmoth, had offended the Evangelicals in Women: or Pour et Contre, had angered the Catholics in Melmoth, and did not even enjoy that compensation of wealth that often accompanies notoriety. His financial situation was worse than it had ever been, and most of his energies were devoted to trying to eke out an existence for himself and his family. It was not until 1824, the year of his death, that Maturin’s last novel, The Albigenses, was published. Although it is the longest of Maturin’s works, consisting of four volumes and nearly 1500 pages, it was conceived of by him as but the first

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Thus his damnation results not from the diabolic powers without, but from within, and in this lies the tragedy of his fate.

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part of a trilogy “illustrative of European feelings and manners in ancient times, in middle, and in modern.” Much has been said of the influence of Scott and the popularity of his historical novels in Maturin’s choice of subjects for his last novel. There can be no doubt that Maturin was indebted to Scott and in The Albigenses often rendered him through imitation the highest form of honor. But at the same time, it is quite consistent with Maturin’s interests that he should have chosen to write a novel focusing on the Middle Ages and, more particularly, on the persecution of the Albigenses. Religious fanaticism, in its many guises, had always fascinated him and the Middle Ages presented him with a rich and often bizarre combination of human experience—of piety existing alongside of superstition, asceticism vying with sensuality, bravery bearing the banner of oppression, and courtly love imposing upon man an unnatural nobility of restraint. There is, however, a certain ambivalence on Maturin’s part towards the material of his last novel. The reason for this ambivalence is that the romantic bent in Maturin—seen in his obvious fondness and sympathy for certain aspects of the feudal ages—is always struggling against an essentially conservative strain within him. On one hand, Maturin is attracted to the age he is describing—to its richness of spirit, to the high ideals it professed, even if it left them too often unpracticed, and to the potential it offered for individual heroism and noble action. This attraction is only partially explained by the fact that Maturin was contemporary with the rise of romanticism and its interest in the literature and culture of other ages. More important in Maturin’s case is the temperamental affinities he had with whatever partook of the aristocratic, an affinity seen in the legends Maturin used to tell of his own family’s noble origins. But if Maturin was politically and emotionally attracted to certain aspects of the Middle Ages, his philosophical and theological view of man prevented him from writing a conventional romance of history extolling the nobility of the age. Maturin might show affinities with the romantic temperament in his belief in nature’s salutary powers and in its capacity to provide man with a glimpse of his Creator; but he does not share the romantic’s belief in the innate goodness of man or in man’s unlimited potential for social and ethical improvement. Goodness and even nobility are possible, although rare, but are constantly endangered by the forces of chance and mutability as well as by man’s own propensity toward the base

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and the ignoble. For Maturin man’s struggle toward the noble and the good is fraught with additional danger by the fact that such a struggle often represses those human desires that if denied for long will ultimately turn against man and destroy him. His idealization of the age, however, does come through in his depiction of women in The Albigenses. In Women and Melmoth, Zaira, Eva, and Immalee stand among the most memorable of his characters; in The Albigenses, on the other hand, Maturin creates two women who, in their conventionality of thought and action, closely resemble those typical romantic heroines he earlier satirized in a review of Radcliffe’s novels. In the case of Genevieve, the granddaughter of the aged leader of the Albigenses, Maturin apparently envisioned every possible trial and tribulation that a heroine could face and then created circumstances whereby she could experience them all. She is sent into exile for rendering aid to a wounded knight she eventually marries, saves a group of women from being assaulted, is almost seduced by the Bishop of Toulouse, saves the life of Queen Ingelberg, and soon must use this fact to protect herself from the dishonourable advances of the Queen’s son, the Dauphin of France. As if this were not enough adventure for a girl not yet twenty years old, she also meets and talks with Eloise, the immortal lover of Abelard. Isabelle, the other heroine, has fewer adventures—she falls in love with and marries a young knight whose destiny it is to kill the last survivor of the Courtenaye family: Isabelle herself. But through the aid of what is perhaps Maturin’s strangest combination of protagonists, a Catholic monk and a sorceress, this disaster is averted and toward the end of the novel, a double wedding takes place. If The Albigenses consisted only of the perils and plights of its two heroes and two heroines, it would be in no way distinguished from the many historical romances tha were flooding the market in Maturin’s time, most of them trying to capitalize on Scott’s success. Fortunately there is much more than that. First of all, Maturin provides us with a vast and sweeping panoramic view of the historical and religious background. He is also quite successful in capturing the essence of the age’s most important figures. Both Simon de Montfort and the Bishop of Toulouse come across larger than life—in their energy and strength, in their enjoyment of the power they wielded, in their mutual hatred of the Albigenses, and in the struggle waged between them to gain recognition as the Champion of the Church. Because Maturin

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If Maturin’s historical interests and his romantic impulses are responsible for his creation of those larger-than-life characters, there is another recurrent impulse in Maturin that checks his admiration for the Middle Ages. He is aware that even his most heroic figures were driven, in part, by unheroic needs and desires; like Women and, to a lesser extent, Melmoth, The Albigenses is a study of religious fanaticism. For Maturin, fanaticism under any guise separates man from himself and from his fellowmen; religious fanaticism, however, is especially dangerous because it deadens one to the feelings of sympathy and compassion and because the energy and enthusiasm of religious fervor are often turned, through violence, hatred, and rigid moral certainty, against religion itself. If Maturin had angered the Evangelicals in Women, the Catholics in Melmoth, in this novel he succeeded in antagonizing them both. But we have to believe Maturin (in spite of his fantasizing about the sexual and sadistic propensities of Catholic priests) when he maintains that he was not criticizing religion, but rather the perversion of religion by those “who . . . painted heaven to their imaginations and their hearers as a place whose joys would be exalted by their consciousness of the interminable sufferings of their persecutors and enemies.” The fact remains, however, that Maturin became progressively more alienated—at least in his fiction—from all organized religion, namely because he felt that any religion that tries to impose its will or creed upon others is in danger of transforming what should be an order of joy and love into an order of suffering and hatred. It is not simply coincidental that the two religious leaders who most clearly represent Maturin’s ideal of the religious man, Pierre, the leader of the Albigenses, and the Monk of Montcalm, both antagonize the power structures of their respective churches. Maturin’s ultimate distrust of all formal religion is further seen in the fact that the novel’s true moral center is found in a scene reminiscent of Voltaire—a writer with whom Maturin shared more than he would have admitted—and involves a shepherd totally isolated from the outside world of chivalry, politics, and religious wars. Professing to a very simple and almost pagan religion, the

shepherd is harshly chastized by visitors for his backwardness and informed of the ways of the civilized world beyond, where religion is such an important issue that it “had been the cause of wars that had desolated the fairest provinces of France; that it had marshalled armies with princes and pontiffs at their head; and already cost the lives of thirty thousand men, sacrificed by their own countrymen. . . .” But the shepherd, preferring his own ways, decided to remain uncivilized and “as the first light of dawn gleamed through the crevice, he unbarred his door, and silently motioned his guests to depart.” There are many strengths in The Albigenses— Maturin’s imaginative recreating of the crusade of the Catholic Church against the Albigenses, his characterization of those men on both sides who play crucial roles in the campaign, and his probing of those emotions and often unacknowledged desires that were concealed beneath the banners of religion and chivalry—but in spite of this, Maturin’s genius, that force we feel on virtually every page of Melmoth, is only sporadically present. This novel is finally weakened by the fact that Maturin is always so evidently in control of it. He knew too well those talents he possessed for creating an exciting tale and for peopling it with tormented characters; and in The Albigenses these skills appear, but in a tired and imitative fashion, lacking the imaginative force and capacity to court the unknown and horrible possessed by Melmoth. It is, of course, impossible to foresee what Maturin would have written had he lived to complete his trilogy, but he seems to lack both the energy and the desire to bring his project to a conclusion, and Maturin lived on after Melmoth in poverty and isolation, fulfilling in life the debilitating and oppressive fate of those poverty-ridden and tormented characters about whom he wrote with such apprehension. On October 30, 1824 Charles Robert Maturin died at the age of forty-four. As his health faded in the last months of his life, he became even more isolated and consequently very little is known of this time. It was apparently a time of great depression for him, compounded by the anxieties of poverty and by illness exacerbated by long hours of work and little sleep during his composition of The Albigenses. Shortly after Maturin’s death, his wife wrote to Scott: You no doubt by this time are acquainted with the death of my dear departed husband; he has left me with four children, the youngest of whom is only five years old, totally unprovided for—he laboured with incessant assiduity for his family even after it had pleased the Almighty to deprive him of health—his sufferings with regard to

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draws them with such vividness, he forces the reader to share his ambivalent attitude toward them. Even though we recognize their cruelty, their boundless egotism, and the discrepancy between their actions and the religion they are professedly defending, we are begrudgingly forced to give them at least our qualified admiration.

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pecuniary circumstances preyed on a constitution naturally delicate, till at last it put a period to his existence—

Scott had planned to visit Maturin in the summer of 1825, but Maturin died before he could meet the man who had for twelve years advised, consoled and encouraged him, and on several occasions had provided the only money that stood between Maturin and starvation. After Maturin’s death, two rumors circulated, both of which are false. The first was that Maturin’s eldest son, William, had burned all of his father’s manuscripts because of the shame he felt in his father’s connection with the stage. William’s letters to Scott after his father’s death completely refute this rumor and suggest that he made every effort to have his father’s literary remains either produced on stage or published. The second rumor—that Maturin had consciously precipitated his own death through a mistake in his medicines—is the sort of story that Maturin’s eccentric habits and behavior would encourage, but it too, as Idman suggests, is unfounded. James Clarence Mangan, who knew Maturin during those final years, recalls seeing him shortly after he had officiated at a funeral: His long pale, melancholy, Don Quixote, out-ofthe-world face would have inclined you to believe that Dante, Bajazet, and the Cid had risen together from their sepulchres, and clubbed their features for the production of an effect. But. . . . The great Irishman, like Hamlet, had that within him which passed show, . . . He bore the ‘thunder-scars’ about him, but they were graven, not on his brow, but on his heart.

The comparison of Maturin to Hamlet need not be examined, but Mangan’s allusions to Dante and Don Quixote are relevant in considering Maturin’s life and art. The romantic poets had explored that “deep and romantic chasm,” that “savage place” Coleridge writes of in “Kubla Khan,” but had pulled up short, except for the later books of Don Juan, in their description of what they found. The gothic novelists had, on the other hand, written of the emotions of fear and terror, but had relied heavily on external machinery and on a topography of horror often used for its own sake. Maturin’s contribution to British literature is found in his ability to synthesize these two traditions, taking the literary medium provided by the gothic novel, but using it to examine more deeply those aspects of human experience embodied in those figures, such as Faust and the Wandering Jew, that had captured the romantic imagination. Yet Maturin is cut off from those romantics who preceded him by a strong Calvinis-

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tic vein that finally prevented him, in spite of his own romantic leanings, from seeking redemption, or even solace from love, be it of Man, nature, or God. Few of the love relationships that he depicts are successful and even fewer of his novels end happily. In one respect Melmoth is Maturin’s attempt to find a basis for hope and belief; and in so far as none of the persons confronted by Melmoth is willing to sell his soul for worldly happiness, Maturin’s world differs from Dante’s Hell in the allimportant fact that hope has not been abandoned. Immalee is the embodiment of Melmoth’s antithesis: in her joy, beauty, and innocence we see Man as he once was and as Maturin would like to be; but she too is fated to die in an Inquisition dungeon, isolated and estranged from all but God. Because Maturin’s world is in many ways monstrous and cruel, his influence was felt most strongly not among the Victorian novelists, but among the French romantics, who found in Edgar Allan Poe and Maturin kindred investigators of that monstrous landscape Baudelaire was to traverse in Les Fleurs du Mal. Some of the later nineteenth-century British writers, such as Rossetti and Oscar Wilde, were to speak highly of Maturin, and one can see in The Picture of Dorian Gray why Wilde might have been attracted to the writings of his fellow countryman. In fact, during Wilde’s final days of exile in Paris, after his release from prison, he assumed the name of “Sebastian Melmoth.” If Maturin’s works evoke in their probing of the diabolic an image of Dante’s Inferno, his own life in some respects painfully reminds one of Don Quixote. There was a certain naiveté and innocence about Maturin that worked against him in his quest for success, and he was unable to understand how his literature could possibly offend his superiors in the church. He maintained an unrealistic expectation that wise and rational men would and could keep separate the content of a novel from the moral character of the man who wrote it. To the very end of his painful life, he kept the hope, against all reason, that some person or event would intervene to alleviate his distress. One can only wish that Maturin had had his own Sancho Panza, someone who was as familiar with the realities of this world as Maturin was with the realities of the other world. But Maturin is neither English, Italian, nor Spanish; he is Irish, and his work must finally be judged in terms of the Irish tradition. He has, of course, no place in that tradition if one excludes

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Maturin was the author of six novels and three published plays; yet he is remembered today, if at all, only for Melmoth the Wanderer. It is unlikely that there will be a resurgence of interest in Maturin in the near future, even though at least two of his novels, The Milesian Chief and Women: or Pour et Contre, definitely do not deserve the obscurity they have suffered. But it is fitting that history has chosen to remember Maturin for that strange and foreboding Wanderer, for in Melmoth Maturin created, with fear and fascination, a figure who embodies in his isolation, his wanderings, and his descent into the recesses of the human heart, those haunted and darkened passages of his

own genius. Through the magic of the written word, he evoked demons from within the human mind, and they, in turn, retaliated upon their summoner by isolating and estranging him from that world into which they were called. Of Maturin, James Clarence Mangan wrote: He—in his own dark way—understood many people; but nobody understood him in any way. And therefore it was that he, this man of the highest genius, Charles Robert Maturin, lived unappreciated—and died unsympathized with, uncared for, unenquired after—and not only forgotten, because he had never been thought about.

We may hope that his insights are not proved by history to be as prophetic as they are sensitive.

Selected Bibliography The Principal Works of Charles Robert Maturin (Dates refer to the first editions, unless otherwise noted)

DRAMA: Bertram; or the Castle of St. Aldobrand. London: John Murray, 1816. Manuel. London: John Murray, 1817. Fredolfo. London: Constable and Co., 1819.

FICTION: The Family of Montorio; or the Fatal Revenge. 3 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807. The Wild Irish Boy. 3 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808. The Milesian Chief. 4 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1812. Women; or Pour et Contre. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Constable and Co., 1818. Melmoth the Wanderer. 4 vols. Edinburgh: Constable and Co., 1820. There is also a recent edition of this novel, edited and introduced by William F. Axton, Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska, 1961. The Albigenses. 4 vols. London: Hurst, Robinson and Co., 1824.

LETTERS: The Correspondence of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Robert Maturin, ed. and intro. by Fannie E. Ratchford and Wm. H. McCarthy, Jr., Austin: Univ. of Texas, 1937.

Secondary Studies Melmoth the Wanderer. vol. 1. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1892. This particular edition, in addition to containing as its frontispiece the famous Brocas portrait of Maturin, also possesses some valuable biographical and bibliographical information: 1) “Memoirs of Charles Robert Maturin”; 2) “Separate

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from his study all writers except the “Irishspeaking Irish.” Maturin is an Anglo-Irishman who wrote in English primarily for an English audience; and although according to Thomas Flanagan’s The Irish Novelists, 1800-1850, he and Lefanu are outside the mainstream of even this tradition because they “turned to tales whose somber and uncanny atmosphere seeks to transcend the immediacies of social fact,” it is difficult to speak of Maturin as other than an Irish novelist, if only by virtue of the problems he shared in common with other Irish writers of his time. He faced the problems of trying to define Ireland as he saw it for a people who viewed it for the most part as an alien culture. Throughout his writings, and especially in The Wild Irish Boy and The Milesian Chief, he wrestles not only with the problem of Ireland’s identity but also tries to educate his reading audience in Ireland’s history, her traditions, her strengths, and her weaknesses. Maturin’s love for Ireland shapes what he wrote and is manifest in the characters he created, from his aged chiefs to his blind and prophetic bards, in the Irish myths, music, and poetry that he spoke of, and in his descriptions of Ireland’s lanscape and cities. He was, however, as firmly rooted in the present political and economic realities of Ireland as he was steeped in Irish folklore and history. As an Irish Protestant with Tory political leanings, he did not believe that Ireland could exist independently of England, but he writes, not as a political theorist or pamphleteer, but as a novelist, and his writings provide us not with answers, but with the articulation of problems. In the problems he writes of and in the conflict between his heart and head where the question of Ireland is concerned, we can see his sense of personal estrangement as an Irishman, and this estrangement is reflected in many of his major Irish characters who are drawn by the past but must find their role in the present.

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Notices of Each Book”; 3) “A Note on Charles Robert Maturin”; 4) “A List of Works by Charles Robert Maturin, With Translations and Adaptations by Other Authors.” Axton, William F. “Introduction,” Melmoth the Wanderer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1961. Hume, Robert D. “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 282-290. Idman, Nilo. Charles Robert Maturin: His Life and Works. London: Constable and Co., 1923. A pioneering study containing a valuable bibliography. Lovecraft, H. P. Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York: Ben Abramson, 1945. Railo, Eino. The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1927. Scholten, Willem. Charles Robert Maturin: The Terror-Novelist. Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1933. Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame. New York: Russel and Russel, 1957.

TITLE COMMENTARY Melmoth the Wanderer CHRIS BALDICK (ESSAY DATE 1989) SOURCE: Baldick, Chris. Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer, by Charles Robert Maturin, pp. vii-ix. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. In the following essay, Baldick discusses Maturin’s place in the Gothic tradition and examines several themes in Melmoth the Wanderer.

Upon his release from prison in 1897, Oscar Wilde travelled to France under an assumed name carefully contrived to announce him as both martyred saint and blasted sinner: it was ‘Sebastian Melmoth’. For, as Wilde well knew, the name of Melmoth still echoed in France, as it did no longer in Ireland or England, with the notoriety of high Romantic despair and damnation; it was the badge of the eternal outcast, of his grandiose self-hatred, and of his withering scorn for heaven and earth. It was, still more appropriately, something of an heirloom, because the author of Melmoth the Wanderer had been the uncle by marriage of Wilde’s mother. Having helped a few years earlier to prepare a biographical introduction to an edition of his great-uncle’s novel, Wilde knew the history and reputation of the Revd Charles Robert Maturin, Anglican curate of St Peter’s in Dublin, novelist, playwright, eccentric, and failure: Ma-

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turin had died in poverty in 1824, his literary efforts frowned upon by his ecclesiastical superiors in Dublin, slighted by most of the critics in Edinburgh, and laughed off the stage in London. In Paris, however, his reputation had flourished posthumously. Balzac, his most prominent admirer, had placed the figure of Melmoth the Wanderer alongside Goethe’s Faust and Byron’s Manfred as one of the great outcasts of modern literature, and he had even written a satirical sequel, Melmoth réconcilié (1835). Baudelaire had later acclaimed Melmoth as the outstanding model of the sneering melodramatic villain and had planned a new translation of Melmoth the Wanderer to replace the incomplete French version of 1821. In the French pantheon of sensational modern authors, Maturin had been given an honourable niche only a little below that of Edgar Allan Poe. This exaltation Maturin owed almost entirely to the unusually fascinating power of his fifth novel, Melmoth the Wanderer, which appeared in 1820. His first, Fatal Revenge (1807), won a few admirers (including Walter Scott) for its treatment of Gothic intrigues, but the others—The Wild Irish Boy (1808), The Milesian Chief (1812), Women (1818), and The Albigenses (1824)—made little impression. Only once did Maturin, assisted and encouraged by Scott and Byron, achieve unmistakable literary success, with the sudden and spectacular triumph of his tragedy Bertram in 1816. Even this was a mixed blessing, though. Already financially burdened by his father’s unfair dismissal from a lucrative Post Office position in 1809, Maturin had later stood surety for another relative who went bankrupt, thus soaking up in advance much of the fortune which Bertram earned. To add to his troubles, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose own work had been passed over by the Drury Lane theatre in favour of Bertram, launched a spiteful attack upon what he saw as subversive, even atheistic sentiments in Maturin’s play. Since Maturin had now to abandon his pseudonym of Dennis Jasper Murphy in order to secure the rewards of his dramatic success, his chances of preferment in the Church of Ireland were compromised beyond repair. The humble stipend of a curate could not meet the expenses of his growing family (there were four children to feed by the time he finished Melmoth), so it was by writing that he would have to sustain it. Bertram, however, was followed by the failure of his next tragedy, Manuel (1817), after which his last drama, Fredolfo (1819), flopped disastrously in a hubbub of giggles and catcalls: the sight of a

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Gothic fiction had flourished in England since the early 1790s, led by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis after the model had been established by Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto (1764), but by the time that Melmoth the Wanderer was written, the genre could be seen to be declining in its impact. This was the result partly of a flood of predictable imitations of Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) in which the Gothic formula became ridiculously repetitive and earned Jane Austen’s affectionate mockery in Northanger Abbey (1818); and partly of a new vogue for regional and historical novels, which absorbed some elements of Gothic while eclipsing Radcliffe’s followers in popularity: the pioneers here were the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth and Maturin’s own literary mentor and pen-friend Walter Scott (although Maturin’s nationalistic romance The Milesian Chief actually antedated the publication in 1814 of Scott’s landmark novel Waverley). Part of Maturin’s achievement in Melmoth the Wanderer, then, was to have breathed some belated vitality—albeit of a strangely nervous and galvanic sort—into what seemed an exhausted convention. I hope to define in the next few pages the nature and the novelty of that resuscitation, but first it will be worth clarifying the relation of Melmoth to its Gothic forerunners, since this book has always been read against the background of the thirty-year reign of ‘Terror-novelists’. There are two kinds of account given of Maturin’s place in Gothic fiction, both of them potentially misleading. The first, adopted in several standard literary histories, speaks of Melmoth the Wanderer as the last—and possibly the greatest—of the Gothic novels in the line from Walpole through Radcliffe and Lewis; the final mad fling of a decadent fad for dungeons and ghosts. But of course Melmoth was not really the last of anything; Gothic fiction lingered on in James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and soon revived in the work of Poe; it has remained defiantly undead as a significant presence in Western literature ever since. Nor is it very helpful to see Melmoth as a direct or linear outgrowth of the Radcliffe school

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character killing his defeated adversary with a sword proffered in surrender drove the London audience into an indignant rage. Evidently out of touch with English notions of fair play, Maturin returned in Melmoth to the safer ground of mediterranean Catholic treachery—in other words, to the Gothic mode of fiction with which his literary career had begun.

FROM THE AUTHOR AN EXCERPT FROM MATURIN’S PREFACE TO MELMOTH THE WANDERER

The hint of this Romance (or Tale) was taken from a passage in one of my Sermons, which (as it is to be presumed very few have read) I shall here take the liberty to quote. The passage is this. ‘At this moment is there one of us present, however we may have departed from the Lord, disobeyed his will, and disregarded his word—is there one of us who would, at this moment, accept all that man could bestow, or earth afford, to resign the hope of his salvation?—No, there is not one—not such a fool on earth, were the enemy of mankind to traverse it with the offer!’

This passage suggested the idea of Melmoth the Wanderer. The Reader will find that idea developed in the following pages, with what power or success he is to decide. The ‘Spaniard’s Tale’ has been censured by a friend to whom I read it, as containing too much attempt at the revivification of the horrors of Radcliffe-Romance, of the persecutions of convents, and the terrors of the Inquisition. I defended myself, by trying to point out to my friend, that I had made the misery of conventual life depend less on the startling adventures one meets with in romances, than on that irritating series of petty torments which constitutes the misery of life in general, and which, amid the tideless stagnation of monastic existence, solitude gives its inmates leisure to invent, and power combined with malignity, the full disposition to practise. I trust this defence will operate more on the conviction of the Reader, than it did on that of my friend. DUBLIN, 31st August 1820 SOURCE: Maturin, Charles Robert. “Preface.” In Melmoth the Wanderer. 1820. Reprint edition, pp. 5-6. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

alone. The alternative account of Maturin’s place in Gothic fiction, indeed, emphasizes his indepen-

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dence from ‘the horrors of Radcliffe-Romance’, citing his preface to Melmoth and claiming him as a precursor of Dostoevsky and Kafka, as a psychological novelist rather than a retailer of ghoulish gimmicks. There is no need, however, to counterpose the psychological and the Gothic in this way, as Maturin’s modern admirers have often done, nor to deny Melmoth’s evident resort to Radcliffean effects: its crumbling parchments, its subterranean passages, its crucial scene of a wedding sealed by a dead hand. A more discriminating account of the varieties of Gothic fiction, such as that offered in David Punter’s survey The Literature of Terror, is able to reconcile these contending versions of Melmoth’s Gothic status, in the first place by reminding us that although Gothic fiction may be most easily recognized by its paraphernalia of props and settings, its distinctive animating principle is a psychological interest in states of trepidation, dread, panic, revulsion, claustrophobia, and paranoia. The most helpful contribution such an approach can make is to bring into view another cycle of novels whose concerns overlap with those of the most celebrated Gothic works, and share important qualities with Melmoth the Wanderer. this group includes, alongside the well-known Frankenstein (1818) of Mary Shelley, two novels by her father William Godwin—Caleb Williams (1794) and St Leon (1799)—together with Hogg’s Justified Sinner. Our improved map now includes two linked groups of novels, each concerned with extreme states of mental disturbance. The first mainstream group could be called ‘full-dress’ Gothic, since it decks out its essential psychological tremors in a uniform costume of lurid effects and trappings; the second unorthodox group carries a much lighter cargo of chains and cowls, so that its similar obsessions with persecution and delusion stand out more clearly. Novels in this second group tend to rely less on the evocation of atmosphere from a monastic or castellar setting than on a fabulous principle of transgression, usually involving the Faustian acquisition of forbidden knowledge. Melmoth the Wanderer belongs with this Godwinian line of novels, with which it shares some unusual features in its construction. Whereas the romances of Radcliffe had palliated their apparent terrors with the reassuring presence of a pious and rational omniscient narrator, the narratives of Caleb Williams and Frankenstein, like the second part of Hogg’s Justified Sinner, give us the intensity of first-person testimony, leading us back through ‘flashback’ recollections and embedded

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tales-within-tales to a realm of inward disturbance not commonly accessible to the more placid conventions of third-person narration. It seems from the subsequent history of Gothic fiction that the myth of transgression calls forth (if it does not absolutely require) a distinctive narrative strategy which wraps its central horror in protective or transitional layers of secondary and tertiary report: the ‘concentric’ accounts of explorer, experimenter, and monster in Frankenstein, the thirdhand stories which reach us through Nelly and Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, the recollection of benighted yarn-spinning that constitutes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the elaborately indirect reconstruction of Sutpen’s outrages in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!—all these justly celebrated cases of narrative involution construct an imaginative topography of conventional surface and criminal depth which imparts a special resonance to the mythic crime while unsettling or corroding the moral certainties by which it might be condemned. Maturin’s novel falls—inadvertently as much as consciously—under this law of Gothic design, although his execution of the embedded narrative pattern remains freakishly irregular even by these standards. The reader should be forewarned that the design by which Maturin connects the various stories-within-stories in this novel is a preposterously convoluted contrivance, to the despair of his earliest critics, and to the embarrassment of his later admirers. It has neither the symmetry of Frankenstein nor the careful organization of Wuthering Heights. Fortunately, though, the essential logic of the plotting is still clear enough to follow, provided that one is willing not just to suspend disbelief but to throw it to the winds. The story leads us back twice from the early nineteenth century to the late seventeenth; first, through an introductory episode in which the young heir John Melmoth reads an account of the traveller Stanton, who encounters Melmoth the Wanderer in Spain in 1677 and later in London; then at much greater length through Monçada, a shipwrecked Spaniard, who not only tells young Melmoth of his own recent experiences at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition but also repeats to him the accounts of the Wanderer collected by an ancient Jew, Adonijah. The principal story relayed by and from Adonijah is the ‘Tale of the Indians’, set on an oriental island and in Spain between 1680 and 1684; it allows Melmoth the Wanderer a much more visible role than before, and concerns his attempted seduction of the innocent young castaway Immalee (who reverts to the name of Isi-

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Even if we put aside the multiple improbabilities of all this, we are still left with a strangely overwrought narrative structure. For example, the Shropshire clergyman’s relation of Melmoth’s early life in ‘The Lovers’ Tale’ forms part of an account spoken by Melmoth himself to Immalee’s father, within a story relayed by an unknown source to Adonijah, which is in turn transcribed and later recalled by Monçada, who repeats this fifth-hand information to young John Melmoth; or so we gather, at one further remove, from the impersonal narrator of the novel. Despite the Radcliffean device of the crumbling or illegible manuscript to which Maturin resorts so often, the story is seen to pass unimpaired through these several layers of report and recall, down to the last detail of dialogue and gesture. It seems as if Melmoth’s seventeenth-century escapades have the status of an indelible stain, like original sin itself according to the Calvinist doctrine to which Maturin subscribed. For a novel ostensibly concerned with its protagonist’s inability to pass on his burden of guilt and horror to another, Melmoth is unusual in that it allows (and in fact demands) that burden to be passed on repeatedly from hand to hand as narration: Adonijah, for instance, is actually obliged, as penance for his crimes of curiosity, to transmit the legend of Melmoth to a younger scribe. This novel is secretly as much about transmission as it is about transgression, but its very structure assumes a principle of transmissibility which its theology denies. A noticeable symptom of this is that the layers of narration which one might expect to be marked by distinct narrative voices are in fact tonally continuous, so that the reader will often forget (as

Maturin himself seems to do) just who is speaking at any given point, and just how many pairs of inverted commas are hung around each incident. The structural oddities observed above tend to run into serious collisions with the doctrinal aims of this novel; but before examining the inconsistencies and contradictions which thus arise, we should grasp Maturin’s religious purpose in its context. Modern approaches to Gothic novels too often take the first short cut to the incestuous and murderous undercurrents of these stories without pausing to consider the important concerns which are visible on the surface; the chief victim of this neglect being the Gothic preoccupation with religious delusions and bigotry. A significant part of the Gothic novel’s appeal to its first readers, after all, was that its claustrophobic evocation of scheming, idolatrous Spaniards and Italians allowed Protestant readers in Britain to congratulate themselves on their liberty and their pious rectitude. As one character exclaims in Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest (1791), ‘O exquisite misery! ’tis now only I perceive all the horrors of confinement—’tis now only that I understand the value of liberty!’ Protestant cultures often seem to favour dramas of persecution and captivity as their adoptive myths of origin, but Maturin was more than usually predisposed to follow this paranoiac inclination of his faith. He was descended from a refugee Huguenot minister who fled France after the Edict of Nantes (which had guaranteed the Protestants some freedom of worship) was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685—the same period to which Melmoth repeatedly returns. This removal from one predominantly Catholic country to another eventually placed Charles Robert Maturin in the service of that Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland which nervously guarded its privileges from the dispossessed Catholic majority in the years between the 1798 uprising and the launching of Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Emancipation movement in 1824. In that same year Maturin published, shortly before his death, a series of sermons on the errors of Catholicism, sermons which were said to have packed his church with eager listeners. To attack Catholicism was not for Maturin, as it was for Lewis in his prurient Gothic novel The Monk (1796), an antiquarian fancydress frolic. It was a very serious duty of his vocation, to which he was earnestly committed. When he writes in Melmoth of the sinister power which Catholic priests have over the lives of Spanish families, we can guess that his ‘Spain’ is partly a nightmarish

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dora when restored to her Spanish family). Further embedded in this tale are two more stories set slightly earlier in the seventeenth century: another Spanish incident, the ‘Tale of Guzman’s Family’—more exactly, the tale of his sister, who marries the impoverished Protestant Walberg; and ‘The Lovers’ Tale’, a miniature historical romance concerning an aristocratic Shropshire family divided by the aftermath of civil war. As if this was were not complicated enough, ‘The Lovers’ Tale’ contains within it the testimony of a clergyman who knew Melmoth the Wanderer before he made his satanic bargain to prolong his life by 150 years. The whole creaky and lopsided structure of the novel is finally allowed to collapse: Monçada breaks off before exhausting Adonijah’s compendium of tales, as Melmoth the Wanderer appears in person in the present day (that is, 1816), his time at last expiring.

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extension of the anxieties he feels about the enduring priestly influence in Catholic Ireland, where the novel begins and ends. Maturin at first designed this novel, he explains in his Preface, as an extended moral fable illustrating an argument in one of his sermons, to the effect that even the most despairing sinner would never ‘accept all that man could bestow, or earth afford, to resign the hope of his salvation’. Our overriding fear of eternal damnation (so the argument runs) will always deter us from selling our souls to the devil, even for the most lavish bribes. When Maturin sets this argument to work within the framework of Gothic fiction, however, it becomes warped almost beyond recognition. To begin with, the central device through which he attempts to illustrate his point—the character of the Wanderer himself—is a glaring anomaly: Melmoth has done exactly what Maturin claims nobody would do, and his subsequent regrets do little to repair the inconsistency. Maturin tries to adjust the terms of his argument by making Melmoth interested only in the purest souls, which he then fails to tempt. As Poe complained in the introductory letter of his Poems (1831), any selfrespecting devil would have consigned two thousand souls to perdition in the time Melmoth takes to put his infernal question to only two of his intended victims. From the perfunctory fashion in which several of the supposedly crucial temptations and refusals are skimmed over in this novel, it seems that Maturin’s interest in his original plan had subsided in favour of other concerns. What appears to have happened in the doctrinal foundations of Melmoth’s design is that the original sermon on bargains with the devil was usurped by another sermon, this time about bargains with God. The new sermon which takes over the theological direction of the story came from Maturin’s stock repertoire of anti-Papist polemics. Its argument is summarized twice by Monçada: ‘But Oh! how false is a treaty made with God, which we ratify with our own blood, when he has declared there is but one sacrifice he will accept, even that of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world!’ Later, Monçada reinforces the point, asking rhetorically if men were taught to look to the one great Sacrifice, would they be so ready to believe that their own, or those of others, could ever be accepted as a commutation for it? You are surprised, Sir, at these sentiments from a Catholic . . .

And so we should be, since the doctrine expressed here is one of the cardinal principles of Protestantism: Christ, through his unique sacrifice,

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being the sole intermediary between man and God. (The ventriloquism by which Catholics often find themselves speaking in Lutheran tongues is a minor Gothic convention inherited from Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797).) As Maturin extends this sermon, he contrasts the doctrine of the one great Sacrifice with the alleged Catholic belief that God can be hoodwinked into granting salvation to those who put themselves or others through penances, mortifications, and ritual observances. Extrapolated to the point of absurdity, the false doctrine of salvation through torture is voiced by the sadistic parricide who conducts Monçada through the vaults of the monastery, and who has been taught by the monks that his sins are remitted with every punishment he inflicts upon the Church’s enemies: ‘But your guilt is my exculpation, your sufferings are my triumph. I need not repent, I need not believe; if you suffer, I am saved.’ Maturin thus characterizes Catholicism, along with Hinduism and Judaism, as a religion of suffering, in the central chapter XVI where Melmoth shows Immalee the faiths of the world through a telescope. True biblical Christianity, on the other hand, is represented as a religion of love and tolerance. Accordingly Maturin himself has to make some gestures towards condemning sectarian intolerance, in the episode of the crazed preachers in Stanton’s madhouse, and in the reconciliations of ‘The Lovers’ Tale’; but the temptation to take clumsy swipes at Papists, Hindus, and Jews frequently gets the better of him. For example, the opening episode of the novel appears to maintain some even-handedness in its caricatures of desiccated Protestant miserliness in the dying uncle and of incoherent Catholic superstition in his attendant crones. But as the novel unfolds, attention to Protestant failings slips almost out of view while the image of the Catholic witch is heavily reinforced in later characters—notably the mothers of Monçada and Immalee, who both stand as types of ‘the mother of witchcrafts and spiritual seduction’: the Church itself. Maturin tends to cast mothers as greedy persecutors of their innocent offspring, the image of the blood-soaked son recurring with obsessive insistence in Melmoth. The most significant maternal betrayal is enacted by Monçada’s mother in the hope of expiating her sin of fornication through the sacrifice of her own son to the monastic discipline. Her motive here illustrates Maturin’s doctrinal point, while the magnificent bejewelled dress in which she prostrates herself before Monçada and

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One thing rescues this portion of the novel from mediocrity, and that is the ironic catechism by which Melmoth introduces Immalee to the cruelty of the world beyond her island idyll. Although Maturin obliges his villain to expound (much to his surprise) a number of unimpeachable Protestant doctrines, it is the subversive blasphemies that resound most convincingly—as Maturin seems to have recognized when he appended a disclaimer to the Wanderer’s antimonarchist diatribes. The novel comes alive most forcefully when the fixities of Maturin’s thematic contrasts begin to dissolve amid the inconsistencies of his narrative structure. When, for example, Melmoth defends the Protestant view of the Bible against the Catholic Church, and we recall that this uncharacteristic behaviour is being related to us in a Jewish text transmitted by a Catholic, something more is involved than mere clumsiness or forgetfulness: an inadvertent dissolution of distinctions is taking place in which the same voice can utter sacrilegious sarcasms and pious platitudes almost in the same breath, erasing the clear line that was expected to lie between them in an ‘improving’ work of fiction. The whispered execrations of the dying monk in Monçada’s monastery, like the confession of the parricide, shocked the novel’s first critics, partly because the disorderly nature of the narrative provided no

stable means by which these utterances could be isolated; their corrosion spreads uncontrollably through the novel. These multiple contradictions between doctrinal piety and structural instability in Melmoth seem to radiate from the ambiguous figure of the Wanderer. As we have noticed, he invalidates the very dogma he is invented to illustrate, and he confounds heresy with orthodoxy in his wayward and sarcastic tirades. The problem seems to be that Maturin has overloaded the character with several functions working at cross-purposes. As many readers have observed, Melmoth is not just a Faust, he is a Mephistopheles at the same time; more exactly, he is a Faust whose punishment is to become a Mephistophelean tempter. This doubling of roles is ambitious enough, but Maturin’s recklessness piles further responsibilities upon his villain’s shoulders: in his visits to the innocent Immalee, the Wanderer has to act the role of Milton’s Satan in Eden while also doubling up as the archangel Raphael who justifies the ways of God to Eve and warns her against the archtempter. We could say that Immalee’s absolute innocence—a device intended to expose the selfthwarting nature of Melmoth’s malignity—tempts Maturin into what is literally a daredevil narrative venture in which the sermons and the blasphemies become dangerously entangled. As Baudelaire remarked in his 1855 essay ‘Of the Essence of Laughter’, Melmoth the Wanderer is a living contradiction. It is precisely the alarming contradictions of his status that bring him, and the novel, to life. A further peculiarity of the Wanderer is that while we may loosely refer to him as the novel’s central character, his position is most often a marginal one: like the Irish landlords of his day, Melmoth is an absentee villain. Unlike Marlowe’s Dr Faustus (Maturin would not have known Goethe’s version), Melmoth is, of course, invisible to us as readers, but he is often invisible or unrecognizable even to the characters of the story. A Faust of rumour, his is an existence made up largely of report, reputation, and expectant surmise. He often functions as an offstage whisper, and the fear of his imminent arrival tends to be more powerful than his actual presence upon this melodramatic stage. The strongest parts of the novel, indeed, are those in which Melmoth himself is absent: Monçada’s adventures in the monastery (some of them plagiarized from Diderot’s novel La Religieuse (1796)) have a force and tension which is unforgettable partly because we forget Melmoth’s existence amid the panic, his

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secures his monastic vows serves as an allegory of Catholicism’s false humility, and above all of its artificiality. Throughout the novel Maturin sustains a thematic contrast between the internal repentance of true faith and the external observances of false superstition; a contrast which is often reduced further to the opposition between Nature and Artifice, especially in the description of monastic life. When Maturin sets up such contrasts, he often allows the dualism of his Calvinist ideology to freeze the novel’s action into awkwardly static tableaux. The most protracted and unsatisfactory exercise in this vein is the attempted seduction of Immalee by Melmoth, in which Maturin evidently tries to recapture something of the encounters between Satan and Eve in Paradise Lost. In these chapters the ‘unimaginable purity’ of Immalee can only be a source of irritation to the modern reader, and even Melmoth’s outbursts of self-loathing disappoint in their repetitiveness. There are some grand flourishes of bombast here (‘amid thunder I wed thee—bride of perdition!’), but the allegorical postures in which Innocence and Experience signal to one another in these episodes lack convincing energy.

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role as advocate of Despair having been dispersed more convincingly among the inhabitants of the monastery. Melmoth’s direct presence, corrosive as it is, is not necessary to that dissolution of stable identities which so enlivens the best parts of the novel. In the delirious claustrophobia of Monçada’s tale, unmatched in any Gothic work in English before Poe, we have a fascinating study of those ‘extraordinary vicissitudes of the human mind’ in which emotions normally regarded as opposites begin to bleed into one another. From his dissection of Catholic hypocrisy as a blend of extreme libertinism and extreme austerity, Maturin proceeds to show monastic religion as a double-edged sword of ecstasy and despair, and exposes the secret complicity of laughter with guilt. Monçada discovers in himself contradictory mixtures of courage and pusillanimity, of curiosity and aversion; a revelation which culminates in the profound unease with which he recognizes that the conspiracy against him has been joined by his own strongest feelings: ‘where the whole world is against us, we begin to take its part against ourselves, to avoid the withering sensation of being alone on our own side.’ Similar possibilities of self-betrayal are raised earlier in a very revealing description by Melmoth of a demented preacher whose yells disturb Stanton in the madhouse: Half the day he imagines himself in a pulpit, denouncing damnation against Papists, Arminians, and even Sublapsarians . . . He foams, he writhes, he gnashes his teeth; you would imagine him in the hell he was painting, and that the fire and brimstone he is so lavish of, were actually exhaling from his jaws. At night his creed retaliates on him; he believes himself one of the reprobates he has been all day denouncing, and curses God for the very decree he has all day been glorifying Him for.

It is tempting to take this as Maturin’s confession, his acknowledgement that this novel is all the time mocking its own religious tenets with some species of nocturnal sabotage. Certainly he was alert to the treacherous subversions of what we now call the unconscious: ‘Oh, Sir,’ Monçada confides to young Melmoth, ‘there are some criminals of the imagination, whom if we could plunge into the oubliettes of its magnificent but lightlybased fabric, its lord would reign more happy.’ A final remark should be made on one unexpected feature of this novel’s psychological concerns. This is the recurrent theme of monotony which Maturin introduces and defends in his

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Preface, where he contrasts the startling adventures of Radcliffe-Romance with his own more credible portrayal of ‘that irritating series of petty torments which constitutes the misery of life in general’. The events of the novel turn out after all to be more incredibly startling than anything in Radcliffe, but Maturin’s indication of an interest in petty torments, in stagnation and boredom as the basis of curiosity and despair, is borne out in many of Melmoth’s stories. Maturin repeatedly dwells on a curious dialectic in which the monotonous becomes intense, while intensity becomes monotonous. He seems at times to be seeking the sources of Gothic horror in a realm usually assumed to be very remote from it: that of domestic realism, where the pressure of petty circumstances acts more powerfully than any devil as a temptation to crime. This ‘realist’ picture of life is visible even in some of the most macabre Gothic episodes, like that of the lovers whose hunger drives them to cannibalism; but the most remarkable of these fusions between realism and Gothicism occurs in the ‘Tale of Guzman’s Family’. The Guzman or Walberg Story is often dismissed as unimportant padding, but some more perceptive critics have identified it as a central clue to the obsessions which drive this novel. Deeply embedded in the heart of Melmoth’s lopsided structure, the tale of Guzman’s heirs concentrates many of Maturin’s own fears of impending poverty, and some of his presumed resentments against his family’s financial claims upon him. It is money, after all, that sets this story in motion, from John Melmoth’s first arrival at his rich uncle’s deathbed to the fatal inheritance which ruins the Mortimers in ‘The Lovers’ Tale’. More particularly, it is family wealth which repeatedly brings disaster to the novel’s leading characters: Stanton, Monçada, Immalee, and Elinor are all in their various ways imprisoned by their own mercenary relatives, in an arrangement which marries the inheritance plot of realist fiction to the confinement plot of the Gothic novel. The disturbing feature of the Guzman tale is that it locates its Gothic obsessions—parricide, filicide, vampirism—so firmly within the bosom of the family institution itself, grafted as it is by legacies on to the root of all evil. Melmoth the Wanderer is, at its best, a ‘gripping’ novel, its furious intensity betraying a compulsion which possessed Maturin as he composed it: the grip, that is, of urgent financial necessity which, as the Preface admits, ‘compels’ him to write. There is some aptness in the fact that the sequel which Maturin seems to have planned

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RICHARD HASLAM (ESSAY DATE 1994) SOURCE: Haslam, Richard. “Maturin and the ‘Calvinist Sublime.’” In Gothick Origins and Innovations, edited by Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage, pp. 44-56. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. In the following essay, Haslam studies the effects of Calvinist religious doctrine and nineteenth-century Irish society on Maturin, as evidenced in his use of the “Gothic sublime” in Melmoth the Wanderer. Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me. Why do ye persecute me as God, and are not satisfied with my flesh? Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever! (Job 19:21-24)

Job’s request that his words be printed in a book is of course answered self-reflexively in the Book of Job itself, but his lament and his yearning echo also through the labyrinthine narrative of Melmoth the Wanderer, that celebrated gothic extravaganza published in 1820 and penned by Charles Robert Maturin (1780-1824), a Church of Ireland clergyman.1 I wish first to examine what I call the ‘Calvinist sublime’ at work in Maturin’s novel and how it produces distinctively gothic effects, and then to consider how the trajectory of this Calvinist sublime is inflected by Maturin’s historical situation in nineteenth-century Ireland and specifically by his involvement in religious polemics. The first of the so-called ‘five points’ of Calvinist doctrine asserted the predestined election to Heaven or reprobation to Hell of every individual, not conditional on belief. Calvin usually silenced queries and fears about the workings of predestination by an appeal to the aggressive question of St Paul in Romans 9: 20-21: ‘O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to Him that formed it, Why hast thou made

me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump, to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?’ But such was the controversy generated by the doctrine of predestination outlined in Book III of his Institutes of the Christian Religion2 that Calvin was forced to produce a separate work justifying his interpretation: in Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God (1552), Calvin mobilises St Augustine to support his denial of the claim that those who believe are chosen; rather, they are chosen in order to believe—election comes before faith. The cause of this arrangement is ‘just though unknown’.3 Calvin defensively states that ‘if those who attribute the hardening of men to His eternal counsel invest God with the character of a tyrant, we are certainly not the author of this opinion’ (p. 60). But the perception of God as an inscrutable tyrant, whimsically determining at the dawn of time that some should be elect, the rest reprobate, was nonetheless a possible and rebarbative byproduct of Calvin’s system. In attempting to justify the wiles of God to men, Calvin asserts that God is ‘the cause of all happenings, yet not the author of evil’, a paradox that unleashes intolerable moral and intentional contradictions within his system, and places an unbearable burden on those adherents who brood upon it too intensely (pp. 168-170). William Bouwsma, in his biography of Calvin, claims that the Sermons on Job (1563) support the hypothesis that Calvin believed there to be a kind of satisfaction owed by creature to Creator that is neither moral nor possible. ‘He saw guilt in creatureliness itself, guilt shared even by human beings created in God’s image before the Fall, guilt towards the Father even on the part of his good children, guilt in existing’.4 Two centuries after Calvin, the Book of Job acted as a stimulus to aesthetic as well as theological reflection. According to Paul Fry, ‘not only Schiller but the entire eighteenth century makes Job the Ur-text of the sublime . . .’.5 Forty years before Schiller’s essay ‘On the Sublime’ (17971800), Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) also drew upon the Book of Job in order to substantiate his innovative claim that a mode of terror was an essential component of the sublime sentiment.6 Burke is significantly reluctant, however, to confront directly the central drama of Job: the spectacle of a swaggering, bullying, self-justifying God who, through his instrument ‘the Satan’, humiliates and tortures his innocent creature. Instead, in the section entitled

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came to be written instead by Balzac, the great forerunner of realism in European fiction. For there is in this dungeon of a book something like a realist novel trying to escape. Intermittently it hints that the most powerful ‘enemy of mankind’ is not the devil but poverty and inherited property; but it never manages to break out of its Gothic bastille. We may, so to speak, hear it tapping feebly on the walls, but its protest is overwhelmed by the howling blasphemies of its neighbours, Maturin’s more desperate criminals of the imagination.

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‘Power’, Burke claims that, while such divine attributes as wisdom, justice and goodness are evident to reason, the imagination is struck principally by the apprehension of divine power: But whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him. And though a consideration of his other attributes may relieve in some measure our apprehensions; yet no conviction of the justice with which it is exercised, nor the mercy with which it is tempered, can wholly remove the terror that naturally arises from a force which nothing can withstand. (p. 68)

In using the term Calvinist sublime, I refer both to Burke’s terminology and to the Freudian concept of ‘sublimation’: the Calvinist sublime is a theologized aesthetics in which elements of the Calvinist system are sublimated out of a creed and into an artistic programme. A Calvinist sublime, however, can only function when some degree of religious doubt is at work. If, as a sincere Calvinist, one believes completely in the creed’s more terrifying aspects then the conditions for a Calvinist sublime will be absent, for as Burke observes in his Enquiry, ‘when danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we see in everyday experience’ (p. 40). Burke’s sublime is a mode of terror, operating only if there is an aesthetic remove between event or object and perceiver. Unalloyed belief or pure terror disperse the Calvinist sublime; only when the parasite of doubt excavates an internal space can it coalesce. The contribution of Burke’s ideas on the sublime to the formation of gothic fiction was attested by Ann Radcliffe in her posthumously published essay, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (1826),7 and has been substantiated by critics like David Punter, in his absorbing 1980 survey The Literature of Terror,8 but what of the intersections between Calvinism and the Gothic? Joel Porte’s 1974 essay ‘In the Hands of an Angry God’9 locates in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817) and The Lost Man (1826), and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) the agency of an ‘internalized Calvinism’ (p. 54), a representation of terror that is fundamentally theological. Victor Sage, in Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (1989),1 0 asserts the relevance of Calvinism, contending that ‘the cause and the effect of the horror experience

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in English culture is a form of ‘theological uncertainty’, an anxiety which is recognisable at many different levels of consciousness’ (p. xvii); along with earlier critics such as Irene Bostrom and Sister Mary Muriel Tarr,1 1 Sage relates the rise and dominance of literary Gothic to the growth from the 1770s onwards of the campaign for Catholic Emancipation. The Emancipation Act was passed in 1829, but Sage suggests that the continuance of the horror novel ‘is equally, if not more strongly, related to the subsequent struggles, doctrinal and political, which flared up between Catholic and Protestant throughout the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth’ (pp. 28-29). Maturin died before the passing of the Emancipation Act, but his novels and sermons are patently bound up with the religious controversies that smouldered and then flared up in Ireland in the wake of the 1801 Act of Union. The Calvinist sublime in Maturin’s fiction is refracted through this historical prism. In the year 1813, Maturin wrote to his literary mentor Walter Scott, ‘I am a High Calvinist in my religious opinions, and therefore viewed with jealousy by Unitarian Brethren and Arminian Masters’;1 2 by 1824, in his Five Sermons on the Errors of the Roman Catholic Church,1 3 Maturin was referring to Calvinism as one of the ‘melancholy aberrations of the human spirit’ (p. 13). This suggests that Maturin’s first novel, Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio (1807), was composed when the novelist was—as it were—a card-carrying Calvinist, while the more renowned Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) was composed in the period when Maturin was—at least officially—removing himself from hardline Calvinism. The aesthetic distance thereby gained may be one of the reasons for the greater achievement of Melmoth. James Boulger, in his study The Calvinist Temper in English Poetry (1980),1 4 has identified the following tenets as crucial to the formation of what he terms a ‘Calvinist aesthetics’: the sensation of terror; anxiety in the face of an arbitrary and inscrutable divine power; resentment against a god whose motives and actions seem those of an enemy; helplessness; a state of sinconsciousness unrelieved by any sustained sense of assurance; the ceaseless search for signs of election or reprobation within the self and the outside world; and detailed analysis of one’s state of mind, heart and soul in written journals or letters. These tenets are presented in crude form in Maturin’s Fatal Revenge and in more sophisticated guise in

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The anguish of terror that cannot name its object, and of guilt that cannot ascertain its danger, gathered over his mind. A sensation of rare and excruciating influence; the sensation of all our measures being anticipated; our progress measured and ruined; the exact reach of our boundary calculated and shadowed out; the inmost recesses of our mind violated and laid waste; and Omniscience engaged on the side of our enemies to destroy us, overcame him. (II, pp. 297-298)

The narrator revealingly employs scripture to evoke Ippolito’s despair, his ‘sense of invisible and universal persecution’: His distraction almost applied to the stupendous frame of the Psalmist, when he exclaimed, ‘Whither shall I go from thy presence?’ Of the latter clause he felt the truth too forcibly, ‘If I go down to Hell, thou art there also. (II, p. 282)

In Melmoth the Wanderer, Maturin develops these allusions to the inscrutable operations of an arbitrary Calvinist machine. Alonzo, protagonist of the ‘Tale of the Spaniard’, having been terrorised by his family and their spiritual ‘Director’ into joining a monastic community, laments: . . . I felt my destiny was fixed—I had no wish to avert or arrest it—I was like one who sees an enormous engine (whose operation is to crush him to atoms) put in motion, and, stupefied with horror, gazes on it with a calmness that might be mistaken for that of one who was coolly analyzing the complications of its machinery, and calculating the resistless crush of its blow. (p. 91)

Later, imprisoned in total darkness in a convent dungeon, Alonzo tries to occupy his mind by attempting to keep time, in order to measure the hours of his confinement. Assailed by doubts that he might be counting sixty-second periods faster than the clock, he ‘wished to be the clock, that I might have no feeling, no motive for hurrying on the approach of time’ (pp. 146-147). Released eventually from confinement, Alonzo reads of his brother’s escape plan and prepares to flee from the convent: After reading these lines, I appeared to myself like a piece of mechanism wound up to perform certain functions, in which its co-operation was irresistible . . . the shortness of time left me no opportunity for deliberation, it left me also none for choice. I was like a clock whose hands are pushed forward and I struck the hours I was impelled to strike. (p. 180)

Such horological conceits, which keep pace with the claustrophobic conviction that time is fast running out, culminate near the end of the novel in the apocalyptic dream of Melmoth the Wanderer, in which he sees a vast ‘dial-plate’, a clock with one hand, which is nearing ‘the appointed period of 150 years’; as Melmoth plummets into a burning ocean . . . his last despairing reverted glance was fixed on the clock of eternity—the upraised black arm seemed to push forward the hand—it arrived at its period—he fell—he sunk—he blazed—he shrieked! The burning waves boomed over his sinking head, and the clock of eternity rung out its awful chime—‘Room for the soul of the Wanderer!’— and the waves of the burning ocean answered, as they lashed the adamantine rock—‘There is room for more!’ (p. 539)

Claude Fierobe has observed that because Melmoth is represented as having chosen his destiny, a choice which his victims later rejected, we cannot speak of predestination in the strict sense of the term (p. 575). We might also recall the claim of the sinister Fr. Schemoli in Fatal Revenge that ‘the first movement is voluntary, all that follow are consequential and inevitable’ (II, p. 240). But, despite such technical exemptions, the grain of both novels is in the direction of a metaphysics of predestination, of the ‘omnipotence of fate’ (Fatal Revenge, III, p. 110). The very structure of the novel, with its narratives incarcerated one within another, recapitulates this thematic determinism. However, the sequence most relevant to the evocation of a Calvinist sublime is the tale which stands outside that ‘Chinese box’ of narratives nested in ‘The Tale of the Spaniard’, namely the mutilated manuscript discovered by young John Melmoth that tells of the experiences of the Englishman Stanton. Deceived into entering, and now incarcerated within, a madhouse outside London, Stanton is another of Maturin’s victims of involuntary confinement; next door to his cell is a puritanical weaver, who had been driven mad by a single sermon from the celebrated Hugh Peters, and was sent to the mad-house ‘as full of election and reprobation as he could hold—and fuller’. The mad weaver ‘regularly repeated over the five points while day-light lasted, and imagined himself preaching in a conventicle with distinguished success; towards twilight his visions were more gloomy, and at midnight his blasphemies became more horrible’: these ravings reveal an occluded, sanguine sexuality seething beneath the purified rites of the conventicle:

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Melmoth. Thus when describing Ippolito, one of the two unfortunate brothers in Fatal Revenge, the narrator declares:

this. They were the devil incarnate in men and could drag him down to hell’.1 5 This account of purging one’s deepest abominations of heart through nocturnal writing in secret character might serve as a metaphor of Maturin’s novelwriting, which was done principally at night.1 6

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Sister Ruth, why doth thou uncover thy bosom to discover my frailty? . . . Dip all thy garments in blood, and let me weave thee fresh when thou art stained—when shall thy saints tread the winepress of thy wrath? Blood! blood! the saints call for it, earth gapes to swallow it, hell thirsts for it!—Sister Ruth, I pray thee, conceal thy bosom, and be not as the vain women of this generation. . . . Sister Ruth, tempt me not with that calf’s head, it is all streaming with blood—drop it, I beseech thee, sister, it is unmeet in woman’s hand, though the brethren drink of it. . . . (pp. 50-51)

Stanton is tempted by Melmoth, who offers him release from the madhouse, on the terms of an ‘incommunicable condition’, which is ultimately communicated at the close of the novel: the condition is that Stanton exchange his fate for that of Melmoth, at the price of his soul. Stanton eventually rejects this proposal, but not before Melmoth brings home to him the full horror that confronts Stanton in the madhouse: ‘Listen’, said the tempter, pausing, ‘listen to the wretch who is raving near you, and whose blasphemies might make a demon start. He was once an eminent puritanical preacher. Half the day he imagines himself in a pulpit, denouncing damnation against Papists, Arminians, and even Sublapsarians (he being a Supra-lapsarian himself). He foams, he writhes, he gnashes his teeth; you would imagine him in the hell he was painting, and that the fire and the brimstone he is so lavish of, were actually exhaling from his jaws. At night his creed retaliates on him; he believes himself one of the reprobates he has been all day denouncing, and curses God for the very decree he has all day been glorifying him for. . . . He grapples with the iron posts of his bed, and says he is rooting out the cross from the very foundations of Calvary; and it is remarkable, that in proportion as his morning exercises are intense, vivid, and eloquent, his nightly blasphemies are outrageous and horrible.—Hark! Now he believes himself a demon; listen to his diabolical eloquence of horror!’ Stanton listened, and shuddered. (pp. 57-58)

This resonant passage encapsulates what I mean by the term ‘Calvinist sublime’: in a process which Jungian psychology would term ‘enantiodromia’, Maturin’s Calvinism retaliates on him and in response is aesthetically sublimated into the ‘diabolical eloquence of horror’. William Haller, in The Rise of Puritanism claims that ‘it was of the very essence of Puritan self-discipline that whatsoever thoughts and actions the old Adam within has most desire to keep hidden, the very worst abominations of the heart, one must when retired to one’s chamber at night draw forth into the light of conscience. To set them down in writing, albeit in secret ‘character’, was a great help in

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Paralleling this cryptographic Calvinism, however, is a recurrent fascination with the Roman Catholic church, which Maturin throughout his gothic novels depicts (in a manner strangely akin to his representation of the Calvinist sublime) as a vast system for subjugation. According to J. M. Roberts, in his The Mythology of the Secret Societies,1 7 the common assertion underlying belief in such diverse secret societies as the Freemasons, the Jesuits, the Carbonari, or the Comintern, is that ‘there is an occult force operating behind the seemingly real outward forms of political life. No discovery, no penetration of the veils of secrecy can ever be assumed to have revealed the full truth about the hidden directors who are, in extreme statements, said to preside over societies which appear to be in conflict with one another’ (p. 150). We can see Maturin articulating this kind of conspiratorial paranoia in Melmoth, when the parricide monk harangues Alonzo: ‘And you dreamt’, he cried, ‘in your temerity, you dreamt of setting the vigilance of a convent at defiance? Two boys, one the fool of fear, and the other of temerity, were fit antagonists for that stupendous system, whose roots are in the bowels of the earth, and whose head is among the stars,— you escape from a convent! you defy a power that has defied sovereigns! A power whose influence is unlimited, indefinable, and unknown, even to those who exercise it, as there are mansions so vast, that their inmates, to their last hour, have never visited all the apartments; a power whose operation is like its motto,—one and indivisible. The soul of the Vatican breathes in the humblest convent in Spain,—and you, an insect perched on a wheel of this vast machine, imagined you were able to arrest its progress, while its rotation was hurrying on to crush you to atoms. (pp. 219-220)1 8

In his second novel, The Wild Irish Boy, Maturin had claimed that Evangelical students at Trinity College found ‘the system of Calvin’ to be ‘amazingly splendid and awful’, because ‘a youthful mind in its first pursuit of religion neither inquires for evidence nor wishes conviction; it demands something that may fill to the utmost its capacity of the marvellous, something under which its faculties may succumb in mute acquiescence’ (I, pp. 122-23). It is clear that in Catholicism as well as Calvinism Maturin sought this ‘capacity of the marvellous’; for Maturin, Catholicism was the matrix of the malign Inquisi-

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I am writing at present a poetical Romance, a wild thing that has a Chance of pleasing more than Regular performances . . . tales of superstition were always my favourites, I have in fact been always more conversant with the visions of another world, than the realities of this, and in my Romance I have determined to display all by diabolical resources, out-Herod all the Herods of the German school, and get the possession of the Magic lamp with all its slaves from the Conjurer Lewis himself.1 9

However, Maturin’s obsession with Catholicism cannot be explained solely by the artistic possibilities and psychological satisfaction it afforded him. As already noted, his novels appeared in the period between the Act of Union and Catholic Emancipation and they are vehicles of propaganda as well as of entertainment. Maturin’s gothic Spain of sinister priests and superstitious populace is also a veiled commentary on Ireland, while his Spanish Catholic heroes often utter rather unorthodox sentiments. Victor Sage notes that the Spaniard Alonzo is a ‘Lutheran puppet’ (p. 34) and Chris Baldick observes that ‘the ventriloquism by which Catholics often find themselves speaking in Lutheran tongues is a minor Gothic convention inherited from Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797)’.2 0 However, the different nature of pro- or antiEmancipation pamphleteering in England and Ireland was conditioned by the simple fact that in the former country Catholics were a minority and in the latter a majority. Desmond Bowen, in The Protestant Crusade in Ireland, 1800-1870, locates a crucial turning point as the 24th of October, 1822, when the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, William Magee, attacked both Presbyterians and Catholics and, in effect, announced a ‘Second Reformation’.2 1 His address launched a furious pamphlet war and Maturin’s 1824 Five Sermons on the Errors of the Roman Catholic Church can be seen as a strategic intervention and possibly as a bid for promotion. Maturin’s stance, however, clearly antedates Magee’s intervention, since it had already been articulated in less hyperbolic terms five years earlier in his Sermons (1819). The Catholicism against which Maturin inveighs in his sermons is less the ‘stupendous system’ of Melmoth and more the oppressor of spirit, gaoler of the soul, and traducer of the Bible: in a ‘Charity Sermon’ Maturin combines a charitable appeal for funds with an espousal of proselytizing, and while playing on the political fears of his Protestant

congregation, introduces the concept of religion as an ideological weapon: Your money cannot satiate the rage of the drunkard,—your money cannot make the indolent work,—your money cannot convince of his folly the giddy wretch who listens to the frantic and wicked lies of the demagogue,—your money cannot bribe to peace those fierce and horrid passions which have defaced the order of society, and made the aristocracy of this country tremble in their down and ermine. Money can never do this; but what money never can do, religion can. (Sermons, pp. 238-39)

In his Five Sermons, published five years later, Maturin is forced to concede that in Ireland, ‘this unhappy country’, ‘political causes, perhaps, operate more powerfully than religious ones’ (pp. 15152), but he nonetheless apostrophises the Catholic community: Roman Catholics of Ireland hear me! Ye call on the rulers of the land for emancipation— emancipate yourselves from the yoke that has pressed on your intellect and your consciences for centuries. Whatever be the civil restraints ye complain of, I do not judge; but remember this, that the restraints ye voluntarily bear are a thousand times more deadly than any earthly despot could possibly lay on man. The shackles of political restraint when once broken, leave no marks; but the iron of priestcraft ‘entereth the soul.’ (pp. 123-24)

Nonetheless, the obsessive representation of Catholicism in Maturin’s novels indicates a ‘cathexis’ in excess of any merely proselytizing agenda. An index of the complexity of his theologized aesthetics and his aestheticized theology can be found in Women (1818), the novel which preceded Melmoth: when his heroine Zaira encounters an old woman at a Dublin dissenter meeting-house, she ‘revived in Zaira’s memory the idea of the old nun in the convent near Paris. There was the same sterility, vacancy, and uniformity in their characters. A person unacquainted with religious distinctions would scarce have known one from the other; yet, in one respect, they were antipodes to one another—Catholicism and Calvinism placed an immeasurable distance between them’ (III, p. 303). This is the daylight Maturin, repudiating Catholicism and Calvinism; yet, in his midnight-writing, the two creeds are— like Alonzo and the parricide monk—in a relationship that happens ‘to unite very opposite characters in the same adventure . . . an union inevitable and inseparable’, a ‘union of antipodes’ (Melmoth, pp. 187, 202). There are, however, aesthetic if not theological benefits to be gained from the fusing of convent and conventicle: Zaira,

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tion, the Jesuit cabal, and especially of every form of superstition. During the composition of Melmoth, Maturin wrote to Walter Scott thus:

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the elegant and cosmopolitan actress who arrives in Dublin from Italy, is ultimately revealed to be both the daughter of a dissolute Protestant Ascendancy landlord and a Catholic peasant girl whom he had seduced, and the mother of a daughter who has been raised as an evangelical Methodist. Zaira’s family ties link a number of Ireland’s major denominations; presumably this triggers her selfcreated theology, which blends various religious systems. According to the narrator, Zaira’s theology ‘was more inquisitive, daring, and autocrative than Catholicism; more full of exterior forms, self infliction and ‘voluntary humility’ than the reformed religion; its speculative part verged very much towards Calvinism; its outward towards popery—for her imagination dictated even in religion, and it was gratified by combining the ambitious and exclusive theory of Calvin (which may be said to establish a kind of religious aristocracy,) with the meretricious and attractive exterior of Catholicism’.2 2 Thus Maturin’s intense and memorable gothic fiction is a function of an aesthetic rapprochement between conflicting elements which, as his sermons indicate, he was not able to reproduce in the religious or political dimensions. The Calvinist sublime at work in his gothic novels is given a particular inflection by the forces of religious and political controversy operating at his particular historical moment. The gothic fiction of another Irishman, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), also exhibits the characteristics of a Calvinist sublime, but because Le Fanu wrote at a later historical moment, the expression of this Calvinist sublime is subtly modulated. The same process occurs in writers like William Godwin, James Hogg, Charles Brockden Brown, Poe and Hawthorne, where the relevant cultural differences might allow us to speak of English, Scottish and American Calvinist sublimes, each inflected by their distinct historical moments. Clearly, I do not have the space to substantiate my claim that these authors (and twentiethcentury writers such as Thomas Pynchon) also explore the contours of the Calvinist sublime. But I would like to conclude with mention of a novel published 102 years after Melmoth the Wanderer. In the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ chapter of Ulysses, Joyce parodies the successive phases of English Literature; in the following extract, in which Malachi (Buck) Mulligan is entertaining medical students with accounts of a recent murder, a revelation is made (about the visiting Englishman Haines) that

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humorously encapsulates some of the ideas about Irish history and the Gothic that I’ve been pursuing: But Malachias’ tale began to freeze them with horror. He conjured up the scene before them. The secret panel beside the chimney slid back and in the recess appeared . . . Haines! Which of us did not feel his flesh creep? He had a portfolio full of Celtic literature in one hand, in the other a phial marked Poison. Surprise, horror, loathing were depicted on all faces while he eyed them with a ghastly grin. ‘I anticipated some such reception’, he began with an eldritch laugh, ‘for which, it seems, history is to blame’.2 3

Notes 1. Melmoth the Wanderer (London: 1820; 1968). 2. Jean Calvin, 1536-1559, A Compend of the Institutes of the Christian Religion (London: 1965), 1st ed. 1536, final ed. 1559. 3. Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God (London: 1961; 1st ed. 1552;) p. 156; see also pp. 62-68. 4. William Bouwsma, Jean Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (Oxford: 1988), p. 42. 5. Paul Fry, ‘The Possession of the Sublime’, Studies in Romanticism XXVI, no.2 (1987), pp. 187-220. 6. Edmund Burke, 1757, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: 1958). 7. Ann Radcliffe, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, New Monthly Magazine VII (1826), pp. 149-50. 8. David Punter, The Literature of Terror (London: 1980), pp. 44-45, 85-86. 9. Joel Porte, ‘In the Hands of an Angry God’, in The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, ed. G. R. Thompson (Washington: 1974), pp. 42-64. 10. Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (London: 1989). 11. Irene Bostrom, ‘The Novel and Catholic Emancipation’, Studies in Romanticism 11 (1963), pp. 155-76; Sister Mary Muriel Tarr, Catholicism in Gothic Fiction in England (1762-1820), (New York: 1946; 1979). 12. Cited in Claude Fierobe, Charles Robert Maturin (17801824): L’Homme et L’Oeuvre (Lille: 1974), p. 577. 13. Five Sermons on the Errors of the Roman Catholic Church (London: 1824). 14. James Boulger, The Calvinist Temper in English Poetry (The Hague: 1980). 15. William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: 1938), p. 100; cited Boulger, p. 55. 16. See Fierobe, p. 155. 17. J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (London: 1972). 18. In Maturin’s last novel, The Albigenses, the cynical Bishop invokes a similar rhetoric: ‘The vast system of which I am no feeble engine, hastens to the consummation of its working—the conquest of the world. That

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19. In his Sermons, Maturin makes the following confession: ‘The very first sounds almost that attract the ears of childhood are tales of another life— foolishly are they called tales of superstition; for, however disguised by the vulgarity of the narration, and the distortion of fiction, they tell him of those whom he is hastening from the threshold of life to join, the inhabitants of the invisible world, with whom he must soon be forever.’ (p. 358, cited in Peter Mills Henderson, A Nut Between Two Blades: The Novels of Charles Maturin (New York: 1980) p. 16) 20. Chris Baldick, ‘Introduction’ to Melmoth the Wanderer (Oxford: 1989), pp. vii-xxiv, p. xiv. 21. Desmond Bowen, The Protestant Crusade in Ireland, 1800-1870 (Dublin: 1978), pp. 83-123. 22. Women, III, p. 235. A bleaker picture of Maturin’s predicament is afforded in a letter written by Sir Charles Morgan, a few weeks before Maturin died: ‘Poor Maturin is ill, severely ill; we (the Drs.) have sent him into the country, I fear, to die. Not content with drawing “the saints” down upon him, he has attacked the “papishes” and is now in the condition somewhat of a nut between the blades of a nutcracker.’ (cited in Niilo Idman, Charles Robert Maturin: His Life and Works (London: 1923), p. 308) 23. James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922 (New York: 1961), p. 412.

Other works cited: Charles Maturin, Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio, 3 vols (London: 1807). ———. The Wild Irish Boy, 3 vols, New York (1808; 1979). ———. Women; or, Pour et Contre, 3 vols, New York (1818; 1979). ———. Sermons, London (1819). ———. The Albigenses London (1824).

CATHERINE LANONE (ESSAY DATE 2002) SOURCE: Lanone, Catherine. “Verging on the Gothic: Melmoth’s Journey to France.” In European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760-1960, edited by Avril Horner, pp. 71-83. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. In the following essay, Lanone analyzes the influence of French culture, politics, and literature on Melmoth the

Wanderer and Maturin’s influence on French writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Honoré de Balzac.

Often considered to be the last true Gothic novel,1 Melmoth was translated into French as early as 1821, first by Mme E. F. Bégin under the title L’Homme du mystère, ou histoire de Melmoth le voyageur, then by J. Cohen under the title Melmoth ou l’homme errant. But the text was cut and altered; only in 1965 was a full translation given by Jacqueline Marc-Chadourne. Jean-Jacques Pauvert chose to publish this with André Breton’s famous 1954 preface, which praised its influence on French literature. Not surprisingly, the leader of Surrealism considered all the hallucinatory desires, the dark castles and visions found in Gothic novels as a potent ‘drug’; indeed, Breton compared the visual impact of The Castle of Otranto to the cinematic thrill caused in 1929 by Bunuel’s eerie image of the razor cutting through the eye in Un chien andalou. But Breton seems to find Melmoth particularly compelling, describing it as a great meteorite flashing through the frame of the Gothic window, an endless shower of ashes mysteriously suspended for a brief moment (‘On doit attendre jusqu’à 1820 pour qu’un nouveau météore se détache du cadre rituel de la fenêtre ogivale, suspendant son interminable pluie de cendres’ (Breton 1996: 15)). I wish to pursue here the motif of the shower of ashes, and discuss the way Melmoth, itself influenced by Diderot’s La Religieuse (Lévy 1995: 579), crossed the Channel to spark fresh inspiration in France at the precise moment when the great Gothic fires of damnation were yielding to the ashen precision of realism in both countries. For Annie Le Brun, nineteenth-century French literature defines itself in terms of its relationship with the Gothic—especially with Melmoth the Wanderer—whether this influence is acknowledged or not (Le Brun 1982). At a time when France was still scarred by the violence of the Revolution and of Napoleonic wars, and a new bourgeois order was emerging, the sheer darkness of Melmoth was bound to trigger fear and fascination, especially since the novel glosses over the circumstances which lead Melmoth to surrender his soul; it focuses on the aftermath, the long quest for someone who might sell a soul and free the tempter. Maturin becomes ‘a practitioner of psychopathological taxonomy’ (Punter 1996: 128), but the taxonomy is curiously unstable, as cruel religious institutions (Sage 1988) and everyday evil outdo the arch villain, whose death eventually fails to provide secure catharsis.

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old and mighty Rome, of whom pedants prate, subdued but the meaner part of man— his body; but our Rome enslaves the mind— that mind, which, once enslaved, leaves nothing for opposition or for defeat . . . for ours is the power that not only binds the spirit but makes it clasp its chain; ours are the powers of the world to come; all that is potent in life, all that is mysterious in futurity, the fears the hopes the hearts of mankind, all are ours . . .’ (III, pp. 203-204)

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR AN EXCERPT FROM AN EARLY REVIEW OF MELMOTH THE WANDERER

We do not envy those who are incapacitated by extreme delicacy of taste, or, we should rather perhaps say, by extreme indulgence in the habits of strict criticism, from enjoying such works as those of Mr. Maturin. They are all, prose and verse, full of faults so numerous, that it would be quite fatiguing—so obvious, that it would be quite useless to point them out. . . . The author, in a very great proportion of every work he has written, has been contented with copying the worst faults of his predecessors and contemporaries, in the commonest walks of fictitious writing. In his best passages there is always a mixture of extravagance—in the whole of his works there is not, perhaps, to be found one page of perfectly natural thought, or perfectly elegant language. And yet, where is the lover of imaginative excitement, that ever laid down one of his books unfinished—or the man of candour and discrimination, who ever denied, after reading through any one of them, that Maturin is gifted with a genius as fervently powerful as it is distinctly original— that there is ever and anon a truth of true poetry diffused over the thickest chaos of his absurdities—and that he walks almost without a rival, dead or living, in many of the darkest, but, at the same time, the most majestic circles of romance? Mr. Maturin is, without question, one of the most genuine masters of the dark romance. He can make the most practised reader tremble as effectually as Mrs. Radcliffe, and what is better, he can make him think as deeply as Mr. Godwin. We cannot carry the commendation sought for by this species of exertion much higher than we do when we say, that in our opinion, a little more reflection and labour are all Mr. Maturin wants, in order to enable him to attain a permanent eminence. SOURCE: “Melmoth the Wanderer, &c.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 8, no. 44 (November 1820): 161-68.

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Thus Melmoth the Wanderer darkly conveys the disturbing forces plaguing society, and depicts potential disruption and the violence inherent in humanity. Baldick defines the Gothic as a ‘sickening descent into disintegration’ (Baldick 1992: xix). In this case, we have several descents into degradation and abjection; the pattern of claustrophobic enclosure occurs both symbolically— through poverty and lack of love—and literally—in the cells of the Inquisition or the subterranean labyrinth of convents. This core of darkness was bound to appeal to Romantics and Surrealists, who were fascinated by the apparition of Melmoth on a lonely rock towering above the stormy sea, or by the play on nightmares and dreams—those dreams which magically take Immalee back to her island every night. Indeed, the text builds claustrophobic boundaries which it challenges, through the figure of the ubiquitous eponymous character whom no walls can stop; who appears quietly at the bottom of a hidden cell in Spain or in the middle of a wild, luscious island; who appears unchanged from one century to the next. Just as we share the sense of entrapment which shatters all secondary characters, we are fascinated by the dreamlike, bewildering erasure of all spatial boundaries as the powerful protagonist switches effortlessly from tale to tale. The most subversive element in Melmoth the Wanderer may well be the structure of the text itself. Balzac especially was fascinated by Maturin’s daring energy, calling him, in the Preface to La Peau de chagrin, the most original writer in contemporary Britain. Indeed, Melmoth plays obsessively with textual boundaries, embedding narrative layers to create a fractal set of Chinese boxes. Centuries go by while the focus switches from one sorry plight to another, weaving an ironic rosary of evil, as Monçada warns his listener: ‘have patience, and you will find that we are all beads strung on the same string’ (Maturin 2000: 332). Thus the novel metatextually exposes its own devices, foregrounding gaps rather than excusing them, the way in which the Gothic text seeks both to establish and challenge boundaries, subverting systematic claustration into an exploration of emptiness, discovering a dark, giddy void at the heart of life. The novel delights in its literally amazing structure. The traditional witness account, which is faithfully reported, is mocked by the totally illogical discovery of an old Jew’s cabinet of curiosities, in which Monçada must sit by skeletons and copy the wondrous tales of Melmoth, including the tediously slow courtship of

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Thematically the reader must enter this deterritorialized, wandering text in order to share, not the story of the wanderer, but his bitter, inconclusive experience, along a dark line of flight which leads nowhere. As the narratives function as screens, we follow descent after descent towards anger and despair, but the object of temptation, the lure of the pact with the devil, is supposedly barred from language, only to reappear repeatedly elsewhere, sometimes through slips of the tongue. In Deleuzian terms, what we have here is a rhizome, a subterranean set of ramifications connecting at random. Melmoth’s doomed, weary quest is shared by the reader who shifts from story to story at the very moment when satisfactory closure is denied. Baited, the reader follows the narrator, from one gloomy place of horror to the next, trapped by the slippery, treacherous narrative pact. And yet the end tantalizingly escapes the reader’s grasp, as Monçada and young Melmoth play detectives by the sea. Because of its unusual structure and bitter darkness, Melmoth the Wanderer aroused a fascination which was to last for more than a century in France. Whereas Melmoth’s son by Immalee dies mysteriously, perhaps strangled by his father, Melmoth’s textual ‘hideous progeny’—to borrow Mary Shelley’s expression—may well be found across the Channel, especially among the poets of darkness. One instantly thinks of Lautréamont or the Surrealists who redeemed the Gothic in a new era of doubt and darkening political prospects, but the most significant figure may well be Baudelaire—that advocate of modernity enamoured with satanic rebellion, who chose as poetical

objects skeletons, prostitutes and the depth of the abyss. Indeed, in his critical writings Baudelaire repeatedly refers to Maturin as a key influence, though he was no poet. He uses him to define his subversive aesthetic perspective, claiming that the dominant mode of modern art must be infernal: ‘Je veux dire que l’art moderne a une tendance essentiellement démoniaque’2 (Baudelaire 1990: 770). Lumping together Beethoven, Byron, Maturin and Poe, Baudelaire celebrates literary correspondences, the deep dark unison illuminating the clouds lurking within the human soul. We too may trace in his ‘flowers of evil’ the withered blossoms plucked by the Wanderer, which mar the exotic purity of Immalee’s island. Balancing Christianity with erotic blasphemy, Les Fleurs du mal (1861)3 display dark beds as deep as tombs, perfume flasks containing the decaying body of lost love, journeys beyond Eros towards Thanatos. Indeed, the long poem entitled ‘The Voyage’ roams from place to place, attempting to answer the haunting question, ‘but what have you seen?’, yet the world shrinks, a mere oasis of horror in a wearisome desert. In the end, the speaker yearns to dive into the unknown, no matter whether it be heaven or hell, so long as he finds something new. Rather than Baudelaire’s beloved Poe, whom he translated,4 the key influence here is Maturin’s Melmoth, hopelessly wandering on the margins of the human world. Indeed, Baudelaire turned him into the epitome of the romantic outcast: Let us remember Melmoth, this admirable emblem. His unbearable suffering comes from the disproportion between his marvellous skills, which he acquired instantly through the pact with the Devil, and the surroundings where he is doomed to live as a creature of God. And none of those whom he wishes to seduce consents to buy back from him, at the same price, his own dreadful privileged condition . . . The man who would be God has thus soon fallen, by virtue of an uncontrollable moral law, lower than his own real nature. This is a soul selling itself bit by bit. (Baudelaire 1976: 438)5

Presumably each narrative episode of Melmoth corresponds to the itemized decay of the unredeemed soul. Here the praise of Melmoth is connected with the ‘sulphurous dawn’ of drugs, as the modern way of selling one’s soul to the devil, but elsewhere Baudelaire shows that he is not simply fascinated by doom and eternal wandering, by the quest for a victim, but by Melmoth’s laughter, which he defines in his ‘Essay on the essence of laughter’6 as ‘a laughter which never sleeps, like a sickness which goes its own way and obeys some providential order’. For him, Melmoth is a contradiction in terms, ‘a living

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Immalee, though no possible explanation can ever be found for such a text. The oral repetition of the written copy of the mysterious illogical text (which paradoxically allows a straight heterodiegetic approach to the Wanderer’s own love story) creates a dizzy narrative structure. Victor Sage points out ‘the relentless fragmentation of the process of transmission’ (Sage 2000: xviii). Rosemary Jackson also emphasizes the way in which Melmoth deconstructs the very notion of representation, equivocating over interpretation, interrogations and evasions: ‘Its relentlessly fragmented structure permits the reader little security. One scene spirals and merges into another, each tale breaking off to lead to another tale, equally truncated, incomplete’ (Jackson 1988: 104). The tainted palimpsest expands yet shrinks, the tales which are read, copied, told and retold or burnt, weave a cancerous texture, as if the text were eroded by an uncertain disease.

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contradiction’, whose icy laughter tears one’s entrails: ‘And thus Melmoth’s laughter is the highest expression of pride, and perpetually fulfils its task, by tearing and burning the lips of the irremediably laughing man’ (Baudelaire 1990: 250) (my translation). Laughter is the true sign of hubris, the true curse. Melmoth is of course in many ways a satirist, and Punter praises his ‘supremely self-conscious wit’ (Punter 1996: 126), while Lévy points out that such laughter comes from an inner split, as when Melmoth both seduces Immalee and wishes to protect her from himself; laughter becomes the seam between good and evil, self and other, at the very edge of pain, enjoyment and defiance. Such devilish laughter echoes in Baudelaire’s prose poem ‘The Flawed Glass Maker’ (1862), in which the poet’s persona, exhilarated by his own madness, drops a flowerpot on a maker of window glass—shattering all his panes—on the grounds that he should make magic glass, pink panes that prove that life is beautiful, rather than ordinary glass. While Baudelaire’s fascination with Melmoth is fairly obvious, it is perhaps more surprising to find Balzac among the early worshippers of the novel. While the Gothic implies darkness and mad desire, Balzac’s fiction establishes the realm of realism and explores nineteenth-century society throughout the ‘Human Comedy’. Though Hugo’s romantic melodramatic tastes may be automatically deemed to descend from the Gothic, Balzac’s achievement seems at first sight to have little, if anything, to do with the Gothic. Yet if Balzac set the bulk of his work within the boundaries of realism, his early writings show very different aspirations. Balzac chose as his early pen names the pompous British title ‘Lord R’hoone’ and then the more European-sounding ‘Horace de St Aubin’, which presumably echoes both Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho. In so doing, Balzac was obviously paying lip service to the tastes of fashionable friends such as Nodier. But there was more to this than a mere fad. For perhaps the Gothic was the inevitable threshold of ‘The Human Comedy’: French realism was actually built on the very ruins of the Gothic, and Balzac had to exorcise the shadowy ghost of Melmoth before he could find his own voice. Indeed, among what Balzac later called his literary ‘rubbish’,7 the first significant text is unquestionably Le Centenaire ou les deux Beringheld, published in 1822, and re-issued in 1837 with little alteration under the title Le Sorcier ou les deux Beringheld (Balzac 1990). Clearly, though he openly criticized his early work, Balzac considered

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it worth publishing again. Unfortunately there is little magic in the Sorcerer’s tale, and the frightful figure of the ‘centenaire’, the ageless old man who supposedly dominates the story, fails to arouse horror or even terror. The text is a clumsy attempt to rival the man he considered to be the greatest of English writers; indeed, Lévy points out that Balzac considered Maturin to be as important as Byron, Hoffmann or Goethe (Lévy 1995: 600). Certainly, The Sorcerer is so redolent of Melmoth that critics such as Breton and Barbéris (1965) dismiss the book as mere plagiarism. The text imitates the split between generations, and tries to spice it up by having the icy ancestor beget his own descendant, replacing an impotent father. Balzac also uses some of Immalee’s love speeches (actually, he even drew upon them in writing his own love letters!). The Spanish Inquisition is replaced by Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt. Balzac’s wanderer retains Melmoth’s fiery burning eyes, but he is extremely old throughout the novel, and he is preternaturally tall, clearly borrowing a few features from Frankenstein’s monster. Indeed, no longer content with attempting to steal souls, he abducts desperate maidens to steal the fluid of life so that he can regenerate himself. If Gothic castles bore Balzac and he considers their inhabitants degenerate, he nevertheless attempts tackling the subterranean maze at the end, only to complicate it with scientific apparatus (strangely enough, the wanderer has also proved to be a mysterious doctor who appears throughout the book). Misreading both Melmoth and Frankenstein, Balzac’s work also botches the technique of embedded narrations, proudly announcing, for instance, Beringheld’s memoirs, only to shift to a heterodiegetic flashback delivered by an intrusive if obsequious narrator who claims he is summing it all up for our own sake. Whilst we might retrospectively wish to dignify this work by describing it as pastiche, the book was probably meant to be taken seriously at the time of publication. It is Balzac’s first piece of real writing, and might perhaps best lie forgotten, were it not for the fact that its very flaws suggest a desire to modernize the plot, and thus stage the action on the impossible boundary between a remote Gothic scenario and bourgeois society. The economy of restraint bars the powers of darkness, but they are not so easily subdued. Melmoth réconcilié is Balzac’s sequel to Maturin’s novel, and it becomes extremely interesting as it attempts to lead us out of the Gothic into the world of proper bourgeois writing. But the parody seems to mock its own purpose. Perhaps

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Melmoth réconcilié is usually seen as a metaphysical tale, in which Balzac asserts potential redemption.9 Instead of vanishing near the home of his ancestors, Melmoth dies in peace; after having found a victim at last, he confesses his crimes and spreads the divine light of revelation among the people surrounding his death bed. In writing the novel, Balzac borrows a few features from the original Melmoth, such as the burning eyes, the grim laugh and the absolute knowledge of his victims’ circumstances, as well as the heavenly music which is followed by a ghastly vision. A few new fantastic effects are introduced, as when Melmoth displays his power by replacing the rainy evening street by the spectacle of a bright summer’s day, or creates double vision at the theatre where, instead of a comedy with a quick-change artist, the victim witnesses the comedy of his own life as his mistress cuckolds him, the very mistress who now sits and laughs beside him, and for whom he sells his soul. The process of wandering from place to place and story to story is condensed into a bifocal show.1 0 What is shrinking here, however, is the very nature of the world beyond boundaries offered by the supernatural traveller and his Faustian pact. The abnormal rule which triggers an abnormal unquenchable thirst for rebellion is no longer cruel religion but money. Melmoth has fallen into a materialistic world: the cell is bound by the iron bars of a cashier’s window, Paris becomes the hellish city of temptation: ‘cette ville aux tentations, cette succursale de l’Enfer’ (Balzac 1979: 346), and it is through mediocre orgies that the mediocre cashier learns to yearn for the divine, panting for the unknown with a soul parched by debauchery. For Castanier no longer attempts to spread evil, he is only a

demon in the making, weak and mean, helpless and powerless. He ends up in the stock exchange, buying the soul of a bankrupt investor, and in a single evening the hellish alliance is exchanged so many times that it loses all value. Thus, the narrator cynically concludes, the enormous power unleashed by Maturin was lost. Though fantastic, the story is neither a failure nor truly Gothic; instead, it is a Gothic recantation. What Balzac is staging is not so much devalued desire or the triumph of money, as the devaluation of Gothic clichés. It is no surprise that the story should focus on Castanier rather than Melmoth, and that he should be a mere cashier forging a letter to steal money from a London bank. Borrowing from England can only be a simulacrum. For the pact is the coin which shifts from hand to hand, losing its value. What Balzac is coming to terms with here, with savage irony, is his own failure to transpose the Gothic to modern Paris, and adapt it to modern society. In a society which has given up honour for money, or in Barthes’s words a noble name for a financial figure, the wild darkness of absolute desire can only be commodified, and thus hollowed out. Gothic images shrink into worthless clichés, coins which are worn out as they slip from hand to hand. Hence the mirror image, when Melmoth’s name first appears as he signs his name backwards, from right to left. Hence also the first portrait we have, which deliberately mingles myth and cliché, from the unbearable eyes to topical puritanical clothes, so that the apparition is simply cut out as an Englishman: ‘[everything], including the shape of his clothes, bespoke an Englishman. He reeked of Englishness’ (Balzac 1979: 350) (my translation). The tale ends with the ludicrous babble of some German ‘Demon-expert’ and the jokes of ‘a devil of’ a clerk; but this is not a completely irrelevant ending. The repetition of ‘fiat’ and ‘fiat lux’ actually emphasizes the arbitrary nature of the dénouement, in which the writer’s ‘fiat’ dismisses the darkness of Gothic clichés. Before discarding the circulation of Gothic clichés as sterile imitation, though, Balzac wrote a fascinating novel in which he seems to step beyond the boundaries of both realism and the Gothic and to reach a unique balance. In The Wild Ass’s Skin, which was the literary event of 1831, Balzac does not seek to imitate Melmoth, but he does rediscover the pact with evil, and rewrites it as a metaphor for desire and the passing of time. We no longer have a tale spanning centuries to arouse despair but, by a metonymic inversion, a life which is reduced to a shrinking piece of

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Balzac was not simply yielding to fashion when he wrote Le Centenaire, since the fascination with Melmoth appears again in 1828, by which time Balzac had bought Cohen’s 1821 translation, and was hoping to print a second edition. Melmoth réconcilié was first published in 1835, and Balzac gives as an afterthought a short summary of Melmoth in a postscript, for those who may not know the book and who thus cannot understand his own tale. Balzac adds that though it may have seemed reasonable to Maturin not to send his protagonist to Paris, the demon must needs have found on his own the path to a city where the odds for accepting the bargain must be about a thousand to one. Amusingly enough, as Le Yaouanc points out,8 Balzac’s Melmoth reaches Paris in 1821, precisely when the translation of the book appeared (Balzac 1979: 1400).

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shagreen. The echoing French title La Peau de chagrin refers to shagreen or leather, but also sounds like the skin of sorrow, stressing the horror of nightmarish imprisonment beyond the boundaries of ordinary human life. The protagonist, the fair angelic Raphaël, meets his tempter in the guise of an old antique dealer, a gaunt Mephistophelian seer. The antique shop mixes the realistic delight for lists of objects with the darker intricacies of the Gothic maze, in an ‘ocean of furnishings, inventions, fashions, works of art and relics’ (Balzac 1977: 37). In the gilded rooms packed with trinkets, the windows grow dark, the fantasmagoric portraits quiver and dance, objects shift shapes in a ‘weird witches’ sabbath worthy of the fantasies glimpsed by Dr Faust’ (Balzac 1977: 42). As in Melmoth the Wanderer, a portrait appears, this time an icon of youth and beauty painted by Raphaël’s namesake. Raphaël’s Christ is the antithesis of the deadly talisman, the magic skin which materializes the paradoxical double find of transgression: it grants all wishes, thus allowing its owner to step beyond the bounds of human life, but it consumes itself, as each wish shrinks the limits of the owner’s life. Like Melmoth, the owner can but wander through the liminal space of death-in-life. Granting utmost power and utter helplessness, the talisman with its uncanny shimmer and supple solidity glitters like a comet, an image which foreshadows the shortness of Raphaël’s life. Once again, the comet suggests fire and ashes, endless wandering but also regular, inevitable repetition and return. When Raphaël cries out that he would like the skin to grant his wishes, the antique dealer quickly replies that he has signed the pact, though nothing has been written. Dismissing conventions, Balzac then switches to the growing awareness and horror of the victim of the pact, a theme which is extremely similar in spirit, though not in detail, to the core of Melmoth. Satisfied boundless desire is contrasted with the obsessive mapping of the ever-shrinking boundary of the skin, the ever-dwindling red line signalling loss of life and energy. This time, Balzac gets all the uncanny effects right. Raphaël seeks a way out, not by looking for another victim but by begging science to save him, yet neither chemistry nor an hydraulic press can manage to stretch the skin. Science pales before uncanny reality; and the horrified Raphaël becomes a wanderer fleeing his beloved Pauline, for each desire burns away his life. Like Melmoth he is the shunned traveller whose presence is unbearable. When he attempts to take the waters, he is challenged to a duel as he refuses to leave, an episode which echoes the

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death of Immalee’s brother. He then retreats to the middle of nowhere in the centre of France, Auvergne, a place which is clearly for Balzac beyond the boundaries of the civilized world, and which he describes fancifully, depicting sheer drops of lava. More than Balzac’s unsteady geography, it is the abject appearance of Raphael’s body which fascinates, the shrunken bloodless figure burnt by the hellish prospect of impending demise. Like Melmoth, Raphaël ultimately returns home, not to the place of his ancestors, but to his apartment in Paris where Pauline finds him. When she suddenly understands the situation and attempts to commit suicide to end all possibility of pleasure, Raphaël forgets all his resolutions to avoid desire and throws himself upon her. In this orgasmic ‘embrace’ he bites her breast, a dénouement which must be connected with the tale of the betrayed lovers who were starved below the convent in Melmoth. The awkward epilogue gives us another key to Balzac’s own version of the Gothic within this tale. While Pauline is turned into the spirit of Nature, and thus descends from Immalee’s virgin island, Foedora, the other woman who first doomed Raphaël to attempt suicide, is suddenly identified as Society. The peremptory allegorical conclusion might puzzle the reader who remembers the vibrant erotic and voyeuristic scene in which Raphaël ventured into the countess’s ‘Gothic boudoir’ and her bedroom to watch her go to bed. But it also adds a realistic element to the Gothic theme of a desire which burns unto death, for the pact with the Devil has been replaced by social hubris: one now loses one’s soul by contracting debts and rashly adoring coldhearted women, by following a new religion which obscures the pure Pauline. As such, La Peau de chagrin constitutes the true threshold of Balzac’s ‘Human Comedy’. Exposing in a nutshell the erotic economy of the modern world—and the modern text—the talisman creates a gloomy Gothic spell which is doomed to shrink and vanish, as dark textual enchantment yields to the cooler ‘lost illusions’ of the bulk of the work. Yet even in the ironic ‘Human Comedy’, some of the power of the dissections of the Parisian vanity fair may well come from unconscious Gothic reminiscences, as the arch deceiver and tempter Vautrin wanders from book to book, with the significant nickname of ‘Trompe la Mort’ . . . Thus Maturin becomes a soothsayer, disseminating in France the ashes and sparks of his words, to use a Shelleyan image. Melmoth journeys to France not only to inform Baudelairian

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Notes 1. ‘In literary histories, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) often marks the end of the Gothic romance proper, as a genre’ (Sage 2000: vii). 2. This is taken from an essay on Théodore de Banville which was first published in 1861. 3. Though a first collection appeared in 1857, and poems were added in 1868, the 1861 edition is usually considered to be the most significant one. 4. In 1852, Baudelaire read Poe avidly, convinced he had found a kindred spirit; he felt tremendous admiration for his conception of poetry. He had already completed a short translation in 1848, and between 1852 and 1865 he translated Poe’s major works, including among other things The Raven, The Black Cat, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Eureka, The Philosophy of Composition, and Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque. One should pay particular attention to Histoires extraordinaires, which was published in 1856, and Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires, which was published in 1857. The prefaces Baudelaire wrote show intellectual osmosis, to the point of sometimes plagiarizing Poe’s Poetic Principle. Lemaître explains that towards the end of his life Baudelaire also wished to translate Melmoth, since he found the existing version deeply unsatisfactory (Baudelaire 1990: 249). 5. Translation mine. This appeared in 1860 as part of Baudelaire’s preface to his long commentary (which included long extracts which he had translated) on De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

6. De l’essence du rire was first published in 1855 in Le Portefeuille. 7. The expression appears in a letter which Balzac addressed to his mother on 30 October 1835. When prefacing a recent edition of The Sorcerer, René Guise was so struck by the term that he checked the manuscript letter, assuming one should read ‘oeuvres’ (works) instead of ‘ordures’ (rubbish). But the hypothesis was proved wrong as the word ‘ordures’ appeared beyond all doubt. 8. Moïse Le Yaouanc is one of the editors of the famous 1979 ‘Pléiade edition’, along with P.G. Castex, T. Bodin, P. Citron, M. Fargeaud, H. Gauthier and R. Guise. 9. The religious implications of Melmoth’s failure to find a victim are discussed by Fowler; for her the righteous steadiness of the potential victims is crucial: ‘Balzac’s wry suggestion notwithstanding, it is not that Melmoth is remarkably stupid in selecting his targets . . . Like Satan, Melmoth fails to part his victims from God not because he is weak, but because they are strong’ (Fowler 1986: 527-528). Balzac’s deliberate shift is particularly revealing. 10. Interestingly enough, Sage draws attention to theatricality in Melmoth: ‘For the Wanderer, moving across history and geography is like moving through the auditorium of a theatre’ (Sage 2000: xx).

References Baldick, C. (ed.) (1992) The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Oxford, Oxford University Press. de Balzac, H. (1979) La Comédie humaine, coll. Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard. ———. (1990) Le Sorcier ou les deux Beringheld [1837], Preface by René Guise, Paris, José Corti. ———. (1977) The Wild Ass’s Skin, trans. H.J. Hunt, Harmondsworth, Penguin. Barbéris, P. (1965) Aux sources de Balzac: les romans de jeunesse, Paris, Les Bibliophiles de l’originale. Baudelaire, C. (1976) Oeuvres complètes, ed. C. Pichois, coll. Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard. ———. (1990) Curiosités esthétiques, L’Art romantique, et autres oeuvres critiques, ed. H. Lemaître, Paris, Bordas. Breton, A. (1996) Preface, in C.R. Maturin, L’Homme errant, Paris, Phébus [1965], pp. xi-xx. Le Brun, A. (1982) Les Châteaux de la subversion, Paris, JeanJacques Pauvert. Butor, M. (1990) La Comédie humaine, coll. Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard. ———. (1998) Le Marchand et le génie, Paris, Edition de la différence. Fowler, K. (1986) ‘Hieroglyphics in Fire: Melmoth the Wanderer’, Studies in Romanticism, 25, pp. 133-147. Jackson, R. (1988) The Literature of Subversion, London, Routledge [1981]. Lévy, M. (1995) Le Roman gothique anglais 1764-1824, Paris, Albin Michel [1967]. Maturin, C.R. (2000) Melmoth the Wanderer, ed. V. Sage, Harmondsworth, Penguin Classics [1820]. Punter, D. (1996) The Literature of Terror, Vol. 1, Harlow, Longman.

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darkness or Surrealistic fantasies, but also to signify how a life can be corroded by barren capitalism as well as instinct and desire. Graham Robb considers that The Wild Ass’s Skin is ‘an astonishing exercise in psychic autobiography’ (Robb 1995: 179), foreshadowing Balzac’s theory of energy, abstinence and excess, which led to his own early death: ‘The pattern of Balzac’s life is laid out, as if in a premonitory dream’ (Robb 1995: 179). The evil pact ultimately concerns writing itself, just as it did, perhaps, for Maturin. According to Michel Butor, the artist must choose to sacrifice his own share of heaven in order to bring revelation to men: ‘such is the way Balzac interprets Faust and rewrites Melmoth’ (Butor 1998: 123). As Sage points out, allusions to painting in Melmoth the Wanderer already question the mimetic connection between life and art, in ‘that extraordinary anticipation of decadence which so attracts the French’ (Sage 2000: xxiii). No wonder that Oscar Wilde, whose Portrait of Dorian Gray owes much to his great-uncle Maturin and Balzac’s piece of shagreen, should have chosen to live in Paris under the fateful name of Sebastian Melmoth. Thus by crossing the Channel, Melmoth ceased to be a religious novel and turned into a metaphor for the curse of the artist. In Balzac’s words, desire burns yet power destroys.

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Robb, G. (1995) Balzac, London, Macmillan [1994]. Sage, V. (1988) Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition, London, Macmillan. ———. (2000) Preface, in C. R. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, Harmondsworth, Penguin Classics.

Surveys the impact of Melmoth the Wanderer and assesses Maturin’s literary talent. Hennelly, Jr., Mark M. “Melmoth the Wanderer and Gothic Existentialism.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 15001900 21, no. 4 (autumn 1981): 665-79.

FURTHER READING Criticism Axton, William F. Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer, by Charles Robert Maturin, pp. vii-xviii. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. Asserts that Maturin’s primary intent in Melmoth is to expose the corruption engendered by religious authoritarianism, and declares that Melmoth is “the highest artistic achievement” of the Gothic genre because in it “the Gothic mummery of the horror novel was brought to serve the uses of a profoundly tragic religious parable.” Birkhead, Edith. “The Novel of Terror: Lewis and Maturin.” In The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance, pp. 63-93. London: Constable & Company Ltd., 1921. Regarded as an important twentieth-century study of the Gothic novel. Focuses on Maturin’s Fatal Revenge and Melmoth the Wanderer, noting Maturin’s indebtedness to earlier Gothic novelists, but distinguishing him from his predecessors “by the powerful eloquence of his style and his ability to analyse emotion.” Birkhead is one of the first twentieth-century critics to comment on the psychological insight displayed in Melmoth. Conger, Syndy M. “An Analysis of Melmoth the Wanderer and Its German Sources.” In Romantic Reassessment: Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans, an Interpretative Study of the Influence of German Literature on Two Gothic Novels, edited by James Hogg, pp. 160-255. Salzburg Studies in English Literature, edited by Erwin A. Stürzl, no. 67. Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1977. Discusses the nature and extent of Maturin’s reliance on German sources for his presentation of Melmoth as part Faust, part Mephistopheles, and part Wandering Jew. According to Conger, “no Gothic novelist before Maturin had ever attempted such a portrait of villainy; and it was German legendary figures which helped him to do so successfully.” Dansky, Richard. “The Wanderer and the Scribbler: Maturin, Scott, and Melmoth the Wanderer.” Studies in Weird Fiction 21 (summer 1997): 10-16. Investigates the possible influence of Maturin’s correspondence, particularly with Sir Walter Scott, as well as Maturin’s financial arrangements with his publisher, on the composition of Melmoth the Wanderer. Dawson, Leven M. “Melmoth the Wanderer: Paradox and the Gothic Novel.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 15001900 8, no. 4 (autumn 1968): 621-32. Asserts that the paradoxical enjoyment of fear and the eroticism of terror are fundamental elements of the Gothic novel and that Melmoth the Wanderer is the most characteristic example of the use of paradox in Gothic fiction. Dawson demonstrates how the Gothic novelists’ exploitation of paradox foreshadowed the Romantics’ efforts to unify experience by a resolution of opposites and disparities.

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Grant, Douglas. Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale, by Charles Robert Maturin. Edited by Douglas Grant. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1968, 560 p.

Analyzes Melmoth the Wanderer’s “preoccupation with five particular but overlapping existential themes: absurdity, isolation, failure of communication, loss of freedom, and the lack of responsible commitment.” Howells, Coral Ann. “C. R. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer.” In Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction, pp. 131-58. London and Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: The Athlone Press, 1978. Argues that the impact of Melmoth the Wanderer derives from Maturin’s examination of human responses to terror and oppression. According to Howells, Maturin transforms suffering “into a literary aesthetic, so that in his hands it becomes nothing less than the raw material for psychological enquiry.” She also maintains that Melmoth the Wanderer must be read as Maturin’s commentary on the paradoxical nature of the human condition, in which the individual is both victim and tormentor. Idman, Niilo. Charles Robert Maturin, His Life and Works. London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1923, 326 p. Book-length study of Maturin that focuses on the Romantic aspects of his works. Kiely, Robert. “Melmoth the Wanderer: Charles Robert Maturin.” In The Romantic Novel in England, pp. 189-207. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. Distinguishes Melmoth the Wanderer from earlier Gothic novels because of its depiction of the repressive practices of the Roman Catholic church and authoritarian political systems, and views the novel as important primarily for its explorations into “the dark side of the human mind.” Maintains that the separate tales in Melmoth the Wanderer are united by the theme of human misery and that Maturin’s examination of the effects of pain on the human personality “illustrates a whole phase of romantic psychology and the creative process.” Kramer, Dale. Charles Robert Maturin. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973, 166 p. Comprehensive study of Maturin’s life and works. Null, Jack. “Structure and Theme in Melmoth the Wanderer.” Papers on Language and Literature 13 (1977): 136-47. Argues that Melmoth the Wanderer derives its psychological intensity from its complex structure, contending that the novel’s fragmented structure reflects “organically the disorientation caused by the characters’ loss of values.” Piper, H. W. and A. Norman Jeffares. “Maturin the Innovator.” The Huntington Library Quarterly 21, no. 3 (May 1958): 261-84. Maintains that Maturin’s reputation as a Gothic novelist has overshadowed his importance as a proponent of Irish regional literature. Piper and Jeffares contend that Maturin’s novels are explorations of Irish culture in which he combined Irish nationalism with Wordsworthian

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Roberts, Marie. “Maturin and the Rosicrucian Heresy.” In Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, pp. 121-55. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Declares that “[w]ith its echoes of Faust and the Wandering Jew, Melmoth advances the Rosicrucian novel into the realms of theological controversy.”

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Maturin’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: British Writers Supplement, Vol. 8; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 178; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vol. 6; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; and Supernatural Fiction Writers.

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Romanticism to contrast English and Irish culture as well as “natural” and cosmopolitan character.

HERMAN MELVILLE (1819 - 1891)

American novelist, short story writer, and poet.

M

elville, a major American literary figure of the nineteenth century, is best known as the author of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), a complex metaphysical novel that is considered a classic of world literature. Virtually unrecognized at the time of his death, Melville is now praised for his rich, rhythmical prose and complex symbolism. A master of both realistic and allegorical narrative, Melville was also an incisive social critic and philosopher who sought to understand the ambiguities of life and to define the individual’s relation to society and the universe. Though Melville is not ordinarily categorized as a Gothic writer, his relationship to this literary tradition has nevertheless been identified by numerous contemporary scholars who point to the frequent adapted use of Gothic conventions in his works. Principally, critics have noted Melville’s exploitation of isolated shipboard settings for the purposes of evoking psychological terror, his use of naïve narrators who witness mysterious, unexplainable events and relate the exploits of menacing antiheroes, and his literary depiction of a cosmic struggle of Manichean polarities in an ambiguous world devoid of the sense that good will ultimately triumph and vanquish evil. For modern critics, all of these devices are pivotal to Moby-Dick, while

elements therein have also been studied in conjunction with his shorter works of prose fiction.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Born in New York City, Melville enjoyed a relatively comfortable childhood until his father’s business failure and early death. Melville ended his formal education at age twelve to help support his family. He worked in the family fur business and as a bank clerk and taught at various schools until, in 1839, he sailed as a cabin boy aboard a merchant ship bound for Liverpool, England. This experience, shocking in its revelation of squalor and human cruelty, subsequently inspired his fourth novel, Redburn: His First Voyage (1849). Melville’s later journey to the South Seas, begun aboard the whaling ship Acushnet, provided the background for his most highly regarded works. Finding conditions unbearable aboard the Acushnet, Melville deserted the ship in the Marquesas and spent several months in captivity among a tribe of cannibalistic Polynesians. He finally escaped aboard a passing whaling vessel. Again appalled by the conditions at sea, Melville joined in a mutiny and was briefly imprisoned in Tahiti. He then moved on to Hawaii and later returned to New York aboard a U.S. naval vessel. Melville had never contemplated a literary career, but with no prospects for a career on his return to the U.S.,

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he was encouraged by family and friends to write about his remarkable journeys. His first novels, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) and its sequel, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), are fictionalized versions of his experiences in the Pacific. Generally praised for their excitement, romance, and splendid descriptions of the South Seas region, these novels were immediately successful and made Melville famous as the “man who lived among the cannibals⬙—a reputation he was never able to overcome and that interfered with the appreciation of his later works. Melville’s mature literary voice began to emerge in Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (1849). At the time he wrote this work he was growing restless with the adventure narrative and was increasingly drawn to philosophical and metaphysical questions in his novels. Mardi represents an important step in Melville’s artistic development, yet its publication marked the beginning of the decline in his popularity. Discouraged by the novel’s poor reception and in need of money, Melville temporarily returned to the travel narrative and produced Redburn and White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850). Melville wrote Moby-Dick between 1850 and 1851. An early chapter of the novel appeared in the October 1, 1851 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine while the complete novel was published in London and New York in the ensuing weeks. Critics and the reading public on both sides of the Atlantic took little notice of the work. Emotionally exhausted following the publication of Moby-Dick and desperate for recognition, Melville immediately began writing Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), a pessimistic novel that is considered the most autobiographical of his works. His popularity, already damaged by the publication of Moby-Dick, was nearly destroyed by Pierre, which was poorly received by a reading public that preferred the entertainment of Typee and Omoo. Melville continued writing prose through the 1850s, despite the critical and popular failure of Pierre and Moby-Dick. He published numerous short stories in periodicals and collected six of his best in The Piazza Tales (1856). Billy Budd, his final novel, was left in manuscript at his death in 1891 and was not published until 1924.

MAJOR WORKS Melville’s mature works of fiction are considered complex pieces that illustrate their author’s incisive exploration of philosophical themes, use

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of allegorical symbolism, and mastery of complex narrative technique. Although Mardi begins as an adventure story, it quickly becomes a combination of philosophical allegory and satire; as such, it anticipates both Moby-Dick and Pierre in its levels of meaning, concern with metaphysical problems, and use of a questing hero. Like Mardi, Moby-Dick was initially conceived as a realistic narrative about sea life; but it took on epic proportions as Melville progressed in its composition. In the novel, the narrator, Ishmael, recounts his ill-fated voyage as a hand on board the whaling ship Pequod. Outfitted with an eclectic crew including South Sea islanders, North American Indians, blacks, and New England salts, the whaler leaves Nantucket on Christmas Day, bound on a commercial hunt for whales. As the trip progresses, however, Ahab, the ship’s captain, exerts his will over the crew and converts the voyage into a quest to destroy his personal nemesis, a celebrated white whale known as Moby Dick. Ahab had lost a leg to the whale in a previous encounter, and his search is further fueled by his monomaniacal conviction that Moby Dick visibly personifies all earthly malignity and evil. The story concludes with a turbulent three-day struggle between the white whale and the Pequod’s crew. The whale has been variously interpreted as God, evil, good, and as a symbol of the ambiguity of nature. Considered by many of Melville’s contemporaries as a sentimental romance, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities treats such themes as illegitimacy, incest, and, as its subtitle suggests, ambiguity. Detailing the story of an idealist who consistently undermines his own good intentions and ultimately commits suicide, Pierre is a deeply psychological work that explores the recesses of the human mind, in particular repressed sexual urges, and examines how good can be transformed into evil in unpredictable ways. Melville’s six-story compilation The Piazza Tales includes “Benito Cereno,” which is generally considered his finest short story, as well as several noted tales, including “Bartleby the Scrivener,” concerning an alienated Wall Street law copyist, and “The Bell-Tower,” a moral parable on the sin of hubris set in Renaissance Italy. In “Benito Cereno” Melville relates an ironic narrative of slave mutiny at sea. Featuring a naïve narrator who stumbles upon the remnants of a violent rebellion but fails to recognize the horrors that have occurred, “Benito Cereno” offers a fascinating thematic study of human depravity and moral relativism. Other late works by Melville include two novels, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857), an allegorical satire on mid nineteenth-

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CRITICAL RECEPTION At the time of his death, Melville was almost unknown as a writer, and his accomplishments were not properly recognized for over a generation. Nineteenth-century critics of Pierre, for instance, often expressed confusion over the novel’s metaphysical questioning and found its theme of incest offensive. In the contemporary period, however, Pierre has been noted as a predecessor of the modern psychological novel. Indeed, a tremendous revival of interest in Melville’s work began in the 1920s, following the publication of the biography Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, written by Raymond T. Weaver (see Further Reading), and constitutes a dramatic reversal nearly unprecedented in American literary history. By the middle of the twentieth century MobyDick was considered one of America’s greatest novels and widely acclaimed as a work of genius. Critics generally agree that in this work Melville parlayed the story of a sea captain’s vengeful search for a legendary whale into a narrative suffused with profound speculation concerning the nature and interrelationship of the individual, society, God, and the cosmos. The novel is also highly acclaimed as a distinctly American book. By resolutely grounding his speculations in American thought, language, and experience, Melville elevated Moby-Dick to the status of a national epic. Although Melville’s contemporaries gave it little notice, Moby-Dick was studied more intensively in the twentieth century than any other American novel and is now considered one of the greatest novels of all time. Additionally, Melville’s late work Billy Budd has been widely examined in an effort to determine Melville’s final views on such issues as justice, morality, and religion. Viewed as one of his finest novels, Billy Budd has been consistently praised for its philosophical insight, multifaceted narrative technique, and complex use of symbol and allegory. Melville’s fiction, particularly Moby-Dick, has been the subject of innumerable interpretations, and the body of Melville criticism, already immense, continues to grow. Among the multitude of scholarly approaches to these works has been a recent appreciation of Gothic features in Melville’s novels and short prose fiction. Newton Arvin has

investigated the influence of the Gothic novel and Gothic literary tropes on Melville, highlighting affinities among the imagery, symbolism, and modes of characterization employed by Melville in his stories and similar devices used by writers such as Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Horace Walpole, and Edgar Allan Poe. Nalini V. Shetty has argued that Melville’s “Benito Cereno” reveals the author’s substantial adaptation of Gothic fictional techniques, suggesting that Melville transferred some of the standard devices used to a evoke a mood of preternatural terror to the shipboard setting and mysterious, twisting plot of this noted story. Similarly, Steven T. Ryan has identified Gothic formulaic elements in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by comparing Melville’s tale with Poe’s Gothic classic “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Ryan observes that Melville uses a literal and commonsensical narrator together with a mysterious figure in this work to create a sense of enclosure and impending catastrophe without relying on the outward trappings of medieval gloom and decay ordinarily found in traditional Gothic narrative. Critics have also studied Moby-Dick as it is informed by Gothic themes, conventions, and characterizations. Tony Magistrale has viewed the novel’s revengeobsessed Captain Ahab as an embodiment of the demonic Gothic villain, while Benjamin F. Fisher IV has demonstrated Melville’s use of the seagoing Pequod as a surrogate for the archetypal “haunted castle” setting of Gothic fiction. Other commentators have elucidated such Gothic motifs as isolation, insanity, and the pervasive presence of an unseen evil in Melville’s Moby-Dick and his other works.

PRINCIPAL WORKS Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. 2 vols. (novel) 1846 Omoo: A Narrative of Adventure in the South Seas (novel) 1847 Mardi: And a Voyage Thither. 2 vols. (novel) 1849 Redburn: His First Voyage (novel) 1849 White Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (novel) 1850 Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (novel) 1851 Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (novel) 1852 Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (novel) 1855 The Piazza Tales (short stories) 1856

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century American life, and Billy Budd, a heavily symbolic work featuring an unreliable narrator, which focuses on the execution of a young sailor accused of fomenting a mutiny aboard an English warship.

MELVILLE

The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (novel) 1857 Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (poetry) 1866 Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (poetry) 1876 John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea Pieces (poetry) 1888 Timoleon (poetry) 1891 Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces (novel and short stories) 1924

PRIMARY SOURCES HERMAN MELVILLE (STORY DATE 1856) SOURCE: Melville, Herman. “The Bell Tower.” In The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces: 1839-1860, by Herman Melville, pp. 174-87. Evanston and Chicago, Ill.: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987. The following excerpt comprises the conclusion of the short story “The Bell Tower,” first published in The Piazza Tales in 1856.

It was thought that on the day preceding the fatality, his visitors having left him, Bannadonna had unpacked the belfry image, adjusted it, and placed it in the retreat provided,—a sort of sentrybox in one corner of the belfry; in short, throughout the night, and for some part of the ensuing morning, he had been engaged in arranging every thing connected with the domino: the issuing from the sentry-box each sixty minutes; sliding along a grooved way, like a railway; advancing to the clock-bell, with uplifted manacles; striking it at one of the twelve junctions of the four-andtwenty hands: then wheeling, circling the bell, and retiring to its post, there to bide for another sixty minutes, when the same process was to be repeated; the bell, by a cunning mechanism, meantime turning on its vertical axis, so as to present, to the descending mace, the clasped hands of the next two figures, when it would strike two, three, and so on, to the end. The musical metal in this time-bell being so managed in the fusion, by some art perishing with its originator, that each of the clasps of the four-and-twenty hands should give forth its own peculiar resonance when parted. But on the magic metal, the magic and metallic stranger never struck but that one stroke, drove but that one nail, severed but that one clasp, by which Bannadonna clung to his ambitious life.

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For, after winding up the creature in the sentrybox, so that, for the present, skipping the intervening hours, it should not emerge till the hour of one, but should then infallibly emerge, and, after deftly oiling the grooves whereon it was to slide, it was surmised that the mechanician must then have hurried to the bell, to give his final touches to its sculpture. True artist, he here became absorbed; an absorption still further intensified, it may be, by his striving to abate that strange look of Una; which, though, before others, he had treated with such unconcern, might not, in secret, have been without its thorn. And so, for the interval, he was oblivious of his creature; which, not oblivious of him, and true to its creation, and true to its heedful winding up, left its post precisely at the given moment; along its well-oiled route, slid noiselessly towards its mark; and aiming at the hand of Una, to ring one clangorous note, dully smote the intervening brain of Bannadonna, turned backwards to it; the manacled arms then instantly upspringing to their hovering poise. The falling body clogged the thing’s return; so there it stood, still impending over Bannadonna, as if whispering some postmortem terror. The chisel lay dropped from the hand, but beside the hand; the oil-flask spilled across the iron track. In his unhappy end, not unmindful of the rare genius of the mechanician, the republic decreed him a stately funeral. It was resolved that the great bell—the one whose casting had been jeopardized through the timidity of the ill-starred workman— should be rung upon the entrance of the bier into the cathedral. The most robust man of the country round was assigned the office of bell-ringer. But as the pall-bearers entered the cathedral porch, nought but a broken and disastrous sound, like that of some lone Alpine land-slide, fell from the tower upon their ears. And then, all was hushed. Glancing backwards, they saw the groined belfry crashed sideways in. It afterwards appeared that the powerful peasant who had the bell-rope in charge, wishing to test at once the full glory of the bell, had swayed down upon the rope with one concentrate jerk. The mass of quaking metal, too ponderous for its frame, and strangely feeble somewhere at its top, loosed from its fastening, tore sideways down, and tumbling in one sheer fall, three hundred feet to the soft sward below, buried itself inverted and half out of sight. Upon its disinterment, the main fracture was found to have started from a small spot in the ear;

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The remolten metal soon reässumed its place in the tower’s repaired superstructure. For one year the metallic choir of birds sang musically in its belfry-bough-work of sculptured blinds and traceries. But on the first anniversary of the tower’s completion—at early dawn, before the concourse had surrounded it—an earthquake came; one loud crash was heard. The stone-pine, with all its bower of songsters, lay overthrown upon the plain. So the blind slave obeyed its blinder lord; but, in obedience, slew him. So the creator was killed by the creature. So the bell was too heavy for the tower. So that bell’s main weakness was where man’s blood had flawed it. And so pride went before the fall.1

Note 1. It was not deemed necessary to adhere to the peculiar notation of Italian time. Adherence to it would have impaired the familiar comprehension of the story. Kindred remarks might be offered touching an anachronism or two that occur.

GENERAL COMMENTARY NEWTON ARVIN (ESSAY DATE MARCH 1949) SOURCE: Arvin, Newton. “Melville and the Gothic Novel.” The New England Quarterly 22, no. 1 (March 1949): 33-48. In the following essay, Arvin delineates the various instances in which Melville’s works are evocative of Gothic fiction by such authors as Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, and E. T. A. Hoffmann.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR JAY MACPHERSON ON MELVILLE’S “THE BELL TOWER” AND FRANKENSTEIN

Melville’s “The Bell-Tower,” 1855, an early moral fable about man and machine handled with Gothic suggestiveness is constructed out of a set of rather clearcut literary materials and takes in a number of interests that have proved durable since. Incidentally, it is the one piece of his fiction to remain in print during the next half-century. Written somewhat under the influence of Frankenstein, which Melville bought in London ten years before, “The Bell-Tower” is perhaps the first story to show what Frankenstein is often wrongly supposed to show, namely the fate of a demonic creator destroyed by what he has created. Like Frankenstein it is a modern story in that no background scheme of divine judgment is necessary. The overreacher’s crime is against man, not God. Like Frankenstein he fixes his sights on his intended achievement and fails to love his fellow, and he comes to his end through purely natural causes, though ones a little tidier than nature usually affords. This is the more striking because the main frame on which Melville builds his story is taken from the Bible, as is heavily emphasized by repeated reference. SOURCE: MacPherson, Jay. “Waiting for Shiloh: Transgression and Fall in Melville’s ‘The BellTower.’” In Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/ Transgression, edited by Kenneth W. Graham, pp. 245-58. New York: AMS Press, 1989.

I There is a curious and rather unexpected passage in Billy Budd in which, alluding to Claggart’s hatred of Billy, Melville remarks that the cause of this dark emotion was “in its very realism as much charged with that prime element of Radcliffean romance, the mysterious, as any that the ingenuity of the author of the Mysteries of Udolpho could devise.”1 Billy Budd and the Mysteries of Udolpho! Claggart and the melodramatic Montoni! Herman Melville and Mrs. Ann Radcliffe! Surely these are little better than laughable juxtapositions, and nothing could be idler or more pedantic than to look closely and seriously at the clue that Melville

dropped behind him in the passage I have just quoted. Such, at least, is bound to be one’s first response to the suggestion that there is a certain strain of the Radcliffean, of the “Gothic,” in Melville’s own work—until, perhaps, one recalls how fond of Mrs. Radcliffe’s books both Balzac and Stendhal were, and reflects that Melville would not be the first writer of great power to owe a certain debt to one of his small predecessors. The fact is, of course, that his mind was a very complex one; that he was tirelessly responsive to the imaginative currents of his age; and that he

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which, being scraped, revealed a defect, deceptively minute, in the casting; which defect must subsequently have been pasted over with some unknown compound.

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was indebted, as only writers of the first order can be, to a thousand books and authors who preceded him. In all that, the “influence” of the Gothic school is a slight and minor element; but every element in the sensibility of a writer like Melville has its interest and meaning for us.

lem. Those pilgrims, he says, who loiter near the sacred tomb at nightfall, and become aware of the lengthening shadows of the stone and the low mysterious sounds stealing from its vicinity,

There can be no doubt of his familiarity with the writers of the Tale of Terror school. He was probably familiar with them from an early date, no doubt from boyhood, though we have to guess at this. In any case, we know that Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom, with its one or two rather trumped-up scenes of what might be called premature Gothicism, was one of the books that, according to a passage in Omoo, oddly turned up in the possession of his amiable host Po-po, on the island of Moorea, and that he read with such delight.2 Some years later, on his visit to England in 1849, Melville bought and brought home with him a quantity of books, among which were three or four of the favorite classics of the Gothic school: Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Beckford’s Vathek, Godwin’s Caleb Williams, and Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein.3 How well Melville may have known the German writers of what is called the Schauerroman it is not easy to say, but in 1850 he is known to have borrowed from his friend Duyckinck the two volumes of Carlyle’s German Romance, with its translations from such romantic and sometimes “Gothic” writers as Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann.4 Still later, traveling in the Near East and finding himself followed about the bazaar in Constantinople by a suspicious-looking Greek, he remembered that “much of the fearful interest of Schiller’s Ghost-Seer”—a once famous shuddertale—“hangs upon being followed in Venice by an Armenian.”5

One wonders how many of Clarel’s readers, in the seventies, would still have recognized in Ludovico the half-comic, half-heroic manservant at the Castle of Udolpho who assists the heroine, Emily St. Aubert, in escaping from that sinister pile, and who later, in the south of France, undertakes to spend the night in the haunted chambers of the Château-le-Blanc.

The singular passage in Billy Budd was not the only place where Melville alluded to the good Ann Radcliffe herself. There is another entry in the journal he kept of his trip to Palestine which is almost as noteworthy; he is speaking of the desolate, stricken landscape of the Holy Land, and remarks: “As the sight of haunted Haddon Hall suggested to Mrs Radcliffe her curdling romances, so I have little doubt, the diabolical landscape of Judea must have suggested to the Jewish prophets, their ghastly theology.”6 In some curious way, the imagery of Mrs. Radcliffe’s books must have got itself intermingled with Melville’s somber impressions of Palestine; an allusion to one of them occurs early in the first part of Clarel, the long metaphysical-descriptive poem he wrote on the basis of his travels in that country. He is describing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusa-

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Shrink, much like Ludovico erst Within the haunted chamber . . .7

II Of course there would have been a great deal in the Gothic writers to inspire risibility in Melville rather than serious emulation, and yet the fact is that there was also a strain of feeling and imagination in them, of romantic sensibility, of morbid fancy, even of “nerves,” to which he was by no means unresponsive. There was, for example, that passion for “wild,” “gloomy,” and “sublime” landscapes which Mrs. Radcliffe and the others derived in part from the tradition of Baroque landscape-painting—from Salvator Rosa, especially, and from such painters as the poetic English landscapist, Richard Wilson—and which certainly contributed to form and educate Melville’s manner of looking at the visible world.8 Most readers of Mrs. Radcliffe will recall her habit of alluding to those painters; a narrow valley in the Pyrenees, for example, in Udolpho, characteristically strikes her as “such a scene as Salvator would have chosen . . . for his canvas.”9 In exactly the same manner, Melville, evoking in Redburn the spectacle of the dying sailor Jackson, brooding in the “infernal gloom” of his bunk, observes that he was a picture “worthy to be painted by the dark, moody hand of Salvator.”1 0 His own landscapes are sometimes decidedly in the great Baroque tradition of Salvator Rosa— and of Ann Radcliffe. Even when it is a question of conjuring up a scene so far from Mrs. Radcliffe’s romantic Pyrenees and Apennines as a wild ravine on the Marquesan island of Nukuhiva, the one in which Melville and Toby spend a wretched night before descending into the Valley of Typee, it seems as if Melville, on the spot, had gazed about him with eyes that had been trained in part by Mrs. Radcliffe: The sight that now greeted us was one that will ever be vividly impressed upon my mind. Five foaming streams, rushing through as many gorges,

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In the particularly “painterly” quality of this piece of landscape-writing—in the dim uncertain lighting, the heavy shadows, the dark surface of the pool, the violence of the physical motions, and the rich accompaniment of awesome sounds—there is an inescapable reminiscence, in Polynesian terms, of some of Mrs. Radcliffe’s fine, gloomy landscapes. Take, for example, that in which Emily St. Aubert finds herself when Montoni’s banditti attempt to abduct her from the Castle of Udolpho: The sun had now been set some time; heavy clouds, whose lower skirts were tinged with sulphurous crimson, lingered in the west, and threw a reddish tint upon the pine forests, which sent forth a solemn sound as the breeze rolled over them. The hollow moan struck upon Emily’s heart, and served to render more gloomy and terrific every object around her—the mountains, shaded in twilight—the gleaming torrent, hoarsely roaring—the black forests, and the deep glen, broken into rocky recesses, high overshadowed by cypress and sycamore, and winding into long obscurity.1 2

It is clear enough, from such a parallel, that Melville has insensibly transmuted the old Baroque or Gothic landscape into something genuinely his own, and the point would be equally clear if one turned to such passages as Pierre’s dream of the ruinous and desolate scenery environing the Mount of Titans,1 3 or the marvelous presentment, in the first sketch of “The Encantadas,” of the blighted, nightmarish landscape of the Galápagos Islands.1 4 It is, of course, Melville’s own “painterly” powers that are really important in these passages, but it is impossible not to detect in them, nevertheless, the lingering vestiges of an older manner in fiction—the manner embodied in such scenes as that of the wild Adriatic seacoast in Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Italian, or the frightful abysses into which the fiend dashes the guilty Am-

brosio in M. G. Lewis’s The Monk, or the dreamlike horror of the bleak Arctic landscape in Frankenstein. If we look in Melville’s work for the great leading symbol of Gothic fiction, the Haunted Castle itself,1 5 it is quite true that we shall not find it, at least not literally; there is of course, in Melville, no such grand and melancholy Gothic structure as that of Otranto or Udolpho or the Castle or R———sitten in Hoffmann’s tale, Das Majorat. There is no House of Usher in his work nor even a House of the Seven Gables. Yet something of the poetic quality of the Haunted Castle—its strangeness, its antiquity, its dilapidation, its somber picturesqueness—may surely be felt, with all the differences, in Melville’s description of the “Pequod” in Moby Dick, with its weather-stained hull, its venerable bows (which looked “bearded”), its spire-like masts, its worn and ancient decks, and its general grotesqueness and strangeness;1 6 and perhaps one feels this quality still more strongly in Melville’s drawing of the doomed Spanish vessel, the San Dominick, in “Benito Cereno,” suggesting as it does “a whitewashed monastery after a thunder-storm, seen perched upon some dun cliff among the Pyrenees.”1 7 One of Mrs. Radcliffe’s beloved convents and monasteries comes immediately to mind, let us say the convent of San Stefano among the wild Abruzzi in The Italian; and certainly there is more than a touch of the Gothic in the San Dominick’s dilapidated tops, its castellated forecastle (“battered and mouldy” like “some ancient turret”), and the “faded grandeur” of its shield-like stern-piece, intricately carved with the arms of Castile and Leon.1 8 And, of course, the emotional tone of “Benito,” its absorbing anxiety and half-pleasurable foreboding, is but a deeper and more serious version of Mrs. Radcliffe’s “pleasing dread.”1 9 Less interesting in every way is the image of the ruined tower, standing out like “the black mossed stump of some immeasurable pine,” in the feeble Hawthornesque tale, “The Bell-Tower” (one of the Piazza Tales); yet this, too, is a dim echo of the towers, the turrets, the belfries in which the Gothic writers abound;2 0 and when, in Pierre, the hero and his half-sister Isabel ensconce themselves in the city high up in the building that adjoins the Church of the Apostles, in chambers from which Pierre can gaze out at “the donjon form of the old gray tower” of the Church itself,2 1 one is at any rate oddly reminded of the La Mottes and their protégée, the forlorn Adeline, in The Romance of the Forest, taking refuge amid the ruins of the Abbey of St. Clair, from the apartments of

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and swelled and turbid by the recent rains, united together in one mad plunge of nearly eighty feet, and fell with wild uproar into a deep black pool scooped out of the gloomy-looking rocks that lay piled around, and thence in one collected body dashed down a narrow sloping channel which seemed to penetrate into the very bowels of the earth. Overhead, vast roots of trees hung down from the sides of the ravine, dripping with moisture, and trembling with the concussions produced by the fall. It was now sunset, and the feeble uncertain light that found its way into these caverns and woody depths heightened their strange appearance, and reminded us that in a short time we should find ourselves in utter darkness.1 1

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which they can contemplate the “almost demolished” eastern tower.2 2 The tower is an obsessive symbol in Gothic fiction, but still more obsessive, and deeply characteristic, is the recurring, dreamlike symbolism of the subterranean—of ill-lighted, perplexing, labyrinthine corridors below ground, of obscure and gloomy vaults, of yawning dungeons; one finds it everywhere in Beckford, in Mrs. Radcliffe, in “Monk” Lewis; and such tales as “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” suggest that this claustrophobic imagery had a quite special value for Poe. It is less characteristic in every way of Melville, but even in him there is a hint of it in the murky, stifling, vermin-infested forecastles of Omoo2 3 and Redburn;2 4 and for a moment or two, in the sketch called “I and My Chimney,” one finds oneself in the true underground realm of Mrs. Radcliffe and Poe. Very often, says the narrator of that sketch, he goes down into his cellar to survey the vast square base of his enormous chimney: “It has a druidical look, away down in the umbrageous cellar there, whose numerous vaulted passages, and far glens of gloom, resemble the dark, damp depths of primeval woods.”2 5 In Melville, as in Hoffmann and Poe, the Unconscious is powerfully symbolized in this imagery of the subterranean. If not the Superconscious, then certainly the Inexpressible bodies itself forth for many of the romantics, and certainly for some of the Gothic writers, in the imagery of music and the musical instrument. One may well question whether Melville was so spontaneously sensitive to musical form as he certainly was to color, to line, and to the plastic in general. Yet he shared too fully the sensibility of romanticism not to be capable, at moments, of expressing himself almost in the vein of Novalis, of Hoffmann, of Shelley: “Now, music,” he says in Redburn, “is a holy thing, and its instruments, however humble, are to be loved and revered. . . . Musical instruments should be like the silver tongs with which the high priests tended the Jewish altars—never to be touched by a hand profane.”2 6 Certainly musical instruments had been favorite emblems for Mrs. Radcliffe and her followers; stringed instruments especially, but wood-winds too and horns; and no cachet of the school is more individualizing than the “picturesque sounds,”2 7 as Mrs. Radcliffe rather finely calls them, which her heroines so love to draw forth from some romantic instrument. Emily St. Aubert, in Udolpho, is representative, and Emily’s pleasantest hours, we are told, were passed in a pavilion

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to which she frequently retired “with a book to overcome, or a lute to indulge her melancholy.”2 8 Isabel, in Pierre, is a not very remote descendant of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Emilys and Adelines and Ellenas, and not least in her passionate penchant for music, especially the music she knows how to draw forth preternaturally, even without touching its strings, from her beloved guitar. This remarkable instrument, she tells Pierre, she had bought with some of her little earnings from a peddler; later, to her astonishment, she had found the name Isabel lettered in gilt on its interior surface, and when she learned that the instrument had come from the Glendinning mansion, she was at once intuitively certain that it had belonged to her mysterious mother. It is, in short, one of the delicate links in the ambiguous chain of circumstances which convinces Pierre that Isabel is in very truth his half-sister. But the poetic use of the symbol is subtler and less tangible than its use in the plot; the mystical melodies which Isabel, in Pierre’s fascinated presence, evokes from her guitar are suggestive of the strangeness, the preternaturalness, the ambiguity of the relations that are at the same moment springing up between Pierre and her. “All the wonders that are unimaginable and unspeakable,” as she herself says, “all these wonders are translated in the mysterious melodiousness of the guitar.”2 9 Indeed, it is while she bends over the speaking instrument, her long dark hair falling over its strings and glowing with a mystic radiance from the “scintillations” of the melody, that Pierre is first aware of the spell which is being cast over him—that spell from which he knows it is impossible for him ever to break.3 0 Gothic as Isabel’s guitar undoubtedly is, it serves a darker and more painful purpose than any of Mrs. Radcliffe’s genuinely charming lutes. In any case, there appears in this same novel a remarkable example of still another favorite Gothic device, the magic portrait. Paintings in general are highly characteristic symbols in romantic fiction—Balzac’s Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu is a familiar example—and true to his romantic heritage Melville had already introduced two striking pictures in Moby Dick, the smoky and almost unintelligible painting hung up in the entry of the Spouter-Inn,3 1 and the stormy seascape that hangs at the back of Father Mapple’s pulpit in the Whaleman’s Chapel.3 2 The painting in Pierre, however, is not a landscape but a portrait, and it belongs in the line of all the mysterious, uncanny portraits that stem from the likeness of Prince Manfred’s grandfather in The Castle of Otranto— the somber portrait which steps down out of its

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The portrait in Pierre, as a matter of fact, is one of two pictures, two portraits of Pierre’s deceased father, the elder Glendinning, one of which Pierre’s mother approves of and allows to hang prominently in her drawing room; the other, however, she intensely dislikes and taboos, insisting that Pierre hang it safely out of her sight in a small closet that adjoins his bedroom. This latter picture represents Pierre’s adored father as a carefree, irresponsible youth, seated negligently in an old-fashioned Malacca chair; and Pierre is much given to sitting before it and communing with it, for he at least imagines that it speaks to him and smiles at him in its suggestive, ambiguous way. He had learned, as a younger boy, of the circumstances under which it had been painted, and now, after the real action begins, his recollection of them sickeningly confirms the suspicions of his father’s rectitude which Isabel’s tale has implanted in his heart. From being the object of a kind of idolatry—a literal “father image,” indeed— the portrait has turned to an object of loathing to Pierre, an emblem of the moral ambiguities that flicker and leer about him; and before he sets off for the city with Isabel, he destroys the chairportrait by burning it. As he does so, and it writhes blackly in the flames, it stares at him tormentedly “in beseeching horror,” quite as if it were a living thing.3 4 It is perhaps not meaningless, psychologically, that both Pierre and Melville should so much have disliked to have their portraits painted or their pictures taken.3 5

III Pierre, in any case, like some of Melville’s other books, owes more than its symbols to his Gothic forerunners. The novel, from this somewhat pedantic point of view, represents an intertwining of three strands in Melville’s literary heritage: Elizabethan tragedy, sentimentalism, and the Radcliffean novel that has so much in common with sentimentalism and that also expressed, in its own time, a kind of displaced Elizabethanism. The incest motive in Pierre, for example, might certainly have come to Melville from Webster or Ford, but it is still more reminiscent of the

sentimental, the Gothic, or in general the romantic school. In White-Jacket, Melville himself alludes to Walpole’s incestuous tragedy, The Mysterious Mother, along with Oedipus Tyrannus and The Cenci;3 6 and he may well have recalled how Mrs. Radcliffe had dallied with the theme in The Romance of the Forest, only to slip away from it unsullied, and how the less fastidious, or less timorous, Lewis had embraced it without coyness, restraint, or apology in The Monk. Needless to say, the fact that Melville turned to the theme of incest in Pierre has a far deeper meaning than any study of literary Einflüsse could possibly suggest; one speaks of these connections only for what they are, no more; and Melville—who, incredibly enough, seems actually to have fancied that Pierre was “calculated for popularity” 3 7 —may have thought that his novel would succeed as The Monk had done sixty years earlier, and partly for similar reasons. At all events, Pierre’s half-sister, the dark and doubtful Isabel, is a perfectly legitimate descendant, if not of Pierre’s father, then certainly, as I have said, of a long line of betrayed and persecuted heroines or even heroes in Gothic fiction, from Walpole’s Isabella in The Castle of Otranto (whose name is so close to her own), or Mrs. Radcliffe’s Ellena, or M. G. Lewis’s Antonia, to Charles Brockden Brown’s Constantia Dudley. It is not only Isabel’s dark beauty that links her with many of these, or her mysterious origins, but much more the fact that she is both innocent and victimized. The persecution of the helpless and the blameless, with its undertones of “romantic agony,” of the fearfully attractive pair, sadism-masochism, is only too notoriously a pervasive theme in romantic literature generally, and full of meaning as it clearly was for Melville himself, there is nothing surprising in its appearing so continuously in his own work. It appears there essentially because the basis for it had been present in his own life and experience, and it would be pure pedantry to allege that there is anything peculiarly Gothic in the figure of the buffeted and put-upon Redburn or in that of White-Jacket, close as this latter allegedly comes to being flogged at the mast. Caleb Williams could have furnished a literary model for these unhappy youths, but it was not at all necessary that he should. Redburn and WhiteJacket suffer from the commonplace and unromantic brutality of the everyday world; elsewhere in Melville there are victims of a more specifically romantic sort. Yillah, in Mardi, with her unearthly beauty and her mysterious provenance, is one of them; surely she is a sort of Polynesian and al-

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frame, at one juncture, and stalks gravely out of the room. Mrs. Radcliffe’s portraits, mostly miniatures, are less preternatural than Walpole’s, and Melville’s imagination is more likely, here, to have been quickened by Hawthorne’s various portraits—and perhaps also by the terribly strange portrait with the baleful eyes which, in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, young John Melmoth burns to ashes at his dying uncle’s injunction.3 3

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legorical Ellena. Surely, too, the pathetic Benito Cereno, the so untragic Spanish sea-captain—with his morbid sensitiveness, his nervous anxieties, and his fainting spells—is a masculine and seagoing Isabella. And surely the innocent and ingenuous Billy Budd, victimized by the unreasoning hatred of Claggart, can count among his ancestors the handsome young Vivaldi in The Italian, who is so mercilessly hounded by his mother and his mother’s confederate Schedoni, and perhaps also the upright and high-minded Caleb Williams, in his time too the object of so black and baseless a malignity. It is not only Melville’s victims who put us in mind, at least a little, of his Gothic predecessors; so too do the monsters who persecute them. Again it is true that Melville derived from experience itself his intense, appalled awareness of the evil in the heart of man, and of its baffling union, now and then, with a certain largeness and even heroism. But it is the most original, not the most imitative, writers who owe the deepest debt to their literary forerunners; and Melville cannot have been unaffected by the romantic writers, including the Gothic, in whose work he found so many embodiments of the type that is known as the Majestic Monster; the type that Schiller called the Ungeheuer mit Majestät.3 8 Wickedness to the point of deviltry, associated nevertheless with a satanic grandeur and loftiness—the splendid ambiguity, indeed, that the romantics loved to see in Milton’s Satan—had a deep and first-hand significance for Melville; he was disposed by native temper, as well perhaps as by chapters in his experience, to be impressed by such devilish but still somehow noble characters as Manfred in Otranto, or Schedoni in The Italian, or Ambrosio in The Monk—precursors as these were of Byron’s Manfred, of Shelley’s Count Cenci, of Balzac’s Vautrin, and other personages in the work of far greater writers than Walpole or Mrs. Radcliffe. It was certainly somewhere in the real world, if not on his Liverpool voyage,3 9 that Melville encountered the misanthropic sailor, Jackson, with his eye of a starved tiger and his ferocious nihilism; but when we are told that “he was a Cain afloat; branded on his yellow brow with some inscrutable curse,”4 0 we realize that an impression out of life itself has joined hands, and in a creative manner, with a literary inheritance. There is a touch of Schedoni in Jackson, as there is a touch of him in the wily, ingratiating, diabolical, yet somehow grandiose Negro slave, Babo, in “Benito,” to whose masterfulness we cannot refuse a reluctant admiration; and combined in

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very different proportions, elements of the same sort are discernible in the splendid figure of Paul Jones, in Israel Potter, “intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambition, civilized in externals but a savage at heart.”4 1 Nor have we left the tradition of the Majestic Monster wholly behind us when we arrive, late in Melville’s career, at the baleful figure of Claggart, master-atarms on the Indomitable, who wreaks so purposelessly the destruction of Billy Budd. Indeed, it is in the central passage which concerns Claggart that one comes upon the allusion with which this essay began, and the collocation seems not without meaning. At any rate, if there is no doubt of Claggart’s monstrous wickedness, his “natural depravity,” or the purity (so to say) of his malignity, neither is there any doubt of his not being a merely small and sordid villain. On the contrary, Claggart is physically tall, spare, and handsome, with a brow that hints of more than average intellect; a man of “superior capacity,” who indeed is “dominated by intellectuality” and wholly free from “vices or small sins.”4 2 He is such a hero of pure evil as only a profoundly romantic imagination could envisage. Profoundly romantic, in one of the largest senses of the word, Melville’s imagination in fact was; and to say so is to say, especially for an English or American writer, that the Gothic or Radcliffean was almost certain to be a minor ingredient in its complex totality. Brockden Brown, our earliest novelist of any true genius, was a Gothic writer in the strictest sense, and the work of Poe and Hawthorne, of course, abounds in Gothic feeling and Gothic detail. This is far less true of Melville, for many reasons, one of which is simply that he was enough younger than any of them to have passed beyond the immediate reach of the Gothic magnetism. I need hardly add that the center of his mind, in any case, lay elsewhere, or that the effect upon him even of a minor master, such as Mrs. Radcliffe certainly was, could never have been a vital one. What is striking, indeed, is that that influence lingered so long as it did in this country, and that it preserved enough of its vitality to impart even the most delicate tincture to an imagination like Melville’s. When one looks at his work with some of his own hints in mind, one observes that it did just that.

Notes 1. Works (London, 1922-1924), XIII, 43. 2. Works, II, 347.

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4. Herman Melville: Representative Selections, xxviii, note. The volumes that Melville borrowed were probably the two volumes of Carlyle’s German Romance: Specimens of Its Chief Authors (Boston, 1841). 5. Herman Melville, Journal up the Straits . . . (New York, 1935), 32. In Der Geisterseher the principal character, the Prince von———, visiting Venice incognito, is accosted at night in St. Mark’s Square by a masked Armenian, who later appears in other guises and is in fact the Wandering Jew. 6. Melville, Journal up the Straits, 88. 7. Works, XIV, 18. There are even one or two other references to Mrs. Radcliffe elsewhere. See Works, XIII, 318 (“The Apple-Tree Table”) and Merrell R. Davis, “Melville’s Midwestern Lecture Tour, 1859,” Philological Quarterly, XX (Jan., 1941), 51. 8. There is an interesting account of these artistic influences on Mrs. Radcliffe in Elizabeth Stockton Ullery, Mrs. Ann Radcliffe as a Pioneer in the Use of Description in Fiction (Northampton, 1933), an unpublished master’s thesis in the Smith College Library. 9. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (London, 1931), I, 30. 10. Works, V, 355. 11. Works, I, 59. 12. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, II, 76.

twain” on Mar Saba (Part III, XXI, “In Confidence”) may be instanced. Nor should one forget, in Moby Dick (Chap. XCIX), the emblematic tower engraved on the doubloon that Ahab nails to the mainmast. 23. Works, II, 8, 46-49. 24. Works, V, 109-110. 25. Works, XIII, 283. There is an interesting discussion of the symbolism in this sketch in Merton M. Sealts, “Herman Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney,’” American Literature, XIII (June, 1941), 142-154. 26. Works, V, 321. 27. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, I, 75. 28. The Mysteries of Udolpho, I, 126. 29. Works, IX, 177. 30. Works, IX, 211-214. 31. Works, VII, 13-14. 32. Works, VII, 48. 33. Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (London, 1892), I, 93-95. 34. Works, IX, 98-119, 273-277. 35. Works, IX, 352-357. See also a letter to Duyckinck in Meade Minnigerode, Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville . . . (New York, 1922), 72-73. 36. Works, VI, 474. 37. A phrase used by Melville in a letter to the English publisher, Bentley. See Harrison Hayford, “The Significance of Melville’s ‘Agatha’ Letters,” English Literary History, XII (Dec., 1946), 306.

13. Works, IX, 476-482. 14. Works, X, 181-187. 15. Interestingly treated in Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism (London, 1927). 16. Works, VII, 85-87. 17. Works, X, 68. 18. Works, X, 69-70. 19. Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (London, 1904), 23. 20. Works, X, 253. Mediocre as it is, “The Bell-Tower” has a certain interest because of the “experimental automaton” which Melville introduces into it, and which recalls not only Frankenstein but such tales of Hoffmann as Der Sandmann and Die Automate. 21. Works, IX, 377. 22. Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, 20. Towers occur several times in Clarel; the tower on Mount Olivet (Part I, XXXVI, “The Tower”) and the “towers

38. Schiller used this phrase in the so-called Unterdrückte Vorrede to Die Räuber. 39. According to William H. Gilman, “Melville’s Liverpool Trip,” Modern Language Notes, LXI (Dec., 1946), 543547, there was actually a sailor named Jackson on the St. Lawrence, the ship on which, in 1839, Melville signed up as a “boy” and made the trip to Liverpool, but the dramatic death of Jackson must have been pure invention, since (as Mr. Gilman has shown in his unpublished doctoral dissertation, “Melville’s Early Life and Redburn,” Yale, 1947) the whole crew of the St. Lawrence returned to New York alive and unscathed; and Jackson the imaginative creation may well have owed something to characters Melville had encountered elsewhere. 40. Works, V, 134. 41. Works, XI, 158. The adjectives quoted are used literally of the United States as a nation, but they are used in metaphorical relation to Paul Jones, whom they also characterize. 42. Works, XIII, 31-35, 43-47.

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3. Willard Thorp, editor, Herman Melville: Representative Selections (New York, 1938), xxviii, note. Mr. Merton M. Sealts, who is preparing a list of the books in Melville’s personal library, tells me that there is no evidence of his having owned any of Mrs. Radcliffe’s works. Only the first installment of Mr. Sealts’ article, “Melville’s Reading: A Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed,” has hitherto appeared in the Harvard Library Bulletin, II (Spring, 1948), 141-163.

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TITLE COMMENTARY

thiessen, a peculiarly American combination from Philip Freneau’s remarkable poem ‘The House of Night’ through Ambrose Bierce and William Faulkner.1

“Benito Cereno” NALINI V. SHETTY (ESSAY DATE 1976) SOURCE: Shetty, Nalini V. “Melville’s Use of the Gothic Tradition.” In Studies in American Literature: Essays in Honour of William Mulder, edited by Jagdish Chander and Narindar S. Pradhan, pp. 144-53. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1976. In the following essay, Shetty “define[s] Melville’s use of the Gothic technique . . . in ‘Benito Cereno,’ and define[s] his extension of the Gothic form.”

Literature abounds in images of the restless ghost who yearns for the burial of his corpse, the Wandering Jew who can find no place to rest his weary head, the magic potion which will keep one forever young and forever beautiful. The supernatural has always persisted in legends and ballads handed down from one generation to another. This taste for the supernatural worked its way back into literature and became an important vogue in the early eighteenth century. In the field of Gothic Romance, the names of Mrs Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, and ‘Monk’ Lewis are formidable. They bequeathed a remarkable collection of ‘Properties’ to a host of imitators—Gothic castles, underground vaults, ill-fitting doors with rusty hinges, trap doors, easily extinguished lamps, old pictures, tapestry—objects trivial and insignificant but fraught with terrible possibilities. But among the blue-blooded aristocracy of Gothic writers, for example, even the despised Mrs Radcliffe had a tendency to explain the supernatural by natural causes. This device of introducing apparently supernatural occurrences which are ultimately traced to natural causes became a predominant feature of the Gothic Romance in its career in the New World. Literary conventions shift with a change in beliefs and myths and a consequent shift in our view of ourselves. By the time the Gothic trappings of Britain had been transplanted across the Atlantic, a considerable change in man’s view of himself and his relation to the universe necessitated a corresponding change in the technique of the Gothic Romance. From Charles Brockden Brown, through Hawthorne and Poe down to the present day, the mechanical horrors of the Baroque genre have been used, but with a difference. The ability to take the stock trappings of Romanticism and to endow them with the genuine horror of tortured nerves has been, according to Mat-

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The American Gothic then is not identical with its European progenitor, but has undergone a subtle transformation. For example, the medieval setting had to be inevitably dropped. The attempt to create the atmosphere of brooding and unknown terror, which the original Gothic Romances had created through the haunted castle and appurtenances, remained. The stress, as in all true Gothic Romances, became essentially subjective, and the Gothic writer became primarily an explorer of private worlds. The Gothic writer usually presents the world of the hero as a microcosm, so that the hero’s charting of the disorder of his inner life becomes parallel to the restoring of order in his microcosm. Characters are shown grappling with their universe, trying to read meanings into matter, but in so doing their own preoccupations tend to distort the meaning. This distortion of reality becomes the grotesque. The old Gothic props of the Radcliffean era serve as images, as ‘objective correlatives’ of the distraught psyche. Thus the haunted castle can become a symbol of authoritarianism, reflections in mirrors can serve to show us the doubleness of human nature. In the hands of a true artist, therefore, the mechanical horrors of the Gothic novel can be transformed into something really felt, so that the horror can become one of tortured nerves. It can be used to explore that mysterious borderland between fantasy and reality. The thesis I propose is that Herman Melville was himself by no means unresponsive to the Gothic genre, and that he incorporated many of its techniques to convey his vision and version of the world. William Van O’Connor’s insight is clear: Herman Melville . . . possessed a profound sense of the human mind as the carrier of long forgotten terrors and violences and he inclined to be contemptuous of writers who had little or no sense of man’s living in the presence of roaring Niagaras.2

Professor Newton Arvin has an excellent study of ‘Melville and the Gothic Novel’, in which he points out that the novelist was familiar with the older tales of terror, including Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Beckford’s Vathek, and Godwin’s Caleb Williams3 and also traces the influence of these original sources on Melville. I will briefly try to define Melville’s use of the Gothic technique—the

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Some of the devices which are the stock-intrade of the Gothic writer are: the use of wild landscape to evoke terror; sudden shock techniques like moving portraits, trapdoors springing open, etc.; the haunted castle with subterraneous vaults and passages. Melville found that he could use the same technique in his fiction. In ‘Benito Cereno’, where the setting is on board a ship, there is none of the terror of landscape, but Melville uses the shock technique effectively. For example, the beak of the ship remains covered until Captain Delano leaves the stalled vessel and returns with his crew. During the final fight, the cable of the San Dominick is cut. The fag end of the cable, in lashing out, whips away the canvas shroud which covers the beak and suddenly there is revealed, above the chalked words ‘Follow your leader’, a human skeleton. There are no haunted castles in Melville, nor houses suggestive of terror such as the House of Usher, but how like these isolated buildings seem some of Melville’s ships. Notable among these is the Pequod with its bearded chin. In ‘Benito Cereno’, the San Dominick is described as ‘battered and mouldy, the castellated forecastle seemed some ancient turret, long ago taken by assault and then left to decay’. Instead of the vaults and haunted corridors of medieval castles, we have the ship’s holds in Omoo and Redburn. But no hero racing down a subterranean vault with a moaning ghost at his heels has had a worse experience than Amasa Delano’s claustrophobic experience in ‘the narrow corridor dim as a tunnel, leading from the cabin to the stairs’ with ‘the Spaniard behind—his creature before’. Either way, to the terror-ridden mind of the American it seemed that violent death awaited him. Besides these specific uses of Gothic devices, the overall effect of the story is also in the Gothic tradition. The tale begins matter-of-factly and continues so until the San Dominick appears in the distance. But as it approaches, it shows no colours and seems to be in desperate trouble. Nature also seems to help in evoking a sense of terror and brooding: With no small interest, Captain Delano continued to watch her—a proceeding not much facilitated by the vapors partly mantling the hull, through which the far matin light from her cabin streamed equivocally enough; much like the sun—by this time hemisphered on the rim of the horizon, and, apparently, in company with the strange ship

entering the harbor—which, wimpled by the same low, creeping clouds, showed not unlike a Lima intriguante’s one sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the Indian loop-hole of her dusk sayay-manta.

Captain Delano’s mystification increases as he approaches the vessel. He thinks he sees a strange shipload of monks peering over the bulwarks in their dark cowls. Through the open portholes he can perceive other dark moving figures like Black Friars pacing their cloister. Melville emphasizes the strangeness and unreality of the situation as it exists. The costumes from afar are unusual, the ship is described as dreamlike, a ‘shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep, which directly must receive back what it gave’. On board, the Gothic elements of the story continue. There is the terrifying contrast of the tumult on the lower decks and the staid figures of the four sphynxlike grizzled negroes, sitting facing each other. They watch the proceedings carefully, while, as they pick junk into oakum, they chant a low monotonous chant. They appear to Delano like ‘so many grey headed bagpipers playing a funeral march’. The figure who brings the whole bizarre situation to a focus is that of Don Benito. His looks are distracted and he jerks out his speeches like a ‘somnambulist suddenly interfered with’. Nothing can be more grotesque than this Spaniard with ‘a certain precision in his attire curiously at variance with the unsightly disorder around, especially in the belittered Ghetto, forward of the mainmast, wholly occupied by the blacks’. Melville conveys to us the horror of this figure by comparing him to an ‘invalid courtier tottering about London streets in the time of the plague’. A wandering mind ridden by terror is a device used by the Gothic writers to the point of dullness. The imagined is often more important than the real in the medieval castle. On board the San Dominick, the dull-nerved Captain Delano has his first twitch of apprehension when he has to walk between the two files of grim hatchet polishers: Gingerly enough stepped good Captain Delano between them, and in the instant of leaving them behind, like one running the gauntlet, he felt an apprehensive twitch in the calves of his legs.

From then on, the cymballing of the hatchet polishers becomes a chorus to his own mounting fears: . . . passing from one suspicious thing to another, his mind revolved the strange questions put to him concerning his ship. By a curious coincidence

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elements of intensity, terror and mystery found in ‘Benito Cereno’, and define his extension of the Gothic form.

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as each point was recalled, the black wizards of Ashantee would strike up with their hatchets as in ominous comment on the white stranger’s thoughts . . . he began to feel a ghostly dread of Don Benito.

We see how Melville makes the tension depend in many cases, on how the sinister situation on the Spanish ship slowly comes to penetrate the consciousness of the trusting and obtuse Yankee captain. The San Dominick is the sinister microcosm whose riddle the good captain has to solve. All terror depends on the reader’s ability to perceive more than Delano does; even while not fully understanding the situation aboard the vessel, the reader feels more perceptive than the captain. The knife blow on the cabin boy’s head, the old sailor’s knot, the shaving incident—all the various episodes provide a new type of Gothic horror. While these incidents add to the Gothic effect, they serve as clues offered to the captain to resolve the mystery in order to restore the normal order. The knot is offered for untying; the shaving scene gives the impression of a headsman with his victim; and when finally the canvas shroud is ripped off the beak of the ship to reveal the skeleton, the mental clarity of Delano parallels the final physical unmasking of the hideous plot. The constant view of the skeleton during the final fight is clearly a Gothic device, but it is more than that. Upon the water the skeleton casts a gigantic ribbed shadow, and one extended arm seems to beckon the whites to avenge the terrible murder, and in Captain Delano’s mind the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fall into place. What I have tried to suggest in the foregoing discussion is that while Melville made free use of Gothic devices and techniques in his fiction, what distinguishes him from the run-of-the mill Gothic writer is that he uses these devices not merely to titillate the reader, but subordinates them to the technical requirements of his story. Again, any discussion of similarity in theme between Melville and the Gothic writers is difficult because most of the Gothic themes found regular recurrence in other types of Romantic fiction. However, taking the short story ‘Benito Cereno’, I will try to analyse how Melville uses a typical Gothic situation to advance two themes which are of major importance in the Melville canon. I refer to the mystery on board the San Dominick and to the ignorant and innocent visitor Amasa Delano, who is not so much instrumental in resolving the mystery as he is merely physically present at the resolution of the mystery. This kind of contrast between complete innocence and

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desperate evil was a situation particularly favoured by the Gothic writers as it best carried the reader into the terror of Gothic regions. In ‘Benito Cereno’, Melville goes beyond his European counterpart in that he uses the situation of an innocent man faced with evil, to give added dimension to the problem of evil in the world. Amasa Delano, the captain of the American ship Bachelor’s Delight, has his fictional counterpart in Henry James’ Christopher Newman: Newman is the innocent American who has to face the guile of the Bellegardes. In Melville’s Delano we have an innocence which has never faced evil. Confronted with the situation on board the San Dominick, Delano is like an untrained mountaineer scaling slippery heights: he is unable to grasp the footholds of clues offered to him, to climb out of the confusion and mystery surrounding him. Having never experienced evil, his mind registers cliche reactions to the various scenes which he witnesses on board the San Dominick. In the negro Babo he sees only a faithful slave, solicitous of his master’s comfort and he observes: There is something in the negro which, in a peculiar way, fits him for avocations about one’s person. Most negroes are natural valets and hair dressers; . . . when to this is added docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind . . . one readily perceives why those hypochondriacs Johnson and Byron . . . took to their hearts, almost to the exclusion of the entire white race, their serving men, the negroes, Barber and Fletcher.

Far from realizing that Babo is the arch-villain of the piece, Delano dismisses all blacks as being ‘too stupid’ to plot against the whites, who ‘were the shrewder race’. He feels, also, that Don Benito could not be in complicity with the blacks in plotting against him, because, ‘who ever heard of a white so far renegade as to apostatize from his very species almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes?’ Not till the final fight does Delano realize what a ‘hive of subtlety’ Babo has been: that his is the master mind which has hatched the plot against the whites on board the San Dominick, and later against Delano and his crew also. With the untying of the physical ‘knot’, Delano is forced to face the fact of evil and cunning on board the San Dominick. However, it is clear that even after this experience, Delano’s mind has not dwelt on the problem of evil in the world, and he cannot understand the depression which siezes the Spaniard. “You are saved” cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; “You are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?”

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However, it must be noted that Don Benito is never pictured to us as an innocent man being confronted with his first experience of evil. If we were to play at equations, I would suggest, New Man: Delano = Don Benito: Bellegardes. Don Benito is the child of an ancient civilization which has seen good and evil, as the decrepit San Dominick has once seen pageantry and pomp on its decks. The battered and ancient San Dominick is a version of Don Benito’s world, offered to us as the objective correlative of the Spanish culture and milieu. But even Don Benito quails when he looks into this abyss of evil on board the San Dominick—and his mind breaks before its awesome terror. Don Benito’s will to live is broken long before Delano blunders in to affect the ‘rescue’. And so, Don Benito, ‘gathering his mantle about him as if it were a pall’, prepares for death. It is implicit in the story that neither Delano who has never experienced evil, nor even Don Benito, is the welladjusted man, since the latter sees only evil and fails to understand that experience of good and of evil are part of the human condition. It is suggested that while experience of evil is necessary, the ideal man would have to go beyond this experience, and his vision would have to accommodate the presence of both good and evil in the world. This emphasis on the dual nature of reality, and the preoccupation with the psychology of evil, runs through Melville’s writing. This preoccupation must be considered primarily in the nature of a corrective to the doctrine of Innocence proposed by the High Priests of Transcendentalism. While Emerson and his friends insisted on Man’s Innocence, Hawthorne and Melville sagely proposed that there was something more to human nature than just that. Melville’s Delano is the Innocent American who is horrified to discover the existence of evil on board the San Dominick. Melville, forcing Delano to face the fact of evil, seems to gently poke fun at the received doctrine that man is innocent, and at what appears to him, a naive attitude towards men and matters. The basic situation—the mystery on board the San Dominick—also serves to underline another theme to which Melville devotes much attention

in his fiction: the discrepancy between appearance and reality. For example, Captain Delano’s assessment of the situation on board the San Dominick changes often. From the initial acceptance at face value of the hard luck story given to him when he boards the Spanish ship, he goes on to suspect that Don Benito may be plotting against him; and then finally when he leaves the San Dominick, he is made to realize that it is the negroes who are in piratical revolt against the whites, and that Don Benito has been a captive in the hands of the negroes. Besides the central situation which gives the lie to reality, there are a number of scenes, incidents, etc. which mislead Delano, and hinder him from striking at the heart of the matter. For example, through a process of tortuous reasoning Delano comes to the conclusion that Atufal has not really rebelled but is a ‘pretended rebel’, and is the ‘punctual shadow’ of Don Benito in order to trap Delano. When the scales drop from his eyes, Delano realizes that Atufal is indeed a ‘pretended rebel’ and a ‘punctual shadow’, but he is there to keep an eye on Don Benito, and to prevent him from communicating his plight to Delano. Similarly, Delano does not detect the tigerish nature of the mulatto steward Francesco who ushers them to the dining table with smiles and bows. In actuality he had been ‘in all things, the creature and tool of the negro Babo, [and] . . . proposed . . . poisoning a dish for the generous Captain Amasa Delano’, Again, there are the negresses who preferred to torture to death instead of simply killing the Spaniards, who also wanted to kill Don Benito, and sang and danced while the various acts of murder took place on board the San Dominick. These women appear to Delano as ‘unsophisticated as leopardesses; loving as doves’. So, in a variety of scenes, Melville who made Ahab declare that ‘all visible objects are but as pasteboard masks’ which we have to strike through to reach the underlying truth, emphasizes that what appears on the surface is not all. Herman Melville was too young to receive the direct force of the European Gothic writers with the same strength as his older contemporaries. But extrovert America had produced Gothic writers: Brown, Hawthorne, Poe—explorers of their own private hells, which excluded the optimism of the Transcendentalists. From them Melville drew the best elements of the Gothic genre without the medieval trappings and hackneyed forms. His own personal experience led him to feel the powerful enmity and evil present in the world and the elusive nature of reality. Part of the novelist’s attempt to present this terror-ridden and

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The plot has been foiled, the Spaniard is saved and Delano feels that ‘the past is passed’. But Don Benito’s memory does not let him forget the horror that he has witnessed. He cannot accept evil as being only one face of the coin of existence, and draw the strength to live from the other side of the coin: the presence of good in the world. He sees corruption and evil as the only facts of life.

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baffling universe is done by the frequent use of Gothic techniques and themes—the persecution of the innocent, the use of desolated ships, etc. In the short story ‘Benito Cereno’, Melville presents Captain Delano’s wrestling with the dark enigma of the San Dominick in terms of a Gothic horror story, and we once more have a glimpse of Melville’s Gothic heart—present so often but frequently not recognized by the reader.

Notes 1. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), pp. 201-2. 2. William Van O’Connor, ‘The Grotesque; An American Genre’ and Other Essays (Carbondale, III., 1962), pp. 25-6. 3. Newton Arvin, ‘Melville and the Gothic Novel’, NEQ Vol. xxii (1949), p. 34.

“Bartleby the Scrivener” STEVEN T. RYAN (ESSAY DATE 1978) SOURCE: Ryan, Steven T. “The Gothic Formula of ‘Bartleby.’” Arizona Quarterly 34 (1978): 311-16. In the following essay, Ryan reveals how, in “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Melville infuses the traditional Gothic formula with realism while still retaining “the character conflict, atmosphere, plot progression, and even the language of the Gothic thriller.”

The most striking aspect of Melville’s “Bartleby” is the story’s amazingly contemporary quality. The story of the scrivener in form and philosophy appears as an eerie foreshadowing of our modern fabulations which balance between a surface reality and an epistemological terror. An ironic explanation for “Bartleby”’s modern flavor is that beneath Melville’s original story form are the underpinnings of an old Gothic formula which also underlies the stories of many contemporary writers, like Joyce Carol Oates, Jerzy Kosinski, John Hawkes, and John Gardner. And like these present writers, Melville transforms the violence of Gothic destruction to a deeper fear of a quiet equilibrium. Melville, like these contemporary writers, is influenced by the Gothic genre.1 Rather than writing standard tales of terror, Melville submerges the conventional devices so that the haunted house, the disembodied spirits, and the catastrophic climax are replaced by more believable images and events, but the story maintains the character conflict, atmosphere, plot progression, and even the language of the Gothic thriller.

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The Gothic formula that “Bartleby” follows is typified by Edgar Allan Poe in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The formula requires a narrator who is an unabashed literalist. The story achieves credibility through the wariness of the narrator and also a tension is achieved between the commonsensical vision of the narrator (man of light) and the second character (man of darkness) who has moved into the realm of mystery. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the reader is eased into the terrifying realm of Roderick Usher by riding with the worldly narrator to the mansion and observing Roderick Usher with the narrator’s objectivity. Thus we are manipulated into the world of mystery through our trust in the narrator and strive with decreasing effectiveness to interpret the action, along with the narrator, in terms of material cause and effect relationships, such as interpreting the house’s thick ambience as electrical phenomena. Similarly in “Bartleby,” we are introduced to the action by the lawyer, who is the practical American with faith in the rational world. Melville goes a step further than Poe and plays with the narrator’s American characteristics of moderation and materialism. Still the lawyer, with his bust of Cicero and walled-in imagination, serves as a useful guide into the unknown. Along with the narrator, we grope for cause-effect explanations for Bartleby’s behavior. We try to understand Bartleby according to his poverty, his failing eyesight, and his dead-letter experience. But we move along with the narrator from an “eminently safe” world to a terrifying world of uncertainty. The antithesis of the narrator is the character that lives in a world beyond commonsensical security. This is the man of darkness who pulls the narrator (and thus the reader) beneath the surface of experience. As the messenger of darkness, this second character is clearly doomed. Roderick Usher is a typical romantic version of the sensitive young man. With his “cadaverousness of complexion,” he is refined to a frightening level of fragility. His senses are so keen that he can listen only to certain musical chords. This sensitivity has placed him beyond the social security of human fellowship. Thus in the material world, he is doomed, but he is also capable of entering the realm beneath the surface reality. In the tension between the narrator and Roderick Usher, Usher clearly represents the more powerful force because the narrator must confront a world of boundless, terrifying potential. The narrator can return to safety only by backing away from this fiery force while admitting his own limited existence.

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The important aspect of the Gothic setting is not the creaking doors or even the Gothic architecture, but rather the human construct that becomes a trap. In Poe’s story, Roderick Usher knows that he cannot escape his decaying family mansion, which expresses his cultural dream transformed into nightmare. The personality of this “mansion of gloom” becomes as important as the human personalities for it is a monster of human creation. With its “vacant and eye-like windows,” it expresses the power of an indifferent physical universe. The gray walls, shielding with a vapor which is “dull, sluggish, . . . and leaden-hued,” emphasize the cold neutral weight of decay and death. Matter shaped by man remains matter and obeys the natural laws which demand an indifferent downward pull of matter. Thus the civilized dream to shape and control nature becomes the Gothic nightmare to civilized constructs that imprison and destroy the life they are designed to protect. Again as an American version of the ancient Gothic trap, Melville offers an office on Wall Street. The narrator does not realize that he is trapped within a construct as ominous as the decaying Usher mansion, but Bartleby does realize the threat and also realizes that he cannot escape the construct. Melville uses the office on Wall Street to demonstrate the nightmare reality of the optimistic American assumption that our capitalistic system can create a utopia. Melville allows the narrator to describe a setting as clearly destructive to human life as any Gothic mansion, while the narrator assumes he is presenting an ideally utilitarian setting. At one end is “the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom.” For contrast, the windows in the opposite direction “com-

manded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade; which wall required no spy-glass to bring out its lurking beauties, but, for the benefit of all near-sighted spectators, was pushed up to within ten feet of my window panes.” The gap between the walls is described as resembling “a huge square cistern.” The narrator may see the American dream blossoming, but Bartleby sees the destructive power of dream transformed to nightmare. Bartleby, like Usher, knows that he cannot escape the construct. Until taken to the Tombs (another human construct revealing decay and death), Bartleby never leaves the office. Staring through the window at the black wall ten feet away, Bartleby understands the threat that was also present in the “vacant and eye-like windows” of the House of Usher—the manipulated physical matter will take its vengeance on man. The narrator cannot understand Bartleby’s “dead-wall revery.” When the narrator asks Bartleby why he will not return to writing, Bartleby responds, “Do you not see the reason for yourself?” Rather than looking at the vision revealed in the black wall, the narrator looks to Bartleby’s eyes for a simple causal solution. The reader understands that the wall offers a vision, that through the human construct the evil mystery is revealed. The important variation between Melville’s setting and a standard Gothic setting like Poe’s is that Wall Street is not physically crumbling. This variation parallels the significant variation in plots, for Melville will not offer the standard climactic thrill of the mansion collapsing into the tarn. The passivity of Melville’s setting and plot places him closer to the modern Gothic vision which presents a greater threat in the quiet leveling of life than in a chaotic breakdown of life. Therefore, the black wall becomes more threatening because it suggests an invincible force that will eternally confine life. Similarly, Bartleby’s quiet retreat into a fetal ball is as threatening an image of human decay as Roderick Usher howling in mad hysteria. Melville follows the important Gothic requirement that destruction and death are the necessary climax of the story. But the destruction offers the modern version of a civilized process that suffocates life while the process gains momentum. The death of both Bartleby and Roderick Usher is required by the powerful force of decayed life in the stories. The loss of these sensitive young men expresses the domination of matter over spirit. Bartleby is presented in one of his final passive stages through a clearly Gothic image of spiritual ruin: “like the last column of some

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Bartleby, like Roderick Usher, is introduced with a quality of refinement which places him beyond the practical realm of the narrator—“Pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!” Bartleby, like Usher, is doomed by his sensitivity. He is isolated within his transcending vision, cut off from human fellowship because he sees and feels what we cannot see and feel. His “pallid haughtiness” separates him from the lawyer’s world. The lawyer’s material explanations and material solutions can neither explain nor help Bartleby. It is Bartleby who must show the lawyer a boundless world. And like Poe’s narrator, the lawyer cannot really “see” what Bartleby sees except for a fleeting moment, and then he must also retreat to save himself, so he can continue his humble half-life.

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ruined temple, he remained standing mute and solitary in the middle of the otherwise deserted room.” An appreciation for the effect Bartleby’s destruction has on the narrator can be enhanced by an understanding of the Gothic language as well as the Gothic development of character, setting, and plot. Certain language used within the Gothic tradition developed profound connotation. Two words that carried a particular emotional significance were “gloom” and “melancholy.” The words carried a heavy charge within the entire romantic movement, but this charge was particularly important in establishing atmosphere and communicating a deep sense of discovery in Gothic fiction. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” Poe describes the “melancholy House of Usher” and the narrator attempts to “alleviate the melancholy” of Roderick Usher. Approaching the mansion, “a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded” the narrator’s spirit and an “irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.” By the excessive use of “melancholy” and “gloom” within such an obvious Gothic tale, Poe demonstrates their importance in creating the mood of the story, but also, like many self-consciously Gothic writers, he desensitizes the reader to the key words. However, the importance of their verbal charge could be saved for climactic moments such as Hawthorne describing Goodman Brown’s “dying hour” as “gloom.” Similarly Melville saves the words for a moment of insight when Bartleby manages to break through the narrator’s hard Yankee skull: “For the first time in my life a feeling of over-powering stinging melancholy seized me. Before I had never experienced aught but a not unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam.” One need not know the importance of “melancholy” and “gloom” in the Gothic tradition to see that this is an important moment of discovery, just as one need not see the underpinnings of a standard Gothic use of character, setting, and plot to understand Melville’s story. However, by recognizing that the words expressed an emotional and intellectual profundity for Melville and his contemporaries, we begin to realize that even when a literary masterpiece transcends the standard literary form of any historical period, it may yet draw heavily from all the immediate resources available to the writer. Like the Gothic writers, Melville was striving to reveal a fathomless darkness beneath our materialistic security; thus he naturally adapted a Gothic formula.

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Note 1. Two critical works which have demonstrated Melville’s relationship to the traditional Gothic novel are Newton Arvin, “Melville and the Gothic Novel,” New England Quarterly, 22 (1949), 33-48, and Heinz Kosok, Die Bedeutung der Gothic Novel für das Erzählwerk Herman Melvilles (Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter & Co., 1963). Biographically, Melville’s association with Hawthorne and his profound respect for Hawthorne’s short stories are clear indications of the direct influence of Gothic fiction during the early 1850s, when “Bartleby” was written. My dissertation, entitled “Chaotic Slumber” (1976), examines the use of Gothic techniques in contemporary fiction.

Moby-Dick TONY MAGISTRALE (ESSAY DATE 1988) SOURCE: Magistrale, Tony. “‘More Demon than Man’: Melville’s Ahab as Gothic Villain.” In Spectrum of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Sixth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Donald Palumbo, pp. 81-86. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1988. In the following essay, Magistrale discusses Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick as an example of a quintessential Gothic protagonist, possessing both human and demonic qualities.

Gothic literature reached its apex in England during the last decade of the eighteenth century, when the enlightenment’s neoclassic lights were replaced by the brooding darkness of haunted castles and the supernatural. Gothicism emerged from an era surfeited with reason and the prosaic, anxious for something wildly different and bizarre. A reaction to the spirit of scientific rationalism that characterized the rest of the century, the Gothic school sought a return to the ambience of the Middle Ages: a renewed fascination with the mystical and the inexplicable as well as an intensified interest in the battle between good and evil. The Gothic environment of crumbling castles with their perilous crags and subterranean dungeons, of mysterious forests and seas, sinister monks and nuns, deformed humans, and demonic villains, anticipates and buttresses the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century. William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1795), and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) represent the best Gothic fiction because they transcend the horror story’s conventions to focus on the supernatural, on the psychic, and on humankind’s most morbid psychological states.

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Melville’s canon ubiquitously evinces Gothic influences. The reasons for Melville’s interest in this literary genre are diverse and complicated, but his fascination is certainly attributable in part to his own literary background as well as to the literary atmosphere of his century. Hawthorne, Melville’s friend and metaphysical cohort, uses the Gothic formula everywhere in his fiction. Hawthorne was influenced not only by Mrs. Radcliffe and her contemporaries, but also by Poe and Brockden Brown. That Hawthorne shared his interest with the younger Melville is apparent. Melville’s own reading indicates yet another connection to the Gothic. He had read Shakespeare (particularly the tragedies), Milton, and Dante thoroughly; Melville’s own unique sense of evil and villainy owes much to these earlier writers. And he had drunk deeply from the polluted wells of eighteenth-century Gothic literature. Merton Sealts reports that Melville had read Walpole’s Otranto, Beckford’s Vathek, and even Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817) in addition to a number of lesser known but related Gothic texts.1 Finally, Gothicism is centrally concerned with fallen humanity, often embracing and flaunting its sinful state. The genre’s characteristic fascination with evil, fixation on rebellion from God and optimistic virtues, and emphasis on disorder, chaos, and ambiguity resonated with some darkly sympathetic chord in Melville’s haunted psyche. The Gothic supplied Melville with a congenial tradition, a vehicle that enabled and encouraged him to give dramatic life to conflicting and often darkly pessimistic philosophical positions. Perhaps nowhere in the canon does Melville use standard Gothic apparatus more successfully

ABOUT THE AUTHOR EXCERPT FROM AN EARLY REVIEW OF MOBY-DICK

In this story Melville is as fantastically poetical as Coleridge in the “Ancient Mariner,” and yet, while we swim spellbound over the golden rhythms of Coleridge feeling at every stroke their beautiful improbability, everything in Moby-Dick might have happened. The woe-struck captain, his eerie monomania, the half-devils of the crew, the relentless pursuit of the ever-elusive vindictive white whale, the storms and calms that succeed each other like the ups and downs of a mighty hexameter, all the weird scenery of the pursuit in moonlight and in daylight, all are so wonderfully fresh in their treatment that they supersede all doubt and impress one as absolutely true to the life. Even the recondite information about whales and seafisheries sprinkled plentifully over the pages does not interfere seriously with the intended effect; they are the paraphernalia of the journey. The author’s extraordinary vocabulary, its wonderful coinages and vivid turnings and twistings of worn-out words, are comparable only to Chapman’s translations of Homer. The language fairly shrieks under the intensity of his treatment, and the reader is under an excitement which is hardly controllable. The only wonder is that Melville is so little known and so poorly appreciated. SOURCE: A review of Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale. The Critic 19, no. 582 (15 April 1893): 232.

than in his creation of Ahab in Moby-Dick. Ahab, like Pierre and Lewis’s Father Ambrosio, is exalted far above common mortals. His prideful gaze is withering and imperious, not unlike the stares of Vathek or Radcliffe’s Montoni. Ahab is developed as an embodiment of the fallen angel/demi-god who in the Christian myth was variously named Lucifer, Devil, Adversary, and Satan. Ahab is not Satan himself but is a human creature who possesses Satan’s evil pride and energy. The madman Elijah warns Ishmael and Queequeg to fear for

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English and German Gothicism reached the American literary consciousness most significantly in the nineteenth century. By then, standard Gothic apparatus had been absorbed by the larger Romantic movement. Consequently, the American progeny of the Gothic school—Ambrose Bierce, Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville— concentrated on “refining” the Gothic by focussing on the more subtle and philosophical implications of the “horror story.” Furthermore, since America was short on castles and monasteries, the form was adapted to an American psychic landscape: Traditional Gothic bonds with evil, haunted castles, and the reliance on supernatural terror were exploited and transformed to tell a more complicated story that often focused on the tragic imperfections inherent in American culture in particular or humankind in general.

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their souls, that a voyage with Ahab and his “shadowy figures” is certain to involve evil and destruction.

attraction to the dark and malignant elements of eroticism, Ahab’s quest for Moby-Dick is as selfdestructive as it is passionate.

“Yes,” said I [Ishmael], “we have just signed the articles.”

The male villain in Gothic fiction is often associated with evil forces, most specifically the devil. Vathek makes a pact with Satan in order to experience as many sensations as mortal life will afford. Gothic fascination with evil also entails a pervasive element of blasphemy. Ambrosio, a Catholic monk in The Monk, at one point violates, on top of an altar, a woman masquerading as a nun. Ahab is an “ungodly, god-like” man who is spiritually outside Christendom and exhibits a well of blasphemy and defiance. He rejects and scorns the gods, “cricket-players and pugilists” (p. 134) in his eyes, and he once spat in the holy goblet on the altar of the Catholic Church at Santa (p. 134). In the course of the whale voyage—a journey that ironically commences on Christmas Day—Ahab engages in three major blasphemous rituals. Each is a parody of a religious rite that casts Ahab in the role of high celebrant and incorporates the use of a harpoon. In the first of these rituals, “The Quarter-Deck,” Ahab pours grog into the inverted ends of hollow harpoon heads and commands the harpooners to drink from the “murderous chalices” with this oath: “God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby-Dick to his death” (p. 225). When Starbuck suggests that perhaps Ahab’s quest is blasphemous, the captain answers in a tone reminiscent of Ambrosio’s or Manfred’s enraged pride: “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations” (p. 221). The demonical nature of Ahab’s quest is again suggested in “The Forge” when Ahab baptizes a scorching harpoon in the name of the devil.

“Anything down there about your souls?” “About what?” “Oh, perhaps you hav’n’t got any,” he said quickly. “No matter though, I know many chaps that hav’n’t got any . . . He’s got enough though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in other chaps,” abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis on the word he.2

The Biblical significance of Ahab’s name also supports the demonic image: Ahab was an evil king of Israel who had done more to provoke the Lord to anger than all the kings before him. But there is another side of Melville’s captain that is not entirely wicked. Like Walpole’s Manfred or Lewis’s Ambrosio, “Ahab has his humanities” (p. 120). He thinks often of his bride and daughter, and his care of the pathetic Pip is significant. Despite his profound bond with evil, Ahab possesses an undeniable streak of sensitivity and melancholia that is found also in, and links him with, a number of earlier Gothic “villains.” Like the Biblical King Ahab, Captain Ahab lives in an ivory house, “the ivory Pequod,” as it is often called, which is tricked out with trophies of whale bones and teeth from profitable voyages. The Pequod also possesses kinship to the Gothic haunted house, and Ahab is the captain who is lord over it. Its likeness to a haunted house is suggested in nearly every description of the Pequod: its weather-stained hull, its venerable bows, its spirelike masts, its worn and ancient decks, and its general atmosphere of grotesqueness and sombre picturesqueness.3 It has much in common with the houses of Usher, Udolpho, or Otranto. The only Gothic apparatus that is missing is an incarcerated maiden. While it is possible to see Ishmael in the role of the passive maiden, and Ahab as his jailor,4 this does a severe disservice to the complex psychosexual relationship often maintained between the Gothic villain and his captive. Perhaps it is more accurate to view Ahab’s monomaniacal quest for Moby-Dick as a substitution for the Gothic villain’s erotic fascination with his captive woman. Ahab is obsessed with the whale just as the Gothic characters of Lewis, Walpole, and Radcliffe are obsessed with perverse images of womanhood, bondage, and violation. Like his sexually frustrated Gothic forerunners, Ambrosio and Manfred, who are motivated by a warped

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Finally, in “The Candles” Ahab hoists his “consecrated” harpoon while delivering a defiant speech that asserts his unconquerable individuality in the face of nature: “Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee . . . Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leaping out of light, leaping out of thee!” (p. 642). Like Manfred on his mountain, Ahab speaks directly to the flashing lightning, calling it his ancestor: “There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not” (pp. 642-43). Here Melville employs standard Gothic effects—tremendous fire, blackness, storm, and battering seas—to represent

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Ahab’s single name, like Manfred’s, Ambrosio’s, or Melmoth’s, suggests a lonely and sinister independence from social ties. Ahab throws overboard, loses, or smashes several “social” objects on the voyage. Each act symbolizes the rejection of some aspect of humanity. In “The Pipe” Ahab realizes that he can no longer derive any pleasure from so leisurely an activity as smoking and throws his pipe into the sea. In “The Quadrant” Ahab dashes the valuable instrument to the deck and crushes it, shouting, “Cursed be all things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him” (p. 634). While the first scene suggests Ahab is alienated from simple human pleasures, the second indicates he has destroyed his ability to find and maintain his social bearings. The antisocial nature of the Pequod’s voyage under Ahab, in the grip of his obsession, is stressed in the ship’s encounters with other whaling vessels. “Come aboard, come aboard!” cried the gay Bachelor’s commander, lifting a glass and a bottle in the air. “Hast seen the White Whale?” gritted Ahab in reply. “No; only heard of him; but don’t believe in him at all,” said the other good-humoredly. “Come aboard!” “Thou art too damn jolly. Sail on.” (p. 627)

Not desirous simply of “avoiding company,” Ahab disregards the values upon which society is built; his quest becomes not only a perversion of the aims of whaling, but also a fanatical violation of respect for other human beings. Ahab’s attitude mirrors the profoundly antisocial world of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel. The Gothic genre remains significant to literary history in large part because it foreshadows the destruction of the social order and stability that was characteristic of the rest of the eighteenth century. The last decade of this century—with its breakdown of social ties, social hierarchy, conventions, and institutions—belongs more to the “romantic” century to follow rather than to the “enlightened” period of reason and social purpose. It is the decade inaugurated by the French Revolution (1789), and that event’s spirit of social disrup-

tion is most fully embodied in the brooding darkness of the Gothic novel. The captain of the Pequod, like the master of the Gothic castle, spends his time avoiding “social company” and tending to an assortment of perverted personal quests. As Ahab’s bonds with humanity slowly disintegrate in the course of the voyage, his links with the satanic grow proportionately stronger. His personal crew, those “shadows” that Ishmael and Queequeg see board the Pequod, resemble “mute supers from an old Gothic drama, indeed, from Vathek.”5 The crew has a symbolic significance indicated in Ishmael’s speculation that “Such a crew, so officered, seemed especially picked or packed by some infernal fatality to help Ahab to his revenge” (p. 251). The enigmatic Fedallah, the crew’s leader, is developed as a satanic figure who, like the forces of evil in Gothic romances, is omnipresent but never clearly defined. Lurking mainly in the background but always weaving his intrigue, “that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last . . . He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams” (p. 307). In depicting the end of Ahab’s quest, Melville uses colossal effects similar to those employed in Gothic romances. Mrs. Radcliffe’s castles inevitably vanish into forests or tarns or the reader’s imagination at the conclusions of her novels. The end of Moby-Dick, like so many visual climaxes in Poe’s tales or Walpole’s Otranto, overwhelms the crew of the Pequod as well as the reader in a vortex of such intensity that it sucks down everything, including “a living part of heaven” (p. 723), with it. The tale that Ishmael lives to tell, however, transcends the limited Gothic world of the late eighteenth century. The genre’s scope is enlarged by Melville to include a tragic philosophical dimension: Ahab’s quest is not simply to avenge his accident at the jaws of Moby-Dick, but to revenge a world-insult, the world-wound of existence dictating that human beings are fated to die from the moment of birth. Existential complexities lift Moby-Dick out of the Gothic cesspool; however, it is also through an adaptation of standard Gothic apparatus that the novel achieves the power and dimensionality of first-rate literature.

Notes 1. Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville’s Reading (Milwaukee, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), pp. 40, 93, 103.

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through pathetic fallacy the scene’s high emotion, conflicting beliefs, and clash of personalities. Once more Ahab establishes his link to the maledominated world of the Gothic by calling the flames his father while denying any knowledge of a mother.

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2. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851; reprint, New York: Bobbs-Merrills Company, Inc., 1964), p. 133. All textual references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically.

arguing that the ship (the Pequod) and the sea serve as gothic castles in the novel, and function in the same manner, to provide a structure to fill with gloom, mystery, and intrigue.

3. Newton Arvin, “Melville and the Gothic Novel,” New England Quarterly 22 (1949): 38.

That Herman Melville turned now and again to the gothic mode is no startling news. Newton Arvin’s essay, ‘Melville and the Gothic Novel,’ remains after more than forty years standard reading for anyone with greater than cursory interest in Melville studies, and his is by no means the sole probing at this vein of Melvillean artistry. And yet we might observe tendencies among critics, G. R. Thompson and Gordon Boudreau excepted, to shy away from the gothicism in Moby-Dick, although that book has been examined from many other angles—and bodes fair to continue to hold out lures for many, and heterogeneous, takers.1 Melville’s contemporaries, we might note, had been quick to detect his similarities and dissimilarities to predecessors in the gothic mode. Reviewing Mardi, in the Athenaeum for 24 March 1849, for example, Henry F. Chorley observed that Chapter 19 in Melville’s book recalled the ImaleeMelmoth episode in Maturin’s famous novel, Melmoth the Wanderer. The same Chorley, in his notice of Moby-Dick,2 remarked that Chapter 42, ‘The Whiteness of the Whale,’ contained enough ‘ghostly suggestions’ to satisfy a Maturin or Lewis, although, ironically, an anonymous reviewer of Moby-Dick in the Spirit of the Times, complimented Melville, along with Dickens, for fresh methods in fiction—writing, in contrast to the slavish imitators of Mrs. Radcliffe.3 Commentators on Melville’s gothicism, however, find their quarry more often in Pierre or the short fiction, such as Edward Rose, in his study of Melville’s interest in the incest in Walpole’s gothic drama, The Mysterious Mother; the critics of ‘The Bell-Tower’; or, most recently, Eugenia C. DeLamotte. Even Heinz Kosok, who painstakingly charted the gothic devices and character types employed by Melville, is rather more terse in treating Moby-Dick than we might wish.4

4. In William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1795), a prototype of what may be called the novel of pursuit, the male protagonist occupies a role that in Gothic literature, Victorian melodrama, and American television drama usually belongs to a female. A victim equally of his insatiable curiosity and of his unrelenting pursuer, Caleb stumbles upon the knowledge that his employer, Falkland, is a murderer. Literally bound and gagged twice, Caleb is pursued and hounded by Falkland’s agents until he maneuvers Falkland into confessing his guilt to the authorities. While it is absurd to compare Melville’s Ishmael to Godwin’s Caleb Williams on any significant level, Ishmael recognizes Ahab’s power and, at several points in the narrative, feels the pressure of Ahab’s will and voices his misgivings. Sealts notes that Melville had read Caleb Williams. 5. Lowry Nelson, Jr., “Ahab as Gothic Hero,” in MobyDick as Doubloon, eds. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970), p. 296.

Bibliography Arvin, Newton. “Melville and the Gothic Novel.” New England Quarterly 22 (1949): 33-48. Beckford, William. Vathek. 1786; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1970. Godwin, William. Caleb Williams. 1794; reprint, London, Oxford University Press, 1970. Lewis, Matthew. The Monk. 1795; reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1952. Maturin, Charles. Melmoth the Wanderer. 1820; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick or the White Whale. 1851; reprint, New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1964. Nelson, Lowry, Jr. “Ahab as Gothic Hero.” In Moby-Dick as Doubloon. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford, eds. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1970. Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1797. ———. The Mysteries of Udolpho. London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1794. Sealts, Merton M., Jr. Melville’s Reading. Milwaukee, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1817; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. 1764; reprint, New York: Dover, 1966.

BENJAMIN F. FISHER IV (ESSAY DATE 1994) SOURCE: Fisher, Benjamin F., IV. “Gothic Possibilities in Moby-Dick.” In Gothick Origins and Innovations, edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage, pp. 115-22. Atlanta, Ga. and Amersterdam: Rodopi, 1994. In the following essay, Fisher illustrates Melville’s handling of the “gothic castle” device in Moby-Dick,

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Here I wish chiefly to bring to bear upon Moby-Dick some of the ideas set forth by Norman N. Holland and Leona F. Sherman in their study, ‘Gothic Possibilities.’5 They offer valuable help in unlocking certain doors to the time-honored, or vilified, gothic property, the haunted castle. That edifice, they argue, may be customarily called a ‘nighttime house,’ as darkness is conducive to the creation of vague terrors in the protagonist (and reader alike). The weird noises that seem to be an inescapable part of gothic fiction or, for that matter, plays and verse, are also enhanced by such tenebrousness, giving rise to the sounds of what children often interpret as sexual violence. Gothic

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Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab in John Huston’s 1956 film adaptation of Moby Dick.

castles typically harbor some family secret, and in consequence the castles seem central in childish fantasies about an adulthood that can be discovered and possessed. There is usually some aspect of an idealized family past connected with these settings, although another, less pleasant, typicality of such castles is a connection with discomfort— often torture—and shame, which in turn are tied to feelings of powerlessness and desire. Fantasies of sexual penetration and of merging with an ‘otherness’ arise from these clusters of emotions. Gothic castles, therefore, are ambiguous locales, at once holding out attractions of nurturing and annihilation. Generally, the protagonist attempts to leave the castle environs, only to be irresistibly drawn back, just as, in other circumstances, one tends to long for home. Parental figures flourish within these gothic castles, figures who in the main derive from the bad fathers and wicked stepmothers in fairy tales, although good parental types, who function as counters to their more lurid opponents, are also part and parcel of gothic fiction. Gothic villains tend to be older or more sexually experienced persons, demon-lovers, perhaps, who hold author-

ity over some more youthful or more naive protagonist. Possibilities for numerous ambiguities occur in the shadings of the environment and characters. The protagonist usually sustains feelings of anxiety or guilt for any covert wishes to do away with the villainous older character, who simultaneously attracts and repels her or him (Holland and Sherman remind us, by the way, that gothic novels enjoyed a long life of being written by women for women, witness the lasting popularity of Mrs. Radcliffe). Passive though the heroines or heroes may be, they manifest an undeniable resistance to their oppressors, thus offering yet another ‘possibility’—that of passivity’s leading to its own variety of power. Characters in gothic works may often discover that the situations they confront can affect their own senses of femaleness or maleness. Ishmael, the teller of Melville’s tale, is for much of his book as ‘mysteriously alive to a dreadful feeling’ as was his predecessor in the Melville canon, Redburn, during his. Like the biblical Ishmael, and like scores of other characters in gothic romance, Melville’s creation is a wanderer who goes in search of identity and solidification of his

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personality. Given the mysteries that surround him, and his name (his chosen name, perhaps, as the opening sentence hints), we would expect to find no end of minuses in his personality. This wanderer goes beyond the shores of land, moreover, engaging in a fascinating, and yet often terrifying, aqua-gothic journey. His voyaging, however, is no mere physical hunt for actual whales, but is an attempt to shake the ‘damp, drizzly November’ in his soul, one which runs to visions of violence, suicide, and death. Therefore it is no odditity that his narrative is a conglomerate of one bit of gothicism after another, and that about those bits hover ambiguity piled upon ambiguity. Perhaps the Holland-Sherman approach may be put to use in throwing some light on Ishmael’s story, which takes us from the traditional landlocked haunted castle onto the seas and the eerie ‘haunted forecastle’—to use Kosok’s term—of the Pequod, itself rife with hauntedness. Ishmael’s initial orientation toward suicide and death draws him toward Ahab and the great whales, of which Moby-Dick, a striking sport among his species, apears to be the most compelling and death-dealing. The old sea-captain has come to believe that in the notorious Moby-Dick is vested a cosmic harshness and evil. Because of his personal experience with this mysterious whale, he wishes to destroy—to bring death to the death-bringer, and thus to reassert his own potency, sexual and other. Ultimately, however, Ishmael more strongly resists this deathorientation as his experiences encourage him to perceive and accept the imperfectibilities in humankind. The strengthening of his credence in the worthwhileness of life leads him to forego the obsessive quest after ego-assertion that leads Ahab to doom in his final encounter with the white whale. Along the way to the closings with MobyDick, Ishmael attains a satisfaction in learning that mutuality becomes possible in human existence as we come to an understanding about extending ourselves to others, rather than trying to strive after what, as he comes to comprehend it, is revealed as a negative self-sufficiency. Melville surpasses many of his predecessors in gothicism by presenting us with what amount to two ‘haunted castles,’ The Pequod and the sea. Each brings forth its mystifying noises to tantalize the ears of those who hear them. Mysteries of sexuality and power-plays are frequently associated with the strange sounds, just as they had been in the pair of miniaturized gothic castles, the inns where Ishmael and Queequeg lodged before embarking. Both the ship and the ocean are haunted by two

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villains, as it is Ahab’s intentness upon overcoming the whale that makes the latter so vital a presence in all thought and activity aboard The Pequod and in the surrounding waters. The ship, to be sure, more obviously descends from the foreboding castellated abbeys in the Appenines so familiar in the Walpole-Radcliffe heritage. The vessel is ‘a rare old craft’ (p. 164). Somewhat atypically, she is ‘rather small if anything; with an oldfashioned claw-footed look.’ Albeit small in dimension, The Pequod nonetheless manages to convey the sense of spaciousness—because of the dreaminess and mind-expansion that she engenders in Ishmael—associated with the vastnesses and shadowy obscurities that are described with a deliciousness in earlier Gothics, as if the beholders relished those features and the sensations they promoted. ‘Long seasoned and weather-stained . . . , her old hull’s complexion was darkened like a French grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable bows looked bearded . . . Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled.’ Her ‘original grotesqueness’ is intensified by the ivory decorations with which Captain Peleg had adorned her to extravagance while he was chief mate (p. 165). Not only does this description mirror to some extent the appearance of Ahab, as he later appears to us; it recalls the hordes of other gothic villains whose nefarious activities in most un-American climes had bronzed them—colored them with the devil’s mark, as it were. The subtle intermingling of male and female attributes here is but one of many throughout the novel. Gorgeous though she is, The Pequod carries about her further ‘possibilities’ in possessing something of the ‘barbaric Ethiopian Emperor’ and several suggestions of cannibalism. She is indeed a ‘noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy!’ This same combination of nobility with melancholy might with equal plausibility designate Ahab, or, for that matter, Ishmael himself after his long testing in whaling. The ocean also repeatedly brings close the borders of melancholy with nobility. In fact, although several important scenes fall credibly into representations of the ‘nighttime house’ mentioned by Holland and Sherman, the sea becomes a modification of gothicism in that its daytime guises mingle beauty and treachery, just as antecedent haunted castles did. Life or death may spring up from its unfathomed depths. If we may for the nonce regard Moby-Dick as haunted by the twin presences of Ahab and the great whale, then we may perceive a kind of parenting being foregrounded here, as it had been

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Ahab appeals initially to Ishmael because the older man—who, like King Lear, in ascending importance, is a father, an old man, and a king— embodies much that Ishmael desires to be and feels in his early anxieties that he is not. Like many other gothic villains, who may owe much to the tragic protagonists in Renaissance drama, Ahab has potentially noble qualities. The captain’s growing monomania, which leaves him in the end bereft of any mutuality with another human being and instead transforms him into a fiend imbued with more horrifying animalistic impulses than even Moby-Dick seems to possess, loses his allure for his nonetheless obedient crewman, whose healthy skepticism and sense of interdependence with others of his kind absolve him from the fate that befalls the others, who have wholly succumbed to Ahab’s enchantment—which is negative, not positive, ‘magic.’ That Ahab should engage in the casting of spells, although they are in the vein of demogogic persuasion and not otherworldly in their origins, is no surprise. His fearsome eye and his Cain-like scar team with his overbearing personality to establish him as a thoroughgoing gothic villain, although the old captain is no simple derivative culled without forethought from Melville’s models. Ahab’s sexuality, never cast as the mere rampant lust of so many other evil gothic types, in its vagueness adds another element of interest to his character. Consistent with his being the master of a ‘nighttime house,’ Ahab finally chooses darkness—of madness, isolation, and death—as he defiantly shouts: ‘I turn my body from the sun’ (Ch. 135). The white whale, too, holds out temporary appeal to the wanderer because the voyage after self-realization encompasses aspects of sexuality, as well as maleness and femaleness, intellectuality

and primitivism, life-giving and destructive inclinations: all embodied in him. He is what Eugenia DeLamotte labels ‘the ever-receding object of desire and, as the prison wall “shoved near,” . . . the ever-impinging source of terror.’ Unlike Ahab, Ishmael finally comes to understand the whale as one more manifestation of an indifferent, if at times captivating, Nature, rather than as a diabolic and calculatingly cruel creature—or so one may interpret the whale’s role in the book. Yet seeing and mulling the possibilities of gender-blendings in Moby-Dick’s physical appearance and in his actions provide Ishmael with some greater, if not rationally clarified, comprehension of his own physio-psychal being than he had when his narrative commenced. Unlike Ahab, and the others in the crew—who have yielded altogether to their captain’s evil spell—Ishmael travels down into the murkiness of the ocean in the vortex of MobyDick’s annihilating whirlpool, but he returns to regions of light and life. He achieves a balancing, just as Ahab consciously eschews, between what Merlin Bowen, years ago, termed head and heart.6 The flight from the haunted castle, in hopes of eluding the consequences of mysteries and secrets sequestered there, also occurs, with certain modifications, in Moby-Dick. In the main, the flight is translated into psychological planes— although physical escapes are not forgotten—in terms of Starbuck’s vain attempts to deter his captain from his mad quest. Were the crew to succeed in turning Ahab from his intentions, they would manage that feat by engaging in the ordinary business of whaling, or corporeally departing the ship if no further business were to be their occupation, or else mutinying (and thus cause something of a flight on Ahab’s part). In the final encounter with Moby-Dick, when the distraught sailors who are set upon by their intended victim think hurriedly of the ship as a refuge, that ship proves to be no center of security as the great whale batters it to its destruction. So in Melville’s handling of gothic possibilities, they can not return. Ishmael was among those who had departed the ship, in his case by the mere chance of Fedallah’s death; and, although he does not literally return to what is no longer above the waves, he does achieve a kind of return as he lights on Queequeg’s coffin, simultaneously a harbinger of death and life, and so much a part of the aura of The Pequod, another center for life and death. That coffin buoys him until The Rachel rescues him, and thus nurtures him as a kind of mother-refuge in contradistinction to the violent and deathdealing realm where phallic manias and animal

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in earlier Gothics, and as it still is in the racks and racks of drugstore and shopping-mall gothic paperbacks, according to the Holland-Sherman construct. Ahab, as derivative from the myth of the old-testament king, is, naturally, a patriarchal father-figure, one who seeks to dominate his crew and redirect his customary occupation for evil purposes. No wonder that he is abetted by the devil-creature, Fedallah, who worships fire, and whose physique hints of the snake. Moby-Dick is more ambiguous because of the varied masculine and feminine traits ascribed to him in his role of parent-figure against whom Ahab rebels. Like the paired gothic ‘castles’ sketched above, captain and his prey evince shifting traits of good and evil, appeal and appall, mystery and forthrightness, calm cunning and shocking violence.

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unpredictability hold sway. Ishmael had gone to The Pequod in hopes of finding there a balm for his soul. The healing qualities in that balm came to him, ironically, only after he had received symbolic lashes from the whips that light on one’s mentality as much as or more so than any actual stripes across the back. His being found by The Rachel suggests how Melville interjected another irony into the lost-child story of biblical origin. That is, Ishmael in fact is ‘lost’ in regard to his uninitiated self—but he has survived annihilation and been found because he developed another, more mature and stabilized selfhood. This wanderer returns to life because he has recognized the futility of trying to pierce the ‘unreadable secret of the universe,’ and in consequence becomes content to remain unheroic rather than to follow in the mindset of Ahab. DeLamotte comments that in Moby-Dick Melville liberated gothic devices, ‘allow[ing] them to float free of their old context’ (p. 89). A problem that in its own manner ‘haunts’ the composer of studies such as this, is that as one pursues what at the outset seems a clearly, and succinctly, definable goal, he discovers that ‘possibilities’ ramify in all directions—excepting that of limitless time. Consequently, I conclude with hopes that my reading has called up, and will call up more, ‘possibilities’ under the surfaces of Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Notes 1. Arvin’s ‘Melville and the Gothic Novel’ first appeared in New England Quarterly, 22 (March 1949), pp. 33-48; rpt. American Pantheon, ed. Daniel Aaron and Sylvan Schendler (New York: Delacorte, 1966) pp. 106-122. Cf. Thompson’s “Gothic Fiction of the Romantic Age: Context and Mode,” the introduction to Romantic Gothic Tales, 1790-1840 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979) pp. 35-43; Boudreau “Of Pale Ushers and Gothic Piles: Melville’s Architectural Symbology,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 18 (2 quar. 1972), pp. 67-82. I quote from Moby-Dick, ed. Harold Beaver (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books, 1972).

5. ‘Gothic Possibilities’ was originally published in New Literary History 8 (Winter 1977), 278-94; rpt. Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweikart (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 6. The Long Encounter: Self and Experience in the Writing of Herman Melville (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) [esp. Ch. 3, ‘Defiance: The Way of Tragic Heroism’]; DeLamotte, p. 134.

Works Cited: Arvin, Newton, ‘Melville and the Gothic Novel’, New England Quarterly, 22 (March 1949), pp. 33-48; rpt. American Pantheon, ed. Daniel Aaron and Sylvan Schendler (New York: Delacorte, 1966) pp. 106-22. Boudreau ‘Of Pale Ushers and Gothic Piles: Melville’s Architectural Symbology,’ ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 18 (2 quar. 1972), pp. 67-82 Bowen, Merlin, The Long Encounter: Self and Experience in the Writing of Herman Melville (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) DeLamotte, Eugenia, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) Fisher, Benjamin, The Gothic’s Gothic: Study Aids to the Tradition of the Tale of Terror (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988) Holland, Norman, & Sherman, Leona, ‘Gothic Possibilities’, originally published in New Literary History 8 (Winter 1977), 278-94; rpt. Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweikart (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) Kosok, Heinz, Die Bedeutung der Gothic Novel für das Erzåhlwerk Herman Melvilles (Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter & Co., 1963) Lloyd-Smith, Allan. Uncanny American Fiction: Medusa’s Face (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989) Rose, Edward, “The Queenly Personality’: Walpole, Melville and Mother,’ Literature & Psychology, 15 (Fall 1965), pp. 216-29 Thompson, G. R., ‘Gothic Fiction of the Romantic Age: Context and Mode,’ the introduction to Romantic Gothic Tales, 1790-1840 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979) pp. 35-43

2. Athenaeum, 25 October 1851. 3. 6 December 1851. 4. Kosok, Die Bedeutung der Gothic Novel für das Erzåhlwerk Herman Melvilles (Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter & Co., 1963). Pertinent bibliography on the topic may be found in my The Gothic’s Gothic: Study Aids to the Tradition of the Tale of Terror (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988) pp. 232-38; Rose, ‘“The Queenly Personality”: Walpole, Melville and Mother,’ Literature & Psychology, 15 (Fall 1965), pp. 216-29; DeLamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) pp. 48-49, 65-92. See also Allan Lloyd-Smith, Uncanny American Fiction: Medusa’s Face (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989) pp. 63-72.

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FURTHER READING Biography Weaver, Raymond M. Melville: Mariner and Mystic. New York: George H. Doran Co., 1921, 399 p. The biography central to the Melville revival of the 1920s. This work was extremely influential in establishing Melville’s reputation as an author of world importance.

Criticism Braswell, William. Melville’s Religious Thought: An Essay in Interpretation. New York: Octagon Books, 1973, 154 p.

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Brodhead, Richard H. “The Uncommon Long Cable: Moby Dick.” In Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel, pp. 134-62. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Proposes that Moby-Dick is founded on an opposition between two views concerning the nature of the world; namely, “a sense of reality as something inhuman that lies beyond the actual and apparent and a sense of it as something visible, tangible, and finally supportive of human scrutiny.”

Comments on Melville’s ironic use of English Gothic ideology and literary conventions in his novel Pierre. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Melville and the Tragedy of Nihilism.” In The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature, pp. 59-83. New York: Vanguard Press, Inc., 1972. Analysis of Melville’s fiction that concentrates on the Manichean struggle between good and evil depicted in his works. Smith, Henry Nash. “The Madness of Ahab.” In Democracy and the Novel: Popular Resistance to Classic American Writers, pp. 35-55. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Coviello, Peter. “The American in Charity: ‘Benito Cereno’ and Gothic Anti-Sentimentality.” Studies in American Fiction 30, no. 2 (autumn 2002): 155-80.

Investigates the ways in which the insanity of Ahab in Moby-Dick serves to qualify or elaborate his proposition that the universe is controlled by an evil power.

Argues that in his story “Benito Cereno” Melville “pits gothic occlusion and opacity against sentimental modes of reading and response” particularly in terms of the work’s naïve narrator and concerns with the politically volatile subject of race in mid-nineteenth-century America.

Stern, Milton R., ed. Discussions of Moby-Dick. Boston: D. C. Heath and Co., 1960, 134 p.

Hillway, Tyrus. Herman Melville. New York: Twayne, 1963, 176 p. Book-length survey of Melville’s life and works. Hume, Beverly A. “The Despotic Victim: Gender and Imagination in Pierre.” American Transcendental Quarterly 4, no. 1 (March 1990): 67-76. Probes the conflicts inherent in Melville’s writing of Gothic romance, both as a male author and as a revisionist of the genre. ———. “Of Krakens and Other Monsters: Melville’s Pierre.” American Transcendental Quarterly 6, no. 2 (June 1992): 92-108. Considers Melville’s rendering of “feminine monstrosities” in the novel Pierre. Levin, Harry. “The Jonah Complex.” In The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, pp. 201-307. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. Concentrates on darkness as a unifying theme in MobyDick. Miles, Robert. “‘Tranced Griefs’: Melville’s Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic.” ELH 66, no. 1 (spring 1999): 157-77.

A collection of essays on Moby-Dick that includes discussion of contemporary reaction to the novel, the significance of Ahab’s perception of evil, and other pertinent topics. Watters, R. E. “Isolatoes.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 50, no. 4 (December 1945): 1138-48. Examines Melville’s treatment of the theme of individual isolation in Moby-Dick and other works.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Melville’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: American Writers; American Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 1; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 25; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 1640-1865; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 3, 74, 250, 254; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring Novels; Exploring Short Stories; Literature and Its Times, Vols. 1, 2; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 3, 12, 29, 45, 49, 91, 93, 123, 157; Novels for Students, Vols. 7, 9; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; Short Stories for Students, Vol. 3; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 1, 17, 46; Something about the Author, Vol. 59; Twayne’s United States Authors; and World Literature Criticism.

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Studies the background and influences central to Melville’s religious disillusionment and analyzes the treatment of religious themes throughout his works.

TONI MORRISON (1931 -)

(Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford) American novelist, essayist, playwright, critic, author of children’s books, and editor.

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n 1993, Morrison became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her fiction was noted for its “epic power” and “unerring ear for dialogue and richly expressive depictions of black America” by the Swedish Academy, while exploring the difficulties of maintaining a sense of black cultural identity in a white world. Especially through her female protagonists, her works consider the debilitating effects of racism and sexism and incorporate elements of supernatural lore and mythology. Many of Morrison’s novels—particularly The Bluest Eye (1970) and Beloved (1987)—have become firmly established within the American literary canon, while simultaneously working to redefine and expand it.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah Willis and George Wofford. She was the second of four children. Her father was originally from Georgia, and her mother’s parents had moved to Lorain after losing their land in Alabama and working briefly in Kentucky. Morrison’s father

worked in a variety of trades, often holding more than one job at a time in order to support his family. To send money to Morrison during her school years, her mother also took a series of hard, often demeaning positions. Music and storytelling— including tales of the supernatural—were a valued part of family life, and children as well as adults were expected to participate. Morrison became an avid reader at a young age, consuming a wide range of literature, including Russian, French, and English novels. Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953. She went on to earn a master’s degree in English from Cornell University in 1955, and spent two years teaching at Texas Southern University in Houston. From 1957 to 1964 she served as an instructor at Howard. In 1958 she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, with whom she had two sons, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin. The marriage ended in divorce in 1964, and Morrison and her children returned briefly to her parents’ home in Ohio. During this period she began to write, producing the story that would eventually become her first novel, The Bluest Eye. In 1966 she moved to Syracuse, New York, and took a job as an editor for a textbook subsidiary of Random House. She relocated again in 1968, this time to New York City, where she continued editing for Random House. She oversaw the publication of works by prominent black fiction writers such as Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara, as well as the autobiographies of influen-

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tial African Americans, including Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali. In 1987, Morrison left Random House to return to teaching and to concentrate on her writing. She has taught at numerous colleges and universities, among them the State University of New York, Bard College, Yale University, Harvard University, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Morrison currently serves on the faculty at Princeton University.

MAJOR WORKS Although critics have noted certain Gothic elements in her first novel, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon (1977) was Morrison’s first novel to explicitly incorporate mythical and supernatural elements into the narrative as a way for characters to transcend their everyday lives. The novel juxtaposes the pressures experienced by black families that feel forced to assimilate into mainstream culture with their unwillingness to abandon a distinctive African American heritage. Tar Baby, published in 1981 and set in the Caribbean, again uses myth and ghostly presences to mitigate the harshness of lives in which all relationships are adversarial—particularly in cultures where blacks are opposed to whites and women are opposed to men. In 1987 Morrison published Beloved, a novel based on the true story of a slave who murdered her child to spare the child from a life of slavery; the book won the Pulitzer Prize. In her exploration of slavery in Beloved, Morrison deals with her recurrent theme of family. The characters are deprived of all aspects of ancestry—mates, children, forebears and the sense of selfhood and dignity that they hold, and, most importantly, the ability to love. Also of central purpose to her theme is the importance of memory: the past is revealed in fragments, as if the characters’ memories were too overwhelming to be presented at one time. The elements of the mythical and supernatural that have marked all of Morrison’s works are prominent in Beloved, particularly in her characterization of the title character.

a decaying mansion populated by a mournful old woman. The house in Beloved, known only by its address (in contrast to the plantation house “Sweet Home,” which also appears in the novel), stands isolated and becomes haunted by a family’s painful memories. Critics have also discussed at length Morrison’s use of ghosts, often representing tragic histories or giving voice to the silenced. Katherine Piller Beutel likens these ghosts to the mythological figure Echo, a distinctly female voice. Critics have also underscored the psychological, and perhaps political, necessity of Morrison’s ghosts, who speak of traumatic events that do not necessarily fit into a conventional historical narrative.

PRINCIPAL WORKS The Bluest Eye (novel) 1970 Sula (novel) 1973 The Black Book [editor] (nonfiction) 1974 Song of Solomon (novel) 1977 Tar Baby (novel) 1981 Dreaming Emmett (play) 1986 Beloved (novel) 1987 Jazz (novel) 1992 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (criticism) 1992 Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality [editor and author of introduction] (essays) 1992 Lecture and Speech of Acceptance upon the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature (speech) 1994 The Dancing Mind: Speech Upon Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (speech) 1996 Paradise (novel) 1998 The Big Box [with Slade Morrison] (juvenilia) 1999

CRITICAL RECEPTION According to critics, architecture figures heavily into Morrison’s portrayal of the Gothic. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, featured an American South version of the trademark Gothic castle in the form of the central character’s home, a cavernous, run-down, one-room storefront. Song of Solomon, although set in urban Detroit, features

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I See You, I See Myself: The Young Life of Jacob Lawrence [with Deba Foxley Leach, Suzanne Wright, and Deborah J. Leach] (juvenilia) 2001 The Book of Mean People [with Slade Morrison] (juvenilia) 2002 Love (novel) 2003 Who’s Got Game?: The Ant or the Grasshopper? [with Slade Morrison] (juvenilia) 2003

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GENERAL COMMENTARY KATHERINE PILLER BEUTEL (ESSAY DATE 1997-98) SOURCE: Beutel, Katherine Piller. “Gothic Repetitions: Toni Morrison’s Changing Use of Echo.” West Virginia University Philological Papers 42-43 (1997-98): 82-7. In the following essay, Beutel maintains that Morrison adapts the ancient myth of Echo to produce Gothic effects with ghostly characters in her works.

In responding to an interviewer’s observation about her novels, Toni Morrison once claimed, “I am very happy to hear that my books haunt.”1 If her works are in fact haunting for most readers, in their disturbing and unforgettable characters and events, they also include haunting of a more ghostly sort. Ghosts, such as the horsemen of Tar Baby or the title character of Beloved, not only exist in her fictional world; they are also often as real, memorable, and central to the stories as “living” characters. They continue to feel pain and desire, for instance, and allow Morrison a means of “giving the dead voice, in remembering the forgotten.”2 The effect of these ghosts and of Morrison’s ghostly themes is the effect of gothic literature—it is disquieting, unsettling, even subversive. Morrison has never been afraid to allow the supernatural to slip into her fiction; even her 1977 novel Song of Solomon, while set in urban Detroit, includes many traditional gothic features, such as the decaying mansion occupied by the unnaturally aged Circe (described as a witch from the main character Milkman Dead’s childhood), or the ghost of Milkman’s grandfather, who appears regularly to mourn his wife to their daughter, Milkman’s aunt Pilate, or even Milkman’s search through the wilderness and dark of night for self, family, and home. Although the witchlike Circe and the ghost of Macon Dead bring the past into

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Although Morrison deals directly with an “Echo” only late in the story, it is central to the novel as a whole and acquires even wider significance when considered in light of the mythological figure of Echo.4 The echo in Song of Solomon is the voice of female pain and longing, issuing from a rocky place, insuppressible, and thus a continuing reminder of Ryna’s unfulfilled desire for the absent male. Echo’s story in myth is also one of a female voice not silenced even by the death of the body. In Ovid’s famous version of the tale, Echo, already condemned only to repeat the ends of others’ speech, is spurned by Narcissus and pines away, becoming only a voice from woodland caves, repeating the mourning of Narcissus for himself.5 In other versions of the myth, such as that related in a third-century romance by Longus, Echo survives as music, after being torn limb from limb by shepherds at Pan’s instigation.6 Thus the echoing singing in this novel also has roots in Echo’s story. As a disembodied voice (from beyond the grave in a sense) Echo fits well in a gothic setting.7 Echoing, disembodied voices breaking out of forces (such as death) that ought to suppress them are reminders of an irrational “other side.” They evoke creepy feelings of what Freud calls the “uncanny,” that which “arouses dread and horror.”8 The decentering effect of voices without visible presence echoes classic gothic’s subversive tendencies, putting rational notions of presence and absence or life and death into question. Thus the myth of Echo considered in light of a work’s gothic inclinations can provide insights about the implications for gender and narrative of these disturbing bodiless and persistant voices. As a distinctly female voice, Echo is like Morrison’s Ryna, speaking the pain of what Morrison calls a “graveyard love” (128), a self-destructive

overly strong love, in this novel experienced by so many of the female characters for men who only leave them. In addition to Ryna, there is Hagar, Pilate’s granddaughter, who is spurned by Milkman and dies after being left behind, in a parallel to Ryna and Solomon that even Milkman himself finally recognizes (332). The triumph of the novel is in fact this growth of a narcissistic male; Milkman is raised never to think beyond himself, and through a journey of discovery learns to lose the “cocoon” of self (277) and feel real love and concern for others. But this growth of Narcissus comes at the expense of Echo. As Ryna is sacrificed in Solomon’s flight, Hagar is sacrificed for Milkman’s growth and final “flight.” Her voice may not live on in the same way Ryna’s does, but even on her deathbed it is insuppressible; Pilate and Reba continually try to “Hush” her, yet she speaks of Milkman’s rejection (315-16). At her funeral, Pilate and Reba sing an echoing refrain of “Mercy. Mercy. Mercy,” and Pilate repeats the last line of a song, “My baby girl,” again and again (317-19). The echoing of Milkman’s voice then on the novel’s final pages, as he yells across the valley to Guitar (described as the voice of the hills and rocks 337) emphasizes once again that Echo remains in song or repeated voice, while Solomon or Milkman leaps. Morrison has maintained that the novel contains both strong and weak women, as does real life (McKay 145), but the role of Echo in this novel emphasizes a disturbing kind of feminine voice, a repetitive one that remains unfulfilled without the absent and longed-for male. If the Echo of myth is doomed to repeat, the recurring echoes of this text, the women doomed to love too much and their grieving voices, stress what seems to be inevitable repetition of a painful and victimized female role. Morrison does give us Pilate, a strong woman with a strong voice, who seems relatively in control of her destiny, but in general the haunting voices of this text emphasize pain and separation. Even Pilate echoes herself upon losing the object of her love, her granddaughter Hagar. Echo’s story (in its many variations), however, provides material for many different views of limitations upon and powers of feminine voice. In other novels, Morrison seems again drawn to Echo’s story—to the pain but also the possibilities of this voice, deprived of body, repetitive, unfulfilled, but also strong and insuppressible and potentially productive and revisionary. Morrison shows haunting echoes in Beloved, for instance, as capable of bringing a healing, since they

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the lives of the characters, it is another haunting, which Milkman and reader encounter later in the story, that is one of the novel’s most disturbing gothic elements. As Milkman joins the hunt in the woods near Shalimar, Virginia, he hears a sound like a woman crying. He learns the sound is an echo from Ryna’s Gulch, according to local lore, the continuing sound of the mourning of his great-grandmother for the husband, Solomon, who left her to fly back to Africa. The central song we have been hearing throughout the novel, sung by Pilate and the children of Shalimar, the one that reveals Milkman’s past to him, is thus Ryna’s song: “Oh Solomon don’t leave me here.”3 Ryna, who lives still as an echo in the woods, is echoed even beyond that in the song.

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provide the opportunity for connection. Instead of the emphasis on separation we see in Song of Solomon, Morrison stresses the power of echo to connect past with present and individual with individual. And in her most recent novel, Jazz, Morrison confronts the notion of inevitable repetition by stressing the possibility of revision. Beloved is Morrison’s most explicitly Gothic novel, dominated by a haunted house, a haunted family and community even, and the flesh-andblood ghost of Beloved herself. Some of this haunting is manifested again in echo—in the disembodied voices that float around the house at 124 Bluestone Road. This “conflagration”9 of voices that Stamp Paid can hear from the road in the novel’s second part consists of echoes of voices once suppressed, voices without body, floating around the gothic, cavelike house. Stamp identifies them as the “mumbling of the black and angry dead” (198), the indecipherable words of “the people of the broken necks, of fire cooked blood and black girls who had lost their ribbons” (181). The voices from the house and even the voice that issues from the character Beloved—but seems at some points to encompass a collective memory of slave-ship experience—are echoes of the dead, illustrating the power of voice, especially feminine voice, to transcend body and time. The connection they provide between past and present allows the possibility for a beginning of healing, since the novel makes clear that the past cannot simply be shoved down and forgotten without disastrous results. The healing connection provided by echo in this novel is not only between past and present but also among characters. The poetic sections of the novel’s second part that give us the “unspeakable” (199) thoughts of Sethe and her daughters Denver and Beloved create a sort of merging among the three women since their voices become jumbled, echoing each other, losing much of their individuality. The chorus-like, poetic blending of the three voices that ends with the echoing refrain “You are mine, You are mine, You are mine” (21517) sounds much like Pilate’s refrain at Hagar’s funeral in the earlier novel, but here in addition to the pain and love expressed there is also a merging of characters accomplished through echoes that cloud boundaries between them. The merging is both dangerous (Sethe nearly does not survive it) and necessary as a step in overcoming the pain of separation. Echo in the Narcissus myth is unable to accomplish the desired merging with her beloved, but the women locked in the house

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do seem to achieve a connection, expressed through their blending voices, although it proves dangerous in the end. Echoes that lead to community, a less overwhelming kind of connection, are ultimately the source of survival and salvation in Beloved. Denver, for instance, lives an isolated life dominated by silence (she is even deaf for two years), but an echo of her dead grandmother’s voice speaks clearly to her, urging her to “go on out the yard” (244). When Denver does leave the yard to enter the community, she finds acceptance, work, and a future. Echoing women’s voices also come to Sethe’s rescue. As the community women gather to exorcise Beloved from their midst, they are described as “Building voice upon voice” to get to “the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words” (261). The echoing among these women, the “Yes, yes, yes, oh yes. Hear me. Hear me. Do it, Maker, do it” (258) does drive Beloved from the house, opening the possibility for Sethe’s survival. The narrator’s final echoing refrain, that this is “not a story to pass on” (274-75) shows some discomfort with the role of repetitive telling, but ultimately the gothic vision of the novel shows that echoes present powerful and necessary challenges to rationalist notions that would separate past from present or parent from child or one person’s “story” from another’s. The echoes of the angry dead that float around the haunted house and the echoes of the sixty million housed in Beloved’s voice show the past that encroaches even when we do our best to forget it. But the echoes among characters, those that show a blending and merging of voice, show the interrelatedness of people, the fragility of independent identity, and the power of connection. Set mainly in the vibrant city in the 1920s, Jazz seems on the surface much less gothic than Beloved or even Song of Solomon, but it too has hauntings, many of which are tied to Joe and Violet Trace’s rural Southern past. Even the city is haunted, however, by “clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women.”1 0 Joe has a “spooky love” (3) for Dorcas, like the dangerous loves of Song of Solomon’s Ryna and Hagar, and Violet attacks a corpse, proving, as Morrison’s narrator tells us, that “underneath the good times and the easy money something evil ran the streets and nothing was safe—not even the dead” (9). Echoes that haunt in this novel, however, are more like Longus’s Echo than Ovid’s, music rather

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There is much repetition in the novel, but in Morrison’s narrative technique we can see a clear development in her use of Echo. The selfconscious primary narrator is a personal, yet unnamed disembodied voice trying to copy the city and “speak its loud voice” (220). In its inability to do so, however, it opens up the possibility of revision—a possibility inherent in Echo’s story but more fully realized in Jazz than in Morrison’s previous novels. If Milkman and Hagar repeat the cycle of Solomon and Ryna in Song of Solomon, Jazz finally subverts the expected repetition, is subverted in the end when Joe, Violet, and Felice do not repeat the ending of the previous triangle. While it might seem that Echo is stripped of the power to communicate, since she is “never around to speak first, never found not to reply” (Ovid 57), even in Ovid’s tale, Echo’s is a voice that can challenge authority by appearing to repeat while actually altering meaning. Echo does so by truncating sounds, turning Narcissus’s “I’d die before I give myself to you,” for instance, into the self-sacrificing “I give myself to you.”1 2 The narrator in Jazz sets up expectations of repetition by telling the whole story on the novel’s first few pages and then implying that when Joe and Violet meet up with Dorcas’s friend Felice, the only change will be in “who shot whom” (6). We expect to hear Joe, Violet, and Dorcas’s story in more detail in the course of the novel, as we do, and we also expect a repeat in the second love triangle. But as the narrator admits, she was

mistaken in thinking “That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack” (220). Unlike Violet’s parrot, who can only repeat “I love you” even when pushed out of the apartment window—an image reminiscent of Echo’s unrequited love—Joe and Violet can find a healthy love for each other again, surviving the threatened tragic ending to the second triangle. The narrator cannot fully echo the voice of the city; it has an independence impossible to repeat. But the narrator can create with what the city provides, taking an active role of revision and reshaping, rather than a passive one of simple repetition of pain. If the narrator is Echo, her relationship with this novel’s Narcissus, Golden Gray, shows significant change, as she realizes that: Not hating him is not enough; liking, loving him is not useful. I have to alter things. I have to be a shadow wishing him well, like the smiles of the dead left over from their lives. (161)

As the narrator then pictures him gaining a “confident, enabling, serene power” from inside a well he stands next to, “a well dug quite clear from trees so twigs and leaves will not fall into the deep water” (161), it becomes obvious there is little mourning or painful desire on Echo’s part, but rather a voice above and in control, making changes where necessary. Echo has grown stronger. In a genre such as the gothic, that gives us “glimpses of the skeletons of dead desires,”1 3 Echo’s hauntings are especially effective. In overcoming silencing and speaking her desire, Echo is a figure standing for the voice gothic has historically provided its women writers and readers. But if that voice is only pain and desire, endlessly repeated, it gives a disturbing comment on feminine voice. Morrison’s use of Echo in Song of Solomon does highlight the limitations dominating female voice in the myth, but in returning to echoes in later novels, Morrison plays more with the possibilities and powers of this disembodied, repeating feminine voice. And for a woman storyteller, a repeater of tales, this suggests an evergrowing confidence in the role of breaking silence.

Notes 1. Nellie Mcay, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danielle TaylorGuthrie (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994) 146. 2. Ashraf H.A. Rushdy, “Daughters Signifyin(g) History: The Example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” AL 64.3 (1992): 567-97. The function of Beloved as a ghost is

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than disembodied voice per se.1 1 “A colored man floats down out of the sky” in the song of his saxophone, for instance (8); Dorcas even hears a woman singing as she dies from Joe’s gunshot (193). And in Joe’s past in Virginia, he has listened to “the music the world makes, familiar to fishermen and shepherds, [and] woodsmen” (176). In this music, concentrated around a rock formation, Joe also hears a “word or two,” a “scrap of a song” (177) mixed in and knows it comes from the cave where his presumed mother, a woman dubbed Wild, lives. Joe only has heard this woman from the rocks; to him she really is “powerless, invisible, wastefully daft. Everywhere and nowhere” (179), like a mythological Echo. Wild has apparently even lived with the character who most resembles Narcissus—Golden Gray, with his flowing golden hair and meticulously cared-for clothes. Joe’s fruitless search for her, like Pan’s “hot chase” of Echo’s voice in Longus’s story (127), can only be repeated, three times in Virginia and once again when the “object” of the search is actually Dorcas.

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Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, pp. 104-20. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.

central to most critical discussion of that novel. See, for instance, Deborah Horvitz, “Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved,” SAF 17:157-67 and David Lawrence, “Fleshly Ghosts and Ghostly Flesh: The Word and the Body in Beloved,” SAF 19:189201. Critics have not, however, traced Morrison’s recurring use of gothic elements in all of her fiction, focusing more on the grotesque than an overall gothic effect. This article looks at this gothic effect in three of Morrison’s novels, especially through the device of disembodied and repetitive voice.

In the following essay, Weissberg traces Morrison’s utilization of the Gothic house as a structure of confinement in Beloved. There is a blue house that sits on this river between two bridges. One is the George Washington that my bus has just crossed from the Manhattan side, and the other is the Tappan Zee that it’s heading toward. My destination is that blue house, my objective is to tape a dialogue between myself and another black American writer, and I stepped on this bus seven years ago when I opened a slim volume entitled The Bluest Eye. Where does the first line of any novel—like any journey—actually begin? Gloria Naylor, ‘A Conversation [with Toni Morrison]’

3. Song of Solomon (New York: Knopf, 1977) 301-03. 4. Studies of myth in Song of Solomon, for example, Cynthia Davis’s “Self, Society and Myth in Toni Morrison’s Fiction,” ConL 23 (1982): 323-42, have made little mention of the Echo story, although most critics note the narcissism of the main character. No one has yet traced Morrison’s developing uses of the Echo myth. 5. The Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Boer (Dallas: Spring, 1989) 58. 6. The Story of Daphnis and Chloe, ed. and trans. W. D. Lowe (Cambridge: Deighton Bell, 1908) 127. 7. For discussions of Echo related to writing and reading see, for instance, John Brenkman, “Narcissus in the Text,” GaR 30 (1976): 293-327, John Hollander, The Figure of Echo (Berkeley: U of California P, 1981), and Susan C. Fishman, “Even as We Speak: Woman’s Voice and the Myth of Echo,” Sexuality, the Female Gaze, and the Arts (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1992). 8. “The Uncanny,” On Creativity and the Unconscious (New York: Harper, 1958) 122. 9. Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987) 172. 10. (New York: Knopf, 1992) 7. 11. The novel’s title itself makes the emphasis on music. For discussions of Morrison’s “jazzy” narrative style, see Eusebio Rodrigues, “Experiencing Jazz,” MFS 39 (1993): 733-53 and Alan J. Rice, “Jazzing It Up a Storm: The Execution and Meaning of Toni Morrison’s Jazzy Prose Style,” J Am S 28 (1994): 423-32. 12. Hollander discusses the tradition of Echo poetry that plays upon this power of communication in significantly truncated repetition (see esp. ch.III). 13. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (New York: Longman, 1980) 409-10.

TITLE COMMENTARY Beloved LILIANE WEISSBERG (ESSAY DATE 1996) SOURCE: Weissberg, Liliane. “Gothic Spaces: The Political Aspects of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited and with an introduction by

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I ‘Gothic’ has its origin as an architectural term, applied to medieval buildings marked by pointed arches and vaults. Its first use dates to the early eighteenth century, when John Evelyn censored medieval buildings in favour of classical structures, those that ‘were demolished by the Goths or Vandals, who introduced their own licentious style now called modern or Gothic’.1 Modernity, thus invented with a backward glance, is defined as an architectural landscape built upon destruction, a vandalism against proper morals, taste, and the achievements of civilisation. This invention of modernity as medieval destruction takes place at the time of the rise of the bourgeoisie. Housing structures changed. The term ‘modern’ was to accommodate concepts that excluded medieval vaults and arches, and which, indeed, relegated those features to a realm of exotic splendour. The word ‘comfort’, for example, was first applied to houses in the eighteenth century. The term shifted from the discourse of religious and legal studies to signify not simply satisfaction, but also to expand on the notion of convenience.2 According to Witold Rybszynski, Walter Scott, a historicist dreamer of medieval times, was one of the first novelists to use the word in its newly acquired sense: ‘Let it freeze without,’ he wrote, ‘we are comfortable within’ (20). ‘There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort’, Jane Austen would soon write in Emma, as Rybszynski points out (101). While Gothic architecture seemed to strive for an assimilation of the grandeur and vastness of nature and spirit, the bourgeois home, as invented in the eighteenth century, drew a clear line between the inside and the outside. Inside, one was able to find not only shelter but also thermal

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It was during the time of the redefinition of bourgeois private space that the medieval castle was rediscovered as a stage set for Gothic literature. Unlike the sheltering bourgeois home, but also unlike classical, symmetrical architecture, it does not represent the owner’s control over its space. But the medieval castle clearly represents another class of owners as well. Compared to the bourgeois house, its aristocratic inhabitant was disowned of his authority over its structure even before a political movement would stress the difference in social positions, and the different avenues of the classes’ development. In an aristocrat’s house, the bourgeois owner would now suspect, anything could happen. Even ghosts could appear. A Gothic building, as it survived in its representational form, and as it was represented in fiction, was simply unsuitable for the idea of home. Homes, however, were proper housing for the individuals of the eighteenth-century middle class. Not only comfort and privacy were promoted, but domesticity as well, which, in turn, became increasingly feminised. As work and living spaces separated, and work divided according to gender lines, the house became the woman’s domain. ‘Und drinnen waltet / Die züchtige Hausfrau’, Friedrich Schiller was eager to explain what was already widely accepted as true.3 In the Gothic novels of the eighteenth century, however, this power over the inside space, the authority of walten, was not given to women. Women rather suffered as the victims and captives of their male and often foreign persecutors. Ironically, this may have been a more precise account of the female social position and struggle for rights at that time than Schiller’s idealisation, as the house’s comforts were also established by a devaluation of women’s work. Compared to the money that buys comfort, comfort’s maintenance is a secondary task. As Clara Reeves and Ann Radcliffe, but also as many male authors, knew, not just the novel, but

precisely the Gothic novel became the fantasy space in which to explore women’s roles and the feminine.4 The idea of modernity as related to bourgeois houses was not created by the backward glance, but by the idea of new acquisition and progress. Money, earned outside, bought comfort, and new objects contributed to the comfort and gave evidence of how a house could be put to the inhabitant’s service. Privacy had to be protected, and the collection of objects, reified goods, provided such a protection as well. Instead of a person leaving the house, the world could symbolically enter. Because their presence itself would thus provide a usefulness of comfort, eighteenthcentury collections encompassed objects of Gothic interiors as well, which, at the same time, seemed to have lost their meaning or sense of purpose in this context. The Gothic, once constructed, could be fragmented, imitated, fetishised. Indeed, Gothic elements were eclectically collected, and integrated into the new and more intimate space. The move to establish the uncanny was countered by the move to make it familiar in the bourgeois’ own way: by economic appropriation.

II The idea of the modern bourgeois home did not remain a European invention. It was imported to the American Colonies, and it has survived on either continent well into the twentieth century. A house as a home is, indeed, a recognisable commodity. It can be multiplied in the construction of neighborhood developments, or reduced to the outward simplicity of a child’s drawing. In its deceptive simplicity, it can gain symbolic meaning and indicate the lifestyle of its dwellers. Introduced into a school primer, for example, a sketch of such a home would not only tell of the building’s material and looks, but also of the individuals occupying it: Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the greenand-white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play. Who will play with Jane?5

This house, built for the nuclear family, tells of the regular income of its adult inhabitants, their sense of order, and their acceptance of an American way of life as a celebration of middle-class values. The description is also generic enough to be recognised by young readers as a reference to their own home. Housing is translated into a familiar concept that would help to overcome the

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content; the inside provided protection against outside spaces filled with potentially hostile forces. In contrast to the bourgeois house, a medieval one offered fewer rooms; rooms were not yet designated for specific functions. The limited space did not acknowledge individual needs, and furniture was largely temporary. For the eighteenth-century bourgeois, the coldness and the emptiness of medieval spaces could signify discomfort only. With the separation of work and living quarters, rooms that allowed for privacy, the eighteenth-century bourgeois was, as an individual, able to construct an alternative life— the comfort of the ‘inside’.

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strangeness of the letters, and promote the learning of a new skill. This primer’s modern house is both a lesson in reading, and a confirmation of values. For those whose house does not resemble this picture, it is a lesson in acculturation. The description of Dick and Jane’s house serves as the beginning of Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye. Published in 1970, the novel turns to the 1940s to describe the life of Black families in the small town of Lorain, Ohio, struggling to come close to the bourgeois ideals that the primer promotes. These ideals, however, are defined by a society not only divided by class, but also by race. There is a jarring difference between the whiteand-green house of the textbook, and the decaying storefront building on the southeast corner of Broadway and Thirty-fifth Street in which the Breedlove family lives. There is a jarring difference, too, between the ideal of beauty promoted by Greta Garbo or Ginger Rogers, and the looks of the little black girls who are compared with them (10). Drinking milk from her Shirley Temple cup, young Pecola Breedlove dreams of having blue eyes. The movie screen, the Shirley Temple cup, and Dick and Jane’s house turn in Morrison’s novel into facades that cover the social inequity, and translate the notion of home into a bourgeois concept that is part of a racially determined aesthetics. If you cannot change your looks, why try to change your house? We are told that the Breedloves accept their house and social standing because they admit to their ugliness (28). The inside of the Breedlove’s storefront residence resonates with an almost medieval oneroom lifestyle: The plan of the living quarters was as unimaginative as a first-generation Greek landlord could contrive it to be. The large ‘store’ area was partitioned into two rooms by beaverboard planks that did not reach to the ceiling. There was a living room, which the family called the front room, and the bedroom, where all the living was done . . . In the center of the bedroom, for the even distribution of heat, stood a coal stove. Trunks, chairs, a small end table, and a cardboard ‘wardrobe’ closet were placed around the walls. The kitchen was in the back of this apartment, a separate room. There were no bath facilities. Only a toilet bowl, inaccessible to the eye, if not the ear, of the tenants. (25)

Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life. The threat of being outdoors surfaced frequently in those days. Every possibility of excess was curtailed with it. If somebody are too much, he could end up outdoors. If somebody used too much coal, he could end up outdoors. People could gamble themselves outdoors, drink themselves outdoors . . . To be put outdoors by a landlord was one thing—unfortunate, but an aspect of life over which you had no control, since you could not control your income. But to be slack enough to put oneself outdoors, or heartless enough to put one’s own kin outdoors—that was criminal. There is a difference between being put out and being put outdoors. If you are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go. The distinction was subtle but final. Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing our metaphysical condition. (11)

This transformation of a home by vandalism may have little to do with the modernity of the Gothic; the Breedlove’s home is hardly a classical structure, nor is it replaced by a contemporary one. The ruin stands, confirming the difference between rich and poor, white and black, property owner and renter, and the act of drunken protest. Only seemingly, race provides a dividing line that cuts through class distinctions. As the dominant model of beauty and the Breedlove’s acceptance of their ugliness shows, the bourgeois ideals are defined for and by white people. Indeed, part of the Breedlove’s tragedy is their acceptance of bourgeois values that leads to schizophrenia and self-annihilation. This is shown, quite poignantly, already in the comparison of houses. Morrison’s novel Beloved begins with the description of a house as well:

Clearly, this house does not offer any possibility of privacy. The distinction between inside and outside is, however, important nevertheless: to rent, or even to own, a house designates stability and social standing. To own or care for property

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is, moreover, central to the bourgeois ideal. While the green-and-white house may never be within reach, burning down the house in which one lived, as Pecola’s father, Cholly Breedlove, does, is not just arson, but a crime of larger proportions:

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old—as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard).6

The house number, representing the building metonymically, acquires a life of its own. Each of the three sections of the novel begins, moreover,

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Snatched just as the slaves were from one place to another, without preparation and without defense. No lobby, no door, no entrance—a gangplank, perhaps (but a very short one). And the house into which this snatching—this kidnapping—propels one, changes from spiteful to loud to quiet, as the sounds in the body of the ship itself may have changed. A few words have to be read before it is clear that 124 refers to a house (in most of the early drafts ‘The women in the house knew it’ was simply ‘The Women knew it’. House was not mentioned for seventeen lines, and a few more have to be read to discover why it is spiteful, or rather the source of the spite.7

The reader is made to arrive at the house much as the protagonists do for whom 124 is, however, a dwelling of choice. ‘124’ as a number constitutes an address, and therefore a desired property. But it contrasts sharply with Dick and Jane’s house in the primer, too, reducing the description of a home to a series of ciphers that cannot, from the outset, refer to any comfort and intimacy. Preoccupied with the house’s actions, the reader is not directed towards its looks. The ‘posture of coziness’ is,8 indeed, suggested by another building’s name in this novel, that of the Southern plantation ‘Sweet Home’. The Garner family, owners of ‘Sweet Home’, insist that the members of their plantation live and work in a harmonious family setting, and that their slaves are treated as paid labourers. Indeed, the sweetness of their home seems to become their inhabitants’ attributes: ‘Mrs Garner put down her cooking spoon. Laughing a little, she touched Sethe on the head, saying, “You are one sweet child”. And then no more’ (26). Sethe came to ‘Sweet Home’ as a young girl and she is the only female slave on the plantation. At ‘Sweet Home’, Sethe ‘marries’ Halle Suggs, and bears him two sons and a daughter. When Mr Garner dies, his brother, ‘schoolteacher’, and two nephews take over the plantation. Similar to the movies’ false images in The Bluest Eye, the Garners’ home reveals now the cruel character that it always had. Sethe realises her own role as a breeder and as an object without rights that would be available for the nephews’ sexual assault. Trying to save her children from a similar fate, she sends them ahead to their freed grandmother Baby Suggs and flees herself, giving birth to her fourth child, Denver, during the escape. But the schoolteacher follows her, and finds her hiding

place. Unwilling to send her children into slavery, Sethe decides to kill them, and indeed kills her older daughter, the ‘crawling already?’ child. While she is punished for her deed, she can also survive with her other three children and Baby Suggs in freedom and later move to 124. Halle, a traumatised witness of the nephews’ sexual advances on Sethe, will never join her. As the novel opens, 124 is already a house of women. Both sons have left. But it is the visit of Paul D., a freed ‘Sweet Home’ man, who provokes Sethe’s memories of the past. These reflections centre again and again on the dead child. Perhaps it is also this child that turns 124 into a haunted house, which personifies this house, breaking the family further apart. This is 124’s prehistory: Each one fled at once—the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn’t have a number then, because Cincinnati didn’t stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them. (3-4)

124 continues to resist the move of the city to integrate houses into neighbourhoods and ‘stretch out’. It thrives on its isolation, just as it is about to be geographically integrated into a community by receiving a number. Sethe, although in freedom, is shunned by her neighbours because of the murder of her child. Combining references to the family history with American History, Morrison is able to give the house a life of its own. 124 is no green-andwhite house, but one of the greyish color that corresponds to the Breedlove’s storefront building. By being haunted by a child, and by acting like a child, 124 is both familiar and defamiliarised—an uncanny actor that rules over its inhabitants. With Paul D.’s arrival, there comes the hope that a semblance of family life could be restored, and that the ghost could be banned. But the past is not only resurrected by Paul D.’s arrival and in narratives. A new person appears, with the name Beloved: A fully dressed woman walked out of the water. She barely gained the dry bank of the stream before she sat down and leaned against a mulberry tree. All day and all night she sat there, her head resting on the trunk in a position abandoned

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with a reference to 124 in which the house turns from being ‘spiteful’ to ‘loud’, and, finally, to ‘quiet’ (3, 169, 239). Morrison comments on the beginning of her novel as a conscious effort to start in medias res:

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enough to crack the brim in her straw hat . . . It took her the whole of the next morning to lift herself from the ground and make her way through the woods past a giant temple of boxwood to the field and then the yard of the slategray house. Exhausted again, she sat down on the first handy place—a stump not far from the steps of 124 . . . Women who drink champagne when there is nothing to celebrate can look like that: their straw hats with broken brims are often askew; they nod in public places; their shoes are undone. But their skin is not like that of the woman breathing near the steps of 124. She had new skin, lineless and smooth, including the knuckles of her hands. (50)

The newness of Beloved’s skin is as puzzling as her curious mixture of wisdom and ignorance. There is the rumour that a black girl had been kept imprisoned in one of the nearby houses, and Beloved acts indeed like a prisoner freed. Her body, as well as her behaviour, give rise, however, to the suspicion that it is not only the name that connects this Beloved to Sethe’s dead daughter. Indeed, ‘Beloved’ is the only word written on the ‘crawling already?’ baby’s tomb stone, the only word Sethe was able to buy by selling her body to the engraver; the word became thus the baby’s name. After Beloved enters Sethe’s house, the baby ghost and the building seem to commence separate existences. Gaining physical presence, however, Beloved can both recall and provide a link to a past that Sethe previously tried to suppress. Beloved, pushing Paul D. aside in Sethe’s affection, but finally being sent away by him, turns the novel less into an investigation about her identity, but about Sethe’s and her family’s history. ‘She was my best thing’ (272) Sethe says after Beloved leaves, stressing the bond between her and the young woman. This bond is reflected again in her relationship to Baby Suggs, her stepmother Nan, and her mother of whom she only knows that she arrived from Africa. In a conversation with Gloria Naylor, Morrison cites two sources for her novel.9 One was a newspaper clipping from 1851 that referred to Margaret Garner, a slave from Kentucky who escaped and killed one of her children; Garner stated when interviewed that she did not want her children to return to slavery. Morrison had come across her story while collecting material for The Black Book, a collection of writings on Black history and culture that she edited in 1974.1 0 Next to the story of this ‘serene young woman’,1 1 Morrison claims to have been struck by the photographs in James Van Der Zee’s collection, The Har-

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lem Book of the Dead, for which she wrote the foreword.1 2 Van Der Zee’s pictures feature dead loved ones in peculiar poses: a dead baby in the arms of its parents, or a fully dressed person in a coffin. To give the dead a semblance of life has an artistic tradition that extends the use of photography in the Black community.1 3 Van der Zee, however, found a special variation for this genre. He worked not only with touch-ups, but also with double exposures. In addition to floating lines of scripture and poetry, many of his pictures also show angels and the Christ image. Photography, as the art of shadows, develops with Van der Zee in the art of religious ghosts, reminding the viewer of the comforting presence of the otherwise invisible divine. Van Der Zee’s angels, as well as the Christ figure, are, moreover, white and ‘conventional’ images of Christian religion. Van Der Zee articulates implicitly already a confrontation of white and black reality and religion that Morrison will rewrite and rephrase in her own work. One of the photographs shows an eighteenyear-old girl who was shot by her jealous lover, and who chose to help him escape rather than save her own life.1 4 Morrison explains: I had about fifteen or twenty questions that occurred to me with those two stories in terms of what it is that really compels a good woman to displace the self, her self. So what I started doing and thinking about for a year was to project the self not into the way we say ‘yourself’, but to put a space between those words, as though the self were really a twin or a thirst or a friend or something that sits right next to you and watches you, which is what I was talking about when I said ‘the dead girl’ . . . So I just imagined the life of a dead girl which was the girl that Margaret Garner killed, the baby girl that she killed.1 5

This space is also one of geographical distance. But the distance between Kentucky and Harlem, New York, parallels a temporal one. It is a distance of historical significance for Black people, that separates the plantation South from the abolitionist North. South to North is Sethe’s route of escape, leading her from Kentucky’s ‘Sweet Home’ to Cincinnati. It is not Van Der Zee’s photograph but rather Margaret Garner’s interview that renders a voice to the muted past. Garner’s story is, first of all, a slave’s history, framed by the newspaper text as the Breedlove’s story is framed by quotations from the school primer, the words of which run together and form fragmented sentences, introducing every section of The Bluest Eye. Beloved reworks Garner’s slave history in a collage of poetry, dreams, past and current stories, to reconstruct a memory that would lead beyond

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III How is it possible, however, for a slave narrative and a Gothic tale to come together? Slave narratives, recorded since the late eighteenth century, were often dictated to white writers, and always edited and published by them. White editors vouched for their authenticity. Often very brief, these narratives are statements presenting a victim’s point of view, a route of suffering that would lead from inhuman conditions to a better, if not always fully emancipated, way of life. Unlike confessions, these autobiographies do not describe a conversion due to an inner revelation. The slave’s life and Bildung is entirely dependent on the economic conditions of his or her white surrounding, and his or her possibilities of protest and escape. The genre of the document is based on the written word. Slave narratives strive to be documents. Though the slave’s story is often told to the editor/writer rather than written, the narrative retains formulaic conventions that are familiar to the readers of literature. Part of the success of slave stories lies in the fact that they were recorded by white men for readers who came from a white tradition.1 6 In her reworking of the slave narrative in Beloved, Morrison, in contrast, gives preference to the oral word. This is the tradition that she herself remembers as uniquely hers, but also as the tradition that the Black community can and should reclaim.1 7 According to Morrison, oral literature is openended, it asks for participation, and thrives on narratives of dreams, myths, and folkloric elements that can be traced back to African roots. This ‘oral’ literature may provide the voice of the slave that had been silenced in the slave narratives, turn Garner’s story from a third-person into a first-person narrative. In changing perspectives, it may introduce an alternative tale that, as fiction, may bear more experiential truth. For Morrison, this change focuses, above all, on the woman’s voice. Although doubly silenced by the white Western tradition, black women emerge in Morrison’s tale as persons of special strength. They are able to take action, and their government of the house finds its limitation not

in black male power, but only in the white system. In a conversation with Rosemarie Lester, Morrison insists that black women, having always been mother and labourer at the same time, are better suited to feminist demands.1 8 The ghost in Beloved, who is female, too, relates particularly well to the female members of the household. The novel proves that the supernatural is not truly alien, but that it takes the black women’s side against white power. It represents Sethe’s family and the historical past. In the novel, it also introduces with Sethe’s story a history that may have been repressed by blacks, but that the white slaveholders and masters attempted to sever and obliterate. For Walter Scott, history had been represented by the visual backdrop of British castles and Highland costumes; they provided a distance between the fictional world and that of his readers that provided the freedom and licence of the historicising effort. For novelists like Clara Reeve or Horace Walpole, the historicising was disrupted by supernatural elements that, introduced as accidental, established order by a denial of a continuum of events that would be shaped by their protagonists. Radcliffe’s psychologising makes it clear to what extent the supernatural countered the historical. In Morrison, the supernatural is able to strengthen the position of the person who encounters it—the woman who encounters the female ghost. Fingerprints tell of the presence of unknown beings. Furniture moved or any other action taken by invisible powers echo the Gothic tradition. These signs and actions disrupt the continuum of events and disturb the sense of comfort. Sethe’s sons, Howard and Buglar, know of this and flee. For the women who stay on, however, the supernatural is, far from being ahistorical, a reintroduction of history, the sign of memory that takes physical shape with the appearance of Beloved. The women in 124 seem to realise that the figures add up to the magic number seven; they accept the ghost because the house is really theirs: ‘It’s a feminine concept—things happening in a room, a house. That’s where we live, in houses. Men don’t live in those houses, they really don’t.’1 9 Living in a space that is feminised, women do not only become the bearers of children but also the bearer of history through their memory, or, as Morrison calls it, rememory. Sethe explains to her daughter Denver: I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there.

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an individual’s tale as a recovery of the AfroAmerican past. It is in this sense, that Samuels and Hudson-Weems called Beloved ‘a ghost story about history’ (135). In picturing the dead, Morrison constructs a language to make the past visible.

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If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place— the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened. (35-6)

Elsewhere, Morrison writes that rememory designates ‘a journey to a site to see what remains have been left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply’.2 0 Memory itself is understood as geographical space.

IV One has only to compare recent novels by Stephen King with Toni Morrison’s invocation of the supernatural to see a similarity of motifs; the dead come to life in both, and haunt the living. The ambiguity of the motif of a ghost’s appearance cannot be denied. This may, on the one hand, prove the limitations of the study of motifs. On the other hand, however, it may also tell much about Morrison’s craft and the attractiveness of her work for a wider audience of black as well as white readers. While Morrison insists on introducing Black voices, she has also been trained in British and American literature and wrote a master’s thesis on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, the latter no stranger to the Gothic tradition. Introducing Beloved in Beloved, Morrison is, indeed, not only restoring Black history via Black folklore, but also reworking the white tradition of Gothic literature in writing the history of its ghosts. But Morrison’s use of the Gothic does more than that. While treating slaves as invisible spirits, American plantation homes—like ‘Sweet Home’—are described as Gothic settings that feature slaves as invisible Blacks. Ghosts, therefore, do not signify the limitations of a white man’s power, but a social order that relies on their presence. Morrison’s reframing is, therefore, a political one, and it has consequences not only for the contemporary Black novel, but also for a new evaluation of the British literature of the past. In an essay on the place of the Afro-American experience within the literary canon, Morrison discusses white American literature and the AfroAmerican response. She argues for a rereading of texts by white authors to discover the ‘unspeakable things unspoken’, ‘a search, in other words, for the ghost in the machine’.2 1 In this essay, shattered mirrors or finger prints are not only signs of a Beloved, but also the signs of a different voice within American literature. This voice is, indeed,

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scarcely recorded yet, because it was deprived of the traditional letter, a claim to visibility that ghosts as well as oral literature cannot fulfill. AfroAmerican literature, moreover, is not simply housed within American literature, as the Breedlove family lives in the Greek landlord’s house. Nor does it occupy a very separate realm, as Pecola’s mother would suggest when she bars her daughter’s entry into the kitchen of her white employers. Afro-American literature responds to the white tradition in and by subversion; by a renaming and retelling of the story. In Beloved, examples for this renaming are given by individual protagonists. Stamp Paid, who helps Sethe in her escape, has given himself his name after he had to offer his wife to their white master. Baby Suggs rejects the name Jenny, stated on her slave bill, and calls herself by the name her husband had given her. Naming the house by its number only, 124, resonates with the renaming of geographical places elsewhere in Morrison’s novels. In Sula (1973), for example, the black community calls their neighbourhood on the hill ‘Bottom’, and knows about the ‘No Mercy Hospital’ and the ‘Not Doctor Street’.2 2 In her interviews, Morrison describes her work as ‘village literature’,2 3 consciously turning back from the city to a community many Blacks experienced before moving ‘North’.2 4 Her ‘village’ is dependent on a linguistic community, and this linguistic understanding relies on references to the ancestral past, common experiences, as well as verbal action. While the act of renaming and naming is achieved by the Black author, the white and the black reader may read differently. Morrison quotes an early paragraph from The Bluest Eye that follows the excerpt from the primer: The Bluest Eye begins ‘Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.’ The sentence, like the one that open each succeeding book, is simple, uncomplicated. Of all the sentences that begin all the books, only two of them have dependent clauses; the other three are simple sentences and two are stripped down to virtually subject, verb, modifier. Nothing fancy here. No words need looking up; they are ordinary, everyday words. Yet I hoped the simplicity was not simply-minded, but devious, even loaded. And that the process of selecting each word, for itself and its relationship to the others in the sentence, along with the rejection of others for their echoes, for what is determined and what is not determined, what is almost there and what must be gleaned, would not theatricalise itself, would not erect a proscenium—at least not a noticeable one.2 5

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If I could understand Emily Dickinson—you know, she wasn’t writing for a Black audience or a white audience; she was writing whatever she wrote! I think if you do that, if you hone in on what you write, it will be universal . . . not the other way around!2 6

On the one hand, Morrison accepts the idea of universal literature. On the other hand, Morrison suggests, white readers may realise the deviousness of her novel’s first sentence, but not the whisper, smoothing over the differences to adjust to an ideal of universal literature. What Morrison is struggling with, and at times with contradictory statements, is the notion of a universal literature to be gained in the face of difference. The relationship of the ‘universal’ to ‘difference’, the peculiarity of a different voice that tries to subvert what it responds to, remains unclear. Africans have many words for yam, Morrison repeats in her interviews, seemingly exposing the universal as a simplifying and unifying measure of a white invention.2 7 In an interview with Elsie Washington, Morrison insists that ‘black’ is no longer something one is born as, but a choice, a ‘mindset’.2 8 White readers, in an act of bleaching purification, may indeed be tempted to read Morrison’s reworking of a British tradition as a deafening act to prove that tradition’s primacy. In the case of Beloved, Margaret Atwood may be such a reader in point. Her review of the book mentions neither the specificity of a Black novelistic tradition, nor does she refer to Morrison as a black woman author. Entitling her piece ‘Haunted by their Nightmares’, Atwood evaluates the novel with a simple account and counting that supersedes that of 124:

watch-me-make-your-flesh-creep mode, but with magnificent practicality, like the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights’ (143), and she finally applauds: ‘Students of the supernatural will admire the way this twist is handled’ (146).3 0 Sometimes, it seems, the Gothic may offer the more familiar house.

Notes I would like to thank Morgan & Morgan Press for permission to reproduce James Van Der Zee’s photograph, published in The Harlem Book of the Dead. 1. J. Evelyn, 1702; quoted in ‘Gothic’, Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edn (1910). 2. Witold Rybczinski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), p. 20. 3. ‘And the virtuous house wife rules inside.’ Friedrich Schiller, ‘Das Lied von der Glocke’, stanza 8, 29-30. 4. In this context, I would like to refer to Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse’s forthcoming study on American captivity tales and the ‘origin’ of the British novel. I believe that the Gothic novel in particular explores the captivity theme as a gendered one. 5. T. Morrison, The Bluest Eye (London: Chatto & Windus, 1979), p. 1. 6. T. Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), p. 3. 7. T. Morrison, ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,’ in Harold Bloom (ed.), Toni Morrison (ser.) Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1990), pp. 228-9. 8. Morrison, ‘Unspeakable,’ p. 228. 9. G. Naylor and T. Morrison: ‘A Conversation’, The Southern Review 21 (1985), pp. 583-5. 10. Published by Random House, Marylin Sanders Mobley points out rightly that a copy of the news article, entitled ‘A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child’, appears on p. 10 of Morrison’s anthology; see Mobley, ‘A Different Remembering: Memory, History and Meaning in Toni Morrison’s Beloved’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Toni Morrison (ser.) Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1990), p. 190. Ironically, Wilfrid D. Samuels and Clenora Hudson-Weems insist that Garner’s story was not included, but that Morrison ‘saved’ it for her novel; see Wilfrid D. Samuels and Clenora Hudson-Weems, Toni Morrison (Boston: Twayne, 1990), p. 95. 11. Morrison in Naylor, ‘Conversation’, p. 583.

Beloved is Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, and another triumph. Indeed, Ms Morrison’s versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a preeminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest. In three words or less, it’s a hair-raiser.2 9

And Atwood continues: ‘The supernatural element is treated, not in an ‘Amityville Horror’,

12. J. Van Der Zee, Owen Dodson, and Camille Bishop, The Harlem Book of the Dead (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Morgan & Morgan, 1978). 13. See Stanley Burns, Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America (Altadena, CA: Twelvetrees Press, 1991). 14. Van Der Zee, Harlem Book of the Dead, p. 53; see illustration. 15. Morrison in Naylor, ‘Conversation’, p. 585.

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Morrison continues, however, to describe this beginning not just as a devious simplicity, but also as the indication of ‘illicit gossip’, ‘whisper’, ‘oral language’, ‘comprehension as in-joke for some’ (218-19) that defines for her Black literature. In her interviews, Morrison does not deny white critics the ability to read and interpret Black literature, in the same way as she herself insists on a reading of Faulkner or Emily Dickinson and an understanding of these authors’ positions:

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16. This is, of course, played out in Morrison’s citation of the school primer in The Bluest Eye, as Michael Awkward rightly observes. See his ‘Roadblocks and Relatives: Critical Revision in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye’, in Nelly McKey (ed.), Critical Essays on Toni Morrison (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), p. 59. 17. See Christina Davis, ‘Interview with Toni Morrison’, Presence Africaine. New Bilingual Series 145, 1 (1988), pp. 144-9. 18. R. K. Lester, ‘An Interview with Toni Morrison, Hessian Radio Network, Frankfurt/M, West Germany’, in Nellie Y. McKay (ed.), Critical Essays on Toni Morrison (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), pp. 48-9. 19. M. Watkins, ‘Talk with Toni Morrison’, New York Times Book Review, 11 September 1977 (New York: Arno Press, 1978), p. 50. In an interview with Robert B. Stepto, Morrison insists on ‘a woman’s strong sense of being in a room, a place, or in a house’; ‘“Intimate Things in a Place”: A Conversation with Toni Morrison’, in Michael S. Harper, and Robert B. Stepto (eds.), Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 212. See also the interview with Rosemarie Lester in regard to girls’ and boys’ different relationship to architecture and space (p. 47), and Morrison’s own rearranging of space to save her writing in the presence of her own sons: Jane Bakerman, ‘“The Seams Can’t Show”: An Interview with Toni Morrison’, Black American Literature Forum 12, 2 (1978), p. 57. 20. Morrison, ‘The Site of Memory,’ in William Zinsser (ed.), Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 113. See also Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, ‘“Rememory”: Primal Scenes and Constructions in Toni Morrison’s Novels’, Contemporary Literature 31, 3 (1990), pp. 300-23, and Susan Willis, ‘Eruptions of Funk: Historicising Toni Morrison’, Black American Literature Forum 16, 1 (1982), pp. 3442. In an interview with Elizabeth Kastor, ‘Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” Country’, The Washington Post, 5 October 1987, B 12, Morrison defines ‘speculation’ as the novelist’s task; he/she does what the (professional) historian, concentrating on ‘ages’, ‘issues’, and ‘great men’ is unable to do. ‘Rememory’ is, quite obviously, such a speculation. 21. Morrison, ‘Unspeakable’, p. 210. 22. C. A. Davis discusses Morrison’s use of names and naming in her essay ‘Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison’s Fiction’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Toni Morrison, Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1990), pp. 7-8. 23. See, for example, Tom LeClair, ‘An Interview with Toni Morrison’, Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 253; and Ntozake Shange with Steve Connon, ‘Interview with Toni Morrison’, American Rag, November 1978, p. 52. See also Morrison’s essay ‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation’, in Mari Evans (ed.), Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1984), pp. 339-45. 24. See the discussion in Houston Baker, Jr, Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing (University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 137, and Morri-

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son’s essay ‘City Limits, Village Values’, in Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts (eds.), Literature and the Urban Experience (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981), pp. 35-43. 25. Morrison, ‘Unspeakable’, p. 218. 26. J. Bakerman, ‘The Seams Can’t Show’, p. 59. 27. See Tom LeClair, ‘An Interview with Toni Morrison’, p. 259; and Claudia Tate, ‘Toni Morrison’, in Claudia Tate (ed.), Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1983), pp. 123-4. 28. E. Washington, interview with Morrison, Essence (October 1987), p. 136. 29. M. Atwood, ‘Haunted by Their Nightmares’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Toni Morrison (ser.) Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1990), p. 143; the review appeared first in the New York Times Book Review, 13 September 1987, 1, pp. 49-50. 30. See also Judith Thurman’s description of Beloved as a ‘ghost story,’ in ‘A House Divided’, The New Yorker, 2 November 1987, 175, or Thomas R. Edwards, ‘Ghost Story’, The New York Review of Books, 5 November 1987, p. 18.

R. CLIFTON SPARGO (ESSAY DATE MARCH 2002) SOURCE: Spargo, R. Clifton. “Trauma and the Specters of Enslavement in Morrison’s Beloved.” Mosaic 35, no. 1 (March 2002): 113-31. In the following essay, Spargo considers how, in Beloved, Morrison “uses the Gothic apparatus to invoke the specter of trauma” to produce a narrative that offers the therapeutic benefits of a protagonist’s journey back inside, through, and ultimately outside of her traumatic past.

In the literary world populated by ghosts that eventually became synonymous with the Gothic tradition, the plot of haunting figures its social concerns as metaphysical matters, even to the point where the dramatic spectacle of the ghost makes it hard to trace the social meaning of which it is a spectral emanation. The social relevance of the ghost seems especially obsolete when the haunting coincides with a narrative of fatalism, as if the one who experiences the ghost and the one who suffers history must alike submit to a symbolic social order overdetermined by the spirits of ancestry and cast too strongly in the die of the past. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, through its turn to Gothic tradition, recovers an untold history of suffering, which seems both the product of such an overdetermined past and a criticism of our conventional historical narratives. As Valerie Smith has argued, Morrison’s method of circling her story back upon itself marks a suspicion about the “limits of hegemonic, authoritarian systems of knowledge” (346). But it also marks, within the world of the story, the characters’ inability to

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Bhabha’s use of psychoanalytic categories veers so close to the contemporary discourse of trauma as to make him complicitous—say, from the perspective of empiricist-minded critics who yield to the trauma all the status they would grant a ghost—with the trauma’s most unreasonable tendencies. Lived as a resistance to an empirically conceived realism about persons, events, and, most significantly, time itself, trauma is a phenomenon that violently interrupts the present tense of consciousness, occurring for the first time only by being repeated. By virtue of this structure of repetition, trauma poses a challenge to historical knowledge, since it is always the symptomology of trauma that one confronts and never the event itself, much as it is always the lack of knowledge that perpetuates the traumatic effect. As an excess or afterlife of the event, trauma refers to an act not yet encountered—as it were, to a specter of the past. To the extent that it testifies, to borrow Cathy Caruth’s phrase, to “a reality or truth that is otherwise not available” (4), the trauma depends by definition on the inadequacy of our knowledge in the present order. For this very reason, the trauma has come to function for many critics as a trope of access to more difficult histories, providing us with entry into a world inhabited by the victims of extraordinary social violences, those perspectives so often left out of rational, progressive narratives of history. Indeed, in this respect the trauma functions rather as a ghost of rationality, that which announces a history haunting the very possibility of history. The problem, to recuperate Bhabha’s conceit, may partly be conceived as a question of whether

FROM THE AUTHOR AN EXCERPT FROM THE CONCLUSION OF BELOVED

It was not a story to pass on. So they forgot her. Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep. Occasionally, however, the rustle of a skirt hushes when they wake, and the knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seem to belong to the sleeper. Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative—looked at too long—shifts, and something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can touch it if they like, but don’t, because they know things will never be the same if they do. This is not a story to pass on. Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there. By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss. Beloved.

SOURCE: Morrison, Toni. An excerpt from Beloved, pp. 323-24. New York: Vintage, 1987.

one stands inside or outside of traumatic history. In the case of Beloved, this is a question already pronounced by Morrison’s revisionings of the Gothic and its rather fluid dualism, articulated, on the one hand, in the demand that we participate imaginatively in events beyond the scope or confidence of reason and, on the other, in a call for us to offer our resistances in the service of rationality and to demystify the story’s supernatural logic. Much as therapists observe traumatic phenomena from the outside, we might argue that

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become adequate to a historical sense of themselves and thus to trace the social meanings behind their sufferings—a point made all too clearly when Paul D becomes frustrated with Sethe’s inability to offer a linear, rational account of herself. Part of the problem, as Homi Bhabha has suggested, is that Sethe cannot construct herself by means of a teleological social narrative in which she would figure as an agent who chooses her own actions, and so, in Bhabha’s view, we are forced to read the inwardness of the slave world from the outside—that is, through the ghostly returning memory of Sethe’s infanticide (16-18). Like many readers of Beloved, Bhabha views this ghostly return as intimating a reclamation of Sethe’s voice and a restoration of an interpersonal social reality eclipsed by the fatalism of slavery, so that history survives beyond the question of its overt visibility, if only in the “deepest resources of our amnesia, of our unconsciousness” (18).

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history arises not so much from traumatic consciousness as from those allegorical significances existing just beyond the characters’ selfconsciousness. In this view, the historically minded reader performs an act of intellectual intervention by restoring the sufferer of trauma to a more reasonable narrative. Yet such an intervention, modelled on the therapist’s compassionate but critical listening, runs the risk of conceiving of history as finally in opposition to the private pathologies of history’s victims. By contrast, Caruth espouses a reading of the trauma from within the structure of its symptomology, so that history speaks meaningfully through a content that we might not otherwise acknowledge, through the repetitions and pathology of the trauma. Strictly speaking, Caruth assigns trauma a meaning absent from Freud, who steadfastly insists upon an act of remembrance capable of dispelling the grip of the past on present consciousness. For Freud, as for the empirical historian, history must be built upon the possibility of an intervention, an intervention that develops as a reasonable and even compassionate opposition to the trauma. It is upon the difficult premise of such an intervention in traumatic history that I focus in this essay. Although a number of critical readings of Beloved, such as Homi Bhabha’s, cause us to focus our attention on the obliquity of a testimonial voice emerging in spite of violent repression, or (according to a reading through trauma) perhaps because of it, such readings speak impossibly from the inside of the trauma as a way of filling in history. This is to bypass the empiricist problem as also the therapist’s concern, with its focus on the peculiar relation an indirect and incapable consciousness—which is to say, a traumatized one— bears to history. Among those who have brought the trauma to bear on questions of history, Dominick LaCapra has perhaps been most insistent on listening to trauma from the hitherside of the therapist’s couch, privileging a rationality that remains outside the trauma. The therapist, as also the good student of history, should experience an “unsettlement” that is also “empathic,” yet, as a lesson for history, the trauma will become meaningful, in LaCapra’s account, only once it has been worked through (to use Freud’s idiom); and so, in his own brief reading of Beloved, LaCapra gives heavy emphasis to the exorcism of Beloved’s ghost as the moment in which community finds its place. If LaCapra’s approach seems thoroughly reasonable, it may nevertheless be difficult to maintain such sensible interpretive strategies in

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relation to the history offered in Beloved. This is so because Morrison has so closely configured the history she recovers with the evidence of the trauma itself. As Beloved opens toward abandoned history, Morrison demands that her readers encounter characters who inhabit history through the symptomology of trauma, apart from and before the acts of imaginative or rational intervention through which we might return them to a myth of American progress that we have made the equivalent of reason itself. Beloved is a novel especially hard on a history so conceived precisely because the benevolence of our reason and the possibility of intervention suppose a separation from—and by definition, an opposition to—the very phenomena upon which we would focus our attention. Just as there is a cynicism that may occur from outside the trauma in the name of reason—say, as the indifference to those people or events that do not fulfill the general progress of society—there is also a cynicism that may occur from inside suffering. Throughout the novel, we are made to wonder whether the symptoms of haunting necessarily contest history conceived as a narrative of subjects with the capacity to intervene in their own and others’ histories. By figuring the recovery of history as an involuntary or traumatic phenomenon, and by suggesting that characters inhabit such a history at the expense of their own freedom, Morrison enacts a fundamental tension between the history of injustice that needs to be recorded and remembered and an ethics of corrective action that hovers, if only spectrally, over the imaginative moment of our witness. We live in a land where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future in which immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is clean. The past is absent or it’s romanticized. This culture doesn’t encourage dwelling on, let alone coming to terms with, the truth about the past.” This is Morrison from a 1988 interview (10-11), describing the myth of America as a land that cancels all debts in the name of freedom and its imagined privileges, yielding to the past only what it will give back to an understanding that cooperates with the freedoms of the future. Despite its etymology, we often give to understanding the very character of an action, that is, a modality of knowledge that intervenes in the past and so resolves the claims it makes on present consciousness. Having provided the condition for moral decisions and actions in the present, once our understanding makes the past serve a present course of thought and action, it puts to rest and,

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With his interventionist understanding of the trauma, LaCapra is highly dubious of any hermeneutics that promotes the excesses of traumatic experience as significations of the real itself, worrying that such a system of thought veers toward a negative sublime that may have affinities with theories of sacrificial violence and even with the Nazi belief in regenerative violence (Representing 100-10; Writing 92-95). Though he is suspicious of redemptive narratives in which the suffering of others becomes uplifting or central to the identity formation of a person or group, LaCapra nevertheless embraces the narrative progress entailed in the psychoanalytic process of working through loss. Endorsing a therapeutic ethic that would make the past accessible to present consciousness, he seeks to put to rest, as much as possible, the specter of injustice, which disturbs and limits both dialogic exchange and “ethically responsible agency” (Writing 90). What LaCapra wants to impress upon us is the capacity of a subjectivity that, having experienced a trauma, comes to inhabit its history rather than be inhabited by it. Many critics have proposed reading the ending of Beloved as an achievement on this order, with the communal exorcism denoting both an act of working through or moving beyond a traumatic relation to loss and, at the same time, an ethical intervention consistent with the therapeutic ethic. When Ella leads the communal charge to defeat the incarnate ghost, which is quite literally destroying Sethe’s talent for surviving, the community finally comes to terms with the specter of

its own indifference and recuperates the pariah in its midst, as well as her daughter. If we are to read the novel’s ending as truly recuperative or redemptive (and I have my doubts on this point), such an ethics would be anticipated earlier in the novel by the scene in which Baby Suggs preaches in the clearing: And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver—love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. (88-89)

Strictly speaking, this passage does not differ all that radically from a cynical remark that Baby Suggs makes at the start of the novel (though later in the chronological time of the story). Discouraging Sethe’s plans to move out of a house haunted by a “baby’s venom” (3), Baby Suggs declares, “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief” (5). To the extent that the present is always a product of the past, there seems little one can do to alter the past and perhaps even less that falls to one’s own agency apart from the determinations of cultural and social history. In each case, Baby Suggs accepts the rule of a hostile world enacting its traumatic injustices on the body parts of a community barely separated from the reality, never mind the memories, of slavery. As Baby Suggs advocates a care for self that might redeem some of the violences of the world, her counsel amounts to an ethics of self-intervention. According to the syntactical flow of this speech, the more overtly poetic turns of language (“love your neck unnoosed and straight” or “the beat and beating heart”) involve rhetorical reversals of traumatic phenomena, which is to say that they are constituted as figurative redemptions of the violences of history. These traumatic references do not require the intervening understanding of a reader more perspicacious than the novel’s represented audience. Morrison supposes that the ex-slaves who hear mention of the noose will remember those they have lost to the violence of the slaveholding culture and experience some anxiety about a fate of persecution awaiting each of them at any moment. When she refers them to their necks “unnoosed and straight,” she sounds the note of traumatic fatalism, as if what has occurred to others also awaits them and cannot realistically be

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for all intents and purposes, contains the past from which it speaks. Such a view of understanding is evident in LaCapra’s reading of the trauma. Much as the survivor begins to exercise “some measure of conscious control, critical distance, and perspective” with regard to extreme experiences and to work through loss by realistically positioning herself between the compelling past and the present in which she must be capable of acting, the historian, or secondary witness, will try to help a victim re-establish boundaries between the past and the present (Writing 90). It is the establishment of these boundaries—quite literally an intervention—that enables the subject to become cognizant of historical injustices without being merely determined by them. In the absence of intervention, the trauma might continue unabated, involving its survivors in the patterns of the precipitating violence, while also—and perhaps more importantly for our historical sense—exercising a mystifying influence on our social narratives of agency.

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avoided. Yet the time of the figure suspends the universalized threat of the noose, imagining a valuation of self bracketed within the vulnerability to history, an opportunity to cease dwelling within the traumas of the past and to embrace freely the ephemeral joys of their own bodies. Although she does not demand from her audience a mythic confidence in American innocence, progress, or opportunity, Baby Suggs hypothesizes a future temporarily redeemed by their holding close to a present care for self and imagining the past as pure exteriority. Corresponding to this inversion of traumatic history, then, is the introverted movement of valuation persuading each member of her audience to appreciate what she or he still possesses, even if it is only those “inside parts” that—according to a social logic barely distinguishing the lives of blacks from animal existence—might as well be food for hogs. As Baby Suggs testifies, however obliquely, to the traumatic hold of the past on the black community’s present consciousness, her turns of phrase imply that she is, to employ LaCapra’s words, “working over” the past and “possibly working it through” (Writing 89). This is imperfect redemption at best, as the parody of Pauline language in Baby Suggs’s sermon suggests. Though Baby Suggs most likely is not meant to be privy to the allusion, she here revises a famous conceit from First Corinthians: “For as the body is one, and hath many members and also members of that one body, being many are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body” (12:12-13). The Pauline allegory erases individual distinctions under the rubric of communal faith, denying the affliction and individualism (and an affliction that is tantamount to individualism) of any particular part: “If the foot shall say, ‘Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body’; is it therefore not of the body?” (12:15). The spiritual progression from part to whole is parodied and secularized when Baby Suggs converts the transcendent touch of grace into a physical caress no longer divinely abstract and no longer dependent upon the hands of another (“So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it”). What is especially remarkable about the passage is the conversion of the excess of the spirit, which is like the excess of trauma, into an ethic of self-love. Working by way of a reduction from the claims of transcendence and communal universalism, Baby Suggs’s sermon revises the corporate body, which stood for the community of faith in Paul, into a collection of unassembled corporeal parts, loved in their separateness and pain.

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Though much of this language sustains the complexity that LaCapra attributes to the process of working through, Baby Suggs does not presume to imagine for any of the afflicted a final reincorporation into the communal whole. A note of traumatic ambiguity persists in any claim she makes for the present, with the act of selfvaluation opening only vaguely toward the future, pushing only haltingly past the isolation of the trauma, and all the time preserving the idiom of the violent past. Thus, when she speaks of the “beat and beating heart,” she refers to an existential condition founded on the interchangeability of the social violences done to the heart (the times the body has been beat, which are inscribed now on the heart) and the rhythm it lives from (a beating that cannot quite keep at bay the word’s more violent connotation). Here is voiced, before the full advent of her cynicism, the fatalism of traumatic existence: knowing no other reality, the victim of violence accepts it as a given and seeks a redemption only from within violence. As she refers each of her listeners to his or her lungs “that have yet to draw free air,” Baby Suggs imagines only a postponement of future injustice, an upholding of self against the imminence of violences still to come. She speaks as though lapsing from the idiom of working through into the language of trauma, offering at best a troubled testimony to her oppression. As Naomi Morgenstern observes, testimony in Morrison’s novel always runs the risk of re-traumatizing the subject as it reproduces the past (see esp. 116-18). Since trauma remains the novel’s language of historical witness, the fact that Baby Suggs never quite gets beyond trauma may intimate not only that therapeutic intervention is at its best an incomplete project but also that history might be lost if such an intervention were to be completed. If I have begun to read Beloved as heir to a tradition of literary ghosts who come to seem figures for trauma, we should remind ourselves that the critical discourse on trauma often works in the other direction, reading from the trauma to the specter. Here, for instance, is LaCapra describing both the trauma and the superseding moment in which the ghosts of the psyche are laid to rest as if they were indeed quite real. In trauma, LaCapra says, words may be uttered but seem to repeat what was said then and function as speech acts wherein speech itself is possessed or haunted by the past and acts as a reenactment or an acting out. When the past becomes accessible to recall in memory, and when language functions to provide some measure of conscious control, critical distance, and perspec-

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I do not wish to accuse LaCapra of believing in ghosts; it is probably enough for some of his critics to say that he believes in trauma. Still, the reader cannot help noticing the logic whereby the one afflicted with trauma achieves distance from “haunting revenants,” as if it were less likely that one could refute the unreality of trauma than make its reality remote enough to appear unreal. I put such weight on LaCapra’s figurative language in this passage in order to draw attention to a strange literalism lurking there: one distances oneself from the trauma as from a ghost, which is to say, as from the reality of a ghost. Striking a largely pragmatic compromise with the disturbing reality of mind that threatens the real world of action, LaCapra’s victim of trauma enacts a progression into reason that refutes the spectral reality that the trauma would otherwise re-enact endlessly in his life. There is a split here in the very meaning of the act. The necessary intervention of memory and language into the unconscious reign of the trauma assumes the capacity of the trauma not only to refer to a past act, but to act out the departed event all over again. Despite his figurative use of ghostly language, LaCapra hardly views the reign of the trauma as a fiction. Rather, the trauma’s reality is so persuasive that it requires the work of memory, language, and rationality. The ghostly image connotes both a reluctantly superseded past and the progression beyond it, since, according to the Enlightenment social narrative upon which the Gothic is precariously founded, the ghost is necessarily a figure for a past quickly becoming obsolete. If trauma can inspire LaCapra’s turn to figurative excess, the trauma itself seems implicated in figurative logic. Since I am here focussed on the trauma’s function in a work of fiction, we need to bear in mind that the progression from a testimonial text to the traumatic imaginings of the literary text resides in the latter’s mediated, already interpreted, relation to the history from which it lives or of which it speaks. If one were trying to read the traumatic reality of African-American history as an unconscious force in Morrison’s con-

sciousness determining her patterns of figuration, this distinction between the unconscious and mediated mechanics of the trauma might seem less necessary. But, as soon as one locates the trauma as a figure on the side of an authorial (or at least a textual) intention, the psychological phenomenality of trauma becomes a figure for storytelling itself. In Morrison’s case, this means that she uses the Gothic apparatus to invoke the specter of trauma—first, as a motivational force explaining the characters’ historical actions, and, second, as a figure for the act of a difficult transmission. As haunting performs the work of a figure, it poses a newness within language that hypothetically or temporarily alienates ordinary meaning and so forces a revision or reconsideration of the very possibilities of representation. Encountering the resistances of the trauma and the failures in understanding that it promotes, the reader remains always aware of what Morrison is trying to say about the history she dares to retell. By exploring the hard edges of a traumatic recalcitrance that is as much the author’s reluctance to insert this recovered history into the myths of progress that inform American storytelling as it is an attempt to describe her characters’ minds realistically, Morrison brings us to the brink of an unspoken history, which should return, if it is to return at all, only as a rupture of rationality, voice, and ordinarily conceived intentions. The novel emerges as an act of difficult listening, embodied, for example, in the person of Ella as she “listen[s] for the holes—the things the fugitives did not say; the questions they did not ask. Listened too for the unnamed, unmentioned people left behind” (92). To the extent that these “holes” are holes in both consciousness and relationship, the ex-slaves’ forgettings function not only as an unconscious coping mechanism but, more surprisingly, as the space of an intention any storyteller who is also a listener—whether she be Ella or Morrison herself— forms against an unmentioned, unmentionable, or traumatically irreferential past. Throughout Beloved, Morrison develops characters who exist as too much or too little of themselves. And, if all of Morrison’s characters in this novel never quite coincide in their own selfconsciousness with the history they endure, it is also true that the lives they live inside history remain incommensurate with the novel’s historical consciousness. By making her characters participate in structures of rhetorical excess that give their words and actions meaning beyond the immediate moment of their emplotted lives, Morrison develops a structure of reading in which our

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tive, one has begun the arduous process of working over and through the trauma in a fashion that may never bring the full transcendence of acting out (or being haunted by revenants and reliving the past in its shattered intensity) but which may enable processes of judgment and at least limited liability and ethically responsible agency. These processes are crucial for laying ghosts to rest, distancing oneself from haunting revenants, renewing an interest in life, and being able to engage memory in more critically tested senses. (Writing 90, emph. mine)

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imaginative acts of identification are limited by the allegorical significances of excess and in which characters who stand for history stand at the same time for the limits of the realistic tradition of fiction with its rational account of history. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of this gap between the reality of a character’s experience and a meaning existing outside self-consciousness occurs when Sethe takes account of the newspaper clipping describing her act of infanticide, knowing “that the words she did not understand hadn’t any more power than she had to explain” (161). The failure here is not just in the white journalist’s lack of empathy but also in the words themselves, which say both too little and too much about Sethe’s act. When Paul D sees the photograph accompanying the article, he insists, “I been knowing her a long time. And I can tell you for sure: this ain’t her mouth. May look like it, but it ain’t” (158). Much like the holes through which Ella hears the unaccounted history of the fugitive slaves, the photograph offers a negative representation of the character Sethe, who becomes unreal in relation to the official history that would record her. Morrison exploits Paul D’s obvious psychological defensiveness in order to make us reflect upon the gap between historical experience and history, between the reality of the trauma and the interpretations that make sense of it. Insofar as the novel develops its story through the phenomenality of the trauma, the psychological explanation, much like the historian’s act of intervention, relies on a second interpretive sense of the trauma as explanatory trope. Morrison’s relation to the Gothic is to the point here, since viewed through the novelistic orthodoxy of empiricism, the persistent silliness of the Gothic plot arises in direct proportion to its rhetorical excess. It might well be said of the Gothic that it aims less to confront the psyche with the excesses of consciousness than to imagine the psyche as if it were already an excess in history. The most overt markings of psychological excess are of course ghosts, those figures through which the Gothic asks whether the spectral phenomenality of the past refers to an inability of the mind to become part of history or to the impossibility that history should become subject to the mind. In the first instance, the meaning of excess, even when it is not the actual source, would be subjective; in the latter, a sociality working against or to the detriment of subjectivity. In response to the dilemma of interpretation provoked by Gothic ghosts, the modern reader most often makes a choice to account for the excesses of plot through

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the distortions of subjectivity and thus to promote the stability of our cultural narratives of rationality. Though the irrationality of the character who sees ghosts may appeal to a reader’s imaginative bent for irrationality, the reader’s ability to identify the flaws in the character’s thinking and the patterns developing from his irrationality keeps the empirical world intact and releases the reader from any anxiety that history might persist without answer. I must emphasize here that in making the choice to explain away the excesses of the Gothic as a symptom of the character’s irrationality, the reader chooses an option presented within the Gothic plot—but an option that, if chosen too soon or too absolutely, would ruin much of a story that has come to depend narratively on its fantastic mechanism. Even when one can explain the extravagances of the Gothic plot as phenomena on the horizon of a subjective irrationality, the story itself seems to insist upon a literal return of a past that constructs Gothic excess, so that we are forced to ask what we ought to make of a past that lives anachronistically beyond its proper moment. As Derrida argues through his reading of Hamlet at the beginning of Specters of Marx, spectral plots demand that we investigate the manner in which present-tense ideology seeks historical foreclosure. The specters of the past—as, say, those that emerge in Marx’s pronouncement at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto that “the specter of communism” haunts Europe—may become relevant precisely at the moment in which they have been put to rest for ideological reasons. As he suggests that the rules of empiricism tend to cooperate with the hegemony of the present social moment, Derrida criticizes those claims of presence belonging to any social order of justice, claims that omit reference to the injustices that the present social order both perpetrates and perpetuates. What the Gothic plot so well expresses is a conflict between social narratives endorsing the progresses obtained through empirical reason and those contrary patterns of thought through which the past remains unbound despite our rational attempts to foreclose it. Yet, since the Gothic specter remains an expression of the departed act and its obsolete era, any action owing to its influences might evoke a reactionary nostalgia for an outdated idealism or a fatalistic obligation to ancient constructs of identity. To adhere to the hurt of the past would be to fail the requirement of an empiricism rooted in the present and a progressive rationality oriented toward the future, and, if one is not simply to ignore the past and to adopt a purely presentist

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According to liberal social theory and the rules of empirical investigation, in order for the trauma to be the product of injustice, we would first require proof that it occurred as a violation of a prior and just ordering of human relations in society. Moreover, as a result of the trauma’s private mode of reference, even if we were able to ascertain that a trauma followed from an injustice, the subjectivity of the trauma might make the social occasion to which it witnesses seem merely the background of the traumatic data. Pre-empting just such a suspicion, Caruth perceives in the seemingly private character of trauma an emergent form of sociality, an aspect of history that unfolds from trauma and implicates each of us in one another’s traumas (24). However one construes the potentially positive connotations of the trauma’s legacy to history, since the trauma necessarily occurs in a subject or a group of people failing to recognize either the symptoms or the events behind them, it demands an event of secondary witness. Providing the very structure of the trauma’s sociality, it is the secondary witness’s reception, her act of listening for the event of injustice behind the symptoms, that should move us beyond the esoteric testimony of the trauma. In its spectral connotations, the trauma would not simply mystify the obsolescence of an injustice and obscure its causes. Rather, it might be introduced as that which intervenes between history as a departed act and history as that which impinges upon present memory and the ethical acts that follow from it. It is surely a deliberate irony of Beloved that not only must history return against the grain of desire and through a figure of haunting, but, once it returns, it must be defeated. This is the very ambiguity of the specter of an injustice or what Morrison elsewhere refers to as the “specter of enslavement,” for, as long as she lives

within her trauma, Sethe is not only a witness to the past but also a pariah in the community. The ending of the novel poses what is at best a highly ambiguous resolution to a highly problematic historical truth, as the community’s intervention in Sethe’s and Denver’s trauma requires an exorcism of a past that refutes the ironic witness of the trauma. There is some evidence for reading the ending as a symbolic act of working through the past, and Ella’s self-justified and self-promoting rationale for stirring the community’s intervention offers the best expression of this ethic: When Ella heard 124 was occupied by somethingor-other beating up on Sethe, it infuriated her. [. . .] Whatever Sethe had done, Ella didn’t like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present. Sethe’s crime was staggering and her pride outstripped even that; but she could not countenance the possibility of sin moving in on the house, unleashed and sassy. [. . .] As long as the ghost showed out from its ghostly place—shaking stuff, crying, smashing and such—Ella respected it. But if it took flesh and came in her world, well, the shoe was on the other foot. She didn’t mind a little communication between the two worlds, but this was an invasion. (256-57, emph. mine)

What Ella objects to is an excess added to Gothic excess, as if Morrison were playing a metafictional joke on us: it is one thing to be haunted by ghosts, Ella says, representing the reader who makes allowances for the Gothic and believes in Morrison’s ghosts, but to be beaten up by them, that is another. Ella interprets the ghost exactly as though it were a trauma needing to be worked through or (if we are truer to her tones) worked over, and like a highly empathetic therapist, she cannot stand the spectacle of the past “taking possession of the present.” It is not clear to me what we are to make of the excessive clichés through which Ella gears herself up to fight Sethe’s antagonist, unless they are supposed to demonstrate how far she is from seeing the ghost as the allegory for history that Morrison has made of it and how mistaken Ella may be in reducing the ghost to a traditionally conceived Gothic antagonist. As Ella conflates historical memory and Gothic oppression, Morrison shows us the fallacy of the therapeutic premise, whereby an injustice of the past can come to seem unjust mostly as a result of the havoc it creates in the lives of those who bother to recall it, perhaps with no choice but to remember. As was true of Baby Suggs’s preaching in the clearing, the therapeutic ethic seems to collapse on itself—in that first instance by lapsing into the idiom of trauma, in the second by forging a

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and ahistorical mode of knowledge, one must translate the hurt of the past in terms of present possibilities. The specter has a value proportionate to its commentary on the realities of the present, but it cannot maintain itself as a resistance to the present except perhaps through the deliberate archaism of a subject still under the spell of the past. As a reflection of partially eclipsed social paradigms, then, the Gothic figure of haunting enacts a disjuncture between past and present that brings with it a new requirement: to intervene in the social narratives governing our existence in the status quo. For Derrida, it is precisely because the specter is a figure for the unresolved past and the missed encounter that it can signify the future of an act not fully encountered.

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distance from trauma that is achieved only through a clichéd language of melodramatic opposition. Falling into the clichéd phraseology of her characters, Morrison declares of Beloved, “They forgot her like a bad dream” (274). Against the grain of most critical readings of the communal intervention (see, for example: Harris 330441; LaCapra, Writing 14; Rody 102-09), I hear in this ending the endurance of Morrison’s suspicion of our cultural narratives of progress. As she presents this contrived resolution of the past, which is either a degenerative or melodramatic resolution of the plot of history, we seem to be in a world much like Shakespearean tragedy, where the ending declares only perfunctorily that history, even tragic history, shall be folded into the progress of society. To this very end, Morrison employs an anti-novelistic and meta-fictional refrain in the final pages, insisting that “this is not a story to pass on” (275) and superficially negating the act of transmission that occurs each time a reader receives this story. In negating her own story, it is as though Morrison has declared that her characters had to get on with their lives, that one can endure only so long in the full consciousness of traumatic history, but that, even so, the last thing we must do is read Sethe’s survival as uplifting. On the question of endings, it is interesting to consider Morrison’s reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in her literary critical study Playing in the Dark. Effectively endorsing the critical tradition’s disappointment with the novel’s ending, Morrison finds fault with Twain for abandoning the escape plot and failing to deliver Jim into freedom at Huck’s hands. The novel’s deferment of Jim’s freedom is essential to its complicity with American ideology, Morrison decides, and this is so “because freedom has no meaning to Huck or to the text without the specter of enslavement.” The focus here is on Huck’s lack of intervention, his failure to become ultimately implicated in Jim’s story. There is a pretty overt reason for this: although The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn testifies to the “yearning of whites for forgiveness and love,” it also requires that the blacks whom they would forgive be viewed as supplicants to the whites and that Jim respond “to the torment and humiliation” that he undergoes with “boundless love” (Playing 56-57). Thus the specter of enslavement of which Jim’s story remains an emanation expresses a fundamental ambivalence of white America toward a history for which it would confess only a limited responsibility. However we read the mock escape to which Huck and Tom

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subject Jim and the deus ex machina that releases Jim as a stipulation of the already deceased widow’s will, it is evident that the novel’s ending has lapsed into the traumatic idiom of slavery. Depicting Jim as altogether lacking the willfulness he showed in running away and Huck as failing to summon on Jim’s behalf the resourcefulness with which he secured his own freedom, Twain refuses to give us the ending that Jim deserves and instead secures Jim’s freedom as though it were consistent with the will of the slaveholding past. A specter of history casts itself over the agency of two characters who had seemed to denote the future of American idealism and freedom, indeed the emerging future of social mutuality. If there is a traumatic force at work here, Twain does not offer any subjective explanation of the trauma but rather employs it as a social allegory denoting the long reach of the past into the present, even past the point at which it had appeared to be defeated. What is perhaps oddest about Morrison’s assessment of Twain’s novel is that the ending she would prefer would be perfectly consistent with American idealism. In delivering Jim to freedom, Huck would express the American belief in a freedom greater than all its contradictory evidences and become an exception to history with whom all readers could identify. As a true remnant of American idealism from a time in which our ugliest history was most conspicuous, Huck would embrace his responsibility and help us all to amend and work through the departed acts of the past. But, if Morrison seems to require a redemptive intervention from Twain and from his hero, her fictional rendering of a scenario that implicitly recalls Twain is much more complicated. In the scene from Beloved where Amy Denver intervenes to help Sethe make it through the night, Morrison revisits the specter of Huck’s failed intervention, but she does so without providing the idealistic rendering she finds lacking in Twain. I close by focussing on the connotations of haunting in this central episode of Beloved, considering Amy’s behaviour as a model of intervention that does not require the cancellation of traumatic history through a subjective return to the empirical rationalities of the status quo. Any ethics that Morrison delineates through Amy’s act of intervention exists in ironic tension with the possibilities of benevolent action, since Amy’s story, narrated in two separate reminiscences, signifies a departure not only from the idealistic narrative of ethical action, but also from the very conception of justice arrived at through a

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Having imagined Amy’s story as a parable about intervening in an oppressive history, Morrison makes Amy stand not against but within the specters of indifference and neglect that characterize white society’s perception of blacks. In the first telling of the story, Amy declares her intention to abandon Sethe (“I gotta go”) and does so in unapologetically racist terms (“What you gonna do, just lay there and foal?” [33]). There is an odd humour at work here, as Morrison denotes Amy’s emergent care but makes her character speak in an idiom of racism reminiscent of Huck’s unre-

formed ideology, never letting us forget the point that Amy has a hard time perceiving her responsibility for Sethe and her history. Amy’s callous reactions function a bit like the defensive reactions people have at horror movies, as they alternately whisper “Get out of there” and “Oh, she’s so stupid.” Indeed, when Amy says “You ain’t got no business walking round these hills, miss” (78), she may refer to the fact that Sethe startled her, almost as if she were already one of the many ghosts populating black grief; or perhaps she only means to suggest that Sethe has put herself in harm’s way. If her thought adopts the interpretive strategy of explaining Gothic phenomena as though they were purely subjective emanations, we see how easily such a course of explanation degenerates into an attitude of blaming the victim, since it must be either Sethe’s irrationality or her moral guilt that functions as the principle of causation behind her suffering. When Amy observes the scars from Sethe’s whipping, she concludes, “You must of did something” (80), unable quite to acknowledge her own implication in the fate of another. Finally, however, it is through the idiom of haunting and the connotations of traumatic history that Morrison makes Amy an unwitting exception to the norms of indifference in Sethe’s life and suggests the possibility of a nonbenevolent ethical response to injustice in history. Having declared her departure and then remained, perhaps only out of curiosity, Amy expresses her ethical concern by way of a subtle defiance of the fatalistic narrative she has so far imposed on Sethe’s life. Anticipating the future of Sethe’s death suddenly, as if it were a trauma pertaining to herself, she continues to interrogate the dying pregnant woman at her side under the false name Sethe has given her: “You ain’t dead yet, Lu? Lu?” “Not yet.” “Make you a bet. You make it through the night, you make it all the way.” (82)

Amy’s ethical “bet” on Sethe’s life rhymingly puns on the fatalism that Amy and Sethe have expressed in conceiving of her death as something “yet” to come, as though it were an inevitability demanding Hamletic resignation (“If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all” [5.2.158-60]). When we recall that in Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud defined anxiety as the psychological condition that prevents

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person’s (or character’s) deliberated course of action. Moreover, since Amy’s story is embedded in Denver’s nostalgia for the story of her own birth, it is especially difficult to read the ethics of intervention that pertain to her actions apart from the question of idealism and the novel’s larger questions about outsiders’ interventions in the trauma of others. This story is part of the allegorical texture of the novel, and it is surely incumbent upon us to remember Amy in relation to the history that she symbolically stands against—not only thinking of Baby Suggs’s having cynically contrasted the possibility of an escape from the traumatic past to all the available modes of memory, but also recalling that the haunting of Sethe has been the result of two catastrophic interventions. The first of these is the menacing intervention of the four white slaveholders who come apocalyptically to bring a fugitive slave to justice and thus incite the desperation that leads Sethe to murder her child. The concept of intervention in Beloved always carries this spectral history with it, and so, when Paul D strives generously to bring the reign of the ghost to an end, he brings the past to bear more fiercely on the present. For all his better intentions, Paul D reflects the biases of the predominant culture in his eagerness to participate in a forgetfulness conforming all experience to progress. What he occasions is the further degradation of Sethe before her history and a subjective response in her not unlike that of Twain’s Jim, who not only permits his “persecutors to torment him,” but responds to their torment with “boundless love” (Morrison, Playing 57). We may remind ourselves, when Sethe loves the source of her humiliation just as willingly as Jim does, that she is loving the spirit of her dead child, whereas Jim is only adoring the rights of authority; but, to the extent that each character’s action is symptomatic of a traumatic history, it is also bound to the past in a manner that subordinates self-love to a spectral and obsolete mode of consciousness.

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trauma by preparing the self for what is awful and to come, it is hard to hear Amy’s continued expression that Sethe will die by her side as anything less than the imagined future of a trauma: “Don’t up and die on me in the night, you hear? I don’t want to see your ugly black face hankering over me” (82). By way of this conversion of the trauma into that which refers not only to another’s past, but to a future in which the suffering of another will be remembered, Amy unwittingly discovers an ethics of intervention that need not cancel the spectacle and hold of suffering to promote an act of responsibility. It goes to the heart of Morrison’s critique of benevolence (a critique implicit, for example, in Mr. Garner’s fairer treatment of his slaves) that Amy enacts her ethical care for another and promotes again the possibility of self-love in Sethe only through the anti-idealistic expression of her bigotry. Beloved asks us whether it is possible for memory to intimate an act not yet encountered, as it were, to glimpse a future of the self given over to ethical meanings not subordinated to a history of intentions. Amy’s intervening action is literally a coming between Sethe and her fate and thus an expression of the paradox of responsibility. She fails to conceive of her actions and Sethe’s fate as matters of necessity, and at the same time she fails to choose her actions as consistent with the rationale of an empirical cultural narrative. Her somewhat unwitting responsiveness interprets ethics as the encounter with the excess meanings of history, with the specters of injustice haunting the lives of others and by implication ourselves. Too often our conventions of narrative and the accompanying mores of empiricism underestimate the devastating trauma of injustice in order to overcome it. In more Gothic terms, we may inherit the past fatalistically or achieve separation from it by accounting for its pathologies through the aberrations of subjective motive and perspective. But for Morrison it is clear that to stand in history is to stand within range of all its specters, to allow history to take measure of us in our inability and still to require our response where none is yet imagined. To the extent that history’s practitioners forget this premise, much of what counts as history may be merely an avoidance of the injustices of the past.

Works Cited Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.

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Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Intro. Bernard Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg. New York: Routledge 1994. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Vol. 18. London: Hogarth, 1955. Harris, Trudier. “Escaping Slavery but Not Its Images.” Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. 1990. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. 330-41. LaCapra, Dominick. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994. ———. Writing Trauma, Writing History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Morgenstern, Naomi. “Mother’s Milk and Sister’s Blood: Trauma and the Neoslave Narrative.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 8.2 (1996): 101-26. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. ———. “Living Memory” [an interview with Toni Morrison]. City Limits (31 March to 7 April 1988): 10-11. ———. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Random House, 1992. Rody, Caroline. “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: History, ‘Rememory,’ and a ‘Clamor for a Kiss.’” American Literary History 7.1 (1995): 92-119. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Smith, Valerie. “‘Circling the Subject’: History and Narrative in Beloved.” Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. 342-55. Twain, Mark. Mississippi Writings: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Life on the Mississippi; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Pudd’nhead Wilson. Ed. Gary Cardwell. New York: Library of America, 1982.

FURTHER READING Bibliographies Middleton, David L. Toni Morrison: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987, 186 p. Includes considerable criticism on Morrison’s first four novels, as well as other writings, interviews, and anthologies. Mix, Debbie. “Toni Morrison: A Selected Bibliography.” Modern Fiction Studies 39, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1993): 795818. Bibliography covering selected criticism on Morrison’s novels.

Criticism Britton, Wesley. “The Puritan Past and Black Gothic: The Haunting of Toni Morrison’s Beloved in Light of Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 21, no. 2 (fall 1995): 7-23.

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Corey, Susan. “Toward the Limits of Mystery: The Grotesque in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” In The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable, edited by Marc C. Conner, pp. 31-48. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Examines Morrison’s disruption of familiar reality in Beloved. Coundouriotis, Eleni. “Materialism, the Uncanny, and History in Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 8, no. 2 (1997): 207-25. Examines the significance of the uncanny to Morrison’s alternate presentation of history in Beloved and Sula. Harris, Trudier. “Beloved: Woman, Thy Name Is Demon.” In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, edited by Barbara Solomon, pp. 127-37. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Explores Beloved’s basis in folk traditions. House, Elizabeth B. “Toni Morrison’s Ghost: The Beloved Who Is Not Beloved.” In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, edited by Barbara Solomon, pp. 117-26. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Contends that the title character in Beloved is not a supernatural being but a young woman who has experienced the horrors of slavery. Neubauer, Paul. “The Demon of Loss and Longing: The Function of the Ghost in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” In Demons: Mediators between This World and the Other: Essays on Demonic Beings from the Middle Ages to the Present, edited by Ruth Petzoldt and Paul Neubauer, pp. 165-74. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 1998. Assesses the reliance on African-American traditions of demonology in Beloved. Nudelman, Franny. “Toward a Reader’s History: ‘Ghosts Might Enter Here.’” In Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition, edited by John L. Idol and Melinda M. Ponder, pp. 278-85. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

Compares the function of ghosts in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Beloved. Redding, Arthur. “‘Haints’: American Ghosts, Ethnic Memory, and Contemporary Fiction.” Mosaic 34, no. 4 (December 2001): 163-82. Discusses Morrison’s use of ghosts in light of American historical views of hauntings. Stryz, Jan. “The Other Ghost in Beloved: The Specter of The Scarlet Letter (1991).” In The New Romanticism: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Eberhard Alsen, pp. 137-57. New York: Garland, 2000. Positions Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter as a literary predecessor to Beloved.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Morrison’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: African American Writers, Eds. 1, 2; American Writers: The Classics, Vol. 1; American Writers Supplement, Vol. 3; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. 1, 22, 61; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography and Resources, Vol. 2; Black Literature Criticism; Black Writers, Eds. 2, 3; Children’s Literature Review, Vol. 99; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 1968-1988; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 2932R; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 27, 42, 67, 113, 124; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 4, 10, 22, 55, 81, 87, 173, 194; Contemporary Novelists, Ed. 7; Contemporary Popular Writers; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 6, 33, 143; Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1981; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Moststudied Authors, Multicultural, Novelists, and Popular Fiction and Genre Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century; Exploring Novels; Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion; Feminist Writers; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 2; Literature and Its Times, Vols. 2, 4; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Major 21st-Century Writers; Modern American Women Writers; Novels for Students, Vols. 1, 6, 8, 14; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Short Stories for Students, Vol. 5; Something About the Author, Vols. 57, 144; Twayne’s United States Authors; and 20th Century Romance and Historical Writers.

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Compares themes and techniques in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables and Morrison’s Beloved.

JOYCE CAROL OATES (1938 -)

(Also wrote under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, playwright, author of children’s books, nonfiction writer, and poet.

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onsidered one of the most prolific and versatile contemporary American writers, Oates has published, since the start of her awardwinning literary career in 1963, more than twenty novels; hundreds of short stories in both collections and anthologies; nearly a dozen volumes of poetry; several books of nonfiction, literary criticism, and essays; and many theatrical dramas and screenplays. Writing in a dense, elliptical style that ranges from realistic and naturalistic to surrealistic, Oates concentrates on the spiritual, sexual, and intellectual malaise of modern American culture in her fiction, exposing the dark aspects of the human condition. Her tragic and violent plots abound with depictions of rape, incest, murder, mutilation, child abuse, and suicide, and her protagonists often suffer as a result of the conditions of their social milieu or their emotional weaknesses. Although her works in other genres address similar issues, most critics concur that her short fiction best conveys the urgency and emotional power of her principal themes. Among the dominant motifs in Oates’s collected fiction is her evocation of a profoundly

Gothic sensibility in American culture. Particularly in such works as her novels Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), and the short story collections Night Side: Eighteen Tales (1977) and Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994), among several others, Oates draws upon the emotional extremes of human existence to produce what critics view as a modern and supremely Gothic vision of the history, culture, and collective psyche of the United States.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Born June 16, 1938, in Lockport, New York, the daughter of a tool-and-die designer and a homemaker, Oates was raised on her grandparents’ farm in Erie County—later represented in much of her fiction as Eden County. A bookish, serious child, she first submitted a novel to a publisher at the age of fifteen. Oates attended Syracuse University on a scholarship and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1960; the following year she earned a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin and married Raymond Smith, a former English professor. From 1962 to 1968 the couple lived in Detroit, where Oates taught at the University of Detroit and published her first novels, short story collections, and poetry. She also witnessed the 1967 race riots, which inspired her National Book Awardwinning novel them (1969). Shortly thereafter,

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Oates accepted a teaching position at the University of Windsor, Ontario, staying until 1978, when she was named a writer-in-residence at Princeton University; she joined the faculty there as a professor in 1987. Despite the responsibilities of an academic career, Oates has actively pursued writing, publishing an average of two books a year in various genres since the publication of her first book, the short story collection By the North Gate (1963). Her early novels consistently earned nominations for the National Book Award, while her short fiction won several individual O. Henry Awards and the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement in both 1971 and 1986. A poet of some merit, and a regular contributor of essays and stories to scholarly journals, periodicals, and anthologies, Oates also is a respected literary critic whose work presents logical, sensitive analyses of a variety of topics. During the 1990s Oates gained additional recognition as a playwright for authoring many plays produced offBroadway and at regional theaters, including The Perfectionist (1993), which was nominated by the American Theatre Critics Association for best new play in 1994. In subsequent years, Oates has continued her prolific output of novels, short stories, dramas, and criticism.

MAJOR WORKS With her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), Oates foreshadows her preoccupation with violence and darkness, describing a destructive romance between a teenage girl and a thirty-yearold stock car driver that ends with his death by accident. Oates’s best known and critically acclaimed early novels form an informal trilogy exploring three distinct segments of American society: A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) chronicles the life of a migrant worker’s daughter in rural Eden County; Expensive People (1967) exposes the superficial world of suburbia; and them presents the violent, degrading milieu of an innercity Detroit family. Oates’s novels of the 1970s explore American people and cultural institutions, combining social analysis with vivid psychological portraits of frustrated characters ranging from a brilliant surgeon (Wonderland, 1971), a young attorney (Do with Me What You Will, 1973), and the widow of a murdered conservative politician (The Assassins, 1975), to religious zealots (Son of the Morning, 1978) and distinguished visiting poets and feminist scholars (Unholy Loves, 1979). Her short stories of this period, most notably in Marriages and Infidelities (1972), and Where Are You Go-

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ing, Where Have You Been? (1974), considered by many to be her best work, concern themes of violence and abuse between the sexes. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” among these, tells of the sexual awakening of a romantic girl by a mysterious man, Alfred Friend; this story is considered a masterpiece of the modern short form and was adapted for film. Two additional collections of short fiction from this period, The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (1975) and Night Side, reflect Oates’s developing interest in Gothic themes. Set in the late nineteenth century, the title piece of the latter collection takes the form of a Victorian ghost story and features a clash between the skeptical materialism of its narrator and the inexplicable qualities of the spirit. During the early 1980s, Oates published several novels that exploit the conventions of nineteenth-century Gothic literature as they examine such sensitive issues as crimes against women, children, and the poor, and the influence of family history in shaping destiny. Bellefleur follows the prescribed formula of a Gothic multigenerational saga by depicting supernatural occurrences while tracing the lineage of an exploitative American family. A Bloodsmoor Romance displays such elements of Gothic romance as mysterious kidnappings and psychic phenomena as it details the lives of five maiden sisters in rural Pennsylvania during the late 1880s. In Mysteries of Winterthurn Oates explores the conventions of the nineteenth-century mystery novel. The protagonist of this work, Xavier Kilgarvan, is a brilliant young detective who models his career after that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes. In the episodes that make up the novel, Kilgarvan investigates bizarre cases of murder and incest shrouded in supernatural mystery. Like these lengthier works, many of her subsequent shorter fiction, such as the stories of Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, also rely on elements of Gothic horror, in many cases drawing inspiration from the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James. Other short stories by Oates, including “Demons” and “Family,” probe the terrifying details of alienated and homicidal families. Most of Oates’s remaining fiction of the 1980s features more explicit violence than does her earlier fiction, which tends toward the depiction of psychological afflictions and obsessions. In Marya (1986) a successful academic searches for her alcoholic mother who had abused her as a child, and in You Must Remember This (1987) a former boxer commits incest with his niece dur-

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CRITICAL RECEPTION Critics hold diverse opinions about Oates’s work, particularly about her repeated use of graphic violence, which some have called a “distorted” vision of American life. Eva Manske (see Further Reading) has summarized the general view: “Some of her novels and stories are rather shrill in depicting the human situation, remain melodramatic renderings of everyday life, highly charged with unrelenting scenes of shocking, random violence, or madness and emotional distress that Oates chronicles as dominant elements of experience in the lives of her characters.” Considering the often extreme content of her work, the mention of Oates’s writing in conjunction with Gothic conventions has become a commonplace among contemporary critics. Several of her early novels, including realistic works such as With Shuddering Fall and Wonderland have been regarded for their grotesque depictions of both physical and psychological violence, and studied within Gothic literary contexts. Oates herself has suggested that Gothic concerns with the bizarre dimensions of human experience and extremes of brutality and psychological duress are essential components of contemporary life. She has also remarked that the term itself (when left uncapitalized) merely signifies “a work in which extremes of emotion are unleashed.” According to

this definition, Oates’s entire oeuvre could be considered in terms of its generically “gothic” qualities. In particular, Oates’s use and adaptation of the supernatural and psychological themes formally associated with the Gothic literary tradition have been most frequently discussed in conjunction with her novels Bellefleur, A Bloodsmoor Romance, and Mysteries of Winterthurn. These works draw heavily upon the preternatural atmosphere of dread and a collection of tropes and conventions evoked in the nineteenth-century Gothic novel. Other works discussed in Gothic contexts include the short story collection Night Side, which Greg Johnson has studied in terms of the link between the psychological and the unseen spiritual realm these stories draw upon in rendering the dark and inscrutable mysteries of the human psyche. Additionally, her novels penned under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith have been said to prominently feature the Gothic trope of the doppelgänger, or double, while her stories and novels set in Eden County are thought to strongly echo the “Southern Gothic” atmosphere found in the novels of William Faulkner and thus likewise explore a haunting landscape crafted in a peculiarly American idiom. While some critics have dismissed her Gothic fiction as whimsical, others have suggested that it invigorates this literary tradition, particularly feminist critics who often have likened Oates’s ghosts to the cultural status of “invisible woman,” as Cara Chell (see Further Reading) has pointed out. Overall, critical consensus has tended to characterize much of Oates’s work as a powerful reinterpretation of a centuries-old literary tradition, one that adapts the Gothic sensibility into a contemporary mode by plunging readers into the often terrifying and hidden emotional recesses of modern American society.

PRINCIPAL WORKS By the North Gate (short stories) 1963 With Shuddering Fall (novel) 1964 The Sweet Enemy (play) 1965 Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories (short stories) 1966 Expensive People (novel) 1967 A Garden of Earthly Delights (novel) 1967 Women in Love and Other Poems (poetry) 1968 them (novel) 1969

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ing the McCarthyist 1950s. Oates’s subsequent works continue to address relations between violence and such cultural realities of American society as racism (Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, 1990), affluence (American Appetites, 1989), alienation (I Lock the Door upon Myself, 1990), poverty (The Rise of Life on Earth, 1991), classism (Heat, 1992), sexual-political power dynamics (Black Water, 1992), feminism (Foxfire, 1993), success (What I Lived For, 1994), serial killers (Zombie, 1995), incest (First Love: A Gothic Tale, 1996), and familial implosion (We Were the Mulvaneys, 1996). In My Heart Laid Bare (1998) Oates returns to the Gothic family saga structure of Bellefleur, recounting the decline of an American family over two centuries in a story deeply concerned with the ongoing history of racial tensions in the United States. Additionally, Oates’s series of mysteries published under the pseudonym of Rosamond Smith—Lives of the Twins (1988), Soul/ Mate (1989), Nemesis (1990), Snake Eyes (1992), and You Can’t Catch Me (1995)—concern the psychopathic exploits of aberrational academics and are noted for their use of Gothic motifs.

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The Wheel of Love and Other Stories (short stories) 1970 Wonderland (novel) 1971

The Rise of Life on Earth (novel) 1991 Black Water (novel) 1992 Heat: And Other Stories (short stories) 1992

Marriages and Infidelities (short stories) 1972

Snake Eyes [as Rosamond Smith] (novel) 1992

Angel Fire (poetry) 1973

Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (novel) 1993

Do with Me What You Will (novel) 1973 The Goddess and Other Women (short stories) 1974

The Perfectionist (play) 1993 Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (short stories) 1994

Miracle Play (play) 1974 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Stories of Young America (short stories) 1974

What I Lived For (novel) 1994

The Assassins: A Book of Hours (novel) 1975

You Can’t Catch Me [as Rosamond Smith] (novel) 1995

Will You Always Love Me? (short stories) 1995

The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (short stories) 1975

Zombie (novel) 1995

Childwold (novel) 1976

Demon and Other Tales (short stories) 1996

Triumph of the Spider Monkey: The First Person Confession of the Maniac Bobby Gotteson as Told to Joyce Carol Oates (novella) 1976

First Love: A Gothic Tale (novel) 1996 Tenderness (novel) 1996

Night Side: Eighteen Tales (short stories) 1977

We Were the Mulvaneys (novel) 1996

Son of the Morning (novel) 1978

Double Delight [as Rosamond Smith] (novel) 1997

Cybele (novel) 1979

Man Crazy (novel) 1997

Unholy Loves (novel) 1979

My Heart Laid Bare (novel) 1998

Bellefleur (novel) 1980

Broke Heart Blues: A Novel (novel) 1999

Angel of Light (novel) 1981

The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque (short stories) 1999

Contraries: Essays (nonfiction) 1981 A Sentimental Education (short stories) 1981 A Bloodsmoor Romance (novel) 1982

Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon [as Rosamond Smith] (novel) 1999

Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 19701972 (poetry) 1982

Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose (essays and nonfiction) 1999

Mysteries of Winterthurn (novel) 1984

Blonde (novel) 2000

Solstice (novel) 1985

Faithless: Tales of Transgression (short stories) 2001

Marya: A Life (novel) 1986

Middle Age: A Romance (novel) 2001

You Must Remember This (novel) 1987

Beasts (novel) 2002

Lives of the Twins [as Rosamond Smith] (novel) 1988

Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (novel) 2002

(Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (nonfiction) 1988 American Appetites (novel) 1989

I’ll Take You There (novel) 2002 Bad Girls (play) 2003

Soul/Mate [as Rosamond Smith] (novel) 1989

The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art (nonfiction) 2003

The Time Traveler (poetry) 1989

Freaky Green Eyes (novel) 2003

Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (novel) 1990

Small Avalanches and Other Stories (short stories) 2003

I Lock the Door upon Myself (novel) 1990

Tattooed Girl (novel) 2003

Nemesis [as Rosamond Smith] (novel) 1990

Where is Little Reynard? (juvenilia) 2003

I Stand Before You Naked (play) 1991

I Am No One You Know (short stories) 2004

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JOYCE CAROL OATES (STORY DATE 1996) SOURCE: Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Temple.” In American Gothic Tales, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, pp. 34648. New York: Plume, 1996. The following short story originally appeared in the collection Demon and Other Tales in 1996.

There, again, the vexing, mysterious sound!—a faint mewing cry followed by a muffled scratching, as of something being raked by nails, or claws. At first the woman believed the sound must be coming from somewhere inside the house, a small animal, perhaps a squirrel, trapped in the attic beneath the eaves, or in a remote corner of the earthen-floored cellar; after she searched the house thoroughly, she had to conclude that it emanated from somewhere outside, at the bottom of the old garden, perhaps. It was far more distinct at certain times than at others, depending upon the direction and velocity of the wind. How like a baby’s cry, terribly distressing to hear! and the scratching, which came in spasmodic, desperate flurries, was yet more distressing, evoking an obscure horror. The woman believed she’d first begun hearing the sound at the time of the spring thaw in late March, when melting ice dripped in a continuous arhythmic delirium from chimneys, roofs, eaves, trees. With the coming of warm weather, her bedroom window open to the night, her sleep was increasingly disturbed. She had no choice, then, did she?—she must trace the sound to its origin. She set about the task calmly enough one morning, stepping out into unexpectedly bright, warm sunshine, and making her way into the lush tangle of vegetation that had been her mother’s garden of thirty years before. The mewing sound, the scratching—it seemed to be issuing from the very bottom of the garden, close by a stained concrete drainage ditch that marked the end of the property. As soon as she listened for it, however, it ceased. How steady the woman’s heartbeat, amid the quickening pulse of a May morning. Out of the old garage, that had once been a stable, the woman got a shovel, a spade, a rake, these implements festooned in cobwebs and dust, and began to dig. It was awkward work and her soft hands ached after only minutes, so she returned to the garage to fetch gardening gloves— these too covered in cobwebs and dust, and

stiffened with dirt. The mid-morning sun was ablaze so she located an old straw hat of her mother’s: it fitted her head oddly, as if its band had been sweated through and dried, stiffened asymmetrically. So she set again to work. First, she dug away sinewy weeds and vines, chicory, wild mustard, tall grasses, in the area out of which the cry had emanated; she managed to uncover the earth, which was rich with compost, very dark, moist. Almost beneath her feet, the plaintive mewing sounded! “Yes. Yes. I’m here,” she whispered. She paused, very excited; she heard a brief flurry of scratching, then silence. “I’m here, now.” She grunted as she pushed the shovel into the earth, urging it downward with her weight, her foot; it was a pity she’d so rarely used gardening implements, in all of her fifty years. She was a naturally graceful woman so out of her element here she felt ludicrous to herself, like a beast on its hind legs. She dug. She spaded, and raked. She dug again, deepening and broadening the hole which was like a wound in the jungle-like vegetation. Chips and shards of aged brick, glass, stones were uncovered, striking the shovel. Beetles scurried away, their shells glinting darkly in the sunshine. Earthworms squirmed, some of them cut cruelly in two. For some time the woman worked in silence, hearing only her quickened heartbeat and a roaring pulse in her ears; then, distinctly, with the impact of a shout, there came the pleading cry again, so close she nearly dropped the shovel. At last, covered in sweat, her hands shaking, the woman struck something solid. She dropped to her knees and groped in the moist dark earth and lifted something round and hollow—a human skull? But it was small, hardly half the size of an adult’s skull. “My God!” the woman whispered. Squatting then above the jagged hole, turning the skull in her fingers. How light it was! The color of parchment, badly stained from the soil. She brushed bits of damp earth away, marveling at the subtle contours of the cranium. Not a hair remained. The delicate bone was cracked in several places and its texture minutely scarified, like a ceramic glaze. A few of the teeth were missing, but most appeared to be intact, though caked with dirt. The perfectly formed jaws, the slope of the cheekbones! The empty eye sockets, so round . . . The woman lifted the skull to stare into the sockets as if staring into mirror-eyes, eyes of an eerie transparency. A kind of knowledge passed

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between her and these eyes yet she did not know: was this a child’s skull? had a child been buried here, it must have been decades ago, on her family’s property? Unnamed, unmarked? Unacknowledged? Unknown? For several fevered hours the woman dug deeper into the earth. She was panting in the overhead sun, which seemed to penetrate the straw hat as if it were made of gauze; her sturdy body was clammy with sweat. She discovered a number of scattered bones—a slender forearm, curving ribs, part of a hand, fingers—these too parchment-colored, child-sized. What small, graceful fingers! How they had scratched, clawed, for release! Following this morning, forever, the finger bones would be at peace. By early afternoon, the woman gave up her digging. She could find no more of the skeleton than a dozen or so random bones. She went up to the house, and returned quickly, eagerly, with a five-foot runner of antique velvet cloth, a deep wine color, in which to carry the skull and bones up to the house. For no one must see. No one must know. “I am here, I will always be here,” the woman promised. “I will never abandon you.” She climbed to the second floor of the house, and in her bedroom at the rear she lay the velvet runner on a table beside her bed and beneath a bay window through whose diamond-shaped, leaded panes a reverent light would fall. Tenderly, meticulously, the woman arranged the skull and bones into the shape of a human being. Though most of the skeleton was missing, it would never seem to the woman’s loving eye that this was so. In this way the woman’s bedroom became a secret temple. On the velvet cloth the skull and bones, unnamed, would be discovered after the woman’s death, but that was a long way off.

GENERAL COMMENTARY JAMES EGAN (ESSAY DATE 1990) SOURCE: Egan, James. “‘Romance of a Darksome Type’: Versions of the Fantastic in the Novels of Joyce Carol Oates.” Studies in Weird Fiction 7 (1990): 12-21. In the following essay, Egan discusses Oates’s combination of “the parodic, the visionary, and the apocalyptic, into a Gothic delineation of the American Dream” in Wonderland, Son of the Morning, Bellefleur, A Bloodsmoor Romance, and Mysteries of Winterthurn.

During the 1970s a critical consensus began to take shape about the fiction of Joyce Carol

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Oates, namely that her work was moving away from “external”, realistic experiences toward the fantastic and visionary (Walker 27; Wagner xix). “Her writings,” Mary Kathryn Grant has suggested, “presuppose a nightmare world which challenges the very limits of man’s endurance and tries his spirit to the breaking point” (2). Increasingly, this “nightmare world” has assumed peculiarly Gothic qualities. Probably the best description of Oatesian Gothic has been offered by Greg Johnson: “Her work combines such traditionally Gothic elements as extreme personal isolation, violent physical and psychological conflict, settings and symbolic action used to convey painfully heightened psychological states, and a prose style of passionate, often melodramatic intensity” (16-17). The Gothic is prominent, concentrated and of particular importance to the thematic statement Oates makes in five novels: Wonderland (1971), Son of the Morning (1978), Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984). An examination of these novels reveals that Oates has refined two forms of Gothicism, a contemporary and a somewhat antiquarian version, to the point where she can articulate an intricate cultural fable which integrates a wide range of thematic motifs, character types, and narrative patterns long associated with the Gothic tradition. That fable derives from her ironic perception of the American Dream and its workings. In short, Oates combines several discrete elements which recur in her writing, notably the parodic, the visionary, and the apocalyptic, into a Gothic delineation of the American Dream. As her Gothic mode evolves from Wonderland to Mysteries of Winterthurn another significant pattern develops: she moves from an indirect, allusive, and aesthetically remote high Gothic toward a direct, overt use of recognizable Gothic idioms found in popular literature for the past century. Several parallels between the Gothic aesthetic and the general characteristics of Oates’s fiction are readily apparent. Her vision of the world is typically dark, skeptical, and parodic, stressing “confrontations with mindless evil”, frenetic quests which result in discoveries of inner “emptiness”, “hidden, unlovely depths of passion”, or the perilously thin line between civilized behavior and savagery (Creighton 27, 32, 40). Her first five novels have been described as “dramatizations of nightmares” (Grant 8). Consistently, Oates examines the shifting borders between the real and the illusory, the self and the Other. For more than a decade she has shown a recurring fascination with

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In a 1980 interview with The Paris Review Oates was asked whether the fact that she had written about medicine, law, politics, religion, and spectator sports meant that she was consciously “filling out a ‘program’ of novels about American life” (370). Though Oates denied that she was deliberately developing such a scheme, American settings, characters, and themes manifest themselves prominently in all her long fiction, and as her vision of American culture and its value systems clarifies, the Gothic slant of her writing becomes more apparent. Written before Oates’s Gothic aesthetic had fully asserted itself, Wonderland (1971) blends the realistic, grotesque, absurd, and macabre. Wonderland may be fairly described as “horrific” and a “shocker”, yet Oates refrains from extremes of the fantastic in her subject matter and plot line. The novel’s opening details the sort of sensational episode common in tabloids or even newspaper headlines: one day in December 1939 Jesse Harte returns from school to find that his father, having murdered the entire family, now waits for him in their chillingly quiet home. Jesse flees into the night as the sound of his father’s shotgun blast fades behind him; though wounded, he has escaped death. After he has lived for awhile with his grandfather, doing heavy farmwork in a grimly naturalistic setting, the affluent Pedersen family adopts Jesse, who becomes a “project” for Dr. Karl Pedersen and strives to emulate his new “father” in all ways, eventually winding up in medical school. Oates presents realistically, almost minutely, the numbingly demanding duties of an intern in a large metropolitan hospital and the grinding pressures that beset Jesse as he evolves into a prominent brain surgeon. The grotesque and the absurd, however, go hand-in-hand with his professional success. The entire Pedersen family is obscenely fat and obsessed with eating: Hildie and Friedrica, Jesse’s siblings, are obese, neurotic child prodigies, and Mrs. Pedersen an obese alcoholic. Oates establishes grotesque gluttony as a metaphor of the various obsessions and compulsions which haunt Jesse throughout his life. She sets the Gothic tenor of

Wonderland by means of a motif Irving Malin associates with new American Gothic, the monstrous family, in this case headed by a narcissistic, “misery-giving” father and containing stunted siblings (58, 65). The Pedersen family tries in various ways to “suffocate” Jesse and “no solution to family strife” seems possible. As Malin argues, images of suffocation and endless strife characterize the new American Gothic version of the familial (9, 80-90). Problems more profound than gluttony set in when Jesse begins work as an intern at a Chicago hospital. At the point, Wonderland recalls Kafka’s absurdist parable, “A Country Doctor”. Jesse must confront the human wreckage, pain, and confusion of a brutal urban world: the horror of sick and beaten children; the gruesome sight of a woman who has aborted her fetus with a fruit juice glass; the endless wounds he must minister to. Like Kafka’s country doctor, Jesse faces an impossible task, to heal the “wounds of life” which the order of things dictates cannot be healed. Jesse cannot stop the flow of blood any more than the country doctor can heal the inexplicable, worm-infested sore he has been summoned to cure. Wonderland’s parallels with Kafka’s allegory also point to the Gothic subtexts which unify Jesse’s journey through the nightmare world of American culture. Modern Gothic themes of violence, breakdown, and putrescence permeate the novel (Punter 3). Jesse narrowly escapes from a father who has collapsed, only to enter an environment where insanity reigns. The Pedersen family is a bizarre illusion, all of whose members have retreated into the neuroses that best sustain them. Despite Karl Pedersen’s grandiose, patriarchal ambitions and tyrannical power, he and his family are degenerating, and the amount of psychological violence he can bring to bear on them cannot arrest the decline. Moreover, as Jesse interns he enters what amounts to an urban Gothic environment of dark hospital corridors, chaos, and various species of death, pressures which erode his sanity. His hospital setting contains various Gothic “paraphernalia of death”, not only the grim devices of abortion (318), but the vast medical machines designed to save lives, machinery which seems at times to do the opposite (Hennessy 50). Yet Wonderland’s closest affinities with the Gothic tradition are classical; its echoes of Shelley’s Frankenstein.1 Early on, Karl Pedersen has a protective, almost messianic interest in Jesse, just as Victor Frankenstein had in the creature—the creature was Victor’s “project”, and Jesse becomes Pederson’s. Like the creature, Jesse

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the “ways the personality may be invaded by mysterious and unpredictable moments of vision, insight or inspiration, and with the dislocations such invasions cause in the texture of everyday life” (Waller 82). In both her realistic and nonrealistic fiction, Oates deals with a remarkably wide range of psychological horror, madness, obsession, and paranoia (Creighton 18). A discussion of the novels in question will illustrate their Gothic qualities.

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reads voraciously and tries earnestly to learn from the social world he inhabits. Ultimately, Pedersen disinherits and disowns Jesse, much as Victor disowned the creature. Yet in each case the legacy of the creator lives on: Wonderland abounds in macabre, perverse doctors and scientists, Dr. Perrault in particular, who all serve as ironic role models for Jesse as he tries to define his identity. Throughout the novel, Jesse’s past haunts him, and he repeatedly tries to escape from it, as Victor did from his. No matter what Jesse does, though, he inevitably parrots Pedersen in thought, deed, even in word. Like the creature, Jesse is a double, a simultaneous embodiment and refutation of Pedersen’s ideals. Oates has, in effect, gothicized the American Dream, for the reader discovers in Jesse’s life an inverted Horatio Alger parable in which Jesse acts much like a Gothic hero in his aggressive quest for power, success, and, in his role as brain surgeon, control over life and death (Day 17). The sins of Pedersen are revisited, in Gothic fashion, on Jesse, who lives an emotionally empty life in a mansion not unlike Pedersen’s, torturing his daughters in some of the ways Pedersen had tortured his own children (MacAndrew 85). Zombie-like, Jesse acts out the false, horrific American Dream of “conquest, control, ownership” and the triumph over “mutability” (Friedman 177). As Jesse moves across the symbolic landscape of American culture he disappears into the Gothic darkness. The skeptical vision of Gothicism converts Jesse’s search for success and freedom into the worship of a destructive bondage. Modern American culture often mythologizes the doctor as a secular savior. Wonderland’s Gothic vision offers a dark version of this mythology, for although Jesse the brain surgeon has the power to save life, by the novel’s end he has become the psychological destroyer of his wife and daughters, as much the destroyer as his maddoctor mentors were. Oates demythologizes the sacrosanct American healer of the body, the doctor. She does so with a sophisticated mixture of contemporary and classical Gothic motifs which are worked into the texture of a complex psychological novel. True, Wonderland qualifies as horrific in many ways, but Oates depends upon an erudite evocation of the Gothic rather than stereotypical devices of plot and character. Her extensive thematic reliance upon Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, is allegorical and indirect rather than literal, and the same might be said of her allusions to the fantastic works of Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka. Her strategy of indirection

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makes substantial demands of the reader, calling upon him to decipher patterns subtle enough to qualify as “high” Gothic. The reader must recognize the nuances of the Gothic tradition to feel comfortable with Oates’s subtexts. Published in 1978, shortly after Oates has “officially” experimented with Gothicism in two short story collections, the Poisoned Kiss (1975) and Night-Side (1977), Son of the Morning shows a more pronounced Gothic configuration than Wonderland did. Oates again draws upon recognizable features of contemporary American life, religious fundamentalism, electronic evangelism, and faith healing, treating many of the details of the evangelist Nathan Vickery’s career realistically: Nathan’s presence at a rural snake-handling ritual, his apprenticeship under the Reverend Marian Miles Beloff, and his final emergence as a Christian cult figure. Her primary concern in Son of the Morning appears to be exploring, through Vickery’s behavior, the numinous (or what passes for it) and the relationship between divine and diabolic. As S. L. Varnado has demonstrated, a pronounced interest in the numinous, particularly in its “sense of absolute overpoweringness”, the “mysterium” or form of the numinous experience and the paradoxical qualities of attraction and repulsion inherent in the numinous has long been a part of Gothic tradition (12-13). Put another way, “except for the fact that Gothicism rids itself of moral prohibitions, the Gothic vision clearly approximates religious affirmations” (BayerBerenbaum 13). Many similarities can be found between Christ’s life and Vickery’s. By the age of eight, Nathan has developed a “peculiar . . . precosity”, almost a psychic intuition. Also at the age of eight, he has a conversation with his grandfather Thaddeus, a confirmed atheist, which parallels the young Christ’s examination by the elders in the temple (117-26); like Christ, Nathan demonstrates to his elder a wisdom beyond the boy’s years. From his adolescence on, moreover, Nathan experiences raptures, visions of Christ, and vivid, occasionally Dantean glimpses into the world of the damned (157). Throughout his life, Nathan’s relationship with others seems remote, as though his comprehension of the human condition suffers because he is partly other, not completely human; the situation echoes the mysteries of Christ’s divine-human nature. Nathan’s intuitive insight, his power as a faith healer (which seems to grow as the book progresses), and his acute sensitivity to the workings of a world beyond the material suggest the Gothic qualities of the novel as well.2 Whether or not Vickery’s behavior and powers

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The mutilation signals a change in the tenor and direct of Son of the Morning as Oates begins to illustrate the relationships between the divine and the diabolic. Significantly she entitles the section of the novel where Nathan begins to appear demonic “Last Things”, an apocalyptic phrase which calls to mind the reign of Antichrist before the end of time. In some respects, the mutilated Nathan’s attitude resembles that of Satan, the biblical “Son of the Morning”. After the blinding, for example, he considers himself above sin (257) and inclines to a regressive gospel of hate (32324). Nathan revels in the public consciousness of him as an “avatar of Christ” (299), displaying some extraordinary powers which imply that he may, in fact, be the supernatural being his disciples perceive him to be. In one instance, Nathan disarms a follower who attacks him with a hunting knife. To witnesses, Nathan’s fingers appear badly slashed, yet neither cuts nor blood can be found on his hands (313). Another time, an attacker delivers a vicious blow to his forehead with a crowbar, but his head is only bruised, not crushed (354). 3 Nathan’s career as an avatar culminates in his most powerful experience of the Other: He saw that the hole before him was a mouth, and that the writhing dancing molecules of flesh were being sucked into it, and ground to nothing . . . but really he heard nothing and saw nothing, for You had swallowed the entire world. He knew his ministry was over, his life was over, that everything had come to pass as it was ordained, but he knew also—for even then You allowed him the realization of certain truths—that his terror had just begun. (362-633)

An ontological horror of a God consumes Nathan, a great vortex fully as terrifying as the scenes of hell he had witnessed earlier in the novel (157, 226). Or perhaps Satan has chosen to claim his fallen avatar. Nathan’s vision of the God-thing represents the culmination of a series of modern Gothic motifs which parody not only the messianic faith healer but the concept of the divine he represents. Nathan’s “incarnation” mocks the Christian version of the Incarnation: his mother was gangraped and his father was never identified. As

Nathan testifies for Christ early in his career, he learns the “trade” of preaching from the Mammon-like Beloff troupe, whose every action mimics religious conviction. Violence and spiritual rape predominate in the “Last Things” (Punter 3). Nathan’s followers physically and emotionally attack him and he appears to be undergoing a nervous collapse after becoming convinced that he and Christ are one. Gothic doubling mocks Nathan’s raptures: the demonic imitates the divine and worse, seems inseparable from it. Son of the Morning offers a Gothic-fantastic treatment of the numinous—ontologically dreadful, cold, and repellent, totally Other and unknowable. The story contains enough conflicting or confusing data about the numinous to prevent the reader from achieving harmony with it. We are left, instead, with the discomforting idea that the numinous cannot be deciphered, and that if it were, mankind would tremble in fear before the Godthing, an alien, formless horror. Oates concedes in Nathan’s vision of the vortex that the numinous appears to be overpowering, but her treatment of “creature-consciousness”, of being “dust and ashes” and the sense of “sheer self-depreciation” that the numinous allegedly brings about seems ominous (Varnado 12). If the “mysterium” or form of the numinous is something “absolutely and intensely positive”, she again calls the phenomenon into question (Varnado 12). Oates’s treatment of the numinous in Son of the Morning may be read as another Gothic version of the American Dream, focused this time on a healer of the soul instead of the body. Ambiguity and parody riddle her portrait of this spiritual healer. Even if one were to argue that she affirms rather than doubts the numinous, Oates echoes a Gothic “contempt for the forms of institutionalized religion” (Bayer-Berenbaum 37). The reader recalls that Nathan’s rise to power and spiritual control causes him to join forces with the Beloffs, and then to set up his own megalomanic cult; in both cases the “forms of institutionalized religion” are suspect. Nathan’s gospel of hate parodies the American Dream’s assumptions about the New Jerusalem’s redemptive powers, and his Gothic vision of the Other undercuts the notion of visionary transcendence itself. As she had done in Wonderland, Oates again treats the Gothic idiom allusively and indirectly. To cite one instance, the novel’s title recalls Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, a character Nathan comes to resemble in the story’s final section. The concept of the numinous itself, the experience of God and the validity of the experience, is intricate, not easily accessible.

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fully qualify him as a Gothic being, he surely does fit the prototype of a Gothic hero: active, seeking power, and in this case godhood (Day 17). Eventually, Vickery comes to believe that he is Christ, and in a public ceremony on Good Friday mutilates himself as an act of “humility” by cutting out his eye (236).

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Oates handles this complex concept in a complex way, presenting Son of the Morning as a psychological novel, though it admittedly features the familiar American character type of the preacher. She adds yet another level of complexity to an indirect, ambiguous tale by means of an ambivalent narrative point of view. The reader must struggle to identify the narrator, who eventually turns out to be Nathan taking a retrospective look at his life. Son of the Morning uses the Gothic, but not to reach a wide audience. In 1980 Oates began what she considered a “cycle” of experimental “genre” novels with Bellefleur (Johnson 6). The “Afterword” to the paperback edition of Mysteries of Winterthurn (1985) suggests that her efforts have a particular intention, to “present America . . . through the prismatic lens of its most popular genres—the family saga and family memoir, the Gothic romance, the detective-mystery novel, and the horror novel” (Johnson 6-7). In Bellefleur Oates does more than draw upon virtually the entire range of Gothic conventions, for she manages, by means of the elaborate, interlocking tales in this family history, to fashion a Gothic epic and to recreate America in miniature. She combines genres in such a way that the story of the Bellefleurs could be described as a “demonic history text” (Gross 2). Bellefleur Manor, “known locally as Bellefleur Castle” (3), epitomizes a classical Gothic setting: huge, antique, ornate, and sometimes baroque in design, with stormdamaged turrets, a vast, gloomy cellar, and a maze of rooms, some of them unused for decades. So singular is the Bellefleur “history of misfortune” that the family could be said to be laboring under the sort of curse traditional in classical Gothic literature. Supernatural powers abound and a variety of Gothic beings thrive in the castle’s environment or manage to work themselves into the sprawling Bellefleur family. The Turquoise Room distinguishes itself as one of the most prominent locations in the manor, possessed of a strange odor no matter how thoroughly it may be aired or scrubbed, and in which guests encounter a number of “foreign presences” (199). After spending a night in the room to investigate its foreign quality, Samuel Bellefleur undergoes a profound psychological change, so profound that his father acknowledges that “what stared coldly at him out of Samuel’s eyes was no longer exactly his son” (202). Hepatica Bellefleur discovers an equally haunting presence in the form of her husband, a peculiarly dark man with “cruel red-rimmed eyes”, who “gives off a fetid, meaty odor” (281), and

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sports “tufts of hair . . . on the backs of his hands and high on his cheeks” (281). “No matter how improbable, how incredible it might seem” (281), Hepatica has married a black bear, a were-thing who certainly appeared human when she first met him. Veronica fares no better after falling in love with the mysterious count Ragnar Norst, whose courtship leaves her alternately rapturous and lethargic. Norst prefers that they meet in the evening, often in clandestine or deserted places (369). Veronica’s brother, Aaron, suspicious of Norst, meets with a drowning accident—those who find his body discover a corpse that has been “bled white” (368). Veronica grows progressively more listless and pale until, after an attack of “pneumonia”, she awakens, strangely transformed into a woman who now shares the Count’s antipathy toward the living. Veronica, it seems, has succumbed to the charms of a vampire. Each of these vignettes represents a variation on the Gothic theme of metamorphosis and accentuates the narrative complexity of Bellefleur: Oates has incorporated into the novel three classical Gothic subgenres, the haunting, the werewolf fable, and the vampire tale. As David Punter points out, this technique of assimilation typifies a sophisticated Gothic narrative structure, and Bellefleur Castle has many such stories to tell (403). Both the manor and the family, moreover, give off the odor of cultural and psychic decay which permeates modern Gothic literature. Once a wellspring of vitality, the robust marriage of Leah and Gideon gradually disintegrates. Gideon’s passion turns to hatred and he engineers the apocalyptic climax of the novel by crashing his airplane into the castle and leveling it. Before her fiery death, Leah’s relentless scheming finally succeeds in securing the release from prison of the aged Jean-Pierre Bellefleur II, imprisoned for most of his life on a murder charge. Seemingly senile and disoriented, Jean-Pierre recollects himself enough to address a migrant labor problem affecting the Bellefleur farming enterprises by murdering the leaders of the migrants’ union. Nor are aesthetic or religious escapes from the family possible. Vernon, the only poetically inclined Bellefleur, is drowned in the Nautauga river by a drunken crowd of mill workers who fail to appreciate his efforts to incite poetic rapture in them (324). Jedediah, long an exile from the castle because of a burning mystical wish to experience God, finally realizes his desire, though in a bizarre form. Pleading with God to show His face, Jedediah suffers excruciating diarrhetic spasms (440) lasting more than a day. Suicide, murderous rampages, and

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Moreover, she organizes the saga of the Bellefleurs around several specifically Gothic themes, notably sexual transgressions (Punter 19, 410-12). On a symbolically stormy night, a strange creature, rat-sized and skeletal, appears at the castle door. The creature turns out to be a large cat, eventually named Mahalaleel, who possesses uncanny powers and develops a strong affection for Leah; in fact, Mahalaleel sleeps in Gideon and Leah’s bed— between them. Soon after the cat’s arrival, Leah becomes pregnant and undergoes a fantastic physical change, growing to Gideon’s height and experiencing a distortion of her facial features so that her “mouth and the flared nostrils and the eyes [seemed] visibly enlarged, as if a somewhat ill-fitting mask had been forced upon her” (55). She gives birth to a “monstrous” child, a hermaphrodite. The episode suggests that Leah has been impregnated by a demon and produced a semihuman child who proves preternaturally precocious—once the unnecessary male organs have been tidily snipped off with a scissors. Leah’s inclination to the sexually perverse includes her fascination with Nightshade, a dwarf discovered by Gideon on a hunting trip. Like Mahalaleel, Nightshade dotes on Leah, taking on the role of her devoted servant and confidant; as Gideon’s affections stray, the dwarf grows physically larger and more appealing. Again the narrative implies an eccentric sexual relationship, for this is the same Leah who, before she married, kept a huge pet spider named Love which intimidated her suitors (130). Sexual aberrations and “crimes caused by a distortion of natural drives” are not the only Gothic transgressions favored by the Bellefleurs (MacAndrew 88). The assumption that Gothic literature’s most prevalent theme may be the revisiting of the sins of the fathers finds ample illustration in the novel. The “sins of the fathers” appears to be a synonym for the family curse, and as Leah’s sexual peculiarities and occult child suggest, Oates allows mothers to share equally with fathers. The fate of Vernon indicates that he, too, has suffered for his fathers’ errors—the mill workers vengefully drown him in part because he belongs to a family which has financially tyrannized them and their ancestors. In a bizarrely ironic way, the overbearing aristocratic pretensions of the Bellefleurs may even have accounted for the fate of Veronica: had an “aristocratic” mien not prevailed among the Bellefleurs, Count Norst

would perhaps have bypassed them. In these and a multitude of other ways, the Bellefleur past wreaks havoc on the present. Fate seems to have decreed that the castle must fall, as inevitably as the House of Usher did. Oates’s creation of a sophisticated, multigenerational family saga allows her to comment on broader patterns in American culture while she recounts the family history. As the novel progresses, Leah grows obsessed with restoring Jean-Pierre’s vast empire to its former glory; at the point where Gideon destroys the manor, she has barely over a thousand acres of the original property left to acquire. Leah’s empire-building signals the crass indulgence of the most materialistic aspects of the American Dream, the crude desires for power in the form of wealth and the manipulation of others. This rage to live out the Bellefleur fantasy of empire puts her at the mercy of the foreboding ironies of the Gothic universe— indeed, as the novel’s plot indicates, her capitalistic quest has dissolved into a Gothically circular journey to nowhere (Day 18). Leah’s urge to consolidate and Gideon’s passion to acquire and ruin people and possessions alike have led each to a cultural horror, the emptiness of the Dream. Both qualify as Gothic villains, overreachers blind to the probability that by dreaming out the deadly Dream they are compounding the Bellefleur curse invoked by the grasping ruthlessness of their forefathers. Like other Gothic overreachers, they deny fate, deny the basic and necessarily limiting conditions of their existence in a doomed attempt to recreate an earthly American paradise in the wilderness. Bellefleur cautions that the alluring wilderness conceals the dark and ominous, demons and specters eager for self-deluded victims. Oates’s saga broadens her cultural critique of the American Dream by showing that the twentieth century shares an ancient Gothic malaise of the spirit. As suggested earlier, Oates recounts in Bellefleur a designedly “popular” Gothic parable. Whether in the novels of Louisa May Alcott, Thornton Wilder, or John Steinbeck, or in the contemporary weekly television series, the family saga has long enjoyed an enthusiastic audience. Fanciers of the Gothic, moreover, would surely find Oates’s tales of shape-shifters, supernatural possession, were-creatures, and vampires, along with the Gothic penchant for melodramatic exaggeration, visible and familiar from their many reincarnations in twentieth-century popular literature and film. As a possible final concession to the workings of popular idioms, Oates presents

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spiritual degradation serve as modern expressions of the ancestral curse: Oates extends the Gothic motif of the collapsing self to the entire family (Day 78).

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less psychological intricacy and a more fixed narrative point of view than she had utilized in Wonderland and Son of the Morning. An Author’s Note to Bellefleur claims that in the novel “the implausible is granted an authority and honored with a complexity usually reserved for realistic fiction”, calling attention to Oates’s creation of a sophisticated Gothic idiom. Having refined the idiom in Bellefleur, she provides variations on selected themes in A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982) and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), her most recent Gothic tales. As the narrator of Bloodsmoor, who designates herself the historian of the Zinn family, points out, her efforts may be construed as “allegorical” and “exemplary” (520), and Bloodsmoor could fairly be called a “romance of the darksome and Gothic type” as well (68). Oates establishes and interrelates several narrative worlds in the novel, the world of pastoral romance, the genteel, drawingroom world of manners, and the Gothic world. She organizes Bloodsmoor around a favorite motif, initiation, in this case with a Gothic twist: all the Zinn daughters enter the Gothic universe through various access routes and their experiences collectively constitute an allegorical fable about that universe. Malvinia, the most haughty and tempestuous of the lot, leaves home for a scandalous career as an actress, becoming the mistress and protégé of the renowned rake, Orlando Vandenhoffen. Malvinia indulges herself in the subtle Gothic decadence of the Gilded Age: dissolute parties, fashionable skepticism, and indulgent promiscuity. Malvinia’s environment might easily pass for elegant instead of decadent if not for her regular, unsettling sexual experiences with what she considers the “Mark of the Beast”. Frequently her paramours discover a ferociously aggressive female, one who bites, kicks, curses, and even yanks at the “masculine organ of regeneration” of Mark Twain, her most celebrated lover. Malvinia and the narrator see her sexuality as a type of demonic possession in which “The Beast [forces] himself into her slender, writhing body—fitting her arms and limbs, and torso, and the nether regions of her being, like a powerful hand thrusting itself into a snug and slightly resistant lady’s glove” (463). The Beast parodies Malvinia’s attempts at “love declarations, kisses, caresses, and other amorous indulgences” (454) with a Gothic expression of doubling, drawing out a hidden personality, an unorthodox self. Deirdre, adopted by John Quincy and Prudence Zinn at an early age, encounters more explicit and menacing forms of the supernatural. Occult presences surround

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Deirdre from her childhood on, and at times seem to control her. She takes the inevitable path to womanhood by becoming a famous medium, but her preternatural gifts prove perilous. At one of Deirdre’s séances, a Professor Bey, participating in a rationalist inquiry into the proceedings, is invaded by an alien, hostile force. Not long after, Deirdre’s own contact spirits overwhelm her, plunging her into the chaotic darkness of the Spirit World (499). Octavia, the most conventional and tranquil of the sisters, opts for what she assumes will be a traditional marriage to Mr. Lucius Rumford, a wealthy widower of what prove to be decidedly eccentric sexual habits. Soon after the marriage, Rumford puts a hood over Octavia’s head before performing the “unitary act” (386). With the passage of time, his conjugal demands grow “gradually more exacting, and more challenging of definition” (425), until they culminate in a most unusual request: he asks Octavia to put a noose around his neck and pull with all the force she can muster. The hooded wife obliges and proceeds to strangle her husband. The Rumford marriage, a Gothically mocking venture into the sexually bizarre, into rape, violence, and death, results in an equally disturbing offspring, Godfrey. An impish, unpredictable child bristling with a dark energy, Godfrey resents Sarah, his infant sister. One day Octavia awakens to a “vertiginous sense of horror, as of suffocation” (433) and rushes to Sarah’s room, to find Godfrey standing near the crib of his dead sister. Octavia has perhaps witnessed the revisiting of the sins of the fathers, the disruption of her ordered world by a demonically inspired being from the Gothic universe. Constance Philippa Zinn starts early on a journey into that universe, and exotic transformations mark her passing. When her husband enters the boudoir on their wedding night, he finds a dressmaker’s dummy occupying Constance Philippa’s place in bed. His bride has disappeared, and she does not reappear until the final chapter, where another fantastic transformation reveals itself. Constance Philippa has adopted the name Philippe Fox, and for good reason: “Mr. Fox was assuredly a male, in every particular: the growth, and expansion, and forcible protuberance, of the inner female organ, being now nearly complete, and having attained a length of some five or six inches in repose” (596). A Gothic metamorphosis has occurred and a new identity has emerged, the true Constance Philippa. Samantha, long her father’s devoted laboratory assistant, reckons with the Gothic universe in ways no less sensational than those of

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The final chapters of Bloodsmoor clarify the ultimate significance of the Gothic initiations of the Zinn girls. Generally, Oates diminishes the traumatic effects of terror evoked by the Gothic universe, for each of the Zinns has not only survived her initiation but has seemingly gained from it. Confronting the reversals, deteriorations, violence, and lack of purpose in the Gothic universe has helped each to find her true self, accept it, and then maintain it in an America reluctant to take females seriously. In fact, entering the Gothic universe has, metaphorically, sophisticated all five and given them some distance from the corrosive influence of the patriarchal utopianism characteristic of the American Dream in the nineteenth century, a utopianism which renders femininity inferior and subordinate. As an “exemplary” fable, Bloodsmoor proposes that only when the Gothic universe which coexists with the materialistic, destructively genteel America of the nineteenth century has been reckoned with, can the nation meet the Modern Age as the Zinn sisters did. Oates implies that the Gothic world can be finally redemptive and not destructive by allowing each of the girls to find true love, in several cases a love abandoned since youth because of the unrealistic demands of gentility. Eileen Bender’s claim that Bloodsmoor may be seen as a “work of feminist resistance” (132) can be supported by the novel’s Gothic initiation rites, which all suggest the competence, creativity, resilience, honesty, and good judgment of the nineteenth-century American woman, despite the societal limitations designed for her. In Bloodsmoor women generally lead the way into the Gothic universe, whereas in the stock Gothic

novel an aggressive male usually does, and they surmount daunting obstacles or find effective ways to mitigate the Gothic’s dark power, proving the Dream’s stereotypical perception of women wrong. To popularize her Gothic romance, Oates not only draws upon the appeal of the supernatural in many ways, particularly in the character of John Quincy Zinn, a more overt and recognizable Frankenstein-figure than Jesse Pederson was in Wonderland, but she capitalizes upon American Gothic narrative’s tendency to provide an “alternative history of the American experience” (Grass 3). In this case, she draws a series of ironic parallels between Bloodsmoor and a well-known nineteenth-century family history and female conduct book, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868). Alcott’s women were the essence of accepted, conventional behavior, and they had no contact whatever with the Gothic universe. Oates seems determined to achieve her own sort of popularity by writing an often lurid, dire, sensational exposé of the Alcott fable, offering in its place a “true history” of what the nineteenth century had denied and counting on her readers to recognize a send-up of an entrenched, easily detected myth about the lives of women. The Gothic serves to entice the reader with its enduringly popular melodramatic intrigue and “scandal”. Mysteries of Winterthurn revolves around the exploits of a detective figure, Xavier Kilgarvan, matching him against the caprices of the Gothic world and recording his attempts to win the love of Perdita, a distant cousin. “The Virgin in the Rose-Bower”, Xavier’s first case, exposes him to a classical Gothic situation, haunted Glen Mawr Manor and a supernatural murder. Mrs. Abigail Whimbrel, spending a night in the manor’s Honeymoon Room, is attacked by vampiric cherubs who seem to inhabit the elaborate mural covering most of one wall. For their primary victim, however, the creatures select Abigail’s infant son, eating away “part of the throat and torso, and much of the back of the tender head” (55). The mysterious assaults continue (the next victims are lambs who appear to have been attacked from the air), prompting Xavier to test his skills in a state of affairs for which the authorities have no explanation. The ominous Miss Georgina Kilgarvan, his cousin, strikes him as a prime suspect, but verifiable evidence remains elusive. However, Xavier’s own analytical methods and the attitudes which underlie them may be his greatest drawbacks. While investigating the Hon-

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her sisters. John Quincy Zinn proves to be one of his age’s most distinguished inventors, whose credits include a time machine and the electric chair and whose dreams late in life include a “perpetual-motion machine” which he expects to apply to the “phenomenon of atom-expansion or detonation” (607). Samantha’s exposure to her father’s eccentric habits, her marriage to the mysterious Nahurn, and her fascination with the process of invention suggest that she may evolve into the haunted wizard John Quincy Zinn finally became. Samantha, however, repudiates her father’s apocalyptic zeal for the destruction of the human race, turning her energies to such mundane matters as the inventions of a “self-filling pen” and a “baby-mobile” (672). Her choice of more humane inventions implies that she has seen the implications of John Quincy Zinn’s absorption by the Gothic universe.

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eymoon Room, he sees blood dripping from the mural, but soon recovers sufficiently to “observe, in a more composed tone, that the ceiling must be leaking” (103). Even when the demons swoop down on Xavier himself, he refuses to concede the reality of the supernatural. After his climactic discovery of a group of mummified infant corpses in the attic above the Honeymoon Room, he swoons, with the result that his future recollections of seeing Georgina hovering over the bodies cannot be proven to his own satisfaction. Nevertheless, Xavier’s failures must not be dismissed as total—at least he meets in the manor the enchanting, beautiful Perdita, who seems very much a part of the preternatural environment, so much so that Xavier perceives a ghostly phantasm of her in his bedroom (92). When the tale ends, however, both the cherubs and Perdita remain mysteries to the young detective. An older and wiser Xavier tries to solve another local crime, the gruesome ritual murders committed on an allegedly bewitched piece of ground, the Devil’s Half-Acre. He methodically reviews the clues, utilizing the latest refinements in the art of criminology, and believes he has found the culprit, the foppish Valentine Westergaard. Now a veritable Sherlock Holmes, Xavier musters sufficient evidence for a trial, but with disastrous results. Westergaard claims that the ghost of a warlock, Elias Fenwick, commandeered him into bringing five sacrificial victims to the Half-Acre. The jury frees Westergaard and indicts Colin, Xavier’s brother, as Fenwick’s accessory, a situation for which Xavier’s mother holds him accountable. Once again, Xavier fails to penetrate what may well have been the supernatural and, though he still loves Perdita, she appears to be further out of reach than ever. Perdita, however, becomes a major figure in Xavier’s last case, “The Bloodstained Bridal Gown”, because her husband, the Reverend Harmon Bunting, has been the victim of a gory axe murder. Perdita claims she was raped by the killer, who wiped her own blood on her bridal gown as a way of claiming her for the devil. Summoned from New York to search out the infamous events in the Grace Episcopal rectory, Xavier brings to bear on the matter his highly polished skills, to no avail. Frustrated by false leads and faulty evidence, he turns to drink and dissolution, finally conceding the case. Ironically, concession has its rewards: Xavier eventually wins the hand of the widowed Perdita, vowing never to trade the satisfactions of a husband and father for the “accursèd art of crime detection” (482).4

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Xavier’s consistent failure to resolve mysterious crimes and the romantic reward that accompanies his failure constitutes yet another allegorical statement about the Gothic world. Clearly Xavier does not resemble the sort of detective-hero described by William Patrick Day, the type of character ideally suited to resolve the “genre’s tendency toward absolute instability”, who can survive in the Gothic world because he can “reconcile the qualities of the male protagonist with those of the Gothic heroine” (Day 50, 55). Xavier’s shortcomings amount to a defense of the fantastic and mysterious, his initiations into the supernatural, the violent, and the bizarre validating the power and sacrosanct status of the dark world. Perdita came from that world, the metaphorical haunted manor, and before Xavier can win her he must concede that some knowledge should remain off limits; that the Gothic universe cannot be deciphered by blatantly analytical schemes; and that recognizing the perimeters imposed by the Gothic stands as a necessary condition of his emotional and psychological initiation. Mysteries of Winterthurn sacralizes the Gothic by preserving its aura of ambiguity, its Otherness. The process of sacralization constitutes yet another Oatesian indictment of fallacies in the American Dream, this time a metaphorical indictment. Xavier has become a renowned investigator, but at the same time his mindset has become reductively materialistic and his methods little more than Yankee ingenuity, clever tinkering. His materialistic approaches to problems of detection connote the arrogant, aggressive materialism inherent in the Dream itself, a materialism capable of comprehending only the literal and immediate, the very opposites of the elusive, symbolic Gothic. When Xavier confronts the Gothic universe, Oates encourages the reader to arrive at an alternative view of the dream, a view distinct from “pietistic . . . idealization” (Gross 89). Oates makes the adventures of Xavier Kilgarvan recognizable and accessible by means of the genre of the detective tale and the subject matter of Xavier’s investigations. From Dupin and Sherlock Holmes to Mike Hammer and the Continental Op, detective figures have become conspicuous, accepted archetypes of popular literature. Xavier’s investigation of the vampiric cherubs allows Oates to link his actions with yet another popular genre, the horror story. She also works the sensational subject matter of the Gothic tradition into his investigation of witchcraft, ritual-cult murders, and, as Cara Chell argues, the possible love-triangle slaying of Perdita’s husband (20). In

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In the novels we have examined, a broad range of Gothic themes and devices appear, from metamorphosis, to multiplication of the personality, to the transformation of time and space. Oates proves herself adept at evoking versions of the dualism central to both classical and contemporary Gothic, illustrating as well the Gothic premise that many closed worlds lie within the open and familiar. Particularly effective are her Gothic renditions of “alien [personalities] within the conscious self” (Creighton 138). In Wonderland and Son of the Morning Oates relies primarily upon modern Gothic motifs, while in Bellefleur, Bloodsmoor, and Winterthurn she adapts classical Gothic to her thematic needs. Each novel develops intricate narrative worlds which interact, with sophisticated effects. Wonderland juxtaposes literal and metaphysical Gothic, Bellefleur the cultural epic and the family history, and Bloodsmoor the utopian fable and the sensational exposé. Her sustained exploration of Gothicism in the context of American culture and mythology links the novels under consideration. The Gothic acts as a device for monstrous parody in Son of the Morning, as the crux of an initiation ritual which helps to define the feminine self in Bloodsmoor, and as a sacralized form of purification in Winterthurn. Bellefleur represents Oates’s most ambitious and thorough effort to Gothicize the American Dream and to relate American culture to the fantastic worlds which surround or lie embedded in it. In Bellefleur she connects her perception of the Dream as pathology to suitably Gothic images of decay, violence, and the monstrous. Of course, the Gothic vision of Joyce Carol Oates continues to evolve and its final statement cannot yet be determined. However, it is fair to say that she wishes to employ both high and popular literary mediums to achieve her goals. Bellefleur, Bloodsmoor, and Winterthurn all display her familiarity with the genres, themes, and underlying assumptions of popular literature. In these three novels she has, in effect, translated the allusive, metaphorical, and metaphysically intricate Gothic idiom of Wonderland and Son of the Morning into a more direct and familiar way of evoking the powerful, durable impression that Gothic melodrama, horror, sensationalism, and violence have traditionally made on the popular imagination.

Notes 1. Cf. Bender, who notes that “Wonderland thus is another Oatesian Frankenstein” (55). She does not, however, develop the parallels with Shelley’s novel in any detail. 2. Cf. Johnson 143, 153-54; Dean 140-43. Both Johnson and Dean point to parallels between Vickery and Christ but do not discuss Oates’s treatment of the Gothic numinous. 3. Cf. Dean, who notes that Nathan is “unkillable” (141). 4. Cf. Bender, who points out that when Oates’s “doomed detectives give up their search for rational solutions, they open the way for loving resolution” (177).

Works Cited Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda. The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art. London: Associated University Press, 1982. Bender, Eileen Tyser. Joyce Carol Oates: Artist in Residence. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Chell, Cara. “Untricking the Eye: Joyce Carol Oates and the Feminist Ghost Story.” Arizona Quarterly 41 (1985): 5-23. Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Day, William Patrick. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Dean, Sharon L. “Faith and Art: Joyce Carol Oates’s Son of the Morning.” Critique 28 (1987): 135-47. Friedman, Ellen G. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Ungar, 1980. Grant, Mary Kathryn. The Tragic Vision of Joyce Carol Oates. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978. Gross, Louis S. Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland to Day of the Dead. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989. Hennessy, Brendan. The Gothic Novel. London: Longman, 1980. Johnson, Greg. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987. MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Malin, Irving. New American Gothic. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. Oates, Joyce Carol. Bellefleur. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980. ———. A Bloodsmoor Romance. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982. ———. Contraries: Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. ———. “Daisy.” Night-Side: Eighteen Tales. New York: Vanguard, 1977. 221-43. ———. Interview. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Fifth Series. Ed. George Plimpton. New York: Penguin, 1981. 361-84. ———. Mysteries of Winterthurn. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984.

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Winterthurn, then, Oates combines the popular genres of mystery, horror, and sensational romance with a linear narrative structure and psychological clarity to make her novel readable as a thriller.

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———. Son of the Morning. New York: Vanguard, 1978. ———. Wonderland. New York: Vanguard, 1971. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman, 1980. Varnado, S. L. Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987. Wagner, Linda W., ed. Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Waller, G. F. Dreaming America: Obsession and Transcendence in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

TITLE COMMENTARY Night-Side GREG JOHNSON (ESSAY DATE 1994) SOURCE: Johnson, Greg. “The Power of Allusion, the Uses of Gothic: Experiments in Form and Genre.” In Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction, pp. 68-93. New York: Twayne, 1994. In the following excerpt, Johnson examines Oates’s treatment of the Gothic in her works, particularly in the 1977 short story collection, Night-Side.

Night-Side The attempt to define and evaluate literary Gothicism has created an ongoing controversy among critics and scholars, primarily because the term “Gothic” has achieved the kind of connotative vagueness—rather like that other free-floating term “Romantic”—that inspires its use in a startling variety of contexts. In 1969, Oates observed that “Gothicism, whatever it is, is not a literary tradition so much as a fairly realistic assessment of modern life,”1 and in 1980 she added that “gothic with a small-letter ‘g’” simply connotes “a work in which extremes of emotion are unleashed.”2 Both comments were in response to critical evaluations throughout her career that have associated her work with the Gothic tradition. In the early 1980s, of course, she published three postmodernist Gothic works—Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)—as part of a projected quintet of novels that view America through “the prismatic lens” of genre fiction (WW, 373); yet Oates’s work had been labeled “Gothic” long before she began concocting these blatantly nonrealistic experiments. Such early novels as

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With Shuddering Fall (1964), Expensive People (1968) and Wonderland also contained extremes of violence, psychological malaise, and grotesque characterization, and were written in a prose style of passionate, often melodramatic intensity. In the view of some critics, these elements aligned Oates with the Southern Gothic tradition of Faulkner, O’Connor, and Carson McCullers, but the dynamic, hallucinatory power of her best work also recalls the complex explorations of Dostoyevsky, the nightmare visions of Poe and Kafka, and even the fantastic world of Lewis Carroll— whose work Oates has often cited as a major influence. Although most contemporary fiction described as “gothic”—the uncapitalized spelling having grown more common as the term’s connotations have become more far-ranging—has eliminated the supernatural elements that characterized the generative eighteenth-century British Gothics of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, the themes of alienation and psychological breakdown have been notable in American literature from the beginning. As Irving Malin observes, Gothicism “is in the mainstream of American fiction” because it evokes the condition of psychological extremity at the heart of our literary tradition.3 In his more recent study of Gothic fantasy, William Patrick Day describes the modernist permutations of the genre in a way strikingly applicable to Oates’s work: “The isolation of the Gothic and modernist protagonist is enforced, not only by the failure of communal and traditional value systems, but by the breakdown of conventional concepts of causality and the idea of wholeness of personality and characters. The doubled and divided characters of the Gothic fantasy reflect the break-down of conventional notions of what constitutes a self. This same disintegration appears, more realistically, in the modernist fascination with states of consciousness.”4 In her pseudonymous Rosamond Smith novels—Lives of the Twins (1987), Soul/Mate (1989), Nemesis (1990), and Snake Eyes (1992)—Oates has examined “doubled and divided” characters by focusing on the phenomenon of twins, a particular fascination she has explored in her short stories (“Heat” and “Twins,” for example) as well, but the more general “break-down of conventional notions of what constitutes a self” is a major theme throughout her work. Furthermore, as Oates asserts in her essay “Wonderlands,” Gothic fiction represents “dimensions of the psyche given a luridly tangible form, in which unacknowledged (or rigorously suppressed) wishes are granted

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freedom. Impulse rises at once to the level of action. . . . Frequently in Gothic fiction the innocent are not only victimized but are co-opted by the wicked: the wonderland is a marvelous place where we are they—our shadow selves given both substance and potency” (WW, 83). Furthermore, in the preface to Bellefleur she argues that “if Gothicism has the power to move us (and it certainly has the power to fascinate the novelist) it is only because its roots are in psychological realism” (WW, 371). For Oates, therefore, the Gothic mode provides an opportunity not to evade the social responsibility and philosophical inquiry traditionally associated with serious fiction; rather, its psychological focus and its liberating aesthetic conventions simply provide an alternative, vibrant, and highly dramatic means of expressing Oates’s typical themes. Above all, the Gothic enables Oates to probe beyond conventional perceptions of reality, an ambition clearly visible also in one of her finest early novels, Wonderland. Itself based upon the Lewis Carroll books that most influenced Oates as a child, impressing her with their “wonderful blend of illogic and humor and horror and justice” (Phillips, “Art of Fiction,” 75), the novel takes as its epigraph a passage from another postmodernist Gothicist, Jorge Luis Borges, which states a primary theme of Oates’s short fiction as well: “We . . . have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false.”5 Virtually all her short-story volumes show some influence of the Gothic tradition, whether in the Faulknerian “Southern Gothic” vein of the early Eden county stories depicting rural isolation and madness; or in the sometimes hallucinatory psychological intensity of “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” “The Metamorphosis,” and “The Dead”; or in certain postmodernist experimental tales of the 1980s collected in Raven’s Wing (1986), The Assignation (1988), and Heat (1991). In The Assignation, one of her two collections of “miniature narratives,” such tales as “Blue-Bearded Lover” and “The Others” recall nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, while others convey the kind of hothouse psychological intensity, the precarious balance between sanity and madness, traditionally associated with the genre. With their brief, truncated scenes and their poetic intensity, they have a brutal, sometimes horrific impact, laying bare with deft economy G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3

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and unflinching directness the anxieties, longings, and obsessions lying just beneath the surface of “ordinary” life. Several of Oates’s collections, however, are even more notable in their use of the Gothic mode in portraying human consciousness as an ongoing journey fraught with bewildering visions, inexplicable detours, unnameable terrors. Even before Night-Side (1977), Oates published The Poisoned Kiss (1975), her collection of mostly nonrealistic tales that, according to her, seemed to spring from an alter ego named “Fernandes.” As Oates noted in the Afterword to the volume, “The only way I could accept these stories was to think of them as a literary adventure, or a cerebral/Gothic commentary on my own writing, or as the expression of a part of my personality that had been stifled” (PK, 188). Although this instance of literary “possession” by a foreign personality, who set all his stories in Portugal (which Oates had never visited), inspired Oates to read voluminously in parapsychology, mysticism, and the occult, she never fully comprehended the experience; eventually, “Fernandes” retreated, and his stories came to an end (PK, 189). The Poisoned Kiss remains an anomaly in Oates’s oeuvre, an experiment in fiction (and in consciousness) that, while lacking the psychological power and wealth of detail that characterize her strongest fiction, nonetheless provides a fascinating gloss on her ongoing exploration of psychological states. Night-Side, however, fully exploits the Gothic mode, occasionally including the traditional staples of supernatural events and exotic settings, but most often focusing upon extreme psychological aberration and isolation, which in turn force her characters to confront riddling and often profound philosophical questions. These stories tend, moreover, to point outward, toward political and social realities, even when they seem most concerned with states of consciousness and make use of fantastic elements. For Oates, as Eva Manske observes, “Gothic elements and fantasies have the larger function of expanding the thematic range and suggestiveness in conveying the atmosphere of public and private American life in the past and today.”6 Night-Side certainly encompasses thematic concerns discussed extensively in other chapters: “The Giant Woman,” for example, is set in Eden County, “The Widows” and “The Snowstorm” focus intensely on female experience, “Daisy” and “Further Confessions” are highly allusive, and “Bloodstains” has allegorical elements, including a Hawthornean birthmark. As a unified collection,

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however, Night-Side is located at the border between visible reality and another dimension— exciting but fearful, yielding expansive visions and nightmares—at which Oates’s characters suffer a reassessment of their concept of self and their relationship to others, to the world, and to their previously held views of their own purpose and destiny. Often this reassessment pushes them to extremes of insanity or repression; a handful of stronger characters returns from the Gothic world, as do Oates’s readers, with a heightened apprehension of a complex reality that is both beautiful and bizarre. Once again, Oates’s comments on traditional Gothic fiction describe her own: “Here, suddenly, is a mysterious door in a wall, and here is the golden key that will unlock it, one has only to summon forth one’s courage and enter. Whatever awaits will not only be strange and unexpected, it will, in a way impossible to explain, make sense; and it will be ours—as ‘reality’ never is” (WW, 79-80). Oates suggests the nature of her enterprise in the book’s subtitle: “Eighteen Tales.” Like the later Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, Night-Side inhabits a realm of storytelling with its own distinct conventions. Unlike the realistic, carefully plotted short story, the tale allows the narrative freedom of brisk pacing, improbable events, and idiosyncratic characters and settings. This freedom does not, however, preclude literary seriousness; as Poe remarked in the preface to his own volume of Gothic tales, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), artistic adaptations of established conventions are “the results of matured purpose and very careful elaboration.”7 Although some of the tales in Night-Side could, in another context, be read as typically Oatesian psychological realism—“The Widows” would fit smoothly into Marriages and Infidelities, for instance—there are others involving the paranormal, the dream state, and other nontraditional approaches to perception and knowledge, and these manage an eerie penetration into their more realistic companion-pieces such as “The Widows,” “The Translation,” and “The Snowstorm.” The result is a collection that, as a whole, brings even “ordinary” experiences— such as being temporarily stranded in a blizzard— into a psychological realm that, like the metaphorical storm itself, blurs the distinction between the familiar, daylight world of ordinary consciousness and a visionary landscape where repressed horrors may spring into vibrant life. In both “The Sacrifice” and “Bloodstains,” for instance, a professional man’s carefully constructed daytime self is revealed as alien and

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The tales that make the most explicit use of Gothic conventions are “Night-Side,” which opens the book, and “A Theory of Knowledge,” which concludes it. By enclosing the collection within these Gothic borders, Oates again suggests the sensibility that will, in differing ways, infiltrate and control the entire volume. The title piece, set in the 1880s and narrated by Jarvis Williams, a Harvard professor, focuses on his and a Boston colleague’s investigation into a Quincy woman who holds séances and regularly makes contact with the spiritual realm. Although Williams is skeptical of the woman’s psychic ability, his colleague Perry Moore is an even more “hardened” disbeliever, “a hearty materialist”8 and “an empiricist who accepts nothing on faith” (NS, 8). Written in an ornate late-Victorian style, featuring a series of séances with the usual trappings—moving furniture, sudden drafts, an array of spirit voices gabbling in various languages—“NightSide” begins as a typical ghost story. There are several turns of the screw, however, that mark the tale as distinctly Oatesian in its focus upon philosophical inquiry and psychological revelation. The narrator’s intellectual complacency, his comfortable disbelief in a spiritual realm, is shattered when the medium makes contact with a ghost from Perry Moore’s past: a spirit named Brandon, apparently a former male lover who committed suicide when Dr. Moore rejected him. (Earlier the narrator had mentioned that Moore’s “failure to marry, or his refusal, is one of Boston’s perennial mysteries” [NS, 8].) Brandon appeals plaintively to Dr. Moore, and the seemingly authentic voice of his dead lover brings Moore to a vehement repudiation of his former skepticism. He tells Williams excitedly, “There are spirits! . . . His entire life up to the present time has been misspent! . . . [and] most important of all—there is no death!” (NS, 14). Williams, striving to hold a middle ground between his rationalist principles and his openminded stance toward the paranormal, visits America’s most famous living philosopher, William James, to discuss “the inexplicable phenom-

enon of consciousness” (NS, 18). James, whom Oates quotes often and admiringly in her essays, states what seems closest to Oates’s own position regarding the seemingly nonrational possibilities of consciousness: “we inhabit not only our egoconsciousness but a wide field of psychological experience (most clearly represented by the phenomenon of memory, which no one can adequately explain) over which we have no control. . . . It is quite possible that there is an element of some indeterminate kind: oceanic, timeless, and living, against which the individual being constructs temporary barriers as part of an ongoing process of unique, particularlized survival” (NS, 19). Parenthetically Williams remarks he is “too timid to ask Professor James whether it might be the case that we do not inevitably own these aspects of the personality—that such phenomena belong as much to the objective world as to our subjective selves” (NS, 19)—a qualification that suggests Oates’s frequently stated antiromantic skepticism toward egocentric methods of interpreting reality. When James describes to Williams a philosophically acceptable view of “the ‘other side’ of the personality” (NS, 20) that might account for psychic ability and Williams decides James is merely describing insanity, Oates turns the screw once again by allowing James to “read” Williams’s mind. Thus the tale, in typical Oates fashion, investigates the mysteries of consciousness from several viewpoints—philosophical, psychological, and supernatural—but neither Oates nor the narrator can settle upon a single, consistent view of Moore’s experience. When Moore dies of a stroke, having written a rambling essay on his new spiritualist beliefs that causes Williams to conclude that his friend had “gone insane” (NS, 22), Williams finds himself drawn back to the pure rationalism of Spinoza: “Away from the phantasmal, the vaporous, the unclear; toward lines, planes, and solids” (NS, 26). Tormented by dreams in which Moore appeals to him, hearing rumors that Moore has become a spiritual presence at local séances, Williams recoils in fear from the notion that death ushers human beings into “a hideous dreamlike state, a perpetual groping, blundering— far worse than extinction—incomprehensible” (NS, 29), and escapes back into ordinary life with his wife and children, who represent to him “the dayside of the world” (NS, 29). For Professor Reuben Weber in “A Theory of Knowledge,” such escape is unavailable. At age seventy-seven, retired and living with his daughter in an old farmhouse in rural New York, he spends

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meaningless, while “Famine Country” and “Daisy” probe the border between sanity and insanity, focusing on the clash between two incompatible ways of viewing and knowing the world. These may be, as Oates has termed it, “gothic with a small-letter ‘g’,” yet the realms of experience they explore are so unstable and delusive that they plunge the reader not into the reassuring familiarity of realism but into the unpredictability of nightmares.

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his days writing in his journal, going through his notes, meditating on his past, yet still hoping to organize a lifetime of philosophical thought into his masterwork, A Theory of Knowledge. Weber’s sense of betrayal—by time, by his former colleagues—consumes him; his attachment to the small, underfed boy who visits from an impoverished neighboring family represents Weber’s desperate attempt to alleviate his own childlike fear and vulnerability. When Weber rescues the boy late one night from severely abusive treatment by his family, Oates implies the entire incident may be only one of Weber’s dreams, a projection in which he valiantly “saves” an unacknowledged version of his own wounded selfhood. Like Perry Moore and other intellectually prideful characters throughout Oates’s work, Weber cannot acknowledge his own defeat by natural processes, cannot relinquish his own self-image as a “disciplined philosopher” far superior to Emerson, a “scatterbrain” (NS, 360), or the “superficial” William James (NS, 354). Oates has remarked that she based Weber’s character on that of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, and that the story is “a poetic attempt to dramatize the contradictions inherent in philosophizing—in abstracting from the world of sense experience and personal history” (Sjoberg, 117). “A Theory of Knowledge” derives both its pathos and its ironic force from its characterization of old Weber, unable to dress himself or clearly to distinguish past from present (as when he suggests to his daughter that the neighbor boy might enjoy playing with Weber’s grandsons, forgetting his grandsons are now fully grown). Weber nonetheless, in sudden spurts of rage and longing, thrusts his egocentric will against his own increasing mental befuddlement and approaching death. He recalls that he “had spent the greater part of his life trying to cut through obscurity, murkiness,” yet his experience, like that of other characters in Night-Side, finally focuses upon the “perplexing, humiliating tricks of the mind” (NS, 352). His story turns upon the ironic contrast between two theories of knowledge: the grand but elusive philosophical design Weber still hopes to construct and the tale in which he appears, which dramatizes Oates’s own, far less optimistic “theory.” Although “Night-Side” and “A Theory of Knowledge” are both set in the nineteenth century and include the ghostly apparitions and nocturnal adventures common to Gothic fiction, other tales in Night-Side, though employing contemporary settings and less eccentric character-

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izations, nonetheless explore psychological states—especially the delusive nature of consciousness, memory, and knowledge—with an eerie intensity and sense of mystery that allies them to the volume’s more traditionally Gothic tales. “The Sacrifice,” for instance, features yet another aging intellectual in Dr. Reaume, a renowned psychiatrist who “had guided his life perfectly” (NS, 262). His encounter with a troubled woman complaining of terrifying nightmares and hallucinations, like Weber’s fascination with the little boy, feeds into his need to “save” other people. Similarly, Oates suggests he may be only dreaming the sequence in which, like the woman in Oates’s later story, “Naked,” he ventures outside his own neighborhood and is attacked by a group of black children, to whom he gives the ludicrous response: “don’t you need me, can’t I be of service to you . . . ?” (NS, 288). Even though Dr. Reaume has spent a lifetime congratulating himself on his eminent sanity and his ability to transcend the psychological snarls his patients suffer, his complacency is itself revealed as a delusion; his very name, of course, suggests that his identity is only a “dream.” Unlike Weber, Dr. Reaume has managed to produce a crowning achievement, “an immense encyclopedic work with the simple title Psychologies” (NS, 283). Again Oates critiques the intellectual hubris that attempts to transcend nature, to produce systematic explanations—whether philosophical, psychological, or religious—of an inexplicably complex reality. As she notes in the essay “Against Nature,” this reality “eludes us even as it prepares to swallow us up, books and all” (WW, 67). This is a notion men like Weber and Reaume—in their egocentric need to create an essentially “fictional” reality, a phantasm, of which they can be the sole lord and master—are unwilling or unable to confront. This basic pattern of an intelligent, accomplished protagonist, finding his or her assumptions about the world and the self abruptly rendered meaningless or absurd, recurs throughout Night-Side. In “Bloodstains,” Lawrence Pryor’s failure to recognize his wife one day from a distance, on the street, begins to haunt him, becoming “a dream he had dreamed while awake” (NS, 171) and forcing him into an uncertain new apprehension of his life as a physician, a husband, and a father. The controlling images of bloodstains—a dark-red birthmark he sees on the back of a stranger’s neck, his wife’s gloves soiled “with something that looks like rust or blood” (NS, 174), his daughter’s bloodstained panties she has hid-

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Similarly, in “The Snowstorm,” a college counselor named Claire is accustomed to helping students in their crises of identity, but when she is trapped on campus in a blizzard, alone and vulnerable, she confronts her own sterility and fear of passion, the same limitation that afflicted earlier characters such as Sister Irene in “In the Region of Ice” and Pauline in “Bodies.” A cool, self-contained woman who has endured several romantic involvements while “her intelligence had stood apart from her, pitying her, scornful of her, waiting for the emotional madness to pass” (NS, 106-107), Claire, like Lawrence, glimpses a “dream-woman” in the distance, except in her case the woman is herself: “How strange it was that she should feel herself merge into that dreamwoman, giving life to her, pumping life through her exhausted limbs!” (NS, 109). Unlike Sister Irene, Claire does seem to accept her turmoil as a stage of personal growth and yearns to merge with the dream-woman in order to bring to life a longrepressed element of personality; the conclusion of “The Snowstorm” suggests that, even though she will cling to her individuality, she may also be prepared to make a tentative move toward an intimate relationship that need not represent “madness.” Throughout Night-Side, Oates explores the extreme psychological risk of confronting the “other,” whether in a supernatural form, as in the title story, or in haunting visions of an alien and unacknowledged self. Of course the theme of the doppelgänger, the dark alter ego, is present throughout Oates’s work, from that brooding early parable of identity, Wonderland, to the later Rosamond Smith novels, but it pervades this collection more thoroughly than any other. Virtually every story, regardless of its style or technical strategy, considers the theme on some level. In the highly experimental “The Dungeon,” the artist, named “Farrell Van Buren,” is merely a sardonic mask for “little gentle Daryl,” who feels entrapped in the “dungeon” of his own self-

absorption (NS, 144). A gay man who yearns to reveal his sexuality to a female friend, he nonetheless fears rejection so deeply (and, it would appear, justifiably) that his self-imprisonment is only reinforced, leading him into fantasies of grotesque and even murderous retaliation. In the darkly comic “Famine Country,” a college-age boy, Ronnie, is released from an institution after a drug overdose that killed his girlfriend and almost killed him, and tries to become reintegrated into his family, who are presented as a parody of American banality; his mother is well-meaning but simple-minded, his father is coarse and self-important. Enmeshed in a pseudomystical pursuit of God, his mind damaged by drug abuse, Ronnie tells his baffled parents: “God enveloped me and gave me new life, and I don’t know who you people are. . . . I try to be polite but it’s a strain and then when you spy on me and try to make me eat—it’s hopeless” (NS, 161). The only resolution for Ronnie’s aggrieved mother is to bury the dead turtle that has washed up on their beachfront property, a creature Ronnie interpreted as the “Turtle-God” appearing magically from a primordial dreamscape of mud and slime. Her gesture is a symbolic act of determined repression—not only of Ronnie’s madness by her sanity, but of the truthseeking generation of the 1960s and 1970s by the stolid incomprehension of the more conventional 1940s and 1950s; yet it hardly suggests any possibility of bridging the extreme stances of each generation. America is dramatized here as a “famine country” that lies spiritually impoverished between two equally destructive and irreconcilable positions. A less hopeless polarity is dramatized through Beatrice and Moira of “The Widows,” who are brought together after their husbands’ deaths and have their first meeting at 3:00 A.M. Yet they long to escape the nocturnal realm into which their sudden solitude has plunged them. Like Sheila and Monica in Oates’s novel Solstice (1985), Beatrice and Moira are physical and temperamental opposites—Beatrice dark and introverted, Moira blond and gregarious—and through their groping conversations, reminiscences, and self-assessments Oates implies a temporary symbiotic union and ultimately a regeneration of self for each woman. Like Beatrice, the poet and widower Francis Bonham in “Daisy” reflects that “the physical being was untrustworthy, an inferior Siamese twin stuck to the soul, a clownish Doppelganger” (NS, 224), but another double is his daughter Daisy, a mentally unstable girl whose name means “the

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den in a drawer—strike him as clues to reality he has never quite perceived before. His very eyes feel like “crusts of blood,” “wounds where his eyes once had been” (NS, 183). Like many of Oates’s characters facing an important transition in their lives—Jesse Pedersen in Wonderland, for example, staring down at the locks from a bridge in Lockport, New York—Lawrence looks out into a river and sees the turbulent, flowing water as embodying a reality in ceaseless flux, one in which his own ephemeral, temporary identity has relatively little meaning.

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Day’s Eye” but whose hallucinations and violent tantrums suggest she is “The Night’s Eye as well” (NS, 230). Based loosely on the relationship between James Joyce and his schizophrenic daughter Lucia, “Daisy,” according to Oates, “deals in a surrealist manner with . . . the relationship between sanity and insanity” (Sjoberg, 117), and may also be read as an allegory for the artist’s riddling relationship to the multidimensional world he attempts, and inevitably fails, to control through his art. Like many of the stories in NightSide, “Daisy” is notable for its length and ambition: these traits reveal Oates’s interest at this stage of her career “in developing stories that are really miniature novellas: stories that deal with a person’s entire life, greatly condensed and focused” (Sjoberg, 117). Perhaps the collection’s most original handling of its predominant theme, “The Translation” also condenses its protagonist’s life experience and again focuses on a painful and unexpected self-recognition. Oliver, a magazine editor and “cultural emissary” visiting Central Europe (NS, 119), becomes instantly infatuated with Alisa, a young music teacher. Unsuccessful in love and suffering a midlife crisis, Oliver depends on his mysterious young translator, Liebert, to convey his interest and admiration, and when Liebert translates Alisa’s answers to his eager queries Oliver is charmed by her intelligence and her ability to live a cultured life within the moral complexities of the Soviet regime. Oliver, in his emotional and sexual excitement, views himself as Alisa’s potential rescuer, and like many of Oates’s characters glimpses in a mirror a new, emerging selfhood, though “the mirror looked smoky, webbed as if with a spider’s web; his own face hovered there” (NS, 118). He has actually become entangled, of course, in the web of his own American naïveté and egotism, for Liebert (Oates slyly gives the translator a name that approximates the German for “lover”) is actually a con man who has invented Alisa’s “cultured” personality. When he gets a sum of money from Oliver under a false pretext and disappears, Oliver is left with a new translator who convey’s Alisa’s actual dialogue, revealing she is simple-minded and interested primarily in Oliver’s financial status and his love life. An intriguing reworking of Henry James’s “international theme,” “The Translation” presents Oliver as a hapless American enmeshed in the deceit and sophistication of old Europe, and is typically Oatesian in conveying both irony and compassion toward both points of view: Oliver, in his passion-

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ate but misguided longing for love and a meaningful life; Liebert and Alisa, in their wily but selfserving ability to live “in the interstices of the political state” (NS, 124). Also characteristic is Oates’s focus upon the beautiful but delusive possibilities of language. Liebert’s false translations are, after all, quite artful, a form of fiction, and Oliver attributes an almost supernatural power to Liebert, who appears “as if he could read Oliver’s thoughts” (NS, 116) and who seems to translate “magically. Surely it was magic” (NS, 123). In the broadest sense, “translation” might be viewed as the controlling theme of Night-Side as a whole: how to unify the psyche, how to plunge into its turbulent, darker realms and translate, or integrate, these aspects of personality into the rational, contained “day-side” of the self? Most of Oates’s characters remain trapped at one extreme or another: the near-madness of psychological grotesques on the one hand (Daryl in “The Dungeon,” Ronnie in “Famine Country”) and the stiff, sterile repression of people entrapped in their fearful lack of self-knowledge on the other (Dr. Reaume in “The Sacrifice,” Weber in “A Theory of Knowledge”). Relationships of various kinds— between lovers, between parents and children, even between nations—wind through the stories as a kind of elaborate dance between the two realms, which at times seem mutually exclusive but more often are mysteriously intermingled and confused. Even though these “tales,” like those collected in the later Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, are more explicit than Oates’s other stories in exploring this theme, they are integral to her larger endeavor in fiction, which is to probe relentlessly the complex mysteries of human personality and identity.

Notes 1. Quoted in “Writing as a Natural Reaction,” Time, 10 October 1969, 108. 2. Tom Vitale, “Joyce Carol Oates Reads from Angel of Light & Interview,” taped interview produced by a Moveable Feast (Columbia, Mo.: American Audio Prose Library, 1981). 3. Irving Malin, New American Gothic (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), 4. 4. William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 168. 5. Epigraph to Oates’s Wonderland (New York: Vanguard, 1971), 13. 6. Eva Manske, “The Nightmare of Reality: Gothic Fantasies and Psychological Realism in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates.” Restant 20, no. 1 (1992): 132.

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Goodman, Charlotte. “Women and Madness in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates.” Women and Literature 5, no. 2 (1977): 17-28.

8. Night-Side (New York: Vanguard, 1977), 2; hereafter cited in text as NS.

Surveys Gothic themes associated with psychologically disturbed female characters in Oates’s novels and short stories.

Abbreviations PK: Joyce Carol Oates, The Poisoned Kiss (New York: Vanguard, 1975). Sjoberg: Leif Sjoberg, “An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates,” in Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates, ed. Lee Milazzo (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989). WW: Joyce Carol Oates, (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988).

FURTHER READING Bibliography Lercangée, Francine. Joyce Carol Oates: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1986, 272 p. Complete, well-annotated bibliography of works by and about Oates, through 1986.

Biography Johnson, Greg. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton, 1998, 492 p. Biography of Oates which describes how Oates’s upbringing, her career stopovers in Detroit and Princeton are mythologized in her fiction.

Criticism Bender, Eileen-Teper. Joyce Carol Oates: Artist in Residence. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, 207 p. Explores the thematic and narrative experimentalism of Oates’s novels. Chell, Cara. “Un-Tricking the Eye: Joyce Carol Oates and the Feminist Ghost Story.” Arizona Quarterly 41 (1985): 5-23. Characterizes Mysteries of Winterthurn as a novel informed by contemporary feminism that parodies many of the Gothic literary conventions of the nineteenth century. Coale, Samuel Chase. “Joyce Carol Oates: Contending Spirits.” In In Hawthorne’s Shadow: American Romance from Melville to Mailer, pp. 161-79. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Concentrates on the Manichean vision of American society depicted in Bellefleur. Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: Twayne, 1979, 173 p. Evaluates the formal and thematic materials employed by Oates in her novels of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly highlighting her departures from the tradition of American literary realism. ———. Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years. New York: Twayne, 1992, 142 p. Continued analysis of Oates’s fiction and its relationship to American romanticism.

Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Postgothic Fiction: Joyce Carol Oates Turns the Screw on Henry James.” Studies in Short Fiction 35, no. 4 (fall 1998): 355-71. Focuses on Oates’s imaginative reinterpretations of Henry James’s Gothic tale The Turn of the Screw in which she informs her versions of the story with a postmodern sensibility concerning the relationship between fiction and reality. Jeannotte, M. Sharon. “The Horror Within: The Short Stories of Joyce Carol Oates.” Sphinx 2, no. 4 (1977): 25-36. Considers Oates’s moral and psychological juxtaposition of protagonists and antagonists in her short fiction. Manske, Eva. “The Nightmare of Reality: Gothic Fantasies and Psychological Realism in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates.” In Neo-Realism in Contemporary American Fiction, edited by Kristiaan Versluys, pp. 131-43. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992. Argues that Oates’s fictional works represent her blending of psychological realism concentrated on the extremes of human emotion with the conventions of Gothic horror. Nodelman, Perry. “The Sense of Unending: Joyce Carol Oates’s Bellefleur as an Experiment in Feminine Storytelling.” In Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, edited by Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, pp. 250-64. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Elucidates Bellefleur as a novel of feminist narrative experimentalism. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Wonderlands.” Georgia Review 38 (1984): 487-506. Introduces the Gothic theme of victimization in her novel Wonderlands. Waller, G. F. Dreaming America: Obsession and Transcendence in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979, 224 p. Centers on the Gothic themes central to the American experience depicted in Oates’s fiction.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Oates’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: American Writers Supplement, Vol. 2; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. 15, 52; Authors in the News, Vol. 1; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography and Resources, Vol. 2; Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 11; Bestsellers, Vol. 89:2; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 1968-1988; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8R; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 25, 45, 74, 113, 129; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 11, 15, 19, 33, 52, 108, 134; Contemporary Novelists, Ed. 7; Contemporary Poets, Ed. 7; Contemporary Popular Writers; Contemporary Women Poets; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 2, 5, 130; Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1981; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-

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7. Edgar Allan Poe, preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, reprinted in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 130.

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studied Authors, Novelists, and Popular Fiction and Genre Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Exploring Short Stories; Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion; Feminist Writers; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 4; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Major 21st-Century Writers;

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Modern American Women Writers; Novels for Students, Vol. 8; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 1, 8, 17; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 6, 70; Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 2; Twayne’s United States Authors; and World Literature Criticism.

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EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809 - 1849)

American short story writer, poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and critic.

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oe’s stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his highly acclaimed short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established an influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks as the architect of the modern short story, Poe was also the principal forerunner of the “art for art’s sake” movement in nineteenth-century European literature. Whereas earlier critics predominantly concerned themselves with moral or ideological generalities, Poe focused his criticism on the specifics of style and construction that contributed to a work’s effectiveness or failure. In his own work, he demonstrated what has been assessed as a brilliant command of language and technique as well as an inspired and original imagination. Poe’s poetry and short stories greatly influenced the French Symbolists of the late nineteenth century, who in turn altered the direction of modern literature. It is this philosophical and artistic transaction that accounts for much of Poe’s importance in literary history.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Poe’s father and mother were professional actors who at the time of his birth were members of

a repertory company in Boston. Before Poe was three years old both of his parents died, and he was raised in the home of John Allan, a prosperous exporter from Richmond, Virginia, who never legally adopted his foster son. As a boy, Poe attended the best schools available, and was admitted to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1825. He distinguished himself academically but was forced to leave after less than a year because of bad debts and inadequate financial support from Allan. Poe’s relationship with Allan disintegrated upon his return to Richmond in 1827, and soon after Poe left for Boston, where he enlisted in the army and also published his first poetry collection, Tamerlane, and Other Poems (1827). The volume went unnoticed by readers and reviewers, and a second collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, received only slightly more attention when it appeared in 1829. That same year Poe was honorably discharged from the army, having attained the rank of regimental sergeant major, and was then admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point. However, because Allan would neither provide his foster son with sufficient funds to maintain himself as a cadet nor give the consent necessary to resign from the Academy, Poe gained a dismissal by ignoring his duties and violating regulations. He subsequently went to New York City, where Poems, his third collection of verse, was published in 1831, and then moved to Baltimore, where he lived at the home of his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm.

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Over the next few years Poe’s first short stories appeared in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier and his “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1832) won a cash prize for best story in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. Nevertheless, Poe was still not earning enough to live independently, nor did Allan’s death in 1834 provide him with a legacy. The following year, however, his financial problems were temporarily alleviated when he accepted an editorship at The Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, bringing with him his aunt and his twelve-year-old cousin Virginia, whom he married in 1836. The Southern Literary Messenger was the first of several journals Poe would direct over the next ten years and through which he rose to prominence as a leading man of letters in America. Poe made himself known not only as a superlative author of poetry and fiction, but also as a literary critic whose level of imagination and insight had hitherto been unapproached in American literature. While Poe’s writings gained attention in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the profits from his work remained meager, and he supported himself by editing Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. After his wife’s death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe became involved in a number of romantic affairs. It was while he prepared for his second marriage that Poe, for reasons unknown, arrived in Baltimore in late September of 1849. On October 3, he was discovered in a state of semiconsciousness; he died four days later without regaining the necessary lucidity to explain what had happened during the last days of his life.

MAJOR WORKS Poe’s most conspicuous contribution to world literature derives from the analytical method he practiced both as a creative author and as a critic of the works of his contemporaries. His theory of literary creation is noted for two central points: first, a work must create a unity of effect on the reader to be considered successful; second, the production of this single effect should not be left to the hazards of accident or inspiration, but should to the minutest detail of style and subject be the result of rational deliberation on the part of the author. In poetry, this single effect must arouse the reader’s sense of beauty, an ideal that Poe closely associated with sadness, strangeness, and loss; in prose, the effect should be one revelatory of some truth, as in “tales of ratiocination” or works evoking “terror, or passion, or horror.” Aside from a common theoretical basis, there is a psychological intensity that is characteristic of

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Poe’s writings, especially the tales of horror that comprise his best and best-known works. These stories—which include “The Black Cat” (1843) “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) and “The TellTale Heart” (1843)—are often told by a first-person narrator, and through this voice Poe probes the workings of a character’s psyche. This technique foreshadows the psychological explorations of Fyodor Dostoevsky and the school of psychological realism. In his Gothic tales, Poe also employed an essentially symbolic, almost allegorical method which gives such works as “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), and “Ligeia” (1838) an enigmatic quality that accounts for their enduring interest and also links them with the symbolical works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. The influence of Poe’s tales may be seen in the work of later writers, including Ambrose Bierce and H. P. Lovecraft, who belong to a distinct tradition of horror literature initiated by Poe. Just as Poe influenced many succeeding authors and is regarded as an ancestor of such major literary movements as Symbolism and Surrealism, he was also influenced by earlier literary figures and movements. In his use of the demonic and the grotesque, Poe evidenced the impact of the stories of E. T. A. Hoffman and the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, while the despair and melancholy in much of his writing reflects an affinity with the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century. It was Poe’s particular genius that in his work he gave consummate artistic form both to his personal obsessions and those of previous literary generations, at the same time creating new forms which provided a means of expression for future artists. A tale of sickness, madness, incest, and the danger of unrestrained creativity, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is among Poe’s most popular and critically examined horror stories. The ancient, decaying House of Usher, filled with tattered furniture and tapestries and set in a gloomy, desolate locale is a rich symbolic representation of its sickly twin inhabitants, Roderick and Madeline Usher. Besides its use of classical Gothic imagery and gruesome events—including escape from live burial—the story has a psychological element and ambiguous symbolism that have given rise to many critical readings. Poe used the term “arabesque” to describe the ornate, descriptive prose in this and other stories in his collection. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is also considered representative of Poe’s idea of “art for art’s sake,” whereby the mood of the narrative, created through skillful use of language, overpowers any social, political, or moral teaching.

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A second group of Poe’s tales center, in obsessive detail, on the horror and misery wrought by a guilty conscience. These include “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and the doppelgänger story “William Wilson” (1840). “The Black Cat” is narrated by a once-kind man who has fallen into alcoholism. One day, in a rage, he hangs his cat and is forever haunted by the image. Upon attempting to kill the cat’s replacement, he instead kills his wife. It appears his deeds will go unpunished until he is given away by the screaming animal, who is sitting on his dead wife’s head. “The Tell-Tale Heart” features a similarly mad narrator forever tormented by the heartbeat of a man he has murdered. While not widely acclaimed during his lifetime, it has become one of Poe’s most famous stories. While the stories “Hop-Frog: Or, the Eight Chained Orang-Outangs” (1849), “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1843), and “The Cask of Amontillado” do not take a guilty conscience as their starting point, they share the same paranoid intensity demonstrated in these tales. Poe first gained widespread acclaim for his poem “The Raven” (1845), which exhibits elements of the tales in both groups identified above. Set at the stroke of midnight in an otherwise empty chamber, the narrator hears a tapping at his door. The narrator, tormented by the ominous raven revealed to be the source of the noise, is not wracked with guilt, however. Rather, he mourns the loss of his love, Lenore, while the raven serves as a despicable and terrifying reminder of her death. Poe completed only one novel, and it was written in the Gothic tradition. Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), the story of an ill-fated sea voyage, has captured the attention of

generations of readers with its action-packed plot, imaginative use of symbol and myth, depiction of cannibalism, and numerous unusual occurrences. Critics studying the imagery of Pym have frequently cited Freudian and Jungian analyses, with the voyage identified as a seminal symbol of a journey inward into consciousness, or denoting a return to the womb.

CRITICAL RECEPTION While most of his works were not conspicuously acclaimed during his lifetime, Poe has come to be viewed as one of the most important American authors in the Gothic tradition. While even today some critics deride the author’s style as amateurish and overwrought, Pamela J. Shelden (see Further Reading) argues that Poe turned hackneyed styles to new and advantageous use. Likewise, Maurice Lévy regards the author as steeped in the tradition of Radcliffe, Walpole and Maturin, yet wholly original. Poe’s stories and poems have become some of the most widely read in English-language literature. “The Fall of the House of Usher” has been lauded by scholars as a prime example of the Gothic short story. Over the years, there have been many interpretations of the story, and much recent scholarship has viewed the tale as a fictional representation of many of Poe’s own literary and social theories. For example, Stephen Dougherty sets the tale in the context of racism and fears of miscegenation in nineteenth-century society and also examines the potential influence of French theorist Michel Foucault’s political ideas on the work. In general, “Usher” is acknowledged as one of Poe’s most cerebral tales, with little or no action to carry the plot. Because of this, the story has lent itself to numerous interpretations, eliciting a large amount of scholarship that continues to explore the text from a variety of perspectives. Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym underwent a remarkable transformation in reputation during the twentieth century. When it was first published and for the remainder of the nineteenth century, the novel was ignored completely, dismissed as a literary hoax, or deemed just another of Poe’s fantastic tales. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, Pym emerged as the most frequently discussed of all of Poe’s works. Critics have studied Poe’s handling of language and Gothic imagery and explored Poe’s use of narrative structure to produce special effects in the novel. Leslie Fiedler notes that many

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The story is also one of several of Poe’s which utilize as a central character the Decadent Aristocrat. This mad, often artistic noble heir took the place of the traditional Gothic villain in tales portraying the sublime hostility of existence itself rather than the evil embodied by individuals. In addition to “The Fall of the House of Usher,” such characters appear in his stories “Metzengerstein” (1840), “Berenice” (1840), “Ligeia” (1838), “The Oval Portrait” (1842), and “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842). Central to the setting in many of these stories is a large, ominous castle, likened by critic Maurice Lévy to the medieval fortresses that appear in the writing of Radcliffe, Charles Robert Maturin, and Horace Walpole. Interior architectural elements, such as the moving tapestry in “Metzengerstein,” serve almost as characters in these tales.

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of the literary conventions used by Poe, and for which he was widely censured, were intended to offer ironic commentary on slavery and other accepted nineteenth-century practices and challenge the notion of innocence in the Western world. A. A. Markley traces Gothic authors who may have influenced Pym, such as William Godwin, and credits Poe with building on this tradition. Today, Poe is recognized as one of the foremost progenitors of modern literature, and of the Gothic style in particular. In contrast to earlier critics who viewed writer and works as one, criticism of the past twenty-five years has developed a view of Poe as a detached artist who was more concerned with displaying his virtuosity than with expressing his soul, and who maintained an ironic rather than an autobiographical relationship to his work. His writing is viewed as highly revelatory of the darkest elements of human nature. Poe’s tales “are a concatenation of cause and effect,” observes D. H. Lawrence. “His best pieces, however, are not tales. They are more. They are ghastly stories of the human soul in its disruptive throes.”

“The Masque of the Red Death” (short story) 1842; published in the journal Graham’s Magazine “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (short story) 1842; published in the journal Snowden’s “The Oval Portrait” (short story) 1842; published in the journal Graham’s Magazine “The Black Cat” (short story) 1843; published in the journal Saturday Evening Post “The Pit and the Pendulum” (short story) 1843; published in the journal The Gift “The Tell-Tale Heart” (short story) 1843; published in the journal Pioneer “The Oblong Box” (short story) 1844; published in the journal Godey’s Lady’s Book “The Premature Burial” (short story) 1844; published in the journal Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper “The Imp of the Perverse” (short story) 1845; published in the journal Graham’s Magazine The Raven, and Other Poems (poetry) 1845 †Tales by Edgar A. Poe (short stories) 1845 “The Cask of Amontillado” (short story) 1846; published in the journal Godey’s Lady’s Book Eureka: A Prose Poem (essay) 1848

PRINCIPAL WORKS Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian (poetry) 1827 Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (poetry) 1829

“Hop-Frog: Or, the Eight Chained Orang-Outangs” (short story) 1849; published in the journal Boston Flag of Our Union “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” (short story) 1849; published in the journal Boston Flag of Our Union

Poems. By Edgar Allan Poe. Second Edition. (poetry) 1831

*

“MS. Found in a Bottle” (short story) 1832; published in the journal Baltimore Saturday Visiter

†

“Ligeia” (short story) 1838; published in the journal American Museum The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket, North America: Comprising the Details of a Mutiny, Famine, and Shipwreck, During a Voyage to the South Seas; Resulting in Various Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries in the Eightyfourth Parallel of Southern Latitude [published anonymously] (novel) 1838 “The Fall of the House of Usher” (short story) 1839; published in the journal Burton’s *Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. 2 vols. (short stories) 1840 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (short story) 1841; published in the journal Graham’s Magazine

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This collection includes, among other stories, “Metzengerstein,” “Berenice,” “William Wilson,” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” This collection includes, among other stories, “The Purloined Letter,” “The Gold-Bug,” and “The Man of the Crowd.”

PRIMARY SOURCES EDGAR ALLAN POE (STORY DATE 1836) SOURCE: Poe, Edgar Allan. “Shadow—A Parable.” In Great Tales of Terror from Europe and America: Gothic Stories of Horror and Romance, 1765-1840, edited by Peter Haining. 1972. Reprint edition, pp. 503-06. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1973. The following short story was first published in The Southern Literary Messenger in 1836. ‘Yea! though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow.’ Psalm of David

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The year had been a year of terror, and of feelings more intense than terror for which there is no name upon the earth. For many prodigies and signs had taken place; and far and wide, over sea and land, the black wings of the Pestilence were spread abroad. To those, nevertheless, cunning in the stars, it was not unknown that the heavens wore an aspect of ill; and to me, the Greek Oinos, among others, it was evident that now had arrived the alternation of that seven hundred and ninety-fourth year when, at the entrance of Aries, the planet Jupiter is conjoined with the red ring of the terrible Saturnus. The peculiar spirit of the skies, if I mistake not greatly, made itself manifest, not only in the physical orb of the earth, but in the souls, imaginations, and meditations of mankind. Over some flasks of the red Chian wine, within the walls of a noble hall, in a dim city called Ptolemais, we sat, at night, a company of seven. And to our chamber there was no entrance save by a lofty door of brass: and the door was fashioned by the artisan Corinnos, and, being of rare workmanship, was fastened from within. Black draperies, likewise, in the gloomy room, shut out from our view the moon, the lurid stars, and the peopleless streets—but the boding and the memory of Evil, they would not be so excluded. There were things around us and about of which I can render no distinct account—things material and spiritual—heaviness in the atmosphere—a sense of suffocation—anxiety—and, above all, that terrible state of existence which the nervous experience when the senses are keenly living and awake, and meanwhile the powers of thought lie dormant. A dead weight hung upon us. It hung upon our limbs—upon the household furniture—upon the goblets from which we drank; and all things were depressed, and borne down thereby—all things save only the flames of the seven iron lamps which illumined our revel. Uprearing themselves in tall slender lines of light, they thus remained burning all pallid and motionless; and in the mirror which their lustre formed upon the round table of ebony at which we sat, each of us there assembled beheld the pallor of

his own countenance, and the unquiet glare in the downcast eyes of his companions. Yet we laughed and were merry in our proper way— which was hysterical; and sang the songs of Anacreon—which are madness; and drank deeply— although the purple wine reminded us of blood. For there was yet another tenant of our chamber in the person of young Zoilus. Dead, and at full length he lay, enshrouded;—the genius and the demon of the scene. Alas! he bore no portion in our mirth, save that his countenance, distorted with the plague, and his eyes in which Death had but half extinguished the fire of the pestilence, seemed to take such interest in our merriment as the dead may haply take in the merriment of those who are to die. But, although I, Oinos, felt that the eyes of the departed were upon me, still I forced myself not to perceive the bitterness of their expression, and, gazing down steadily into the depths of the ebony mirror, sang with a loud and sonorous voice the songs of the son of Teios. But gradually my songs they ceased, and their echoes, rolling afar off among the sable draperies of the chamber, became weak, and undistinguishable, and so faded away. And lo! from among those sable draperies where the sounds of the song departed, there came forth a dark and undefined shadow—a shadow such as the moon, when low in heaven, might fashion from the figure of a man: but it was the shadow neither of man nor of God, nor of any familiar thing. And quivering awhile among the draperies of the room, it at length rested in full view upon the surface of the door of brass. But the shadow was vague, and formless, and indefinite, and was as the shadow neither of man nor God—neither God of Greece, nor God of Chaldea, nor any Egyptian God. And the shadow rested upon the brazen doorway, and under the arch of the entablature of the door, and moved not, nor spoke any word, but there became stationary and remained. And the door whereupon the shadow rested was if I remember aright, over against the feet of the young Zoilus enshrouded. But we, the seven there assembled, dared not steadily behold it, but cast down our eyes, and gazed continually into the depths of the mirror of ebony. And at length I, Oinos, speaking some low words, demanded of the shadow its dwelling and its appellation. And the shadow answered, ‘I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is near to the catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of Helusion which border upon the foul Charonian canal.’ And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror, and stand trembling, and shuddering, and aghast: for the

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Ye who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, and many centuries shall pass away, ere these memorials be seen of men. And, when seen, there will be some to disbelieve, and some to doubt, and yet a few who will find much to ponder upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron.

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tones in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and, varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable, fell duskily upon our ears in the wellremembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends.

EDGAR ALLAN POE (STORY DATE 1842) SOURCE: Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Oval Portrait.” In Great Ghost Stories: 34 Classic Tales of the Supernatural, compiled by Robin Brockman, pp. 55-7. New York: Gramercy Books, 2002. The following short story was first published in Graham’s Magazine in 1842.

The château into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Apennines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs Radcliffe. To all appearance it had been temporarily and very lately abandoned. We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments. It lay in a remote turret of the building. Its decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique. Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque. In these paintings, which depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces, but in very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of the château rendered necessary—in these paintings my incipient delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest; so that I bade Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room—since it was already night,—to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which stood by the head of my bed, and to throw open far and wide the fringed curtains of black velvet which enveloped the bed itself. I wished all this done that I might resign myself, if not to sleep, at least alternately to the contemplation of these pictures, and the perusal of a small volume which had been found upon the pillow, and which purported to criticise and describe them. Long, long I read—and devoutly, devoutly I gazed. Rapidly and gloriously the hours flew by and the deep midnight came. The position of the candelabrum displeased me, and outreaching my hand with difficulty, rather than disturb my slumbering valet, I placed it so as to throw its rays more fully upon the book.

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But the action produced an effect altogether unanticipated. The rays of the numerous candles (for there were many) now fell within a niche of the room which had hitherto been thrown into deep shade by one of the bedposts. I thus saw in vivid light a picture all unnoticed before. It was the portrait of a young girl just ripening into womanhood. I glanced at the painting hurriedly, and then closed my eyes. Why I did this was not at first apparent even to my own perception. But while my lids remained thus shut, I ran over in my mind my reason for so shutting them. It was an impulsive movement to gain time for thought—to make sure that my vision had not deceived me—to calm and subdue my fancy for a more sober and more certain gaze. In a very few moments I again looked fixedly at the painting. That I now saw aright I could not and would not doubt; for the first flashing of the candles upon that canvas had seemed to dissipate the dreamy stupor which was stealing over my senses, and to startle me at once into waking life. The portrait, I have already said, was that of a young girl. It was a mere head and shoulders, done in what is technically termed a vignette manner; much in the style of the favorite heads of Sully. The arms, the bosom, and even the ends of the radiant hair melted imperceptibly into the vague yet deep shadow which formed the background of the whole. The frame was oval, richly gilded and filigreed in Moresque. As a thing of art nothing could be more admirable than the painting itself. But it could have been neither the execution of the work, nor the immortal beauty of the countenance which had so suddenly and so vehemently moved me. Least of all, could it have been that my fancy, shaken from its half slumber, had mistaken the head for that of a living person. I saw at once that the peculiarities of the design, of the vignetting, and of the frame, must have instantly dispelled such idea—must have prevented even its momentary entertainment. Thinking earnestly upon these points, I remained, for an hour perhaps, half sitting, half reclining, with my vision riveted upon the portrait. At length, satisfied with the true secret of its effect, I fell back within the bed. I had found the spell of the picture in an absolute life-likeliness of expression, which, at first startling, finally confounded, subdued, and appalled me. With deep and reverent awe I replaced the candelabrum in its former position. The cause of my deep agitation being thus shut from view, I sought eagerly the volume which discussed the paintings and their histories. Turning to the number which

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“She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee. And evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter. He, passionate, studious, austere, and having already a bride in his Art: she a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee; all light and smiles, and frolicsome as the young fawn; loving and cherishing all things; hating only the Art which was her rival; dreading only the pallet and brushes and other untoward instruments which deprived her of the countenance of her lover. It was thus a terrible thing for this lady to hear the painter speak of his desire to portray even his young bride. But she was humble and obedient, and sat meekly for many weeks in the dark high turret-chamber where the light dripped upon the pale canvas only from overhead. But he, the painter, took glory in his work, which went on from hour to hour, and from day to day. And he was a passionate, and wild, and moody man, who became lost in reveries; so that he would not see that the light which fell so ghastly in that lone turret withered the health and the spirits of his bride, who pined visibly to all but him. Yet she smiled on and still on, uncomplainingly, because she saw that the painter (who had high renown) took a fervid and burning pleasure in his task, and wrought day and night to depict her who so loved him, yet who grew daily more dispirited and weak. And in sooth some who beheld the portrait spoke of its resemblance in low words, as of a mighty marvel, and a proof not less of the power of the painter than of his deep love for her whom he depicted so surpassingly well. But at length, as the labor drew nearer to its conclusion, there were admitted none into the turret; for the painter had grown wild with the ardor of his work, and turned his eyes from the canvas rarely, even to regard the countenance of his wife. And he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him. And when many weeks had passed, and but little remained to do, save one brush upon the mouth and one tint upon the eye, the spirit of the lady again flickered up as the flame within the socket of the lamp. And then the brush was given, and then the tint was placed; and, for one moment, the painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud voice, ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ turned suddenly to regard his beloved:—She was dead!”

GENERAL COMMENTARY

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designated the oval portrait, I there read the vague and quaint words which follow:

MAURICE LÉVY (ESSAY DATE 1968) SOURCE: Lévy, Maurice. “Poe and the Gothic Tradition.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 18, no. 66 (1972): 19-29. In the following essay, translated by Richard Henry Haswell and first published in French in Caliban in 1968, Lévy assesses Poe’s works within the context of the Gothic tradition.

Since the appearance of Marie Bonaparte’s study, only the daring speak of Poe without evoking his dipsomania, opiomania, cyclothymia, paraphrenia, and sado-necrophilia, all so obviously characterizing the major part of his work. Today how does one dare to see in Poe’s architectural structures anything but mother-figures, or in the inextricable maze of the island of Tsalal where Pym got lost, anything but a fantasy of the maternal body from an intestinal point of view? The “shadows” and “doubles” and the Devil must be symbols of the castrating father-figure and “The Oval Portrait” must illustrate the sadomasochistic, partly necrophilistic theme of the Life-in-Death mother-figure. But, at the risk of appearing profane, I feel that these themes, however attractive, codify too rigorously the most intimate impulses of the poet, and make too much sense in stories which also contain, I believe, on the very principle of the “bizarre,” the “grotesque,” and the “extravagant,” something of the completely unmotivated and something—of tradition. Before Poe wrote, other authors had described tottering buildings, castles in ruins or on the point of collapse, or dark passages twisting in the bowels of the earth. At the time he was writing, the Gothic novel had formed an integral part of the Anglo-American literary patrimony for many years. In 1809, the year of Poe’s birth, the genre that Walpole had created was still very much alive. And the young man landing in England in 1815, if he was old enough to be interested, no doubt would have noticed books with strange titles having to do only with “Haunted Castles,” “Ruined Priories,” “Italians,” and “Monks” in the windows of the bookstores. He probably did not return to America before 1820, the year Melmoth was published. Is it too daring to imagine the young pensioner of the “Manor House School” at Stoke Newington reading under his coat, in the manner of so many of his contemporaries, some really scary Radcliffean imitation? Or later the student at the brand-new university at Charlottesville feverishly

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turning the pages of The Castle of Otranto or The Monk, borrowed from the nearest circulating library? For the Gothic novel had extended its domain to New England. William Lane, whose Minerva Press, more than any other publishing house, had been responsible for the outpouring of “horrors” that had inundated the nation, had had a correspondent at New York since the end of the eighteenth century. During these years, LouisAlexis Hocquet de Caritat, an exile from Champagne who owned on Broadway the most important lending library in town, offered to his innumerable clientele, alongside the insipidities of certain post-Richardson novels, the substantial pleasures of the terror that Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis so generously dispensed. An observer of the epoch tells us that “the Library of Mr. Caritat was charming. Its shelves could scarcely sustain the weight of Female Frailty, The Posthumous Daughter, and The Cavern of Woe; they required the aid of the carpenter to support the burden of The Cottage on the Moor, The House of Tynian, and The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne; or they groaned under the multiplied editions of The Devil in Love, More Ghosts! and Rinaldo Rinaldini.”1 One would have recognized there several of the more representative titles from the “Frantic School.”2 But an examination of the “Catalogue of Novels” published by this enterprising bookseller is more informative; in 1804 nearly 200 titles out of the 1,500 recorded represent the growing vogue of the transatlantic Gothic novel.3 The disillusioned protests of the critics were unavailing.4 Charles Brockden Brown, in the preface to Edgar Huntly, denounced in vain the puerile methods, the “Gothic castles and their chimeras,” of the fiction of the day.5 Far from confining itself to the ports and the larger towns, the “evil” little by little conquered the country. With his return to the United States after a prolonged absence, Royall Tyler, the author of a small forgotten novel, affirmed in 1797 that each rural village had its “social library” and that milkmaids and hired hands in the most remote areas trembled so much at the reading of the novels of Radcliffe that they did not dare go to bed alone.6 When Poe began writing his tales, the duodecimos of Lane for a long time had found their place on the shelves of the descendants of the pilgrim fathers, to the neglect, said Tyler, of the family Bunyan. That Poe had heard of them, that he himself had applied them, is occasionally acknowledged in his own works. “The Oval Portrait” is placed under the avowed patronage of Mrs. Radcliffe from the very first page.7 In the “Letter to B———”

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he mentions Melmoth, moreover, in respectful terms and in order to say that the Wandering Jew did not strike him as a satanic figure (Works, VII, xxxviii). In The Southern Literary Messenger in 1835, he gave a laudatory account of The Heroine, an amusing parody of the Gothic novel which Eaton Stannard Barrett had published in England in 1813 and which had just appeared in America. Without doubt the review was an occasion for Poe to relive the scenes and episodes of The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, or The Children of the Abbey by Regina-Maria Roche. Elsewhere he speaks of Godwin, and he mentions Vathek; and if Beckford’s novel, much less Caleb Williams, does not truly belong to the genre created by Walpole, at least these references testify to his taste for what one could call more generically the “roman noir.”8 A closer reading of Poe’s tales, in fact, makes inevitable the recognition of the presence of a certain number of “obsessive motifs,” as well as certain characters and techniques of writing which are all, to differing degrees, connected with the Gothic tradition. My purpose here is to assemble these motifs and to juxtapose them with those affined motifs that characterize the countless descendants of The Castle of Otranto, allowing the reader to decide for himself the fitness and the merits of this approach.

I The most obvious point of departure is the close resemblance of the huge, gloomy, and menacing Gothic castles which rise on the horizon of “The Oval Portrait,” “Ligeia,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” to the medieval fortresses that form the obligatory setting for the fictional adventures in Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe, and Maturin. The château to which the wounded hero of “The Oval Portrait” is led by his servant is “one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Apennines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe” (Works, IV, 245). It is the castle of Udolpho that we are here explicitly invited to recall, with its turrets, battlements, and ruined ramparts, standing “silent, solitary, and sublime” in the heart of the Apennines. Moreover, the protagonist establishes himself in “a remote turret of the building.” One thinks of the “Western Tower,” the “Southern Tower,” and the “Eastern Tower” dear to the Gothic imagination. It is also amusing to recall the “Southwest Tower” which perplexed M. Dabaud in the delightful pastiche by Bellin de la Liborlière, in La Nuit Anglaise (1799), because as a reader of “romans noirs” he could not remember

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The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost savage, aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored memories connected with both, had much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into that remote and unsocial region of the country. (Works, II, 258)

There, “although the external abbey, with its verdant decay hanging about it, suffered but little alteration,” he furnishes the interior, just as La Motte in The Romance of the Forest (1791) or SaintAubespine in Saint-Botolph’s Priory (1806) establish themselves in abbeys by making the interior comfortable and leaving the exterior ruins intact to preserve their “picturesque beauty.” The entire drama of “Ligeia” takes place in a room that he decorates in a “semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical” style which was already old in the history of taste (Works, II, 259). Were it not for the slightly bizarre nature of the decorative elements imagined by the author of “The Philosophy of Furniture,” the reader could truly believe himself introduced to a room dreamed up by one or another of the Gothic novelists. At this point we may note that in order to exercise freely Poe’s imagination needs an interior space bounded by the tottering walls of a dwelling belonging to the past, a Gothic dwelling. The fears and the anguish of Poe, as those of Radcliffe, are always concretely lodged. This of course appears best in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Here the architectural element not only plays a basic role in the plot but extends to the attitudes and behavior of the characters. With the first lines of the tale, the narrator, who discovers in the twilight “the bleak walls—the vacant eye-like windows” of the “melancholy” house of Usher, takes his place in the long line of

heroes and heroines seized by gloomy presentiments and unreasonable fears at the threshold of the castle. He experiences “an utter depression of the soul,” “an iciness . . . of the heart”: “I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.” One recalls the fears of so many Gothic heroines—frail in spite of their intrepidity—whose souls falter the moment they are about to cross the threshold of those nightmarish dwellings, or of Piranesi prisons, or of tombs that give them the impression that they are going to be buried alive: “She viewed [the castle] with horror,” the author of The Ruins of Rigonda (1808) had already written, “and as the massy but almost crumbling gates closed behind her, she heaved a sigh, and seemed as it were to have entered her tomb.”1 1 Monsieur Harcourt, in The Romance of the Castle (1800), exclaims to himself as he enters the castle of Llangwellein, “When I entered the portals of this Gothic structure, a dread (surely prophetic), chilled my veins, pressed upon my heart, and scarcely allowed me to breathe.”1 2 One also recalls Ellena who, in The Italian (1797), on entering the convent of San Stephano, is seized with sinister presentiments, or Rosalie, in Sicilian Mysteries (1812), who views the ramparts and the turrets of the fortress where she is led with a feeling of horror: “Its remote situation, its dilapidated state, struck the dreadful suspicion on her heart that she was brought there to suffer.”1 3 A statement of all of the agonies of the threshold which torment the heart of Gothic heroines would be endless; I add only those of Cherubina, who embodies all of the virtues of the perfect “Heroine” so dear to Poe’s heart.1 4 At the moment of crossing the threshold of the solemn castle of Monckton, she also, the intrepid, warlike, virile Cherubina, feels her courage fail: While she surveyed its roofless walls, overtopt with briony, grass and nettles, and admired the Gothic points of the windows, where mantling ivy had supplied the place of glass, long suffering and murder came to her thoughts.1 5

The threshold of the castle—as much in Poe as in Radcliffe or the other followers of Walpole— establishes the boundary of a magic space, a sphere of the fantastic. To enter into the house of Usher as into the castle of Otranto or of Udolpho is to plunge into the irrational, to descend to the most primordial strata of the Self where the logic which presides over the elaboration of our conscious thoughts holds no sway: “To enter within a castle,” Jean Roudaut has admirably written, “is to become a character in a dream; it is to be given

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any tower situated between cardinal points.9 The apartment where Poe’s character proposes to pass the night has the “antique and dilapidated” appearance of those which Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines harmlessly explore. Like the apartment of Signora Laurentini that Emily visits in The Mysteries of Udolpho, also accompanied by a servant, Poe’s is also “abandoned.” All human presence has vanished and the hero is alone face to face with the unexpected. In particular, as in Radcliffe’s scene, the mysteriousness condenses around the portrait of a woman, whose strange gaze fascinates the hero.1 0 The motif of the isolated turret and the closed-off apartment recurs in “Ligeia.” It will be remembered that the hero, following the death of his first wife, buys an abbey—the setting of so many Gothic adventures—isolated in one of the wildest portions of England:

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to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion. (Works, III, 275)

Just as in the title, for instance, of The House of Tynian (1795)—one of the most Gothic of novels that I am familiar with—it is simultaneously a matter of the Tynians and of their castle. In fact there exist subtle and intangible ties between Roderick Usher and his house. It exerts on him “an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit—an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence” (Works, III, 281). This influence is so heavy, these correspondences between man and his home so profound, that the mysterious and apparently incurable sickness of Roderick can be seen as the symptom of some interior fault, of which the long fissure that marks the façade of the castle is only the visible sign. When the hero, the last descendant of the Ushers, arrives at the final stage of his drama, the castle, now unnecessary, collapses upon him; the flowing and tumultuous waters of the dream close in upon the dreamer.

Illustration from “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

over, completely whole and aware, to forces free of all logical or moral construct; it is to be put in a place where time ceases to be measurable and actions extend as far as desires.”1 6 This explains the sense of total estrangement which Poe’s narrator experiences when he finds himself inside the house of Usher. To enter a residence is not only to enter someone else’s home, but partly to enter into someone else. The further he penetrates this “mansion of gloom” and the further he familiarizes himself with the high vaulted chambers and the interminable corridors and the damp cellars, the more profoundly he penetrates the mystery which hovers around the personality of Roderick. The house of Usher is an ancestral castle, Gothic, handed down from father to son through innumerable generations, a castle which strengthens the feeling of blood and is identified in a significant manner with the family. It should not be forgotten that the word house refers at the same time to a family line as well as to a family residence: The original title of the estate [was merged with] the quaint and equivocal appellation of the “House of Usher”—an appellation which seemed

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In this connection it is impossible not to remember the direct ties which link the hero of The Castle of Otranto to his castle. In the first of the Gothic romances, the one that served from 1764 as model and norm for the literature of fantasy, the same secret correspondences can be discovered. Manfred himself is the last scion, or at least he believes he is, of the house of Otranto. The entire drama is played behind the walls of the old residence, where he lures the young woman whom he lusts after, sequesters those who oppose his ambitious projects, and threatens with death the young man who dares dispute his title. The castle of Otranto is a symbol of his will to power, the spatial projection of his destiny into an architectural form. The Prince is also directly connected with the threat which causes the growth of the giant to weigh upon the building that it secretly inhabits. When the Prince is forced to renounce the world and to shut himself in a convent, the castle of Otranto dissolves: A clap of thunder at that instant shook the castle to its foundations; the earth rocked, and the clank of more than mortal armour was heard behind. Frederic and Jerome thought the last day was at hand. The latter, forcing Theodore along with them, rushed into the court. The moment The-

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Is it not remarkable that in both the novel of Walpole and in the tale of Poe the decadence of a “house,” of a family “gloriously ancient,” leads ultimately to the collapse of the ancestral dwelling which had sheltered it?

II Every Gothic residence worthy of that epithet not only proudly raises its crenellated towers toward the sky but also enroots itself in “Mother Earth” with deep underground passages, galleries that form an inextricable labyrinth at the most profound depths. It is customary for the heroes who have these incredible adventures to creep through subterranean mazes and to wander in narrow bowels which cross and recross, changing level and always burying themselves more deeply into the dense, solid darkness. The vocation of the Gothic heroes is essentially that of losing their way. To mention only one example, let us accompany Matilda for a moment in her peregrinations. She is one of those intrepid young women who pass an appreciable part of their lives underground. When she reached the bottom, she found herself in a narrow vaulted way, along which she proceeded for a considerable distance; when by the light of her lamp, she perceived she had got into a spacious cavern, out of which branched a number of narrow passages, made by nature or art out of the solid rock. She entered into one, which, winding round, she found, after walking about an hour, that it had brought her to the same place, from whence she had set out. She then took another, which proved to be that she had first come along, as it brought her to the foot of the staircase she had descended from the great hall. She returned back along the same passage till she again got into the same large cavern. She now entered one on the opposite side, which, appearing to be something wider than the others, she thought might lead, possibly, to some road out. She proceeded along it, for some time, when she was again bewildered by a number of narrow paths, not knowing which to take. She ventured upon one, however, which led her to another cavern, neither so lofty, or so large, as that she had just passed through. As she was crossing it, to enter an opening on the opposite side, she stumbled over something. On holding her lamp down to it, she perceived that it was the skeleton of a human body. In her horror and surprise, she dropped the lamp from her hand, and was in total darkness, the light being extinguished by the fall.1 8

Sometimes the narrow passages become so shrunken and obstructed that the characters must advance on hands and knees. Then, to the perplexity caused by the inextricable maze of subterranean tunnels is added the suffocating feeling of having to remain a prisoner of the earth forever; images of the claustrophobic universe of the grave complete the labyrinthine dream and make it more terrible. For instance in Melmoth, when Monçada felt the oneiric shrinkings which suddenly interrupt his subterranean progression, he remembers the story he had read of an explorer who suddenly swelled up in a gallery of the Egyptian pyramids, obstructed the passage, and died miserably, trampled by his companions.1 9 In its extreme, this obsession with a narrow and constricting place is expressed by the dream of premature burial—no need to recall its obsessive character in Poe—the nightmare in which we picture ourselves alive in the grave. It appears, for example, in The Restless Matron (1799), The Monk (1796), Count Eugenio; or, Fatal Errors (1807) and in many other tales where the young heroine, under the effects of a powerful drug that someone has administered to her, is thought to be dead and is buried. There is little need to emphasize the essential role, in the tales of Poe, played by images of the labyrinth—or, to speak in the terms of Gaston Bachelard, of the “prison dynamique.” Only the most important examples need be cited: the school where William Wilson is pensioned, all filled with complex passages that give the boy the illusion of infinity; the subterranean walk of the narrator of “The Cask of Amontillado” and his victim; the aquatic maze formed by the endless meandering of the stream that Ellison floats on in his approach to the domain of Arnheim; the hold of the ship Pym is shut up in where he attempts to force a way between casks and barrels; or later, on the island of Tsalal, the tortuous road through labyrinths so complex that Poe must draw them.2 0 Is it necessary to attribute these oneiric ambulations to an analistic exploration of the maternal body? According to Marie Bonaparte, the wells, pits, and cells that the subterranean passages lead to symbolize the maternal cloaca, which blocks or directs “the movement, in the bowels, of the faeces to which the child, in its anal sexual theories, likens itself.”2 1 I do not have the authority to deny or confirm such a hypothesis. All that I can say is that it must similarly explain many episodes from many Gothic novels, wherein the dream of the labyrinth had already, some thirty or

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odore appeared, the walls of the castle behind Manfred were thrown down with a mighty force.1 7

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forty years earlier than Poe, been popularized through the process of literary composition. One could make an analogous remark about Marie Bonaparte’s interpretation of “The Man of the Crowd.” She quite justifiably evokes, in connection with this indefatigable walker who ceaselessly travels the streets of London, the figure of the Wandering Jew, that great “déambulateur mythique” whose origins are lost in the night of time. But in her eyes he embodies nothing less than the formidable Father-figure since he derives from the patriarchal tribes which murdered the divine Son (p. 424). I will not further contest this point. But permit me to add that the character of the Wandering Jew was also, at the time Poe wrote his tale, an obligatory character in a certain category of novels that runs from The Monk through Godwin’s Saint-Leon and Shelley’s SaintIrvyne to Maturin’s Melmoth. Poe did not invent this figure of homo viator; he drew it from the ancient well of universal literature a short time after the Gothic novel had brought it again into favor with the Anglo-American public. The figure of the Wandering Jew is one of the great images; one of the “images primordiales” that has illustrated the human adventure from the time that men felt like putting it into fable. At the time Poe wrote, it had also become almost a literary cliché. One could say the same about the appearances of the Devil that spread fear occasionally in Poe’s tales. The Devil may also embody the figure of the castrating Father, particularly in “Never Bet the Devil your Head.” But however attractive the interpretation psychoanalysis may propose for this tale, it would seem to neglect the traditional nature of this most popular of fantasy characters. Several decades earlier he had already caused the fall of Ambrosio, Victoria, Berenice, Jaqueline d’Olzenburg, Melmoth, and countless other weak beings—young ladies in hoop skirts and gentlemen in lace frills—all cast down into the abyss in expiation of some ambitious bent of the soul.2 2 The dream of falling is also, in itself, a dream as old as man, by means of which the dreamer enjoys descending into the deepest part of himself and pretends to be prisoner in the most archaic levels of his Self; but it is also a dream that Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, George Walker, Edward Montagu, Shelley, Maturin, and many others whose names have not survived, had just presented again to the tastes of the day, a dream which, thanks to them, formed part of the Anglo-American literary patrimony in Poe’s day, a dream which served as a vehicle for anguish and disquietude in a specific and, from certain points of view, inevitable form.

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III So far we have pointed out, in particular, structural analogies between the tales of Poe and the Gothic tradition: the frequent recourse to a medieval setting in order to circumscribe the action and the sphere of fantasy, the descent into subterranean passages and tombs, and the use of certain of the most redoubtable characters typically haunting the architectural spaces of Walpole’s genre. But more specific reminiscences of themes and devices belonging to the most characteristic manner of the Frantic School occur as well in certain of Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. The “Pit and the Pendulum” is one of these. The narrator, it will be recalled, falls into the hands of the Inquisition and, after a dubious trial, is incarcerated in one of their sinister prisons and subjected to intolerable tortures, moral as well as physical. Doubtless the Fathers of the Inquisition represent, as Marie Bonaparte says, “the infinitely multiplied Father, a sort of royal ‘we’” (p. 587). But it is appropriate to remember the role that the Inquisitors and their prison play in The Italian, The Monk, Melmoth, and in countless and often anonymous descendants of the masterpieces of the genre. The Gothic buildings are only the spatial representation of Catholicism, which at that time still remained for the Anglican conscience the symbol of all abuses and of the most refined mental cruelties. It would be impossible to list the dusty remains of all the minor imitations of Lewis and Radcliffe in which the hero is sometime confined in a filthy cell, from which only a natural event such as earthquake or tidal wave, or some quirk of exterior forces, liberates him. In Sicilian Mysteries (1812), The Ruins of Rigonda (1808), Gonzalo di Baldivia (1817), Cesario Rosalba (1819), and The Abbess (1799), to consider only these titles, the prisons of the Inquisition are not only places of solitary confinement but also torture chambers. After the tribunal scene, which always unfolds, as in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” in a vast chamber with walls draped in black, the victim is led through a maze of dim passageways to secret subterranean places where he makes out in the half-light ropes, pulleys, chains, and steel wheels, whose function he is not long in discovering.2 3 He is stripped, his joints are dislocated, his flesh torn—the blood flows.2 4 Sometimes he is stretched out under the burning sun while drops of ice water from a caldron fall one by one on his head.2 5 It is difficult to say if it is more terrible to feel the steel of the tongs probe palpitating flesh or to see the inexorable approach of the honed

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Furthermore, it will be remembered that in “The Pit and the Pendulum” the walls of the hero’s cell are wretchedly painted “in all the hideous and repulsive devices to which the charnel superstition of the monks has given rise. The figures of fiends in aspects of menace, with skeleton forms, and other more really fearful images, overspread and disfigured the walls” (Works, V, 76-77). In the mind of the Inquisitors these horrifying daubs are thought to add even more terrible tortures of the spirit to the physical suffering of the victim. Now Poe did not invent this detail. Is it possible that he found it in some popular work on the horrors of the Inquisition? In any case, it is certain that the device was used by many Gothic novelists eager to spare nothing in order to arouse terror. In W. H. Ireland’s The Abbess, for example, the hero is awakened in the night by a horrifying cry and sees frightening forms come to life on the wall of his cell: Horrid objects struck his sight. He started from his miserable couch; he, for a moment, yielded to the impulse of fear. He approached the wall, on which the most dreadful images that human fancy could invent, were portrayed, to terrify the wretched inhabitants of this earthly cell. One demon of gigantic stature seemed to roll his eyes upon the Comte. Hissing serpents appeared to dart forth their blood-dripping tongues, whose points were armed with points of fire. Ghastly forms were represented in the background, and skeletons intwined with poisonous adders, and among chapless skulls, from whose eyeless sockets were issuing long wreathing worms, the speckled toad, and the death-dealing scorpion seemed to dwell.2 6

The same device occurs in Melmoth in the scene where Monçada is aroused from sleep by the glowing flames which suddenly invade his cell: I awoke one night, and saw my cell in flames; I started up in horror but shrunk back on perceiving myself surrounded by demons, who, clothed in fire, were breathing forth clouds of it around me. Desperate with horror, I rushed against the wall, and found what I touched was cold. My recollection returned, and I comprehended that these were hideous figures scrawled in phosphorus, to terrify me.2 7

It seems to me that here Poe is incontestably following a precise literary tradition. Although the “pit” and the “pendulum” can have precise significances on a psychoanalytic level, the general atmosphere of the tale, the secret and malevolent presence of the Inquisitors and their frightening

designs, put the American writer directly in debt to British fiction of the beginning of the century. “The Pit and the Pendulum” is the most perfect, the most horrifying, and the best written of Gothic tales imitative of The Italian and The Monk.

IV To complete this account, the frequent use that Poe makes of two motifs especially popular with Gothic novelists must be discussed. Long before the American thought of writing, the motifs of the portrait and of the animated tapestry formed part of the tested techniques of horror in literature. The “oval portrait” to which the artist has in some way transferred the life of the model is not the first of the genre. In The Castle of Otranto Walpole had made use of a picture which depicted a character in such a lively manner that it leaves the frame and signals Manfred to follow it.2 8 And one cannot avoid thinking of the eyes of the portrait of Melmoth which in Maturin’s novel follow the narrator wherever he goes.2 9 It would be wearisome to provide an exhaustive list of all the portraits in Gothic novels which not only spread panic among credulous servants but seriously sway the equilibrium of the most intrepid hero. To note in Edmund of the Forest (1797), The Castle of Ollada (1794), Netley Abbey (1795), The Spirit of Turretville (1800), The Castle of Caithness (1802), Reginald; or, the House of Mirandola (1799), The Spirit of the Castle (1802), and in many other publications today fallen into well-deserved oblivion, that the instances of this device admit the same basic grounds of creating the effect of terror sought by their authors will suffice for a more exact estimate of Poe’s originality, which resides less in the choice of subject than in the manner in which he treats it. Finally, “Metzengerstein” illustrates, in two ways, the Gothic tradition which we are reviewing. First, the central motif of the tale is that of the animated tapestry. Here again it is not a matter of reducing the literary worth of Poe but, on the contrary, of making his art more obvious, if one recalls in connection with this scene (one of the most astonishing of the story), all the hangings and tapestries which, from the first novels of Charlotte Smith to The Fatal Revenge; or, The House of Montorio by Maturin, suddenly terrify the heroine by seeming to become alive. Of course, in The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey, Clermont, and The Romance of the Castle, as in the majority of the narratives belonging to the subclass where the supernatural is rationally explained, it is a current of air which seems suddenly to give life to the

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edge of a pendulum; in any case Poe’s “sadism” had many antecedents in the English literature of the beginning of the century.

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demons, dragons, and monsters depicted on the cloth.3 0 Let us say that in his preference for the irrational the author of “Metzengerstein” exploited to the limit a device that some Radcliffean romance had provided him the germ for. The idea was attractive to him, for “Ligeia” contains impressive drapery, so arranged in the bizarre nuptial chamber designed by the hero that a shrewdly directed current of air keeps it perpetually moving. As the narrator reports in “Ligeia”: But in the draping of the apartment lay, alas! the chief phantasy of all. The lofty walls, gigantic in height—even unproportionably so—were hung from summit to foot, in vast folds, with a heavy and massive-looking tapestry—tapestry of a material which was found alike as a carpet on the floor, as a covering for the ottomans and the ebony bed, as a canopy for the bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of the curtains which partially shaded the window. The material was the richest cloth of gold. It was spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures, about a foot in diameter, and wrought upon the cloth in patterns of the most jetty black. But these figures partook of the true character of the arabesque only when regarded from a single point of view. By a contrivance now common, and indeed traceable to a very remote period of antiquity, they were made changeable in aspect. To one entering the room, they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities; but upon a farther advance, this appearance gradually departed; and step by step, as the visitor moved his station in the chamber, he saw himself surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong to the superstition of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the draperies—giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole. (Works, II, 260-261)

One might say that the narrator tries to recreate for his second wife the atmosphere and the setting where former heroines enjoyed being terrified, keeping in mind, however, that this statement makes several Baroque variations upon a Gothic theme. But to return to “Metzengerstein,” the second element which makes it nearly a perfect Gothic story is the obscure prophecy that the entire plot turns upon. Announced from the first page, it is verified at the end: “A lofty name shall have a fearful fall when, as the rider over his horse, the mortality of Metzengerstein shall triumph over the immortality of Berlifitzing” (Works, II, 186). Now if there is one traditional motif of the Gothic novel, it is the prophecy formulated in the first pages that prepares for and justifies subsequent supernatural intervention. The Castle of Otranto itself opens with an ancient oracle proclaiming

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that “the Castle and Lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it.”3 1 The meaning of these mysterious words is soon understood when one learns during the course of the narrative about the existence of a giant ceaselessly growing and threatening the dissolution of the dwelling that shelters it. Just as Walpole’s drama resolves itself when this strange prediction comes true, “Metzengerstein” cannot continue beyond the sphere of fantasy strictly demarcated by the sybilline words with which it opens. Recall that analogous dramatic situations occur in dozens of minor novels, The Cavern of Death (1794), The Traditions (1795), The Haunted Priory (1796), and Mort Castle (1800) being only the most eloquent examples. Robert Evans introduces into his The Dream; or, Noble Cambrians (1801) a long note explaining the role that the prophecy should play in this class of fiction.3 2 Of course there is an element of extravagance in making Poe an American disciple of Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin. The least of his tales obviously contains more art than the most brilliant “Gothic” story, and the interior spaces that he explores are immeasurably more authentically those of the soul. But one must still acknowledge that there are situations and themes in the groundwork of his art and of his oneiric peregrinations which the numerous followers of Walpole had exploited before him. Poe infinitely surpasses the literary devices and recipes for terror which Radcliffe, Lewis, and their imitators had developed thirty years earlier. Poe surpasses them, but he utilizes them. Without abandoning the images of the Gothic castle, the subterranean passages, the labyrinth, and the prisons of the Inquisition, he gives these locations the new dimensions of prisons projected by anguish in dream. A psychoanalysis of Poe is incomplete that rests on the discoveries of Freud rather than on those of Jung and Gaston Bachelard. It should make obvious in Poe’s work the great “images primordiales” of the dream of depths, the structures of the vertical imagination which the Gothic novelists had rediscovered at the end of the eighteenth century.3 3 In this way the correspondences that we have outlined will explain themselves less perhaps by a direct and lucid description than by a return to the same archetypes.

Notes [This essay was first] published as “Edgar Poe et la tradition ‘gothique,’” Caliban: Annales de la Faculté des Lettres de Toulouse, 4 (1968), 35-51.

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2. [In his exhaustive study of the English Gothic novel, Lévy traces the phrase “l’école frénétique” to Charles Nodier, and states that it especially well applies “to the multiplying horrors and frenzied episodes” characteristic of the minor novels which descend from the works of Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis; Le Roman “Gothique” Anglais: 1764-1824 (Toulouse, 1968), p. 383. Lévy also notes Wordsworth’s reference to “frantic novels” in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, p. 646.—Translator.] 3. G. G. Raddin, An Early New York Library of Fiction (New York, 1940). 4. As for example the following, which appeared in The Portfolio: “Horrible description predominates. The authors go out of the walks of nature to find some dreadful incident. Appalling noises must be created. Ghosts must be manufactured by the dozens. A door is good for nothing, in the opinion of a romance writer, unless it creak. The value of a room is much enhanced by a few dismal groans. A chest full of human bones is twice as valuable as a casket of diamonds. Every grove must have its quiet disturbed by the devil, in some shape or other. Not a bit of tapestry but must conceal a corpse; not an oak can grow without sheltering banditti.” Cited by F. L. Pattee in the introduction to his edition of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or, the Transformation (New York, 1958), p. xxvii. 5. Edgar Huntly, ed. David Lee Clark (New York, 1928), p. xxiii. 6. The Algerine Captive (New Hampshire, 1797), cited in Prefaces to Three Eighteenth-Century Novels, ed. Claude E. Jones, The Augustan Reprint Society (Los Angeles, 1957), pp. viii-ix. 7. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, reprint of the New York 1902 edition (New York, 1965), IV, 245. Hereafter cited as Works. 8. See “The Philosophy of Composition,” Works, XIV, 193; “Landor’s Cottage,” VI, 264. 9. “I assure you I know well the West Tower of L’Abbaye de Grasville, the South Tower of the castle of Mazzini, the East Tower of the castle of Udolpho, the North Tower of the castle of Blanguy, but the Southwest Tower, father, that is new,” La Nuit Anglaise (Paris, 1799), I, 116-117 [my translation—Translator]. 10. The Mysteries of Udolpho, Everyman edition (London, 1931), II, 204. 11. The Ruins of Rigonda; or, the Homicidal Father (London: Chapple, 1808), II, 128.

everything graceful and glorious as not to have devoured thy adventures? Who is there so unfortunate as not to have taken thee by the hand? Who so lost as not to have enjoyed thy companionship? Who so much of a log, as not to have laughed until he has wept for very laughter in the perusal of thine incomparable, inimitable and inestimable eccentricities?” The Southern Literary Messenger, 2 (1835), 41. 15. Eaton S. Barrett, The Heroine, ed. M. Sadleir (London, 1927), p. 244. 16. “Les Demeures dans le Roman Noir,” Critique, nos. 147-148 (1959), p. 725 [my translation—Translator]. 17. The Castle of Otranto, ed. W. S. Lewis, Oxford English Novels (Oxford, 1964), p. 108. 18. Matilda Montfort (London: Spenser, 1809), II, 90-91. 19. Melmoth (London, 1892), II, 34-35. 20. See “William Wilson”: “From each room to every other there were sure to be found three or four steps either in ascent or descent. Then the lateral branches were innumerable—inconceivable—and so returning in upon themselves, that our most exact ideas in regard to the whole mansion were not very far different from those with which we pondered upon infinity” (Works, III, 303). See “Amontillado,” Works, VI, 169-172; “The Domain of Arnheim,” VI, 191; “Pym,” III, 30-33, 221-225. 21. The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, tr. John Rodker (London, 1949), pp. 341342. 22. Protagonists respectively of The Monk (1796) by Lewis, Zofloya; or the Moor (1806) by Charlotte Dacre, The Three Spaniards (London, 1800) by George Walker, Jaqueline of Olzenburg; or, Final Retribution (London, 1800), and Melmoth the Wanderer (London, 1820) by Maturin. 23. Cf. for example the descriptions in Sicilian Mysteries, V, 148; The Ruins of Rigonda, III, 87; Gonzalo di Baldivia; or, a Widow’s Vow by Ann of Swansea (London: Minerva Press, 1817), I, 141; Cesario Rosalba; or, the Oath of Vengeance (London: Minerva Press, 1819), V, 263; etc. 24. Cf. W. H. Ireland, The Abbess (London: Earle & Hemet, 1834), III, 145; Sicilian Mysteries, V, 149; George Brewer, The Witch of Ravensworth (London: J. F. Hughes, 1808), II, 154; The Castle of Villa-Flora (London: Minerva Press, 1819), III, 152; etc. 25. Gonzalo di Baldivia, I, 141-142. 26. The Abbess, II, 196. 27. Melmoth, I, 258.

12. (London: Minerva Press, 1800), II, 55.

28. The Castle of Otranto, p. 24.

13. The Italian, Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library (Edinburgh, 1824), X, 560; Sicilian Mysteries; or, the Fortress Dei Vechii (London: H. Colburn, 1812), II, 56.

29. I, 20, 94. Remember that Maturin’s novel gave Wilde the idea for The Portrait of Dorian Gray.

14. Poe wrote: “Cherubina! Who has not heard of Cherubina? Who has not heard of that most spiritual, that most ill-treated, that most accomplished of women, of that most consummate, most sublimated, most fantastic, most unappreciated and most inappreciable of heroines? Exquisite and delicate creation of a mind overflowing with fun-frolic, farce, wit, humor, song, sentiment, and sense, what mortal is there so dead to

30. “The ragged tapestry represented still more horrible figures, all of which waved in lifelike movements as the air (admitted by the door) fanned the loose hanging on which they were represented,” The Horrors of Oakendale Castle (New York: J. Harrison, 1799), p. 13. “Nor could she prevent herself from starting as the tapestry, which represented a number of grotesque and frightful figures, agitated by the wind that whistled through the crevices, every now and then

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1. John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half in the U.S.A. (London, 1803), pp. 186-187.

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swelled from the walls,” R. M. Roche, Clermont (London: Minerva Press, 1798), I, 113. The heroine is frightened by “the pallid figures on the tapestry now and then moved by the wind, admitted through various crevices of this dreary chamber. They had really a terrific appearance, and might well be mistaken for the ghosts of the heroes they represented,” The Romance of the Castle, II, 71. 31. The Castle of Otranto, pp. 15-16. 32. (London: Minerva Press, 1801), I, 54-55. 33. [For Lévy’s application of Jung and of Bachelard (especially Bachelard’s concept of “verticalité”) to Gothicism in general, see Le Roman “Gothique” Anglais, particularly pp. 601-643—Translator.]

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR D. H. LAWRENCE ON THE PURPOSE OF POE’S TALES

Moralists have always wondered helplessly why Poe’s “morbid” tales need have been written. They need to be written because old things need to die and disintegrate, because the old white psyche has to be gradually broken down before anything else can come to pass. Man must be stripped even of himself. And it is a painful, sometimes a ghastly process. Poe had a pretty bitter doom. Doomed to seethe down his soul in a great continuous convulsion of disintegration, and doomed to register the process. And then doomed to be abused for it, when he had performed some of the bitterest tasks of human experience, that can be asked of a man. Necessary tasks, too. For the human soul must suffer its own disintegration, consciously, if ever it is to survive. But Poe is rather a scientist than an artist. He is reducing his own self as a scientist reduces a salt in a crucible. It is an almost chemical analysis of the soul and consciousness. Whereas in true art there is always the double rhythm of creating and destroying. This is why Poe calls his things “tales.” They are a concatenation of cause and effect. His best pieces, however, are not tales. They are more. They are ghastly stories of the human soul in its disruptive throes. Moreover, they are “love” stories. SOURCE: Lawrence, D. H. “Edgar Allan Poe.” In Studies in Classic American Literature. 1923. Reprint edition, pp. 70-88. New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1930.

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TITLE COMMENTARY The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym LESLIE FIEDLER (ESSAY DATE 1960) SOURCE: Fiedler, Leslie. “The Blackness of Darkness: E. A. Poe and the Development of the Gothic.” In Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960. Reprint, pp. 37082. New York: Anchor Books, 1992. In the following essay, Fiedler offers a biographical interpretation of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

In his harried career as a journalist, bookreviewer, short-story writer, poet, and critic, Edgar Allan Poe tried twice to write a full-length novel, reworking each time chronicles of American exploration on sea and land. Both The Narrative G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3

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of A. Gordon Pym (1837-38) and The Journal of Julius Rodman (1840) strike us as improbable books for Poe to have attempted, concerned as they are with the American scene and the great outdoors. The former is based upon accounts of pioneering expeditions to the South Seas, and especially a South Polar expedition projected by an acquaintance of Poe called J. N. Reynolds; while the second borrows heavily from the journals of Lewis and Clark, purporting to describe a trip across the Rockies which had preceded theirs. Both long fictions are, superficially at least, fullfledged “Westerns” from the pen of an author none of whose more notable short stories (except the insufferably commercial “The Gold Bug”) involve either native problems or a native setting. There is little doubt that Poe was trying to cash in on contemporary interest in the remote and the unexplored, exploited, on the one hand, by such popular histories as Washington Irving’s Astoria or Adventures of Captain Bonneville, and, on the other, by the Indian novels of James Fenimore Cooper. In the course of a review of the latter’s Wyandotté, written in 1843, Poe reflects on the Leatherstocking Tales and remarks a little ruefully: . . . we mean to suggest that this theme—life in the Wilderness—is one of intrinsic and universal interest, appealing to the heart of man in all phases; a theme, like that of life upon the ocean, so unfailingly omniprevalent in its power of arresting and absorbing attention, that while success or popularity is, with such a subject, expected as a matter of course, a failure might be properly regarded as conclusive evidence of imbecility on the part of the author. . . .

He goes on to add, however, that “the two theses in question,” that is, the wilderness and life upon the ocean, are subjects to be avoided by the “man of genius . . . more interested in fame than popularity,” for they belong to the lesser of the “two great classes of fiction,” the “popular division” at whose head Cooper stands. Of this category, Poe remarks that “the author is lost or forgotten; or remembered, if at all, with something very nearly akin to contempt.” He considers his own fiction in general part of the other great class, which includes the work of “Mr. Brockden Brown, Mr. John Neal, Mr. Simms, Mr. Hawthorne,” of whom it can be said that “even when the works perish, the man survives.” Yet in Gordon Pym and Julius Rodman, Poe tried his hand at the two popular themes, attempting, for the first time perhaps, to treat the sort of legendary material which had appeared in Leatherstocking Tales with the scrupulous documentation of Irving’s nonfictional accounts. The kind of

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book at which Poe aimed Melville was to produce with eminent success, beginning less than a decade later with the best-selling Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), and raising the genre to unexpected power in Moby Dick. Poe is considerably less successful, failing completely in the case of the unfinished Julius Rodman to lend fictional life to borrowed documents; and achieving in Gordon Pym a work so hopelessly unpopular (in America at least!), that only within the last very few years has a major attempt to redeem it been undertaken. Poe himself, some time after its appearance, was willing to write off Gordon Pym as a “silly book”; and certainly from the first he had considered it, or pretended to consider it, a shameless bid for popular success—the sort of “Tale in a couple of volumes,” which his friend Paulding had assured him would win him the mass audience that had snubbed his collections of short stories. The whole apparatus which surrounds the anonymous final form of Gordon Pym is apologetic: an involved attempt on Poe’s part to convince himself that his primary purpose in publishing the tale was to perpetrate a hoax on the reader. But this is an almost compulsive aspect of Poe’s art in general, arising from a dark necessity, which dogged not only him among American writers, of remaining in ignorance about his own deepest aims and drives. Just so Cooper was obligated to believe that he was mocking his wife’s literary taste before he could become an author, while Melville eternally persuaded himself that he was on the verge of producing a best-seller, and Twain pretended he was a writer of books for boys. The apologetic and playful preface to Pym has for us now chiefly biographical interest, illuminating the author but not the work. Whatever Poe’s ostensible or concealed motives, he created in his only complete longer fiction not a trivial hoax but the archetypal American story, which would be recast in Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn. Why, then, did Poe’s book not achieve either the immediate acclaim accorded the latter or the slowly growing reputation won by the former? All the attributes of the highbrow Western are present in his novel: the rejection of the family and of the world of women, the secret evasion from home and the turning to the open sea. Only a bevy of black squaws and a few female corpses (“scattered about . . . in the last and most loathesome state of putrefaction”) intrude into the world of pure male companionship which Poe imagines; and they provide no competition to the alliance of Pym either with his boyhood friend and Anglo-

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Saxon compeer, Augustus Barnard, or with his dusky demon, the “hybrid line-manager,” Dirk Peters. Rioting and shipwreck and rescue at sea do not break the rhythm of the flight that bears Pym farther and farther from civilization toward a primitive isolation, symbolized by the uncharted island and the lost valley, the derelict ship, and the small boat adrift at sea. Even Rip Van Winkle’s initiatory draught, the alcoholic pledge to escape and forgetfulness, is represented in Pym. Buried in a coffin-like refuge in the black hull of a riot-torn ship, Gordon Pym finds at hand a bottle to console him; and later he and his companions fish up out of the flooded hold a flask of Madeira! There are totemic beasts to spare in the pages of Poe’s Western: a great white bear dramatically slaughtered, as well as legendary and exotic animals, compounded surrealistically out of incongruous familiar forms, and even stranger tabooed birds, who float lifelessly on a tepid and milky sea. And through it all, the outcast wanderer—equally in love with death and distance— seeks some absolute Elsewhere, though more in woe than wonder. Poe’s realm of refuge and escape seems finally a place of death rather than one of love: the idyllic American dream turned nightmare as it is dreamed in its author’s uneasy sleep. If the West means archetypically some ultimate innocence, there is no West in Poe’s book at all— only an illusory hope that draws men toward inevitable disenchantment and betrayal. It is not merely that a gothic horror balances the quest for innocence in Gordon Pym; such a balance is the standard pattern of all highbrow Westerns: of Moby Dick, in which the sinister figure of Fedallah confronts the beneficent one of Queequeg; and even of Huckleberry Finn, in which the threat of Pap’s ignorant spite and the shadow of slavery define by contrast the pure peace of Jackson’s Island and the raft. Only in Poe’s novel, however, is the dark counterpoint permitted to drown out the cantus firmus of hopeful joy or to mar a final harmonic resolution. Huckleberry Finn closes on a note of high euphoria, sustained by rescue and redemption and promises of new beginnings, which quite conceal from the ordinary reader the tragic implications of the conclusion; while Moby Dick ends with the promise of adoption, the symbolic salvation of the orphaned Ishmael by the crushing, motherly Rachel. Only at the close of Gordon Pym is the Great Mother identified with total destruction, a death without resurrection, a sterile, white womb from which there is no exit. “And now we rushed

Title page of the 1930 edition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of snow.” The white whale and the Rachel have been fused into a single symbol, the Great Mother as vagina dentata; and though Poe’s preface has already assured us that Pym somehow escaped to write his story, we know this for a mere device to explain how such a firstperson narrative could have been written at all—a gimmick and a lie. In the tone and feeling of the text, which alone have the right to ask an act of faith, there is every assurance that Pym and Peters died. The book is finally an anti-Western disguised as the form it utterly travesties; and this fact the great public, which will not in such matters be fooled, perceived—and perceiving, rejected the work. From the beginning, a perceptive reader of Gordon Pym is aware that every current sentimental platitude, every cliché of the fable of the holy marriage of males is being ironically exposed.

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Man’s best friend, the dog, turns into a slavering monster ready to tear his master’s throat to appease his hunger and thirst; a presumably loyal crew, led by the kind of standard black cook who plays the grinning and subservient comedian even in Moby Dick, mutinies; a bird flies through the pure blue air to drop “with a sullen splash” at the feet of a half-famished group of sailors “a portion of clotted and liverlike substance,” a chunk of decayed human flesh; an approaching ship, hailed as a source of rescue, turns out to be a vessel loaded only with human carrion, from which issues “a smell, a stench, such as the whole world has no name for.” Even the friendly bottle, traditional symbol of innocent male companionship, induces not joy but the D.T.’s, “an indescribable state of weakness and horror . . . a violent ague.” Most disconcerting of the parodies in Pym is that of the theme of resurrection itself, which later carries so much symbolic weight in both Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn. Like Ishmael or Huck, Gordon Pym is presumably slain only to rise again, immersed and entombed only to be reborn—in his case, not once but over and over. Out of the coffin in the hold and out of a swoon that seems death itself, he is brought to life, but only to face mutiny and a new threat of destruction; and he emerges in the disguise of a ghost: his face coated with white chalk and blotched with blood, his clothes stuffed to resemble the bloated stomach of a swollen corpse. The threat of murder once again avoided, he is the victim of shipwreck; and almost dead once more (his life meagerly sustained by drinking the blood of a murdered shipmate), he is rescued by a passing ship, only to fall victim to a last catastrophe which leaves him buried alive just as in the beginning. A “living inhumation,” Poe calls the state of life-indeath, to which his long circle brings him back; and he lingers almost sensuously over the details: “The blackness of darkness . . . the terrific oppression of the lungs, the stifling fumes from the damp earth . . . the allotted portion of the dead. . . .” But even from this plight, Pym is rescued, this time by his blood-stained, demonic mate, Dirk Peters; and the two together approach the ultimate plunge into a white polar chasm, from which there is no reason to believe either can emerge. Indeed, it is precisely such an end which the pariah poet-sailor has prayed for, has loved in anticipation: “death or captivity among barbarian hordes . . . a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some grey and desolate rock.” The guilt of Pym and of his creator demands of experience not the consolation of love but the

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delicious punishment of a living death, not the gift of Queequeg but of Fedallah. Since Pym lusts for Gehenna rather than Eden, the companions he chooses on his quest embody not fertility or patient endurance but impotence and terror. Augustus Barnard, his first specter bridegroom, dies horribly, rots away visibly on a parody before-the-fact of Huck’s raft: “His arm was completely black from the wrist to the shoulder, and his feet were like ice. . . . He was frightfully emaciated; so much so that . . . he now did not weigh more than forty or fifty [pounds] at the farthest. His eyes were . . . scarcely perceptible, and the skin of his cheeks hung so loosely as to prevent his masticating any food . . . without great difficulty.” His painful death is not even sacrificial, merely another device to produce a shudder, especially at the point where his entire leg comes off in the hand of the man who is attempting to heave his rotten corpse into the sea! Augustus’ impromptu grave-digger is his successor; for it is Dirk Peters who tosses the first good companion over the side, to the sharks who gather with gnashing teeth. But Peters is, as we have already noticed, a very ogre: such a monster, one of Poe’s critics describes him, as children draw to scare themselves, a nightmare out of our racial beginnings. In him, the qualities of Queequeg and Fedallah and Captain Ahab are oddly combined; a savior and a beloved primitive, he is also a murderer, a consumer of human flesh, a demi-devil, a madman. He is, in fact, as Marie Bonaparte suggests, the accursed hero who has destroyed the Father, taking on himself the guilt of the artist who only writes or dreams such horror. He protects the artist-surrogate of the plot with almost maternal tenderness, fights his battles like a big brother; and like a lover, holds him safe and warm when the defeated wanderer seeks his bloody embrace, impotent and whimpering. Yet the sought-for embrace is a rape and a betrayal, a prelude to certain death. The climax of the relationship of Pym and Peters comes at the moment when the two are trapped on the Island of Tsalal, where all their companions have been killed by an artificial landslide contrived by the bloodthirsty black aborigines. The two survivors are trying to find their way out of a cleft in the earth that has providentially sheltered them; and Pym is suspended in fright on a sheer cliff wall. For one moment my fingers clutched compulsively upon their hold, while, with the movement, the faintest possible idea of escape wandered, like a shadow, through my mind—in the next my

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The “dusky, fiendish . . . figure” is, of course, Peters, the half-breed; and the studied ambiguity of the passage, in which the language of horror becomes that of eroticism, the dying plunge becomes a climactic embrace, makes it clear that the longing to fall and the desire for the dark spouse are one, a single perverseness. Peters is not made an angelic representative of instinct and nature even at this critical instant; he remains still a fiend, even in the act of becoming a savior. And the reader is left to wonder what so dark and orgasmic a salvation can possibly mean except the exchange of one death for an even more damnable other. Poe presents us not with the standard resolution of the American’s ambiguity toward the life of impulse: an opposition of good savage and evil savage, as in Cooper’s confrontation of Pawnee and Sioux, or Mark Twain’s contrast of benevolent Negro and malevolent Indian. Though the son of an Upsaroka mother preserves Pym from the menace of the black hordes of TooWit (“Seizing a club from one of the savages who has fallen, he dashed out the brains of the three who remained . . .”), Poe is not finally intent on playing the same symbolic game as Twain in reverse. He is rather portraying a world in which the primitive may save or destroy, but remains always brutal and amoral, from any Christian point of view—diabolic. Poe espouses, that is to say, the view of instinctual life which is the common property of those writers whom he regards as “men of genius,” the view of Brockden Brown and Hawthorne; and he quite consciously rejects the sentimentalizing of the savage which he finds in popularizers like Cooper. Poe is quite at home with that distinctively American strain of the gothic, in which the aristocratic villains of the European tale of terror are replaced by skulking primitives, and the natural rather than the sophisticated is felt as a primal threat. Indeed, Poe’s aristocratic pretensions make it impossible for him to adopt such an attitude without the equivocations and soulsearching demanded of such liberal gothicists as the young Brockden Brown. His fictional world needs no good Indians because he believes in

none; and try as he will, he cannot keep quite distinct the mutinous black cook, whom he calls a “perfect demon,” from the “dusky, fiendish” figure of Dirk Peters. Theoretically, the tale of Gordon Pym projects through its Negroes the fear of black rebellion and of the white man’s perverse lust for the Negro, while symbolizing in the red man an innocent and admirable yearning for the manly violence of the frontier; but in the working out of the plot, the two are confused. Certainly, Pym has prepared himself for the encounter with Peters by reading the journals of Lewis and Clark in his coffin-refuge in the hold; but Peters refuses to become a harmless embodiment of the West, remaining to the end an ogre, his great, bare teeth displayed like fangs. It is true that the half-breed line-manager offers protection against the shipboard mutineeers and the vicious natives of Tsalal; but his sheltering embrace is identified with the mortal hug of the grizzly bear, whose skin he wears to cover his bald pate. The figure of the black man blends ambiguously with that of the slave, while that of the red man blurs into that of the wild beast! The West, at any rate, was always for Poe only half real, a literary experience rather than a part of his life; but the South moved him at the deepest personal level. Insofar as Gordon Pym is finally a social document as well as a fantasy, its subject is slavery; and its scene, however disguised, is the section of America which was to destroy itself defending that institution. Poe’s novel is surely the first which uses gothicism to express a peculiarly American dilemma identifying the symbolic blackness of terror with the blackness of the Negro and the white guilts he embodies. It is, indeed, to be expected that our first eminent Southern author discover that the proper subject for American gothic is the black man, from whose shadow we have not yet emerged. Though the movement of Gordon Pym seems to bear us away from America, once Nantucket and New Bedford have been left behind, and to carry us through remoter and remoter seas toward the exotic Antarctic, it ends in a region quite unlike the actual polar regions. Heading toward an expected world of ice and snow, Pym finds instead a place of tepid waters and luxuriant growth; seeking a white world, he discovers, beside and within it, a black one. What has gone wrong? It is necessary for Poe to believe, in that blessed ignorance which frees forbidden fancies, that Pym’s fictional voyage is bearing him toward the polar region, just as it was necessary for him to believe the whole story a delicious hoax; but we, as latter-day

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whole soul was pervaded with a longing to fall; a desire, a yearning, a passion utterly uncontrollable. I let go at once my grasp upon the peg, and, turning half round from the precipice, remained tottering for an instant against its naked face. But now there came a spinning of the brain; a shrillsounding and phantom voice screamed within my ears; a dusky, fiendish and filmy figure stood immediately beneath me; and, sighing, I sank down with a bursting heart, and plunged within its arms.

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readers, need not be the victims of either delusion. For all the carefully worked-up details about penguins, biche de mer, galapagos tortoises (bait for the audience which was later to subscribe to the National Geographic), Poe follows the footsteps not of Captain Cook but of his own first voyage in the arms of his mother, undertaken before his memory began, from New England to the South. In his deepest imagination, any flight from the North bears the voyager not toward but away from the snow—not to the South Pole, but to the American South. Certainly, it grows not colder, but warmer and warmer, as Pym aboard the last ship to rescue him, the Jane Gay, pushes closer and closer to the Pole. “We had now advanced to the southward more than eight degrees farther than any previous navigators. We found . . . that the temperature of the air, and latterly of the water, became milder.” Whatever pseudo-scientific explanations Poe may have believed would sustain this improbable notion of a luke-warm Antarctica, certain symbolic necessities were of more importance; he is being, in fact, carried back to Ole Virginny—as the color of the natives he meets on the Island of Tsalal (latitude 83° 20', longitude 43° 5' W.) clearly indicates. They are brawny, muscular, and jet black, with “thick and woolen hair,” “thick and clumsy lips,” these “wretches,” whom Pym describes, after they have destroyed all the white men but him and Peters, as “the most wicked, hypocritical, vindictive, blood thirsty, and altogether fiendish race of men upon the face of the globe.” Poe very carefully does not ever call them Negroes, though he bestows on them those marks which, in a review of two books on abolition, he listed as the special stigmata by which God distinguished the race that were to become slaves. He “blackened the negro’s skin and crisped his hair into wool.” At any rate, where an informed reader might have expected some kind of Indian, Poe could only imagine plantation hands in masquerade; and he sets them in a world distinguished not only by blackness and warmth, but by a certain disturbing sexuality quite proper to Southern stereotypes of Negro life. That sexuality can only be expressed obliquely by Poe, who was so squeamish about matters of this kind that the much franker Baudelaire was driven to remark, “Dans l’oeuvre d’Edgar Poe, il n’y a jamais d’amour.” The phallicism of the island he, therefore, suggests not in human terms but by a reference to the islanders’ chief crop, the biche de mer—a kind of sea-cucumber of which, Poe informs us, the

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authorities say that it “renews the exhausted system of the immoderate voluptuary.” The inhabitants of Tsalal are not, of course, the burlesque Negroes, those black “rascals” or “scamps,” named pompously “Jupiter” or “Pompey,” who lend a minstrel-show note to Poe’s lighter tales. Woolly-pated and bow-legged, these characters play the role of mischievous, cowardly, stupid and faithful dependents, good always for a laugh when they say “soldiers” for “shoulders” or “clause” for “cause.” No more are the black savages of Gordon Pym like the ideal colored servants sketched by Poe in his review of Slavery in the United States by J. K. Paulding, the author whose suggestion led to Poe’s writing his encoded Southern tale. The “degree of loyal devotion on the part of the slave to which the white man’s heart is a stranger,” Poe insists, is far “stronger than they would be under like circumstances between individuals of the white race”; and, indeed, such “loyal devotion” ranks high in “the class of feelings ‘by which the heart is made better’ . . .” It is precisely such loyalty which the actions of the natives in Poe’s novel belie, since it is his hidden doubts on this score which they embody. The dark hordes of Too-Wit project the image of what the Southerner privately fears the Negro may be; just as the idealized body-servant of Poe’s review projects the image of what the anti-abolitionist publicly claims he is. But the two images are complementary halves of a single view based on wish and terror: the subdued dependent bent to the sick-bed in love and the resentful victim abiding in patience a day of vengeance. It is the darker half, however, which is true to Poe’s memories of his boyhood and youth in the Allan household; while the lighter belongs only to certain patriarchal legends, to which he learned to subscribe during his days on The Southern Literary Messenger. In the single reference to the Negro in his correspondence, Poe complains to his stepfather (the date is 1827): “You suffer me to be subjected to the whim & caprice, not only of your white family, but to the complete authority of the blacks.” At the climax of Gordon Pym, Poe dreams himself once more, though a grown man, subject to that nightmare authority; and the book projects his personal resentment and fear, as well as the guilty terror of a whole society in the face of those whom they can never quite believe they have the right to enslave. In Tsalal, blackness is no longer the livery of subjection but a sign of menace; so utterly black, that even the teeth concealed by their pendulous lips are black, the Antarctic sav-

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How has Pym arrived here, in this place where whiteness itself is taboo, where even the flicker of a handkerchief, the flash of sunlight on taut sails, a little flour in the bottom of a pan stir terror, and doom the white man who feels at home in a world full of such pale symbols? Pym has sought a polar whiteness and has discovered instead a realm of the domination of black. It was (as Marie Bonaparte and other analytical critics have made clear) his mother whom Poe was pursuing in his disguise as Pym: that lost, pale mother, white with the whiteness of milk and the pallor of disease; and the imaginary voyage is a long regression to childhood. But hostilely guarding the last access to the White Goddess, stands the black killer, TooWit. In the ultimate reaches of his boyhood, where he had confidently looked for some image of maternal comfort and security, Poe-Pym finds both the white chasm and cascade and the black womb sealed off by black warriors. Surely, the latter fantasies represent memories of the black mammy and the black milk brother, who has sucked at the same black breast. Writing from the conscious level of his mind and addressing a public largely Southern, Poe dealt with the effect of these quasimaternal and fraternal bonds sanguinely enough. Those very feelings, he argued, “‘by which the heart is made better’ . . . have their rise in the relation between the infant and his nurse. They are cultivated between him and his fostering brother. . . . They are fostered by the habit of affording protection and favors to the younger offspring of the same nurse. . . .” But the buried mind of Poe does not

believe what the rationalizing intelligence propounds; in dreams (and in the fiction which is close to those dreams), the foster-brother arises to destroy and crush, to block the way to the lost, pale mother who preceded the Negro nurse. And even the good foster-brother, whom Poe split off from his dark imago in Peters, he cannot finally feel as benign; for him the black man and the “blackness of darkness” are one. That they remain one in much distinguished American fiction after his time is probably not due to the direct influence of Poe. He rather prophetically anticipates than initiates a long line of American books, in which certain gothic writers exploit the fear and guilt which the comic Negro of popular art attempts to laugh out of existence.

A. A. MARKLEY (ESSAY DATE SPRING 2003) SOURCE: Markley, A. A. “The Godwinian Confessional Narrative and Psychological Terror in Arthur Gordon Pym.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 4, no. 1 (spring 2003): 4-16. In the following essay, Markley traces how works by William Godwin—and by other Gothic writers who used Godwin’s “confessional” style—influenced The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym has enjoyed a surge of critical attention in recent years, much of which has been concerned with charting and analyzing the scores of source materials that Poe wove into the fabric of his complex and unusual novel.1 Many scholars, such as Bruce Weiner, have recognized Pym’s relationship to the widely popular genre of Gothic fiction, noting its particular correlation with the “explained” or “rational” mode of Gothic popularized by Ann Radcliffe, whose suspenseful page-turners ultimately provide a reasonable explanation for every supernatural or oddly coincidental occurrence in the plot.2 Pym’s strong debt to Daniel Defoe, particularly to Robinson Crusoe (1719) has also long been acknowledged; clearly Defoe is a critical source of influence not only in terms of subject matter, but in Poe’s manner of developing a first person narrative voice.3 It was William Godwin, however, who first married the first person confessional narrative to elements of Gothic suspense in his novels of the 1790s and afterwards. Godwin’s literary influence is much forgotten today, despite the wide appeal of his novels during his lifetime and despite the school of followers he inspired with his peculiar blend of terror and confessional narrative—figures such as Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Edward Bulwer-

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ages inhabit a black land in which the vegetation and the animals, water itself are all subdued to the same dismal color. The voyage of Pym has transported him improbably into the black belt, a black belt transformed from the level of sociology to that of myth, in whose midst the reigning Caucasian is overwhelmed by a sense of isolation and peril. Not even the glimmer of white teeth bared in a heartening smile cuts the gloom of this exclusive and excluding dark world, whose ultimate darkness is revealed in that final chasm in which Pym and Peters are trapped after the treacherous destruction of their white shipmates. “We alone had escaped from the tempest of that overwhelming destruction. We were the sole living white men upon the island.” At this point, the darkness of “Nigger-town” merges at last into the darkness of the womb which is also a tomb, an intestinal chamber from which there is apparently no way of being born again into a realm of light.

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Lytton, William Ainsworth, and, perhaps most importantly in terms of his own influence on Poe, Charles Brockden Brown. 4 Burton Pollin has acknowledged the relationship between the theme and atmosphere of Poe’s works and Godwin’s and has cataloged both the nineteenth-century references that likewise acknowledge this connection and the seventeen times in Poe’s own writings, largely in his reviews, in which Poe himself praises specific aspects of Godwin’s fiction.5 In his review of Godwin’s Lives of the Necromancers, for example, Poe writes The name of the author of Caleb Williams and of St. Leon is . . . a guarantee for . . . excellence. There is about all the writing of Godwin one peculiarity which we are not sure that we have ever seen pointed out for observation . . . an air of mature thought—of deliberate premeditation. . . . No English writer . . . with the single exception of Coleridge, has a fuller appreciation of the value of words; and none is more nicely discriminative between closely-approximating meanings.6

In a later review, Poe compares Caleb Williams with Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839): “In both novels the hero escapes repeatedly from prison. In the work of Ainsworth the escapes are merely narrated. In that of Godwin they are discussed. With the latter we become at once absorbed in those details which so manifestly absorb his own soul. We read with the most breathless attention. We close the book with real regret.”7 In a final example, in criticizing Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge (1841), Poe favors the works of Godwin and his disciple Bulwer-Lytton, calling them “the best constructors of plot in English literature.”8 A passionate radical devoted to the idea of social reform in England, Godwin published in 1793 a mammoth work of political philosophy, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, which idealistically looked forward to the dissolution of government in a society founded entirely on sincerity and rational thinking. Realizing, however, that both the cost and the approach of Political Justice precluded its wide dissemination amongst a mass audience of readers, Godwin turned next to the novel as a vehicle for expressing his political views to a wider readership. The result was perhaps the most influential British novel of this period, Things As They Are, or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, published in 1794, and followed by dozens of reprints in England, America, and France in the years to follow.9

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In setting out to illustrate the evils of Britain’s political and class systems, Godwin developed a new sub-genre of the confessional narrative. One of the novel’s most recognizable features lies in Godwin’s particular manner of characterizing his first person narrator; in this case a narrator in torment, driven to tell the story of a disastrous life brought about by his own errors in judgment. The narrator, Caleb Williams, is secretary to a wealthy landowner named Falkland, an aristocrat who values his sense of personal honor above all other aspects of his life. By listening to neighborhood gossip and snooping around Falkland’s possessions, Caleb gradually begins to piece together a crime in Falkland’s past—the murder of a neighbor and the framing of two innocent tenant farmers for the crime. When Falkland discovers that Caleb knows his secret, he sets about ruining the young man’s reputation, has him thrown into jail for alleged theft, and, when Caleb escapes, has him dogged from town to town, making sure that no one harbors Caleb or listens to his tale. The political intention of the novel is clear in its deft illustration of the power that the aristocrat held over the reputation of those of the lower classes, merely by relying on the authority of his class status. But from a literary perspective, the deeper interest in the novel lies in Godwin’s creation of Caleb as a narrator. Godwin drew heavily on his predecessors in developing his own brand of first-person narrative. Defoe’s narrators, such as the titular heroes of Moll Flanders (1722), Colonel Jack (1722), and Roxana (1724) had shocked readers in the earlier eighteenth century with their frank confessions of lurid lives of crime. Godwin specifically turned to Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack in creating the voice of a character caught in the predicament of having to survive amongst the worst excesses of the British class system as a social outcast. These novels also inspired Godwin to depict the life and point of view of the criminal world from the inside. His particularly memorable depiction of the “gentleman-thief,” Captain Raymond, brings home the point that nobility can exist even in those driven to crime. Moreover, the insider’s point of view allowed him an opportunity to depict the brutality of contemporary British prisons and the blatant inequities of the judicial system. Godwin also turned to Samuel Richardson in developing his first person narrator; in his epistolary format in Pamela (1740-41), Clarissa (174748), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54), Richardson achieved new levels of emotional veracity and

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Drawing on such influences and focused by a strong drive towards social reform, Godwin managed to create in Caleb Williams a startlingly realistic personality—a slippery narrator fully in control of his story, and yet one whose confessions and rants of terror and profound remorse evoke strong emotional responses in the reader. Pamela Clemit has pointed out that Godwin’s use of first person is central to his political purpose: “the inbuilt unreliability of [the] first-person account throws the burden of interpretation and decision on the reader, soliciting his or her active participation,” and thus fostering Godwin’s ideal of private judgment in which each individual is obligated “to seek out objective truths in the moral and political realm.”1 0 Godwin continued to write first person confessional novels for the rest of his career. Punctuated by periods in which he experimented with the essay, biography, history, and drama, and alongside a 25-year career as a publisher and author of children’s books, Godwin published five more novels, most of which, unlike Caleb Williams, are given a particular historical setting which deeply informs the novels’ political bent. The most fantastic of these in Gothic terms, St. Leon (1799), tells the story of a man who struggles with the unexpectedly unpleasant results of having been given the gifts of the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone against the back-drop of the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century continental Europe. The narrator of Fleetwood (1805) indicates Godwin’s new interest in exploring the abnormal psyche in the tale of an aberrantly egocentric man whose inability to trust his wife nearly leads him to destroy her. Delving even deeper into abnormal psychology, Mandeville (1817) explores the descent of a troubled narrator into madness in an England torn apart by Civil War. These latter two novels in which the reader must weigh more and more evidence that his narrator is actually mad may well have influenced Poe’s explorations of abnormal psychology in such tales as “The Tell-tale Heart,” “The Black Cat” and “William Wilson.” Clearly Poe shared with Godwin a fascination with anatomizing the mind of a character by allowing that character to tell his own tale. His work in this vein was not, however, always in the serious mode; in his “How to Write a Blackwood

Article,” Poe humorously satirizes the dilemma of the author who attempts to achieve Gothic suspense with the use of a first person narrator. In this tale, Psyche Zenobia’s first hand account of her tragic and bizarre decapitation on the town clock makes light of a central paradox of the genre and calls attention to the basic unreliability of the narrator who tells his or her own tale.1 1 Arthur Gordon Pym calls up the tradition of the Godwinian novel at nearly every turn—beginning with its very title. Critics have noted the similarity between the name of the narrator, “Arthur Gordon Pym” and the author, “Edgar Allan Poe.” Similarly, “Caleb Williams” as a name raises questions concerning the relationship between narrator and author: “Williams” of course recalling Godwin’s own first name, and “Caleb” alluding to a spy who worked for Moses in the Old Testament—thus Caleb can be interpreted as “William’s spy.”1 2 Pym’s opening words likewise recall the Godwinian tradition; Godwin’s narrators inevitably open their tales by discussing their upbringing and education, usually in order to reveal aspects of their early life and early personal qualities that ultimately led to disaster. This convention has a twofold purpose; in addition to providing important background information for the reader to factor into his or her judgment of the narrator’s actions as they unfold, beginning the character’s story in such a way can also be seen as a bid for veracity, contributing to a distancing of the narrator from the author of the work. Poe takes such a bid a step farther in actually having his narrator refer to Poe himself as editor in the Preface, and in closing the novel with the final “Note,” presumably by the editor, Poe. Pym’s expression of anxiety about his ability to write a viable novel, and about the credibility of his adventures are clearly a further attempt to fool the audience into thinking him to be real. In going to such lengths to establish the veracity of his narrator’s existence, Poe seems to have followed the example of another gothic novelist who drew much from Godwin, Scottish author James Hogg. In his 1824 Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Hogg similarly took pains to distance himself from the text by having his narrator refer to “James Hogg” as an editor of the text; indeed “James Hogg” even appears as a character in the narrative towards the end of the tale. Hogg even went so far as to publish a letter in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine announcing particular discoveries relating to the events of the novel prior to the novel’s publication, later incorporating this letter into the fabric of his novel as well.

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psychological depth. Pamela’s struggles with the relentless advances and irrational anger of her employer, Mr. B., provided a particular model for the troubled love/hate relationship between servant and master in the case of Caleb and Falkland.

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Very much in the spirit of Godwin’s narrators, Pym immediately displays a tendency towards what Godwin called “precipitation,” or acting hastily and rashly, and without regard for possible consequences. Oddly, Pym’s response to his neardeath experience in the Ariel at the beginning of Chapter 1, and the sensational tales of mutiny, shipwreck, and cannibalism that he hears from his friend Augustus, lead him only to long the more to go to sea. One may think of Robert Walton, the narrator of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the most famous of the products of the “Godwinian school,” who as an ambitious sea captain experiences only a renewed passion for adventure from reading such sea tales as Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—the kind of sea tale that would make most readers hope never to set foot on a deck. In addition to a tendency towards precipitative behavior, Godwinian narrators generally have a healthy regard for their own attributes, despite the remorse they unanimously express for their many past sins. Pym’s self-assurance, particularly as he expresses it while attempting to survive on the wreck of the Grampus—“I suffered less than any of us, being much less reduced in frame, and retaining my powers of mind in a surprising degree, while the rest were completely prostrated in intellect, and seemed to be brought to a species of second childhood”1 3 —bears a striking similarity to confident statements made by Godwinian narrators, who often confess to finding themselves physically attractive. Upon drinking his elixir of life and recapturing his youth, for example, Reginald St. Leon remarks, “I knew not how to take away my eyes from the mirror before me.”1 4 Similarly, Casimir Fleetwood, when relating his marriage to a much younger woman, avows, “My person was pleasing, and my demeanour graceful; circumstances which had acquired me in Paris the appellation of the handsome Englishman.”1 5 As a common convention of Gothic fiction, imprisonment, or the fear of imprisonment in running from the law, plays an important role in many of Godwin’s novels. Pym’s period of imprisonment as a stowaway in the hold of the Grampus and Poe’s exploration of the psychological effects of being deprived of light, fresh air, clean water, and adequate nourishment strongly parallels Caleb Williams’ vividly depicted incarceration in jail as well as St. Leon’s 12-year imprisonment by the Spanish Inquisition. One of Godwin’s chief purposes in his political novels was to expose the indecencies of the prison system in contemporary

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Britain. Carefully researching the state of the prisons of the day, Godwin adds footnotes to the text of Caleb Williams during the episode of Caleb’s incarceration in order to make it clear that his details relating to the state of prison cells and buildings and to the care of inmates are entirely factual. In Poe’s novel, Pym’s period of confinement seems also to function on a deeper level, and one much more psychological in nature— representing perhaps a gestational period, or Pym’s passing through a period of death in the coffin-like box to a symbolic rebirth. Pym’s dog “Tiger” plays an interesting role in this episode. Having been twice rescued from death by Tiger in the past, Pym is delighted to find that Augustus has secreted the dog on board. Poe, however, puts a chilling twist on the love between man and beast when the measure of Pym’s desperation in the hold can be assessed by Tiger’s turning feral from want of food and water. Interestingly, Godwin, too, portrays the intense loyalty dogs to his narrators in at least two novels; in Fleetwood, the narrator’s faithful pet follows him all the way from Wales to Oxford when the narrator enrolls in the university. In St. Leon, a dog described much like Pym’s “Tiger” suffers for his great love for the narrator. Like Tiger, who in the mutiny of the Grampus saves his master yet again by killing a mutineer, St. Leon’s dog performs similar feats of heroism, at one point pulling a drowning boy from a river. In each of these texts, a far-fetched episode demonstrating the pure love of a dog for his master seems to be a useful tool for intensifying the emotional experience of the novel and for making the narrator a more sympathetic personality. The plot devices of imprisonment and escape allowed Godwin reliable means by which to develop high suspense in his novels. Arthur Gordon Pym is so loaded with suspense and adventure as to seem almost a parody of the Gothic genre. One way in which Godwin characteristically intensifies suspense is by creating situations in which a character’s worst fear is realized immediately upon his expressing it. In putting together his theory concerning Falkland’s past crime, Caleb repeatedly commits actions while hoping Falkland will not see or hear him. Inevitably, Falkland appears immediately, as if summoned supernaturally to the scene by Caleb’s very anxiety. Poe seems almost to be making fun of this kind of heavy-handed device when, despite Augustus’s careful plans to disguise Pym and to spirit him onto the Grampus after dark, Pym finds

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The element of disguise in this episode likewise parallels a common Godwinian situation. Caleb Williams often experiments with aspects of disguise in his desperate attempts to flee his relentless pursuers. At one point he rubs ash on his face and dresses in the rags of the poor in order to pass as a Jew in metropolitan London; at another point he quickly lays on an Irish brogue to confuse his captors when he is apprehended trying to escape the country. St. Leon similarly affects an array of disguises to elude pursuers throughout his narrative; ultimately his attainment of the elixir of life, which restores him permanently to a state of youth 32 years younger, proves to be the ultimate, fool-proof disguise. The issue of disguise in Godwin is, obviously, closely tied to the narrator’s exploration of his own identity and his assertion of self through his narrative. Of course, the situation also allows for rich theoretical readings when one steps back from the narrative and considers the role of the writer in playing with his own sense of self and his role as author in creating a startlingly realistic first-person narrator. David Ketterer, for one, has discussed deception as a theme and a technique in this novel, focusing on the ways in which Pym continually challenges the reliability of our perceptions of reality.1 6 Certainly the richest episode of disguise in Pym is that in which Pym disguises himself to impersonate the dead body of his shipmate Hartmann Rogers, to terrify the mutineers and to help his friends stage a counter take-over. Pym’s detailed description of the corpse and his various attempts to approximate its horrible aspect in his own appearance take the Godwinian narrator’s exploration of self to a new and much darker level of confrontation with death and physical corruption. The disarming nature of this passage brings to mind similarly bizarre episodes in which Godwin experiments with this tactic particularly as a means of exploring aspects of the aberrant personality. The best examples are found in Fleetwood. As a young student in school, the narrator Fleetwood participates in a complex scheme by which he and his friends aim to humiliate one of their overachieving colleagues by creating a life-size puppet to impersonate a schoolmaster. The visually impaired over-achiever is perfectly fooled by the puppet, and the violent harangues of this pseudoschoolmaster actually drive the boy to suicide in a

prank gone horribly wrong. Later in the novel, Fleetwood deals with his rage at the presumed infidelity of his wife by dressing up two wax dummies in their clothing, using the dummies to act out a mock wedding feast, and then tearing the dummies to shreds in a terrifyingly psychotic fit of rage. It is interesting to note that as in Pym, what the author is exploring here is the power of outward appearance as the signifier of identity and ultimately as a means of attacking and even destroying others. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley would explore this idea even further in demonstrating that when appearance is blindly accepted as a valid signifier of character, great violence can be the result. One of the most intriguing elements of Poe’s novel is the relationship between Pym and his friend Augustus, his companion throughout the first half of the novel. The references to the closeness of these young men’s relationship, the fact of their sharing a bed and “lying close,” strongly prefigure the relationship between Melville’s Ishmael and Queequeg of Moby-Dick (1851). While scholars have noted that Augustus’ age and the date of his death tie him closely to the figure of Poe’s brother Henry,1 7 the reader may also sense a subtle homoeroticism implicit in the attachment between these two characters. Judith Sutherland has identified aspects of the doppelgänger in their relationship, an old folk motif that offers a complex symbolic means of exploring identity and otherness, two aspects of the same personality, or the dangerously potent attraction and hatred between two characters who mirror each other in powerful ways; Poe’s “William Wilson” is certainly one of the finest examples of the use of this motif in modern literature.1 8 Clearly Poe is doing much more with Augustus than offering a portrait of his dead brother, as the two characters balance each other in intriguing ways. A drunken Augustus nearly leads a sober Pym to his death in the novel’s first episode; later Augustus’ life amongst the crew of the Grampus neatly balances Pym’s pseudo-death in the ship’s hold; this balance of active and passive “doubles” may remind the reader of the similar situation in which Victor Frankenstein falls into a nine-month state of neardelirium and confinement in bed while his newly created creature makes his first foray into the world. But Poe, interestingly, strikes off from the doppelgänger aspects of Pym’s relationship with Augustus nearly as soon as he develops it. Pym’s reemergence from the ship’s hold in the imperson-

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himself nevertheless face to face with his grandfather, the person he least wishes to meet. Pym proceeds to befuddle the poor old man in a humorous deflation of the suspense of the episode.

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ation of a corpse, unsettles the balance of the doubles and knocks Augustus from his status as a major player in the novel. Augustus loses his place as Pym’s older brother figure and caretaker and gradually becomes more and more ill, until he dies at the novel’s exact center. His near immediate decomposition and the falling apart of his body when the others throw it into the sea to be devoured by the circling sharks, symbolize his decomposition as a key player.1 9 Perhaps the oddest aspect of this scene is Pym’s relatively rational response to Augustus’ grisly end. Pym’s psychological movement away from his fraternal attachment to and his idolization of Augustus in the novel’s earliest chapters charts an important aspect of his growth as a character. By the time of Augustus’ death, he has been utterly superseded by the figure of the half-breed Dirk Peters, whose initially appalling physical qualities are gradually mollified in the reader’s memory, as his behavior makes him seem more and more to be the most rational and capable actor in the tale. Interestingly, this process of mollification begins for the reader in Peters’ humane treatment of Augustus during and after the mutiny on the Grampus; Peters’ odd affection for Augustus is acknowledged by his grumbling fellow mutineers. How does one of the most dangerous, frightening, and unattractive characters in the novel become central both to the narrative and to the narrator’s own life and mind? Again one might think of Melville’s Ishmael and Queequeg. Perhaps the answer lies in such a character’s ability to challenge the narrator’s preconceptions about otherness and difference. Godwin’s use of subtle elements of homoeroticism is an aspect of many of his novels. Caleb Williams’ intense love-hate relationship with his patron and tormenter Falkland and the ways in which these characters “double” each other have been fruitfully explored in this light.2 0 His psychotic narrators, Fleetwood and Mandeville, each develop an intense hatred for a perceived rival that from a psychoanalytic perspective can only be interpreted as having a sexual basis; each frequently comments on the beauty and attractiveness of his particular nemesis. Both of these situations perfectly illustrate Eve Sedgwick’s theory of homosocial desire, in which intense desire between men is channeled into hateful competition; one of the texts with which Sedgwick most persuasively illustrates this aspect of desire is Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.2 1 Godwin’s Cloudesley (1830) is

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perhaps his most thorough treatment of the power of attraction between men and the inherent dangers therein. In this novel the young hero, Julian, continually expresses a desire for an intense male bond—first directed towards his friend Francesco Perfetti, and later towards the infinitely charming bandit known as St. Elmo—friendships described as having the mix of fraternal love and hero-worship characterized by Pym’s early relationship with Augustus. Another figure in Cloudesley that offers a strong parallel to Dirk Peters is Julian’s dark and brooding guardian Borromeo, whose misanthropy is ultimately recuperated by the example of the noble Julian. Borromeo is actually a recasting of an earlier misanthrope, Bethlem Gabor, one of the most memorable figures in St. Leon, whose response to the violent loss of his family drives him to imprison and torment St. Leon because of St. Leon’s attempts to contribute to the benefit of his fellow man.2 2 In both of these cases, a wrathful, dangerous, and physically intimidating character is gradually softened by his contact with the hero of the novel; the evolution of Peters as a character clearly follows the same trajectory. It is important to note the clear relationship of these brooding characters to the Byronic hero, Byron himself having been deeply influenced by Godwin’s work.2 3 Reading Arthur Gordon Pym as a product of the Godwin school places several of the novel’s characteristics into sharp focus. Its near-parody of Gothic conventions and relentless suspense not only reveals Poe at his best as a master of this genre, but shows him working out aspects of these conventions that would turn up again and again throughout the body of his later work. More importantly, Poe is undeniably successful here in developing the veracity of a peculiar and challenging first-person narrator, and in exploring that narrator’s psyche with incredible complexity in Pym’s descriptions of his adventures, in symbolic episodes of death and rebirth, and in his relationships with other characters. In Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe seems to have set himself the goal of employing every convention he could glean from both Gothic fiction and the popular genre of the sea narrative—often abruptly moving away from one and on to another as soon as he has developed it. The sheer number of terrifying incidents and suspenseful episodes packed into this short work indeed suggest not merely an attempt to meet the conventions of any particular genre, but rather an effort to surpass them all.

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Notes

8. “Chapter of Suggestions,” Opal XIV (1845): 188-9; rpt. in Burton R. Pollin, ed., Collected Writings of Poe: The Brevities: Pinakidia, Marginalia, Fifty Suggestions, and Other Works, vol. II (NY: Gordian, 1985), 468-70; cited in Pollin, “Poe and Godwin,” 250. 9. Godwin himself made revisions to the novel for new editions in 1796, 1797, 1816, and 1831. 10. Clemit, 6. 11. See Jonathan Auerbach’s discussion of this tale as a satiric comment on the act of narration in The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989), 3-8. 12. Burton R. Pollin, “The Significance of Names in the Fiction of William Godwin.” Revue des Langues Vivantes 37 (1971): 391. 13. Pollin, ed., Collected Writings, I:130. 14. William Godwin, St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Pamela Clemit, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, vol. IV (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), IV:283.

1. See, for example, Burton R. Pollin, ed. The Imaginary Voyages: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, The Journal of Julius Rodman, vol. 1 of Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (Boston: Twayne, 1981; rpt. NY: Gordian P., 1994), and Pollin’s “Poe’s Life Reflected through the Sources of Pym,” Poe’s Pym: Critical Explorations, ed. Richard Kopley (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1992), 95-103. See also Richard Kopley’s edition of the novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (NY: Penguin, 1999), and Ronald C. Harvey’s discussion of studies of Poe’s sources in The Critical History of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: “A Dialogue with Unreason” (NY: Garland, 1998), 110-12.

16. David Ketterer, The Rationale of Deception in Poe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1979), as discussed by Harvey, Critical History, 116.

2. Bruce Weiner, “Novels, Tales, and Problems of Form in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in Kopley, Critical Explorations, 49-50. See also Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (NY: Stein and Day, 1960; rpt. NY: Dell, 1966), 392-400.

18. Judith Sutherland, The Problematic Fictions of Poe, James, and Hawthorne. (Columbia: U. of Missouri P., 1984), 33.

3. Burton Pollin, “Poe and Daniel Defoe: A Significant Relationship.” Topic 16 (1976): 3-23. 4. For a discussion of Brockden Brown and Mary Shelley as disciples of Godwin, see Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993). 5. Burton Pollin, “Poe and Godwin,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 19 (1965): 237-53; rpt. in Discoveries in Poe (Notre Dame: U. of Notre Dame P., 1970), 107-27. The majority of these references can be found in Pollin, Godwin Criticism: A Synoptic Bibliography (Toronto: U. of Toronto P., 1967), 554. See also Pollin’s “Primitivism in Imogen,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 67 (1963): 186-90, for a discussion of analogies between Godwin’s early novel Imogen (1784) and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 6. Southern Literary Messenger VIII (December 1835): 92-4; cited in Pollin, “Poe and Godwin,” 240-1. 7. “Review of Guy Fawkes: or the Gunpowder Treason. An Historical Romance,” Graham’s Magazine X (November 1841): 214-22; cited in Pollin, “Poe and Godwin,” 243.

15. William Godwin, Fleetwood, or, The New Man of Feeling, ed. Pamela Clemit, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, vol. V (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), 189.

17. See Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation. Trans. John Rodker. (London: Imago, 1949; rpt. NY: Humanities P., 1971), and Kopley, Arthur Gordon Pym, 224, n. 5., and 231, n. 3.

19. See J. Gerald Kennedy’s thorough discussion of this aspect of the novel in “Pym Pourri: Decomposing the Textual Body,” in Kopley, Critical Explorations, 169-71. 20. See Robert J. Corber, “Representing the ‘Unspeakable’: William Godwin and the Politics of Homophobia,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990): 85-101; and Alex Gold, Jr., “It’s Only Love: The Politics of Passion in Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 19 (1977): 135-60. 21. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Murder Incorporated: Confessions of a Justified Sinner,” in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (NY: Columbia UP, 1985), 97-117. 22. For a thorough analysis of Godwin’s Bethlem Gabor, see Gary Kelly, “History and Fiction: Bethlem Gabor in Godwin’s St. Leon,” ELN 14 (1976): 117-20. 23. For Godwin’s influence on Byron, see William St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989), 339-40. 24. Pollin, “Poe and Godwin,” 253.

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As Burton Pollin aptly points out, Poe seems to have had little interest in the strain of social criticism running throughout Godwin’s fiction, choosing instead to imitate Godwin’s development of atmosphere, his unpredictable but carefully modulated plots, and his intensely realistic depictions of peculiar, often aberrant personalities.2 4 Despite this major difference between Godwin’s and Poe’s approach, a close reading of Arthur Gordon Pym alongside Godwin’s novels makes quite clear the particular aspects of Godwin’s style and approach that Poe valued so highly. On the basis of Arthur Gordon Pym alone, Poe must be regarded as a major figure in the “school of Godwin,” which managed by the midnineteenth century to take the first-person narrative to a startlingly new level of emotional intensity and psychological realism.

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“The Fall of the House of Usher” STEPHEN DOUGHERTY (ESSAY DATE WINTER 2001) SOURCE: Dougherty, Stephen. “Foucault in the House of Usher: Some Historical Permutations in Poe’s Gothic.” Papers on Language and Literature 37, no. 1 (winter 2001): 3-24. In the following essay, Dougherty examines the gothicism of “The Fall of the House of Usher” within the context of the racism and fear of miscegenation in nineteenthcentury society.

“[I]n the nineteenth century,” writes Reginald Horsman, “the Americans were to share in the discovery that the secret of Saxon success lay not in the institutions but in the blood” (24). This “discovery” was of monumental and devastating importance, and by the middle of the century the sign of blood seemed to be everywhere. Americans and Europeans were entering a new era of blood—of blood spilled as never before in genocides around the globe, of blood seeping inexorably into the sacred and profane imagination of race and the nation, and of blood horrors turned into a staple of mass entertainment. This era of blood was the era of the bourgeoisie’s entrenchment. In Juice of Life Piero Camporesi tells us, “At least up until the eighteenth century, blood was still dubbed the ‘father of all the humors.’ Life and salvation were closely tied up with its quality and purity” (14). Camporesi implicitly suggests a diminished rather than an augmented concern with blood in the modern world. But, if anything, this concern was heightened by its modified signification in the nineteenth century. After the collapse of the traditional theory of humors with the rise of scientific medicine in the eighteenth century, blood lost some of its old associations, but it gained some important new ones. Blood came to represent not the character of the individual, but the purity of the race or nation. The idea of purity—or impurity—of blood became the vessel of many bourgeois fears about confrontation with indigenous and colonized peoples, national identity, historical destiny, and the dream of progress. The race or nation whose mission—and manifest destiny—was to lead humanity into a better world could hardly dilute the very essence of its identity by “mixing” its blood. The most cherished precept of this era could be summed up in the words that John C. Calhoun spoke on the U. S. Senate floor in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War: “. . .

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Ours is a government of the white man. . . . [I]n the whole history of man . . . there is no instance whatever of any civilized colored race, of any shade, being found equal . . .” (my emphasis; qtd. in Fredrickson 136). Though the proud boast was meant to naturalize white colonialism and imperialism, which were already well into one of their most expansive phases in U. S. history, Calhoun’s words belie a profound insecurity regarding the popular imagination of the white American destiny. The great fear was miscegenation, a mixing of bloodlines which, as historians and ethnologists of the era were becoming convinced, was the central factor in the decline of great civilizations. “Whenever in the history of the world the inferior races have been conquered and mixed in with the Caucasian,” Josiah Nott appealed to fellow Americans, and to southern compatriots especially, “the latter have sunk into barbarism” (qtd. in Horsman 130). This fear was most routinely projected onto the Other who constituted the enemy internal to the body politic—the African. In 1839, the same year that “The Fall of the House of Usher” was published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, the revered New England theologian Horace Bushnell predicted that if the slaves were ever freed they would die off by the end of the century. As George Frederickson emphasizes in his valuable reading of the period in The Black Image in the White Mind, Bushnell’s prediction represented an early transposition onto the slaves of the brutally callous view that had already made Native American genocide seem acceptable and natural to the whites: “‘vices which taint the blood and cut down life’ might well ‘penetrate the whole stock, and begin to hurry them off, in a process of premature extinction; as we know to be the case with another barbarous people, [the Indians] now fast yielding to the infection of death’” (qtd. in Fredrickson 155). Bushnell imagined this extinction to be a “glorious” possibility for the white man; and indeed Frederickson refers to this vision of black annihilation as Bushnell’s “happy theme” (155). But if this theme is a positive one, then Bushnell’s happiness was inextricably bound up with an equally potent fear of his own race’s extinction, precipitated by a dystopic future of miscegenation in the North—the inevitable result of emancipation. The fear of miscegenation, or tainted blood, belied deeper fears of disease and death. Insisting that degeneracy sets in when a nation does not secure its “leading ethnical principal,” ethnologist J. Aitken Meigs urged that Americans “provide

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It is within the matrix of this collective racial/ biological nightmare scenario that I will discuss “The Fall of the House of Usher,” justly the most famous of all Poe’s Gothic horrors. For it is only within the context of this nightmare that one can explain adequately why “Usher” occupies such a seminal place in the nineteenth-century development of the Gothic genre. “If there is one work that announces the true arrival of the Gothic tale, its convincing emergence from cruder beginnings,” writes Chris Baldick, “it is . . . ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’” (xviii). With painstaking attention to economy of expression and unity of effect, Baldick suggests, Poe managed to create a story that would become an ur-type for the Gothic up to the present day”—a remarkably crystalized pattern . . . for the future evolution of Gothic fiction” (xviii). Indeed, the pattern has been revisited and reworked by countless Gothic stylists since Poe. Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Washington Cable, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Angela Carter, Joyce Carol

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intelligently for the amelioration of that disease . . . whose deadly influences threaten, sooner or later, like the Lianes of a tropical forest, to suffocate the national tree over which they are silently spreading” (qtd. in Fredrickson 133). In this associative strategy that links together the tropical—embodied in the African—with disease that threatens the life-blood of the nation, the fear of miscegenation is exposed as the dread of a historical destiny gone awry. But even more importantly, it is exposed as the dread of destiny itself—of the inevitable decline and fall of civilizations, and, more viscerally, of the individual death that awaits us all. Whites read in the visage of blacks a figuration of their own mortality. It was not only the fear of death, a white rhetoric of denial, which was likewise an implicit claim to immortality, that they projected onto the Other, however; it was also death itself: “It is a shame that you shall die, that your race shall be exterminated.” In Horace Bushnell’s curiously telling expression, blacks, like Native Americans, were infected with death. They were the carriers of death whose continued presence within the legitimate white population endangered the bodily integrity and the sacred life-force of the nation. In their own threatened blood, the whites perceived the liquid medium by which they too could become infected with death and cheated of the great destiny promised them in the providential rhetoric of U.S. nationhood.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR H. P. LOVECRAFT ON POE’S LITERARY INNOVATIONS

Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal, and hampered by more or less of conformity to certain empty literary conventions such as the happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in general a hollow moral didacticism, acceptance of popular standards and values, and striving of the author to obtrude his own emotions into the story and take sides with the partisans of the majority’s artificial ideas. Poe, on the other hand, perceived the essential impersonality of the real artist; and knew that the function of creative fiction is merely to express and interpret events and sensations as they are, regardless of how they tend or what they prove—good or evil, attractive or repulsive, stimulating or depressing, with the author always acting as a vivid and detached chronicler rather than as a teacher, sympathizer, or vendor of opinion. He saw clearly that all phases of life and thought are equally eligible as subject matter for the artist, and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and gloom, decided to be the interpreter of those powerful feelings and frequent happenings which attend pain rather than pleasure, decay rather than growth, terror rather than tranquility, and which are fundamentally either adverse or indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward sentiments of mankind, and to the health, sanity, and normal expansive welfare of the species. SOURCE: Lovecraft, H. P. “Edgar Allan Poe.” In Supernatural Horror in Literature. 1945. Reprint edition, with a new introduction by E. F. Bleiler, pp. 52-9. New York: Dover, 1973.

Oates, Isabel Allende, and others would all write fictions that effectively pay homage to Poe’s “Usher.” Ultimately, however, as Baldick explains, the importance of “Usher” in the history of Gothic

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has as much to do with its new, or newly amplified, theme as with its technical innovations: [Poe’s] new formula involved not only the stripping down of a cumbersome conventional machinery to its essential elements but an accompanying clarification and highlighting of a theme long familiar to Gothic writing and to the surrounding culture of Romantic sensationalism, although hitherto left hovering in the shadows: that of the decline and extinction of the old family line. Perfectly harmonizing the terminal involution of the Usher family with the final crumbling of its mansion—of “house” as dynasty with house as habitation—Poe ensured that whereas before him the keynote of Gothic fiction had been cruelty, after him it would be decadence. (xviii)

Baldick’s proposal of a gothic trajectory that moves from cruelty to decadence may be schematic—certainly Gothic literature exhibited a mixture of cruelty and decadence from its inception—but it is also provocative. What I am interested in is its resonance with Foucault’s model for the transformation of the way in which sovereign power has been wielded since the classical age. With this resonance in mind we may follow Baldick’s cue and map the Gothic’s generic development onto a broader historical tableau in the following manner. The Gothic of cruelty, the Gothic of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century tales, with titles such as “The Vindictive Monk,” “The Maniac’s Fate,” “The Poisoner of Montremos,” and “The Parricide Punished,” belong to a residually feudal European world where, as Foucault writes, “[t]he sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing” (History 36). This was a Gothic that reflected a mode of power “exercised mainly as a means of deduction . . . a subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate a portion of the wealth . . . goods and services, labor and blood, levied on the subjects. Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself” (136). The Gothic of cruelty is obsessed with filiation and patrimonial inheritance, and it is inhabited by powerful, easily enraged, lascivious aristocrats whose perverted desires bring them into mortal conflict with men and women of lesser class origins. In its representation of perverts in power and fair maidens in distress, the Gothic of cruelty is motivated by a potent and revolutionary image of the end of aristocracy and the termination of a whole class structure (brought down by an excess of sexual desire). Of course,

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this class structure was already in its death throes, or in a state of rigor mortis, even as these texts were being written. If the Gothic of decadence represents a departure, or a mutation, as Baldick suggests, it is because it belongs to a modern, democratic world where the mechanisms of power are no longer exercised upon the social body from the outside, but are instead internal to it. This is a Gothic that reflects and reproduces the fears of a newly hegemonic bourgeoisie—fears that are no longer about dying at the hands of omnipotent perverts, but about the conditions of life and living, and how these things may become perverted and degenerated through the improper valorization of the body and through the botched management of the body’s forces and pleasures. The Gothic that Baldick claims Poe more or less inaugurates is, in other words, a Gothic that focuses on what Foucault calls “the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes . . .” (139). What Poe can help us to establish is that which is simultaneously gestured towards and occluded in the crucial final chapters of Foucault’s History of Sexuality: the component part of this species body is the individual bourgeois body as it is in the process of becoming “whitened” in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is a great deal to lay at his doorstep, but there is something compelling about interpreting Poe as the first “New World” gothicist—that is, the first writer to give the Gothic a uniquely American, as opposed to Old World, European spin, even as he put the terms of this Americanness in brackets so as to question its legitimacy. But I also mean something both more sweeping and less generic than what this claim usually implies. For Poe might well be the first full-fledged gothicist of the modern political world: the world of democratic nation-states in the ascendant, of nationalist ideological systems in the process of consolidation, and of national peoples becoming population groups. Such an interpretation further situates Poe as the seminal gothicist of this new life-form of which the nation-state is merely the comprehensive political expression: the population group or species body whose organic wellbeing is regulated by discursive strategies that separate out what properly belongs to the social body and what pathologically threatens its purity, order, and smooth functioning.

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As I will argue, “Usher” is a horror story about the racialized conditions of production of the new species body. Yet what one notices foremost about “Usher” is the emphasis on class and aristocracy. At the beginning of the tale, class affiliation is the primary means of marking division and establishing identity, and the story’s focus is on filiation and estate patrimony—the conservation of power and wealth. The narrator’s introductory observations invoke a class-bound notion of both family and “race”: I had learned . . . the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other—it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the ‘House of Usher’. . . . (399)

Here, the isolate “Usher race” is merely another name for the ancient and inbred family lineage, defined and delimited by the estate with which it has become so intimately identified. What is transmitted undeviatingly is the patrimony. In this context, the Ushers’ “deficiency” is linked to a shortage of new wealth; and their lack of “collateral issue” suggests their failure to enhance the family’s fortunes by securing alliances with other aristocratic families. But as the tale progresses, it becomes clear that the Ushers are deficient in other ways, too. Roderick’s sister, Madeline Usher, suffers from a disease that “had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis” (404). Roderick Usher, too, suffers from a debilitating illness that manifests itself most clearly in a hyper-responsiveness to external stimuli: “. . . the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could only wear garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from

stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror” (403). It is telling that Usher refers to his disease—a neurasthenia widely construed in the Victorian era as the sign of an advanced biological and intellectual development1 —as the “family evil.” For it suggests that the patrimony at issue in “Usher” is really disease itself, and that the deficiency in question is above all a matter of the “bloodline.” Later in the story, Usher will frame an incipient theory of hereditary influence based on his nightmarish obsession with the family evil: The belief, however, was connected . . . with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. Its evidence . . . [was] in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him—what he was. (408)

The revelation of Usher’s superstition signals an intensified emphasis on the eerie vitality of the house and on its status as an objective correlative for the family history. But this revelation also signals an historical shift in what the family history is a record of. It goes from being a record of transmitted patrimony—the house as estate passed on from sire to son—to being a record of transmitted genetic information. In the passage above, in other words, the house emerges as the very embodiment of Roderick Usher’s biological destiny. Extrapolating from “Usher” to the cultural history of the nineteenth century, we can read in this shift the translation of an essentially aristocratic concern with genealogy and inheritance into the bourgeois obsession with biological integrity and the dangers of heredity. Whereas the old nobility prided itself on its “blue blood,” the bourgeoisie did something similar but in diametrically opposite terms. Foucault provocatively suggests that bourgeois families “wore and concealed a sort of reversed and somber escutcheon whose defamatory quarters were the diseases or defects of the group of relatives . . .” (History 12425). In other words, the bourgeoisie terrorized itself with the spectres of its psycho-sexual perversions, nervous afflictions, shameful cretinism and senile dementia, as well as with imaginings of racial degeneration and the contamination of its blood. Why would the bourgeoisie choose to terrorize itself in this manner? Given the psychical cost, the expected ends had to be either extremely

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important or entirely unconscious. As Jacques Donzelot has argued, the proliferation of these anxieties helped to constitute no less than the bourgeois family unit itself by affecting “a tactical constriction of its members” over and against an imagined external threat (45). The racialization of culture in the nineteenth century empowered the bourgeoisie by providing its members with a racial Other against which to constitute their own social identity. At the same time, however, it led to what Daniel Pick incisively describes as a “profound [sense of] political confusion and historical disorientation” (237). In Faces of Degeneration, Pick explores the development of degeneracy theory and its intertwining with historical narratives of the nineteenth century. Objecting to the rigidity and the reductiveness built into many contemporary social histories of degeneracy theory, Pick argues that “[t]he discourse of degeneration . . . was never simply ‘instrumental’; it articulated fears beyond the merely strategic, fears of inundation, the subject overwhelmed at every level of mind and body by internal disorder and external attack” (44). The medical-scientific discourse inaugurated by Benedict Morel gave the world the degenerate, “a given individual whose physiognomic contours could be traced out and distinguished from the healthy” (Pick, 9). But the real danger of degeneracy had more to do with that which could not be seen, because its symptoms were yet illegible. As Pick observes, “degeneration also connoted invisibility and ubiquity—thus suggesting the inadequacy of traditional phrenology and physiognomy; it was a process which could usurp all boundaries of discernible identity, threatening the very overthrow of civilisation and progress” (9). Poe registers this sense of historical disorientation and the fear of inundation in the apocalyptic finale of “Usher.” He also registers it by subverting the purity of being associated with whiteness in what we might call the affirmative racist imagination. As it is for Melville in Moby Dick, whiteness in “Usher” is an ambivalent marker. It connotes civilization as well as its threatened destruction. Usher’s finely sculpted features indicate his superior white European ancestry. But his whiteness is tainted with illness and with death. His pigmentation is described as “[a] cadaverousness of complexion” and as having a “ghastly pallor” (401). His purity of race, in other words, belies a condition of decrepitude, leaving the narrator “at once struck with an incoherence—an inconsistency” in the whole manner and bearing of his

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boyhood friend (402). The physical features of Usher’s ancestral House bear the mark of an analogous inconsistency: Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled webwork from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. (400)

What is at stake in this peculiar attention to the discrepancy between integral and disintegrative forces bears on the discrepancy the heart of degeneracy theory between appearance and “inner constitution,” between what appears to be healthy and vigorous and what is in fact, or is feared to be, blighted with disease and ultimately doomed. In his Essay on the Inequality of the Races (185355), the “father” of modern racism, the Frenchman Count Arthur de Gobineau, writes, “The word degenerate, when applied to a people, means . . . that this people has no longer the same intrinsic value as it had before, because it has no longer the same blood in its veins, continual adulterations having gradually affected the quality of the blood” (qtd. in Biddis 114). Although Gobineau was the greatest nineteenth-century popularizer of racial degeneracy theory, he was not its first proponent; nor was he the first to situate it in the context of an elaborate vision of human history. For as we have already seen, many antebellum Americans were convinced—before Gobineau—that the true health of a people and the causes of national success and/or failure were to be found not in their system of government, but in a collective “inner constitution” that had become implicitly racialized. In a sense, then, “Usher” stands as a textbook example of the terrifying ambivalence about progress, evolution, and history that supremacist ideologies inevitably generate. Roderick Usher appears to be racially pure; he is cultured, a fabulous musician, and a painter, “the accomplished heir of all the ages,” as Harry Levin suggests (161). But he is also “hopeless” and “frail” (404), and as the narrator ironically puts it, “a bounden slave” to a terror lurking in his heart for which neither he nor Usher can find a definite object.

Moon, Veins, Blood The indefinite object of Usher’s terror has been most commonly interpreted as a culturally constant death anxiety—the fear of the universal

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Once, long ago, as Usher nostalgically recounts in his guitar-accompanied dirge, the Haunted Palace was “a fair and stately palace”: Wanderers in that happy valley Through two luminous windows saw Spirits moving musically To a lute’s well-tuned law, Round about a throne, where sitting (Porphyrogene!) In state his glory well befitting, The ruler of the realm was seen.

the impending destruction of the southern slavocracy, then what transpires in “The Haunted Palace” begins to sound like a slave uprising. Certainly the experience of violent slave rebellion was fresh in the minds of Virginians like Poe, and southerners more broadly, throughout the 1830s.3 More significant, however, is the way in which “The Haunted Palace” transforms its nightmare articulation of endangerment. So far, in its overwrought imagery of lordship and rebellion, the poem seems to evoke mainly political insurrection; and in its invocation of class antagonism we may justly trace the contours of a distinctively southern paranoia in Usher’s. Initially, then, the poem specifically figures the southern slaveowner’s fear of an external assault upon property by an oppressed class—those dressed in “robes of sorrow” who finally rise up in rebellion against their lord and master. It is, after all, the monarch’s estate that is assailed in “The Haunted Palace,” and thus his sense of lordliness in ownership that is debased. The social and political threat is profoundly transformed in the poem’s final stanza, however, when the racist and more broadly nationalist content of Usher’s paranoia makes a startling reappearance:

But then the ballad takes a frightful turn: . . . evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch’s high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow, Shall dawn upon him, desolate!) And, round about his home, the glory That blushed and bloomed Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed.

And travellers now within that valley, Through the red-litten windows, see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody; While, like a rapid ghastly river, Through the pale door, A hideous throng rush out forever, And laugh—but smile no more. (407)

(407)

Harry Levin’s claim that “Usher” ought to be situated in a regional context offers us a useful point of departure for interpreting these lines. According to Levin, Poe’s tale is a nightmarish prophecy of the cultural and political defeat of American slave society, as well as a prefiguration of its literary aftermath: “Much that seems forced in William Faulkner’s work becomes second nature when we think of him as Poe’s inheritor,” Levin writes, thinking of “Caddy and Quentin, those two doomed siblings of the house of Compson, or of Emily Grierson, that old maid who clings to the corpse of her lover” (161). The narrator’s reference to Usher as “the master” (400) gives a certain legitimacy to Levin’s claim. So, too, does Usher’s fantastic account of the family fall in “The Haunted Palace.” For if we interpret “Usher” (pace Levin) as a white colonial nightmare about

What is striking about these lines is their resonance with contemporary accounts, especially among northern travellers in the South, of the grotesquery of Negro song and dance. One might compare them to the description of Topsy’s performance in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The black, glassy eyes glittered with a kind of wicked drollery, and the thing struck up, in a clear and shrill voice, an odd Negro melody, to which she kept time with her hands and feet, spinning round, clapping her hands, knocking her knees together, in a wild, fantastic sort of time, and producing the native music of her race . . . as odd and unearthly as that of a steamwhistle. (237)

In Stowe’s novel the menace of the racial Other is safely contained (and to a certain degree, dissolved) within the context of a liberal political project and a pluralistic social ethos. But there are no such humanizing forces at work in Poe’s writ-

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“inexorability of extinction,” as Gillian Brown writes (332). But if we turn our attention towards the interpolated poem, “The Haunted Palace,” we find evidence of a more culturally and historically specific source for Usher’s terror. In this wild and mournful interlude to the tale, whose “under or mystic current” (406) of meaning so powerfully impresses the narrator, Usher dreams nostalgically about an ancient ruler who sits at a glorious throne. This mythical lord lives only to seek his pleasure, while a “A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty / Was but to sing . . . / The wit and wisdom of their king” (407) reassure him of his innate superiority and of the legitimacy of his dominion. As numerous critics have suggested,2 the poem is a microcosmic account of Usher’s one great story, the decline and fall of his ancient family lineage.

POE Scene from Roger Corman’s 1960 film adaptation of “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

ing; and so the menace of blackness is intensified. In “The Haunted Palace” it ultimately assumes the formlessness of a fluid infection that circulates within the house of the monarch. Although the imagery recalls Stowe’s, it also anticipates a story Poe would write three years after “Usher”—“The Masque of the Red Death.” The “red-litten windows” look forward to the grotesquely illuminated rooms of Prince Prospero’s imperial suite and to the “scarlet stains” that disfigure the doomed victims in that story (670). Likewise, the “Vast forms that move fantastically / To a discordant melody” evoke the victims of the Red Death, the dancing knights and ladies who, along with Prince Prospero, vainly “bid defiance to contagion” (671). In its anticipation of Poe’s more elaborate treatment of the fear of blood contagion in “The Masque of the Red Death,” this stanza effects a biologization of the perceived endangerment; it marks a qualitative shift in the terms of its representation from a matter of class struggle for property, prestige, and power to a matter of bodily integrity, and conversely, the onslaught of infection and disease.

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What I am suggesting is that the collective fantasy of impending doom embodied in “The Haunted Palace,” and by extension, in “Usher,” is transposed from being strictly classist fantasy to being racist and nationalist fantasy. Consequently, it transcends the regional specificity that Levin attaches to it. In the new racist consciousness of the antebellum era, as we have seen, the enslaved African became an infectious agent threatening the sacred life-force of the nation; and blood served as the fluid medium for—and the bodily sign of—contamination. Interrogating fantasies of contamination in an early modern European context, Piero Camporesi writes, “It seems clear that the notion of fertility is intertwined with the sense of contamination . . . that the metaphors of generation and life belong to the impure fleshliness of copula, and to semen, the excrement of blood” (114). Camporesi suggests, in other words, that what is involved in the fantasy of blood contamination is a fear of ungoverned male desire and an unregulated apportionment of sperm. Such a fear ineluctably manifested itself in the nineteenth century as, on one side of the race

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It is appropriate, then, that the specter of blood presides over the final scene of “Usher.” Here the narrator describes his desperate escape from the ill-fated house: . . . from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken. . . . While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened—there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight. . . . (417)

Blood, in Poe’s tale, is as much an avatar of death as it is an avatar of life, the (failed) transmission of the pure racial stock from one generation of Ushers to the next. With this powerfully imagistic finale, “The Fall of the House of Usher” stands revealed as what Camporesi calls an “antique lunar and bloody mytholog[y]” (37). Poe mixes “moon, veins, [and] blood” in a narrative that is about fertility and contagion, and the endangered reproduction of the white race. In this light, Usher’s nightmare vision in “The Haunted Palace” is intimately connected to his dark fascination with “the old African Satyrs and Ægipans” in the pages of Pomponius Mela, over which, as the narrator tells us, his companion “would sit dreaming for hours” (409). In the guise of the satyr, the African in “Usher” is explicitly associated with biological/sexual danger. He appears, in the instructively conspicuous phrase of Frantz Fanon, as “the biological-sexual-sensual-genital-nigger” who “represents the sexual instinct (in its raw state) . . . the incarnation of a genital potency beyond all morality and prohibitions” (Fanon 202, 177).4 Thus the dangerously vital African satyr emerges on the border of the tale as the antinomy of the sick and exhausted Usher.

Eerie Mansion In the background of our reading of “Usher” lies the famous (or infamous) Foucauldian shift from the classical to the modern world. If the trajectory of the reading gives the impression of an unproblematical endorsement of the notion of

the shift as a clean semantic break, via the changing force of racial discourse from lineage to typology, then at this point I want to muddy the waters. Poe, I have suggested, is a gothicist whose horror is steeped in certain modern political realities of the nineteenth century, foremost of which is the rise of a biologized, statist, or nationalist, racism. By way of example, we have charted the often subtle manifestations of biologized racism in “Usher.” However, we cannot say that a story like “Usher” signals anything like the consolidation of a new order where race simply supplants class. For the obvious fact is that we have had to rescue the racial element in “Usher” out of the matrix of a fantasy whose manifest obsession is classist because Usher’s incipient dreams of blood contamination are embedded in a story about fallen aristocracy. Yet this is precisely why “Usher” is so instructive: it contains within it the aristocratic etymology of modern racism. Poe’s Gothic in “Usher” does not signal the consolidation of a new world; rather, it traverses in its unfolding narration one of the main discursive axes upon which the temporal shift from the classical to the modern world occurs—the class-race axis. What it reveals, then, is not so much a radical change in the meaning of race from that of the nobility’s to that of the bourgeoisie’s, but rather, as Ann Laura Stoler writes apropos of Foucault’s preoccupations at one point in his thinking on race,5 “the processes of recuperation [of racial discourse], of the distillation of earlier discursive imprints, remodeled in new forms” (68). In emphasizing this point too forcefully, however, we can fall prey to the opposite danger: the conclusion that “The Fall of the House of Usher” is in essence merely an upper-class fantasy—an interpretation that would certainly be in keeping with the conventional notion of Poe as a writer wholly out of step with his democratic time and place. Benedict Anderson, for instance, argues that The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, . . . above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to “blue” or “white” blood and “breeding” among aristocracies. No surprise then that the putative sire of modern racism should be, not some petty-bourgeois nationalist, but Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau. (149)

For Anderson, as for Foucault, modern racism has an aristocratic pedigree. But unlike Foucault, Anderson sees modern racism as continuous with the old race discourse of the nobility; it represents the legitimization of upper-class domination according to the new criteria of skin color. Accord-

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equation, the fear of excessive, limitless reproduction of the “inferior races,” and on the other side, that of the failed reproduction of the “superior race”—the extinction of a white family, the collapse of a white nation.

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ing to Anderson, the “official nationalism” for which racism was pressed into service in the nineteenth century was an upper-class political project. Stoler observes that, for Anderson, “[t]hese two racisms become one and the same, welded by a nineteenth-century ‘conception of empire’. . . . By his account ‘late colonial empires even served to shore up domestic aristocratic bastions, since they appeared to confirm on a global, modern stage antique conceptions of power and privilege’” (Stoler 30). The problem with such a theory, like the problem with reading “Usher” as purely classist fantasy, is that it reduces racism to a mere effect of an historically prior class discourse.

however, this experience of the uncanny has broader resonances. It is especially telling that the “armorial trophies,” the insignia of Usher’s pedigree, have become “phantasmagoric.” The trappings of nobility had become unmoored in the modern world from the signifying constellation in which they were formerly enmeshed, and their new strangeness in “Usher” is the consequence of their being in an acute state of flux. The old aristocratic world-system had dissolved—that is to say, the signs that constituted it remained behind—and the shape of the world that followed it would depend in part on how these signs were redeployed.

Foucault argues to the contrary that nationalism and racism were inextricably related bourgeois political projects. Since we have been taking our historical bearings from Foucault all along it is only natural to assume that this hypothesis is, in fact, valid. It is, after all, the coterminous rise of the bourgeoisie and nationalist ideology that we began this essay by tracking. If for Foucault it is the lingering traces of “earlier discursive imprints” upon nineteenth-century racism that really matter, it also true in his thinking that, as Stoler notes, the “racisms of the nobility and the bourgeoisie are distinct . . .” (30). There is, in other words, a process of historical rescription at work by which elements in an earlier discourse resurface and take on altered meaning as they are aligned with new elements, for the purpose of legitimizing new power structures.

The shape of this new world greatly depended on how the meaning of race was reconstituted in the nineteenth century. If the House is indeed the embodiment of the dynasty, or the ancient “Usher race,” what we witness in Poe’s story is the eerie biologization of the House precisely insofar as the concept of race was biologized. The ancient edifice teems with fungi; it is overspread with “a pestilent and mystic vapor” (400); “ebon blackness” goes from being a decorative marker of wealth (as in the rich ebony flooring in the passage above) to a marker of biological danger. It is due to this process of biologization, moreover, that we may just as intimately identify the House with the last scion of the race—the morbidly diseased figure of Roderick Usher. Based on this identification, the “dark and intricate passages” of the House through which the narrator is silently conducted at the beginning of the tale assume something of the quality (especially after the “Haunted Palace” interlude) of what Foucault refers to in The Order of Things as the “profound, interior, and essential space” (231) of the human organism—and human identity—as it is bio-racially redefined in the modern era.

What, finally, is the effect of Poe’s exposure of this process of rescription in “Usher”? What is achieved is the Gothic threat of a destabalized reality, the first sign of which is the narrator’s sense of strangeness as he enters the grand and dilapidated House: A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master. . . . While the objects around me—while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestry of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy—while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this—I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up. (401)

With its “vacant and eye-like windows” (398), the House of Usher offers a glimpse into the deep and impenetrable mystery of this newly conceived identity. But what Poe’s tale underscores in its Gothicism is that the loathsome blackness Usher fears is just as much a “phantasmagoric conception” (405) as the radiant vision of whiteness he paints on canvas and which the narrator describes as being suffused with “a ghastly and inappropriate splendor” (406).

The House is not quite as Usher’s boyhood friend had remembered it. For the narrator, the strangeness is that of returning as an adult to old childhood haunts. In the context of my reading,

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Ultimately, the paranoid delirium of modern, bourgeois identity is Poe’s great subject. Of this delirium, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari remark that it has something like two poles, racist and racial. . . . And between the two, ever so many

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If “Usher” is one such richly ambiguous text it is because it bodies forth in such a concentrated fashion the mutation of race thinking at a pivotal point in its history. Yet it also articulates incisively how white supremacist ideology could redound upon its manipulators. Just as the psychotic Doctor Schreber finds that he is the Great Mongol in his delirium, so, too, does Usher discover a secret affinity between himself and the old African Satyr he sits dreaming about. He finds himself at the precise ideological locus that the latter reputedly occupied: biologically exhausted, infected with death.

Notes 1. See Athena Vrettos’s Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) 14751. 2. See, for example, Daniel Hoffman’s Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), and Richard Wilbur’s “The House of Poe” (Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robert Regan. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967. 98-120). 3. One of the most detailed accounts of the history of American slave insurrections in the nineteenth century, from the “Gabriel plot” of 1800 to Nat Turner’s rebellion and beyond, is in Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 15501812. (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1968). 4. The African in “Usher” possesses a paradoxical ontology. He is conjured as the slave dressed in robes of sorrow who rises up against his master, and as the Satyr, the black phallus over which Usher sits dreaming for hours; on the other hand, these figures fail to materialize as such. The African Satyr and the marauding slave enter the story’s frame merely as traces, diseased projections of Usher’s unconscious. Though the story obsessively circulates around them, we catch only fleeting, veiled glimpses of them. The status of the African body is further complicated by its redundant and asymmetrical relation with Usher’s consumptive and incestuous twin sister. Although Madeline figures sensationally in the story’s closing moments as the vengeful undead, returning all bloodied from her premature entombment in the house’s subterranean depths to clasp her brother in one final embrace, her place in the tale is shadowy, mysterious, and fleeting. She appears but once, as if spoken into presence by Usher at the very moment he first reveals her existence and her diseased condition to the narrator in a fit of despair, only to vanish once again:

“Her decease,” he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, “would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers.” While he spoke, the lady Madeline . . . passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread— and yet found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps . . . I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus probably be the last I should obtain—that the lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no more. (404) Like the African, Madeline, too, signifies both excessively, and not at all. Passively consumed by disease in life, confined and controlled by her “medical men” (409), speaking no words, seen in the tableau above but not seeing, her subjectivity is acknowledged and refused all in the same moment. Only in death does she return to Usher, figuring dread as loathsome, feminine excess. 5. Stoler investigates Foucault’s 1976 College de France lecture series in considerable detail in the third chapter of Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983. Baldick, Chris. Introduction. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Ed. Chris Baldick. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. xi-xxiii. Biddis, Michael D. Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970. Brown, Gillian. “The Poetics of Extinction.” The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 330-344. Camporesi, Piero. Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic Significance of Blood. Trans. Robert R. Barr. New York: Continuum, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley et al. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Donzelot, Jacques. The Policing of Families. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979. Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980. 3 vols. 19801986. ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image In The White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny 18171914. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1971.

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subtle, uncertain shiftings where the unconscious itself oscillates between its reactionary charge and its revolutionary potential. Even Schreber finds himself to be the Great Mongol when he breaks through the Aryan segregation. Whence the ambiguity in the texts of great authors, when they develop the theme of races, as rich in ambiguity as destiny itself. (105)

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Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981. Levin, Harry. The Power of Blackness. New York: Knopf, 1958.

Budick, E. Miller. “Poe’s Gothic Idea: The Cosmic Geniture of Horror.” Essays in Literature 3 (1976): 73-85. Asserts that “Gothicism in Poe is the natural human response to the implications of idealism.”

Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-c. 1918. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Butler, David W. “Usher’s Hypochondriasis: Mental Alienation and Romantic Idealism in Poe’s Gothic Tales.” American Literature 48, no. 1 (March 1976): 1-12.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Masque of the Red Death.” Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 2. Ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbot. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978. 3 vols. 1969-1978.

Traces the appearance of characters with the mental disorder hypochondriasis in several of Poe’s tales and discusses its suitability in a Gothic setting.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

Elbert, Monika. “Poe’s Gothic Mother and the Incubation of Language.” Poe Studies: Dark Romanticism: History, Theory, Interpretation 26, nos. 1-2 (June-December 1993): 22-33.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: Bantam, 1981.

Examines the effect of the death of Poe’s mother on his writing. Engel, Leonard W. “Claustrophobia, the Gothic Enclosure and Poe.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 10, no. 2 (fallwinter 1989): 107-17.

FURTHER READING Bibliography Dameron, J. Lasley, and Irby B. Cauthen Jr. Edgar Allan Poe: A Bibliography of Criticism, 1827-1967. A John Cook Wyllie Memorial Publication. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974, 386 p. Annotated guide to critical and biographical writings on Poe published prior to 1968.

Biography Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. 1941. Reprint edition. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, 804 p. Definitive biography of Poe, originally published in 1941.

Criticism Baudelaire, Charles. Baudelaire on Poe: Critical Papers, edited and translated by Lois Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop, Jr. State College, Pa.: Bald Eagle Press, 1952, 175 p. Incorporates biographical and critical studies by Baudelaire written at various times, including those in Edgar Poe: His Life and Works (1852 and 1856). Bonaparte, Marie. The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-analytic Interpretation, translated by John Rodker. London: Imago, 1949, 749 p. Story-by-story analysis of psychosexual symbolism and motifs in Poe’s tales. Brennan, Matthew C. “Poe’s Gothic Sublimity: Prose Style, Painting, and Mental Boundaries in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 11, nos. 3-4 (August 1990): 353-59. Proposes that Poe used an ambiguous prose style in “The Fall of the House of Usher” to convey the psychotic condition of Roderick Usher’s mind. Brennan also draws a parallel between the abstract-expressionism of Roderick’s painting and actual nineteenth century art. Brill, Robert Densmore. “Edgar Allan Poe’s Prescription for a Good Night’s Sleep: ‘The Premature Burial.’” The Atlantic Literary Review 3, no. 1 (January-March 2002): 126-47. Closely examines “The Premature Burial.”

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Discusses Poe’s use of the Gothic in stories such as “MS. Found in a Bottle” and “The Premature Burial,” which depict eventual escape from enclosure. Fisher, Benjamin F. “Poe’s ‘Metzengerstein’: Not a Hoax.” American Literature 42, no. 4 (January 1971): 487-94. Treats the short story “Metzengerstein” as an early example of Poe’s Gothic fiction. Frank, Frederick S. “The Gothic at Absolute Zero: Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” Extrapolation 21 (1980): 21-30. Analyzes Poe’s use of Gothic motifs in the context of a sea-story adventure. Garrison, Joseph M., Jr. “The Function of Terror in the Work of Edgar Allan Poe.” American Quarterly 18, no. 2, part 1 (summer 1966): 136-50. Attempts to reconcile the mixture of beauty and terror in Poe’s work. Ginsberg, Lesley. “Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe’s ‘The Black Cat.’” In American Gothic: New Inventions in a National Narrative, edited and with an introduction by Robert K. Martin, pp. 99-128. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. Studies Poe’s treatment of slavery in “The Black Cat.” Griffith, Clark. “Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics.” University of Toronto Quarterly 24, no. 1 (October 1954): 8-25. Maintains that “Ligeia” is primarily a satire of Gothic fiction. Haggerty, George E. “Poe’s Gothic Gloom.” In Gothic Fiction/ Gothic Form, pp. 81-106. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989: 8-25. Focusing on “The Fall of the House of Usher,” examines Poe’s fascination with the mechanics of Gothic literature. Heller, Terry. “Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and the Pleasures of Terror.” Gothic 2, no. 2 (1980): 39-49. Examines the means by which Poe’s tale evokes horror on the part of the reader and argues that the enjoyment of such a reaction is a legitimate literary end. Holland-Toll, Linda J. “‘Ligeia’: The Facts in the Case.” Studies in Weird Fiction 21 (summer 1997): 2-10.

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Thompson, G. R. “‘Proper Evidences of Madness’: American Gothic and the Interpretation of ‘Ligeia.’” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 66 (1972): 30-49.

Hustis, Harriet. “‘Reading Encrypted but Persistent’: The Gothic of Reading and Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 1 (spring 1999): 3-20.

Assesses “Ligeia” in the context of its Gothic predecessors.

Provides a brief history of an ongoing debate over Poe’s classification as a writer within American and French traditions, and notes that “Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ calls attention to the narrative space it occupies as Gothic text in order to question those parameters and the means by which critics arrive at such dimensions.” Lenz, William E. “Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym and the Narrative Techniques of Antarctic Gothic.” CEA Critic 53, no. 3 (spring-summer 1991): 30-8.

———. Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973, 254 p. Contends that in both his Gothic and his comic stories Poe employed a conscious irony derived from writers of the German Romantic movement. ———. “Locke, Kant, and Gothic Fiction: A Further Word on the Indeterminism of Poe’s ‘Usher.’” Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 4 (fall 1989): 547-60. Analyzes “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a work of Gothic fiction.

Assesses Poe’s use of sea narrative and Gothic fiction, and suggests that it was Poe who discovered the Antarctic as a locale particularly suited to Gothic works.

Timmerman, John H. “House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Papers on Language and Literature 39, no. 3 (summer 2003): 227-44.

Mainville, Stephen. “Language and the Void: Gothic Landscapes in the Frontiers of Edgar Allan Poe.” Genre 14, no. 3 (fall 1981): 347-62.

Evaluates the historical context and influence of Poe’s cosmology in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Examines Poe’s handling of language in Pym and the unfinished Journal of Julius Rodman, and focuses on his creation of Gothic landscapes. Mooney, Stephen L. “Poe’s Gothic Wasteland.” Sewanee Review 70 (1962): 261-83. Discusses Poe’s use of “ironic images of man in the nineteenth-century age of anxiety.” Nadal, Marita. “Beyond the Gothic Sublime: Poe’s Pym or the Journey of Equivocal (E)motions.” Mississippi Quarterly 53, no. 3 (summer 2000): 373-88. Investigates Poe’s use of horror, terror, and the sublime in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Ringe, Donald A. “Edgar Allan Poe.” In American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, pp. 128-51. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982. Provides an overview of Gothic themes in Poe’s work. Rowe, Stephen. “Poe’s Use of Ritual Magic in His Tales of Metempsychosis.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 4, no. 2 (fall 2003): 41-52. Investigates references to metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls, in Poe’s work. Shelden, Pamela J. “‘True Originality’: Poe’s Manipulation of the Gothic Tradition.” American Transcendental Quarterly, no. 29 (winter 1976): 75-80. Discusses how Poe “combines” Gothic conventions “to represent the terror which wells from psychic reality.” Stein, William Bysshe. “The Twin Motif in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Modern Language Notes 75, no. 2 (February 1960): 109-11. Examines structural details in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Swann, Charles. “Poe and Maturin—A Possible Debt.” Notes and Queries 37, no. 235 (December 1990): 424-25. Notes similarities between the title character’s description of the island of Tsalal in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and a passage in Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.

Tombleson, Gary E. “Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ as Archetypal Gothic: Literary and Architectural Analogs of Cosmic Unity.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 12, no. 2 (1988): 83-106. Argues that the architectural references in “The Fall of the House of Usher” render the story archetypically Gothic. Voller, Jack G. “The Power of Terror: Burke and Kant in the House of Usher.” Poe Studies 21, no. 3 (December 1988): 27-35. Contends that “The Fall of the House of Usher” represents a rejection of the theories of the sublime offered by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, and instead focuses on terrors and emotions that could not be easily explained within the context of the optimistic aesthetic proposed by Burke and Kant. Voloshin, Beverly R. “Explanation in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Studies in Short Fiction 23, no. 4 (fall 1986): 419-28. Assesses “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a unique variation of the Gothic genre of short fiction that blends natural, preternatural, and supernatural elements to create an unusually haunting effect. Woodberry, George E. Edgar Allan Poe. 1885. Reprint edition. New York: AMS Press, 168, 354 p. One of the first full-length studies of Poe’s life and career.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Poe’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: American Writers; American Writers: The Classics, Vol. 1; American Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 2; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 14; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 3; Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vols. 5, 11; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 1640-1865; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 3, 59, 73, 74, 248, 254; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Poets; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring Poetry; Exploring Short Stories; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature and Its

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Argues against reading Poe’s tale from a rational point of view in which each event corresponds to a natural explanation.

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Times, Vol. 2; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Mystery and Suspense Writers; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 1, 16, 55, 78, 94, 97, 117; Poetry Criticism, Vols. 1, 54; Poetry for Students, Vols. 1, 3, 9; Poets: American and British; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers, Vol. 4; St. James

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Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, Ed. 4; Science Fiction Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 2, 4, 7, 8, 16; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 1, 22, 34, 35, 54; Something about the Author, Vol. 23; Supernatural Fiction Writers; Twayne’s United States Authors; World Literature Criticism; World Poets; and Writers for Young Adults.

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ANN RADCLIFFE (1764 - 1823)

(Born Ann Ward) English novelist, poet, and journal writer.

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onsidered one of the most important writers of the English Gothic tradition, Radcliffe transformed the Gothic novel from a mere vehicle for the depiction of terror into an instrument for exploring the psychology of fear and suspense. Her emphasis on emotion, perception, and the relationship between atmosphere and sensibility helped pave the way for the Romantic movement in England. Radcliffe’s best-known novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), ranks as one of the chief exemplars of the Gothic genre.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Radcliffe was born in London. A shy child afflicted with asthma, she read widely. Though she was given private instruction in the classics, literature, painting, and drawing, Radcliffe received little encouragement from her parents to continue her studies. As a young woman, Radcliffe associated with the “bluestockings” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Hester Lynch Piozzi, who, biographers believe, provided her with inspiration and intellectual stimulation. In 1787 she married William Radcliffe, later the editor of

the English Chronicle, who recognized her talent and encouraged her to begin writing novels. Although Radcliffe was the most popular English novelist of her generation, she managed to avoid publicity almost entirely. In fact, when Christina Rossetti attempted to write a biography of Radcliffe in 1883, she was forced to abandon the project because of the lack of available information. For unknown reasons Radcliffe withdrew entirely from public life in 1817 at the peak of her fame. Her absence triggered a series of rumors, the most widespread being that she had suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by the terrors described in her own works. Sir Walter Scott speculated that she stopped writing because she abhorred the manner in which her imitators had cheapened and sentimentalized the Gothic novel. Obituaries appeared in newspapers on the supposition that Radcliffe had died. Also in circulation were legends that Radcliffe had died in an insane asylum and that her ghost returned to haunt her imitators.

MAJOR WORKS Radcliffe’s first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne: A Highland Story (1789), made a negligible impression upon readers and reviewers alike. A historical romance set in Scotland, the novel abounds in the picturesque description and dark

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atmosphere that was to become Radcliffe’s trademark. Yet it was criticized for its abundance of anachronisms, especially imposing upon feudal heroines a distinctively nineteenth-century sensibility. A Sicilian Romance (1790), Radcliffe’s next work, established her reputation as the preeminent Gothic novelist. Here the distinctive features of Radcliffe’s style emerge more fully: the use of landscape to create a mood of terror, mystery, and suspense, intricacy of plot, a lyrical prose style, and a focus on individual psychology. The Romance of the Forest (1791), and The Mysteries of Udolpho, her first signed work, strengthened her popularity and made her a best-selling author in England, the United States, and Europe. The Mysteries of Udolpho contains all of the classic Gothic elements, including a haunted castle, a troubled heroine, a mysterious and menacing male figure, and hidden secrets of the past. The most prominent theme in Udolpho is the triumph of virtue over villainy: a characteristic of all the novels by Radcliffe, who was a devout Christian. Montoni, who squanders his fortunes and turns to illegal and deadly means to win them back, is eventually imprisoned, while Emily, though she endures many trying adventures, maintains her moral principles and eventually finds happiness. Related to this theme is the importance of balance and moderation, which Emily’s father teaches her. It is when Emily allows herself to go to emotional extremes, becoming imbalanced, that she suffers most. Also present in the story is Emily’s search for truth and need to uncover the secrets at Udolpho and the Villeroi chateau. Another theme is the inescapable past. Many of the characters are haunted by their past, as Emily is; although the mysteries of Udolpho are eventually resolved, there is still a sense of an inescapable haunting that follows the characters. A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795) details Radcliffe’s first trip outside of England. The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), a Gothic mystery which is considered by some to be Radcliffe’s best novel, traces the machinations of the monk Schedoni, who became a prototypical Gothic hero—brooding, mysterious, and fascinating.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Critics have speculated on the various influences upon Radcliffe’s style, noting the similarities between her landscapes and the paintings of the Neapolitan painter and poet Salvator Rosa and the French landscape painter Claude Lorrain. Crit-

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ics also note that her linking of terror and beauty corresponds with Edmund Burke’s philosophy of the sublime and that her poetry resembles that of William Collins, James Thomson, Thomas Gray, and James Macpherson. In addition, Radcliffe’s motif of the heroine in distress indicates a knowledge of sentimental novelists such as Charlotte Smith, although her works most often appear to be modeled upon the works of Horace Walpole. The primary distinguishing feature of Radcliffe’s style is her explained endings. After elaborately setting up a mystery, planting the seeds of supernatural agency, and piquing the reader’s curiosity, Radcliffe invariably resolves her plots in a rational and orderly way, providing reasoned explanations for seemingly supernatural events. Whether they praise or criticize her for this practice, critics cite this as Radcliffe’s distinctive contribution to the development of the English novel. The Mysteries of Udolpho was both an extremely popular and critically acclaimed novel when it was first published and for many years after. Readers enjoyed Radcliffe’s gift for description and her deftness at building dramatic tension throughout the story. She was acknowledged by critics of her time as the queen of the Gothic novel, and she was also considered a pioneer of the Romantic movement. With her popularity, however, also came a wide array of imitators who shamelessly— and often poorly—copied her style, plots, and characters. It was because of these lesser writers that Radcliffe’s works often suffered by association. Her work was sometimes satirized, too, most famously in Jane Austen’s 1818 novel, Northanger Abbey. Overall, early critical response to Radcliffe’s works was mixed: while Samuel Taylor Coleridge attacked her explained endings for their inadequacy in satisfying the expectations of the reader, Sir Walter Scott called her “the first poetess of romantic fiction” for her natural descriptions. Other contemporary critics assessed her explanations as tedious, her dialogue as wooden, and her characters as flat, while some praised her brilliant rhetorical style, her examination of fear, and her affirmation of moral order at the conclusion of each novel. Thomas Noon Talfourd (see Further Reading) attributed Radcliffe’s anticlimactic endings to her obedience to the conventions of the Gothic novel. He proposed that Radcliffe determined that the conventions of romance did not allow for supernatural agency, and that she therefore felt bound to explain it away. Virginia Woolf (see Further Reading) disputed Talfourd by assert-

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Observations during a Tour to the Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland (travel essays) 1795 The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents. A Romance. 3 vols. (novel) 1797 Gaston de Blondeville; or, The Court of Henry III. Keeping Festival in Ardenne, A Romance. St. Alban’s Abbey, A Metrical Tale; With Some Poetical Pieces. To Which Is Prefixed a Memoir of the Author (novel and poetry) 1826

PRIMARY SOURCES ANN RADCLIFFE (NOVEL DATE 1794) SOURCE: Radcliffe, Ann. “The Haunted Chamber.” In Gothic Tales of Terror, Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain, edited by Peter Haining. 1972. Reprint edition, pp. 49-67. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books Inc., 1973. The following excerpt is from an episode of Radcliffe’s novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, first published in 1794.

The Provençal Tale

The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance; Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry. 4 vols. (novel) 1794

There lived, in the province of Bretagne, a noble baron, famous for his magnificence and courtly hospitalities. His castle was graced with ladies of exquisite beauty, and thronged with illustrious knights; for the honour he paid to feats of chivalry invited the brave of distant countries to enter his lists, and his court was more splendid than those of many princes. Eight minstrels were retained in his service, who used to sing to their harps romantic fictions taken from the Arabians, or adventures of chivalry that befell knights during the crusades, or the martial deeds of the baron, their lord; while he, surrounded by his knights and ladies, banqueted in the great hall of the castle, where the costly tapestry that adorned the walls with pictured exploits of his ancestors, the casements of painted glass enriched with armorial bearings, the gorgeous banners that waved along the roof, the sumptuous canopies, the profusion of gold and silver that glittered on the sideboards, the numerous dishes that covered the tables, the number and gay liveries of the attendants, with the chivalric and splendid attire of the guests, united to form a scene of magnificence such as we may not hope to see in these degenerate days.

A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany, with a Return Down the Rhine; To Which Are Added

Of the baron the following adventure is related:—One night, having retired late from the banquet to his chamber, and dismissed his at-

PRINCIPAL WORKS The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne: A Highland Story [published anonymously] (novel) 1789 A Sicilian Romance. 2 vols. [published anonymously] (novel) 1790 The Romance of the Forest: Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry. 3 vols. [published anonymously] (novel) 1791

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ing that Radcliffe’s novels were remarkably free from convention. At the turn of the century, Walter Raleigh (see Further Reading) enlarged the popular understanding of Radcliffe by noting her role as a predecessor of the Romantic movement in England. Wylie Sypher’s Marxist analysis (see Further Reading) delineated the novels’ simultaneously bourgeois and anti-bourgeois tendencies, which he considered hypocritical. On the whole, Radcliffe’s works received very little critical attention until the late 1950s, when Devendra P. Varma’s overview of her novels again spurred curiosity about her work. The 1960s and 1970s reflected this surge of renewed interest. Critics have pursued new approaches to defining the role of description in Radcliffe’s works; the extent and intent of her preoccupation with the realm of irrational behavior have been debated extensively, and recent critics have analyzed Udolpho from feminist and psychological standpoints and offer scholarly considerations of Emily’s character. Udolpho has also been considered in terms of its sensual subtext and Emily’s growing sense of her sexuality. In this new light, the novel has gained greater appreciation among modern literary commentators. Such writers as William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Anne and Emily Brontë, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Lord Byron (who used Schedoni as the model for the Byronic hero), admired Radcliffe’s exploration of extreme emotional states and adapted her techniques in their own works. Most critics now view Radcliffe as a key figure in the Gothic tradition who freed the collective English literary imagination from conventional and rational constraints and ushered in English Romanticism.

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tendants, he was surprised by the appearance of a stranger of a noble air, but of a sorrowful and dejected countenance. Believing that this person had been secreted in the apartment, since it appeared impossible he could have lately passed the ante-room unobserved by the pages in waiting, who would have prevented this intrusion on their lord, the baron, calling loudly for his people, drew his sword, which he had not yet taken from his side, and stood upon his defence. The stranger, slowly advancing, told him that there was nothing to fear; that he came with no hostile intent, but to communicate to him a terrible secret, which it was necessary for him to know. The baron, appeased by the courteous manner of the stranger, after surveying him for some time in silence, returned his sword into the scabbard, and desired him to explain the means by which he had obtained access to the chamber, and the purpose of this extraordinary visit. Without answering either of these inquiries, the stranger said that he could not then explain himself, but that, if the baron would follow him to the edge of the forest, at a short distance from the castle walls, he would there convince him that he had something of importance to disclose. This proposal again alarmed the baron, who would scarcely believe that the stranger meant to draw him to so solitary a spot at this hour of the night without harbouring a design against his life, and he refused to go; observing at the same time, that if the stranger’s purpose was an honourable one, he would not persist in refusing to reveal the occasion of his visit in the apartment where they stood. While he spoke this, he viewed the stranger still more attentively than before, but observed no change in his countenance, nor any symptom that might intimate a consciousness of evil design. He was habited like a knight, was of a tall and majestic stature, and of dignified and courteous manners. Still, however, he refused to communicate the substance of his errand in any place but that he had mentioned; and at the same time gave hints concerning the secret he would disclose, that awakened a degree of solemn curiosity in the baron, which at length induced him to consent to the stranger on certain conditions. ‘Sir knight,’ said he, ‘I will attend you to the forest, and will take with me only four of my people, who shall witness our conference.’ To this, however, the knight objected. ‘What I would disclose,’ said he with solemnity, ‘is to you alone. There are only three living

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persons to whom the circumstance is known: it is of more consequence to you and your house than I shall now explain. In future years you will look back to this night with satisfaction or repentance, accordingly as you now determine. As you would hereafter prosper, follow me; I pledge you the honour of a knight that no evil shall befall you. If you are contented to dare futurity, remain in your chamber, and I will depart as I came.’ ‘Sir knight,’ replied the baron; ‘how is it possible that my future peace can depend upon my present determination?’ ‘That is not now to be told,’ said the stranger; ‘I have explained myself to the utmost. It is late: if you follow me it must be quickly; you will do well to consider the alternative.’ The baron mused, and, as he looked upon the knight, he perceived his countenance assume a singular solemnity. (Here Ludovico thought he heard a noise, and he threw a glance round the chamber, and then held up the lamp to assist his observation; but not perceiving anything to confirm his alarm, he took up the book again, and pursued the story.) The baron paced his apartment for some time in silence, impressed by the words of the stranger, whose extraordinary request he feared to grant, and feared also to refuse. At length he said, ‘Sir knight, you are utterly unknown to me; tell me, yourself, is it reasonable that I should trust myself alone with a stranger, at this hour, in the solitary forest? Tell me, at least, who you are, and who assisted to secrete you in this chamber.’ The knight frowned at these words, and was a moment silent; then, with a countenance somewhat stern, he said, ‘I am an English knight; I am called Sir Bevys of Lancaster, and my deeds are not unknown at the holy city, whence I was returning to my native land, when I was benighted in the forest.’ ‘You name is not unknown to fame,’ said the baron; ‘I have heard of it.’ (The knight looked haughtily.) ‘But why, since my castle is known to entertain all true knights, did not your herald announce you? Why did you not appear at the banquet, where your presence would have been welcomed, instead of hiding yourself in my castle, and stealing to my chamber at mid-night?’ The stranger frowned, and turned away in silence; but the baron repeated the questions. ‘I come not,’ said the knight, ‘to answer inquiries, but to reveal facts. If you would know

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After some farther hesitation, the baron determined to follow the stranger, and to see the result of his extraordinary request; he therefore again drew forth his sword, and, taking up a lamp, bade the knight lead on. The latter obeyed; and opening the door of the chamber, they passed into the ante-room, where the baron, surprised to find all his pages asleep, stopped, and with hasty violence was going to reprimand them for their carelessness, when the knight waved his hand, and looked so expressively at the baron, that the latter restrained his resentment, and passed on. The knight, having descended a staircase, opened a secret door, which the baron had believed was only known to himself; and proceeding through several narrow and winding passages, came at length to a small gate that opened beyond the walls of the castle. Perceiving that these secret passages were so well known to a stranger, the baron felt inclined to turn back from an adventure that appeared to partake of treachery as well as danger. Then, considering that he was armed, and observing the courteous and noble air of his conductor, his courage returned, he blushed that it had failed him for a moment, and he resolved to trace the mystery to its source. He now found himself on the healthy platform, before the great gates of his castle, where, on looking up, he perceived lights glimmering in the different casements of the guests, who were retiring to sleep; and while he shivered in the blast, and looked on the dark and desolate scene around him, he thought of the comforts of his warm chamber, rendered cheerful by the blaze of wood, and felt, for a moment, the full contrast of his present situation. (Here Ludovico paused a moment, and, looking at his own fire, gave it a brightening stir.) The wind was strong, and the baron watched his lamp with anxiety, expecting every moment, to see it extinguished; but though the flame wavered, it did not expire, and he still followed the stranger, who often sighed as he went, but did not speak. When they reached the borders of the forest, the knight turned and raised his head, as if he meant to address the baron, but then closing his lips, in silence he walked on. As they entered beneath the dark and spreading boughs, the baron, affected by the solemnity

of the scene, hesitated whether to proceed, and demanded how much farther they were to go. The knight replied only by a gesture, and the baron, with hesitating steps and a suspicious eye, followed through an obscure and intricate path, till, having proceeded a considerable way, he again demanded whither they were going, and refused to proceed unless he was informed. As he said this, he looked at his own sword and at the knight alternately, who shook his head, and whose dejected countenance disarmed the baron, for a moment, of suspicion. ‘A little farther is the place whither I would lead you,’ said the stranger; ‘no evil shall befall you—I have sworn it on the honour of a knight.’ The baron, reassured, again followed in silence, and they soon arrived at a deep recess of the forest, where the dark and lofty chestnuts entirely excluded the sky, and which was so overgrown with underwood that they proceeded with difficulty. The knight sighed deeply as he passed, and sometimes paused; and having at length reached a spot where the trees crowded into a knot, he turned, and with a terrific look, pointing to the ground, the baron saw there the body of a man, stretched at its length, and weltering in blood; a ghastly wound was on the forehead, and death appeared already to have contracted the features. The baron, on perceiving the spectacle, started in horror, looked at the knight for explanation, and was then going to raise the body, and examine if there were any remains of life; but the stranger, waving his hand, fixed upon him a look so earnest and mournful, as not only much surprised him, but made him desist. But what were the baron’s emotions when, on holding the lamp near the features of the corpse, he discovered the exact resemblance of the stranger his conductor, to whom he now looked up in astonishment and inquiry! As he gazed he perceived the countenance of the knight change and begin to fade, till his whole form gradually vanished from his astonished sense! While the baron stood, fixed to the spot, a voice was heard to utter these words: (Ludovico started, and laid down the book for he thought he heard a voice in the chamber, and he looked towards the bed, where, however, he saw only the dark curtain and the pall. He listened, scarcely daring to draw his breath, but heard only the distant roaring of the sea in the storm, and the blast that rushed by the casements; when,

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more, follow me; and again I pledge the honour of a knight that you shall return in safety. Be quick in your determination—I must be gone.’

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concluding that he had been deceived by its sighings, he took up his book to finish his story.) While the baron stood, fixed to the spot, a voice was heard to utter these words: ‘The body of Sir Bevys of Lancaster, a noble knight of England, lies before you. He was this night waylaid and murdered, as he journeyed from the holy city towards his native land. Respect the honour of knighthood, and the law of humanity; inter the body in christian ground, and cause his murderers to be punished. As ye observe or neglect this, shall peace and happiness, or war and misery, light upon you and your house for ever!’ The baron, when he recovered from the awe and astonishment into which this adventure had thrown him, returned to his castle, whither he caused the body of Sir Bevys to be removed; and on the following day it was interred, with the honours of knighthood, in the chapel of the castle, attended by all the noble knights and ladies who graced the court of Baron de Brunne. Ludovico, having finished this story, laid aside the book, for he felt drowsy; and after putting more wood on the fire, and taking another glass of wine, he reposed himself in the armchair on the hearth. In his dream he still beheld the chamber where the rally was, and once or twice started from imperfect slumbers, imagining he saw a man’s face looking over the high back of his armchair. This idea had so strongly impressed him, that, when he raised his eyes, he almost expected to meet other eyes fixed upon his own; and he quitted his seat, and looked behind the chair before he felt perfectly convinced that no person was there. Thus closed the hour. The count, who had slept little during the night, rose early, and, anxious to speak with Ludovico, went to the north apartment; but the outer door having been fastened on the preceding night, he was obliged to knock loudly for admittance. Neither the knocking nor his voice was heard: he renewed his calls more loudly than before; after which a total silence ensued; and the count, finding all his efforts to be heard ineffectual, at length began to fear that some accident had befallen Ludovico, whom terror of an imaginary being might have deprived of his senses. He therefore left the door with an intention of summoning his servants to force it open, some of whom he now heard moving in the lower part of the château.

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To the count’s inquiries whether they had seen or heard anything of Ludovico, they replied, in affright, that not one of them had ventured on the north side of the château since the preceding night. ‘He sleeps soundly, then,’ said the count, ‘and is at such a distance from the outer door, which is fastened, that to gain admittance to the chambers it will be necessary to force it. Bring an instrument, and follow me.’ The servants stood mute and dejected, and it was not till nearly all the household were assembled, that the count’s orders were obeyed. In the meantime, Dorothee was telling of a door that opened from a gallery leading from the great staircase into the last ante-room of the saloon, and this being much nearer to the bedchamber, it appeared probable that Ludovico might be easily awakened by an attempt to open it. Thither, therefore, the count went; but his voice was as ineffectual at this door as it had proved at the remoter one; and now, seriously interested for Ludovico, he was himself going to strike upon the door with the instrument, when he observed its singular beauty, and withheld the blow. It appeared on the first glance to be of ebony, so dark and close was its grain, and so high its polish; but it proved to be only of larch wood, of the growth of Provence, then famous for its forests of larch. The beauty of its polished hue, and of its delicate carvings, determined the count to spare this door, and he returned to that leading from the back staircase, which being at length forced, he entered the first ante-room, followed by Henri and a few of the most courageous of his servants, the rest waiting the event of the inquiry on the stairs and landing-place. All was silence in the chambers through which the count passed, and, having reached the saloon, he called loudly upon Ludovico; after which, still receiving no answer, he threw open the door of the bedroom, and entered. The profound stillness within confirmed his apprehensions for Ludovico, for not even the breathings of a person in sleep were heard; and his uncertainty was not soon terminated, since the shutters being all closed, the chamber was too dark for any object to be distinguished in it. The count bade a servant open them, who, as he crossed the room to do so, stumbled over something, and fell to the floor, when his cry occasioned such a panic among the few of his fel-

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Henri then sprang across the room, and, opening a window-shutter, they perceived that the man had fallen over a chair near the hearth, in which Ludovico had been sitting;—for he sat there no longer, nor could anywhere be seen by the imperfect light that was admitted into the apartment. The count, seriously alarmed, now opened other shutters, that he might be enabled to examine farther; and Ludovico not yet appearing, he stood for a moment suspended in astonishment, and scarcely trusting his senses, till his eyes glancing on the bed, he advanced to examine whether he was there asleep. No person, however, was in it; and he proceeded to the Oriel, where everything remained as on the preceding night; but Ludovico was nowhere to be found. The count now checked his amazement, considering that Ludovico might have left the chambers during the night, overcome by the terrors which their lonely desolation and the recollected reports concerning them had inspired. Yet, if this had been the fact, the man would naturally have sought society, and his fellow-servants had all declared they had not seen him; the door of the outer room also had been found fastened, with the key on the inside; it was impossible, therefore, for him to have passed through that; and all the outer doors of this suite were found, on examination, to be bolted and locked, with the keys also within them. The count, being then compelled to believe that the lad had escaped through the casements, next examined them; but such as opened wide enough to admit the body of a man were found to be carefully secured either by iron bars or by shutters, and no vestige appeared of any person having attempted to pass them; neither was it probable that Ludovico would have incurred the risk of breaking his neck by leaping from a window, when he might have walked safely through a door. The count’s amazement did not admit of words; but he returned once more to examine the bedroom, where was no appearance of disorder, except that occasioned by the late overthrow of the chair, near which had stood a small table; and on this Ludovico’s sword, his lamp, the book he had been reading, and the remains of his flask of wine, still remained. At the foot of the table, too, was the basket, with some fragments of provision and wood.

Henri and the servant now uttered their astonishment without reserve, and though the count said little, there was a seriousness in his manner that expressed much. It appeared that Ludovico must have quitted these rooms by some concealed passage, for the count could not believe that any supernatural means had occasioned this event; yet, if there was any such passage, it seemed inexplicable why he should retreat through it; and it was equally surprising, that not even the smallest vestige should appear by which his progress could be traced. In the rooms, everything remained as much in order as if he had just walked out by the common way. The count himself assisted in lifting the arras with which the bedchamber, saloon, and one of the ante-rooms were hung, that he might discover if any door had been concealed behind it; but after a laborious search, none was found; and he at length quitted the apartments, having secured the door of the last antechamber the key of which he took his own possession. He then gave orders that strict search should be made for Ludovico, not only in the château, but in the neighbourhood, and retiring with Henri to his closet, they remained there in conversation for a considerable time; and whatever was the subject of it, Henri from this hour lost much of his vivacity; and his manners were particularly grave and reserved, whenever the topic, which now agitated the count’s family with wonder and alarm, was introduced.1

Note 1. The château had been inhabited before the count came into its possession. He was not aware that the apparently outward walls contained a series of passages and staircases, which led to unknown vaults underground, and, therefore, he never thought of looking for a door in those parts of the chamber which he supposed to be next to the air. In these was a communication with the room. The château (for we are not here in Udolpho) was on the sea-shore in Languedoc; its vaults had become the store-house of pirates, who did their best to keep up the supernatural delusions that hindered people from searching the premises; and these pirates had carried Ludovico away.

ANN RADCLIFFE (ESSAY DATE 1826) SOURCE: Radcliffe, Ann. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” New Monthly Magazine 16 (1826): 145-52. In the following excerpt from a fictional conversation between two travelers, Radcliffe presents a distinction between horror and terror.

[Said W———:] “Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and

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lows who had ventured thus far, that they instantly fled, and the count and Henri were left to finish the adventure.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR SIR WALTER SCOTT ON RADCLIFFE’S TALENT

Mrs. Radcliffe’s powers, both of language and description, have been justly estimated very highly. They bear, at the same time, considerable marks of that warm, and somewhat exuberant imagination, which dictated her works. Some artists are distinguished by precision and correctness of outline, others by the force and vividness of their colouring; and it is to the latter class that this author belongs. The landscapes of Mrs. Radcliffe are far from equal in accuracy and truth to those of her contemporary, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, whose sketches are so very graphical, that an artist would find little difficulty in actually painting from them. Those of Mrs. Radcliffe, on the contrary, while they would supply the most noble and vigorous ideas, for producing a general effect, would leave the task of tracing a distinct and accurate outline to the imagination of the painter. As her story is usually enveloped in mystery, so there is, as it were, a haze over her landscapes, softening indeed the whole, and adding interest and dignity to particular parts, and thereby producing every effect which the author desired, but without communicating any absolutely precise or individual image to the reader. . . . It may be true, that Mrs. Radcliffe rather walks in fairy-land than in the region of realities, and that she has neither displayed the command of the human passions, nor the insight into the human heart, nor the observation of life and manners, which recommend other authors in the same line. But she has taken the lead in a line of composition, appealing to those powerful and general sources of interest, a latent sense of supernatural awe, and curiosity concerning whatever is hidden and mysterious; and if she has been ever nearly approached in this walk, which we should hesitate to affirm, it is at least certain, that she has never been excelled or even equalled. SOURCE: Scott, Sir Walter. “Ann Radcliffe.” In Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Novels. 1824. Reprint edition, edited by Ioan Williams, pp. 102-19. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968.

awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the [latter] . . . , respecting the dreaded evil?” . . . “How can any thing be indistinct and not confused?” said Mr. S———. . . . [Replied W———: “Obscurity,] or indistinctness, is only a negative, which leaves the imagination to act upon the few hints that truth reveals to it; confusion is a thing as positive as distinctness, though not necessarily so palpable; and it may, by mingling and confounding one image with another, absolutely counteract the imagination, instead of exciting it. Obscurity leaves something for the imagination to exaggerate; confusion, by blurring one image into another, leaves only a chaos in which the mind can find nothing to be magnificent, nothing to nourish its fears or doubts, or to act upon in any way; yet confusion and obscurity are terms used indiscriminately by those, who would prove, that Shakspeare and Milton were wrong when they employed obscurity as a cause of the sublime, that Mr. Burke was equally mistaken in his reasoning upon the subject, and that mankind have been equally in error, as to the nature of their own feelings, when they were acted upon by the illusions of those great masters of the imagination, at whose so potent bidding, the passions have been awakened from their sleep, and by whose magic a crowded Theatre has been changed to a lonely shore, to a witch’s cave, to an enchanted island, to a murderer’s castle, to the ramparts of an usurper, to the battle, to the midnight carousal of the camp or the tavern, to every various scene of the living world.”

GENERAL COMMENTARY DAVID S. MIALL (ESSAY DATE 2000) SOURCE: Miall, David S. “The Preceptor as Fiend: Radcliffe’s Psychology of the Gothic.” In Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and Their Sisters, edited by Laura Dabundo, pp. 31-43. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, Inc., 2000. In the following essay, Miall considers Radcliffe’s treatment of women’s education in her works.

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Despite different aims, the writings of both Wollstonecraft and Radcliffe share one obvious preoccupation, concern with the education of women. Both react, although differently, to the contemporary emphasis in fashionable education on feminine accomplishments and the cult of sensibility. The teacher’s role in Radcliffe’s novels, however, surpasses that of parent or tutor. Suspense or terror, supernatural intimations, the use of the sublime, and the persecution by powerful men also support pedagogical issues; in this respect the novels point to another principle underlying the neurosis of the 1790s. There was enforced upon most women by the prevailing culture—that “perpetual babyism” of which Mary Hays complained (97). To be more precise, the Radcliffean Gothic is constructed from a psychological machinery that enacts the predicament of the abandoned child, for whom the only resolution available is the temporary one of wish fulfillment. The novels’ significance, and their attraction for their first readers, perhaps lies in that they capture the borderline status of women, neither child nor adult, and portray, albeit in disguised and symbolic form, the attendant disabilities to which their middle-class female readers were themselves victim. Radcliffe probably did not consciously design her novels to explore such issues; on the contrary, their paradoxes of plot and character suggest conflicted, unconscious materials. No record indicates that Radcliffe received any formal educa-

tion, although her novels show familiarity with English literature of the eighteenth century, Shakespeare and Milton, and a wide range of travel literature. Radcliffe as a girl is likely to have been exposed to educational issues discussed within the Wedgwood circle, which also conducted experiments in education involving children of both sexes. The later publication of her novels coincided with an intensification of the debate on female education, which peaked in the 1790s.1 Her novels make apparent that Radcliffe studied some of the central issues with increasing seriousness and depth of understanding, particularly the place of sensibility and the moral education of women. But the failures of the educational model that Radcliffe came to know, above all its failure to ensure the maturity of women and meaningful social roles, are reflected in the Gothic form intrinsic to Radcliffe’s fiction. Thus I interpret the novels as studies in the psychopathology of childhood. Although Radcliffe hoped for an education for women that would secure their virtue and sensitivity, her novels actually hold up to society a distorting mirror in which the preceptors of women appear fiendish and predatory. That Radcliffe was concerned with education is apparent in all her novels from the first, The Castles Athlin and Dunbayne, the opening pages of which consider the heroine’s education. Radcliffe’s reading of Rousseau’s Emile is manifest in The Romance of the Forest, in which the character of La Luc is modeled on Rousseau’s Savoyard vicar. The most elaborate treatment of female education appears in the early chapters of Udolpho, where Radcliffe dwells at some length on St. Aubert’s upbringing of Emily and his valedictory precepts to her before his death. Radcliffe’s views on education cannot be identified with those of St. Aubert, however, but they do correspond significantly with contemporary discussions by such writers as Thomas Gisborne and Hannah More. Her handling of the issues, however, suggests a profound, if unconscious, distrust of the ideological implications of current practices in female education, which she is likely to have encountered with the Wedgwood circle and perhaps even in her own experience. Radcliffe was related maternally to a wide and influential world. Her uncle was Thomas Bentley, who became the partner of Josiah Wedgwood the potter in 1769, and appears to have been keenly interested in education. Wedgwood’s first surviving letter to Bentley, in 1762, refers to “an excellent piece upon female education, which I once had

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From the perspective of the 1990s, we might regard the Britain of the 1790s as marked by a pervasive neurosis of the social order. Nowhere is this more evident than in the position assigned to women, who were subjected to a range of legal and social disabilities. Although these disabilities were not new to the 1790s, they acquired a special intensity in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the reaction against all things Jacobin. One notable turning point was the eruption of hysteria following the publication of the first edition of William Godwin’s Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, which helped ensure that Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) would quickly lose the regard it had initially enjoyed and would soon fall into obscurity. Another instance is the publication of the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, from The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) to The Italian (1797). The extraordinary popular success that the novels enjoyed, together with the rash of thirdrate imitations that immediately ensued, suggests that the novels fulfilled an urgent social need.

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the pleasure of reading in MS.” and which Bentley is urged to publish (i:2). As a child, she stayed with Bentley at his Chelsea house: the longest period appears to have been autumn, 1771, to spring, 1772, when Ann was aged seven. Apart from Bentley’s direct influence, Ann would also have become aware of contemporary educational practice in the example of Wedgwood’s daughter (Susannah [1765-1817]), who was one year younger than Ann and who, upon marrying Dr. Robert Darwin in 1796, became the mother of Charles Darwin. Susannah stayed either with Bentley or at a nearby school in Chelsea called Blacklands between October, 1775, and April, 1778. She seems to have received the standard education for a girl. Wedgwood speaks in one letter of her improvements “as well in her general carriage, & behavior, as in her Music, Drawing & c.” (ii:302-03). Female education when Radcliffe was growing up placed its primary focus on accomplishments. Many critics noted that these were merely utilitarian and subverted any genuine educational achievement. In a diary entry of 1784, for example, Mrs. Thrale (later Piozzi) writes that the female student’s “Mother only loads her with Allurements, as a Rustic lays Bird Lime on Twigs, to decoy & catch the unwary Traveller”—that is, a husband (i: 590-91). Yet these same accomplishments constitute almost all that we first see of an Emily or an Ellena, to whom Valancourt or Vivaldi respond in textbook manner by falling immediately and irrevocably in love. Radcliffe’s heroines, in fact, keep themselves occupied very much as contemporary guides recommended. Gisborne’s Enquiry (1797) suggests improving reading (citing poets that Radcliffe particularly prized, such as Milton, Thomson, Gray, Mason, and Cowper), including poems that instill a sense of the sublime in nature; and he urges the performance of regular acts of charity to poor neighbors (223). Ellena, in The Italian, supports herself by selling fine work anonymously through the local convent, somewhat after the manner of Mrs. Cooper’s shop in London, noticed by Priscilla Wakefield, which discreetly sold goods made by ladies in deprived circumstances (115). But in themselves accomplishments are insufficient, as Radcliffe’s novels imply. Numerous parents in the 1790s enabled their sons and daughters to ape the manners of the upper classes by attending boarding schools, but as Catherine Macaulay warned, such a polite exterior “is liable to change into a determined rudeness whenever motives of caprice or vanity intervene” (172)—a

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change that occurs only too readily in the case of a Madame Cheron. The touchstone of Emily’s virtue, as with Valancourt, is unswerving sensibility, whether to poetry or to nature. Radcliffe thus accepts the prototype, which so many boarding schools were designed to reproduce, in endowing her heroines with all the fashionable accomplishments; but she shows its limitations at the same time, a stance that ennobles her heroines but weakens their credibility as protagonists. The physical ideal of womanhood that evolved toward the end of the eighteenth century was equally damaging. Increasing restrictions on body shape and clothing meant, in Lawrence Stone’s account, “extreme slimness, a pale complexion and slow languid movements, all of which were deliberately inculcated in the most expensive boarding schools” (Family 445). Weakness of body and mind seems to have given women greater sexual attractiveness by increasing the scope for male control. As Fanny Burney’s Mr. Lovel in Evelina says, “I have an insuperable aversion to strength, either of body or mind, in a female” (361). Radcliffe’s heroines, who are capable of little physical exertion and often faint, seem close to this anorexic paradigm. The achievement of this ideal formed the “hidden curriculum” of their schooling. Female education in Radcliffe’s period was not primarily about singing or embroidery, it was the enforcement of an anemic, passive, and compliant disposition to prolong women’s childhood state constantly on the edge of adolescence. Thus, in Athlin and Dunbayne, Mary’s indisposition makes her more attractive to Alleyn since it gives her “an interesting languor, more enchanting than the vivacity of blooming health” (110). In her later novels Radcliffe achieves similar effects through the emotional suffering of her heroines, which renders the countenance “more interesting” (Udolpho 161). Besides the heroines’ illnesses, their childlike qualities contribute directly to their attractiveness. This is stated most blatantly in Romance of the Forest when Theodore reflects that Adeline’s charms are best described by the lines of a poem: “Oh! have you seen, bath’d in the morning dew, / The budding rose its infant bloom display; / When first its virgin tints unfold to view” (Forest 172). Wollstonecraft bitterly complains about this view, speaking of women “hanging their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility” (149). Adeline is also said to be amiable, beautiful, and possessing a simplicity of manners (29); she has a love of virtue that makes it difficult for her to dissemble (160). She has just those virtues, in fact, that More

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In Udolpho the most important education received by the heroine is largely in the form of precepts; yet Radcliffe manages this ambiguously. Emily’s father appears to subscribe to a model of female education similar to More’s, although his precepts may not be intended at face value. VaIancourt’s elder brother is described “haranguing on the virtues of mildness and moderation:” (117), which seems to caricature St. Aubert’s advice to Emily. Madame Cheron frequently talks in precepts: “she failed not to inculcate the duties of humility and gratitude” (121). More disturbingly, however, Montoni also speaks in maxims, referring to “friends who assisted in rescuing you from the romantic illusions of sentiment . . . they are only the snares of childhood, and should be vanquished the moment you escape from the nursery” (196)—an even more brutal version of St. Aubert’s advice to Emily. Also, Cheron’s precepts, based as she claims on “a little plain sense” (204) or “only common sense” (205), are shown actually to involve an acceptance of and complicity in the world of Montoni. Thus, common sense is invoked to disguise patriarchal tyranny. Not coincidently, then, while Montoni attempts to gain control over Emily’s property, he talks to her in precepts: “you should learn and practise the virtues, which are indispensable to a woman— sincerity, uniformity of conduct and obedience” (270).3 Compliance and self-control are demanded by the preceptor in contrast to the method of the teacher, who emphasizes development in the pupil’s own interests—a role rarely found in Radcliffe’s fiction (except perhaps Madame de Menon in A Sicilian Romance). Therefore, precepts may be the primary agents of the patriarchal perspective, like Polonius’s toward his children; preceptors invariably stand against sensibility. Feeling must be controlled by the patriarchal force of reason since feeling is an agent of discovery and would enable its possessor

to challenge the preceptor’s authority. Thus although Radcliffe seems on the one hand to applaud the precepts of a St. Aubert, on the other hand the tenor of her novels points not only to the inadequacy of such precepts, but also suggests that those who wield them are agents of repression or terror. In educating Emily, St. Aubert strives “to teach her to reject the first impulse of her feelings, and to look, with cool examination, upon the disappointments he sometimes threw in her way” (Udolpho 5). But as Robert Kiely notes, “the incongruity between human behavior and moral principles which increases as the book progresses is strangely prefigured in Emily’s philosophical father” (71), who fails to abide by his own precepts. While he speaks to Emily of controlling her feelings by reason or mind on the day of her mother’s funeral (20-21)—surely a highly premature injunction—he himself is unable in 20 years to overcome his grief at the death of his sister, the poisoned Marchioness de Villerois (660). This prevents his letting Emily know that he even had such a sister, and his silence borders on the culpable, since her knowledge of this piece of family history might have alerted her to the danger of Montoni’s guardianship. Whether Radcliffe expected readers to infer that is not clear; her plot lacks internal consistency. The surface structure of her fiction, with its notorious explanations of the supernatural, supports the principles of reason and a rational control over sensibility, and St. Aubert is rendered a mouthpiece for precepts from contemporary treatises on female education. Yet these same principles are repeatedly subverted by Radcliffe’s focus on extreme states of feeling. By placing her heroines at the borders of perception and rationality, she enables their aroused sensibilities to acquire knowledge essential for survival. Radcliffe’s handling of sensibility is thus equivocal at a critical juncture of cultural change. More, for example, in her early poem to Mrs. Boscawan “Sensibility,” written in 1782, gives her subject high praise: “Unprompted moral! sudden sense of right!” (i:34). In the Strictures of 1799, however, several pages warn of the dangers of sensibility, and she withdraws her earlier trust in its moral powers. Women of sensibility, she declares, “are apt to employ the wrong instrument to accomplish the right end. They employ the passions to do the work of the judgment” (i:380). Richard Edgeworth, who brought up his first son on principles of freedom and sensibility inspired by Rousseau, later moved away from sensibility. When considering female education with his coauthor Maria Edgeworth he advises, “we must

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advocates in her Strictures (1799) while complaining about women’s passion for dress and ornament: “Modesty, simplicity, humility, economy, prudence, liberality, charity are almost inseparably, and not very remotely, connected with an habitual victory over personal vanity and a turn to personal expense” (i:336). Such a heroine is simultaneously strong and weak; she has the finest, best-honed moral sense yet is liable to faint at every critical moment (although the frequency of fainting fits steadily diminishes across Radcliffe’s novels).2 The source of this paradox emerges with the role of moral instruction in Radcliffe’s fiction, that is, the use of the precept.

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cultivate the reasoning powers at the same time that we repress the enthusiasm of fine feeling” (i:380). Radcliffe occupies both sides of this debate. She accepts the high valuation placed on women’s moral judgment in shaping society through the men they influence (a role on which More and others insisted). For example, Adeline, Emily, and Ellena decide to reject immediate marriage with their suitors at a critical moment, thus becoming moral guides to the men. At the same time, Radcliffe values the impulses of sensibility in ways that More and Edgeworth reprobated. Anticipating the Edgeworths, she makes St. Aubert warn Emily, in terms very similar to ones used by More or the others, “do not indulge in the pride of fine feelings, the romantic error of amiable minds” (Udolpho 80). Yet such rational caution has serious limitations. Contemporary education manuals emphasize keeping females occupied, hence the ceaseless cultivation of accomplishments such as embroidery, etching, drawing, or ribbon work. A woman should carefully avoid reverie, as More stresses. “she, who early imposes on herself a habit of strict attention to whatever she is engaged in, begins to wage early war with wandering thoughts, useless reveries, and that disqualifying train of busy, but unprofitable imaginations . . . “(i:336). But Radcliffe likely would have disagreed with these prescriptions. Although Emily, for instance, feels some guilt when she notices that she has dropped her needlework and fallen into a reverie or has lingered in communion with the falling dusk and the sounds of nature, this is when her sensibilities, thus activated, register the signals that contribute in the long run to her safety. For Emily—and Ellena after her—reverie provides a training in anticipatory reflection on her plight; it becomes soon enough a more urgent interpreting of various critical events and the intellectual study of the logic of different possibilities. To imagine a particular outcome is to gain some control over its actuality. Radcliffe heroines spend an increasing amount of time doing this, as the ratio of action to cogitation decreases over the course of her novels. Reverie strengthens, not weakens, the preparedness of the Radcliffe heroine. Thus to debate the priority of reason or sensibility in Radcliffe is perhaps fallacious. The novels demonstrate the convergence of these faculties, that sensibility itself is a form of reason. “Despite its elaborate assertions of the need to dominate feeling by reason,” as Spacks observes, “The Mysteries of Udolpho dramatizes the power of feeling to guide people accurately” (174). Hence,

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Radcliffe presents an insight that Coleridge or Wordsworth shortly offers more explicitly: for example, Coleridge claims in 1803 that his philosophy is “to make the Reason spread Light over our Feelings, to make our Feelings diffuse vital Warmth thro’ our Reason” (Notebooks i:1623). Thus feelings, far from coming under the control of reason, increasingly guide the heroine’s behavior. Conger, noting this, points to Ellena’s sudden suspicion of Spalatro’s food in The Italian (216): “Here is one of Radcliffe’s most successful fictional demonstrations of the finely tuned sensibility in action, and one that presents that sensibility unequivocally as an instinctive survival skill” (135). Radcliffe also extends the heroine’s clairvoyance to premonitory dreams, such as Adeline’s, which lead her to her murdered father’s manuscript (Forest 108-110), a device in which Radcliffe improves upon a predecessor’s strategy (Clara Reeve’s Old English Baron [1778]). Despite these significant accomplishments, however, the Radcliffe heroine oddly fails to mature either socially or psychologically. Although she survives her ordeals in order to marry and, presumably, bear children, she seems quite untouched by the succession of terrifying experiences she has had to endure. Udolpho, in the words of Macdonald (1989), is “a novel of education in which her heroine starts out with nothing to learn, a novel of maturation in which her heroine ends up as innocent, and as infantile, as she began”(203; also Kiely 78, Howells 9). This analysis applies to the heroines of all the novels. Radcliffe’s vision, then, cannot encompass maturation. At the same time, the Gothic heroine is a survivor, as Punter has suggested (11). Representative of some aspect of actual female experience, she survives amidst the social disruptions and gender politics of the late eighteenth century, but only at the cost of considerable psychological injury. She is the plaything of a Gothic machinery that involves removal of parents, extreme social isolation, prolonged incarcerations, and states of excessive terror, all of which symbolize a predicament that in reality is too threatening to be adequately comprehended. The repetitive nature of Radcliffe’s plots, not only within each novel but from one novel to the next, points to a version of the repetition compulsion which, as Freud pointed out, lies at the root of the uncanny (xvii:238). Endlessly replicating situations of terror, the novels point to a primary source in the experience of women of Radcliffe’s generation, the repeated failure to master a

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trauma. The remarkable success of the Gothic genre she created shows that the representation of woman’s predicament in her novels met an urgent cultural need, not just in the 1790s, but in the several decades and numerous imitators that followed. Although critics have noted that Radcliffe’s Gothic fictions occupy a borderland poised between natural and supernatural, the suspense this causes mainly serves plot machinery. Their evocation of a more important psychological borderland generates their genuine emotional power, that between childhood and adulthood. Punter’s point that readers of Gothic fiction are free to indulge in regressive visions does not fully account for the experience of women writers such as Radcliffe and their first female readers.4 Our regressive vision was their historic reality. In this sense, the infantilism imposed on women during the Romantic period perpetuates the psychodrama of early childhood, manifest in the plot of such a novel as The Italian as uncanny appearances and connections, meaningful coincidences (portrayed as providence), and the omnipotence of the prevailing powers of church and class. The reader’s emotions, in short, reproduce the response to the oppressors that controlled women’s lives. Above all, the hallucinatory symptoms that occur in terror reflect as in a distorting mirror the ethical framework of 1790s patriarchy, with its extravagant and psychotic ethical demands on women. In this world, even the suspicion of a single ethical slip by a woman precipitates a fall into the abyss of ruin; a scale of retribution both disproportionate to the degree of guilt incurred and radically different from that under which men operated.5 This primitive and savage ethical order imposed upon women suggests one source for the atavism of the Gothic novel, the fear of pollution springing from women’s sexuality. As Paul Ricoeur comments on the fear of defilement: “When [man] first wished to express the order in the world, he began by expressing it in the language of retribution” (30). Working out this problematic, Gothic fiction partly desexualizes its heroine by pushing her back across the borders of adolescence, at the same time visiting upon her massive and not entirely explicable sufferings. These serve to increase her sensibilities, sometimes to hallucinatory intensity, but this supplies the heroine’s strength as well as her liability. As Emily reflects, “when the mind has once begun to yield to the weakness of superstition, trifles impress it with the force of conviction” (Udolpho 634-35). Yet much of the behavior that preserves her at Udol-

Title page of The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents, 1797.

pho derives from just such conviction based upon apparent trifles—a few words, gestures, remote sounds. But the heroine’s hallucinatory perceptions are not merely fantasy, even though they are often factually mistaken at the banal level of plot. A hallucination intimates repressed unconscious thoughts. As Freud remarks in speaking of “conversion hysteria,” a hallucination reproduces in disguised form the actual experience when the repression occurred (xx:111). In this way Radcliffe disguises experiences that properly belong to childhood animism, in which no events are unexplained or random; every strange sight or sound holds a meaning with felt personal significance, even though this significance may be obscure or inexplicable. Just so does a Radcliffe heroine respond with hallucinatory intensity to the sights and sounds around her. Although the animism is later withdrawn in the bathos of explanation (Macdonald 199), the intimated meaning often remains in force and fails to dispel the atmosphere of threat or providence surrounding the heroine. For example, the improbable

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coincidences on which a Radcliffe plot depends are never adequately explained.6 Such animism belongs normally only to childhood, but it is likely to be reawakened later in life during crises, such as separation or bereavement. Radcliffe seems to replay such a crisis in the plot of each of her novels, given that her heroines find themselves bereft of one or, usually, both parents, leaving the heroine exposed to vengeful or providential powers beyond her understanding or control. The plot, in other words, replays the regression to animism, in which nothing is meaningless. As Freud says, animism is the “most consistent and exhaustive” and “truly complete” explanation of the universe (xiii:77). Another dimension of such animism is that the internalizing of the preceptor’s voice, which psychoanalytically produces the superego or conscience, is incomplete. Thus the threatening behavior of a Montalt, a Montoni, or a Schedoni echoes the paternal language of the late eighteenth century toward Radcliffe’s generation. These men are indeed the “monstrous and phantastic” parental images of which Melanie Klein speaks (250), but in Radcliffe they are not merely outgrowths of the inner aggressive impulses to which Klein attributes them; they correspond to the actual forces that shaped the lives of women and sought to confine them to a state of perpetual adolescence. The Gothic thus embodies the chronic paranoia imposed upon women, easy to ridicule or disregard, as the high culture of the period did only too readily, but representing a genuine persecution nonetheless. Radcliffe’s novels thereby reproduce the kind of persecution often seen in modern clinical reports of hallucinations, especially those of children (Cain 205, Pilowsky 10). At the same time, her heroine’s stories invariably replicate the precipitants for hallucinations—being orphaned, isolated, and set adrift in conditions of sensory deprivation (imprisoned in a castle or a convent); in addition, the novels follow a wish-fulfillment pattern, repeated across all the novels, of ultimate rescue by a hero of similar adolescent attributes, following successive failures at deliverance. As the problems faced by women outside the novel are insoluble, neither is development possible for the fictional heroines; they have virtually nothing to learn that would be of use, and they contribute nothing to the society to which they supposedly return after their persecutions cease (and it should be noted that the social structures that facilitated their persecutions remain intact, whether class, religion, or gender). Protagonists such as Ellena

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and Vivaldi are thus given only the most elementary and contingent of concerns, arising from their love and the various predicaments that follow from it. This is in striking contrast to a Montoni or Schedoni, whose concerns relate to a complex social system of rewards, privileges, and duties. While their concerns are ended only by their deaths, the concerns of Ellena and Vivaldi, by contrast, end with marriage. Hence, the aptness of the refrain that sounds through the last chapter of The Italian, “0! giorno felice!” signifying the story’s end. With their elementary problems resolved, Ellena and Vivaldi’s story has nothing to sustain it beyond a single day. This final freeze frame betrays the stasis in which the women Radcliffe portrays are trapped. Another century must elapse before such Gothic congealment would begin to loosen its regressive grip.

Notes 1. Miller lists the number of publications devoted to the “character, duties and education of women” in Britain: in the decade beginning 1760 there were 16, in 1770, 23; 1780, 25; 1790, 41; 1800, 35; 1810, 13 (492-98). 2. Someone faints on average after every 11 pages in Athlin (converting the page sizes of the Arno reprint to those of the Oxford editions), 18 pages in Sicilian, 40 pages in Forest, 48 pages in Udolpho, and 52 pages in The Italian. 3. Anne Mellor’s recent discussion of the sublime in Udolpho touches on this question: “Radcliffe’s point is clear: the deepest terror aroused by the masculine sublime originates in the exercise of patriarchal authority within the home” (93). 4. Punter refers to our pleasure in “being able to peer backwards through our own personal history, because all psychotic states are simply perpetuations of landscapes which we have all inhabited at some stage in our early infancy” (8). 5. Even Radcliffe’s preoccupation with the incarceration of her heroines seems less a mere fantasy in light of how often wives were forcibly and legally confined by their husbands (Stone, Road 164-69). 6. Perhaps the most absurd examples are from Forest, where the fleeing La Mottes and Adeline end up at the Abbey of St. Clair, which just happens to be owned by Adeline’s uncle, and when Peter and Adeline flee to his village in the Savoy, Adeline just happens to end up living with La Luc, the father of her lover Theodore, but all the novels depend in some degree on such coincidences.

Works Cited Burney, Fanny. Evelina. Ed. Edward A. Bloom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Cain, Albert C. “The Impact of Parental Suicide on Children.” The Child and Death. Ed. Olle Jane Z. Sahler. St. Louis: Mosby, 1978. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. London: Routledge, 1957-.

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Edgeworth, Richard and Maria. Practical Education. 1798. London: Hunter, 1815. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955-74. Gisborne, Thomas. Enquiry Into the Duties of the Female Set. London: Cadell, 1797.

———. Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Wakefield, Priscilla. Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex; with Suggestions for Its Improvement. London: Johnson, 1798. Wedgewood, Josiah. Letters of Josiah Wedgewood: 1762-1795. 3 Vols. Ed. Katherine Eufemia Farrer. 1903; rpt. Manchester: Morton, 1973. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. 2nd ed. Ed. Carol H. Poston. New York: Norton, 1988.

Hay, Mary. Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women. London: Johnson, 1798. Howells, Coral Ann. Love, Mystery, and Misery. London: Athlone Press, 1978.

TITLE COMMENTARY

Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972.

The Mysteries of Udolpho

Klein, Melanie. Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921-1945. London: Hogarth Press, 1975. Macdonald, D. L “Bathos and Repetition: The Uncanny in Radcliffe.” Journal of Narrative Technique 19:2 (1989), 197-204. Macaulay, Catherine. Letters on Education: With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects. London: Dilly, 1790. Mellor, Anne. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993. Miller, Peter J. Appendix B. “The Education of the English Lady, 1770-1820.” Diss. University of Alberta, 1969. More, Hannah. Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. The Complete Works of Hannah More. New York: Harper, 1835. Piowsky, Daniel. “Problems in Determining the Presence of Hallucinations in Children.” Hallucinations in Children. Ed. Daniel Pilowsky and William Chambers. Washington: American Psychiatry Press, 1986. Piozzi, Hester Lynch. Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale. Ed. Katherine C. Balderston. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951. Punter, David. “Narrative and Psychology in Gothic Fiction.” Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression. Ed. Kenneth W. Graham. New York AMS Press, 1989. 1-27. Radcliffe, Ann. The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. 1821; rpt. New York Arno: Press, 1972. ———. The Italian. Ed. Frederick Garber. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. ———. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Ed. Bonamy Dobrée. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. ———. The Romance of the Forest. Ed. Chloe Chard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. Trans. Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. New York Harper, 1977.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (REVIEW DATE AUGUST 1794) SOURCE: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. A review of Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe. Critical Review (August 1794): 361-72. In the following excerpt from a review of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Coleridge faults the work as a substandard effort, compared to Radcliffe’s earlier literary achievements.

[The Mysteries of Udolpho does not] require the name of its author to ascertain that it comes from the same hand [that produced The Romance of the Forest]. The same powers of description are displayed, the same predilection is discovered for the wonderful and the gloomy—the same mysterious terrors are continually exciting in the mind the idea of a supernatural appearance, keeping us, as it were, upon the very edge and confines of the world of spirits, and yet are ingeniously explained by familiar causes; curiosity is kept upon the stretch from page to page, and from volume to volume, and the secret, which the reader thinks himself every instant on the point of penetrating, flies like a phantom before him, and eludes his eagerness till the very last moment of protracted expectation. This art of escaping the guesses of the reader has been improved and brought to perfection along with the reader’s sagacity. . . . In this contest of curiosity on one side, and invention on the other, Mrs. Radcliffe has certainly the advantage. She delights in concealing her plan with the most artificial contrivance, and seems to amuse herself with saying, at every turn and doubling of the story, ‘Now you think you have me, but I shall take care to disappoint you.’ This method is, however, liable to the following inconvenience, that in the search of what is new, an

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Conger, Syndy. “Sensibility Restored: Radcliffe’s Answer to Lewis’s The Monk.” Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/ Transgression. Ed. Kenneth W. Graham. New York: AMS Press, 1989.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR EDITH BIRKHEAD ON RADCLIFFE AND THE GOTHIC

The enthusiasm which greeted Walpole’s enchanted castle and Miss Reeve’s carefully manipulated ghost, indicated an eager desire for a new type of fiction in which the known and familiar were superseded by the strange and supernatural. To meet this end Mrs. Radcliffe suddenly came forward with her attractive store of mysteries, and it was probably her timely appearance that saved the Gothic tale from an early death. The vogue of the novel of terror, though undoubtedly stimulated by German influence, was mainly due to her popularity and success. The writers of the first half of the nineteenth century abound in references to her works, and she thus still enjoys a shadowy, ghost-like celebrity. Many who have never had the curiosity to explore the labyrinths of the underground passages, with which her castles are invariably honeycombed, or who have never shuddered with apprehension before the “black veil,” know of their existence through Northanger Abbey, and have probably also read how Thackeray at school amused himself and his friends by drawing illustrations of Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels.

These volumes are interspersed with many pieces of poetry, some beautiful, all pleasing, but rather monotonous. . . . [Poetical] beauties have not a fair chance of being attended to, amidst the stronger interest inspired by such a series of adventures. The love of poetry is a taste; curiosity is a kind of appetite, and hurries headlong on, impatient for its complete gratification. . . . If, in consequence of the criticisms impartiality has obliged us to make upon this novel, the author should feel disposed to ask us, Who will write a better? we boldly answer her, Yourself; when no longer disposed to sacrifice excellence to quantity, and lengthen out a story for the sake of filling an additional volume.

SOURCE: Birkhead, Edith. “‘The Novel of Suspense’: Mrs. Radcliffe.” In The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance, pp. 38-62. London: Constable & Company, Ltd., 1921.

author is apt to forget what is natural; and, in rejecting the more obvious conclusions, to take those which are less satisfactory. The trite and the extravagant are the Scylla and Charybdis of writers who deal in fiction. With regard to the work before us, while we acknowledge the extraordinary powers of Mrs. Radcliffe, some readers will be inclined to doubt whether they have been exerted in the present work with equal effect as in the Romance of the Forest. Four volumes cannot depend entirely on terrific incidents and intricacy of story. They require character, unity of design, a delineation of the scenes of real life, and the variety of well supported contrast. The Mysteries

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of Udolpho are indeed relieved by much elegant description and picturesque scenery; but in the descriptions there is too much of sameness: the pine and the larch tree wave, and the full moon pours its lustre through almost every chapter. Curiosity is raised oftener than it is gratified; or rather, it is raised so high that no adequate gratification can be given it; the interest is completely dissolved when once the adventure is finished, and the reader, when he is got to the end of the work, looks about in vain for the spell which had bound him so strongly to it. There are other little defects, which impartiality obliges us to notice. The manners do not sufficiently correspond with the aera the author has chosen. . . . The character of Annette, a talkative waiting-maid, is much worn, and that of the aunt, madame Cheron, is too low and selfish to excite any degree of interest, or justify the dangers her niece exposes herself to for her sake. We must likewise observe, that the adventures do not sufficiently point to one centre. . . .

WILLIAM ENFIELD (REVIEW DATE NOVEMBER 1794) SOURCE: Enfield, William. Review of The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe. The Monthly Review (November 1794): 278-83. In the following review, Enfield offers a highly favorable assessment of The Mysteries of Udolpho.

If the merit of fictitious narratives may be estimated by their power of pleasing, Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances will be entitled to rank highly in the scale of literary excellence. There are, we believe, few readers of novels who have not been delighted with her Romance of the Forest; and we incur little risque in predicting that the Mysteries of Udolpho will be perused with equal pleasure.

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Through the whole of the first volume, the emotions which the writer intends to excite are entirely of the tender kind. Emily, the heroine of the tale, early becomes familiar with sorrow, through the death of her parents; yet not before the reader is made acquainted with their characters and manners, and has accompanied them through a number of interesting circumstances, sufficient to dispose him to the exercise of tender sympathy. At the same time, her heart receives, by slow and imperceptible degrees, the soft impressions of love; and the reader is permitted, without the introduction of any dissonant feelings, to enjoy the luxury of observing the rise and progress of this passion, and of sympathising with the lovers in every diversity of sentiment, which an uncommon vicissitude of events could produce; till, at last, Emily is separated from her Valancourt, to experience a sad variety of woe. With the interesting narrative of this volume, are frequently interwoven descriptions of nature in the rich and beautiful country of the South of France, which are perfectly in unison with the story; at the same time that they display, in a favourable light, the writer’s powers of fancy and of language, and afford no small addition to the reader’s gratification. We should have great pleasure, would our limits permit, in giving to our readers some specimens of these descriptions.

Something of the marvellous is introduced in the first volume, sufficient to throw an interesting air of mystery over the story; and the reader feels the pleasing agitation of uncertainty concerning several circumstances, of which the writer has had the address not to give a glance of explanation till toward the close of the work. In the remaining volumes, however, her genius is employed to raise up forms which chill the soul with horror; and tales are told that are no less fitted to “quell each trembling heart with grateful terror,” than those with which, “by night, “The village matron round the blazing hearth Suspends her infant audience.”

Without introducing into her narrative any thing really supernatural, Mrs. Radcliffe has contrived to produce as powerful an effect as if the invisible world had been obedient to her magic spell; and the reader experiences in perfection the strange luxury of artificial terror, without being obliged for a moment to hoodwink his reason, or to yield to the weakness of superstitious credulity. We shall not forestall his pleasure by detailing the particulars: but we will not hesitate to say, in general, that, within the limits of nature and probability, a story so well contrived to hold curiosity in pleasing suspence, and at the same time to agitate the soul with strong emotions of sympathetic terror, has seldom been produced. Another part of the merit of this novel must not be overlooked. The characters are drawn with uncommon distinctness, propriety, and boldness. Emily, the principal female character, being naturally possessed of delicate sensibility and warm affection, is early warned by her father against indulging the pride of fine feelings,—(the romantic error of amiable minds,)—and is taught that the strength of fortitude is more valuable than the grace of sensibility. Hence she acquires a habit of self command, which gives a mild dignity to her manners, and a steady firmness to her conduct. She is patient under authority, without tameness or cunning. Desirous, in the first place, of her own approbation, she is equally unaffected by the praise and the censure of fools. In love, she is tender and ardent without weakness, and constant notwithstanding every inducement, from interest or terror, to abandon the object of her affection. Good sense effectually fortifies her against superstitious fear; and a noble integrity and sublime piety support her in the midst of terrors and dangers. In the character and fortunes of Emily’s aunt, Madame Cheron, to whom her sufferings are solely owing, is exhibited an example of the mischief which silly pride brings on itself

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The works of this ingenious writer not only possess, in common with many other productions of the same class, the agreeable qualities of correctness of sentiment and elegance of style, but are also distinguished by a rich vein of invention, which supplies an endless variety of incidents to fill the imagination of the reader; by an admirable ingenuity of contrivance to awaken his curiosity, and to bind him in the chains of suspence; and by a vigour of conception and a delicacy of feeling which are capable of producing the strongest sympathetic emotions, whether of pity or terror. Both these passions are excited in the present romance, but chiefly the latter; and we admire the enchanting power with which the author at her pleasure seizes and detains them. We are no less pleased with the proofs of sound judgment, which appear in the selection of proper circumstances to produce a distinct and full exhibition, before the reader’s fancy, both of persons and events; and, still more, in the care which has been taken to preserve his mind in one uniform tone of sentiment, by presenting to it a long continued train of scenes and incidents, which harmonize with each other.

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and others. Dazzled with shew, she wants the sense both to discern merit and to detect imposture: supercilious in her condescension, and ostentatious in her pity, she inflicts cruel wounds without intention; she admires and despises by turns, and equally without reason: she neither bears injuries with meekness nor resents them with dignity; and her exasperated pride vents itself in feeble lamentation, and prevents her from using the necessary means for her safety, till at length it exposes her to cruel insults, and precipitates her destruction.—Montoni, her second husband, is an Italian of strong talents, but of an abandoned character and desperate fortune: he is unprincipled, dauntless, and enterprising; reserved through pride and discontent, deep craft conceals all his plans: wild and various in his passions, yet capable of making them all bend to his interest, he is the cause of cruel wretchedness and infinite terror to those who are under his power. Some gleams of comic humour play through the gloom of the story, in the character and conversation of the faithful servant Annette, who has an insuperable propensity to credulity, and an irresistible impulse to communication: but whose naïveté, simple honesty, and affection, render her character interesting. Several other portraits are drawn with equal strength; for which we must refer to the volumes. The numerous mysteries of the plot are fully disclosed in the conclusion, and the reader is perfectly satisfied at finding villainy punished, and steady virtue and persevering affection rewarded. If there be any part of the story which lies open to material objection, it is that which makes Valancourt, Emily’s lover, fall into disgraceful indiscretions during her absence, and into a temporary alienation of affection. This, in a young man of noble principles and exalted sentiments, after such a long intimacy, and such a series of incidents tending to give permanency to his passion and stability to his character, we must think unnatural. The performance would in our opinion have been more perfect, as well as more pleasing, if Du Pont, Emily’s unsuccessful admirer, had never appeared; and if Valancourt had been, as Emily expected, her deliverer from the Castle of Udolpho. The story, we apprehend, might have been easily brought to its present termination on this supposition. The embellishments of the work are highly finished. The descriptions are rich, glowing, and varied: they discover a vigorous imagination, and an uncommon command of language; and many of them would furnish admirable subjects for the

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pencil of the painter. If the reader, in the eagerness of curiosity, should be tempted to pass over any of them for the sake of proceeding more rapidly with the story, he will do both himself and the author injustice. They recur, however, too frequently; and, consequently, a similarity of expression is often perceptible. Several of the pieces of poetry are elegant performances, but they would have appeared with more advantage as a separate publication. Our readers may form some judgment of the writer’s descriptive and poetical talents from the following specimen; the scene of which is at Venice: ‘In the cool of the evening the party embarked in Montoni’s gondola, and rowed out upon the sea. The red glow of sun-set still touched the waves, and lingered in the west, where the melancholy gleam seemed slowly expiring, while the dark blue of the upper æther began to twinkle with stars. Emily sat, given up to pensive and sweet emotions. The smoothness of the water, over which she glided, its reflected images—a new heaven and trembling stars below the waves, with shadowy outlines of towers and porticos, conspired with the stillness of the hour, interrupted only by the passing wave, or the notes of distant music, to raise those emotions to enthusiasm. As she listened to the measured sound of the oars, and to the remote warblings that came in the breeze, her softened mind returned to the memory of St. Aubert and to Valancourt, and tears stole to her eyes. The rays of the moon, strengthening as the shadows deepened, soon after threw a silvery gleam upon her countenance, which was partly shaded by a thin black veil, and touched it with inimitable softness. Hers was the contour of a Madona, with the sensibility of a Magdalen; and the pensive uplifted eye, with the tear that glittered on her cheek, confirmed the expression of the character. ‘The last strain of distant music now died in air, for the gondola was far upon the waves, and the party determined to have music of their own. The Count Morano, who sat next to Emily, and who had been observing her for some time in silence, snatched up a lute, and struck the chords with the finger of harmony herself, while his voice, a fine tenor, accompanied them in a rondeau full of tender sadness. To him, indeed, might have been applied that beautiful exhortation of an English poet, had it then existed: —“Strike up, my master, But touch the strings with a religious softness! Teach sounds to languish through the night’s dull ear Till Melancholy starts from off her couch, And Carelessness grows concert to attention!” With such powers of expression the Count sang the following RONDEAU.

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After the remarks which we have already made, we need scarcely add our recommendation of these interesting volumes to general readers.

KENNETH W. GRAHAM (ESSAY DATE 1989) SOURCE: Graham, Kenneth W. “Emily’s DemonLover: The Gothic Revolution and The Mysteries of Udolpho.” In Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, edited by Kenneth W. Graham, pp. 163-71. New York: AMS Press, 1989. In the following essay, Graham discusses the narrative pace of The Mysteries of Udolpho and how it works to build suspense and evoke the revolutionary spirit of Gothic fiction in a storyline that contains very little actual action.

In a metaphor that Ann Radcliffe probably and perhaps rightly would have found lacking in taste, Robert Scholes compares the act of fiction with the act of sex: For what connects fiction . . . with sex is the fundamental orgastic rhythm of tumescence and detumescence, of tension and resolution, of intensification to the point of climax and consummation. In the sophisticated forms of fiction, as in the sophisticated practice of sex, much of the art consists of delaying climax within the framework of desire in order to prolong the pleasurable act itself.1

Although the quotation is taken from a discussion of John Fowles’ The Magus, it shows a startling aptness to Mrs. Radcliffe’s fictional method which is to draw out a situation longer than seems possible by delaying the climax. The amplitude of her accomplishment becomes apparent when one measures the majesty of the three to four bulky volumes that comprise each of her novels against the modest paragraph that could contain a just summary of her plot. That so much impends in Ann Radcliffe’s fictions and so little happens is surely evidence of an astonishing degree of narrative sophistication.

It is precisely in the attenuation of threatening situations that Mrs. Radcliffe’s chief success and chief fascination as a writer of Gothic romances lie. Her employment of suspense entraps her readers in a mounting rhythm of excitement and irresolution as terror succeeds terror, while the climax, a total and satisfying release from tension, is continually promised and continually postponed. Because the terrors themselves derive intensity from vague threatenings of moral dissolution, a sexual metaphor for the rhythm of tension and intermission seems an appropriate one. Thus her narrative method, approximating that described by Scholes, operates through delaying climax within a framework of both fear and desire. That she employed such a method, and repeated it in most of her romances, suggests that Mrs. Radcliffe was addressing her narratives to a human psychology more complex than those of the reductionist theories current in eighteenthcentury Britain from Locke’s tabula rasa2 to Hartley’s materialist associationism. To direct, as I think she does, a significant overtone of her narratives at pre-rational levels of human consciousness is to commit something of a revolutionary act. While it may appear absurd (and, indeed, illbred) to argue an affinity between the refined Mrs. Radcliffe and the sans-culottes who stormed the Bastille, it is fruitful to consider the Marquis de Sade’s observation that the Gothic novel was an inevitable result of the revolutionary shocks that all Europe was feeling during these revolutionary times.3 For Sade, what links the Gothic novel to the revolution is its willingness to extend the boundaries that convention ascribes to the concept of human nature, its willingness to call for the aid of hell to present the whole truth of human depravity. Those impending calamities on which Mrs. Radcliffe’s narratives focus such lingering attention are the product of an imagination prepared to acknowledge the diabolical. When Dr. Johnson dismissed the poems of Ossian with the declaration: “Sir, a man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it,”4 he was voicing a traditional ethical distrust of the unregulated imagination, a fear of the monsters the abandoned mind might spawn. Ann Radcliffe’s are the novels of a respectable woman. They manifest an apparent capitulation to all the restraints, decorums and tyrannies of late eighteenth-century conventionalities in erotic and ethical matters. Yet she overcame many restrictions with subtle audacity: her narratives insinuate the dissolution of the very conventionalities they uphold. They continually anticipate perils,

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‘Soft as yon silver ray, that sleeps Upon the ocean’s trembling tide; Soft as the air, that lightly sweeps Yon sail, that swells in stately pride; ‘Soft as the surge’s stealing note, That dies along the distant shores, Or warbled strain, that sinks remote— So soft the sigh my bosom pours! ‘True as the wave to Cynthia’s ray, True as the vessel to the breeze, True as the soul to music’s sway, Or music to Venetian seas; ‘Soft as yon silver beams that sleep Upon the ocean’s trembling breast; So soft, so true, fond Love shall weep, So soft, so true, with thee shall rest.’

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contemplate imminent assaults on the social order in the crimes of murder, incest and rape, and thus extend an imaginative validity to evil in its most vicious forms. To recall Dr. Johnson’s warnings in Rambler No. 4 against the romance for its “wild strain of imagination,” its heating the mind “with incredibilities,” its creation of men “splendidly wicked” whose “resemblance ought no more to be preserved, than the art of murdering without pain,”5 and to note how her romances return repeatedly to situations in which moral values seem threatened by splendidly wicked men is to perceive how wholeheartedly Ann Radcliffe had embraced a revolutionary aesthetic. The Mysteries of Udolpho is vitally revolutionary in a manner that the marquis would approve and Dr. Johnson might well protest. The momentum of the account builds towards a situation rich in imaginative possibility that Mrs. Radcliffe hastens to establish and labours to prolong: the maiden is in perilous proximity to the villain in the castle and the hero is locked out. It is one of those situations that we have come to recognize as typically, even archetypically, Gothic. The castle, its centrality underlined in the very title of Mrs. Radcliffe’s romance, is prison-like in its function of keeping people in and out. But it is more intricate than a prison or bastion: it is described as “a strange, rambling place.”6 Emily is “perplexed by the numerous turnings”; “she feared to open one of the many doors that offered”; she “began to fear that she might . . . lose herself in the intricacies of the castle” (I 262). Such passages show Radcliffe’s Gothic castle to be a kind of labyrinth and a labyrinth is, of course, a place of peril and misdirection where a monster lurks and where the maiden may be held in bondage. Versions of the labyrinth that resound through Cretan legend, Sleeping Beauty’s wall of thorns and Brünhilde’s wall of fire point to contrasting interpretations: it is a place of sterility from which the hero’s rescue of his bride betokens a return of fruitfulness to the wasteland, or it is a place of fearful virility in which the demon-lover has entrapped the enthralled maiden. In the Gothic novel the second emphasis predominates: the monster in the labyrinth is Manfred in his castle, looking to beget an heir to Otranto upon the frightened Isabella; it is Ambrosio in the catacombs, holding Antonia in thrall to his lust; and, of course, it is Montoni, whose ominous presence forms the forefront of Emily’s anxious apprehensions. The allure of the Gothic situation lies

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chiefly in the vulnerability of the maiden to the dark designs and unpredictable violence of the Gothic villain. The Montoni that emerges from Mrs. Radcliffe’s narrative is a potentially-explosive force of obscure purposes who smoulders in the shadows of his castle like a monster in its labyrinth. She makes him alien to the novel’s system of values. He is cruel, unresponsive to domesticity and indifferent to the picturesque, yet he is handsome: his eyes are somber and sparkling and his features “manly and expressive.” Radcliffe underlines his sexual attractiveness with repeated references to his terrible energies, desperate temper and vigorous passion. Each turn of the page threatens to reveal a feudal noble of barely-bridled sensuality, l’homme fatal, the enslaver of woman, a perilously absorbing mixture of Don Juan and Bluebeard. As is usual with Radcliffe, the illusion is more potent than the reality. Viewed objectively, Montoni’s life forms a pattern of unfulfillment. He gambles in casinos but loses. He is ambitious to be a military leader but becomes only a robber captain, one whose capture is perfunctory when the narrative has no further use for him. Despite his displays of passion and energy, he lacks sexual drive. He marries Mme. Charon to obtain her money; yet he does not see through her pretensions of wealth, nor does he make sure of what fortune she has before he marries her. Since Mme. Charon has neither wit nor beauty with which to beguile him, his lack of judgment in these matters is astonishing. After marriage he grumbles, blusters and threatens in order to obtain her property. He does not succeed and after Mme. Charon’s death he has to make Emily the target of blusterings and threatenings, with similar unsuccess. To sustain the role given him, Ann Radcliffe made Montoni surprisingly impotent. When we seek the source of the lasting impression of Montoni as the smouldering, passionate demon-lover, we discover the figure to be almost wholly the creation of Emily, the chaste, pure maiden. At an early meeting “Emily felt admiration, but . . . it was mixed with a degree of fear she know not exactly wherefore” (I 23). When through marriage Montoni becomes head of her family, Emily watches him eagerly, trying to fathom from his gloomy features the thoughts concealed beneath. “Emily observed these written characters of his thought with deep interest and not without some degree of awe, when she considered that she was entirely in his power” (I 195). We might assume this last reflection to be ac-

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century. In Emily’s disconcerted mind are opposed versions of reality. One is a comforting world of pastoral domesticity and sensibility centered on two almost interchangeable male figures, her father St. Aubert and her lover Valancourt. They inhabit the providential and ordered world that begins the novel

Emily’s irrational attraction to Montoni reflects one facet of Mrs. Radcliffe’s awareness of the potency of that central Gothic situation that brings together maiden, villain and castle over which her narrative lingers with such unconscionable sophistication. As Mrs. Radcliffe seems to have been aware, the ambivalence of Emily’s lovehate attitude to her demon-lover reflects the ambivalence of her century towards the unregulated imagination. Mrs. Radcliffe may have held the belief with Dr. Johnson that “he that thinks reasonably must think morally”8 but her works manifest a stronger interest in the statement’s corollary about the irrational and the immoral. In the inclination of her narratives to contemplate human kinship with mystery and human fascination with evil, Mrs. Radcliffe seems to reveal an attitude that has more in common with the Marquis de Sade than with Dr. Johnson. Sade’s own attraction to the Gothic novel is connected to a similar willingness to suspend ethical concerns in order to contemplate the perils of the maiden perplexed in a Gothic labyrinth where each turning may carry her into the clutches of the monster. Such willingness means for Sade a shadowing forth of his own revolutionary credo that the unnatural is natural. What is revolutionary about the Gothic novel in general and The Mysteries of Udolpho in particular is an assumed license to contemplate levels of human thought and behaviour hitherto almost ignored in literature of the eighteenth

The other world flourishes in the secret inner spaces of Emily’s nervous apprehensions; it is the disordered and labyrinthine world of barelycontrolled passion and energy centred on the male figure of Montoni. The demonic world looms in the body of the narative. Ann Radcliffe is careful to emphasize that this world is an aberration, yet her narrative lingers there. Her imagination abides unjustifiably long in conditions of ambivalence, where, at least aesthetically, the rational is not superior to the irrational, the moral to the immoral, the providential to the demonic. When considering the Gothic in a revolutionary perspective, it is easy to underestimate Ann Radcliffe’s achievement. Compared to the projections of fragmented psychologies in Godwin’s Caleb Williams and the audacious portrayals of living evil in works of Beckford and Lewis, Radcliffe’s hintings and suggestings may appear unduly hesitant. In the tension between conventional sanctities and the desire to transgress limits, the sanctities are explicitly dominant and the woman wailing for her demon lover remains well beneath the levels of Emily’s consciousness. That woman’s existence is never acknowledged yet her presence is felt as Emily is haunted by apprehensions both supernatural and sexual. Ann Radcliffe’s art lies in the careful balancing of the explicit and the implicit that permits her to be revolutionary without ceasing to be conventional. Triumphantly, her art leaves the unspeakable unspoken.

On the pleasant banks of the Garonne . . . stood . . . that chateau of Monsieur St. Aubert. From its windows were seen the pastoral landscapes of Guienne and Gascony, stretching along the river, gay with luxuriant woods and vines, and plantations of olives. (I 1)

and ends it: Oh! how joyful it is to tell of happiness such as that of Valancourt and Emily; to relate that . . . they were at length restored to each other—to the beloved landscape of their native country—to the securest felicity of this life . . . while the bowers of La Vallée became once more the retreat of goodness, wisdom, and domestic blessedness! (II, 344)

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companied by a frisson of anxious apprehension. Emily’s mind dwells on Montoni, creates of him a figure of Burkean sublimity that both attracts and repels her. He frightens and fascinates her because he undermines her notions of patriarchy and domesticity. Her father had been a man of feeling; Montoni is a man of action and cruelty. His “stern manners” contrast with “the tenderness and affection to which she had been accustomed till she lost her parents” (I 239). He disorients her and threatens her conditionings. Domesticity and filial affection become disturbingly intermingled in her mind with vague shadowings of slavery and incest. She is agitated by his presence: “. . . Montoni is coming himself to seek me! In the present state of his mind, his purpose must be desperate” (II 100). Montoni represents a vital disorder foreign to Emily’s values and she exaggerates his power and makes of him an erotic fantasy based on terror.7 Consciously Emily fears and deplores Montoni, yet his presence lingers in her mind as if her spirit is reaching out after him, longing for the unspeakable fulfillment that he represents.

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Notes 1. Robert Scholes, “The Orgastic Fiction of John Fowles”. The Hollins Critic, VI, 5 (December, 1969), 1. 2. Indeed, Locke’s tabula rasa theory, by cutting man off from his unconscious, gave impetus to a general rejection of the total psyche in eighteenth-century psychological theory. 3. “. . . il devenait le fruit indispensable des secousses révolutionnaires dont l’Europe entière se ressentait.” Marquis de Sade, “Idée sur les Romans” in Les Crimes de L’Amour, Oevres Complètes, vol. 10 (Paris: Au Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1966), p. 15. 4. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 6 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, n.d.), IV, 211. 5. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 4 in Selected Writings, ed. R.T. Davies (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 76-79. 6. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 2 vols. (London: J.M. Dent, 1931; rpt. 1962), I, 234. Subsequent citations from the novel will be taken from this edition and page references enclosed within parentheses and inserted in the text. 7. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 86, 65. 8. Samuel Johnson, “Preface to Shakespeare,” Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), vol VII of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, p. 71.

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DEVENDRA P. VARMA ON RADCLIFFE’S LEGACY

It is a curious coincidence of literary history that the stars that reigned in the year of the nativity of The Castle of Otranto (1764) saw the birth of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (née Ward), in whose works we perceive the Gothic fiction approaching its meridian. Not much is known about her life, except that she was the wife of an Oxford graduate, and that she wrote her weird and mysterious tales beside a blazing fire in a quiet room to enliven her long, solitary winter evenings. Extraordinarily fascinating stories flowed from her pen which, with all their faults, unmistakably bear the stamp of genius. The name of this potent enchantress, who touched the secret springs of fear and extended the domain of romance, was felt as a spell by her admirers, and to this day her blood-curdling terrors freeze many a midnight reader. SOURCE: Varma, Devendra P. “Mrs. Ann Radcliffe: The Craft of Terror.” In The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences, pp. 85-128. London: Arthur Barker, 1957.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Frontispieces from the four volumes of the 1799 edition of The Mysteries of Udolpho.

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FURTHER READING Criticism Anderson, Howard. “Gothic Heroes.” In The English Hero, 1660-1800, edited by Robert Folkenflik, pp. 205-21. Newark, Del. and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Press, 1982. Analyzes the male characters in The Mysteries of Udolpho and measures their complexity and traits versus the men in such works as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk, and Radcliffe’s The Italian. Castle, Terry. “The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho.” In The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, edited by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, pp. 231-53. New York: Methuen, 1987. Points out that although critics of The Mysteries of Udolpho usually focus on the Gothic episodes of the novel that occur at the castle, the events in the other sections of the book also deserve attention for their fantastical undertones and preoccupation with death and the dead.

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While agreeing with other critical assessments that Radcliffe’s work is erratic and seriously flawed, argues that The Mysteries of Udolpho should not be dismissed completely because the novel has a definite emotional power that the unprejudiced reader can learn to appreciate.

Compares Emily St. Aubert, the heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho, with earlier heroines of the English novel, and finds that Emily is unique because “both the moral and material aspects of her ordeal are subordinated to the struggle which takes place within her mind.” Argues that the achievement of the novel is “the projection of the nonrational mentality into a total environment”; in this, Kiely asserts, Radcliffe “has succeeded in doing something new for the novel.”

Durant, David. “Ann Radcliffe and the Conservative Gothic.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 22, no. 3 (summer 1982): 519-30.

MacKenzie, Scott. “Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic Narrative and the Readers at Home.” Studies in the Novel 31, no. 4 (winter 1999): 409-31.

Insists that Radcliffe is not a forerunner of the Romantic movement in England. Her reactionary nature in the novels, Durant points out, can be seen in the way she rejected the chaos she perceived in contemporary life and advocated a return to the pastoral simplicity symbolized by the family circle.

Discusses Radcliffe’s Gothic style and its effects on the eighteenth-century public mind.

Epstein, Lynne. “Mrs. Radcliffe’s Landscapes: The Influence of Three Landscape Painters on Her Nature Descriptions.” Hartford Studies in Literature 1, no. 2 (1969): 10720. Explores the relationship between Radcliffe’s depiction of landscape and her acquaintance with three seventeenthcentury landscape painters: Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin. Fawcett, Mary Laughlin. “Udolpho’s Primal Mystery.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 23, no. 3 (summer 1983): 481-94. Explores the underlying sexual themes in The Mysteries of Udolpho, and theorizes that Gothic novels can be seen not just as escapist literature but, when viewed psychoanalytically, as symbolic explorations into thoughts and desires that are suppressed within the mind. Flaxman, Rhoda L. “Radcliffe’s Dual Modes of Vision.” In Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, edited by Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski, pp. 124-33. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986. Urges the recognition of Radcliffe’s work as innovative for its time, emphasizing the author’s descriptive skills and highlighting her particular techniques in painting a scene. Howells, Coral Ann. “Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho.” In Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction, pp. 28-61. London: Athlone Press, 1978. Analyzes the manner in which Radcliffe stimulates the imagination of her readers. According to Howell, Radcliffe uses her characters to reflect emotion and activate the reader’s “pattern of emotional association.” Concludes that Radcliffe always remains a separate presence in control of her narrative so that she can always be “manipulating her readers’ responses.” ———. “The Pleasure of the Woman’s Text: Ann Radcliffe’s Subtle Transgressions in The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian.” In Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, edited by Kenneth W. Graham, pp. 151-61. New York: AMS Press, 1989. Maintains that when the reader examines particular passages in The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian that do not appear to fit well within the rest of the narratives, a pattern evolves involving transgressions and the appropriateness of women’s feelings. Kiely, Robert. “The Mysteries of Udolpho: Ann Radcliffe.” In The Romantic Novel in England, pp. 65-80. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Miles, Robert. Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995, 201 p. Book-length study of Radcliffe’s life and works from a sociopolitical perspective, offering aesthetic and historical context. Moers, Ellen. “Traveling Heroinism: Gothic for Heroines.” In Literary Women, pp. 122-40. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1976. Emphasizes “a locus of heroinism” in Radcliffe’s Gothic fantasies, which later women “have turned to feminist purposes.” Recognizes the theme of the dangers of sensibility in Radcliffe’s work, and compares Radcliffe with Fanny Burney, noting similarities in their treatment of “the horrors of a woman’s life.” Murray, E. B. Ann Radcliffe. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972, 178 p. Overview of Radcliffe’s life and major works, and an evaluation of her literary legacy. Raleigh, Sir Walter. “The Revival of Romance.” In The English Novel: Being a Short Sketch of Its History from the Earliest Time to the Appearance of “Waverly.” Fifth edition, pp. 216-52. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911. Commends Radcliffe’s handling of suspense, fine use of romance conventions, and effective manipulation of scenery and sensation. In exhibiting these characteristics in her prose, Raleigh maintains, Radcliffe “anticipated and guided the poetry of the Romantic revival.” Sypher, Wylie. “Social Ambiguity in a Gothic Novel.” Partisan Review 12, no. 1 (1945): 50-60. Detects beneath the surface of Radcliffe’s work “a pattern of socioeconomic contradictions, paradoxes, ambivalences, and ambiguity that affords some criteria of the greater romantics and of British romanticism generally.” The principal ambiguity in The Mysteries of Udolpho, according to Sypher, lies between “aesthetic values and moral values.” Talfourd, Thomas Noon. “Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Radcliffe.” In Gaston de Blondeville; or, The Court of Henry III, Vol. I, by Ann Radcliffe, 1826. Reprint edition, pp. i.-cxxxii, New York: Arno Press, 1972. First memoir ever written about Radcliffe; prefixed to the posthumously published Gaston de Blondeville. Praises Radcliffe’s literary innovations, her “daring economy” in employing “instruments of fear,” and her excellent portrayal of scenery, but acknowledges her shortcomings in the area of characterization.

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———. Introduction to The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe, pp. vii-xxvi. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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Tompkins, J. M. S. “The Gothic Romance.” In The Popular Novel in England: 1770-1800. 1932. Reprint edition, pp. 243-95. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. States that Radcliffe’s novels are “unashamedly romantic, with no didactic intent,” and stresses that Radcliffe contributed to the development of the psychological novel in her analyses of fear, adding that many of her prose passages are unmatched in eighteenth-century fiction. Tooley, Brenda. “Gothic Utopia: Heretical Sanctuary in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian.” Utopian Studies 11, no. 2 (2000): 42-56. Asserts that “Radcliffe’s Gothic tale participates in a strategy whereby British Gothic writers situate their novels at a discreet distance (spatially and/or temporally) from current events while at the same time commenting upon political and familial questions sparked by the Revolutionary decade.”

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Woolf, Virginia. “Phases of Fiction.” In Granite and Rainbow: Essays, pp. 93-145. London: Hogarth Press, 1958. Essay originally published serially in The Bookman, New York, in 1929. Considers descriptive writing to be Radcliffe’s greatest talent, but argues that, because she is incapable of creating in her readers a mood which would make the mysteries believable, Radcliffe’s books are ultimately “stale, forced, unappetizing.”

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Radcliffe’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 39, 178; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; NineteenthCentury Literature Criticism, Vols. 6, 55, 106; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; Supernatural Fiction Writers; and World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3.

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ANNE RICE (1941 -)

(Born Howard Allen O’Brien; has also written under the pseudonyms Anne Rampling and A. N. Roquelaure) American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter.

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nne Rice is the best-selling author of mainstream Gothic fiction that centers on the alluring subjects of vampirism, occult demonology, and the supernatural. Her debut novel, Interview with the Vampire (1976), attracted a large popular audience and established her as a foremost contemporary author of horror fiction. Subsequent installments in the “Vampire Chronicles” series, including The Vampire Lestat (1985) and The Queen of the Damned (1988), fortified her reputation as a highly imaginative writer of macabre fantasy. Rice’s engaging novels are distinguished for their richly descriptive settings, provocative eroticism, and looming metaphysical concerns that reflect the precarious nature of religious faith and truth in the postmodern world. Her vampires, demons, and historical personages are typically dispossessed or alienated individuals who wrestle with existential questions of morality, religion, sex, and death. Though best known for her “Vampire Chronicles” and “Mayfair Witches” series, Rice has also published several successful historical novels, The Feast of All Saints (1980) and Cry to Heaven (1982), both of which feature exotic historical settings and social outcasts.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Rice was named Howard Allen after her postal worker father, Howard O’Brien, and mother, Katherine Allen O’Brien. As a child she disliked her first name so much that she changed it to Anne in grade school. The second of four sisters, Rice grew up in the blue-collar “Irish Channel” neighborhood of New Orleans. The Irish Channel borders the affluent Garden District of the city, and Rice has credited walking by the neighborhood’s opulent homes, conscious of her status as an outsider, as an influence on her life and work. Rice attended a Catholic church as a child, but she eventually rejected organized religion in her teenage years. After her mother’s death from health complications caused by alcoholism when Rice was fourteen, the family moved to Texas, where Rice met her high school sweetheart and husband, poet Stan Rice. They married in 1961 and shortly afterward moved to San Francisco, where their daughter, Michelle, was born. Rice initially attended Texas Women’s University but transferred to San Francisco State University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1964 and a Master of Arts in creative writing in 1971. She also took graduate classes at the University of California, Berkeley. When fiveyear-old Michelle died of leukemia in 1972, Rice and her husband began abusing alcohol as a means of escaping their grief, a destructive pattern that lasted several years. Rice found some measure

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of relief by writing Interview with the Vampire in only five weeks; the novel’s child-vampire character, Claudia, resembles Michelle in age and appearance. Two works of historical fiction, The Feast of All Saints and Cry to Heaven followed during the early 1980s before Rice returned to the subject of vampires. Her popularity soared with the 1985 publication of the second book in the “Vampire Chronicles” series, The Vampire Lestat, followed by The Queen of the Damned, a Literary Guild main selection in 1988, The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Memnoch the Devil (1995), and The Vampire Armand (1998). The popular “Mayfair Witches” series, comprised of The Witching Hour (1990), a Book-of-the-Month selection, Lasher (1993), and Taltos (1994), added to her popularity and incredible commercial success. Rice also adapted Interview with the Vampire into the screenplay for the 1994 film version of the novel that starred Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Rice returned to New Orleans in 1988, purchasing a mansion in the Garden District, which serves as the setting for her books about the Mayfair Witches. Following the death of her husband in 2002, Rice decided to discontinue writing about vampires, and announced to her fans in January, 2004, that she was selling her homes in New Orleans and moving to an anonymous suburban address. Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles” novel series has been adapted as Lestat, a stage musical with music by Elton John, lyrics by Bernie Taupin, and book by Linda Woolverton.

MAJOR WORKS Rice’s fiction revolves around the experiences of outsiders and misfits in society, questions of atheism and agnosticism, and themes of power and submission. Often including supernatural characters and plotting, Rice’s work is noted for its darkness, eroticism, and evocation of setting and historical detail. In Interview with the Vampire, a vampire named Louis relates his life story and adventures to a reporter who records their session. Recalling his transformation into a vampire in 1790 at age twenty-five, Louis describes his first kill and evolving relationships with Lestat, his maker, and Claudia, a child-vampire whom they created together. Unlike Claudia and Lestat who revel in murderous bloodshed, Louis is tormented by a moral dilemma—he believes it is wrong to kill, but he must kill to survive. An ensuing power struggle between Louis and Lestat results in Lestat’s second death, for which Louis is imprisoned in the Theatre des Vampires, a coven of

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vampires in Paris. After burning the Theatre and escaping with Armand, an older vampire who mentors him, Louis returns to New Orleans where he lives as an outcast. As in much Gothic fiction, underlying themes of homoeroticism and incest are prevalent throughout the novel. Rice also examines religious beliefs by comparing Louis, who tries and fails to construct his own moral framework, to his brother, a devout Roman Catholic. In the sequel, The Vampire Lestat, Lestat awakes from a moribund slumber in the year 1980, and becomes a leather clad rock star. Presented as an autobiographic account, the novel traces the origins and history of vampirism through ancient, medieval, and modern history. The story concludes as Lestat performs in San Francisco to an audience of vampires who prepare to kill him for revealing their secrets in his published autobiography and lyrics. A continuation of the previous novel, The Queen of the Damned involves Akasha, mother of all vampires, whose scheme to institute world peace involves exterminating most of the male population and founding an empire governed by women. In The Tale of the Body Thief Lestat contemplates suicide and eventually agrees to exchange his body with a mortal to temporarily escape his relentless ennui. Lestat must relearn mortal habits and a desperate chase follows after his counterpart disappears with his immortal body. Rice grapples with a shift in her personal philosophy from atheism to uncertainty about God’s existence in Memnoch the Devil, in which Lestat converses with God and the Devil and tours Hell before deciding whether to join forces with the Devil. In The Vampire Armand, the sixth installment of the “Vampire Chronicles,” Rice resurrects the title character, who earlier succumbed to a lethal dose of sunlight. Armand recollects his apprenticeship to Marius De Romanus in sixteenth-century Venice and subsequent rise as head of a Parisian vampire clan. Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles” series created a legion of devoted fans who enthusiastically purchased each new book and thronged The Anne Rice Collection, the author’s New Orleans retail shop that sold everything from clothing and fragrances to dolls based on her fictional characters. While Rice’s popularity showed no sign of waning, following the death of her husband in 2002 the author announced that she was done with vampires, citing a desire to write something different, to create characters who were not damned or condemned. Blood Canticle (2003) was the last volume in the “Vampire Chronicles” series.

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Rice combined her interest in history with her exploration of social exiles by writing two historical novels. The Feast of All Saints enters the world of the gens de couleur, the group of free mulattoes who lived in antebellum New Orleans. The story focuses on the experiences of siblings Marcel and Marie, whose distinctive golden skin prohibits their full acceptance within either black or white society. Cry to Heaven centers upon the life of an eighteenth-century Italian castrati, a male singer who is castrated as a boy to preserve his high voice. The protagonist, Tonio Treschi, attempts to fulfill his desire to become one of the greatest opera singers in Europe while plotting revenge on his brother for treacherously having him castrated and exiled. Both books focus on characters who, like Rice’s vampires and witches, exist on the fringes of mainstream society without being accepted by it. Rice also explored her fascination with sadomasochism by writing a pseudonymous series of pornographic novels—The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983), Beauty’s Punishment (1984), and Beauty’s Release (1985) as A. N. Roquelaure and Exit to Eden (1985) and Belinda (1986) as Anne Rampling.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Most critics recognize Rice’s remarkable talent for constructing page-turning plots, evoking a sense of place—particularly when writing about her native New Orleans—and creating whole new universes peopled by supernatural characters. She is widely praised for rejuvenating the hackneyed genre of vampire fiction with her intelligent, ambitious novels. Rice’s novels are also noted for their appealing eroticism and have attracted the interest of readers who identify with the themes

of alienation depicted in the underground culture of vampire society. Though some critics appreciate Rice’s philosophical musings on immortality and incorporation of occult history in her novels, others find her writing verbose, implausible, and clichéd. Some dismiss her otherworldly subject matter and frequent erotic descriptions as unworthy of serious literary effort. Commentators studying Gothic elements of Rice’s works have emphasized particularly how she transforms traditional vampire fiction by creating monsters with whom readers can sympathize, and even identify. Martin J. Wood has asserted that “Rice’s works force a jarring revision of our understanding of vampire mythology and, finally, of ourselves.” Critics have also examined Rice’s contemporary treatment of traditionally Gothic themes and conventions— particularly her explorations of the darker side of society, psychology, and culture—and have noted how her works remain true to the tradition while expressing modern concerns and sensibilities. Edward J. Ingebretsen assesses Rice’s exploration of religious issues, declaring that “[t]heological disputation . . . remains a traditionally gothic activity, and nowhere is it more in evidence than in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.” Lynda and Robert Haas (see Further Reading) contend that “there is no contemporary writer with stronger ties to the Gothic tradition than Anne Rice.”

PRINCIPAL WORKS Interview with the Vampire (novel) 1976 The Feast of All Saints (novel) 1980 Cry to Heaven (novel) 1982 The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty [as A. N. Roquelaure] (novel) 1983 Beauty’s Punishment [as A. N. Roquelaure] (novel) 1984 Beauty’s Release: The Continued Erotic Adventures of Sleeping Beauty [as A. N. Roquelaure] (novel) 1985 Exit to Eden [as Anne Rampling] (novel) 1985 The Vampire Lestat (novel) 1985 Belinda [as Anne Rampling] (novel) 1986 The Queen of the Damned (novel) 1988 The Mummy; or, Ramses the Damned (novel) 1989 The Witching Hour (novel) 1990 The Tale of the Body Thief (novel) 1992

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The “Mayfair Witches” series features Rowan Mayfair, scion of a matrilineal old New Orleans family whose members possess supernatural gifts and have been shadowed through time by a mysterious entity named Lasher. These books are characterized by intricate plotting, cliffhanger endings, and frequent flashbacks that tell the story of the Mayfair family’s entanglement with Lasher over hundreds of years. The Mummy (1989) takes place in London, where young Julie Stratford falls in love with the reanimated mummy of Pharaoh Ramses III, who possesses the secret elixir of life. Julie and Ramses travel to Egypt where Ramses revives a murderous Cleopatra. In Servant of the Bones (1996), the genie Azriel fights the attempts of a demented millionaire to commit genocide on the population of the Third World.

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Lasher (novel) 1993 Interview with the Vampire [adaptor; from her novel] (screenplay) 1994 Taltos (novel) 1994 Memnoch the Devil (novel) 1995 Servant of the Bones (novel) 1996 Violin (novel) 1997 The Vampire Armand (novel) 1998 Vittorio the Vampire (novel) 1999 Merrick (novel) 2000 Blood and Gold (novel) 2001 Blackwood Farm (novel) 2002 Blood Canticle (novel) 2003

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR ANGELA CARTER ON RICE’S SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

Anne Rice is self-conscious in a way that antique masters of the genre—Bram Stoker, Lovecraft, even Poe—were not, and contemporaries such as Clive Barker and Stephen King are, well, too repressed to be. SOURCE: Carter, Angela. “The Curse of Ancient Egypt.” New Statesman & Society (1 September 1989): 31-2.

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TITLE COMMENTARY Interview with the Vampire

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FROM THE AUTHOR RICE ON HER FEARS

I think all my writing has been part of a battle with my fears. When I write, I explore my worst fears and then take my protagonist right into awful situations that I myself am terrified by. And I think that the act of putting all that fear and terror and confusion into an orderly, plotted story has been very therapeutic for me. It definitely helps me to continue through life. Obviously I’m obsessed with death. I’m not obsessed, per se, with pain and suffering. I actually try not to write about it, surprisingly enough. And so even though my books are supposed to be bloody and horrible, there is a shrinking from this. Or at least there’s a terrible moral dilemma there. I mean, I have to write about pain, obviously— the pain that other people have suffered and pain I’d be afraid to suffer myself. I feel very driven to do it, and it clearly helps me. I only hope that it’s in such a framework that it does not simply add to the horror of someone else. SOURCE: Rice, Anne, with Mikal Gilmore. “The Devil and Anne Rice.” Rolling Stone (13-27 July 1995): 92-4, 97-8.

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FURTHER READING Criticism Doane, Janice Devon Hodges. “Undoing Feminism: From the Preoedipal to Postfeminism in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles.” American Literary History 2, no. 3 (fall 1990): 422-42. Asserts that “Anne Rice’s massively popular vampire books . . . provide a useful way of beginning to explore the difficulties of the feminist attempt to represent the mother through the language of the preoedipal.” Haas, Lynda and Robert Haas. “Living with(out) Boundaries: The Novels of Anne Rice.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, pp. 55-67. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Contends that “there is no contemporary writer with stronger ties to the Gothic tradition than Anne Rice . . . Rice has consistently and successfully combined many of the Gothic conventions initiated by Horace Walpole . . . with her own unique style and with the concerns of postmodern philosophy.” Hoppenstand, Gary, and Ray B. Browne, eds. The Gothic World of Anne Rice. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996, 261 p. Comprehensive collection of essays studying Rice’s works within the context of the Gothic tradition. Kemppainen, Tatja. “Your Heart Bleeds for Me: Finding the Essential Human in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.” Moderna Språk 94, no. 2 (2000): 122-36. Compares Rice’s treatment of the vampire in Interview with the Vampire and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s treatment of the superman in Also sprach Zarathustra, and examines Rice’s novel in terms of the theories of Sigmund Freud. Roberts, Bette B. Anne Rice. New York: Twayne, 1994, 173 p. Book-length study of Rice’s life and works. Rout, Kathleen. “Who Do You Love? Anne Rice’s Vampires and Their Moral Transition.” Journal of Popular Culture 36, no. 3 (winter 2003): 473-79.

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Tomc, Sandra. “Dieting and Damnation: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.” English Studies in Canada 22, no. 4 (December 1997): 441-60. Surveys the cultural significance of female body image, androgyny, and self-abnegation in Interview with the Vampire. Waxman, Barbara Frey. “Postexistentialism in the NeoGothic Mode: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.” Mosaic 25, no. 3 (summer 1992): 79-97. Explores the confluence of existential philosophy, postmodernism, and Gothic fiction in Interview with the Vampire and subsequent Rice novels.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Rice’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: American Writers Supplement, Vol. 7; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. 9, 53; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 3; Bestsellers, Vol. 89:2; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 65-68; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 12, 36, 53, 74, 100, 133; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 41, 128; Contemporary Novelists, Ed. 7; Contemporary Popular Writers; Contemporary Southern Writers; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 292; DISCovering Authors Modules: Popular Fiction and Genre Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Gay & Lesbian Literature, Ed. 2; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Ed. 2; Major 21st-Century Writers; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; and Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 2.

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Maintains that “over the years” Rice’s “moral neutrality toward a murderous but fascinating group of creatures has gradually evolved into a non-violent endorsement of global peace between vampires and human beings.”

SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771 - 1832)

(Also wrote under the pseudonym Jedediah Cleishbotham) Scottish novelist, poet, short story writer, biographer, historian, critic, and editor.

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n immensely popular writer of both poetry and fiction during his lifetime, Scott exerted a profound influence on early nineteenth-century European literature. Modern scholars consider him both the inventor of the historical novel and the first best-selling novelist. As the anonymous and enormously prolific “Author of Waverley,” Scott not only elevated the novel to a status equal to that of poetry but also influenced the way history has been written and understood by subsequent generations of historians and novelists. Despite the unprecedented success of his novels and poetry, Scott’s literary reputation and popularity underwent one of the most pronounced reversals in the history of English literature following his death. Today his poetry is largely ignored, although his novels continue to attract the attention of literary historians. Among the many areas of continued scholarly interest in Scott’s fiction, substantial notice has been paid to the Gothic qualities his novels and short stories. Even though Scott urged his readers to distinguish Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814) and the subsequent series of Waverley Novels from tales of Gothic horror, modern scholars have observed that these

works nevertheless exhibit numerous affinities to the Gothic literary mode. Scott’s fiction, which makes broad use of historical and frequently medieval settings, alludes to the mysterious workings of fate and the supernatural, and often depicts violent clashes between romantic and modern sensibilities, is routinely cited for its substantial exploitation of these and other Gothic themes and devices.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Scott was born in Edinburgh to middle-class parents, the fourth surviving child of Walter Scott and Anne Rutherford. At the age of two, he suffered an attack of polio that rendered him lame for the rest of his life. In spite of his illness, however, Scott led an active outdoor life during his childhood and developed an appreciation for the picturesque scenery that later figured so prominently in his writings. He enrolled in Edinburgh High School in 1778 and five years later entered the University of Edinburgh, studying history and law. In 1786, he was apprenticed to his father’s legal firm and was called to the bar in 1792. While serving his apprenticeship, Scott traveled extensively in the Scottish Border country and Highlands, where he delighted in the natural settings and rural inhabitants. In 1800 he was able to combine his love for Scottish lore and literature with his ongoing excursions into the countryside

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as he started collecting and editing ballads for his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-03). Although the work produced only modest sales when published, the collection enjoyed critical favor. The positive reception of the Minstrelsy and the encouragement of his friends prompted Scott to attempt an original work based on Scottish themes. His efforts resulted in The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805). The success of this work when it appeared was immediate and substantial. Determined to earn a living through his writings, Scott gave up the law as a full-time profession and, beginning in 1808 with Marmion, published a series of highly popular and remunerative poems with Scottish backgrounds and themes, including what is perhaps his bestknown long poem, The Lady of the Lake (1810). From this time, Scott’s expenditures increased as quickly as his income, and many critics and biographers have tied his enormous output directly to a desire for material gain. Scott had purchased a farm in 1811 and, after renaming the property Abbotsford, began devoting huge sums of money to building, planting, and collecting relics from Scotland’s past. Thus, though his income was large, his financial situation was often precarious. By the time Rokeby appeared in 1813, readers were also beginning to lose interest in his poetry. In addition, the triumph of the first two cantos of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold in 1812 had convinced Scott that he could not compete with the younger poet. Anxious to retain his audience and large income, Scott decided to revise and complete a fragment of a novel that he had begun ten years before. Waverley proved a popular sensation when published in 1814. Considered the first historical novel, Waverley quickly became the most successful work of its kind ever to appear, and brought huge profits to Scott and his publishers. Buoyed by his first venture as a novelist, Scott began writing at a rapid pace, and over the next seventeen years produced more than two dozen novels and tales in a series that has since become known as the Waverley Novels. He was able to maintain his prolific output not only because he never plotted his works ahead of time and seldom revised his manuscripts, but also because he maintained strenuous work habits even when gravely ill. Because at the time writing novels was perceived as less respectful than writing poetry, Scott had published Waverley anonymously. When the success of Waverley increased the public’s appreciation for novelists, he nevertheless chose to retain his anonymity for many years, a practice his biographers have traced both to his love of secrecy

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and to his perception that the mystery surrounding the novels contributed to their sales. Many of the novels were published as “by the Author of Waverley,” and he was often referred to simply as the “Great Unknown.” Despite his policy of anonymous publication, numerous readers and critics knew of his authorship; he became the most popular writer in contemporary English literature and a highly respected and admired figure throughout Europe. In 1818 he accepted a baronetcy, becoming Sir Walter Scott. In 1826, disaster struck when a publishing house in which he was a silent partner failed. Instead of choosing to declare bankruptcy, Scott arranged to work off the debt through his writings. The remainder of his life was devoted to the increasingly difficult task of producing saleable works in a variety of genres. Beginning in 1830 he suffered a series of strokes as he labored to pay his creditors. A trip to the Mediterranean in 1831 to regain his health proved unsuccessful, and after experiencing further strokes and paralysis he died at Abbotsford in 1832.

MAJOR WORKS A prolific writer of both poetry and prose, Scott enjoyed astounding popular success as a writer in both these genres during a literary career that roughly spanned the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Among his earliest poetic collections, the three-volume Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border contains numerous Scottish ballads that had never before appeared in print, as well as imitated ballads written by Scott and others. His The Lay of the Last Minstrel is an original poem set in medieval times that, in Scott’s words, was “intended to illustrate the customs and manners which anciently prevailed on the borders of England and Scotland.” The work launched his career as a poet, and was followed by several more narrative pieces crafted in the same spirit. Scott’s first novel Waverley; or,’Tis Sixty Years Since, features the tale of an Englishman who travels to the Scottish Highlands and becomes caught up in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Waverley spawned more than twenty similar works of historical fiction, collectively known as the Waverley Novels. In these stories, most of which describe the lives of ordinary individuals who become involved in great historical events, Scott presented in lavish detail the speech, manners, and customs of past ages. In studying these works, critics have often divided them into three groups. The first, the so-called “Scotch Novels,” are stories that evoke the declin-

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While many of the Waverley Novels feature hints of the supernatural, Scott generally relegated his literary depiction of the inexplicable and otherworldly to his short fiction. Among these works, the collection Chronicles of the Canongate (1827) includes two darkly pessimistic short stories. The first of these, called “The Highland Widow,” is a tale that dramatizes the passing of the old Scotch way of life in the death of a widow’s son, apparently caused by the supernatural power of a fatal curse. In the second story, “The Two Drovers,” a misunderstanding coupled with the strange and tragic workings of fate leads to the murder of an English cattleman by a Scottish drover, and eventually to the Highlander’s execution for his crime. Another collection of short fiction, The Keepsake for 1829 (1828) includes Scott’s ghost story “The Tapestried Chamber; or, The Lady in the Sacque,” and a tale of sorcery, “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror,” featuring a magical mirror that

allows gazers to witness important events as they transpire miles away. Further evidence of Scott’s interest in the supernatural is located in his critical writings, notably in his late study of folk superstitions entitled Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830).

CRITICAL RECEPTION The novelty of Scott’s writing style and subject matter captivated his early audience; in fact, his writings created a vogue for Scottish culture and even led to an increase in tourism in Scotland. Many contemporary critics, however, have agreed that Scott’s poetry and novels reveal glaring deficiencies, including careless construction, prolixity, and bad grammar. Yet most early reviewers acknowledged the superiority of his novels, arguing that their originality, vivid portrayal of history, and lively characters outweighed their faults. Scott’s ability to bring Scottish and English history to life—to capture the language, costumes, and settings of the past—as well as his understanding of the effects of social change upon the lives of ordinary people, were entirely new contributions to English fiction. To many early Victorians, Scott was a heroic figure whose exemplary life and courageous struggle to pay his debts were reflected in the morally irreproachable qualities of his works. Yet certain critics, prominent among them Thomas Carlyle, felt that Scott’s life should not be confused with his works, which were shallow, lacking in true passion, and written largely for material gain. As the nineteenth century progressed, the increasingly sophisticated design and self-conscious art of the novel as practiced by such writers as George Eliot and Henry James caused numerous commentators to deride the disorganized plots and intellectual superficiality of Scott’s fiction. Although his admirers countered by praising his enduring appeal as a storyteller and the entertainment value of the Waverley Novels, by the turn of the century many critics maintained that Scott could no longer be considered a major English novelist. His readership as well as his critical stock had been declining since mid century, and while the second half of the twentieth century would show mounting scholarly interest in his works, Scott, a writer who in his own day had been compared with William Shakespeare, would eventually be described by W. E. K. Anderson as the “Great Unread.” Nevertheless, twentieth-century critics have emphasized Scott’s important role in literary history. Scholars have traced his influence on the

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ing feudal culture of the Scottish Highlands prior to Scotland’s absorption into Great Britain. They include Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816), and Old Mortality (1816), as well as two novels set during the Jacobite uprising of 1715, Rob Roy (1818) and The Heart of Midlothian (1818), followed by The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), The Legend of Montrose (1819), and Redgauntlet: A Tale of the Eighteenth Century (1824). The second group features works concerned with medieval history in England and Europe, including such novels as Ivanhoe (1820), set during the reign of King John and depicting the figure of Locksley (better known as Robin Hood), Quentin Durward (1823) and Anne of Geierstein; or, The Maiden of the Mist (1829). Works placed in the third category are those focused on the Tudor-Stuart era in England, including Kenilworth (1821), which plays out among the intrigues of the Elizabethan court, The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Peveril of the Peak (1822), and Woodstock; or, the Cavalier (1826), the last two set during the seventeenth-century English Civil War. Other novels by Scott particularly noted for their use of mystery, the uncanny, and other Gothic literary conventions include The Black Dwarf (1816), featuring a deformed, enigmatic hero who hides his identity until the end of the novel, The Pirate (1822), set in the remote Orkney islands in 1700 and detailing a struggle between two half-brothers, the pirate Cleveland and his rival Mordaunt, St. Ronan’s Well (1824), also depicting a brutal rivalry between half-brothers but set in early nineteenth-century Scotland, and Castle Dangerous (1832), concerned with the excesses of the late medieval chivalric code.

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masterpieces of novelists as diverse as Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Commentators have also explored Scott’s significant contribution—through his invention and development of the historical novel—to the history of ideas, specifically with respect to the modern concept of historical perspective. Modern studies of the Waverley Novels have consistently stressed the superiority of the “Scotch Novels” over the rest, and critics have given particular attention to The Heart of Midlothian, often considered his finest novel. Scott’s works have attracted increasing scholarly notice since the general proliferation of English literary scholarship that began in the 1950s, and recent commentators have explored such specific aspects of his novels as his passive heroes and his portrayal of the Middle Ages. Contemporary scholars studying the relationship of Scott’s fiction to the Gothic tradition have found numerous points of contact, despite the writer’s efforts to distance himself from this literary mode he frequently disparaged. Among them, Marilyn Orr (see Further Reading) has explored the generic conflict between romance and Gothic in The Pirate and St. Ronan’s Well. Concentrating on motifs of doubling and repetition in these novels, Orr characterizes the former work as a romance that strives toward a synthetic unification of opposites, while assessing the latter as a thoroughly Gothic work symbolically focused on the subversion and dominance of the double. Fiona Robertson has concentrated on Scott’s extensive use of such Gothic devices as deferral, detachment, and denial in his Waverley Novels, particularly in The Pirate, Rob Roy, and Peveril of the Peak, viewing these as works that foreground a sense of mystery, secrecy, and anxiety in a resoundingly Gothic manner. Other critics have traced the extensive use of Gothic motifs in Scott’s collected fiction, particularly in his Waverley Novels. Such tropes as the delayed disclosure of a central narrative mystery, an evocation of dread and emotional anxiety caused by threats of violence or imprisonment, and a use of the uncanny and supernatural, often through reference to terrifying ghostly apparitions or in allusions to superstitious beliefs and nefarious secret societies, are common features throughout these works. Likewise, Scott’s interest in fatalist themes, his medieval settings, romantic characterizations, and occasional use of the supernatural in both his novels and short fiction strongly recall the English Gothic mode in transition from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. And, while Scott’s im-

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mensely popular works have now largely become the concern of literary specialists, such studies have reaffirmed Scott’s status as a crucial figure in the development of the English novel and a seminal influence on nineteenth-century European literature.

PRINCIPAL WORKS The Eve of Saint John (poetry) 1800 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. 3 vols. [editor and contributor] (poetry) 1802-03 The Lay of the Last Minstrel (ballad) 1805 Ballads and Lyrical Pieces (poetry) 1807 Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (poetry) 1808 The Lady of the Lake (poetry) 1810 The Vision of Don Roderick (poetry) 1811 The Bridal of Triermain; or, the Vale of St. John (poetry) 1813 Rokeby: A Poem (poetry) 1813 Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. 3 vols. (novel) 1814 The Field of Waterloo (poetry) 1815 Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer (novel) 1815 The Lord of the Isles (poetry) 1815 The Antiquary (novel) 1816 *The Black Dwarf (novel) 1816 *Old Mortality (novel) 1816 Harold the Dauntless (poetry) 1817 *The Heart of Midlothian (novel) 1818 Rob Roy (novel) 1818 *The Bride of Lammermoor (novel) 1819 *The Legend of Montrose (novel) 1819 The Abbot (novel) 1820 Ivanhoe (novel) 1820 Miscellaneous Poems (poetry) 1820 The Monastery (novel) 1820 Kenilworth (novel) 1821 The Fortunes of Nigel (novel) 1822 Peveril of the Peak (novel) 1822 The Pirate (novel) 1822 Quentin Durward (novel) 1823

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St. Ronan’s Well (novel) 1824 †Tales of the Crusaders (novels) 1825 Woodstock; or, The Cavalier: A Tale of the Year Sixteen Hundred and Fifty-One (novel) 1826 ‡Chronicles of the Canongate (short stories) 1827 ‡Chronicles of the Canongate. Second Series. (novel) 1828 §The Keepsake for 1829 (short stories) 1828 Anne of Geierstein; or, The Maiden of the Mist (novel) 1829 Waverley Novels. 48 vols. (novels) 1829-33 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (nonfiction) 1830 *Castle Dangerous (novel) 1832 *Count Robert of Paris (novel) 1832 The Miscellaneous Works of Sir Walter Scott. 30 vols. (biographies, travel essays, history, and criticism) 1870-71 The Journal of Sir Walter Scott (journal) 1890 The Waverley Novels. 25 vols. (novels) 1892-94 The Complete Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott. 5 vols. (poetry) 1894 The Letters of Sir Walter Scott. 12 vols. (letters) 1932-37 *

† ‡

§

These works were written under the pseudonym Jedediah Cleishbotham and originally published in the four series of Tales of My Landlord, Collected and Arranged by Jedediah Cleishbotham, Schoolmaster and Parish-Clerk of Gandercleugh. Comprised of the novels The Betrothed and The Talisman. The first series of this work consists of the short stories “The Highland Widow,” “The Surgeon’s Daughter,” and “The Two Drovers.” The second series contains the novel St. Valentine’s Day; or, The Fair Maid of Perth. This collection includes the short stories “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror,” “The Tapestried Chamber; or, The Lady in the Sacque,” and “The Laird’s Jock.”

PRIMARY SOURCES SIR WALTER SCOTT (POEM DATE 1799) SOURCE: Scott, Sir Walter. “The Erl-King’s Daughter.” In An Apology for Tales of Terror, pp. 73-6. Printed at the Mail Office: Kelso, 1799. In the following poem, Scott offers a companion piece to his translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Der Erlkonig” (“The Erl-King”), collected in the same volume.

O’ER hills and through forests Sir Oluf he wends, To bid to his wedding relations and friends: ’Tis late, and arriving where sports the elf-band, The Erl-King’s proud daughter presents him her hand.

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Redgauntlet: A Tale of the Eighteenth Century (novel) 1824

“Now welcome, Sir Oluf! Oh! welcome to me! “Come, enter our circle my partner to be.” “Fair lady, nor can I dance with you, nor may: “To-morrow I marry, to-night must away.” “Now listen, Sir Oluf! Oh! listen to me! “Two spurs of fine steel will I give unto thee; “A shirt too of satin receive as thy boon, “Which my Queen-mother bleach’d in the light of the moon. “Then yield thee, Sir Oluf! Oh! yield thee to me, “And enter our circle my partner to be.” “Fair lady, nor can I dance with you, nor may: “To-morrow I marry, to-night must away.” “Now listen, Sir Oluf! Oh! listen to me! “An helmet of gold will I give unto thee.” “An helmet of gold would I willingly take, “But I will not dance with you for Urgola’s sake.” “And deigns not Sir Oluf my partner to be? “Then curses and sickness I give unto thee; “Then curses and sickness thy steps shall pursue: “Now hence to thy lady, thou lover so true!” Thus said she, and laid her charm’d hand on his heart; Oh! never Sir Oluf had felt such a smart! Swift spurr’d he his steed till he reach’d his own door, And there stood his mother the castle before. “Now riddle me, Oluf, and riddle me right, “Why look’st thou, my dearest, so wan and so white?” “How should I not, mother, look wan and look white? “I have seen the Erl-King’s cruel daughter tonight. “She cursed me, her hand to my bosom she prest: “Death followed the touch, and now tortures my breast: “She cursed me, and said—To thy lady now ride! “But ne’er shall my lips kiss the lips of my bride!” “Now riddle me, Oluf, and what shall I say, “When here comes the lady so fair and so gay?” “Oh! say, I am gone for a while to the wood, “To prove if my hounds and my courser be good.” Scarce dead was Sir Oluf, and scarce shone the day, When in came the lady, so fair and so gay, And in came her father, and in came each guest, Whom the hapless Sir Oluf had bade to the feast.

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They drank the red wine, and they ate the good cheer, “Oh! where is Sir Oluf? Oh! where is my dear?” “Sir Oluf is gone for a while to the wood, “To prove if his hounds and his courser be good.” Then trembled the lady so fair and so gay: She eyed the black curtain, she drew it away: But soon from her bosom for ever life fled, For there lay Sir Oluf, pale, breathless, and dead.

SIR WALTER SCOTT (STORY DATE 1828) SOURCE: Scott, Sir Walter. “The Tapestried Chamber.” In The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, chosen by Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert, pp. 1-12. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. The following excerpt is from a short story first collected in The Keepsake of 1829, published in late 1828.

‘My dear lord,’ he at length said, ‘what happened to me last night is of nature so peculiar and so unpleasant, that I could hardly bring myself to detail it even to your lordship, were it not that, independent of my wish to gratify any request of yours, I think that sincerity on my part may lead to some explanation about a circumstance equally painful and mysterious. To others, the communications I am about to make, might place me in the light of a weak-minded, superstitious fool who suffered his own imagination to delude and bewilder him; but you have known me in childhood and youth, and will not suspect me of having adopted in manhood the feelings and frailties from which my early years were free.’ Here he paused, and his friend replied: ‘Do not doubt my perfect confidence in the truth of your communication, however strange it may be,’ replied Lord Woodville; ‘I know your firmness of disposition too well, to suspect you could be made the object of imposition, and am aware that your honour and your friendship will equally deter you from exaggerating whatever you may have witnessed.’ ‘Well then,’ said the general, ‘I will proceed with my story as well as I can, relying upon your candour; and yet distinctly feeling that I would rather face a battery than recall to my mind the odious recollections of last night.’ He paused a second time, and then perceiving that Lord Woodville remained silent and in an attitude of attention, he commenced, though not without obvious reluctance, the history of his night’s adventures in the Tapestried Chamber.

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‘I undressed and went to bed, so soon as your lordship left me yesterday evening; but the wood in the chimney, which nearly fronted my bed, blazed brightly and cheerfully, and, aided by a hundred exciting recollections of my childhood and youth which had been recalled by the unexpected pleasure of meeting your lordship, prevented me from falling immediately asleep. I ought, however, to say, that these reflections were all of a pleasant and agreeable kind, grounded on a sense of having for a time exchanged the labour, fatigues, and dangers of my profession, for the enjoyments of a peaceful life, and the reunion of those friendly and affectionate ties which I had torn asunder at the rude summons of war. ‘While such pleasing reflections were stealing over my mind, and gradually lulling me to slumber, I was suddenly aroused by a sound like that of the rustling of a silken gown, and the tapping of a pair of high-heeled shoes, as if a woman were walking in the apartment. Ere I could draw the curtain to see what the matter was, the figure of a little woman passed between the bed and the fire. The back of this form was turned to me, and I could observe, from the shoulders and neck, it was that of an old woman, whose dress was an old-fashioned gown which, I think, ladies call a sacque; that is, a sort of robe, completely loose in the body, but gathered into broad plaits upon the neck and shoulders, which fall down to the ground, and terminate in a species of train. ‘I thought the intrusion singular enough, but never harboured for a moment the idea that what I saw was anything more than the mortal form of some old woman about the establishment, who had a fancy to dress like her grandmother, and who, having perhaps (as your lordship mentioned that you were rather straitened for room) been dislodged from her chamber for my accommodation, had forgotten the circumstance, and returned by twelve to her old haunt. Under this persuasion I moved myself in bed and coughed a little, to make the intruder sensible of my being in possession of the premises.—She turned slowly round, but gracious heaven! my lord, what a countenance did she display to me! There was no longer any question what she was, or any thought of her being a living being. Upon a face which wore the fixed features of a corpse, were imprinted the traces of the vilest and most hideous passions which had animated her while she lived. The body of some atrocious criminal seemed to have been given up from the grave, and the soul restored from the penal fire, in order to form, for a space, a

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Here General Browne stopped, and wiped from his brow the cold perspiration with which the recollection of his horrible vision had covered it. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I am no coward. I have been in all the mortal dangers incidental to my profession, and I may truly boast that no man ever knew Richard Browne dishonour the sword he wears; but in these horrible circumstances, under the eyes, and as it seemed, almost in the grasp of an incarnation of an evil spirit, all firmness forsook me, all manhood melted from me like wax in the furnace, and I felt my hair individually bristle. The current of my life-blood ceased to flow, and I sank back in a swoon, as very a victim to panic terror as ever was a village girl or a child of ten years old. How long I lay in this condition I cannot pretend to guess. ‘But I was roused by the castle clock striking one, so loud that it seemed as if it were in the very room. It was some time before I dared open my eyes, lest they should again encounter the horrible spectacle. When, however, I summoned courage to look up, she was no longer visible. My first idea was to pull my bell, wake the servants, and remove to a garret or a hay-loft, to be ensured against a second visitation. Nay, I will confess the truth, that my resolution was altered, not by the shame of exposing myself, but by the very fear that, as the bell-cord hung by the chimney, I might, in making my way to it, be again crossed by the fiendish hag, who, I figured to myself, might be still lurking about some corner of the apartment. ‘I will not pretend to describe what hot and cold fever-fits tormented me for the rest of the night, through broken sleep, weary vigils, and that dubious state which forms the neutral ground between them. A hundred terrible objects appeared to haunt me; but there was the great difference betwixt the vision which I have described,

and those which followed, that I knew the last to be deceptions of my own fancy and over-excited nerves. ‘Day at last appeared, and I rose from my bed ill in health, and humiliated in mind. I was ashamed of myself as a man and a soldier, and still more so, at feeling my own extreme desire to escape from the haunted apartment, which, however, conquered all other considerations; so that, huddling on my clothes with the most careless haste, I made my escape from your lordship’s mansion, to seek in the open air some relief to my nervous system, shaken as it was by this horrible rencounter with a visitant, for such I must believe her, from the other world. Your lordship has now heard the cause of my discomposure, and of my sudden desire to leave your hospitable castle. In other places I trust we may often meet; but God protect me from ever spending a second night under that roof!’ Strange as the general’s tale was, he spoke with such a deep air of conviction, that it cut short all the usual commentaries which are made on such stories. Lord Woodville never once asked him if he was sure he did not dream of the apparition, or suggested any of the possibilities by which it is fashionable to explain supernatural appearances, as wild vagaries of the fancy or deceptions of the optic nerves. On the contrary he seemed deeply impressed with the truth and reality of what he had heard; and, after a considerable pause, regretted, with much appearance of sincerity, that his early friend should in his house have suffered so severely. ‘I am the more sorry for your pain, my dear Browne,’ he continued, ‘that it is the unhappy, though most unexpected, result of an experiment of my own! You must know, that for my father and grandfather’s time, at least, the apartment which was assigned to you last night had been shut on account of reports that it was disturbed by supernatural sights and noises. When I came, a few weeks since, into possession of the estate, I thought the accommodation which the castle afforded for my friends was not extensive enough to permit the inhabitants of the invisible world to retain possession of a comfortable sleeping apartment. I therefore caused the Tapestried Chamber, as we call it, to be opened; and without destroying its air of antiquity, I had such new articles of furniture placed in it as became the modern times. Yet as the opinion that the room was haunted very strongly prevailed among the domestics, and was also known in the neighbourhood and to many

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union with the ancient accomplice of its guilt. I started up in bed, and sat upright, supporting myself on my palms, as I gazed on this horrible spectre. The hag made, as it seemed, a single and swift stride to the bed where I lay, and squatted herself down upon it, in precisely the same attitude which I had assumed in the extremity of horror, advancing her diabolical countenance within half a yard of mine, with a grin which seemed to intimate the malice and the derision of an incarnate fiend.’

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of my friends, I feared some prejudice might be entertained by the first occupant of the Tapestried Chamber, which might tend to revive the evil report which it had laboured under, and so disappoint my purpose of rendering it a useful part of the house. I must confess, my dear Browne, that your arrival yesterday, agreeable to me for a thousand reasons besides, seemed the most favourable opportunity of removing the unpleasant rumours which attached to the room, since your courage was indubitable and your mind free of any preoccupation on the subject. I could not, therefore, have chosen a more fitting subject for my experiment.’ ‘Upon my life,’ said General Browne, somewhat hastily, ‘I am infinitely obliged to your lordship—very particularly indebted indeed. I am likely to remember for some time the consequences of the experiment, as your lordship is pleased to call it.’ ‘Nay, now you are unjust, my dear friend,’ said Lord Woodville. ‘You have only to reflect for a single moment, in order to be convinced that I could not augur the possibility of the pain to which you have been so unhappily exposed. I was yesterday morning a complete sceptic on the subject of supernatural appearances. Nay, I am sure that had I told you what was said about that room, those very reports would have induced you, by your own choice, to select it for your accommodation. It was my misfortune, perhaps my error, but really cannot be termed my fault, that you have been afflicted so strangely.’ ‘Strangely indeed!’ said the general, resuming his good temper; ‘and I acknowledge that I have no right to be offended with your lordship for treating me like what I used to think myself—a man of some firmness and courage.—But I see my post-horses are arrived, and I must not detain your lordship from your amusement.’

less so, that he was a little ashamed of the peevishness which he had displayed towards his wellmeaning entertainer. The general, therefore, followed Lord Woodville through several rooms, into a long gallery hung with pictures, which the latter pointed out to his guest, telling the names, and giving some account of the personages whose portraits presented themselves in progression. General Browne was but little interested in the details which these accounts conveyed to him. They were, indeed, of the kind which are usually found in the old family gallery. Here was a cavalier who had ruined the estate in the royal cause; there a fine lady who had reinstated it by contracting a match with a wealthy Roundhead. There hung a gallant who had been in danger for corresponding with the exiled Court of St Germain’s; here one who had taken arms for William at the Revolution; and there a third that had thrown his weight alternately into the scale of Whig and Tory. While Lord Woodville was cramming these words into his guest’s ear, ‘against the stomach of his sense’, they gained the middle of the gallery, when he beheld General Browne suddenly start, and assume an attitude of the utmost surprise, not unmixed with fear, as his eyes were caught and suddenly riveted by a portrait of an old lady in a sacque, the fashionable dress of the end of the seventeenth century. ‘There she is!’ he exclaimed; ‘there she is, in form and features, though inferior in demoniac expression to the accursed hag who visited me last night!’

‘Nay, my old friend,’ said Lord Woodville, ‘since you cannot stay with us another day, which, indeed, I can no longer urge, give me at least half an hour more. You used to love pictures, and I have a gallery of portraits, some of them by Vandyke, representing ancestry to whom this property and castle formerly belonged. I think that several of them will strike you as possessing merit.’

‘If that be the case,’ said the young nobleman, ‘there can remain no longer any doubt of the horrible reality of your apparition. That is the picture of a wretched ancestress of mine, of whose crimes a black and fearful catalogue is recorded in a family history in my charter-chest. The recital of them would be too horrible; it is enough to say, that in yon fatal apartment incest and unnatural murder were committed. I will restore it to the solitude to which the better judgement of those who preceded me had consigned it; and never shall any one, so long as I can prevent it, be exposed to a repetition of the supernatural horrors which could shake such courage as yours.’

General Browne accepted the invitation, though somewhat unwillingly. It was evident he was not to breathe freely or at ease until he left Woodville Castle far behind him. He could not refuse his friend’s invitation, however; and the

Thus the friends, who had met with such glee, parted in a very different mood; Lord Woodville to command the Tapestried Chamber to be unmantled and the door built up; and General Browne to seek in some less beautiful country, and

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TITLE COMMENTARY The Waverley Novels FIONA ROBERTSON (ESSAY DATE 1994) SOURCE: Robertson, Fiona. “Secrecy, Silence, and Anxiety: Gothic Narratology and the Waverley Novels.” In Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction, pp. 161-95. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. In the following excerpt, Robertson asserts that in the Waverley Novels “Scott’s narrative techniques of deferral and denial have much in common with the Gothic, and are used with a complex alertness to their literary signification.” What is this secret sin; this untold tale, That art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse?1 They dare not murder me,—they dare not incarcerate me;—they are answerable to the court to which I have appealed for my forthcoming,—they dare not be guilty of any violence. (Monçada, Melmoth the Wanderer)2

When Edie Ochiltree is not sitting at his elbow Scott writes stories structured by loss, anxiety, and what is called in Peveril of the Peak ‘the influence of undefinable apprehension’.3 It would be easy, given the common critical association of Gothic, repression, and the unconscious, to make these stories into subtexts of the Waverley Novels, ‘buried letters’ of the type Mary Jacobus has proposed for the workings of Gothic in Villette.4 This [essay proposes instead] to interpret individual Waverley Novels in some detail without presupposing any such aesthetic ranking or blurring the distinction between the claims that Scott uses Gothic devices to represent anxiety and that Gothic can in any way be equated with Scott’s personal fears. [T]he argument aims first to establish that imitation, parody, and extension of Gothic conventions in the Waverley Novels help Scott to construct some of the non-authorial and even anti-authorial voices described in the previous chapter. The discussion of The Pirate, Rob Roy, and Peveril of the Peak in this [essay] focuses on the techniques (not lapses) of tone, narrative structure, description, and interior monologue by which Scott both raises and controls interpreta-

tions of the social world which sharply contradict the interpretations endorsed by his rational authorial voice. From this discussion two points emerge most strongly. One is that Scott’s narrative techniques of deferral and denial have much in common with Gothic, and are used with a complex alertness to their literary signification. This is particularly true of the manipulation of secrets and narratorial secrecy, and it reinforces the argument that when looking for the impact made by Gothic on the Waverley Novels critics must attend to technique and tone as well as to events and settings. All Scott’s plots depend upon the preservation then unravelling of secrets, although few go so far as Kenilworth, which can be read as an allegory of secrecy, as a cautionary tale about what happens when a man compromises with truth and plain-dealing, and when the secret (Amy) to which he rashly commits himself bursts out of his control. The second main point is that Scott, so often censured for a supposed shallowness in psychological representation, is much more versatile and resourceful as an analyst of states of mind than he first appears. The first section of Chapter 2 [in Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction] analysed the methods developed in Gothic fiction to ritualize ‘not secrets . . . but Secrecy’, in Kermode’s formulation. This process in Gothic is selfconsciously literary, bolstered by close reference to other texts. The first epigraph to this [essay], the plea for explanation in Walpole’s play about incest, The Mysterious Mother (1781), became a favourite point of reference in later Gothic fiction, used to suggest both the fearfulness and the inexpressibility of the secrets around which literary Gothic is plotted. A constant point of reference in Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and The Italian, the ‘untold tale’ of ‘secret sin’ hints at the forbidden subject of incest (between Montalt and Adeline, Schedoni and Ellena) with which both novels flirt, but which they finally evade.5 More generally, novelists used the promise of the ‘untold tale’ both as a stimulus to readers’ curiosity and as an acknowledgement of the limits of the fictional ‘art’ which could never hope to satisfy it. Although all narratives depend upon a degree of secrecy, Gothic novels are particularly dominated by the sense of ‘secret sin’, the unutterable or unnarratable source of mystery which must remain safely beyond the bounds of fiction. The Waverley Novels, likewise, hint repeatedly at horrors which they do not enact, and build mysterious plots around the silence (willed or

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with some less dignified friend, forgetfulness of the painful night which he had passed in Woodville Castle.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR WILLIAM HAZLITT ON SCOTT’S ACHIEVEMENTS AS A WRITER OF PROSE

The Author of Waverley has got rid of the tagging of rhymes, the eking out of syllables, the supplying of epithets, the colours of style, the grouping of his characters, and the regular march of events, and comes to the point at once, and strikes at the heart of his subject, without dismay and without disguise. His poetry was lady’s waiting-maid, dressed out in cast-off finery: his prose is a beautiful, rustic nymph, that, like Dorothea in Don Quixote when she is surprised with dishevelled tresses bathing her naked feet in the brook, looks round her abashed at the admiration her charms have excited. The grand secret of the author’s success in these latter productions is that he has completely got rid of the trammels of authorship; and torn off at one rent (as Lord Peter got rid of so many yards of lace in the “Tale of a Tub”) all the ornaments of fine writing and worn-out sentimentality. All is fresh, as from the hand of nature: by going a century or two back and laying the scene in a remote and uncultivated district, all becomes new and startling in the present advanced period. Highland manners, characters, scenery, superstitions, northern dialect and costume, the wars, the religion, and politics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, give a charming and wholesome relief to the fastidious refinement and “overlaboured lassitude” of modern readers, like the effect of plunging a nervous valetudinarian into a cold-bath.

‘It is only,’ said the Lady Hermione, ‘because I linger like a criminal on the scaffold, and would fain protract the time that must inevitably bring on the final catastrophe. Yes, dearest Margaret, I rest and dwell on the events of that journey, marked as it was by fatigue and danger, though the road lay through the wildest and most desolate deserts and mountains, and though our companions, both men and women, were fierce and lawless themselves, and exposed to the most merciless retaliation from those with whom they were constantly engaged—yet would I rather dwell on these hazardous events than tell that which awaited me at Saint Jean de Luz.’6

The long sentence, elaborating on details of the journey, delays the moment when Hermione must instantiate Dalgarno’s villainy. When, anticipating many other readers, Maria Edgeworth complained of Scott’s tendency to ‘huddle the cards together in such a shameless manner’ at the end of his novels, she responded to a structural pattern characteristic of fictions based on secrets, seen here in miniature in Hermione’s effort to expand on every detail except the one her listener wants to hear.7

SOURCE: Hazlitt, William. “Sir Walter Scott.” The New Monthly Magazine 10, no. 40 (April 1824): 297-304.

enforced) of key characters. In order to do this they employ techniques of deferral and delay which owe much to the example of Gothic; and they also develop ways of suggesting forms of freefloating anxiety, best analysed by Alexander Welsh in his discussion of Rob Roy, which again have much in common with the construction of fear in

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Radcliffean Gothic. Secret sins and unvoiced (what Melmoth the Wanderer terms ‘unutterable’) fears are traceable to many of the same narratorial ploys and habits of imaginative reference. A simple and striking instance may be found in the passage in The Fortunes of Nigel in which the Lady Hermione relates her life-story to Margaret Ramsay and delays its crisis by lingering over insignificant details:

There are close technical links, therefore, between narratorial delay (the ‘huddled’ structure), secrecy-driven plotting, and the suggestion, but not explication, of anxiety. By bringing these closer together in the following discussion I hope also to question one of the most common and most damaging of all complaints about Scott: that is, that he did not understand, or did not care to investigate, the workings of the mind in states of anger, obsession, neurosis, or desire. Lukács, as usual, pronounces decisively on the matter: ‘Scott does not command the magnificent, profound psychological dialectics of character which distinguishes the novel of the last great period of bourgeois development.’ 8 A belief in Scott’s ‘sunny’ disposition may have been useful for writers who, like Carlyle, wished to attack the morbid tendencies of modern literature. For twentiethcentury critics, however, accustomed to praise different (and equally conventional) methods of psychological examination in fiction, Scott has sometimes seemed embarrassingly inadequate. Even for Carlyle, the conviction that Scott was ‘a

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It is a mercy our thoughts are concealed from each other. O if at our social table we could see what passes in each bosom around we would seek dens and caverns to shun human society. To see the projector trembling for his falling speculations, the voluptuary ruing the event of his debauchery, the miser wearing out his soul for the loss of a guinea—all—all bent upon vain hopes and vainer regrets—we should not need to go to the hall of the Caliph Vathek to see men’s hearts broiling under their black veils.1 3

In this passage, Scott progressively distances himself from the immediate cause of his abhorrence by making it increasingly figurative and literary. He first imagines other examples which elaborate his friend’s disgrace but which also place it in a more general moral context. Here he is close to the practice of eighteenth-century moralists and ultimately to the evocative style of the pulpit. Then he uses literary precedent (Vathek) and exaggerated literary language (‘hearts broiling under their black veils’) as a form of protection by exaggeration. Elsewhere in his personal writings, Scott imagines the conflicts between abstracted qualities of the mind in strikingly literary ways, some of which resemble the common elements of his own novels. Trying to express his feelings about the suicide of his friend Huxley, for example, he writes in his Journal in December 1826: A thousand fearful images and dire suggestions glance along the mind when it is moody and discontented with itself. Command them to stand

and shew themselves and you presently assert the power of reason over imagination. But if by any strange alterations in one’s nervous system you lost for a moment the talisman which controuls these fiends? Would they not terrify into obedience with their mandates rather [than] we would dare longer to endure their presence?1 4

This passage, sparked by the experience of a vivid nightmare, echoes a passage from the fictional journal of Darsie Latimer in Redgauntlet, written eighteen months earlier. In turn, both passages recall Clarence’s account of his dream in the first act of Richard III (‘Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wracks . . .’).1 5 Scott uses comparable techniques of detachment followed by literary exaggeration at emotional crisis-points in his fiction. Faced simultaneously with emotional and linguistic collapse, characters search, like Scott in his Journal, for a ‘talisman’ by which to control the fiends of imagination. This talisman is as much linguistic as rational. Their passivity being strongly linked to an inability to speak effectively, they are reduced, like Rob Roy’s Frank Osbaldistone, to outbursts of childish passion rendered in selfconsciously literary terms: Heaven knows, it was not apathy which loaded my frame and my tongue so much, that I could neither return Miss Vernon’s half embrace, nor even answer her farewell. The word, though it rose to my tongue, seemed to choke in my throat like the fatal guilty, which the delinquent who makes it his plea knows must be followed by the doom of death. . . . I felt the tightening of the throat and breast, the hysterica passio of poor Lear; and, sitting down by the wayside, I shed a flood of the first and most bitter tears which had flowed from my eyes since childhood.1 6

Frank Osbaldistone’s inability to grasp the reality of his youthful experiences is to some extent a special feature of his individual personality.1 7 Even so, the way in which Frank describes his outburst of emotion, veering away from the uncomfortably personal to the safely literary (King Lear), has much in common with distinctive habits of Scott’s narrative technique throughout the Waverley Novels. The intrusion of possibly incongruous literary references does not always work so abruptly to defuse moments of horror as does the sudden appearance of Fang and Snare in the climactic confrontation from Melmoth the Wanderer described in Chapter 2 [of Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction], but it works on the same principle of literary transgression. Frank Osbaldistone’s description of a baffling and complex paralysis—physical, emotional, and

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genius in extenso, as we may say, not in intenso’ limited his artistic standing.9 Virginia Woolf, reappraising Scott at a time when his work was out of fashion among critics, had to conclude that he was ‘not among the great observers of the intricacies of the heart’.1 0 David Cecil agreed: ‘Scott was no analyst.’1 1 Scott himself made coy asides referring to this supposed deficiency. ‘I like so little to analyze the complication of the causes which influence actions’, he demurs (thinking of Fielding) in the first chapter of The Antiquary.1 2 The aside in The Antiquary is clearly misleading, however. Scott does deal with the darker aspects of psychology, but in order to preserve the usefulness of his rational narrative persona he is obliged to find alternative, extra-narratorial ways of exploring them. If one leaves aside for a moment the complications introduced by fictional contexts, the technique can be seen quite clearly at work in Scott’s private writings. When obliged to describe distressing experiences in his own life in his letters and Journal he uses a distinctive language of literary reference and suggestion, overstatement and cliché. A friend’s disgrace leads him to reflect in the Journal:

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linguistic—holds true for the experiences of many characters in Scott’s novels. Like many Gothic fictions, the Waverley Novels trace the consequences of the sins of curiosity, a movement out of the unaccountability of childhood not into adult power but into adult responsibility, often detached from power. Julia Mannering, the heroine of Scott’s second novel, gives a memorable account of this process: I feel the terrors of a child, who has, in needless sport, put in motion some powerful piece of machinery; and, while he beholds wheels revolving, chains clashing, cylinders rolling around him, is equally astonished at the tremendous powers which his weak agency has called into action, and terrified for the consequences which he is compelled to await, without the possibility of averting them.1 8

Such a perception of the world is very close to that lack of control so vividly described by Maturin’s Monçada in Melmoth the Wanderer, where human beings, in a kind of parody of the Newtonian universe, set machines moving which they are then unable to halt: Every thing passed before me as in a dream. I saw the pageant move on, without a thought of who was to be the victim. I returned to the convent—I felt my destiny was fixed—I had no wish to avert or arrest it—I was like one who sees an enormous engine (whose operation is to crush him to atoms) put in motion, and, stupefied with horror, gazes on it with a calmness that might be mistaken for that of one who was coolly analysing the complication of its machinery, and calculating the resistless crush of its blow.1 9

This sense of physical paralysis extends, as many critics after Alexander Welsh have noted, to a breakdown of control and a rhetoric of anxiety and persecution. The rationalist commitments of the Waverley Novels are continually undermined by the terms in which Scott’s protagonists perceive and describe their experiences. ‘Undefinable apprehension’, ‘acute anxiety’, and ‘irrational dread’ beset one protagonist after another. Even the redoubtable Hereward the Varangian of Count Robert of Paris, left alone in a chamber which leads to the palace dungeons, responds in the unmistakable tones of Waverley-Novel anxiety: ‘“I have done nothing,” he thought, “to merit being immured in one of these subterranean dens. . . .”’2 0 As Nigel Oliphant complains, the hero is placed in a situation ‘where every fair construction of [his] actions and motives is refused [him]’.2 1 Alternatively, as Scott describes the situation of Harry Bertram, in terms which already move his experiences one step away from actuality, he is confused by ‘the mysteries which ap-

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peared to thicken around him, while he seemed alike to be persecuted and protected by secret enemies and friends’.2 2 The form of paralysis which is most rewardingly analysed in the context of Gothic, however, is the linguistic variety, recalling the many scenes in Gothic in which characters are implored to speak or to take decisive action to save loved ones (typified, perhaps, by Lorenzo’s nightmare vision of Antonia’s death near the beginning of The Monk). Scott’s young heroes struggle for speech yet find themselves ‘chocked’, struggle to declare their love or honour yet are laughed at as children, seek action but find paralysis, ‘enchantment’, and imprisonment. Ironically, the Waverley Novels built their reputation upon speech. In the opening chapter of The Bride of Lammermoor, Dick Tinto complains that Peter Pattieson’s characters ‘make too much use of the gob box . . . there is nothing in whole pages but mere chat and dialogue’.2 3 Yet despite the garrulousness of some characters many others undergo agonies of selfexpression in which they are silent, inarticulate, and hesitant. The Waverley Novels repeatedly test the hero who cannot speak out, or who stifles his emotions, often in legal situations or crises which are described in the language of law. Two such narratives—Rob Roy and Peveril of the Peak—are analysed below. The focus of the first part of the chapter, however, is one of Scott’s most complex analyses of secrecy and the ideological implications of secrecy-driven plotting—The Pirate. It is chosen here partly because it is one of the Waverley Novels most frequently decreed to have been spoilt by inappropriate literary conventions, and partly because it seems to be such a clear endorsement of rational interpretations of life. David Brown is typical in linking the proliferation of supernatural and fantastic elements to a lack of basic historical understanding: ‘With only a limited understanding of the period and setting concerned, Scott instinctively falls back on Gothic horrors, spurious romance, and antiquarian curiosities to sustain the novel for its four hundred pages.’2 4 The Pirate, however, was the novel which irritated Coleridge into his marginal comments on the ‘make-believe’ supernatural in the Waverley Novels, already quoted in the Introduction. Throughout The Pirate Scott experiments with different literary forms with the apparent intention of sorting and ranking them, and it is not difficult to determine which form(s) win. Despite this, however, it is significant that Coleridge registers such tensions and difficulties in the novel. The Pirate seems to offer supporters of

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1. The Pirate: ‘The Interest of a Riddle’ I must remain the dreaded—the mystical—the Reimkennar—the controller of the elements, or I must be no more! I have no alternative, no middle station. . . . The parricide shall never also be denounced as the impostor! (Norna of the Fitful Head)2 5

In The Pirate, Scott takes up the social and literary challenges presented by piratical heroes from Byron’s Conrad to Maturin’s Bertram, firmly rejecting the charismatic misanthropy which they had substituted for heroism. Although some of this rejection stems from the ironic depiction of the pirate, Clement Cleveland, much is conducted on the level of plot. The Pirate is a deconstruction of mystery and its alliance with anti-social imagination. In spite of all Norna’s misgivings, it systematically denounces the parricide as the impostor, the rebel against society as the victim of delusive visions. In The Pirate, as in Gothic fiction, readers play a double role which makes them simultaneously detectives, actively piecing together evidence, and passive listeners, knowing that everything strange will eventually be explained. After a brief introduction to the geography and social conditions of Zetland at the end of the seventeenth century, The Pirate confronts its readers with a series of mysteries, which are presented as imaginatively compatible with its desolate and recess-riddled scenery. In the order in which they are introduced, these mysteries are: Basil Mertoun’s misanthropic gloom, misogyny, and indifference towards his son Mordaunt;2 6 the instinctive enmity between Mordaunt Mertoun and the pirate, Clement Cleveland; Mordaunt’s sudden expulsion from the charmed circle of the Troil household; and the ‘fatal secret’ of Norna’s alienation from society. When introducing the first of these, the strange isolation and misanthropy of Basil Mertoun, Scott acknowledges the special imaginative appeal of the principle of mystery itself. Deciding that none of Basil Mertoun’s qualities equals in the eyes of the Zetlanders the mystery surrounding him, the narrator concludes: ‘Above all, Mr Mertoun’s secret seemed impenetrable, and his presence had all the interest of a riddle, which men love to read over and over, because they cannot find out the meaning of it.’2 7 These are highly reader-conscious terms. They also anticipate the strong interest shown throughout The Pirate in riddles, ‘wild’ rhymes,

and mysterious withheld speech. Not only is the narrative itself a triumph of rational explanation over riddling mystery. The novel’s restructuring of social and domestic life after the mysteries in which it begins also follows the principles established by clear and direct speech. Language triumphs over gesture. Open communication replaces rumour and incantation. In the imagination of Mordaunt Mertoun, also, mystery is given a special prominence. He is seen meditating the secrets of the ocean, ‘aided by the dim twilight, through which it was imperfectly seen for more than half the year’. Vividly the narrator describes the creatures thought to inhabit the ‘bottomless depths and secret caves’, the mermaid, kraken, and sea-snake, sometimes glimpsed by mariners through banks of fog.2 8 Scott presents Zetland as a land enshrining secrets. And it is significant that the man who both casts dissension into the community of Zetland and eventually brings about its more lasting harmony—the pirate himself—is plucked from the sea by Mordaunt in contravention of all the islanders’ convenient taboos about sea-rescue. Through this association Cleveland himself becomes a sort of kraken, rising from the secrets of the past. The mysteries of The Pirate are capable of being solved at any moment by a few words uttered by two characters, Norna of the Fitful Head and Basil Mertoun, who have been lovers many years before and have had an illegitimate child. Norna believes this child to be Mordaunt, who is assumed by the Zetlanders to be Mertoun’s only son, but it transpires that Mordaunt is Mertoun’s second son, his child by a failed later marriage. Norna discovers too late that her son is in fact the pirate, Cleveland, whose schemes she has worked so hard to frustrate. One part of the mystery, then, is their youthful love-affair and the extreme distrust of women it has produced in Mertoun. The second is Norna’s conviction that she is to blame for the death of her father, which leads to her self-imposed isolation and necromantic ‘enthusiasm’. These mysteries are linked thematically by the moral and social question of the proper relationship between father and child. When the novel opens, Norna and Mertoun are living as strangers to each other in a community ignorant of their secret but intrigued by their different styles of linguistic indirectness. The misanthropic Mertoun is nicknamed the ‘Silent Man of Sumburgh’.2 9 Norna, in her role as ‘Sibyl’, ‘Pythoness’, ‘Reimkennar’, speaks predominantly in riddles or in a form of inspired private language.

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a pro-rationalist, anti-Gothic Scott their ideal text. Yet the contest actively foregrounds the complexity of the forces at work.

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Her closest tie is with her dumb servant, Nick Strumpfer (or ‘Pacolet’, one of Scott’s favourite nicknames for minor characters). In a rhetoric which recalls Melmoth the Wanderer, and all the traditions of Faustian overreaching which lie behind it, she repeatedly hints that the reason for her outcast speech is a pact made with the dark powers and ‘a sacrifice which human tongue can never utter’.3 0 The two interviews between these cryptic recluses are neatly designed as complementary exercises in linguistic indirection and revelation. In the first, Mertoun meets Norna at the ruinous church of St. Ninian, hoping to hear news of his missing son. Ignorant of Norna’s true identity and failing to recognize in the mysterious sibyl his former beloved, Mertoun conjures her disdainfully to speak plainly, to ‘Lay aside this useless affectation of mystery’.3 1 Norna complies, but only by whispering words to him which are withheld from the reader: ‘Hearken, then!’ said the old woman. ‘The word which I speak shall touch the nearest secret of thy life, and thrill thee through nerve and bone.’ So saying, she whispered a word into Mertoun’s ear, the effect of which seemed almost magical.3 2

In their second meeting, this time in the cathedral of St Magnus in Kirkwall, it is Mertoun’s turn to break the silence by revealing that Cleveland, not Mordaunt, is Norna’s son. His explanation breaks the spell of what Mertoun calls ‘the legerdemain of lunacy—the mere quackery of insanity’.3 3 Realizing the true limits of her power and knowledge, Norna resumes her name and her original place in society. The Zetland community as a whole is beset by other silences and mysterious forms of speech or riddles. In the central chapter of the novel (chapter 21 out of forty-two), Magnus Troil asks his guests, and obliges his daughters, to take part in a traditional fortune-telling conducted through riddling rhymes, and in a later explanation of the mysteries of Norna’s wonderful knowledge and power, the narrator demonstrates how the everyday instances of Norna’s dealings with the supernatural powers depend upon pacts of silence. The islanders who provide her with information are ignorant of each other’s actions, and, ‘as her orders were generally given under injunctions of the strictest secrecy, men reciprocally wondered at occurrences, which had in fact been produced by their own agency, and that of their neighbours, and in which, had they communicated freely with each other, no shadow of the marvellous would have remained’.3 4 As the love-story of The Pirate emphatically declares, only when characters com-

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municate freely are they able to break the spells which surround them. The Pirate is torn between the recognition that sociability and speech are essential to happiness and stability, and a fascination with anti-social, secretive, and silent characters. On the one hand, the narrative voice insistently denies the fanciful claims of the superstitious and romantic characters, repeatedly explaining, for example, that Norna’s supernatural powers are merely delusions of her imagination, and can be explained by reference to the specific historical and cultural conditions of Zetland. It makes Norna’s addiction to mysterious speech both comic and maddening, as in the scene soon after Mordaunt becomes an unwelcome guest at BurghWestra, when she tries to warn Mordaunt of ‘the machinations of a villain’,3 5 without giving him enough information to be of practical use. To Norna’s fanciful description of the adder who has crept into the eagle’s nest, Mordaunt replies: ‘You must speak more plainly, Norna . . . if you would have me understand or answer you. I am no guesser of riddles.’3 6 The same sceptical narrative voice exposes the connections between superstition, madness, and imagination.3 7 It insists that Norna’s imagination has led to madness and alienation, and that the same fate threatens ‘the high-minded and imaginative Minna’, as a result of her ‘unusual intensity of imagination’.3 8 Minna is constitutionally inclined to the sublime scenery of ‘solitary and melancholy grandeur’ suited to her ‘wild and poetical visions’.3 9 When she falls into a nervous illness brought on by her consciousness of the secret (as she thinks it) that Cleveland has murdered Mordaunt, her plight is described in terms which closely echo Norna’s description of the secret of her parricide. It is a ‘horrible secret, which haunted her while awake, and was yet more tormenting during her broken and hurried slumbers’. The narrator underlines the point: ‘There is no grief so dreadful as that which we dare not communicate.’4 0 Minna is taken to Norna’s strange outpost dwelling, a place described in terms which make literal the threat of division imperilling her, and defining Norna: This natural fosse, which seemed to have been the work of some convulsion of nature, was deep, dark, and irregular, narrower towards the bottom, which could not be distinctly seen, and widest at top, having the appearance as if that part of the cliff occupied by the building had been half rent away from the isthmus which it terminated,—an idea favoured by the angle at which it seemed to recede from the land, and lean towards the sea, with the building which crowned it.4 1

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On the other hand, however, Scott shows that imagination and desire are stimulated by denial and silence, a recognition which, as I have suggested, is implicit in the organization of his own mystery-novel. He describes Mordaunt’s distress when the Troil sisters withdraw their friendship: Mordaunt felt, as it were, assured upon the instant, that the regard of Minna was extinguished, but that it might be yet possible to recover that of the milder Brenda; and such is the waywardness of human fancy, that though he had never hitherto made any distinct difference betwixt these two beautiful and interesting girls, the favour of her, which seemed most absolutely withdrawn, became at the moment the most interesting in his eyes.4 2

The whole imaginative venture of The Pirate is based on the same association between what is withheld and what is desired. Scott’s readers, like Mordaunt Mertoun, are to be shown that it is wrong to equate denial with desire. At all its stages the story told in The Pirate constructs this lesson by contrasting the powers of communication and silence. Near the end of the first volume in the Magnum Opus edition, Minna and Brenda tentatively discuss the barriers to their free communication which have been created by their love for two men who are enemies. This scene is contrasted to the failures of communication between Mordaunt and Basil Mertoun, and between Mordaunt and Magnus Troil. Soon afterwards, Minna and Brenda take part in a fortune-telling scene in which Norna foretells in rhyme their future lives and loves. Finally, the romantic entanglements of the plot are explicable in terms of communication and silence. Minna and Cleveland never communicate directly enough to establish the differences between her ideals of an ancient sea-king and the reality of his life as a pirate. Mordaunt’s imagination is stimulated by Minna’s silence, and his emotions baffled by his father’s silence, but his love is fixed by Brenda’s speech. Only Brenda risks her family’s displeasure to explain to Mordaunt the reasons for his fall from favour, and tries to help Minna by discussing her fears with Mordaunt. Minna, by contrast, is nearly driven mad because she must not communicate her own ‘fatal secret’.4 3 Brenda, the heroine of communication, and the sociable

Mordaunt, break out of the bond of secrecy and silence which holds other characters fatally entranced. Even in their dreams, Minna and Brenda are contrasted in terms of speech and silence. Before they awake to discover Norna sitting by the hearth, singing, her voice has become interwoven with their dreams. Each dream is symbolic of one sister’s situation. Minna dreams that she is alone in a desolate cavern by the seashore, and is beckoned by a mermaid who sings to her a prophetic song of ‘calamity and woe’. Brenda dreams that she is sitting in a bower surrounded by her father and his friends. She tries to entertain them with her favourite lively song, but loses control of her voice, which assumes, ‘in her own despite, the deep tones and wild and melancholy notes of Norna of Fitful-head’.4 4 Brenda is the heroine of society and also its entertainer, its speaker and singer. Minna is silent while another sings. Brenda’s dream is also expressive of her plight while forbidden by her father to communicate with Mordaunt, to assume cold words which are not her own. Since Norna is about to tell the story of her demonic pact and supposed parricide, it is also significant that it is her song which intrudes in each sister’s dream. Norna is the mermaid tempting Minna from society, the voice she must resist. She is also the doleful voice against which Brenda must struggle to assert her own right of social, harmonious speech. The drama of language, imagination, and desire conducted in The Pirate touches on some of the most prevalent concerns of Scott’s fiction. Although all the Waverely Novels demonstrate Scott’s interest in language as the primary medium of social interaction, and his commitment to finding a suitable language of fiction to achieve the same ends, most also contain one or more characters whose non-conforming speech, or whose refusal or inability to speak, is a threat. Some of these are characters whose language does not seem to obey the conventions of social speech (like the songs of Davie Gellatley in Waverley and Madge Wildfire in The Heart of Midlothian) although it is later discovered to be meaningful in its own way. Other characters harbour terrible secrets which they must eventually tell, such as Elspeth Mucklebackit in The Antiquary and Norna in The Pirate. A third, and especially threatening, group consists of mute or seemingly mute characters. It includes Norna’s dumb dwarf Nick Strumpfer and the fake mute Fenella in Peveril of the Peak, supported in the introduction to the Magnum Opus by the tale of the servant girl ‘Dumb Lizzie’ from

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Norna’s unnatural (though unintentional) crime against her father is repeated in the image of the rock torn away by natural convulsion, and leaning out towards the sea which (conventionally enough) is the source of passion and secrecy in the novel.

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Scott’s own family history. This is the context of debate about society and language in which one should position The Pirate’s contrast between Minna and Brenda Troil, and between the characters in the novel who take to extremes the principles by which this contrast is governed (Norna being the correlative of Minna’s guilty silence and Magnus Troil, or less flatteringly the gossip Bryce Snailsfoot, being the correlative of Brenda’s social speech). Equally complex is Scott’s evaluation of imagination in the context of secrecy or of what is tantalizingly withheld. The plots of the Waverley Novels usually punish anti-social and secretive characters who misuse imagination, like George Staunton in The Heart of Midlothian and Richard Middlemas in “The Surgeon’s Daughter,” crushed to death by a ceremonial elephant which is a kind of grotesque symbol of his Indian fantasy-life. More sentimental images of the romantic imagination (usually feminized, although Scott’s most savage portrayals of imagination also take female form), such as Minna Troil, prove problematic, however. Minna’s renunciation of her dreams at the end of The Pirate is a particularly sour version of the conflict between ‘romance’ and ‘real history’ which, since Edward Waverley, Scott’s imaginative characters had had to negotiate. Minna declares to Cleveland: ‘The delusions which a solitary education and limited acquaintance with the modern world had spread around me, are gone and dissipated forever.’4 5 Scott recognizes the harshness of this, however, and is anxious to reassure. ‘Reader, she was happy’, declares the narrator, making an unusually direct and decisive intervention.4 6 In The Pirate, Scott restricts his characters’ imaginative indulgences, exposing the dangers of allowing the world of private imagination to dominate the social, public world. Clearly there is much more at stake in the novel’s creation of an alternative, extra-rational, highly charged world of the imagination than critics usually grant. The Pirate, in conclusion, is a deconstruction of fictions based on mystery but also a powerful reinvention and redirection of Gothic plotting. It replaces silence with speech and secrecy with openness, but in doing so it continues rather than discredits Gothic aesthetics as typified by Radcliffe. As in Gothic, the genuine complications are to be found not in the explicit statements made by the narrative voice but in the imaginative activity prompted in the reader. Readers of The Pirate are engaged in solving mysteries while its hero is being taught that such fascinations are delusive. In a more subtle way, however, they are engaged

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in a fiction which accepts conventions—including novelistic ones—as a precondition of social interaction. The contrast with the ‘unutterable’ in Melmoth the Wanderer is instructive. In this novel, Maturin celebrates a private language, exemplified by Immalee-Isidora who learns social corruption as she learns a system of speech but who always retains a degree of linguistic as well as moral purity. Maturin shows language to be necessarily social but ideally also personal, and ultimately a private instrument of communication with God. In The Pirate Scott rejects a range of private, ‘secret’ languages and in the marriage of his hero and heroine enshrines the sociability of speech. To do so, however, he is forced to deploy all the authority of his narrating voice: ‘Reader, she was happy.’ Not all his novels choose to make so unequivocal an intervention.

Notes 1. Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (London, 1781), I. iii. 8. 2. Melmoth, ii. 31. 3. WN [The Waverley Novels] xxix. 186. 4. ‘The Buried Letter: Villette’ (1979), repr. in Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (London, 1986), 41-61. 5. Italian, chs. 1, 4, 9; Romance of Forest, ch. 2. 6. WN xxvii. 50-1. 7. In a letter of Jan. 1824 about St Ronan’s Well, quoted in Letters, viii. 142 n. 8. Lukács, Historical Novel, 34. 9. Carlyle, Works, xxix. 35. 10. Woolf, Collected Essays, 4 vols. (London, 1966-7), i. 142. 11. Cecil, Scott, 36. 12. WN v. 13. David Craig links this to Scott’s supposed unwillingness to examine his own psychology, in Scottish Literature and the Scottish People, 311. Kurt Wittig notes that Scott does not pry into ‘the dark abysses of its deepest passions’, The Scottish Tradition in Literature (Edinburgh, 1958), 221. 13. Journal, 236-7. Scott was probably reacting to the Heber scandal, which he reports, Journal, 162. 14. Journal, 253 (Scott’s attempt to deal with his thoughts of Huxley’s suicide, which he describes in terms of macabre compulsion: see his nightmares about Huxley, pp. 247-8). For Scott’s growing fear of madness and loss of control, see also pp. 615, 621, 632. 15. WN xxxvi. 47; Richard III, 1. iv. 24. 16. WN viii. 271-2. 17. The argument proposed by Millgate, Making of the Novelist, ch. 7. 18. WN iv. 18.

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20. WN xlvi. 66. 21. WN xxvii. 243. 22. WN iv. 210. 23. WN xiii. 271: see Woolf on Scott’s ‘chatterboxes’, Collected Essays, i. 42. 24. Historical Imagination, 187. 25. WN xxv. 221. 26. Not really a problem, according to Nassau Senior in his review of The Pirate, Quarterly Review, xxvi (Oct. 1821), 456, where he notes Mertoun’s misanthropy and silence, ‘which, at once, indicate, to a practised novel-reader, one of the numerous family of retired criminals, or injured lovers’. 27. WN xxiv. 8. 28. All quotations from WN xxiv. 25. 29. WN xxiv. 80. 30. WN xxiv. 175.

Millgate, Jane, Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Edinburgh, 1984). Radcliffe, Ann, The Romance of the Forest: Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry, 3 vols. (London, 1791). [Ed. and introd. Chloe Chard (Oxford, 1986).] ———, The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents: A Romance, 3 vols. (London, 1797). [Ed. and introd. Frederick Garber (Oxford, 1968, 1981).] Scott, Sir Walter, Bt., Rob Roy, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1818, for 1817). ———, The Waverley Novels, 48 vols. (Edinburgh, 1829-33). ———, The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson et al., 12 vols., Centenary Edition (London, 1932-7). ———, The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford, 1972). Shakespeare, William, The Riverside Shakespeare, textual ed. G. Blakemore Evans, gen. introd. Harry Levin et al., essay on stage history Charles H. Shattuck (Boston, Mass., 1974). Woolf, Virginia, Collected Essays, 4 vols. (London, 1966-7).

31. WN xxv. 94. 32. WN xxv. 95. 33. WN xxv. 355. 34. WN xxv. 212: the link is reinforced by the presence of Norna’s dumb dwarf, ‘Pacolet’, xxv. 122-3. 35. WN xxiv. 177. 36. WN xxiv. 176. 37. WN xxv. 99, 225, 354-5: on Minna, xxiv. 333, xxv. 36, 66, 112, 130, 148, 371: contrast Brenda, xxiv. 353, xxv. 106, 370-1: Halcro’s alternative opinion, xxiv. 228. 38. WN xxv. 371, xxiv. 333. 39. WN xxiv. 36, 40. 40. Both quotations from WN xxv. 98. 41. WN xxv. 118. 42. WN xxiv. 207-8. 43. WN xxv. 98-101 (100). 44. The dreams passage, WN xxiv. 331-2. 45. WN xxv. 365. 46. WN xxv. 371.

Bibliography Brown, David, Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination (London, 1979). Carlyle, Thomas, The Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Edition, ed. H. D. Traill, 30 vols. (London, 1896-9). Cecil, Lord David, Sir Walter Scott, The Raven Miscellany (London, 1933). Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel (1937), trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London, 1962). Maturin, Charles Robert, Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1820). [Ed. and introd. Alethea Hayter (Harmondsworth, 1977).]

ROBERT IGNATIUS LE TELLIER (ESSAY DATE 1995) SOURCE: Le Tellier, Robert Ignatius. “Gothic Motifs in the Waverley Novels.” In Sir Walter Scott and the Gothic Novel, pp. 125-49. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. In the following excerpt, Le Tellier surveys the Gothic elements in the Waverley Novels.

VI. Gothic Motifs in the Waverley Novels The Waverley Novels constitute a vast corpus of 22 novels written over a span of 18 years. The approach adopted here in endeavouring to investigate a particular type of influence and occurrence will initially be different from that used in looking at the poems, a much more contained group, and also the beginning of Scott’s creative writing. The analogy of the overture will be recalled: the poems present in miniature, in artful compression, many of the themes and ideas worked out in immense detail in the novels. The nature and density of the influence obviously varies from work to work. As in the exercise on the poems, the pioneer in this exploration who provides the foundation of scholarly enquiry after the texts themselves, is Freye who concentrates essentially on the poetry but devotes a small section to the supernatural occurrences in the novels,1 and Hartland who also has a chapter on the novels,2 while Parsons in his section on the prose provides the most detailed study available on the diverse types and strands of folklore found in Scott’s fiction.3

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19. Melmoth, i. 233-4.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR MARIA EDGEWORTH, IN A LETTER TO SIR WALTER SCOTT, 1814

We have this moment finished Waverley. It was read aloud to this large family, and I wish the author could have witnessed the impression it made—the strong hold it seized of the feelings both of young and old—the admiration raised by the beautiful descriptions of nature—by the new and bold delineations of character—the perfect manner in which every character is sustained in every change of situation from first to last, without effort, without the affectation of making the persons speak in character—the ingenuity with which each person introduced in the drama is made useful and necessary to the end—the admirable art with which the story is constructed and with which the author keeps his own secrets till the proper moment when they should be revealed, whilst in the mean time, with the skill of Shakespeare, the mind is prepared by unseen degrees for all the changes of feeling and fortune, so that nothing, however extraordinary, shocks us as improbable; and the interest is kept up to the last moment. We were so possessed with the belief that the whole story and every character in it was real, that we could not endure the occasional addresses from the author to the reader. They are like Fielding; but for that reason we cannot bear them, we cannot bear that an author of such high powers, of such original genius, should for a moment stoop to imitation. This is the only thing we dislike, these are the only passages we wish omitted in the whole work; and let the unqualified manner in which I say this, and the very vehemence of my expression of this disapprobation, be a sure pledge to the author of the sincerity of all the admiration I feel for his genius. SOURCE: Edgeworth, Maria. An excerpt from a letter to Sir Walter Scott. In The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. I, edited by Augustus J. C. Hare, pp. 239-44. New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895.

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1. MYSTERIES. It is no accident that the enduring fame of Mrs Radcliffe’s most illustrious work, The Mysteries of Udolpho, contains in the title so much of its mystique, a mystique of faraway time and place. This is rendered even more intangible by the nexus of riddles and puzzles which complicate the course of the action and make the unfolding of the heroine’s progress synonymous with a process of clarification of unanswered questions and unsolved enigmas that reach back into the remotest past. It will be remembered that the central thread running through the plot of the verse romances is invariably related to a concealed identity, of De Wilton in Marmion, of James V in The Lady of the Lake and of Redmund O’Neal in Rokeby. Indeed, kidnapping, borrowing, disguising and imposture run through the poems, and also through the novels, so providing a nexus of recurrent ideas, helping to create “a single, though not seamless, body of work mysteriously united by a continuing return to a number of key images and ideas”.4 Connected with this is a series of figures which Wilt sees generated by a recurrent sense of a type of original sin in civilization which she identifies as “usurpation”, violent and illegal self-appropriation, which gives rise to types like “the red-handed king, the reluctant soldier, the corrupted priest” from real history, and other types like “the spellbinding lady, the Protean outlaw, the shape-shifting minstrel-author of Waverley himself” who emerges from the romance world of the Gothic or pure fantasy. For Wilt the central crisis of usurpation can eventually be explained in terms of “the fragmentation and virtual disappearance of the kingdom called Christendom which is part of the construction of state and self.” It is this which “causes him the greatest unease of all, [and] is at the very root of the long Waverleyan dream/history of the the loss that gains. “The illegitimate actions on the part of these various types of people enable a construction of those modern fictions of legitimacy, the state and the self”: the first is an appropriation, a romance of property,5 that justifies usurpation; the second is the fixing of an identity, the ending of uncertainty, disguise or imposture. Thus central to the plot of so many of Scott’s works is a sustaining of mystery, a mystery invariably centred on a cloudy or lost origin, of heroes and heroines whose parents are unknown. At the end of the novel, the child recovers his family and his legitimate property—so that state and self are affirmed.6 The matter is presented with clarity already in 1815 in his second novel, Guy Man-

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At the very end of his literary career, Scott was to use this very same mystery as a principle of plot. Towards the end of Castle Dangerous (1832), one learns that the young man Augustine, presumed the son of a minstrel, is the heroine Augusta of Berkley, betrothed to the castellan, Sir John de Walton. She is in danger of being treated as a spy by Sir John before her identity is discovered, only to be captured by the enemy Sir James Douglas, and is then offered in exchange for the castle. Sir John’s impossible position which would entail the loss of the all-important property is solved by the arrival of orders to surrender the castle, after which the lady is restored to her lover. State and identity, both of the Lady Augusta and of Sir John, are preserved. The novels between Guy Mannering and Castle Dangerous often conceal the nature of this mystery. It is, for example, only at the end of The Black Dwarf (1816) that one learns who the mysterious dwarf is, and from where he derives his authority over the other principal characters. He secretly and beneficently intervenes in the story to the advantage of his neighbours, saving Grace Armstrong from abduction by robbers, and restoring her to her lover Hobbie Elliot, and preventing the marriage of Isabella Vere with Sir Frederick Langley. Isabella’s father, the Laird of Ellieslaw, has wrung her consent to the marriage for his own ends. The Dwarf is eventually revealed to be the rich Sir Edward Manley, a near kinsman of Isabella, a man embittered by deformity and his unhappy love for Isabella’s mother, who has long been supposed dead. The revelation restores identity, clarity, a mystery in family history, and saves the integrity of Ellieslaw’s self and property. It is similarly only at the end of A Legend of Montrose (1819) that one recognizes in Annot Lyle, the long-lost daughter of Sir Duncan Campbell. He has believed her to be dead, lost in the capture of his castle and killed along with his other children by a group of Highland bandits known as “the Children of the Mist”. The McAulays had saved her and adopted her at the time when they had launched a punitive expedition against the wild tribe.

The mystery of Annot’s origin, the obscurity of her birth, prevent both Allen McAulay and the Earl of Menteith from pressing their suit. Only when the deathbed confession of the leader of the Children of the Mist reveals that Annot is the daughter of Sir Duncan Campbell does her marriage with Menteith become possible. The proof of her identity arrives opportunely to give a happy denouement to the story, confers on her not only a full perception of self, her status in society, but also restores her property, “the castle of her father” (ch. 23). Mordaunt Morton in The Pirate (1822) learns from the mouth of Ulla Troil (Norna of the Fitful Head) that he is her son. But this is a false trail in a nexus of family secrets, and at the very end of the novel one learns that he is in fact the legitimate son of Basil Mertoun, and it is his rival, the disturbing buccaneer interloper Cleveland who is her son by an earlier illicit union with Basil. The truth about the family relationships leads to clarity about identity and origins, the dangerous stranger moving away and the legally sanctioned son affirming self and property in his marriage and the implied inheritance of two families. Similar mysteries envelop Darsie Latimer in Redgauntlet (1824) who is really the head of his house, a fact hidden from him. He is kidnapped by his ruthless uncle, Herries of Birrensworth, a fanatical Jacobite, as part of a last-ditch attempt to restore the Stuarts, to secure the support of his followers. Only after many experiences based on the attempts of his friend Alan Fairford to rescue him, does Darsie learn who he really is—Sir Arthur Darsie Redgauntlet—and is he able to assume his rightful role and his responsibilities as head of his family. There is similarly a mystery hanging over the parentage of Roland Graeme in The Abbot (1820) who is sent as a page to the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots and becomes an active agent in devising her flight. The mystery of his birth is explained and he is found to be heir of the house of Avenel. He is pardoned by the Regent and able to marry Catherine Seyton in full possession of self and state. The pattern is similar for the poor Scottish Crusader, Sir Kenneth or the Knight of the Leopard, in The Talisman (1825) who must live through trials and humiliations before a final combat with his enemy, the Marquis of Monserrat whom he defeats and wounds, and is revealed to be Prince David of Scotland. The obstacle which

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nering which presents a good example of this type of mystery. George Brown, lover of Julie, the daughter of Guy Mannering, after many adventures and setbacks, is at last able to marry Julie since it is proved that he is the son of Bertram the landowner and inheritor of Ellogowan Castle. Brown was kidnapped by gypsies when he was small in an act of vengeance on Bertram for the expulsion of the gypsies from his land.

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his supposed lowly birth presented to his union with Edith Plantagenet is thus removed. The mystery pattern is thus at the heart of concepts of the self and one’s role in society. The family and possession of identity, integrity, status, or property and its attendant public duties, is the ideal medium of expression. The pattern is usually a positive one, the revelation and secret disentangling of a network of disabling mysteries resulting in restoration or resumption of what was lost or usurped. Sometimes though the outcome is reversed: the clarification of mysteries reveals crime and precipitates distress or loss. The medium is always that of the family though. In The Heart of Midlothian (1818) Effie Deans bears the illegitimate child of one Robertson who is really a young nobleman, George Staunton. Effie is accused of the murder of her child and her life is saved only because of the heroic action of her sister Jeanie, after which she is able to marry her lover and becomes Lady Staunton, in possession both of identity and property. Her illegitimate son was not murdered, but rather kidnapped by Madge Wildfire, the insane daughter of Margaret Murdockson (an old harridan who had charge of Effie during her confinement). The boy has grown up with banditti and when Staunton, now Sir George, in his efforts to recover his son, comes upon them unexpectedly, he is killed by his own son. A nexus of disruption, violence and crime has rent asunder family ties and social restraints leading to fatal loss of self and destruction of life itself. This negative pattern is repeated in St Ronan’s Well (1824) which is also realized entirely in terms of family relationships. The story centres around two half-brothers, sons of the late Earl of Etherington, who had married secretly abroad and then publicly at home. The younger brother, though unentitled, bears the title and is at bitter emnity with his half-brother, Francis Tyrrel. He has intervened in a love affair between Francis and Clara Mowbray, and has actually impersonated his brother at a midnight marriage with Clara who finds herself married to a man she hates. The brothers make a compact to leave Clara undisturbed and still bearing her maiden name, both of them undertaking never to return to Scotland. But Etherington, who is threatened with dispossession of the earldom by Francis, and tempted to believe that fortune will accrue if his marriage with Clara is acknowledged, returns to demand her hand in a more open manner and public celebration of the marriage. He puts pressure on her brother Mowbray who in turn menaces Clara with death

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if she does not co-operate. Although the plotter is finally exposed, Clara’s mind has been unhinged by the terror and pressures and she dies. The secret and general miasma of mystery has led to an unravelling of the structures of society, to chaos and eventually death itself. Just how much the mystery motif, the search for true identity, is central to the establishment of self and state is illustrated most sustainedly and positively in Ivanhoe (1819) where the action is interlaced by decisive appearances of both the outlaw Robin Hood and the king himself, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, both in numbers of various disguises and personae. Richard intervenes to save Ivanhoe at the beginning and at the end of the novel, as does Robin Hood in the middle. Both represent poles of authority and rightness—one outside the law, the other the embodiment of the law. Both are active in a lawless society where the usurpation of power is endemic and sanctioned by the ambitions of Prince John during Richard’s supposed imprisonment (“kidnapping”) in Austria. Both intervene to restore order, symbolized in the the disclosure of their identities. The revelation of self is directly connected to the restoration of the state; clarification of mystery is associated with legitimacy, the foiling of usurpation, the ascendancy of law. 2. TERROR AND HORROR The Gothic novels are famous for their evocation of terror, for an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear provoked by superstitious dread, emotional anxiety, the advent of the supernatural, whether real or imagined, and a confrontation with distress provoked by actual encounter with violence and pain. If the terrors of Mrs Radcliffe’s heroines stop short of this actual encounter with the unspeakable, while using the potential and imminence of such a possibility to the full, then in Lewis, as later with Maturin, the potential becomes actual and the imminent made present. The darker side of Romanticism found its first release in the scenes of stress in the Gothic novel, initiating what Mario Praz came famously to call the “Romantic Agony”.7 This aspect of the Romantic experience was considered in terms of its aesthetic meaning in the discussion of sublimity. Mrs Radcliffe distinguished clearly between terror and horror,8 although she remained always a practitioner of terror only, of a terror understood as a stimulus, an emotional response to overwhelming sensory perception, akin to fear. Lewis’s depiction of the fate of Agnes in the vaults of the monastery in The Monk is a case in point: while the evocation of of these subterranean prisons is a

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The Gothic novel is justly famous for its evocation of fear and agony, and it is probable that the agonies of The Monk with their echoes of the German Schauerroman, contributed to fashioning a tendency in Scott to produce scenes of surprising fearfulness which use the principles of terror and horror. Several of the Waverley Novels depict scenes of great distress and suffering which are in the mainsteam of the Romantic Agony. At the end of his first novel Waverley, there is an account of the execution of Fergus McIvor which illustrates the tendency, and also draws attention to the application of the aesthetics of fear. The scene opens with a static tableau that focuses on some frightening detail. The court was occupied by a squadron of dragoons and a battalion of infantry, drawn up in hollow square. Within their ranks was the sledge, or hurdle, on which the prisoners were to be drawn to the place of execution. . . . It was painted black, and drawn by a white horse. At one end of the vehicle sat the Executioner, a horrid-looking fellow . . . with the broad axe in his hand . . . (Waverley ch. 69)

The impression is visual and singles out hurdle, axe and headsman. When it continues, the emphasis is aural. The dead march was then heard, and its melancholy sounds were mingled with those of a muffled peal, tolled from the neighbouring cathedral. The sound of the military music died away as the procession moved on . . .

The last part moves away from the outer scene to focus on Waverley’s reactions which reveal the classic symptom of terror, of a mind numbed with the perception of dread and grief. . . . the court yard was now totally empty, but Waverley still stood there as if stupified, his eyes fixed upon the dark pass where he had seen the last glimpse of his friend.

At no point is the actual execution depicted; the closest one comes is to placing the traitors’

heads on the walls, and even here the actual and inescapable confrontation with the agony is obviated. He dared hardly look back towards the Gothic battlements . . . ‘They’re no there,’ said Alan Polwarth. . . . with the vulgar appetite for the horrible, [he] was master of each detail of the butchery—‘the heads are ower the Scotch yate . . .’

The treatment of this scene has been more in the manner of Mrs Radcliffe than Lewis. Here is how the latter deals with Ambrosio’s treatment by the Inquisition. Returned to his dungeon, the sufferings of Ambrosio’s body were far more supportable than those of his mind. His dislocated limbs, the nails torn from his hands and feet, and his fingers mashed and broken by the pressure of the screws, were far surpassed in anguish by the agitation of his soul . . . (Monk III, 425)

The scene is horrific, but in its lurid yet impersonal details and broad description of human reactions, it has an unfocused quality which leaves its effects melodramatic and generalized. In Old Mortality (1816), Scott again conjures up scenes of terror. Initially, the impression is rather like that of the execution scene in Waverley. There is a procession which instils dread. Trumpets, drums, and kettle-drums, contended in noise with the shouts of a numerous rabble . . . (Mortality ch. 35)

The mood is suddenly changed by the undramatic appearance of grisly details. The next object was two heads borne upon pikes; and before each bloody head were carried the hands of the dismembered sufferers . . .

Morton’s reaction is like Waverley’s, weak with the apprehension of terror. However, what ensues is in a different league altogether: when Hartland asserts, “ajoutons cependant que les horreurs de Scott ne sont jamais si crues que celles de Lewis. Néanmoins il s’en souvient constamment”,9 he is right about Scott’s subtler approach, but even Lewis does not produce the following effects. The opening part of the scene of Macbriar’s torture is a classic instance of the inducement of terror: there is a definite effect on the spectator. A dark crimson curtain, which covered a sort of niche, or Gothic recess in the wall, rose at the signal, and displayed the public executioner, a tall, grim, and hideous man, having an oaken table before him, on which lay thumbscrews. . . . Morton who was unprepared for this ghastly apparition, started when the curtain rose . . . (Ibid. ch. 36)

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source of mystery and terror, the actual description of Agnes’s imprisonment, the detailed account of her anguish, her torment with the death and corruption of her baby, is pure horror. The mind is numbed, or recoils from the graphic nature of the experience. Scott’s appropriation of this famous episode in Marmion underlines the aesthetic difference very pertinently: his account of the vaults in St Cuthbert’s is full of the sublime evocation of terror, but avoids actually describing her fate; it is suggested in the terrifying screams of fear which can be heard as the inquisitional tribune leaves the place of trial.

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But the scene is developed further, and the reader is trapped with Macbriar in an horrific and inescapable situation of agony and distress. The refinement of detail and psychological reaction produces a hair-raising effect, even in reading. The executioner . . . enclosed the leg . . . within the tight iron boot, or case, and then placed a wedge of the same metal between the knee and the edge of the machine, took a mallet in his hand, and stood waiting. . . . the second blow fell. The third and fourth succeeded; but at the fifth, when a larger wedge had been introduced, the prisoner set up a scream of agony. Morton, whose blood boiled within him at witnessing such cruelty, could bear no longer . . .

Other scenes of fear centre on torture and execution which run like a Leitmotif through the Waverley Novels. In Ivanhoe there is the grim spectacle of Front-de-Boeuf’s torture chamber where Saracen slaves from Palestine become executioners and prepare the instruments of torture with which to begin the torment of Isaac of York to induce him to pay up a vast ransom. The scene is full of gloom and fear as the surroundings, the props, the intentions, elicit terror in the imminent prospect of the horror of torture (ch. 22). Scenes of execution occur at various times. In A Legend of Montrose, among the traces of the brutality of the Highlanders is the cruel fate of the “Children of the Mist”. Dalgetty observes the lugubrious testimonies of their repression as he approaches the Castle of the Marquis of Argyle, images of suffering and death (“Midway this space was erected a rude gibbet, on which hung five dead bodies . . .” ch. 12). The executioner himself is described in The Talisman (ch. 17). As a character he also appears in Anne of Geierstein, surrounded by the appurtenances of his trade (ch. 14), as in Old Mortality. The horror of the actual execution is depicted in this novel. The matter-of-factness of the events reduce the horror of the description, but not the power of the detail. . . . somewhat behind the captive, appeared a tall man, attired in red . . . the sword was brandished, the blow was struck, and the victim’s head rolled on the scaffold . . . while the headless corpse shot streams from the arteries, which were drunk up by the saw-dust that strewed the scaffold . . . (Geierstein ch. 16)

Closely related to these images of pain and death, and directly linked to the perception of horror, are the reiterated situations of imprisonment so common in the Waverley Novels. Again

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the idea is central to the Gothic experience where at some point the central protagonists find themselves entrapped, often incarcerated and menaced. Emily’s central adventure in Udolpho entails a confinement, an inescapable loss of freedom in a distant wilderness of castle, mountain and forest. Ellena is Schedoni’s prisoner in the sea cottage in Apulia in The Italian, while Agnes’s immuring in the vaults of St Clare is a locus classicus of Gothic horror. Imprisonment is established as a dominant motif in Waverley where the hero’s romantic attachment to a dangerous cause leads to arrest and imprisonment from which he must be rescued by his devoted Rose. In Guy Mannering, the rascal lawyer Glossin and the smuggler Hatteraick are finally seen in prison together where Glossin is murdered by Hatteraick who then takes his own life. The prison becomes the symbol of the nexus of crimes and villainy the two have perpetrated. The prison scene in Old Mortality has already been mentioned. The very title of The Heart of Midlothian is that of a prison; it opens with the storming of the prison and the lynching of Captain Porteous. The purported infanticide of Effie means that she is imprisoned in the Talbooth as well until Jeanie Deans secures her pardon. In A Legend of Montrose Dalgetty experiences imprisonment in Argyle Castle, while the central episode of Ivanhoe depicts the mass imprisonment of Cedric and Rowena, the wounded Ivanhoe, Athelstane, Isaac of York and Rebecca. The dungeons and turrets of Torquilstone represent the locus of lawlessness, the collapse of civilized standards. Rebecca is later held captive on a charge of witchcraft until freed by Ivanhoe’s victory on her behalf. The Abbot is similarly centred on the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots held at Lochlevan Castle, the archetypal tragic Romantic heroine held against her will by the harsh forces of an antiromantic political reality. Kenilworth likewise is built around the de facto incarceration of the beautiful Amy Robsart, who has secretly married the Earl of Leicester. He is forced to conceal his marriage for fear of incurring the wrath of the jealous Queen Elizabeth. Amy is accordingly mewed up in Cumnor Place, an old country house near Oxford, where through evil misrepresentation and intrigue, she is done to death. Imagery of capture and imprisonment also occur in The Pirate, where Magnus and his daughters are apprehended by the pirates before they themselves are taken prisoners by the frigate ‘Halcyon’.

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Quentin Durward is full of images of violence and imprisonment. The reference to Louis XI’s dreaded castle of Loches not only captures the Gothic flavour of the prison imagery, but serves as a representative symbol for all the prisons of the Waverley Novels. These are often prisons of the mind, as in St Ronan’s Well, where the setting is contemporary and domestic, and yet the fate of Clara is a type of psychological enthrallment which is simply another form of imprisonment. Also in Redgauntlet, the prison idea is not literal: Darsie is kidnapped by his uncle and legally restrained by him (itself a type of deception with an injunction from a corrupt magistrate). The imprisonment is far more to do with the spirit, with the hold of the past as represented in an untenable ideology embodied by Herrie’s Jacobite fanaticism. The notions of prisons of the mind and emotions are further explored in the Crusader novel The Betrothed, where both the heroine Eveline Berenger and the old constable, Hugo de Lacy, idealistically sign away their freedom of action and choice in rash vows, which they feel obliged to honour in spite of changed circumstance and the pressures of time and age. Hugo’s absence on Crusade and Eveline’s growing love for the young Damian, as well as the machinations of Randal de Lacy, lead to a charge of high treason and actual imprisonment, which is cleared up by the rational behaviour of the old constable. In The Talisman Sir Kenneth’s ignorance of his true identity, his victimization, detention and near execution before being rescued by Saladin, are all metaphysical extensions of a type of imprisonment of his true self.

Woodstock too presents a prison more of the mind than actually. Charles II’s hiding in the old lodge is a kind of self-imposed imprisonment because of the opportunities for concealment offered by the place. Cromwell hopes that Charles will take advantage of this facility and be captured there, but the intrigue which follows, the simulated haunting of the mansion, foils the plan and shows the Puritan soldiers to be prisoners of superstition. Scott’s last novels are also full of the imagery of imprisonment. In Anne of Geierstein the Philipsons are seized by Archibald of Hagenbach, and only narrowly escape death by the uprising of the people and his condemnation and execution by the Vehmgericht. In Count Robert of Paris the hero and his wife are detained as hostages for the Crusaders when they cross to Asia, Robert is thrown into prison and must be rescued by the chivalrous Hereward. In Castle Dangerous Augusta de Berkley is captured by the Douglas and offered in exchange for the castle. The vulnerable, uncertain identity of all these characters is stressed by their victimization symbolized in imprisonment. The terror and horror of abduction, kidnapping, torture, imprisonment and execution finds expression in other images of disruption and chaos, like the evocation of mass violence which is a hallmark of the Gothic novel, and shows a fundamental disruption in nature and the heart of man reflected in the chaos of uncontrolled and uncontrollable behaviour. In The Monk, the riot which develops outside the convent rapidly degenerates into mass confusion, in which elemental forces of destruction are unleashed, the outcome of which is the murder of the Abbess. . . . one of the Gates was forced open. The Rioters poured into the interior part of the Building. . . . The Flames rising from the burning piles caught part of the Building, which being old and dry, the conflagration spread rapidly from room to room. The Walls were soon shaken by the devouring element: . . . nothing was to be heard but shrieks and groans; The Convent was wrapped in flames, and the whole presented a scene of devastation and horror. (Monk III, 357-358)

Scott reflects this perception of the frightening potential for violence and chaos in the hearts of men most startlingly perhaps in the account of the Porteous Riots of 1736 in the opening episodes of The Heart of Midlothian. As in the torture scenes, Scott’s handling of materials is sharper than Lewis’s, more perceptive of detail and hu-

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In The Fortunes of Nigel the young hero is led into bad ways and caused to break the law against duelling by his enemy Lord Dalgarno: he is imprisoned in the Tower from where he is rescued only by the efforts of his beloved, Margaret Ramsay. His imprisonment is part of the loss of his inheritance, reputation and name, the lowpoint of his disrupted fortunes which reflect a corruption in society, as embodied in the court. The same pattern and implication is traced in Peveril of the Peak, where Julian Peveril and his father fall foul of the Duke of Buckingham, and are accused of complicity in the Popish Plot. Only with the help of the mysterious Fenella is their case brought to the notice of the King who intervenes to save them, sharing a sense of obligation for the kindness shown in the past by the old cavalier, Sir Geoffrey Peveril.

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man motivation and reaction. The violence and chaos are as torrential though. A huge red glaring bonfire speedily arose close to the door of the prison . . . illuminating the ferocious and wild gestures of the rioters who surrounded the place, as well as the pale and anxious groups of those who, from windows in the vicinage, watched the progress of this alarming scene. . . . The flames roared and crackled . . . and a terrible shout soon announced that the door had kindled and was in the act of being destroyed. . . . the rioters rushed . . . over its yet smouldering remains. Thick showers of sparkles rose high in the air . . . (Midlothian ch. 6)

This type of scene is found throughout the Waverley Novels, but is related more to the human confusion of purpose that leads to conflict, often on a vast scale of confrontation, as already seen in Marmion. The description of the Battle of Prestonpans in Waverley is a decisive turningpoint in the hero’s life, and the cause for him to question his romantic espousement of a lost cause. The same occurs in Rob Roy, where Francis Osbaldistone becomes the unwilling witness of an encounter between clansmen and royal troops, the symbol of a dangerous and futile way of life. It is in Ivanhoe though that such scenes of violence and chaos are considered in several variations. The tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouche represents a controlled form of violence, but is symptomatic of a wasteful arrogance in the heart of man. The siege of Torquilstone is a great setpiece, and a sustained evocation of destructive chaos which culminates in the conflagration of the castle. During the siege the discussion between Ivanhoe and Rebecca represents a central point of reference to the place and meaning of anger and violence in human affairs. The theme is brought to a sustained consideration in The Fair Maid of Perth, filled with the imagery of violence and chaos which reaches its highpoint in the battle of the champions from the clans of Qulele and Chatten in the final episodes. The violence and carnage cause the hero Henry Smith to reconsider his life and attitudes to impulsiveness, anger and violence. The final defeat of Charles the Bold by the peaceable Swiss at the Battles of Granson and Morat in Anne of Geierstein signifies the choice of moderation over the glamorous but facile and destructive violence that is the heritage of original sin. Closely connected with the terror and the horror of the mass violence are the instances of personal acts of anger and force in the Gothic novel. Crimes by individuals are recurrent. As

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always, the differences between Mrs Radcliffe and Lewis are instructive. The closest Mrs Radcliffe comes to depicting murder is Schedoni’s sinister contemplation of the sleeping Ellena in The Italian. In The Monk though, the horrendous highpoint to the criminal career of Ambrosio is the murder of Elvira followed by the rape and murder of Antonia. The personal crime is a reflection of the disruption in the universe and the reality of evil. The Waverley Novels do not present personal violence in quite this lividness, but nevertheless trace a series of frightening actions which violate the natural law and the standards of love. Some of the crimes of violence are fundamental to this movement of plot, like the succession of abductions and kidnappings, the recurrent imprisonments. But these more individual and isolated actions of violence are threaded throughout the novels as points of disruption, and often as moments of personal confrontation. In Guy Mannering Bertram [⫽Brown] is wrongly suspected by Mannering of paying attentions to his wife, and is wounded by him in a duel and left for dead. The forcible expulsion of the gypsies from the Ellogowan estate, and the murder and suicide in prison of Glossin and Hatteraick respectively, continue the record of violent deeds. Old Mortality depicts the assassination of the Archbishop of St Andrew’s, Rob Roy the murder of the spy Morris by Helen McGregor; Rashleigh is killed by Rob Roy after having betrayed his Jacobite associates. The Heart of Midlothian depicts the lynching of Captain Porteous as well as the parricide of George Staunton by the Whistler, his own son. In The Bride of Lammermoor Lucy murders her husband on their wedding night, while in A Legend of Montrose the wedding of Annot Lyle and Menteith is interrupted by Allan MacAulay, who stabs his rival. Ivanhoe is filled with images of violence and pain, with its multiple abductions, imprisonments, tournaments, all of which are highlighted in the final ironic comment on violence when Bois-Guilbert falls dead in combat with Ivanhoe, although untouched by his rival’s lance. Amy Robsart is murdered in Kenilworth; Lord Dalgarno is killed by robbers as he proceeds to Scotland in a last attempt to seize Nigel’s property. The Talisman as well is filled with violence, an attempted assassination of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, and the combat between Conrad de Monserrat and Sir Kenneth. The Fair Maid of Perth similarly moves from one act of disruption to another, the attempted abduction of Catherine by Rothsay, the

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Associated in a minor way with these acts of criminality and violence are figures from the world of romance, who both add to the mystery of the plots and intensify the elements of terror and horror. These are those embodiments of the exotic and the lawless that haunt the pages of Romantic fiction, the gypsies and robbers, both groups used extensively in the German literature and the Gothic novel, which so influenced Scott, from Goethe’s robber baron Götz von Berlichingen (1773) and Schiller’s Die Räuber (1782) through the banditti of Mrs Radcliffe and Lewis. Mrs Radcliffe constantly heightens the sublime effect of her wild scenes by etching the landscape with figures of outlaws, discerned in the distance, menacing life and property, but safely at a remove. There was a singularity in their dress, and a certain ferocity in their air, that fixed her attention. She withdrew from the casement while they passed, but soon returned to observe them further. Their figures seemed so suited to the wildness of the surrounding objects, that, as they stood surveying the castle, she sketched them for banditti amid the mountain view of her picture . . . (Udolpho I, 280-281)

In The Monk the balladesque terrors of Raymond’s tale set in the forests of Germany contains a skirmish with robbers. Robbers (and their variants, banditti, smugglers and pirates) are always a symbol of extreme lawlessness and disruption. Robbers occur in The Heart of Midlothian and The Fortunes of Nigel, where they cause death to protagonists who have themselves engaged in criminal activity. The buccaneers of The Pirate represent an alien intrusion that a close and ordered society cannot contain. In Guy Mannering, the challenge to law and possession is symbolized in the kidnapping of Bertram by smugglers, while the exercise of just and prudent stewardship is stressed by the way the nomadic and lawless gypsies are treated. Meg Merrilies, one of Scott’s most vivid creations, represents a world of folklore and mystery, a challenge to order and to crime alike, since it is her reaction to the reckless disregard for tradition embodied in the Laird of Ellangowan’s expulsion of the gypsies from his illegally acquired estates, symptomatic of a violation of the deeper values of tradition and

justice. It is her action further which reveals the conspiracy of Glossin and Hatteraick to kidnap Harry Bertram again, and leads to the restoration of true identity and property. In Quentin Durward, gypsies also make an ambiguous contribution, beyond the law, but an elemental force that if harnassed sympathetically, can put the hero in touch with untapped springs of folk wisdom and insight. 3. THE MARVELLOUS AND THE IMPROBABLE. Mystery and terror are partially underpinned in the Waverley Novels by an undertow of unease, eeriness or premonition induced by the introduction of the supernatural or the superstitious. The debate about the nature of the marvellous, as to whether Walpole’s or Lewis’s direct presentation of a numinous world, or Mrs Radcliffe’s technique of indirect presentation through sensory deception and rational explanation, is discussed by Scott in his Lives of the Novelists. It will be recalled that while professing to dislike the explained supernatural, the evidence of his poems shows a movement from numinous reality through mystification by explicable means to psychological impressionability. The Waverley Novels themselves occupy an ambiguous position since he includes episodes derived from Scottish and German folklore that have a numinous nature with other events that are disturbing but fixed in human behaviour. This ambiguity of response is present from the outset in Waverley, where the clansman Vich Ian Vhor sees the Bodach Glas, the grey ancestral spirit that predicts the imminence of death. The spectre is real to its recipient, but rationally explicable to Waverley as a sociological/psychological phenomenon. No editorial intrusion tries to manipulate the reader in either direction. “. . . I . . . was astonished at the man’s audacity in daring to dog me. I called to him but received no answer. I felt an anxious throbbing at my heart; and to ascertain what I dreaded I stood still. . . . By Heaven, Edward, turn where I would, the figure was instantly before my eyes at the same distance! I was then convinced it was the Bodach Glas. My hair bristled, and my knees shook. . . . I made the sign of the cross, drew my sword, and uttered, ‘In the name of God, Evil Spirit, give place!’ ‘Vich Ian Vohr,’ it said, in a voice that made my very blood curdle, ‘beware tomorrow!’ The words were no sooner spoken than it was gone. . . .” Edward had little doubt that this phantom was the operation of an exhausted frame and depressed spirits, working on the common belief to all Highlanders in such superstitions. (Waverley ch. 59)

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hacking off of Ramornay’s hand by Henry Smith, the murder of Rothsay in the Castle of Falkland, the suicide of Conachar. It is the last word in Scott’s consideration of the disruption and confusion endemic to the view of the world explored in dark Romanticism, and an integral part of the imagery used by Scott to explore his own universe more fully.

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The Doppelgänger motif borrowed from German literature, appears again without sceptical qualification in Old Mortality, where during Morton’s long absence from England, there is a supposed apparition of him in his home areas, as if his inheritance were guarded by a manifestation of himself, an assertion of his living presence. In A Legend of Montrose, the Doppelgänger reappears and is rather more sinister, as it predicts to Allan the violence he will perpetrate on his rival. The most famous example in Scott of the use of the direct supernatural, occurs in The Monastery in the person of the ghostly White Lady, a figure again derived from German legend of the elemental spirits of the water, the undine, which Scott had read about in Baron Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Novelle (1811). She is represented as a guardian figure of the Avenel family and provides a mystic tie between humans and creatures of the elements, and appears from time to time to give predictions and advice, and work acts of beneficence, like restoring Sir Percy Shafton to life after he has been fatally wounded, appearing and disappearing at will, a real spirit. Another instance of apparently genuine ghostly manifestation is in The Betrothed, where Evelyn is visited by a lady with a bleeding finger who predicts the pattern of events to follow. These examples of the genuinely marvellous are rare exceptions in the Waverley Novels, the heritage of all Scott’s reading and researches into demonology and sorcery. Instances of the use of the superstitious, explicable forms of folktale or the eerie, occur in characters like Meg Merrilies, whom Mannering comes across in the Gothic ruins of Ellogowan Castle. He finds her spinning a thread drawn from wool of three different colours, black, white and grey. She sings and spins a kind of spell, which is an evocation of the ancient connection between fate and spinning. The model for Scott has surely been the Three Norns of German mythology familiar from his wide reading in German superstition and in his correspondence with Jakob Grimm. Meg provides a connecting link with a kind of preternatural insight, prophetic forewarning throughout the action. Her presence, expanded in eerie effectiveness, is developed in The Bride of Lammermoor into the three old hags who embittered by old age, poverty or neglect, exert a baleful and gloomy influence of foreboding and disaster throughout the novel, like a type of superstitious chorus, “one of Scott’s best contributions to demonology”.1 0

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Norna of the Fitful-Head in The Pirate also serves to represent dark, pagan forces of preChristian belief in her insights and rituals, intensifying the indigenous background and deepening the sense of fatefulness. Integral to Scott’s use of the eerie, the explained supernatural, the probable, so much Mrs Radcliffe’s stock-in-trade, are thus conversations, recitals of legends and popular rumours which induce an atmosphere of tension, even alarm. Sometimes characters are disturbed without cause, but rendered uneasy by murmurs or intimations produced by the mist or the night. But as with the great Poetess of Romantic fiction, there is a preference for association of these effects with architectural images—empty, or uninhabited buildings, or newly ruined ones. Caves, crypts, secret passages, trap doors, sliding panels are the essential elements in the construction of intrigue. Fear inspired by apparently supernatural agents are really the result of trickery explained by the rules of Mrs Radcliffe. The conformity with her approach is very close.1 1 Ruins themselves seem to invite the manifestation of unusual or frightening events, the imagery of abandonment, remoteness and decay providing an objective correlative to the lonely, isolated and frightened/impressionable human consciousness. There is a good example in Guy Mannering where Bertram reaches a building in ruins, where he finds a wounded man watched over by a gypsy. He hides when the accomplices of the sufferer arrive, watching and listening to them from his hiding. When they leave to dispose of the body, he escapes. The scene is full of the remoteness, eeriness, terror and tension of the Gothic (ch. 27-28). Impelled by curiosity to reconnoitre the interior of this strange place before he entered, Brown gazed in at this aperture. A scene of greater desolation could not well be imagined. There was a fire upon the floor, the smoke of which . . . escaped by a hole broken in the arch above. The walls, seen by this smoky light, had the rude and waste appearance of a ruin of three centuries old at least . . . (Mannering ch. 27)

This basic experience of fear is used as a manifestation of the gullibility and impressionability of others, and put to thematic purposefulness in other instances. In The Antiquary, for example, Eddie Ochiltree and Lovel, hidden in the ruins of a church, frighten the Baronet and the scoundrel Dousterswiwel by their groanings and shrill cries in order to foil their dishonest plans (ch. 21). Later the German is terrified anew in these ruins at midnight by his experiences (ch.

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Closely related to ruin and church, but of a decidedly melodramatic character, is the imagery of secret architecture, of passages and rooms that exist hidden behind the surface and provide a dimension of the clandestine, inevitably for the deception of others, be this for positive or negative reasons. Dalgetty and Ronald in A Legend of Montrose, for example, are able to escape from Argyle Castle by means of a secret passage. A hidden mechanism opens the door and the passage leads to the apartments of the Marquis (ch. 13-14). Norna in The Pirate bolsters her reputation as a sorceress by the installation of sliding panels and doors in her house by which she and her deformed dwarf are able to exercise their trickery. The Hermit of Engeddi in The Talisman leads Sir Kenneth though secret passages to a magnificent chapel (ch. 4). Only later is the explanation given of the vision he experiences (ch. 8). The arc of tension and the explanation are the classic techniques of the Gothic novel. Peveril of the Peak is full of these frisson-inducing mysteries where the architectural motif is now a prison: Julian in prison is surprised to be addressed by a mystery voice (ch. 35). The following night the same voice speaks to him at length. Only at the end of the novel does one learn how the acrobatic Fenella was able to enter Julian’s prison. But it is in Woodstock where one finds what is probably the most developed instance of the explained supernatural with its concomitant architectural associations so much used by Walpole and Mrs Radcliffe. Doors close violently without apparent human agency; strange sounds are heard, distant subterranean thunder; beds are moved; doors resist being opened, then spring open introducing currents of air which extinguish candles; Everard hears a voice which gives him menacing advice: soon after he finds himself in danger of death; mysterious music is heard and a voice urging Everard to leave Woodstock. The minister Holdenough believes that he sees the ghost of a boyhood friend, first in a mirror, then gliding slowly towards the door (ch. 17). Later one sees the passages and secret appartments where Charles II has been hiding (ch. 22). Then it is

revealed that Dr Rochecliffe with his assistants has chased away the agents of the Commonwealth. The nature of this terrorizing has been by architectural-mechanical trickery, all of which is revealed in what must be the most extended instance of the explained supernatural in Romantic literature (ch. 34). Some of the effects could be by Mrs Radcliffe herself, as in this instance of mysterious music so much loved by the authoress. A wild strain of melody, beginning at a distance, and growing louder as it advanced, seemed to pass from room to room, from cabinet to gallery, from hall to bower, through the deserted and dishonoured ruins of the ancient residence of so many sovereigns; and, as it approached, no soldier gave alarm, nor did any of the numerous guests of any degrees, who spent an unpleasant and terrified night in that ancient mansion, seem to dare to announce to each other the inexplicable cause of apprehension. (Woodstock ch. 15)

The association is not only with Mrs Radcliffe but also with Karl Grosse whose novel Der Genius (1791-95) appeared in English as Horrid Mysteries (1796), and must have been known to Scott. Here the methods of terror and subjugation used by a sinister secret society hinge on just such a sustained and intricate use of mechanical trickery.1 2 The terrifying apparatus so plentiful in Woodstock reappears in Anne of Geierstein. Arthur on guard duty is mystified and thrilled when he sees the spectral form of Anne (ch. 10). Later he is in prison anticipating the advent of his assassins. Anne and a black figure appear again to relieve him of his bonds; the black form takes him out of prison by the ordinary passages (ch. 15). The older Philipson later feels his bed moving, descending by means of cords and pulleys into a subterranean vault where he is involved in the terrifying ceremonies of a secret society—the centre of a trial of the dread Vehmgericht, and barely escapes sentence of death (ch. 20). In his last novel, Castle Dangerous, Scott again returns to the appurtenances and architectural ploys of the supernatural, as Ursula with Augusta escapes from her cell by opening a secret door which has access to a tortuous secret passage. In his use of the marvellous and the improbable then, his incidents and imagery are methods of instilling terror and mystery; all are culled from his memories of the ballads of the Border, the ballads and tragedies of the Schauerromantik, and his own researches into the superstitions, beliefs and practices of Scotland and the Middle Ages. On this

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25). The Black Dwarf contains analogous passages: a church rather than the ruins provides the emotive setting, where the Dwarf mysteriously intervenes, hidden in the shadows, to interrupt the coerced marriage of Isabella (ch. 17). A similar scene is to be found in The Pirate where Kirkwall intervenes to stop the marriage of Cleveland and Mina (ch. 37).

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foundation he has added circumstances and ideas found already in the Gothic novel which he knew so well. In these instances, the imitation is almost self-conscious, a use of conventions and motifs in the ordering of plot and range of imagery. A subtler integrating of the deeper, disturbing implications of dark Romanticism though can be discerned in his adaptation of the Gothic mode itself, the projection of a view of the world. It is in this adaptation and revitalization of a whole vision that he carries the implications of the roman noir to new depths and insights.

b) Novels —Numerous complete editions exist, among them the first edition, The Waverley Novels: New Edition (Edinburgh: R. Cadell, 1830) and The Centenary Edition (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1871). The Everyman Library contains one of the best collected editions. Fine popular editions include the Collins Library of Classics and the Nelson Classics. Other modern editions of individual novels are published by Penguin. No significant textual variations exist between these different editions. The new critical edition was launched by the Edinburgh University Press in 1993.

2. THE GOTHIC NOVELISTS Beckford, W. Vathek [1786] in Three Gothic Novels. Ed. P.FAIRCLOUGH with an Introductory Essay by M.PRAZ. Harmondsworth, 1968.

Notes 1. Freye, 53-63.

Lewis, M. G. The Monk: A Romance [1796]. Ed. H.ANDERSON. London, 1973.

2. Hartland, 57-72. 3. Parsons, 68-285.

Maturin, C. R. Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale [1820]. Ed. D.GRANT. London, 1972.

4. Wilt, 19-20.

Radcliffe, A. The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents [1797]. Ed. F. GARBER. London, 1971.

5. Welsh, 93-126. 6. Parsons, 264: “In the strife plot, the problem of worth and status is complicated by war rather than by parentage, as in the identity plot. . . . The dénouement brings peace after hostilities, the reward of pardon and marriage for the good man, and the punishment of death or disgrace for the bad.” 7. M. Praz, The Romantic Agony (London, 1970). 8. “Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them. . . . neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr Burke by his reasoning anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one.” Mrs Radcliffe’s theory was published in the New Monthly Magazine, 8(1826). See Letellier, Kindred Spirits, 267 for a survey of Mrs Radcliffe’s place in the late eighteenth- early nineteenth-century discussions of the aesthetics of the sublime.

———The Mysteries of Udolpho [1794]. (Everyman’s Library 865-866.) Introduction R.AUSTIN FREEMAN. 2 vols. London, 1931, 1968. ———The Romance of the Forest [1791]. (The World’s Classics.) Ed. C.CHARD. Oxford, 1986. Quotations from London first edition. Reeve, C. The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story [1777]. Ed. J.TRAINER. London, 1967. Shelley, M. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus [1818] in Three Gothic Novels. Harmondsworth, 1968. Walpole, H. The Castle of Otranto: A Story [1764] in Three Gothic Novels. Harmondsworth, 1968.

II. Secondary Texts Freye, W. The Influence of “Gothic” Literature on Sir Walter Scott. Rostock, 1902. Hartland, R. W. Walter Scott et le roman ‘Frénétique’: Contribution à l’étude de leur fortune en France. Paris, 1928.

9. Hartland, 63. 10. D. Cameron, “The Web of Destiny: The Structure of The Bride of Lammermoor” 185, observes that the taut structure, harmony and effect of this novel lies in “Scott’s brilliant use of the supernatural as a device to suggest certain qualities of the historical context, to express the secret desires of the characters, and to control the pace of the narrative.”

Letellier, R. I. Kindred Spirits: Interrelations and Affinities between the Romantic Novels of England and Germany (1790-1820). (Salzburg Studies in English Literature 33:3.) Salzburg, 1982.

11. Hartland, 68.

Praz, M. The Romantic Agony. Trans. A. Davidson. London, 1970.

12. Cf. Letellier, Kindred Spirits, 206-209.

Parsons, C. Witchcraft and Demonology in Scott’s Fiction. Edinburgh and London, 1964.

Scott, W. Journal (1825-1832). Ed. J. G. TAIT and W. M. PARKER. London, 1950.

Bibliography

———. Letters. Ed. GRIERSON, H. J. C. et al. 12 vols. London, 1932- 7.

I. Primary Texts

———. The Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart.. 30 vols. Edinburgh, 1834-6.

1. SIR WALTER SCOTT a) Poetry

Welsh, A. The Hero of the Waverley Novels. New Haven and London, 1963.

—Collected Poetry and Plays. (Oxford Standard Authors.) Oxford, 1904.

Wilt, J. Secret Leaves: The Novels of Sir Walter Scott. Chicago, 1985.

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Criticism Boatright, Mody C. “Scott’s Theory and Practice Concerning the Use of the Supernatural in Prose Fiction in Relation to the Chronology of the Waverley Novels.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 50, no. 1 (March 1935): 235-61. Elucidates the critical principles Scott devised concerning the proper use of the supernatural in fiction, ideas and techniques that he believed would distinguish his novels from those of his Gothic precursors. Boatright then goes on to apply these principles to Scott’s works in an attempt to verify the rough order of composition of his novels. Chandler, Alice. “Origins of Medievalism: Scott.” In A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, pp. 12-51. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971. Examines Scott’s role in introducing medievalism into nineteenth-century English literature. Hart, Francis R. Scott’s Novels: The Plotting of Historic Survival. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966, 371 p. A detailed study of the Waverley Novels divided into four sections: “The Quixotic Tragedy of Jacobism,” “Opposing Fanaticisms and the Search for Humanity,” “The Historical Picturesque and the Survivals of Chivalry,” and “The Falls and Survivals of Ancient Houses.” Hayden, John O., ed. Walter Scott: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970, 554 p.

Lauber, John. Sir Walter Scott. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966, 166 p. A concise introduction to Scott and his writing featuring both biographical and critical material. Orr, Marilyn. “Repetition, Reversal, and the Gothic: The Pirate and St. Ronan’s Well.” English Studies in Canada 16, no. 2 (June 1990): 187-99. Focuses on Scott’s use of the Gothic device of the double to represent the opposition between “the rational beneficence of romance” and “the irrational malignancy of its Gothic alternative” in two of the Waverley Novels, The Pirate and St. Ronan’s Well. Parsons, Coleman O. Witchcraft and Demonology in Scott’s Fiction: With Chapters on the Supernatural in Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1964, 363 p. Discusses Scott’s developing use of supernatural elements in his poetry and prose. Wilt, Judith. “Transmutations: From Alchemy to History in Quentin Durward and Anne of Geierstein.” European Romantic Review 13, no. 3 (September 2002): 249-60. Focuses on two novels set in Renaissance Burgundy; considers elements Scott portrayed through the lens of historical objectivity and those he rendered as Gothic and occult mysteries. Woolf, Virginia. “Sir Walter Scott.” In Collected Essays, pp. 134-43. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966. Impressionistic assessment of Scott that concludes: “The emotions . . . in which Scott excels are not those of human beings pitted against other human beings, but of man pitted against Nature, of man in relation to fate.”

Reprints selected nineteenth-century critical commentary on Scott and his works. Hennelly, Mark M. “Waverley and Romanticism.” NineteenthCentury Fiction 28, no. 2 (September 1973): 194-209. Analyzes Scott’s use of myth, dialectic, and romantic literary conventions in Waverley. Irvine, Robert P. “Scott’s The Black Dwarf: The Gothic and the Female Author.” Studies in Romanticism 38, no. 2 (summer 1999): 223-48. Evaluates Scott’s innovative blending of social-realistic and Gothic elements in his 1816 novel The Black Dwarf in conjunction with his appropriation of feminine authorial discourse in this work. Jack, Ian. “The Waverley Romances.” In English Literature, 1815-1832, pp. 185-212. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. A biographical and historical introduction to the Waverley Novels.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Scott’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 22; Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 2; British Writers, Vol. 4; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1789-1832; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 93, 107, 116, 144, 159; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Moststudied Authors, Novelists, and Poets; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 15, 69, 110; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 13; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; Short Stories for Students, Vol. 10; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 32; Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 1; Twayne’s English Authors; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3; World Literature Criticism; and Yesterday’s Authors of Books for Children.

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FURTHER READING

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY (1797 - 1851)

(Born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) English novelist, editor, critic, short story and travel writer.

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helley is best known for her novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which has transcended the Gothic and horror genres and is now recognized as a work of philosophical and psychological resonance. Critics agree that with the depiction of a seemingly godless universe where science and technology have gone awry, Shelley created a powerful metaphor for the modern age; indeed, the Frankenstein myth, which has been adapted to stage, film, and television, has pervaded modern culture. Shelley’s achievement is considered remarkable, moreover, because she completed the book before her twentieth birthday. In addition to Frankenstein, Shelley’s literary works include several novels that were moderately successful when published but are little-known today and an edition of poetry by her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, which she issued with notes that are now regarded as indispensable. Her reputation rests, however, on what she once called her “hideous progeny,” Frankenstein.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Shelley’s personal life has sometimes overshadowed her literary work. She was the daughter

of Mary Wollstonecraft, the early feminist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and William Godwin, the political philosopher and novelist. Her parents’ wedding, which occurred when Wollstonecraft was five months pregnant with Mary, was the marriage of two of the day’s most noted freethinkers. While they both objected to the institution of matrimony, they agreed to marry to ensure their child’s legitimacy. Ten days after Mary’s birth, Wollstonecraft died from complications, leaving Godwin, an undemonstrative and self-absorbed intellectual, to care for both Mary and Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft’s daughter from an earlier liaison. Mary’s home life improved little with the arrival four years later of a stepmother and her two children. The new Mrs. Godwin, whom contemporaries described as petty and disagreeable, favored her own offspring over the daughters of the celebrated Wollstonecraft, and Mary was often solitary and unhappy. She was not formally educated, but absorbed the intellectual atmosphere created by her father and such visitors as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She read a wide variety of books, notably those of her mother, whom she idolized. Young Mary’s favorite retreat was Wollstonecraft’s grave in the St. Pancras churchyard, where she went to read and write and eventually to meet her lover, Percy Shelley. An admirer of Godwin, Percy Shelley visited the author’s home and briefly met Mary when she

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was fourteen, but their attraction did not take hold until a subsequent meeting two years later. Shelley, twenty-two, was married, and his wife was expecting their second child, but he and Mary, like Godwin and Wollstonecraft, believed that ties of the heart superseded legal ones. In July 1814, one month before her seventeenth birthday, Mary eloped with Percy to the Continent, where, apart from two interludes in England, they spent the next few years traveling in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. These years were characterized by financial difficulty and personal tragedy. Percy’s father, Sir Timothy Shelley, a wealthy baronet, cut off his son’s substantial allowance after his elopement. In 1816, Mary’s half-sister Fanny committed suicide; just weeks later, Percy’s wife, Harriet, drowned herself. Mary and Percy were married in London, in part because they hoped to gain custody of his two children by Harriet, but custody was denied. Three of their own children died in infancy, and Mary fell into a deep depression that was barely dispelled by the birth in 1819 of Percy Florence, her only surviving child. The Shelleys’ marriage suffered, too, in the wake of their children’s deaths, and Percy formed romantic attachments to other women. Despite these trying circumstances, both Mary and Percy maintained a schedule of rigorous study—including classical and European literature, Greek, Latin, and Italian language, music and art—and ambitious writing; during this period Mary completed Frankenstein and another novel, Valperga (1823). The two also enjoyed a coterie of stimulating friends, notably Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt. The Shelleys were settled near Lenci, Italy, on the Gulf of Spezzia in 1822 when Percy drowned during a storm while sailing to meet Leigh and Marianne Hunt. After one mournful year in Italy, Mary returned permanently to England with her son. Shelley’s life after Percy’s death was marked by melancholy and hardship as she struggled to support herself and her child. Sir Timothy Shelley offered her a meager stipend, but ordered that she keep the Shelley name out of print; thus, all her works were published anonymously. In addition to producing four novels in the years after Percy’s death, Mary contributed a series of biographical and critical sketches to Chamber’s Cabinet Cyclopedia, as well as occasional short stories, which she considered potboilers, to the literary annuals of the day. The Shelleys’ financial situation improved when Sir Timothy increased Percy Florence’s allowance with his coming of age in 1840, which enabled mother and son to travel in Italy and

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Germany; their journeys are recounted in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844). Too ill in her last few years to complete her most cherished project, a biography of her husband, Shelley died at age fifty-four.

MAJOR WORKS Although Frankenstein has consistently dominated critical discussions of Shelley’s oeuvre, she also composed several other novels in addition to critical and biographical writings. Her five later novels attracted little notice, and critics generally agree that they share the faults of verbosity and awkward plotting. After Frankenstein, The Last Man (1826) is her best-known work. This novel, in which Shelley describes the destruction of the human race in the twenty-first century, is noted as an inventive depiction of the future and an early prototype of science fiction. Valperga and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830) are historical novels that have received scant attention from literary critics, while Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837), thought by many to be autobiographical, are often examined for clues to the lives of the Shelleys and their circle. Shelley’s stories were collected and published posthumously, as was Mathilda, a novella that appeared for the first time in 1959. The story of a father and daughter’s incestuous attraction, it has been viewed as a fictional treatment—or distortion—of Shelley’s relationship with Godwin. The posthumously published verse dramas, Proserpine and Midas (1922), were written to complement one of Percy Shelley’s works and have garnered mild praise for their poetry. Critics have also lauded Shelley’s nonfiction: the readable, though now dated, travel volumes, the essays for Chamber’s Cabinet Cyclopedia, which are considered vigorous and erudite, and her illuminating notes on her husband’s poetry.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Since Shelley’s death, critics have devoted nearly all of their attention to Frankenstein. Early critics, generally with some dismay, usually classified the novel as belonging to the Gothic genre then practiced by such authors as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis. While most early Victorian reviewers reviled what they considered the sensationalist and gruesome elements in Frankenstein, many praised the anonymous au-

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Frankenstein criticism has proliferated since the 1950s, encompassing a wide variety of themes and approaches. The monster, who is often the focus of commentary, has been interpreted as representing issues ranging from the alienation of modern humanity to the repression of women. Many commentators have viewed the monster as Dr. Frankenstein’s double, an example of the doppelgänger archetype. In a similar vein, critics have discussed Dr. Frankenstein and the monster as embodying Sigmund Freud’s theory of id and ego. Students of the Gothic, supernatural horror, and science fiction novel have adopted Frankenstein as a venerable forebear and have approached it from a historical slant. Alternately, Shelley’s life has served as a starting point for those who perceive in the novel expressions of the author’s feelings toward her parents, husband, children, and friends. Feminist critics, in particular, have found Shelley and Frankenstein a rich source for study, describing it, for example, as a manifestation of the author’s ambivalent feelings toward motherhood.

PRINCIPAL WORKS History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, with Letters descriptive of a Sail around the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni (nonfiction) 1817 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 3 vols. (novel) 1818; revised edition, 1831 Valperga: or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca. 3 vols. (novel) 1823 Posthumous Poems [editor] (poetry) 1824 The Last Man. 2 vols. (novel) 1826 The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck. 3 vols. (novel) 1830 Lodore. 3 vols. (novel) 1835 Falkner. 3 vols. (novel) 1837 The Poetical Works of Percy Shelley [editor] (poetry) 1839 Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (travel essays) 1844 The Choice: A Poem on Shelley’s Death (poetry) 1876 Tales and Stories by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (short stories) 1891 Proserpine and Midas [first publication] (plays) 1922 *Mathilda [edited by Elizabeth Nitchie] (novella) 1959 Collected Tales and Stories (short stories) 1976 The Journals of Mary Shelley (journals) 1987 The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. 3 vols. (letters) 1988 *

Originally titled The Fields of Fancy, Mathilda is believed to have been written c. 1819.

PRIMARY SOURCES MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY (ESSAY DATE MARCH 1824) SOURCE: Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. “On Ghosts.” In London Magazine 9 (March 1824): 253-56. In the following essay, Shelley treats the subject of belief in ghosts, offering her own thoughts and creative writings, as well as anecdotes and excerpts from others’ writings.

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thor’s imagination and powers of description. In the later nineteenth century and throughout Frankenstein criticism, commentators have focused on Prometheanism in the novel, an aspect that Shelley herself highlighted in the book’s subtitle. This line of inquiry, which continues to engage critics, likens Dr. Frankenstein to the Greek mythic figure who wreaks his own destruction through abuse of power. Percy Shelley treated the same mythicphilosophic theme in his poetry, most notably in Prometheus Unbound, and critics have searched for his influence on Frankenstein, particularly in the expression of Romantic ideals and attitudes. Scholars have also debated the value of the additional narratives that Percy encouraged Mary to write. While some have praised the novel’s resulting three-part structure, others have argued that these additions detract from and merely pad the story. Nevertheless, most have valued the otherworldly Arctic scenes. Commentators have also frequently noted the influence of Shelley’s father, tracing strains of Godwin’s humanitarian social views; in addition, some critics have found direct thematic links to his fiction, particularly to his novel, Caleb Williams. Other literary allusions often noted in Frankenstein include those to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the source of the book’s epigraph, as well as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

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their familiars? and, last, what of ghosts, with beckoning hands and fleeting shapes, which quelled the soldier’s brave heart, and made the murderer disclose to the astonished noon the veiled work of midnight?

I look for ghosts—but none will force Their way to me; ’tis falsely said That there was ever intercourse Between the living and the dead. —Wordsworth

What a different earth do we inhabit from that on which our forefathers dwelt! The antediluvian world, strode over by mammoths, preyed upon by the megatherion, and peopled by the offspring of the Sons of God, is a better type of the earth of Homer, Herodotus, and Plato, than the hedged-in cornfields and measured hills of the present day. The globe was then encircled by a wall which paled in the bodies of men, whilst their feathered thoughts soared over the boundary; it had a brink, and in the deep profound which it overhung, men’s imaginations, eaglewinged, dived and flew, and brought home strange tales to their believing auditors. Deep caverns harboured giants; cloud-like birds cast their shadows upon the plains; while far out at sea lay islands of bliss, the fair paradise of Atlantis or El Dorado sparkling with untold jewels. Where are they now? The Fortunate Isles have lost the glory that spread a halo round them; for who deems himself nearer to the golden age, because he touches at the Canaries on his voyage to India? Our only riddle is the rise of the Niger; the interior of New Holland, our only terra in. cognita; and our sole mare incognitum, the north-west passage. But these are tame wonders, lions in leash; we do not invest Mungo Park, or the Captain of the Hecla, with divine attributes; no one fancies that the waters of the unknown river bubble up from hell’s fountains, no strange and weird power is supposed to guide the ice-berg, nor do we fable that a stray pick-pocket from Botany Bay has found the gardens of the Hesperides within the circuit of the Blue Mountains. What have we left to dream about? The clouds are no longer the charioted servants of the sun, nor does he any more bathe his glowing brow in the bath of Thetis; the rainbow has ceased to be the messenger of the Gods, and thunder longer their awful voice, warning man of that which is to come. We have the sun which has been weighed and measured, but not understood; we have the assemblage of the planets, the congregation of the stars, and the yet unshackled ministration of the winds:—such is the list of our ignorance. Nor is the empire of the imagination less bounded in its own proper creations, than in those which were bestowed on it by the poor blind eyes of our ancestors. What has become of enchantresses with their palaces of crystal and dungeons of palpable darkness? What of fairies and their wands? What of witches and

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These which were realities to our fore-fathers, in our wiser age— —Characterless are grated To dusty nothing.

Yet is it true that we do not believe in ghosts? There used to be several traditionary tales repeated, with their authorities, enough to stagger us when we consigned them to that place where that is which “is as though it had never been.” But these are gone out of fashion. Brutus’s dream has become a deception of his over-heated brain, Lord Lyttleton’s vision is called a cheat; and one by one these inhabitants of deserted houses, moonlight glades, misty mountain tops, and midnight church-yards, have been ejected from their immemorial seats, and small thrill is felt when the dead majesty of Denmark blanches the cheek and unsettles the reason of his philosophic son. But do none of us believe in ghosts? If this question be read at noon-day, when— Every little corner, nook, and hole, Is penetrated with the insolent light—

at such a time derision is seated on the features of my reader. But let it be twelve at night in a lone house; take up, I beseech you, the story of the Bleeding Nun; or of the Statue, to which the bridegroom gave the wedding ring, and she came in the dead of night to claim him, tall, and cold; or of the Grandsire, who with shadowy form and breathless lips stood over the couch and kissed the foreheads of his sleeping grandchildren, and thus doomed them to their fated death; and let all these details be assisted by solitude, flapping curtains, rushing wind, a long and dusky passage, an half open door—O, then truly, another answer may be given, and many will request leave to sleep upon it, before they decide whether there be such a thing as a ghost in the world, or out of the world, if that phraseology be more spiritual. What is the meaning of this feeling? For my own part, I never saw a ghost except once in a dream. I feared it in my sleep; I awoke trembling, and lights and the speech of others could hardly dissipate my fear. Some years ago I lost a friend, and a few months afterwards visited the house where I had last seen him. It was deserted, and though in the midst of a city, its vast halls and spacious apartments occasioned the same sense of loneliness as if it had been situated

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I have heard that when Coleridge was asked if he believed in ghosts,—he replied that he had seen too many to put any trust in their reality; and the person of the most lively imagination that I ever knew echoed this reply. But these were not real ghosts (pardon, unbelievers, my mode of speech) that they saw; they were shadows, phantoms unreal; that while they appalled the senses, yet carried no other feeling to the mind of others than delusion, and were viewed as we might view an optical deception which we see to be true with our eyes, and know to be false with our understandings. I speak of other shapes. The returning bride, who claims the fidelity of her betrothed; the murdered man who shakes to remorse the murderer’s heart; ghosts that lift the curtains at the foot of your bed as the clock chimes one; who rise all pale and ghastly from the churchyard and haunt their ancient abodes; who, spoken to, reply;

and whose cold unearthly touch makes the hair stand stark upon the head; the true old-fashioned, foretelling, flitting, gliding ghost,—who has seen such a one? I have known two persons who at broad daylight have owned that they believed in ghosts, for that they had seen one. One of these was an Englishman, and the other an Italian. The former had lost a friend he dearly loved, who for awhile appeared to him nightly, gently stroking his cheek and spreading a serene calm over his mind. He did not fear the appearance, although he was somewhat awe-stricken as each night it glided into his chamber, and, Ponsi del letto insula sponda manca. [placed itself on the left side of the bed]

This visitation continued for several weeks, when by some accident he altered his residence, and then he saw it no more. Such a tale may easily be explained away;—but several years had passed, and he, a man of strong and virile intellect, said that “he had seen a ghost.” The Italian was a noble, a soldier, and by no means addicted to superstition: he had served in Napoleon’s armies from early youth, and had been to Russia, had fought and bled, and been rewarded, and he unhesitatingly, and with deep relief, recounted his story. This Chevalier, a young, and (somewhat a miraculous incident) a gallant Italian, was engaged in a duel with a brother officer, and wounded him in the arm. The subject of the duel was frivolous; and distressed therefore at its consequences he attended on his youthful adversary during his consequent illness, so that when the latter recovered they became firm and dear friends. They were quartered together at Milan, where the youth fell desperately in love with the wife of a musician, who disdained his passion, so that it preyed on his spirits and his health; he absented himself from all amusements, avoided all his brother officers, and his only consolation was to pour his love-sick plaints into the ear of the Chevalier, who strove in vain to inspire him either with indifference towards the fair disdainer, or to inculcate lessons of fortitude and heroism. As a last resource he urged him to ask leave of absence; and to seek, either in change of scene, or the amusement of hunting, some diversion to his passion. One evening the youth came to the Chevalier, and said, “Well, I have asked leave of absence, and am to have it early tomorrow morning, so lend me your fowling-piece and cartridges, for I shall go to hunt for a fortnight.” The Chevalier gave him

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on an uninhabited heath. I walked through the vacant chambers by twilight, and none save I awakened the echoes of their pavement. The far mountains (visible from the upper windows) had lost their tinge of sunset; the tranquil atmosphere grew leaden coloured as the golden stars appeared in the firmament; no wind ruffled the shrunk-up river which crawled lazily through the deepest channel of its wide and empty bed; the chimes of the Ave Maria had ceased, and the bell hung moveless in the open belfry: beauty invested a reposing world, and awe was inspired by beauty only. I walked through the rooms filled with sensations of the most poignant grief. He had been there; his living frame had been caged by those walls, his breath had mingled with that atmosphere, his step had been on those stones, I thought:—the earth is a tomb, the gaudy sky a vault, we but walking corpses. The wind rising in the east rushed through the open casements, making them shake;—methought, I heard, I felt—I know not what—but I trembled. To have seen him but for a moment, I would have knelt until the stones had been worn by the impress, so I told myself, and so I knew a moment after, but then I trembled, awe-struck and fearful. Wherefore? There is something beyond us of which we are ignorant. The sun drawing up the vaporous air makes a void, and the wind rushes in to fill it,— thus beyond our soul’s ken there is an empty space; and our hopes and fears, in gentle gales or terrific whirlwinds, occupy the vacuum; and if it does no more, it bestows on the feeling heart a belief that influences do exist to watch and guard us, though they be impalpable to the coarser faculties.

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what he asked; among the shot there were a few bullets. “I will take these also,” said the youth, “to secure myself against the attack of any wolf, for I mean to bury myself in the woods.” Although he had obtained that for which he came, the youth still lingered. He talked of the cruelty of his lady, lamented that she would not even permit him a hopeless attendance, but that she inexorably banished him from her sight, “so that,” said he, “I have no hope but in oblivion.” At length lie rose to depart. He took the Chevalier’s hand and said, “You will see her to-morrow, you will speak to her, and hear her speak; tell her, I entreat you, that our conversation tonight has been concerning her, and that her name was the last that I spoke.” “Yes, yes,” cried the Chevalier, “I will say any thing you please; but you must not talk of her any more, you must forget her.” The youth embraced his friend with warmth, but the latter saw nothing more in it than the effects of his affection, combined with his melancholy at absenting himself from his mistress, whose name, joined to a tender farewell, was the last sound that he uttered. When the Chevalier was on guard that night, he heard the report of a gun. He was at first troubled and agitated by it, but afterwards thought no more of it, and when relieved from guard went to bed, although he passed a restless, sleepless night. Early in the morning some one knocked at his door. It was a soldier, who said that he had got the young officer’s leave of absence, and had taken it to his house; a servant had admitted him, and he had gone up stairs, but the room door of the officer was locked, and no one answered to his knocking, but something oozed through from under the door that looked like blood. The Chevalier, agitated and frightened at this account, hurried to his friend’s house, burst open the door, and found him stretched on the ground—he had blown out his brains, and the body lay a headless trunk, cold, and stiff. The shock and grief which the Chevalier experienced in consequence of this catastrophe produced a fever which lasted for some days. When he got well, he obtained leave of absence, and went into the country to try to divert his mind. One evening at moonlight, he was returning home from a walk, and passed through a lane with a hedge on both sides, so high that he could not see over them. The night was balmy; the bushes gleamed with fireflies, brighter than the stars which the moon had veiled with her silver light. Suddenly he heard a rustling near him, and the figure of his friend issued from the hedge and

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stood before him, mutilated as he had seen him after his death. This figure he saw several times, always in the same place. It was impalpable to the touch, motionless, except in its advance, and made no sign when it was addressed. Once the Chevalier took a friend with him to the spot. The same rustling was heard, the same shadow slept forth, his companion fled in horror, but the Chevalier staid, vainly endeavouring to discover what called his friend from his quiet tomb, and if any act of his might give repose to the restless shade. Such are my two stories, and I record them the more willingly, since they occurred to men, and to individuals distinguished the one for courage and the other for sagacity. I will conclude my “modern instances,” with a story told by M. G. Lewis, not probably so authentic as these, but perhaps more amusing. I relate it as nearly as possible in his own words. A gentleman journeying towards the house of a friend, who lived on the skirts of an extensive forest, in the east of Germany, lost his way. He wandered for some time among the trees, when he saw a light at a distance. On approaching it he was surprised to observe that it proceeded from the interior of a ruined monastery. Before he knocked at the gate he thought it proper to look through the window. He saw a number of cats assembled round a small grave, four of whom were at that moment letting down a coffin with a crown upon it. The gentleman startled at this unusual sight, and, imagining that he had arrived at the retreats of fiends or witches, mounted his horse and rode away with the utmost precipitation. He arrived at his friend’s house at a late hour, who sate up waiting for him. On his arrival his friend questioned him as to the cause of the traces of agitation visible in his face. He began to recount his adventures after much hesitation, knowing that it was scarcely possible that his friend should give faith to his relation. No sooner had he mentioned the coffin with the crown upon it, than his friend’s cat, who seemed to have been lying asleep before the fire, leaped up, crying out, ‘Then I am king of the cats;’ and then scrambled up the chimney, and was never seen more.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY (STORY DATE 1891) SOURCE: Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. “The Transformation.” In Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, selected by Marvin Kaye, pp. 107-21. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1985. The following excerpt is from a short story written in 1831, but first published in Tales and Stories by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in 1891. “Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched With a woful agony,

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“Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge “The Ancient Mariner”

I have heard it said, that, when any strange, supernatural, and necromantic adventure has occurred to a human being, that being, however desirous he may be to conceal the same, feels at certain periods torn up as it were by an intellectual earthquake, and is forced to bare the inner depths of his spirit to another. I am a witness of the truth of this. I have dearly sworn to myself never to reveal to human ears the horrors to which I once, in excess of fiendly pride, delivered myself over. The holy man who heard my confession, and reconciled me to the Church, is dead. None knows that once— Why should it not be thus? Why tell a tale of impious tempting of Providence, and soulsubduing humiliation? Why? answer me, ye who are wise in the secrets of human nature! I only know that so it is; and in spite of strong resolve,—of a pride that too much masters me—of shame, and even of fear, so to render myself odious to my species,—I must speak. . . . The country people were all alive and flocking about; it became necessary that I should conceal myself; and yet I longed to address some one, or to hear others discourse, or in any way to gain intelligence of what was really going on. At length, entering the walks that were in immediate vicinity to the mansion, I found one dark enough to veil my excessive frightfulness; and yet others as well as I were loitering in its shade. I soon gathered all I wanted to know—all that first made my very heart die with horror, and then boil with indignation. Tomorrow Juliet was to be given to the penitent, reformed, beloved Guido—tomorrow my bride was to pledge her vows to a fiend from hell! And I did this!—my accursed pride—my demoniac violence and wicked self-idolatry had caused this act. For if I had acted as the wretch who had stolen my form had acted—if, with a mien at once yielding and dignified, I had presented myself to Torella, saying, I have done wrong, forgive me; I am unworthy of your angelchild, but permit me to claim her hereafter, when my altered conduct shall manifest that I abjure my vices, and endeavour to become in some sort worthy of her. I go to serve against the infidels; and when my zeal for religion and my true penitence for the past shall appear to you to

cancel my crimes, permit me again to call myself your son. Thus had he spoken; and the penitent was welcomed even as the prodigal son of Scripture: the fatted calf was killed for him; and he, still pursuing the same path, displayed such openhearted regret for his follies, so humble a concession of all his rights, and so ardent a resolve to reacquire them by a life of contrition and virtue, that he quickly conquered the kind old man; and full pardon, and the gift of his lovely child, followed in swift succession. Oh, had an angel from Paradise whispered to me to act thus! But now, what would be the innocent Juliet’s fate? Would God permit the foul union—or, some prodigy destroying it, link the dishonoured name of Carega with the worst of crimes? To-morrow at dawn they were to be married: there was but one way to prevent this—to meet mine enemy, and to enforce the ratification of our agreement. I felt that this could only be done by a mortal struggle. I had no sword—if indeed my distorted arms could wield a soldier’s weapon—but I had a dagger, and in that lay my hope. There was no time for pondering or balancing nicely the question: I might die in the attempt; but besides the burning jealousy and despair of my own heart, honour, mere humanity, demanded that I should fall rather than not destroy the machinations of the fiend. The guests departed—the lights began to disappear; it was evident that the inhabitants of the villa were seeking repose. I hid myself among the trees—the garden grew desert—the gates were closed—I wandered round and came under a window—ah! well did I know the same!—a soft twilight glimmered in the room—the curtains were half withdrawn. It was the temple of innocence and beauty. Its magnificence was tempered, as it were, by the slight disarrangements occasioned by its being dwelt in, and all the objects scattered around displayed the taste of her who hallowed it by her presence. I saw her enter with a quick light step—I saw her approach the window—she drew back the curtain yet further, and looked out into the night. Its breezy freshness played among her ringlets, and wafted them from the transparent marble of her brow. She clasped her hands, she raised her eyes to heaven. I heard her voice. Guido! she softly murmured—mine own Guido! and then, as if overcome by the fulness of her own heart, she sank on her knees;— her upraised eyes—her graceful attitude—the beaming thankfulness that lighted up her face— oh, these are tame words! Heart of mine, thou im-

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Which forced me to begin my tale; And then it left me free.

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agest ever, though thou canst not portray, the celestial beauty of that child of light and love. I heard a step—a quick firm step along the shady avenue. Soon I saw a cavalier, richly dressed, young and, methought, graceful to look on, advance. I hid myself yet closer. The youth approached; he paused beneath the window. She arose, and again looking out she saw him, and said—I cannot, no, at this distant time I cannot record her terms of soft silver tenderness; to me they were spoken, but they were replied to by him. “I will not go,” he cried: “here where you have been, where your memory glides like some heaven-visiting ghost, I will pass the long hours till we meet, never, my Juliet, again, day or night, to part. But do thou, my love, retire; the cold morn and fitful breeze will make thy cheek pale, and fill with languor thy love-lighted eyes. Ah, sweetest! could I press one kiss upon them, I could, methinks, repose.” And then he approached still nearer, and methought he was about to clamber into her chamber. I had hesitated, not to terrify her; now I was no longer master of myself. I rushed forward—I threw myself on him—I tore him away—I cried, “O loathsome and foul-shaped wretch!” I need not repeat epithets, all tending, as it appeared, to rail at a person I at present feel some partiality for. A shriek rose from Juliet’s lips. I neither heard nor saw—I felt only mine enemy, whose throat I grasped, and my dagger’s hilt; he struggled, but could not escape. At length hoarsely he breathed these words: “Do!—strike home! destroy this body—you will still live: may your life be long and merry!” The descending dagger was arrested at the word, and he, feeling my hold relax, extricated himself and drew his sword, while the uproar in the house, and flying of torches from one room to the other, showed that soon we should be separated. In the midst of my frenzy there was much calculation:—fall I might, and so that he did not survive, I cared not for the death-blow I might deal against myself. While still, therefore, he thought I paused, and while I saw the villainous resolve to take advantage of my hesitation, in the sudden thrust he made at me, I threw myself on his sword, and at the same moment plunged my dagger, with a true, desperate aim, in his side. We fell together, rolling over each other, and the tide of blood that flowed from the gaping wound of each mingled on the grass. More I know not—I fainted.

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Again I return to life: weak almost to death, I found myself stretched upon a bed—Juliet was kneeling beside it. Strange! my first broken request was for a mirror. I was so wan and ghastly, that my poor girl hesitated, as she told me afterwards; but, by the mass! I thought myself a right proper youth when I saw the dear reflection of my own well-known features. I confess it is a weakness, but I avow it, I do entertain a considerable affection for the countenance and limbs I behold, whenever I look at a glass; and have more mirrors in my house, and consult them oftener, than any beauty in Genoa. Before you too much condemn me, permit me to say that no one better knows than I the value of his own body; no one, probably, except myself, ever having had it stolen from him. Incoherently I at first talked of the dwarf and his crimes, and reproached Juliet for her too easy admission of his love. She thought me raving, as well she might; and yet it was some time before I could prevail on myself to admit that the Guido whose penitence had won her back for me was myself; and while I cursed bitterly the monstrous dwarf, and blest the well-directed blow that had deprived him of life, I suddenly checked myself when I heard her say, Amen! knowing that him whom she reviled was my very self. A little reflection taught me silence—a little practice enabled me to speak of that frightful night without any very excessive blunder. The wound I had given myself was no mockery of one—it was long before I recovered—and as the benevolent and generous Torella sat beside me, talking such wisdom as might win friends to repentance, and mine own dear Juliet hovered near me, administering to my wants, and cheering me by her smiles, the work of my bodily cure and mental reform went on together. I have never, indeed, wholly recovered my strength—my cheek is paler since—my person a little bent. Juliet sometimes ventures to allude bitterly to the malice that caused this change, but I kiss her on the moment, and tell her all is for the best. I am a fonder and more faithful husband, and true is this—but for that wound, never had I called her mine. I did not revisit the sea-shore, nor seek for the fiend’s treasure; yet, while I ponder on the past, I often think, and my confessor was not backward in favouring the idea, that it might be a good rather than an evil spirit, sent by my guardian angel, to show me the folly and misery of pride. So well at least did I learn this lesson, roughly taught as I was, that I am known now by all my friends and fellow-citizens by the name of Guido il Cortese.

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DIANE LONG HOEVELER (ESSAY DATE 1997) SOURCE: Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Mary Shelley and Gothic Feminism: The Case of ‘The Mortal Immortal.’” In Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein: Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley’s Birth, edited by Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O’Dea, pp. 150-63. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. In the following essay, Hoeveler discusses the “Gothic feminism”—characterized by women engaging in passiveaggressive, self-negating behavior—in Shelley’s works, particularly in the short story “The Mortal Immortal.”

During the month of May 1794, the most popular drama in London, playing nightly to packed houses at Covent Garden, was Henry Siddons’s The Sicilian Romance; or The Apparition of the Cliff, loosely based on Ann Radcliffe’s second novel, published in 1790. One of the more interesting changes in the play concerns the villain of the Siddons piece, who keeps his inconvenient wife chained to solid stone in a rocky cave in the forest, a place he visits only to feed her and blame her for inflicting wounds of guilt on his heart. Although the Gothic villain would later metamorphose into the Byronic hero consumed by unspeakable guilt over illicit sins, the villain of the Siddons drama is a bit more prosaic. He simply desires to marry a younger and more beautiful woman, one who will further improve his social and political status, because his first wife, the mother of his children, has become redundant. The young woman he desires, whom we would recognize as a future trophy wife, is pursued from castle to convent to cavern, aided by the hero, the villain’s son-turned-outlaw. As the above synopsis makes obvious, female Gothic novels like Radcliffe’s Sicilian Romance provided the subject matter, techniques, and melodramatic formulae that, first on the stage in England, later on the French stage, and much later in the Hollywood “women in jeopardy” films such as The Silence of the Lambs, have continued to promulgate the primal Gothic tradition of “good” or femininity triumphing over “evil” or masculinity. The typical female Gothic novel presents a blameless female victim triumphing through a variety of passive-aggressive strategies over a malecreated system of oppression and corruption. The melodrama that suffuses these works is explicable only if we understand that, as Paula Backscheider has recently demonstrated, a generally hyperbolic sentimentalism was saturating the British literary scene at the time, informing the Gothic melodra-

mas that were such standard fare during the popular theater season.1 But melodrama, as Peter Brooks has demonstrated, is also characterized by a series of moves or postures that made it particularly attractive to middle-class women. Specifically, Brooks lists as crucial to melodrama the tendency toward depicting intense, excessive representations of life that tend to strip away the facade of manners to reveal the primal conflicts at work, leading to moments of intense confrontation. These symbolic dramatizations rely on what Brooks lists as the standard features of melodrama: hyperbolic figures, lurid and grandiose events, masked relationships and disguised identities, abductions, slow-acting poisons, secret societies, and mysterious parentage. In short, melodrama is a version of the female Gothic, while the female Gothic provides the undergirding for feminism as an ideology bent on depicting women as the innocent victims of a corrupt and evil patriarchal system. If husbands can routinely chain their wives to stone walls and feed them the way one feeds a forsaken pet that will not die, then what sort of action is required from women to protect and defend themselves against such abuse? Demure, docile behavior is hardly adequate protection against a lustful, raving patriarch gone berserk. According to Brooks, the Gothic novel can be understood as standing most clearly in reaction to desacralization and the pretensions of rationalism.2 Like melodrama, the female Gothic text represents both the urge toward resacralization and the impossibility of conceiving sacralization other than in personal terms. For the Enlightenment mentality, there was no longer a clear transcendent value to which one could be reconciled. There was, rather, a social order to be purged, a set of ethical imperatives to be made clear. And who was in a better position to purge the new bourgeois world of all traces of aristocratic corruption than the female Gothic heroine? Such a woman—professionally virginal, innocent, and good—assumed virtual religious significance because, within the discourse system, so much was at stake. Making the world safe for the middle class was not without its perils. Gothic feminism was born when women realized that they had a formidable external enemy—the lustful, greedy patriarch—in addition to their own worst internal enemy—their consciousness of their own sexual difference, perceived as a weakness. A dangerous species of thought for women developed at this time and in concert with the sentimentality of Samuel Richardson and the

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GENERAL COMMENTARY

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR MARILYN BUTLER ON SHELLEY’S LIFE AND ITS IMPACT ON FRANKENSTEIN

Among the tumultuous events of Mary Shelley’s life from 17 to 19, its emotional stresses must have had subtle, powerful effects on the shaping of Frankenstein, her first and best novel. Her thwarted but longed-for dialogue over the years with her father (which she afterwards described in a letter as “an excessive & romantic attachment” * ) was interrupted, to be replaced by a richer but almost equally problematic relationship with her lover Shelley. In the four and a half years from 1815 to mid-1819 she was to lose the first three of her four children. Her suffering over their deaths was complicated by her own sense of guilt, probably dating back to her first realization that her own birth had caused the death of her mother. Mary’s capacity for guilt must have been further exercised by two pathetic and from her point of view reproachful suicides in the autumn of 1816: those of Fanny Imlay, Mary’s half-sister, on 9 October, and of Harriet (Westbrook) Shelley, Percy’s wife, in November-December. Percy Shelley should have helped his young wife to cope, but he resembled her father in offering support that was intellectually superb, emotionally inadequate; unintentionally he even contributed to the death of her second daughter, another Clara, in September 1818, by ordering Mary to travel across Italy with the sick child in the Italian summer heat. After each bereavement, William Godwin wrote her letters which briskly recommended as little mourning as possible. To the extent that Frankenstein is a family drama, centred on parental nurture (or the lack of it), on the failure of communication and mutual support, and on the death of its gentlest, most vulnerable members, it reads like the imaginative reworking of experience. *

Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, 1983, 1988), ii. 215.

SOURCE: Butler, Marilyn. Introduction to Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Reprint edition, edited and with notes by Marilyn Butler, pp. ix-li. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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hyperbolic Gothic and melodramatic stage productions of the era. This ideology graphically educated its audience in the lessons of victimization.3 According to this powerful and socially coded formula, victims earned their special status and rights through no action of their own but through their sufferings and persecutions at the hands of a patriarchal oppressor and tyrant. One would be rewarded not for anything one did but for what one passively suffered. According to this paradigm, women developed a type of behavior now recognized as passive aggression; they were almost willing victims not because they were masochists but because they expected a substantial return on their investment in suffering. Whereas Richardson’s Clarissa found herself earning a crown in heaven for suffering rape by Lovelace, the women in female Gothic texts were interested in more earthly rewards. The lesson that Gothic feminism teaches is that the meek shall inherit the Gothic earth; the female Gothic heroine always triumphs in the end because melodramas are constructed to suit this version of poetic justice. The God we call Justice always intervenes and justice always rectifies, validates, and rewards suffering. Terrible events can occur, but the day of reckoning invariably arrives for Gothic villains. This ideology fostered a form of passivity in women, a fatalism that the mainstream feminist would be loathe to recognize today. Yet Gothic feminism undergirds the special pleading of contemporary women who see themselves even today as victims of an amorphous and transhistorical patriarchy. When the contemporary feminist theorist Naomi Wolf identifies what she calls “victim feminism”—characterized by a loathing of the female body and a reification of victimization as the only route to power—we can hardly be faulted for hearing the echo of Mary Shelley’s literary visions.4 As the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was destined to be an overdetermined personality. A heavy intellectual burden rested on her slight shoulders, and for the most part she fulfilled that expectation not only by marrying extravagantly but by writing well. In fact, her union with Percy Shelley may have been her greatest literary performance—her real and imagined victimization on his account, first as wife, then as widow, being only slightly less painful than the sufferings experienced by her fictional heroines. And although her husband’s presence haunts all of her works, the real heroes or hero-villains of Mary’s life were always her parents, who also recur

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We do not think of Mary Shelley as a feminist by contemporary standards, nor did she think of herself as one. She once stated: “If I have never written to vindicate the rights of women, I have ever befriended women when oppressed—at every risk I have defended and supported victims to the social system. But I do not make a boast.” But she understood all too well what her mother failed to grasp—that woman’s protection was in her studied pose of difference and weakness. In fact, she went so far as to observe that “the sex of our [woman’s] material mechanism makes us quite different creatures [from men]—better though weaker.”6 But Mary’s notion of the social system—the legal, financial, class, religious, and educational superstructure that undergirded nineteenth-century British culture—was finally codified and symbolized by her in the patriarchal bourgeois family. Her fathers are not simply demigods of the family hearth, they are representatives of a larger, oppressive, patriarchal system. They inherit and bequeath wealth because they represent and embody

that lucre themselves, in their very persons.7 The body of the male in Mary Shelley’s fiction is always a commodity of worth, an object to be valued, reconstructed, reassembled, and salvaged, while the bodies of the women in her texts are always devalued, compromised, flawed, and inherently worthless. At the core of all of Mary Shelley’s works, however, is the residue of what Freud has labeled in “A Child Is Being Beaten” (1919) as variations on the beating fantasy that children generally experience between the ages of five and fifteen. In these repeated scenarios of desire and repression a girl will typically move through three psychological positions. In the first and third positions, her stance is sadistic and voyeuristic—“another child is being beaten and I am observing the act”—but in the second psychic position her posture is masochistic, erotic, and deeply repressed: “I am the child being beaten by my father.” For the boy, the psychic transformation is less complex due to the elimination of one stage. For him, the first position, “I am loved (or beaten) by my father,” is transformed into the conscious fantasy “I am being beaten by my mother.” According to Freud, the roots of the phallic mother (the all-powerful mother in possession of the father’s phallus) can be located precisely in this early fantasy,8 but for Mary Shelley, the psychic terrain is complicated by the fact that she, as a woman writer, typically seeks to elide gender by assuming the position of a male protagonist. The basic beating fantasies we see throughout her works—the attacks the “creature” makes on various members of Victor Frankenstein’s family, the incestuous attack on Mathilda by her father, the attack on the body of the idealized female icon in “The Mortal Immortal”—all represent variations on the beating fantasy, expressing the child’s ambivalence and impotence when confronted with the power and mystery of the parental figures. Why does incest hover so blatantly over Mary (not to mention Percy) Shelley’s Gothic works in ways that do not occur quite so self-consciously in the works of other female Gothic writers? Why are her heroines always defined and self-identified as daughters first, wives second, mothers only briefly? Why would she send the text of Mathilda, a shockingly graphic (for its time) portrayal of a father’s incestuous love for his daughter, to her own father? And why would she then be surprised when he failed to arrange for its publication?9 Writing on the very margins of her unconscious obsessions, Mary Shelley played the role of dutiful daughter to the end, leaving the ashes of Percy in

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obsessively in various mutated forms in everything she wrote. Mary Wollstonecraft may have left us only two inadequately realized fictions and two vindications, but she also left us Mary Shelley, in many ways destined to complete and fulfill her mother’s aborted philosophical and literary visions.5 If Wollstonecraft failed to understand the full implications of her suggestions for women— that they effectively “masculinize” themselves and shun “feminine” values as weak and debilitating— her daughter understood all too well the consequences of such behavior for both men and women. Mary’s major work, Frankenstein (1818), stands paradoxically as the Gothic embodiment of the critique of Gothic feminism. If Wollstonecraft could barely imagine a brave new world for women inhabited by sensitive Henrys, Mary Shelley puts her fictional women into that world and reveals that the sensitive male hero is a mad egotist intent on usurping feminine values and destroying all forms of life in his despotic quest for phallic mastery. Her other two works most clearly in the Gothic mode, Mathilda (1819) and the short story “The Mortal Immortal” (1833), also critique the female Gothic formulae as they had evolved by the time she was writing. For instance, Mathilda rewrites Frankenstein, turning the prior text inside out, revealing the incestuous core of the Gothic feminist fantasy as she experienced it. Everyone in Mary Shelley’s corpus is a victim, but her female characters are the victims of victims and thus doubly pathetic and weak.

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Rome and having herself buried with her parents and son in England. In many ways, Percy was as ephemeral a presence in her life as she was in his. It would appear from a reading of their letters and journals that both of them were playacting at love with ideal objects of their own imaginary creation. Unfortunately, as Mary learned too late, the real loves in both their lives were their parents, both real and imagined. “The Mortal Immortal: A Tale” (1833),1 0 one of the many short stories Mary wrote for money in her later life, plays in its oxymoronic title with ambiguity and impossibility, suggesting that there may be a way to make mortals immortal, just as Mary desperately wanted to believe that there may be a way to equalize women with men. Note, however, that the fear and loathing of the female body that activated Frankenstein and Mathilda recur as dominant motifs in a majority of Mary’s short stories, not simply in this one. Frankenstein punished every female body in that text, scarring and disfiguring all female attempts to rewrite the generative body as sacred and whole. It replaced the maternal womb with chemical and alchemical artifice, only to blast masculine attempts at procreation as futile and destructive. In Mathilda, the male principle once again would appear to be the only effectual parent; but, as in the earlier work, the father produces his progeny only to consume it, feeding on his daughter as a vampire feeds on victims in order to sustain a perverse form of death-in-life. “The Mortal Immortal” situates the reader within the same psychic terrain, and, like the other works, it plays with variations of beating fantasies, with sometimes the male protagonist as victim, sometimes the female. But we begin this narrative initially within the frame of legendary discourse, this time of the Wandering Jew. We learn early in the text that the narrator defines himself in negative terms, in terms of what he is not. He tells us that he is not the Jew because he is infinitely younger, being only 323 years old (“TMI,” 314). “The Mortal Immortal” actually reads as if it were inspired not by that particular old legend but by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” or “The Devil’s Elixirs,” the latter reviewed in Blackwood’s in 1824 (16:55-67). Mary Shelley does not record in her journal having read “The Sandman” in either a French or Italian translation, and her knowledge of German was certainly not strong enough for her to have read it in the

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original, but the tale was well-known in England by 1833, the year she wrote and published “The Mortal Immortal.”1 1 Like the Hoffmann tale, “The Mortal Immortal” is told by a naive narrator attempting to decode the scientific experiments of a quasi crank and supposed quack, Cornelius Agrippa, the famous German alchemist whose assistant supposedly “raised the foul fiend during his master’s absence, and was destroyed by him” (“TMI,” 314). A deep fear of death and its association with the father’s phallic power motivate Hoffmann’s “Sandman,” while they occur in more muted form in the Shelley tale. The invocation of the name of Cornelius Agrippa, the association of Agrippa and Satan, both of whom figured so prominently in Frankenstein as the inspiration of Victor’s dabbling in reanimating the base metal of the human body, suggest that masculine, scientific, and phallic powers are as dangerous as they are crucial to the development of human civilization. Once again, the human body is the obsessive focus of this tale, as it was in the two earlier Gothic works by Mary Shelley. Now, however, the issues are not only clear but very clearly delineated: the female body is decayed and fraudulent; it is a pale and inadequate copy of the prior and superior male body. The tale is predicated on the decline of the body of the beauteous Bertha, whose fading is contrasted to the continuing phallic power of the immortal Winzy, her body rotting while his flourishes over the course of their marriage. Mary Shelley constructs her tale over the body of Bertha, but before she gets to Bertha, the narrator, Winzy, introduces the reader to his own desperate state of mind. He is a man who has lived for 323 years and fears that he may indeed be immortal. He is a man who feels “the weight of never-ending time—the tedious passage of the still-succeeding hours” (“TMI,” 314). Traditionally read as a slightly veiled autobiographical statement expressing Mary Shelley’s own repugnance at having survived her husband, parents, and three of her children, the fear of time in this text actually expresses a fear of death, a terror about the nonexistence of an afterlife.1 2 Life at least prolongs the uncertainty that there may indeed be an afterlife where one will be reunited with the souls of one’s beloveds. Death will bring the final and unequivocal answer, and that is something that Mary Shelley was as unprepared to face in 1833 as she was in 1818. Like a fairy tale, this short fiction begins with the poor. young assistant—“very much in love”—

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If Cornelius Agrippa as the masculine and phallic aspect of the narrator is identified with the fires of Satan, Bertha as the feminine principle is associated with water and the fountain, “a gently bubbling spring of pure living waters” (“TMI,” 315). While ordered to work overtime stoking the furnaces of Agrippa, Winzy loses the favor of Bertha, who rejects him in favor of the rich suitor Albert Hoffer. Consumed with frustrated jealousy, Winzy decides to drink the magical elixir that Agrippa is preparing because he has been told that the brew is “‘a philter to cure love; [if] you would not cease to love your Bertha—beware to drink!’” (“TMI,” 317). But that is precisely what Winzy wants—he wants to be free of his attachment to the feminine, or to put it another way, Mary Shelley wants to be free of her tie to the female body.

Once again, her male narrator expresses Mary Shelley’s own ambivalence and repugnance toward not only the female body but female sexuality and the chains of love. Listen to these revealing words from Winzy about his state of mind and motivations: False girl!—false and cruel! . . . Worthless, detested woman! I would not remain unrevenged— she should see Albert expire at her feet—she should die beneath my vengeance. She had smiled in disdain and triumph—she knew my wretchedness and her power. Yet what power had she?— the power of exciting my hate—my utter scorn— my—oh, all but indifference! Could I attain that— could I regard her with careless eyes, transferring my rejected love to one fairer and more true, that were indeed a victory! (“TMI,” 317)

What power had she indeed? Questioning the source and the power of the female body stands as the central query of Mary Shelley’s corpus. The answer she discovers suggests that the female body has only as much power as the male chooses to allot to it. But the focus in this passage is on the male response to the female body, running the gamut from hate to scorn to indifference. Notice the progression of emotions. Only when one reaches indifference is one free of the obsessive hold of the other on one’s consciousness. Mary Shelley throughout her works strives to escape just exactly this—the corrosive effect of the passions on her heart and body, seeking the cool indifference, the frigidity, the stark embrace of reason that she represented in the climactic presentation of the Arctic Circle in Frankenstein. Grabbing the elixir and drinking, Winzy declares his intention to be cured “of love—of torture!” He finds himself sinking instead into a “sleep of glory and bliss which bathed [his] soul in paradise during the remaining hours of that memorable night,” only to awake and find his appearance “wonderfully improved” (“TMI,” 317, 319). When he ventures out to Bertha’s neighborhood, he finds himself the amorous object not only of Bertha but also of her rich old protectress, the “old high-born hag,” “the old crone.” The ugly old woman represents a standard feminine archetype, the double-faced goddess motif that Mary and Percy would have been familiar with through their readings in classical mythology. Blake (in “The Mental Traveller”), Keats (in “Lamia” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”), and Percy himself (in “Prince Athanase”) had used the duplicitous female figure. The old hag in this text represents not simply what Bertha will become, a sort of

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working for the notorious “alchymist” Cornelius Agrippa, who keeps killing all of his assistants because of the inhuman demands he makes on them. One need not search far to see Winzy as the victim of a beating fantasy at the hands of this father substitute. Thwarted in his efforts to persuade his recently orphaned childhood sweetheart Bertha to live “beneath [his] paternal roof,” Winzy suffers greatly when Bertha goes off to live with “the old lady of the near castle, rich, childless, and solitary” (“TMI,” 315). Rather than have a child herself, this wealthy woman “buys” (or, as we might more euphemistically say, “adopts”) a beautiful adult woman and then tries to barter her off to the highest bidder. Bertha is dramatic and self-dramatizing. She begins to dress in “silk,” pose in her “marble palace” (“TMI,” 315), and generally amuse herself by taunting and tormenting the frustrated Winzy. Bertha wants Winzy to prove his love by accepting the risky job of working for Agrippa: “‘You pretend to love, and you fear to face the Devil for my sake!’” (“TMI,” 315). Accepting a “purse of gold” from Agrippa makes Winzy feel “as if Satan himself tempted me” (“TMI,” 315). Bertha wants to put her would-be lover through a test, and she can think of no better one than to subject him to the ultimate evil father, the ultimate beater. No simple coquette, Bertha specializes rather in psychic and emotional abuse of her lover, continually subjecting him to anxiety and jealousy: “Bertha fancied that love and security were enemies, and her pleasure was to divide them in my bosom” (“TMI,” 316). Notice, however, that everything Bertha metes out to Winzy is later delivered to her. She plays the role of Gothic villainess and later Gothic victim in this work.

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humanized foreshadowing element, but also a version of the phallic mother as class avenger. Now conceiving a lecherous attraction to Winzy, the old hag aggressively pursues him, sending Bertha back to the castle with the peremptory command, “Back to your cage—hawks are abroad!” (“TMI,” 319). Ironically, the only hawk is the old hag, seeking to feast on her prey, the masculine flesh of Winzy. But Winzy is now free of the earlier “respect” he had for the old hag’s “rank.” Now he boldly runs after Bertha, only to discover that he is as much in love with her as ever: “I no longer loved—Oh! no, I adored—worshipped—idolized her!” (“TMI,” 319). The two triangles operating here—Winzy/Bertha/old hag and Winzy/Bertha/ false suitor—place the young lovers in the two varieties of oedipal rivalry that recur throughout Mary Shelley’s fiction. The prior and more powerful association for her heroes and heroines is always the paternal and maternal home. The old hag represents the child-consciousness’s (re)construction of the father and mother as one potent figure, all-powerful and all-consuming. This father/mother monad has been traditionally understood within psychoanalytical discourse as the phallic mother, the mother with the father’s phallus, the fearful composite of maternity with power.1 3 If Ann Radcliffe was finally able by the conclusion of her novels to kill the phallic mother, Mary Shelley is able to flee only temporarily from her. Rather, Bertha decides to reject the old hag’s wealth and power and to run away to an alternate maternal abode: “‘O Winzy!’ she exclaimed, ‘take me to your mother’s cot.’” But not only does Bertha gain a new mother-figure, Winzy’s father also “loved her” and “welcomed her heartily” (“TMI,” 320). Winzy is not so much gaining a wife as Bertha is gaining new parents. Or, to put it another way, Winzy is not so much gaining a wife as a new sibling. Five years of bliss pass quickly, and one day Winzy is called to the bed of the dying Cornelius, who finally explains that his elixir had been not simply “a cure for love” but a cure “for all things— the Elixir of Immortality” (“TMI,” 321). Love is here presented as another form of disease, a weakening and debilitating condition that leaves one prey to the ravages of mortality. To be “cured of love” is to be made immortal, impregnable, godlike, because to be human is to embody all the opposite qualities (“TMI,” 321). Love here is also presented as something that feminizes or weakens the masculine self, but the narrator is hardly a realistic presentation of a male character. His

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consciousness, his sensibility is feminine. He loves; therefore, he is as vulnerable as Mary Shelley found herself. He seeks to escape the ravages to which the flesh is prone, the never-ending pregnancies that Mary endured for six years, the repeated processions to the cemetery to bury babies. Winzy is the idealized masculine component of Mary Shelley—her reason and her intellect—that she desperately wants to believe will provide a means of escape for her. If she can be like a man—free from the biological curse—she would be like a god, immortal, inhabiting a world of the mind. But the feminine aspect of Mary Shelley lives in the figure of Bertha, the female body that rots and decays before the saddened eyes of Winzy. Years pass and Bertha is now fifty, while Winzy appears to be her son. The two are “universally shunned” (“TMI,” 322) by their neighbors, largely because they embody the most pernicious incestuous dream of all—the tabooed love of a mother and son. Winzy has finally married the old crone, much to his dismay. Fleeing to a new country, the two decide to “wear masks,” although Bertha’s mask is infinitely less successful than Winzy’s. Resorting to “rouge, youthful dress, and assumed juvenility of manner,” Bertha is a parody of her former self. A desperate caricature of femininity, she has become a “mincing, simpering, jealous old woman.” In other words, she has become another phallic mother, guarding her son Winzy with a “jealousy [that] never slept” (“TMI,” 323). The female body—once so beautiful and perfect— has become a flawed and diseased artifice, a shell fitted over a mass of stinking corruption. The male body, in stark contrast, continues to exist as statuesque and youthful, a perfect emblem of the triumph of masculinity and masculine values over the feminine. The female body has become the target and object of the beating given to it by the ultimate Nobodaddy—life, time, and mortality. The years pass until Bertha is finally bedridden and paralytic and Winzy functions as her nurse: “I nursed her as a mother might a child” (“TMI,” 324). The wheel has come full circle. The mother is the child, while the husband/son has become a “mother.” All gradations in the family romance have been tried in much the same way that Blake depicted them in “The Mental Traveller.” Confined within the bourgeois domicile, the sexes feed on each other parasitically until they have consumed themselves in the process of playing all their gendered and ungendering roles to a limited audience. When Bertha finally dies, Winzy decides to escape the family romance. He lives

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But the dream of desire is the same at the end of all of Mary Shelley’s texts: to escape the body and live in the realm of pure mind. Like her mother, Mary Shelley was a reluctant sensualist. She needed, philosophically, to embrace free love and open marriage, but her disappointments in her philandering husband could not be concealed. Claiming to support free love is easy as long as one does not have a husband who has a history of collecting pretty young things and bringing them home. Finally a deep revulsion toward the female body emerges as clearly in Mary Shelley’s works as it does in Wollstonecraft’s. Gothic feminism for Mary Shelley entailed the realization that women would always be life’s victims, not simply because social, political, economic, and religious conventions placed them in inferior and infanticizing postures, but because their own bodies cursed them to forever serve the wheel of physical corruption. Being a mother, bringing to life a child who would die, and perhaps would die soon, condemned women to serve a merciless god—the cycle of generation, birth, and death—in a way that men did not. The nightmare haunting Mary Shelley’s life was not simply that she caused the death of her mother but that she recapitulated a reversed version of the same tragedy with three of her own children. She experienced her life as a sort of curse to herself and the ones she loved, and why? She understood that her life, her very physical being, fed on her mother’s body parasitically, cannibalistically consuming it. Later she watched her children

wither, unable to be sustained by her. These recurring nightmares fed her fictions, but they also spoke to a deeper fear that has continually plagued women. Gothic feminism seeks to escape the female body through a dream of turning weakness into strength. By pretending that one is weak or a passive victim, one camouflages oneself in a hostile terrain, diverting attention from one’s real identity. Mary Shelley knew that on some level she was no victim; she knew her strength and intelligence were more than a match for anyone’s. But she also sensed danger in that strength, or at least experienced it ambivalently, fearing that it caused the deaths of others. The grotesque freakishness of the creature in Frankenstein, made material in the description of “his” oddly assembled body and his continual rejection by everyone he seeks to love, trope Mary Shelley’s own sense of herself and all women as diseased, aberrant, and freakish composites of the hopes and dreams of other people. Gothic feminism for Mary Shelley is embodied in the sense of herself and the female body as a void, an empty signifier, a lure into the cycle of painful birth and disappointing death. Railing against the female body—sometimes disguised as male and sometimes blatantly presented as female—is finally the only position that Mary Shelley can take. She can laud the bourgeois family, she can valorize community and what we now label “family values,” but she ultimately cannot escape the mortality that gives the lie to everything she seeks to praise. She inhabits a female body, she bleeds and causes bleeding in others, and those unfortunate facts define for her and her fiction the Gothic feminist nightmare in its starkest terms.

Notes 1. See the suggestive discussion of “Gothic Drama and National Crisis” in Paula R. Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 149-234. 2. For the best discussion of the stock tropes of melodrama, see Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 3, 16-17. Brooks acknowledges the importance on his thinking of Eric Bentley’s “Melodrama” in The Life of the Drama (New York: Athenaeum, 1964), 195-218. 3. The best discussion of the development of sentimentality (also known as “sensibility”) as a change in consciousness can be found in Jean Hagstrum’s Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). On the same subject, also see the valuable collection of essays titled Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics, ed. Syndy McMillen Conger (Totowa, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990). On weakness

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alone in melancholy depression, contemplating suicide, until he decides to “put [his] immortality” to the test by journeying to the Arctic Circle. Like Victor Frankenstein, he decides to seek his destruction in the embrace of the “elements of air and water” (“TMI,” 325). This desire to reconcile opposites, to bathe and immerse himself in mutually exclusive physical elements, represents Mary Shelley’s attempt to depict the catastrophic merging of masculine and feminine elements in the human psyche. If men are associated with the realm of air, the intellect, reason, and the mind, then women are identified with water, the physical, and the body and its fluids. Winzy’s seeking oblivion in the extremely gender-coded landscape of the Arctic Circle suggests that the apocalypse Mary Shelley imagined for herself and her characters involved an escape from all polarities, or rather a freezing and holding of the two elements in a static situation. We do not know what becomes of Winzy, just as we never know what becomes of the creature at the conclusion of Frankenstein.

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as a central component of sentimentality, see R. W. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974) and Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986). 4. Naomi Wolf, Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century (New York: Random House, 1993), 136-37. 5. The relationship, real and imagined, between Mary Shelley and her dead mother and flawed father is explored most revealingly in William St. Clair’s The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (New York: Norton, 1989). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) discusses Mary Shelley’s relationship with her mother and its influence on her works (213-47), as does Janet M. Todd’s “Frankenstein’s Daughter: Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft,” Women and Literature 4 (1976): 18-27. On the influence of Godwin on her works, see Katherine Powers, The Influence of William Godwin on the Novels of Mary Shelley (New York: Arno, 1980), and on Mary’s relationship with her father, see U. C. Knoepflmacher, “Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters,” in The Endurance of Frankenstein, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 88119. Several recent biographies of Mary Shelley explore the parental influence on her writings. In particular, see Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (London: Routledge, 1988); Emily Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989); and Muriel Spark, Mary Shelley (1951; rprt., London: Constable, 1987). 6. The full text of Mary’s well-known journal confession reads: With regard to “the good Cause”—the cause of the advancement of freedom & knowledge—of the Rights of Woman, & c.—I am not a person of opinions. . . . Some [people] have a passion for reforming the world:— others do not cling to particular opinions. That my parents and Shelley were of the former class, makes me respect it. . . . I was nursed and fed with a love of glory. To be something great and good was the precept given me by my Father: Shelley reiterated it. Alone & poor, I could only be something by joining a party—& there was much in me— the woman’s love of looking up & being guided, & being willing to do anything if any one supported & brought me forward, which would have made me a good partizan—but Shelley died & I was alone. . . . If I have never written to vindicate the Rights of women, I have ever befriended women when oppressed. (21 October 1838) (The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert [Oxford: Clarendon, 1987] 2:553-54)

8. See Sigmund Freud, “‘A Child is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 17:175-204. The fullest attempt to apply the beating fantasy motif to female Gothic fiction can be found in Michelle Massé, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). In particular, see her chapter “‘A Woman Is Being Beaten’ and Its Vicissitudes,” 40-106. 9. Mary Shelley sent the manuscript of Mathilda to Godwin via their mutual friend Maria Gisborne in May 1820. After almost two years of fruitless inquiry, she finally concluded that Godwin would not help see the manuscript into publication, so she began trying to recover it. She never succeeded, and the novella was not published until Elizabeth Nitchie prepared an edition for press in 1959 (Mathilda [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959]). Terence Harpold explores the incestuous core and motivation of Mathilda in his article “‘Did you get Mathilda from Papa?’: Seduction Fantasy and the Circulation of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” Studies in Romanticism 28 (1989): 49-67. Harpold concludes that the novel “represents a fantasy of seduction,” and that the submission of the novel to Godwin “signals Mary’s effort to engage him in the seduction fantasy, but to acknowledge the authority of his desire in the primal scene which determines her understanding of herself and her relations with each of her parents” (64). 10. All quotations from “The Mortal Immortal” are taken from text reprinted in The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 314-26, hereafter cited in the text as TMI. The first printing of “The Mortal Immortal” was in The Keepsake (1834), 71-87.

The second Shelley quotation is taken from her letter of 11 June 1835 (Selected Letters of Mary W. Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995], 257).

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7. Analyzing fathers and mothers in Mary Shelley’s fiction has been a persistent focus in the literary criticism of her work. A useful overview of the critical history on this topic can be found in Jane Blumberg, Mary Shelley’s Early Novels: ‘This Child of Imagination and Misery’ (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993). See also Marc A. Rubinstein, “‘My Accursed Origin’: The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein,” Studies in Romanticism 15 (1976): 165-94; James B. Carson, “Bringing the Author Forward: Frankenstein through Mary Shelley’s Letters,” Criticism 30 (1988): 431-53; and Kate Ellis, “Mary Shelley’s Embattled Garden,” in The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 181-206.

11. Although I have been unable to document Mary Shelley’s reading of the Hoffmann tale through her own record of her readings in the journal, I believe she may at least have been familiar with the story’s rough plotlines through the text’s circulation in British literary circles by 1833. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” is itself a seminal literary source in psychoanalytic discourse systems. Freud developed his theory of the uncanny while reading the story, and it has inspired a number of French feminist meditations on “the phallic gaze,” most notably Hélène Cixous’s fruitful “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s ‘The Uncanny,’” New Literary History 7 (1976): 525-48. An overview of the psychoanalytic history of the Hoffmann story can be found in Sarah Kofman, Freud and Fiction, trans. Sarah Wykes (Cambridge: Polity Press,

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12. Like Mathilda and the other novels besides Frankenstein, the short stories of Mary Shelley are now the focus of critical interest. For a very different reading of the female body in this text, see Sonia Hofkosh, “Disfiguring Economies: Mary Shelley’s Short Stories” in The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 204-19. 13. For useful overviews and summaries of the theoretical and psychoanalytical background on the phallic mother, see Marcia Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother: Psychoanalysis, Modernism, and the Fetish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Dana Birksted-Breen, ed., The Gender Conundrum: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Femininity and Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1993).

TITLE COMMENTARY Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (ESSAY DATE 1817) SOURCE: Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “On Frankenstein.” The Athenaeum, no. 263 (10 November 1832): 730. Shelley wrote the following highly favorable review of Frankenstein in 1817, but it was not published until 1832. Unlike most early reviewers, he emphasized the novel’s moral aspects. He also traces similarities between Mary Shelley’s narrative style and characterization and William Godwin’s.

The Novel of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, is undoubtedly, as a mere story, one of the most original and complete productions of the day. We debate with ourselves in wonder, as we read it, what could have been the series of thoughts—what could have been the peculiar experiences that awakened them—which conduced, in the author’s mind, to the astonishing combinations of motives and incidents, and the startling catastrophe, which compose this tale. There are, perhaps, some points of subordinate importance, which prove that it is the author’s first attempt. But in this judgment, which requires a very nice discrimination, we may be mistaken; for it is conducted throughout with a firm and steady hand. The interest gradually accumulates and advances towards the conclusion with the accelerated rapidity of a rock rolled down a mountain. We are led breathless with suspense and

sympathy, and the heaping up of incident on incident, and the working of passion out of passion. We cry “hold, hold! enough!”—but there is yet something to come; and, like the victim whose history it relates, we think we can bear no more, and yet more is to be borne. Pelion is heapen on Ossa, and Ossa on Olympus. We climb Alp after Alp, until the horizon is seen blank, vacant, and limitless; and the head turns giddy, and the ground seems to fail under our feet. This novel rests its claim on being a source of powerful and profound emotion. The elementary feelings of the human mind are exposed to view; and those who are accustomed to reason deeply on their origin and tendency will, perhaps, be the only persons who can sympathize, to the full extent, in the interest of the actions which are their result. But, founded on nature as they are, there is perhaps no reader, who can endure anything beside a new love story, who will not feel a responsive string touched in his inmost soul. The sentiments are so affectionate and so innocent—the characters of the subordinate agents in this strange drama are clothed in the light of such a mild and gentle mind—the pictures of domestic manners are of the most simple and attaching character: the father’s is irresistible and deep. Nor are the crimes and malevolence of the single Being, though indeed withering and tremendous, the offspring of any unaccountable propensity to evil, but flow irresistibly from certain causes fully adequate to their production. They are the children, as it were, of Necessity and Human Nature. In this the direct moral of the book consists; and it is perhaps the most important, and of the most universal application, of any moral that can be enforced by example. Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked. Requite affection with scorn;—let one being be selected, for whatever cause, as the refuse of his kind—divide him, a social being, from society, and you impose upon him the irresistible obligations—malevolence and selfishness. It is thus that, too often in society, those who are best qualified to be its benefactors and its ornaments, are branded by some accident with scorn, and changed, by neglect and solitude of heart, into a scourge and a curse. The Being in Frankenstein is, no doubt, a tremendous creature. It was impossible that he should not have received among men that treatment which led to the consequences of his being a social nature. He was an abortion and an anomaly; and though his mind was such as its first impressions framed it, affectionate and full of moral sensibility, yet the circumstances of his

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1991), while its status within the Romantic tradition is examined by Marianne Thalmann, The Literary Sign Language of German Romanticism, trans. Harold Basilius (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972).

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existence are so monstrous and uncommon, that, when the consequences of them became developed in action, his original goodness was gradually turned into inextinguishable misanthropy and revenge. The scene between the Being and the blind De Lacey in the cottage, is one of the most profound and extraordinary instances of pathos that we ever recollect. It is impossible to read this dialogue,—and indeed many others of a somewhat similar character,—without feeling the heart suspend its pulsations with wonder, and the “tears stream down the cheeks.” The encounter and argument between Frankenstein and the Being on the sea of ice, almost approaches, in effect, to the expostulations of Caleb Williams with Falkland. It reminds us, indeed, somewhat of the style and character of that admirable writer, to whom the author has dedicated his work, and whose productions he seems to have studied. There is only one instance, however, in which we detect the least approach to imitation; and that is the conduct of the incident of Frankenstein’s landing in Ireland. The general character of the tale, indeed, resembles nothing that ever preceded it. After the death of Elizabeth, the story, like a stream which grows at once more rapid and profound as it proceeds, assumes an irresistible solemnity, and the magnificent energy and swiftness of a tempest. The churchyard scene, in which Frankenstein visits the tombs of his family, his quitting Geneva, and his journey through Tartary to the shores of the Frozen Ocean, resemble at once the terrible reanimation of a corpse and the supernatural career of a spirit. The scene in the cabin of Walton’s ship—the more than mortal enthusiasm and grandeur of the Being’s speech over the dead body of his victim—is an exhibition of intellectual and imaginative power, which we think the reader will acknowledge has seldom been surpassed.

SIR WALTER SCOTT (ESSAY DATE MARCH 1818) SOURCE: Scott, Sir Walter. “Remarks on Frankenstein.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 2, no. 12 (March 1818): 612. In the following excerpt, Scott places Frankenstein in the philosophical, rather than merely sensational, school of supernatural fiction, assessing it as a work of creative and poetic genius, despite its implausible plot.

[Frankenstein] is a novel, or more properly a romantic fiction, of a nature so peculiar, that we ought to describe the species before attempting any account of the individual production. . . .

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[The] class of marvellous romances admits of several subdivisions. In the earlier productions of imagination, the poet or tale-teller does not, in his own opinion, transgress the laws of credibility, when he introduces into his narration the witches, goblins, and magicians, in the existence of which he himself, as well as his hearers, is a firm believer. This good faith, however, passes away, and works turning upon the marvellous are written and read merely on account of the exercise which they afford to the imagination of those who, like the poet Collins, love to riot in the luxuriance of oriental fiction, to rove through the meanders of enchantment, to gaze on the magnificence of golden palaces, and to repose by the waterfalls of Elysian gardens. In this species of composition, the marvellous is itself the principal and most important object both to the author and reader. . . . A more philosophical and refined use of the supernatural in works of fiction, is proper to that class in which the laws of nature are represented as altered, not for the purpose of pampering the imagination with wonders, but in order to shew the probable effect which the supposed miracles would produce on those who witnessed them. In this case, the pleasure ordinarily derived from the marvellous incidents is secondary to that which we extract from observing how mortals like ourselves would be affected, By scenes like these which, daring to depart From sober truth, are still to nature true.

Even in the description of his marvels, however, the author, who manages this style of composition with address, gives them an indirect importance with the reader, when he is able to describe, with nature and with truth, the effects which they are calculated to produce upon his dramatis persona. . . . But success in this point is still subordinate to the author’s principal object, which is less to produce an effect by means of the marvels of the narrations, than to open new trains and channels of thought, by placing men in supposed situations of an extraordinary and preternatural character, and then describing the mode of feeling and conduct which they are most likely to adopt. . . . In the class of fictitious narrations to which we allude, the author opens a sort of accountcurrent with the reader; drawing upon him, in the first place, for credit to that degree of the marvellous which he proposes to employ; and becoming virtually bound, in consequence of this indulgence, that his personages shall conduct themselves, in the extraordinary circumstances in which they are placed, according to the rules of

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We have only to add, that this class of fiction has been sometimes applied to the purposes of political satire, and sometimes to the general illustration of the powers and workings of the human mind. Swift, Bergerac, and others, have employed it for the former purpose, and a good illustration of the latter is the well known Saint Leon of William Godwin. In this latter work, assuming the possibility of the transmutation of metals and of the elixir vito, the author has deduced, in the course of his narrative, the probable consequences of the possession of such secrets upon the fortunes and mind of him who might enjoy them. Frankenstein is a novel upon the same plan with Saint Leon; it is said to be written by Mr Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, if we are rightly informed, is son-inlaw to Mr Godwin; and it is inscribed to that ingenious author. . . . [In Frankenstein] the author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination. The feeling with which we perused the unexpected and fearful, yet, allowing the possibility of the event, very natural conclusion of Frankenstein’s experiment, shook a little even our firm nerves; although such, and so numerous have been the expedients for exciting terror employed by the romantic writers of the age, that the reader may adopt Macbeth’s words with a slight alteration: We have supp’d full with horrors: Direness, familiar to our “callous” thoughts, Cannot once startle us.

It is no slight merit in our eyes, that the tale, though wild in incident, is written in plain and forcible English, without exhibiting that mixture of hyperbolical Germanisms with which tales of wonder are usually told, as if it were necessary that the language should be as extravagant as the fiction. The ideas of the author are always clearly as well as forcibly expressed; and his descriptions of landscape have in them the choice requisites of truth, freshness, precision, and beauty. The selfeducation of the monster, considering the slender opportunities of acquiring knowledge he possessed, . . . [is] improbable and overstrained. That he should have not only learned to speak, but to read, and, for aught we know, to write—that he should have become acquainted with Werter, with

Plutarch’s Lives, and with Paradise Lost, by listening through a hole in a wall, seems as unlikely as that he should have acquired, in the same way, the problems of Euclid, or the art of book-keeping by single and double entry. . . . We should also be disposed, in support of the principles with which we set out, to question whether the monster, how tall, agile, and strong however, could have perpetrated so much mischief undiscovered; or passed through so many countries without being secured, either on account of his crimes, or for the benefit of some such speculator as Mr Polito, who would have been happy to have added to his museum so curious a specimen of natural history. But as we have consented to admit the leading incident of the work, perhaps some of our readers may be of opinion, that to stickle upon lesser improbabilities, is to incur the censure bestowed by the Scottish proverb on those who start at straws after swallowing windlings. The following lines, which occur in the second volume, mark, we think, that the author possesses the same facility in expressing himself in verse as in prose. We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep. We rise; one wand’ring thought pollutes the day. We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh, or weep, Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away; It is the same; for, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free. Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but mutability!

Upon the whole, the work impresses us with a high idea of the author’s original genius and happy power of expression. We shall be delighted to hear that he has aspired to the paullo majora; and, in the meantime, congratulate our readers upon a novel which excites new reflections and untried sources of emotion. If Gray’s definition of Paradise, to lie on a couch, namely, and read new novels, come any thing near truth, no small praise is due to him, who, like the author of Frankenstein, has enlarged the sphere of that fascinating enjoyment.

HAROLD BLOOM (ESSAY DATE 1965) SOURCE: Bloom, Harold. “Frankenstein, or the New Prometheus.” Partisan Review 32 (1965): 611-18. In the following essay, Bloom discusses the image of the double and the Promethean myth in Frankenstein.

The motion picture viewer who carries his obscure but still authentic taste for the sublime to

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probability, and the nature of the human heart. In this view, the probable is far from being laid out of sight even amid the wildest freaks of imagination; on the contrary, we grant the extraordinary postulates which the author demands as the foundation of his narrative, only on condition of his deducing the consequences with logical precision.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR ELLEN MOERS ON MOTHERHOOD, THE FEMALE GOTHIC, AND FRANKENSTEIN

Mary Shelley was a unique case, in literature as in life. She brought birth to fiction not as realism but as Gothic fantasy, and thus contributed to Romanticism a myth of genuine originality. She invented a mad scientist who locks himself in his laboratory and secretly, guiltily, works at creating human life, only to find that he has made a monster. It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. . . . The rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. . . . His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing . . . ; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

That is very good horror, but what follows is more horrid still: Frankenstein, the scientist, runs away and abandons the newborn monster, who is and remains nameless. Here, I think, is where Mary Shelley’s book is most interesting, most powerful, and most feminine: in the motif or revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences. Most of the novel, roughly two of its three volumes, can be said to deal with the retribution visited upon monster and creator for deficient infant care. Frankenstein seems to be distinctly a woman’s mythmaking on the subject of birth precisely because its emphasis is not upon what precedes birth, not upon birth itself, but upon what follows birth: the trauma of the afterbirth. SOURCE: Moers, Ellen. “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother.” The New York Review of Books 21, No. 4 (21 March 1974): 24-8.

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the neighborhood theater, there to see the latest in an unending series of Frankensteins, participates in a Romantic terror now nearly one hundred and fifty years old. The terror is a familiar and a pleasing one, and few figures in contemporary mythology are as universally loved as Frankenstein’s once pathetic monster, now a star beaconing from the abode of television, comic strips and the sweatshirts of the young. “Frankenstein,” to most of us, is the name of a monster rather than of a monster’s creator, for the common reader and the common viewer have worked together, in their apparent confusion, to create a myth soundly based on a central duality in Mary Shelley’s novel.1 As Richard Church and Muriel Spark were the first to record, the monster and his creator are the antithetical halves of a single being. Miss Spark states the antithesis too cleanly; for her, Victor Frankenstein represents the feelings, and his nameless creature the intellect. In her view, the monster has no emotion, and “what passes for emotion . . . are really intellectual passions arrived at through rational channels.” Miss Spark carries this argument far enough to insist that the monster is asexual, and that he demands a bride from Frankenstein only for companionship, a conclusion evidently at variance with the novel’s text. The antithesis between the scientist and his creature in Frankenstein is a very complex one, and to be described more fully it must be placed in the larger context of Romantic literature and its characteristic mythology. The shadow or double of the self is a constant conceptual image in Blake and Shelley, and a frequent image, more random and descriptive, in the other major Romantics, especially in Byron. In Frankenstein, it is the dominant and recurrent image, and accounts for much of the latent power the novel possesses. Mary Shelley’s husband was a divided being, as man and as poet, just as his friend Byron was, though in Shelley the split was more radical. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus is the full title of Mrs. Shelley’s novel, and while Victor Frankenstein is not Shelley (Clerval is rather more like the poet), the Modern Prometheus is a very apt term for Shelley or for Byron. Prometheus best suits the uses of Romantic poetry, for no other mythic figure has in him the full range of Romantic moral sensibility, and the full Romantic capacity for creation and destruction. No Romantic writer employed the Prometheus archetype without a full awareness of its equivocal potentialities. The Prometheus of the ancients had

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In the Romantic readings of Milton’s Paradise Lost (and Frankenstein is implicitly one such reading), this double identity of Prometheus is a vital element. Blake, whose mythic revolutionary named Orc is another version of Prometheus, saw Milton’s Satan as a Prometheus gone wrong, as desire restrained until it became only the shadow of desire, a diminished double of creative energy. Shelley went further in judging Milton’s Satan as an imperfect Prometheus, inadequate because his mixture of heroic and base qualities engendered in the reader’s mind a “pernicious casuistry” inimical to the spirit of art. Blake, more systematic a poet than Shelley, worked out an antithesis between symbolic figures he named Spectre and Emanation, the shadow of desire and the total form of desire, respectively. A reader of Frankenstein, recalling the novel’s extraordinary conclusion with its scenes of obsessional pursuit through the Arctic wastes, can recognize the same imagery applied to a similar symbolic situation in Blake’s lyric on the strife of Spectre and Emanation: My Spectre around me night and day Like a Wild beast guards my way. My Emanation far within Weeps incessantly for my Sin. A Fathomless and boundless deep, There we wander, there we weep; On the hungry craving wind My Spectre follows thee behind. He scents thy footsteps in the snow, Wheresoever thou dost go Thro’ the wintry hail and rain . . .

Frankenstein’s monster, tempting his revengeful creator on through a world of ice, is another Emanation pursued by a Spectre, with the enormous difference that he is an Emanation flawed, a nightmare of actuality, rather than a dream of desire.

Though abhorred rather than loved, the monster is the total form of Frankenstein’s creative power, and is more imaginative than his creator. The monster is at once more intellectual and more emotional than his maker, indeed he excels Frankenstein as much (and in the same ways) as Milton’s Adam excels Milton’s God in Paradise Lost. The greatest paradox, and most astonishing achievement, of Mary Shelley’s novel is that the monster is more human than his creator. This nameless being, as much a Modern Adam as his creator is a Modern Prometheus, is more lovable than his creator and more hateful, more to be pitied and more to be feared, and above all more able to give the attentive reader that shock of added consciousness which compels a heightened realization of the self. For, like Blake’s Spectre and Emanation, or Shelley’s Alastor and Epipsyche, Frankenstein and his monster are the solipsistic and generous halves of the one self. Frankenstein is the mind and emotions turned in upon themselves, and his creature is the mind and emotions turned imaginatively outward, seeking a greater humanization through a confrontation of other selves. I am suggesting that what makes Frankenstein an important book, though it is only a strong, flawed, frequently clumsy novel is that it vividly projects a version of the Romantic mythology of the self, found, among other places, in Blake’s Book of Urizen, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Byron’s Manfred. It lacks the sophistication and imaginative complexity of such works but precisely because of that Frankenstein affords a unique introduction to the archetypal world of the Romantics. William Godwin, though a tendentious novelist, was a powerful one, and the prehistory of his daughter’s novel begins in 1794 with his best work of fiction, Caleb Williams. Godwin summarized the climactic (and harrowing) final third of his novel as a pattern of flight and pursuit, “the fugitive in perpetual apprehension of being overwhelmed with the worst calamities, and the pursuer, by his ingenuity and resources, keeping his victim in a state of the most fearful alarm.” Mary Shelley brilliantly reverses this pattern in the final sequence of her novel, and she also takes from Caleb Williams her destructive theme of the monster’s war against what Caleb Williams from his prison cell calls “the whole machinery of human society.” Muriel Spark, pointing to Shelley’s equivocal Preface to his wife’s novel, argues that Frankenstein can be read as a reaction “against the rational-humanism of Godwin and Shelley.”

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been for the most part a spiritually reprehensible figure, though frequently a sympathetic one, both in terms of his dramatic situation and in his close alliance with mankind against the gods. But this alliance had been ruinous for man, in most versions of the myth, and the Titan’s benevolence toward humanity was hardly sufficient recompense for the alienation of man from heaven that he had brought about. Both sides of Titanism are evident in earlier Christian references to the story. The same Prometheus who is taken as an analogue of the crucified Christ is regarded also as a type of Lucifer, a son of light justly cast out by an offended heaven.

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Certainly Shelley was worried lest the novel be taken as a warning against the inevitable moral consequences of an unchecked experimental Prometheanism and scientific materialism. The Preface insists that: The opinions which naturally spring from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always in my own conviction; nor is any inference justly to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind.

There are two paradoxes at the center of Mrs. Shelley’s novel, and each illuminates a dilemma of the Promethean imagination. The first is that Frankenstein was successful: he did create Natural Man, not as he was, but as the meliorists saw him. Indeed, Frankenstein did better than this, since his creature was more imaginative even than himself. Frankenstein’s tragedy stems, not from his Promethean excess, but from his own moral error, his failure to love. He abhorred his creature, became terrified of it, and fled his responsibilities. The second paradox is the more ironic. This disaster either would not have happened, or would not have mattered anyway, if Frankenstein had been an esthetically successful maker; a beautiful “monster,” or even a passable one, would not have been a monster. The creature himself bitterly observes: Shall I respect man when he contemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness; and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union.

As the sensuous horror of his creature was no part of Victor Frankenstein’s intention, it is worth noticing how this came about. It would not be unjust to characterize Victor Frankenstein, in his act of creation, as being momentarily a moral idiot. There is an indeliberate humor, to which readers since 1945 are doubtless more sensitive than earlier ones, in the contrast between the enormity of the scientist’s discovery, and the mundane emotions of the discoverer. Finding that “the minuteness of the parts” slows him down, he resolves to make his creature “about eight feet in height, and proportionably large.” As he works on, he allows himself to dream that “a new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.” Yet he knows his is a “workshop of filthy creation,” and he fails the fundamental test of his own creativity. When the “dull yellow eye” of his creature opens, this creator falls from the

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autonomy of a supreme artificer to the terror of a child of earth: “breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” He flees his responsibility, and sets in motion the events that will lead to his own Arctic immolation, a fit end for a being (rather like Lawrence’s Gerald in Women in Love) who has never achieved a full sense of another’s existence. It is part of Mary Shelley’s insight into her mythological theme that all the monster’s victims are innocents. The monster not only refuses actively to slay his guilty creator; he mourns for him, though with the equivocal tribute of terming the scientist a “generous and self-devoted being.” Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus who has violated nature, receives his epitaph from the ruined second nature he has made, the Godabandoned, who consciously echoes the ruined Satan of Paradise Lost, and proclaims “Evil thenceforth became my good.” It is imaginatively fitting that the greater and more interesting consciousness of the creature should survive his creator, for he alone in Mrs. Shelley’s novel possesses character. Frankenstein, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, has no character in his own right; both figures win a claim to our attention only by their primordial crimes against original nature. The monster is of course Mary Shelley’s finest invention, and his narrative (Chapters XI through XVI) forms the highest achievement of the novel, more absorbing even than the magnificent and almost surrealistic pursuit of the climax. In an age so given to remarkable depictions of the dignity of natural man, an age including the shepherds and beggars of Wordsworth, Frankenstein’s hapless creature stands out as a sublime embodiment of heroic pathos. Though Frankenstein lacks the moral imagination to understand him, the daemon’s appeal is to what is most compassionate in us: “Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

The passage I have italicized is the imaginative kernel of the novel, a reminder of the novel’s epigraph: Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me? —Paradise Lost, Book X, 743-5

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It moved every feeling of wonder and awe that the picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting. I often referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with, and acquire knowledge from, beings of a superior nature: but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition; for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.

From a despair this profound, no release is possible. Driven forth into an existence upon which “the cold stars shone in mockery,” the daemon declares “everlasting war against the species,” and enters upon a fallen existence more terrible than the expelled Adam’s. Echoing Milton, he asks the ironic question, “And now, with the world before me, whither should I bend my steps,” to which the only possible answer is: toward his wretched Promethean creator. If we stand back from Mary Shelley’s novel, in order better to view its archetypal shape, we see it as the quest of a solitary and ravaged consciousness first for consolation, then for revenge, and finally for a self-destruction that will be apocalyp-

tic, that will bring down the creator with his creature. Though Mary Shelley may not have intended it, her novel’s prime theme is a necessary counterpoise to Prometheanism, for Prometheanism exalts the increase in consciousness despite all costs Frankenstein breaks through the barrier that separates man from God and apparently becomes the giver of life, but all he actually can give is death-in-life. The profound dejection endemic in Mary Shelley’s novel is fundamental to the Romantic mythology of the self, for all Romantic horrors are diseases of excessive consciousness, of the self unable to bear the self. Kierkegaard remarks that Satan’s despair is absolute, because Satan as pure spirit is pure consciousness, and for Satan (and all men in his predicament) every increase in consciousness is an increase in despair. Frankenstein’s desperate creature attains the state of pure spirit through his extraordinary situation, and is racked by a consciousness in which every thought is a fresh disease. A Romantic poet fought against selfconsciousness through the strength of what he called imagination, a more than rational energy by which thought could seek to heal itself. But Frankenstein’s daemon, though he is in the archetypal situation of the Romantic Wanderer or Solitary, who sometimes was a poet, can win no release from his own story by telling it. His desperate desire for a mate is clearly an attempt to find a Shelleyan Epipsyche or Blakean Emanation for himself, a self within the self. But as he is the nightmare actualization of Frankenstein’s desire, he is himself an emanation of Promethean yearnings, and his only double is his creator and denier. When Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner progressed from the purgatory of consciousness to his very minimal control of imagination, he failed to save himself. He remained in a cycle of remorse. But he at least became a salutary warning to others, and made of the Wedding Guest a wiser and a better man. Frankenstein’s creature can help neither himself nor others, for he has no natural ground to which he can return. Romantic poets liked to return to the imagery of the ocean of life and immortality; in the eddying to and fro of the healing waters they could picture a hoped-for process of restoration, of a survival of consciousness despite all its agonies. Mary Shelley, with marvelous appropriateness, brings her Romantic novel to a demonic conclusion in a world of ice. The frozen sea is the inevitable emblem for both the wretched daemon and his obsessed creator, but the daemon is allowed a final image of reversed Promethean-

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That desperate plangency of the fallen Adam becomes the characteristic accent of the daemon’s lamentations, with the influence of Milton cunningly built into the novel’s narrative by the happy device of Frankenstein’s creature receiving his education through reading Paradise Lost “as a true history.” Already doomed because his standards are human, which makes him an outcast even to himself, his Miltonic education completes his fatal growth in self-consciousness. His story, as told to his maker, follows a familiar Romantic pattern “of the progress of my intellect,” as he puts it. His first pleasure after the dawn of consciousness comes through his wonder at seeing the moon rise. Caliban-like, he responds wonderfully to music, both natural and human, and his sensitivity to the natural world has the responsiveness of an incipient poet. His awakening to a first love for other beings, the inmates of the cottage he haunts, awakens him also to the great desolation of love rejected, when he attempts to reveal himself. His own duality of situation and character, caught between the states of Adam and Satan, Natural Man and his thwarted desire, is related by him directly to his reading of Milton’s epic:

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ism. There is a heroism fully earned in the being who cries farewell in a claim of sad triumph: “I shall ascend my funeral pyre triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames.” Mary Shelley could not have known how dark a prophecy this consummation of consciousness would prove to be for the two great Promethean poets who were at her side during the summer of 1816, when her novel was conceived. Byron, writing his own epitaph at Missolonghi in 1824, and perhaps thinking back to having stood at Shelley’s funeral pyre two years before, found an image similar to the daemon’s, to sum up an exhausted existence: The fire that on my bosom preys Is lone as some volcanic isle; No torch is kindled at its blaze— A funeral pile.

The fire of increased consciousness stolen from heaven ends as an isolated volcano, cut off from other selves by an estranging sea. “The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds,” is the exultant cry of Frankenstein’s creature. A blaze at which no torch is kindled is Byron’s self-image, but he ends his death poem on another note, the hope for a soldier’s grave, which he found. There is no Promethean release, but release is perhaps not the burden of the literature of Romantic aspiration. There is something both Godwinian and Shelleyan about the final utterance of Victor Frankenstein, which is properly made to Walton, the failed Promethean, whose ship has just turned back. Though chastened, the Modern Prometheus ends with a last word true, not to his accomplishment, but to his desire: “Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.”

Shelley’s Prometheus, crucified on his icy precipice, found his ultimate torment in a Fury’s taunt: “And all best things are thus confused to ill.” It seems a fitting summation for all the work done by Modern Prometheanism, and might have served as an alternate epigraph for Mary Shelley’s disturbing novel.

Note 1. Mary Shelley, second wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, was 19 when she wrote the original Frankenstein.

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MARCIA TILLOTSON (ESSAY DATE 1983) SOURCE: Tillotson, Marcia. “‘A Forced Solitude’: Mary Shelley and the Creation of Frankenstein’s Monster.” In The Female Gothic, edited by Julian E. Fleenor, pp. 167-75. Montreal, Quebec: Eden Press, 1983. In the following essay, Tillotson analyzes how Shelley’s personal experience with solitude or loneliness informed her thematic treatment of solitude and loneliness in Frankenstein.

The story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein usually begins where she herself began it, in Switzerland, in the summer of 1816, when Lord Byron proposed to her, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori, “We will each write a ghost story.” Shortly thereafter, Shelley had her “waking dream”: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life.”1 This dream may explain how Shelley got the idea for her novel and for its hero, Victor Frankenstein. It does not, however, explain how the monster became the novel’s second protagonist. For the plot that the dream suggests requires that only Frankenstein be sympathetic yet awesome, admirable yet pitiful: in trying to benefit mankind, he created a monster. Frankenstein’s tragedy was sufficiently horrifying to be the basis for a tale of terror, and Shelley knew that: “Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.” The second tragedy, the monster’s, does not seem to have been part of Shelley’s original idea; at least her dream gives no hint that the monster’s situation would be as pitiable as the scientist’s, and as important to the novel.2 The monster developed into a second hero because Shelley imagined his isolation and his resentment with special vividness. It has often been pointed out that Shelley shared with the monster a loneliness that began with life itself.3 If a child may see a parent’s death as a deliberate desertion, then she had been abandoned by her mother at birth just as the monster was abandoned by Frankenstein: thus, Shelley had Frankenstein do to the monster what she, on some unconscious level, may have felt Mary Wollstonecraft had done to her. But this similarity between Shelley’s life and the monster’s helps to explain only Frankenstein’s desertion of his “baby” on the night he gave it life, not the

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Why the novel has two protagonists, and why the monster is so unmonstrous, are questions that no one, from Shelley herself to Ellen Moers, has answered—or even asked. Calling Frankenstein a “birth myth” and attributing much of the novel’s originality and power to its author’s experience of motherhood, Moers does not deal with the monster’s qualities.4 Like Shelley’s own comments on her novel, Moers’ ideas help us to understand Frankenstein but not the monster. Moers’ basic argument, however—that women writers used Gothic mechanisms to express feeling and beliefs and even facts about their existence that they could communicate in no other way—is as enlightening about the monster as it is about Frankenstein. For the experiences women drew on to create the Female Gothic were not all as profoundly affecting as childbirth. Less elemental experiences were still powerful or painful or terrifying enough to be transformed by a woman’s imagination into Gothic fiction. From this more ordinary kind of Gothic source material—social neglect and unkindness, and the consequent feelings of exclusion—came the pitiable monster, the novel’s second hero; at least, this is how I shall try to account for the monster and his ability to win our compassion. The question I cannot answer is whether Shelley was fully aware of what she was doing: did she deliberately use the monster’s selfdefense to protest against men’s behavior toward women, or did she merely make the monster speak for her without knowing herself that the source of his rage was her own? In any case, Shelley had been lonely all her life, but there is evidence that at the time she conceived of and began writing Frankenstein, she was subjected to a new and particularly painful isolation: she was excluded from the companionship of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. A similar exclusion is, of course, the devastating experience that turns the monster into a murderer. For the monster was not innately evil, nor was he driven to crime by a vague and general loneliness. The agony that makes him kill is quite specifically the agony of a creature whose best hopes for himself and others cannot be realized or even communicated. This was how Shelley saw herself by the end of that summer in Geneva: her lover and his brilliant, fascinating friend ate, talked, drank,

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monster’s subsequent behavior or his ability to justify himself. In other words, this similarity may help us understand why Shelley sympathized with the monster but not how she compelled her readers to do the same thing.

Illustration from the 1831 edition of Frankenstein.

and sailed together, but she could not join their conversations or share their amusements. Although she was by no means ugly, her problem, like the monster’s, was her appearance: her strong mind was housed in a woman’s body. With interests and aspirations resembling those of the men with whom she associated, she was isolated from them by her sex. Her exclusion may not have been as violent or as absolute as the monster’s but it was as real. Leslie A. Marchand understood her situation when he told how, in Pisa during the winter of 1821-22, she and Teresa Guiccioli would walk or ride out to meet Byron, Percy Shelley, and their male companions as they were returning from their daily pistol-shooting excursions: “. . . it was for Mary, strongly attracted by the intellect and charm of Byron, almost the only opportunity to associate in this man’s world, for which by temperament and intellectual proclivities she was eminently fitted.”5 Writing to Marianne Hunt from Pisa on 5 March 1822, Shelley complained about this exclusion: “Our good cavaliers flock together, and as they do not like fetching a walk with the absurd womankind, Jane [Mrs. Williams] and I are off together, and talk morality and pluck violets by the way.”6 Marchand contrasts Shelley’s exclusion in Pisa to the closer association with the two poets that she had enjoyed five and a half years earlier in Geneva.

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But the surviving information about how the two households passed their time during the summer when Frankenstein was begun indicates that she did not always share in the companionship of the two poets. Writing about that summer six years later, on 19 October 1822, three months after her husband’s death, she attributed her onlooker’s role to her own diffidence: I have seen so little of Albé [the Shelleys’ name for Byron] since our residence in Switzerland, and, having seen him there every day, his voice—a peculiar one—is engraved on my memory with other sounds and objects from which it can never disunite itself. . . . [S]ince incapacity and timidity always prevented my mingling in the nightly conversations of Diodati, they were, as it were, entirely tête-à-tête between my Shelley and Albé.7

The important fact is not that if she was too shy to intrude her ideas, the men did not ask her for them. The important fact is that even this silent participation in the men’s conversations did not last long.

brought any member of the Shelley party along. Finally, Clairmont began to be a problem. Byron let her copy the poetry he had been working on since the trip around the lake, but in mid-July he decided he could no longer tolerate her presence, so he got his fellow poet to keep her away from Diodati. Within a few days of this break, Percy, Mary, and Claire went on a tour of Chamonix. They were gone from 21 to 27 July. True, they stopped at Diodati the night they returned, and spent three hours with Byron before going home to see their baby. But the temporary separation did not bring Byron and Clairmont back together. By August her pregnancy as well as her personality were causing more difficulties; Byron agreed to support the child but became more and more determined to have nothing to do with its mother.

The two poets lived near each other on Lake Geneva for three months, from 25 May 1816, when Byron arrived (the Shelley party had been there since 13 May), to 29 August, when the Shelley party returned to England.8 With Percy Shelley were Mary, who was not yet his wife; Claire Clairmont, who was already Byron’s mistress; Percy’s and Mary’s infant son, William; and a nursemaid. Byron was traveling with Dr. John Polidori and three servants. Soon after the two groups met a routine of afternoon sails and evening conversations began, in which the two poets, the two women, and the doctor all took part. On 3 or 4 June the Shelley party moved across the lake to Montalègre, where they had rented a house. They still saw Byron daily, and on 10 June he moved into the Villa Diodati, a ten-minute walk away. Byron probably suggested the ghost stories on 15 or 16 June, for on the 17th Polidori recorded in his diary that everyone but he had started writing.

But whatever happened to the others, Mary Shelley’s closeness to the two poets diminished as the summer of 1816 progressed. Her journal indicates that after 20 July she was no longer included in their sails on the lake, which they took almost daily and often twice a day. After 14 August, when “Monk” Lewis arrived to visit Byron, she never again went to Diodati, although her lover continued to go there most evenings. When Lewis was followed by John Cam Hobhouse and Scrope Davies on 26 August, Percy Shelley passed that evening at Diodati, and he dined, sailed, and talked with Byron and his friends the following day. In the two weeks between Lewis’ arrival and the Shelley party’s departure on 29 August, Byron occasionally spent an hour or so at Montalègre but he did not bring his guests along, and Mary Shelley never met them. Clairmont went to Diodati three times during this period, but only to copy Byron’s poetry and not to participate in supper parties and conversations. Once Hobhouse and Davies were there, she did not go to Diodati at all. The company at Byron’s house had become exclusively masculine.

The first interruption in the closeness of the group came when they had spent nearly a month together: on 22 June the poets began a sailing trip around Lake Geneva, leaving the women and Polidori behind. After their return on 1 July, the intimacy that all five had shared began to disintegrate. Polidori’s foolish vanity had begun to annoy the poets even before their trip together, and when he sprained his ankle, they were both glad to go off without him. Then Madame de Staël, whom Byron had met in England in 1813, arrived at her house across the lake from Diodati, and early in July he began visiting her. Although he occasionally took Polidori there, Byron never

Thus, as far as Mary Shelley was concerned, the last part of the summer at Geneva was very much like the winter at Pisa; she was cut off from the society “for which by temperament and intellectual proclivities she was eminently fitted.” The first month or so in Switzerland, when she was included in the poets’ pastimes, far from making up for the subsequent neglect, would only make her feel it more. Furthermore, Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., argues persuasively that she was seriously attracted to and fascinated by Byron, but was unconscious of the nature of her interest in him.9 Uncomplicated by guilt, her pain at being excluded from his company would be all the stronger. Byron’s

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In order to see how likely it is that the monster’s pain and anger express what Shelley went through during the last part of that summer on Lake Geneva, we must remember that she only began the novel in Switzerland. The longest sustained bout of writing took place later, back in England. Her journal shows that she wrote nearly every day from 18 October to 13 December 1816, that she worked irregularly in January and March 1817, and that she corrected and copied her finished manuscript between 10 April and 13 May. She had plenty of time to come to terms with her feelings of exclusion, to comprehend them and give them shape, so that she could draw on them to create first the motivation for the monster’s violence and then the arguments with which he justifies himself and wins our compassion. Furthermore, from 6 to 9 December, while she was working daily on Frankenstein, she recorded in her journal that she was reading her mother’s Vindication of the Rights of Women. The monster’s assertion that his impulses were benevolent until Frankenstein’s desertion and other people’s cruelty drove him to crime resembles Wollstonecraft’s argument that women’s education turns potentially virtuous, sensible, and loving creatures into vain, foolish, selfish ones. To see the similarity between the loneliness and frustration to which an intelligent, educated, serious-minded woman is subjected on account of her sex, we need only remember that both suffer because of the disparity between the nature of their minds and forms of their bodies. The monster regrets having the germs of an intelligence, for his “sorrow only increased with knowledge.” He says, “I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feelings; but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain,

and that was death. . . .” The monster insists that he suffers because he has the capacities to think and feel, but cannot use them. He curses the creator who “had endowed me with perceptions and passions, and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind.” Having failed to win companionship by helping people, by learning their language, by asking for their understanding and good will, he turns to his creator. The monster explains that inside he is just like the people who despise him, with the same desires, the same affections: he sympathized with the cottagers he had watched and listened to, and he identified with the feelings in the books he had heard them read. But after developing all these ideas and emotions, he learned that there was no context in which he could express them. The world has no more use for a loving monster than it has for a thinking woman. So the monster asks Frankenstein to make him a mate, justifying this request by saying, “My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal.” Percy Shelley had offered Mary “communion with an equal” when she ran off with him in the summer of 1814.1 2 She expected her lover to treat her as a companion and not just a mistress. Whatever William Godwin’s deficiences as a father were, he had brought her up to read and think; she used his library, went with him to lectures and the theater, and met the literary men who came to the house. Certain facts about her education are disputed: some writers see her as neglected by her father, others as indulged by him.1 3 But one fact emerges clearly: a great part of her childhood misery was caused by her claiming for herself the intellectual stimulation that the men around her took for granted. Godwin’s second wife, however, expected all the girls of the household, including Wollstonecraft’s daughter, to sew and cook and clean, not to talk or read or write. There is a story that the girls hid behind a chair one night to hear Coleridge read “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; Mrs. Godwin discovered them and would have sent them to bed if Coleridge had not pleaded for them. If this apocryphal story is not true—it appears without any source in most lives of Mary Shelley1 4 —it seems to have been invented to illustrate the conflict about Shelley’s education, Mrs. Godwin believing that daughters should be trained to be wives and mothers, Godwin and his friends, admirers of Wollstonecraft, believing that if daughters were not to be brought up like sons—

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dislike of dining with women, his disgust with Clairmont, and his desire to entertain his friends without introducing them to any embarrassingly free females left Shelley more and more out of things. She must have suffered from her isolation—or, more accurately, from her relegation to the company of Clairmont, whom Shelley called “the bane of my life since I was three years old.”1 0 Looking back nearly fifteen years later, when both her husband and Byron were dead, Shelley said that the period in Geneva had been the happiest in her life, and Lovell suggests that this was because Clairmont’s infatuation with Byron had at last removed her from rivalry for Percy Shelley’s attentions.1 1 After the first month Byron’s presence often meant not that Mary Shelley had her lover to herself but that she had Clairmont.

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sent away to school and prepared for professional careers—they should at least be allowed to exercise their understanding and expand their imagination. Because of the influences of her father and her dead mother, Shelley did not accept the intellectual separation between women and men that was the rule in her society. She had always resisted domestic tasks while growing up, and she naturally expected more from her relation with her lover than to keep his house and bear his babies. In the summer of 1816, when Byron was around, she suddenly found herself treated like other women, as an inferior. By the end of August she was not even a silent auditor of the poets’ conversations. She came closest to being with the two of them on 24 August, when she wrote in her journal: “Write. Shelley goes to Geneva. Read. Lord Byron and Shelley sit on the wall before dinner; after, I talk with Shelley, and then Lord Byron comes down and spends an hour here. Shelley and he go up [to Diodati] together.” This laconic description lets us see not only the two men talking to each other outdoors but also the woman watching them hungrily, unable to hear what they are saying. For a while that summer there had been none of the customary segregation of the sexes. The women were included in the men’s talk about art and politics, science and religion. True, Byron seemed to have taken such segregation for granted when he first met the Shelley party in Geneva: after Clairmont introduced both of her traveling companions to Byron, he invited only Percy Shelley to dine with him and Polidori that night. However, the next day both women began to be included in the daily breakfasts and sailing parties, and the pattern of sexual segregation seemed to be broken. Clairmont knew how universal that pattern was, writing to Byron while on her way to Switzerland “that she had ten times rather be his male friend than his mistress.” It was obvious to her that a male friend would enjoy an intellectual intimacy that a mistress, admitted only to physical intimacy, would never know. Polidori is a good example of the difference sex made. He was automatically included in that first dinner party with Percy Shelley although Byron already thought him a fool by the time they got to Geneva. At the end of August, without having improved in anyone’s opinion, Polidori was still taking part in the gatherings at Diodati from which the women were excluded.1 5 We cannot know for certain that Shelley used the monster to express her own pain and resent-

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ment. But when a literary character is, against all expectations, as sympathetic and “real” as this monster, we recognize that the author was doing more than mechanically constructing a figure to meet the needs of her plot. The monster’s terrifying solitude and frustrated rage, which make him the novel’s second protagonist and Mary Shelley’s most original and fascinating invention, must have had their source in her own strongest emotions. After all, she made his arguments so convincing that Percy Shelley found “the direct moral of the book” in the monster’s defense of himself: Nor are the crimes and malevolence of the single Being, though indeed withering and tremendous, the offspring of any unaccountable propensity to evil, but flow irresistibly from certain causes fully adequate to their production. They are the children, as it were, of Necessity and Human Nature. In this the direct moral of the book consists.1 6

Percy did more than accept the monster’s ideas. Although Mary Shelley based the character of Frankenstein on Percy, the poet identified not with the scientist but with the monster. Applying the moral he had found, “Treat a person ill and he will become wicked,” Percy came to this conclusion: It is thus that too often in society those who are best qualified to be its benefactors and its ornaments are branded by some accident with scorn, and changed by neglect and solitude of heart into a scourge and a curse.1 7

While the monster cannot really be described as “best qualified” to benefit society, that is indeed how Percy Shelley saw himself.1 8 That he found the impulse to identify with the monster so powerful is a sign of Mary Shelley’s success in creating him. If Shelley tried to make her novel a compaint to her husband about her treatment in Geneva, she failed when he saw himself as the victim rather than as the victimizer. In another way, however, she succeeded in using her novel to oppose the intellectual isolation of women. Except for Polidori, the others who were present when Byron made his suggestion put their ghost stories aside almost as soon as they began them. Shelley, unlike Clairmont, wanting to be a writer and not just the mistress or wife or daughter of a writer, went ahead to complete her novel, imitating her mother as well as her father and husband.1 9 Frankenstein should not be seen as an aberration—the grotesque product of the morbid imagination of a woman not yet twenty—but as the first achievement of a professional writer. The publication, the good reviews, and the general success of Franken-

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Naturally diffident, serious, quiet, she was called by her husband, and she has since been called cold by modern students of her works and his.2 0 She denied the charge: “A cold heart! Have I a cold heart? God knows! But none need envy the icy region this heart encircles; and at least the tears are hot which the emotions of this cold heart force me to shed.” But the best refutation is in her first novel and its monster. That monster is finally a collection of ideas. He owes his origin at least as much to books as he does to the experiences Shelley shared with him—the loss of a mother and the experience of motherhood.2 1 But the monster comes from nowhere but her own imagination. As an abstract conception, he may be related to Adam or Lucifer or the Noble Savage, but when he begins to move and speak, the compelling logic of his demand for understanding and pity proves that he expressed something that Shelley herself felt deeply. And what else could that be if it was not her experience of a similarly unjust, painful, and unremitting isolation?

Notes 1. Mary W. Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, ed. K. Joseph, Oxford English Novels (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), Introduction, p. 9. All subsequent quotes are from this text. 2. Not until she wrote the introduction to her tale for its second edition, published in 1831, did Mary Shelley tell how the idea came to her after she had stayed up late listening to the two men, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, talking about galvanism. In The Mutiny Within (New York: Braziller, 1967), James Rieger questions her story of the dream, arguing on the basis of an entry in Polidori’s diary that she overheard him and not Byron discuss galvanism with Percy Shelley (pp. 243-44). If Shelley did indeed invent her dream, then we are more justified than ever in looking elsewhere for the origin of the novel. Rieger does just that, but he finds his answer not in Mary Shelley’s mind but in Percy’s: “His assistance at every point in the book’s manufacture was so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator”

(Introduction, Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley [Indianapolis: Bobbs, Merrill, 1974], p. xviii). Once again, a man is given credit for a woman’s achievement. 3. It has long been a critical commonplace to see the monster, Frankenstein, and Walton as expressions of Shelley’s lifelong loneliness. See, for example, M.G. Lund, “Mary Godwin Shelley and the Monster,” University of Kansas City Review, 28 (1962), 253-58; Elizabeth Nitchie, Mary Shelley: Author of “Frankenstein” (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 13-21; and Sylvia Norman, “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,” Shelley and His Circle, 1773-1822, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron, III (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), 399. 4. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Anchor Books, 1977), pp. 141-51. 5. Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1957), III, 947-48. 6. Mary Shelley, Letters of Mary Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman, Oklahoma: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1944), I, 158; the italics are Shelley’s. 7. Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley’s Journal, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman, Oklahoma: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1947), p. 184. 8. My sources for the events of the summer of 1816 are Marchand, II, 620-36, 643-46; Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (New York: Dutton, 1975), pp. 319-46; Newman Ivey White, Shelley (New York: Knopf, 1940), I, 438-64; John Buxton, Byron and Shelley: The History of a Friendship (London: Macmillan, 1968); and Mary Shelley, Journal, pp. 50-61. Her journal for the period 14 May 1815 to 20 July 1816 is missing. Polidori also kept a diary, but he made only sketchy entries from 25 May to 2 July 1816, and then wrote nothing at all until 5 September (The Diary of John William Polidori, ed. William Michael Rossetti [London: Elkin Mathews, 1911]). Clairmont’s journal for this period has not survived. Thus, there is no daily record of the first two months of the Geneva summer, and the letters of the two Shelleys and Byron from that period are not very numerous or very helpful. 9. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., “Byron and Mary Shelley,” KeatsShelley Journal, 2 (1953), 35-49. 10. W.E. Peck, Shelley: His Life and Work (Boston: Houghton, 1927), I, 401, quoting Mrs. Julian Marshal, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1889), II, 312. Clairmont had come along when Mary and Percy ran off to France in July 1814, and continued to live with them until 13 May 1815, when they found a place for her away from them. She was, however, back with them early in 1816 (White, I, 383-85, 402-4, 434). 11. Lovell, pp. 38-39. 12. Percy’s letter to Mary of 28 October 1814 shows how he talked to her about their relationship: “Your thoughts alone can waken mine to energy. My mind without yours is dead and cold as the dark midnight river when the moon is down. . . . How divinely sweet a task it is to imitate each others excellencies— and each moment to become wiser in this surpassing love. . . .” (Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964], I 414). He justified his betrayal of his first wife by saying that she could not give him such companionship. On 5

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stein gave her something she wanted, something her husband never achieved in his lifetime. The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin was only doing the natural thing when she wrote her tale. It was just as natural for her to continue writing: she wrote a travel book, two dramas, a long story, and a second novel before her husband’s death, and as a widow she supported herself and her son by her writing. She never produced anything else as good or successful as Frankenstein, but she achieved a small amount of independence in what was, for her as it had been for her mother, the only profession open to women besides governess or schoolmistress.

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October 1814 he wrote to Harriet Shelley: “I shall watch over your interests, mark the progress of your future life, be useful to you, be your protector, and consider myself as it were your parent; but as friends, as equals those who do not sympathize can never meet” (Shelley, Letters, I, 404). 13. Those who see Godwin as paying a great deal of attention to his daughter’s education include Holmes (Shelley, p. 170) and Muriel Spark (Child of Light [Hadleigh, Essex: Tower Bridge, 1951], p. 17). Those who take the opposite view include Rieger (Introduction, Frankenstein, p. xiii) and Richard Church (Mary Shelley [New York: Viking, 1928], p. 32). 14. Nitchie, p. 29; Spark, p. 17; Church, p. 28. R. Glynn Grylls tells the story but calls it a legend in Mary Shelley: A Biography (1938; rpt., New York: Haskell, 1969), p. 17. 15. Holmes, pp. 325, 372, 324-344 passim; Marchand, II, pp. 619-51 passim. 16. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Review of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Shelley’s Prose, or The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque, N.M.: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1954), p. 307. Apparently this review was never published in Percy’s lifetime. 17. “Review of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” pp. 307-08. 18. Holmes makes this point about Percy’s view of Frankenstein, attributing “extraordinary premonition” to Mary because she exploited the theme of exile that would be so important in her husband’s poetry several years later (pp. 333-34). Knowing that in Italy the poet saw himself as a social outcast because of his beliefs, Holmes does not recognize that in Switzerland Mary Shelley was an outcast because of her sex. 19. Byron published the fragment of his vampire story with Mazeppa in 1819. Polidori completed not only his own tale, Ernestus Berchtold, which he published in 1819, but also Byron’s; Polidori’s version of The Vampyre was published as the poet’s in April 1819. Nothing is known about Percy Shelley’s and Clairmont’s attempts. In her introduction to the second edition of her tale Mary talked about how she had always thought of being an author: “It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing. As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to ‘write stories’” (Frankenstein, p. 5). 20. See Percy Shelley’s description of his wife in Epipsychidion, 277-307. Among modern writers, Spark (pp. 120-21) and Moers (pp. 143-44) talk about Shelley’s coldness, and Rieger says that “Shelley’s spiritual dalliances slowly embittered his wife and froze a temperament that had always been cool” (Introduction, Frankenstein, p. xv). As Doris Langley Moore shows in Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered (London: Murray, 1974), pp. 487-95, Percy’s dalliances were not always just spiritual, and Mary had a difficult life both with and without him. 21. The most stimulating and enlightening recent studies of the novel concentrate on the similarities between Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, and especially on the fact that both were mothers. See Moers, pp. 141-51, and Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 155-73.

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SIR WALTER SCOTT ON FRANKENSTEIN AND THE USE OF THE SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION

Our English severity of taste will not easily adopt this wild and fantastic tone into our own literature; nay, perhaps will scarce tolerate it in translations. The only composition which approaches to it is the powerful romance of Frankenstein, and there, although the formation of a thinking and sentient being by scientific skill is an incident of the fantastic character, still the interest of the work does not turn upon the marvellous creation of Frankenstein’s monster, but upon the feelings and sentiments which that creature is supposed to express as most natural—if we may use the phrase—to his unnatural condition and origin. In other words, the miracle is not wrought for the mere wonder, but is designed to give rise to a train of acting and reasoning in itself just and probable, although the postulatum on which it is grounded is in the highest degree extravagant. So far Frankenstein, therefore, resembles the Travels of Gulliver, which suppose the existence of the most extravagant fictions, in order to extract from them philosophical reasoning and moral truth. In such cases the admission of the marvellous expressly resembles a sort of entry-money paid at the door of a lecture-room,—it is a concession which must be made to the author, and for which the reader is to receive value in moral instruction. But the fantastic of which we are now treating encumbers itself with no such conditions, and claims no further object than to surprise the public by the wonder itself. SOURCE: Scott, Sir Walter. “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition.” The Foreign Quarterly Review 1, no. 1 (July 1827): 61-98.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Scene from the 1939 film Son of Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Bela Lugosi.

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Utilizes feminist scholarship to present a balanced picture of Shelley’s life. Sunstein, Emily W. Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality. Boston and Toronto, Ontario: Little, Brown, and Co., 1989, 478 p. Defines Shelley as an exemplary Romantic, and seeks to provide an authoritative biography that dispels common myths surrounding Shelley’s life and those of her contemporaries. Williams, John. Mary Shelley: A Literary Life. London: Palgrave, 2000, 222 p. Provides an overview of Shelley’s life.

Criticism Birkhead, Edith. “Later Developments of the Tale of Terror.” In The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance. 1921. Reprint edition, pp. 157-84. Russell & Russell, Inc., 1963. Chapter in what is considered one of the first significant studies of the Gothic tradition. Offers a thoughtful overview of Frankenstein, and briefly considers Valperga, The Last Man, and some of Shelley’s short stories. Botting, Fred, ed. New Casebooks: Frankenstein. London: Macmillan, 1995, 271 p. Compilation of essays representing the different critical approaches commonly employed in analyses of Frankenstein. Clery, E. J. “Mary Shelley.” In Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley, pp. 117-46. Horndon, Tavistock, Devon: Northcote House in Association with the British Council, 2000. Studies Shelley within the tradition of Gothic literature written by women. Clifford, Gay. “Caleb Williams and Frankenstein: First-Person Narratives and ‘Things as They Are.’” Genre 10, no. 4 (winter 1977): 601-17. Outlines the artistic and philosophical viewpoints of the first-person narratives in Caleb Williams and Frankenstein and compares Shelley’s narrative techniques with those of her father. Eberle-Sinatra, Michael, ed. Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner. New York: Macmillan—St. Martin’s Press, 2000, 250 p. Collection of essays on Shelley’s works, arranged in sections titled “The Craft of Writing,” “Gender,” “The Contemporary Scene,” and “The Parental Legacy.”

FURTHER READING Bibliography Frank, Frederick S. “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Register of Research.” Bulletin of Bibliography 40, no. 3 (September 1983): 163-88. A bibliography of twentieth-century research on Frankenstein published through 1982.

Biographies Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York and London: Routledge, 1988, 275 p. Draws on unpublished material and Shelley’s fiction to present an analysis of Shelley’s life. Seymour, Miranda. Mary Shelley. New York: Grove Press, 2000, 672 p.

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Garbin, Lidia. “The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck: Walter Scott in the Writings of Mary Shelley.” Romanticism On the Net 6 (May 1997): . Argues “that we cannot understand Perkin Warbeck unless we see that it stands in Scott’s shadow and that Mary Shelley is deeply sympathetic to the tenor of Scott’s works.” Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. “Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve.” In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, pp. 213-47. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. Views Frankenstein in terms of Shelley’s relationship to the general patriarchy of literature as figured in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Noting that Shelley read Milton’s

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Goldberg, M. A. “Moral and Myth in Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Keats-Shelley Journal 8 (winter 1959): 27-38. Investigation of the themes of isolation and knowledge in Frankenstein that is considered one of the first comprehensive assessments of the novel and a milestone in Frankenstein scholarship. Hill-Miller, Katherine C. “My Hideous Progeny”: Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and the Father-Daughter Relationship. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1995, 249 p. Devotes attention to Godwin’s influence on Shelley, particularly as her literary predecessor. Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Fantasy, Trauma, and Gothic Daughters: Frankenstein as Therapy.” Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism 8 (2000): 7-28. Argues that Frankenstein’s “power resides . . . in its unconscious working out and through the author’s own intense sense of victimization, and her increasingly desperate struggle for love and family.” Hogle, Jerrold E. “Frankenstein as Neo-Gothic: From the Ghost of the Counterfeit to The Monster of Abjection.” In Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre, edited by Tilottama Rajan and Julia Wright, pp. 176210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Contends that “Frankenstein turns out to be one major apogee of the Gothic’s development from the Walpolean ghosts of older ghosts to the ghost-like representation and sequestering of the abject.” Johnson, Barbara. “My Monster/My Self.” Diacritics 12, no. 2 (summer 1982): 2-10. A landmark essay in which Johnson presents Frankenstein as a both a complex fictionalization of Shelley’s autobiography and a commentary on the nature of female autobiography, contending that “Frankenstein can be read as the story of the experience of writing Frankenstein.” Kaplan, Morton, and Robert Kloss. “Fantasy of Paternity and the Doppelgänger: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” In The Unspoken Motive: A Guide to Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism, pp. 119-45. New York: Free Press, 1973. Offers a classic psychoanalytic approach to Frankenstein, employing Freudian paradigms and methods of dream analysis. Kiely, Robert. “Frankenstein: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.” In The Romantic Novel in England, pp. 155-73. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. Examines and elaborates upon what he considers to be two dominant themes in Frankenstein: “the monstrous consequences of egotism” and “the virtue of friendship.” Knoepflmacher, U. C. “Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters.” In Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, edited by George Levine, U. C. Knoepflmacher, and Peter Dale Scott, pp. 88-119. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Contends that “Frankenstein is a novel of omnipresent fathers and absent mothers,” a situation he relates explicitly to Shelley’s own family history and the repressed anger at her father that appears to surface in the novel.

Miyoshi, Masao. “The Logic of Passion: Romanticism.” In The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians, pp. 47-106. New York: New York University Press, 1969. Suggests that the characters Walton, Clerval, and the Monster in Frankenstein serve to illuminate various aspects of Victor Frankenstein’s personality. According to Miyoshi, Walton mirrors Frankenstein in his Faustian striving, while Clerval and the Monster represent the good and evil extremes, respectively, of the scientist’s nature. Poovey, Mary. “My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley and the Feminization of Romanticism.” PMLA 95, no. 3 (May 1980): 332-47. Explores the pressures faced by Shelley, who was expected to be both an original writer and a conventional feminine model of propriety. ———. “‘My Hideous Progeny’: The Lady and the Monster.” In The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen, pp. 114-42. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Depicts Shelley as torn between the desire for selfexpression and the desire to conform. Rauch, Alan. “The Monstrous Body of Knowledge in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Studies in Romanticism 34, no. 2 (summer 1995): 227-53. Reads Frankenstein as “Shelley’s critique of knowledge”—specifically of scientific knowledge as a discourse owned, shaped, and frequently misused by men. Rieger, James. Introduction to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, edited by James Rieger. 1974. Reprint edition, pp. xi-xxvii. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982. Disputes the notion that Frankenstein is either Gothic romance or early science fiction, and discusses it as an example of mythic fiction. Rubenstein, Marc A. “‘My Accursed Origin’: The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein.” Studies in Romanticism 15, no. 2 (spring 1976): 165-94. Utilizes Shelley’s biography and psychoanalytic methodology to analyze Frankenstein as a struggle with “the problem of motherhood.” Schoene-Harwood, Berthold. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, 208 p. Surveys the major critical approaches to Frankenstein, as well as film adaptations and other works that have been influenced by the novel. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. “Appendix A.” In Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, edited by James Rieger, pp. 222-29. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982. Written in 1818. Shelley briefly recounts her biography, with an emphasis on her intellectual development and the events that led to the “waking dream” in which she first envisioned Victor Frankenstein and his creature. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Frankenstein and Devi’s Pterodactyl.” In Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, pp. 56-68. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

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poem before writing her novel, Gilbert and Gubar assert that Shelley adopted the misogyny of Paradise Lost into her own “pained ambivalence toward mothers.”

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Argues that focusing on Frankenstein “in terms of English cultural identity,” reveals “that, although Frankenstein is ostensibly about the origin and evolution of man in society, it does not deploy the axiomatics of imperialism for crucial textual functions.” Thomas, Ronald R. “Demons and Disease in Frankenstein.” In Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious, pp. 81-99. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Asserts that “Frankenstein is an extended, elaborate account of its author’s remarkable dream,” and contends that “[t]he gothic novel Mary Shelley called the ‘transcript’ of her dream may be read as a symptom—a text that expresses the desire for an adequate language to describe the mysterious forces that produced it.” Twitchell, James B. “Frankenstein and the Anatomy of Horror.” The Georgia Review 37, no. 1 (spring 1983): 41-78. Discusses Frankenstein and its popular culture legacy as part of an effort to define “horror” as a genre and discern the source of its audience appeal. Veeder, William. Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: The Fate of Androgyny. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, 277 p. Applies the concepts of “androgyny” and “bifurcation” to an examination of the presence of aggression in Shelley’s work, considering in particular its relation to gender identity. Walling, William A. Mary Shelley. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972, 173 p. Full-length study of Shelley’s life and works. Williams, John. “Translating Mary Shelley’s Valperga into English: Historical Romance, Biography or Gothic Fiction?” In European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 17601960, edited by Avril Horner, pp. 147-60. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Investigates the genre classification of Valperga by discussing its roots in the traditions of Gothic fiction, the historical novel, and the Victorian biography.

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Yousef, Nancy. “The Monster in a Dark Room: Frankenstein, Feminism, and Philosophy.” Modern Language Quarterly 63, no. 2 (June 2002): 197-226. Maintains that “Frankenstein contends with ideals of autonomy and self-sufficiency not only by narrating the unnatural fashioning of a creature in an act of solitary conception but, perhaps more important, by narrating the unnatural development of the creature after it has been abandoned to its solitary fate.” Zimmerman, Lee. “Frankenstein, Invisibility, and Nameless Dread.” American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture 60, no. 2 (summer 2003): 135-58. Contends that Victor Frankenstein’s claims to have lived a happy childhood with kind and indulgent parents are “idealized and defensive,” and asserts that “just as the monster suffers from parentlessness, so too does Victor, who is his double. The monster’s story of emotional abandonment is Victor’s story.”

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Shelley’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 20; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 3; Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 5; British Writers, Vol. 3; British Writers: The Classics, Vol. 2; British Writers Supplement, Vol. 3; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1789-1832; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 110, 116, 159, 178; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring Novels; Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion; Literary Movements for Students, Vols. 1, 2; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 14, 59, 103; Novels for Students, Vol. 1; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, Ed. 4; Science Fiction Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Something about the Author, Vol. 29; Twayne’s English Authors; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3; and World Literature Criticism.

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ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850 - 1894)

(Full name Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson) Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and playwright.

and his novels and stories are still considered seminal to the late nineteenth-century development of adventure, romance, and Gothic literature.

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n inventive prose stylist, Stevenson is the versatile author of classic works in several genres. Renowned for his adventure novels Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751 (1886), and for his outstanding work of supernatural horror The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Stevenson is additionally remembered as a travel writer and author of children’s verse. Just as his famous stories of piracy and horror have placed him at the forefront of writers of romances, his unusual life and personality have made him one of literature’s most intriguing individuals, to the extent that his biography has often overshadowed his literary reputation. Nevertheless, critics credit his continued esteem to the enduring appeal of his fiction, which features fast-paced action, intricate plots, and well-drawn characters. Stevenson is also admired for his fecund imagination and affinity for the psychology of children, as displayed most notably in his early “boys’ novels” and his poetry collection A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885). Although his present critical standing does not equal that accorded him by his contemporaries, his mass popularity continues,

Stevenson was born in Edinburgh. A sickly, fragile child, he suffered from severe respiratory ailments that frequently interrupted his schooling. Although he wanted to be a writer, his father insisted that Stevenson be trained in a more secure profession. Thus he attended Edinburgh University between 1866 and 1871, studying engineering, although the subject held little appeal for him. Later, in a compromise with his father, he took a law degree in 1875, but never practiced. Motivated by his love for adventure and his desire to seek out a climate agreeable to his health, Stevenson traveled extensively throughout his life. His journeys to France in the 1870s provided much of the material for his early travel books, An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). In 1876, while in France, Stevenson met Mrs. Fanny Osbourne, an American woman eleven years his senior. When Osbourne returned to California two years later to arrange a divorce, Stevenson followed. The newly married couple stayed in America for almost a year and then returned to Europe with Lloyd Osbourne, Fanny’s son. During the 1880s, despite his con-

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tinuing poor health, Stevenson wrote many of his best-known works, including Treasure Island. Originally begun as a game for his stepson, the novel was published serially in a children’s magazine under the title “The Sea-Cook” and became Stevenson’s first popular and critical success. The works that followed, including A Child’s Garden of Verses, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped, strengthened his growing reputation. In 1887, the Stevensons returned to the United States. From California, they sailed to Samoa, where they settled, Stevenson finding the climate congenial to his respiratory condition. His life on the island consisted of dabbling in local politics, managing his plantation, and writing several works, including collaborations with Lloyd Osbourne. He died unexpectedly at the age of forty-four from a cerebral hemorrhage.

MAJOR WORKS Stevenson’s short stories and novels for adults include the works most often cited by modern critics as his best: The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887), Island Nights’ Entertainments (1893), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Master of Ballantrae (1889), and Weir of Hermiston (1896). Unlike his earlier works, these novels and stories examine moral dilemmas presented in an atmosphere imbued with mystery and horror. Modern commentators note certain recurring themes, such as those of the divided self and the nature of evil. Several of these pieces partake directly in the Gothic tradition, featuring elements of the horrific and supernatural. Reputedly based upon a nightmare brought on by fever and narcotic drugs, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde centers on the ill-fated attempt of the scientist Jekyll to dissociate the good and evil components of his being for the purposes of isolating and eliminating the latter. Compounding a drug to achieve this goal, Jekyll unwittingly transforms himself into the villainous Hyde upon drinking it. The metamorphoses begin to occur randomly, and ultimately Jekyll kills himself to stop Hyde’s predations. The story has been variously interpreted as an allegory of the twofold nature of human beings, a moralizing tale about good and evil, and a satire concerned with the cultural forces that require individuals to suppress natural urges. Sometimes seen as a didactic Victorian cautionary tale about the dangers of abandoning oneself to base instincts, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde escapes sensationalism through its controlled narrative: gruesome events are described after the fact by

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different observers. Aside from this extended work, Stevenson also wrote several other pieces of short fiction that explore Gothic and supernatural subjects. Originally published in 1885 and posthumously collected in Stevenson’s The Story of a Lie, and Other Tales (1904), “The Body-Snatcher” is an account of supernatural retribution that befalls two medical students who rob graves and commit murder to obtain cadavers for dissection. One of Stevenson’s most celebrated short stories, “Markheim” was first published in 1885 and was later featured in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables. Exhibiting the influence of writings by Edgar Allan Poe as well that of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, “Markheim” is a tale of psychological horror centered on its eponymous protagonist as he commits an evidently premeditated murder and then encounters a stranger, a devilish doppelgänger, who seems to know everything about him, including his crime. The major themes in “Markheim” are similar to those of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, namely the struggle between good and evil—and freewill and predestination—within the human soul. In the story, this assay between the opposing forces of virtue and malevolence in the individual is expressed through the figure of the ambiguous double, the visitant, who most critics interpret to be the embodiment of Markheim’s conscience. Several more of Stevenson’s works of short fiction follow in the Scottish literary tradition established by Sir Walter Scott, with many drawing upon the Gothic conventions of the uncanny and inexplicable used by Scott in his romances. These include “Thrawn Janet,” a ghost story that exploits superstitious belief in witchcraft and demonic possession; “The Merry Men,” a hallucinatory sea tale concerned with madness and conscience; and “The Pavilion on the Links” and “Black Andie’s Tale of Tod Lapraik,” adventure stories with detailed historical backgrounds. Other stories, such as “The Bottle Imp” and “The Isle of Voices,” draw upon the folklore of the South Seas Islands. Collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments, “The Bottle Imp” recounts the tale of a Hawaiian man who, while visiting San Francisco, buys a bottle containing a magical but malevolent creature that grants its possessor wishes. He soon learns, however, that the imp is evil and seeks to relieve himself of its curse. Another of Stevenson’s most famous stories “The Beach of Falesá” (1892) is principally a work of literary realism concerned with British imperialism in the South Seas. The story’s characteristic eeriness, however, has prompted some to comment on its subtle use of

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CRITICAL RECEPTION After Stevenson’s untimely death, his family issued editions of his letters and approved an official biography designed to sustain popular perception of Stevenson as a brave, talented, and somewhat fey invalid whose life and works were above reproach. Although several critics warned readers against this eulogistic approach to the writer, the content of Stevenson criticism did not change significantly until 1915, when Frank Swinnerton (see Further Reading) published his R. L. Stevenson: A Critical Study. Considered by modern critics the most important challenger to the Stevenson myth, Swinnerton rejected the uncritical adoration of early readers and inspired a change in the critical approach to Stevenson, which had previously focused on personal rather than literary subjects. Although critics are still fascinated by his life and reputation, they now respond to his work more often with serious analysis and acclaim. In the contemporary period, Weir of Hermiston, the novel that Stevenson was at work upon when he died, has come to be regarded by many as his best effort for its forceful style and for its psychologically and morally complex characters. Meanwhile Treasure Island, Kidnapped and A Child’s Garden of Verses remain popular with young readers, and continue to be regarded as classics of children’s literature. Critical appreciation of Stevenson’s status as an influential Gothic writer has largely focused on his novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The work itself was immensely popular with contemporary readers, although early critics’ reactions varied widely. Almost all acknowledged Stevenson’s skill as a writer of suspense, though many questioned the work’s moral intent. Some viewed the story as a moral allegory on the nature of evil, while other commentators found Stevenson’s own remarks illuminating, particularly his statement that the transformation of Jekyll into Hyde was meant to show that desires, when ignored, become perverted. Since the middle of the twentieth century, critics have continued to forward moral, thematic, and psychological interpretations of Stevenson’s novella. Masao Miyoshi

has studied Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a complex work that explores the paradoxical “double nature” of man, a favorite theme of both eighteenthcentury Gothic and later romance authors who sought to depict the unresolved dualities inherent in all human beings. Joyce Carol Oates has assessed the novella as a characteristic work of Victorian Gothic, describing it as a moral parable, a cautionary tale concerned with the good and evil impulses that reside within us all. Matthew C. Brennan represents numerous contemporary critics who have taken a psychological and cultural approach to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by emphasizing its use of such Gothic tropes as unconscious repression and the urge toward self-destruction. Linda Dryden (see Further Reading) has returned to the contemporary Victorian reception of Stevenson’s novella, arguing that the story capitalized upon a peak in late nineteenth-century concern with such quintessentially Gothic themes as cultural degeneracy, criminal insanity, and atavism. Dryden has likewise linked the book’s popular success to its artistic rendering of the particularly urban and imperial anxieties associated with life in fin de siècle London. While scholarly interest in Stevenson’s novella endures, opinion remains divided over the overall value of the writer’s oeuvre. Despite some critical neglect of his writings, however, his children’s poetry, adventure stories, and adult romances persist in attracting readers who appreciate fine writing and exciting adventure, and his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde continues to be regarded as one of the outstanding examples of late-Victorian Gothic horror.

PRINCIPAL WORKS The Pentland Rising: A Page of History, 1666 (essay) 1866 An Inland Voyage (travel sketches) 1878 “Providence and the Guitar” (short story) 1878; published in the journal London “The Story of a Lie” (short story) 1879; published in the journal New Quarterly Magazine Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (travel sketches) 1879 Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (essays) 1881 Deacon Brodie; or, The Double Life: A Melodrama Founded on Facts [with William Ernest Henley] (play) 1882 Familiar Studies of Men and Books (essays) 1882

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Gothic conventions. For many of his remaining stories, including “Providence and the Guitar” (1878) and “The Story of a Lie” (1879), Stevenson drew on his own vagabond youth, wryly detailing the posing and fakery that can accompany a bohemian way of life in these pieces.

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*New Arabian Nights. 2 vols. (short stories) 1882

#St. lve’s: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England (novel) 1897

Treasure Island (novel) 1883 “The Body Snatcher” (short story) 1885; published in the journal Pall Mall Magazine

Poems Hitherto Unpublished. 2 vols. (poetry) 1916; also published as New Poems and Variant Readings, 1918

A Child’s Garden of Verses (poetry) 1885 Macaire [with Henley; first publication] (play) 1885 More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter [with Fanny Stevenson] (short stories) 1885

* † ‡

Prince Otto (novel) 1885 Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751 (novel) 1886 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (novella) 1886 Memories and Portraits (essays) 1887 †The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (short stories) 1887 Underwoods (poetry) 1887

#

This collection contains the short story “The Pavilion on the Links.” This collection contains the short stories “Markheim,” “The Merry Men,” and “Thrawn Janet.” This collection contains the short stories “The Bottle Imp,” “Black Andie’s Tale of Tod Lapraik,” and “The Isle of Voices.” This work was completed by A. T. Quiller-Couch.

PRIMARY SOURCES ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (STORY DATE FEBRUARY-MARCH 1891)

The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (novel) 1888

SOURCE: Stevenson, Robert Louis. “The Bottle Imp.” In Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, selected by Marvin Kaye, pp. 46-70. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1985.

The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale (novel) 1889

The following excerpt is from a story written around 1889 and first published in the New York Herald from February to March, 1891.

The Wrong Box [with Lloyd Osbourne] (novel) 1889

Now there was an old brutal Haole drinking with him, one that had been a boatswain of a whaler—a runaway, a digger in gold mines, a convict in prisons. He had a low mind and a foul mouth; he loved to drink and to see others drunken; and he pressed the glass upon Keawe. Soon there was no more money in the company.

Admiral Guinea [with Henley] (play) 1890 Ballads (poetry) 1890 Beau Austin [with Henley] (play) 1890 Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays (essays) 1892 “The Beach of Falesá” (short story) 1892; published in the journal Illustrated London News The Wrecker [with Osbourne] (novel) 1892 Catriona, a Sequel to “Kidnapped”: Being Memoirs of the Further Adventures of David Balfour at Home and Abroad (novel) 1893; also published as David Balfour: Being Memoirs of His Adventures at Home and Abroad, 1893 ‡Island Nights’ Entertainments (short stories) 1893 The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette [with Osbourne] (novel) 1894 The Works of R. L. Stevenson. 28 vols. (novels, unfinished novels, short stones, travel sketches, poetry, essays, drama, and letters) 1894-98 Weir of Hermiston (unfinished novel) 1896

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“Here, you!” says the boatswain, “you are rich, you have been always saying. You have a bottle or some foolishness.” “Yes,” says Keawe, “I am rich; I will go back and get some money from my wife, who keeps it.” “That’s a bad idea, mate,” said the boatswain. “Never you trust a petticoat with dollars. They’re all as false as water; you keep an eye on her.” Now this word struck in Keawe’s mind; for he was muddled with what he had been drinking. “I should not wonder but she was false, indeed,” thought he. “Why else should she be so cast down at my release? But I will show her I am not the man to be fooled. I will catch her in the act.” Accordingly, when they were back in town, Keawe bade the boatswain wait for him at the corner by the old calaboose, and went forward up

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There was Kokua on the floor, the lamp at her side; before her was a milk-white bottle, with a round belly and a long neck; and as she viewed it, Kokua wrung her hands. A long time Keawe stood and looked in the doorway. At first he was struck stupid; and then fear fell upon him that the bargain had been made amiss, and the bottle had come back to him as it came at San Francisco; and at that his knees were loosened, and the fumes of the wine departed from his head like mists off a river in the morning. And then he had another thought; and it was a strange one, that made his cheeks to burn. “I must make sure of this,” thought he. So he closed the door, and went softly round the corner again, and then came noisily in, as though he were but now returned. And, lo! by the time he opened the front door no bottle was to be seen; and Kokua sat in a chair and started up like one awakened out of sleep. “I have been drinking all day and making merry,” said Keawe. “I have been with good companions, and now I only came back for money, and return to drink and carouse with them again.” Both his face and voice were as stern as judgment, but Kokua was too troubled to observe. “You do well to use your own, my husband,” said she, and her words trembled. “Oh, I do well in all things,” said Keawe, and he went straight to the chest and took out money. But he looked besides in the corner where they kept the bottle, and there was no bottle there. At that the chest heaved upon the floor like a sea-billow, and the house spun about him like a wreath of smoke, for he saw she was lost now, and there was no escape. “It is what I feared,” he thought. “It is she who has bought it.” And then he came to himself a little and rose up; but the sweat streamed on his face as thick as the rain and as cold as the well-water. “Kokua,” said he, “I said to you to-day what ill became me. Now I return to house with my jolly companions,” and at that he laughed a little quietly. “I will take more pleasure in the cup if you forgive me.” She clasped his knees in a moment, she kissed his knees with flowing tears.

“Oh,” she cried, “I ask but a kind word!” “Let us never one think hardly of the other,” said Keawe, and was gone out of the house. Now, the money that Keawe had taken was only some of that store of centime pieces they had laid in at their arrival. It was very sure he had no mind to be drinking. His wife had given her soul for him, now he must give his for hers; no other thought was in the world with him. At the corner, by the old calaboose, there was the boatswain waiting. “My wife has the bottle,” said Keawe, “and, unless you help me to recover it, there can be no more money and no more liquor to-night.” “You do not mean to say you are serious about that bottle?” cried the boatswain. “There is the lamp,” said Keawe. “Do I look as if I was jesting?” “That is so,” said the boatswain. “You look as serious as a ghost.” “Well, then,” said Keawe, “here are two centimes; you just go to my wife in the house, and offer her these for the bottle, which (if I am not much mistaken) she will give you instantly. Bring it to me here, and I will buy it back from you for one; for that is the law with this bottle, that it still must be sold for a less sum. But whatever you do, never breathe a word to her that you have come from me.” “Mate, I wonder are you making a fool of me?” asked the boatswain. “It will do you no harm if I am,” returned Keawe. “That is so, mate,” said the boatswain. “And if you doubt me,” added Keawe, “you can try. As soon as you are clear of the house, wish to have your pocket full of money, or a bottle of the best rum, or what you please, and you will see the virtue of the thing.” “Very well, Kanaka,” says the boatswain. “I will try; but if you are having your fun out of me, I will take my fun out of you with a belaying-pin.” So the whaler-man went off up the avenue; and Keawe stood and waited. It was near the same spot where Kokua had waited the night before; but Keawe was more resolved, and never faltered in his purpose; only his soul was bitter with despair. It seemed a long time he had to wait before he heard a voice singing in the darkness of the avenue. He knew the voice to be the boatswain’s; but it was strange how drunken it appeared upon a sudden.

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the avenue alone to the door of his house. The night had come again; there was a light within, but never a sound; and Keawe crept about the corner, opened the back door softly, and looked in.

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Next the man himself came stumbling into the light of the lamp. He had the devil’s bottle buttoned in his coat; another bottle was in his hand; and even as he came in view he raised it to his mouth and drank. “You have it,” said Keawe. “I see that.” “Hands off!” cried the boatswain, jumping back. “Take a step near me, and I’ll smash your mouth. You thought you could make a catspaw of me, did you?” “What do you mean?” cried Keawe. “Mean?” cried the boatswain. “This is a pretty good bottle, this is; that’s what I mean. How I got it for two centimes I can’t make out; but I am sure you shan’t have it for one.” “You mean you won’t sell?” gasped Keawe. “No, sir,” cried the boatswain. “But I’ll give you a drink of the rum, if you like.” “I tell you,” said Keawe, “the man who has that bottle goes to hell.” “I reckon I’m going anyway,” returned the sailor; “and this bottle’s the best thing to go with I’ve struck yet. No, sir!” he cried again, “this is my bottle now, and you can go and fish for another.” “Can this be true?” Keawe cried. “For your own sake, I beseech you, sell it me!” “I don’t value any of your talk,” replied the boatswain. “You thought I was a flat, now you see I’m not; and there’s an end. If you won’t have a swallow of the rum, I’ll have one myself. Here’s your health, and goodnight to you!” So off he went down the avenue towards town, and there goes the bottle out of the story. But Keawe ran to Kokua light as the wind; and great was their joy that night; and great, since then, has been the peace of all their days in the Bright House.

TITLE COMMENTARY The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde THE TIMES, LONDON (REVIEW DATE 25 JANUARY 1886) SOURCE: A review of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson. The Times, London, no. 31665 (25 January 1886): 13. In the following laudatory review of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the critic praises Steven-

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son’s handling of his supernatural subject matter, comparing his work favorably with Edgar Allan Poe’s.

Nothing Mr. Stevenson has written as yet has so strongly impressed us with the versatility of his very original genius as [The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,] this sparsely-printed little shilling volume. From the business point of view we can only marvel in these practical days at the lavish waste of admirable material, and what strikes us as a disproportionate expenditure of brain-power, in relation to the tangible results. Of two things, one. Either the story was a flash of intuitive psychological research, dashed off in a burst of inspiration; or else it is the product of the most elaborate forethought, fitting together all the parts of an intricate and inscrutable puzzle. The proof is, that every connoisseur who reads the story once must certainly read it twice. He will read it the first time, passing from surprise to surprise, in a curiosity that keeps growing, because it is never satisfied. For the life of us, we cannot make out how such and such an incident can possibly be explained on grounds that are intelligible or in any way plausible. Yet all the time the seriousness of the tone assures us that explanations are forthcoming. In our impatience we are hurried towards the denouement, which accounts for everything upon strictly scientific grounds, though the science be the science of problematical futurity. Then, having drawn a sigh of relief at having found even a fantastically speculative issue from our embarrassments, we begin reflectively to call to mind how systematically the writer has been working towards it. Never for a moment, in the most startling situations, has he lost his grasp of the grand ground-facts of a wonderful and supernatural problem. Each apparently incredible or insignificant detail has been thoughtfully subordinated to his purpose. And if we say, after all, on a calm retrospect, that the strange case is absurdly and insanely improbable, Mr. Stevenson might answer in the words of Hamlet, that there are more things in heaven and in earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. For we are still groping by doubtful lights on the dim limits of boundless investigation; and it is always possible that we may be on the brink of a new revelation as to the unforeseen resources of the medical art. And, at all events, the answer should suffice for the purposes of Mr. Stevenson’s sensational tour d’esprit. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll is sensational enough in all conscience, and yet we do not promise it the wide popularity of Called Back. The brochure that brought fame and profit to the late Mr. Fargus was pitched in a more commonplace

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Nor is it the mere charm of the story, strange as it is, which fascinates and thrills us. Mr. Stevenson is known for a master of style, and never has he shown his resources more remarkably than on this occasion. We do not mean that the book is written in excellent English—that must be a matter of course; but he has weighed his words and turned his sentences so as to sustain and excite throughout the sense of mystery and of horror. The mero artful use of an “it” for a “he” may go far in that respect, and Mr. Stevenson has carefully chosen his language and missed no op-

ABOUT THE AUTHOR JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS ON DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

At last I have read Dr Jekyll. It makes me wonder whether a man has the right so to scrutinise “the abysmal deeps of personality”. It is indeed a dreadful book, most dreadful because of a certain moral callousness, a want of sympathy, a shutting out of hope. . . . As a piece of literary work, this seems to me the finest you have done. . . . But it has left such a deeply painful impression on my heart that I do not know how I am ever to turn to it again. SOURCE: Symonds, John Addington. “Excerpt from a letter dated 3 March 1886.” Quoted in Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Ernest Mehew, p. 310. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1886.

portunity. And if his style is good, his motive is better, and shows a higher order of genius. Slight as is the story, and supremely sensational, we remember nothing better since George Eliot’s “Romela” than this delineation of a feeble but kindly nature steadily and inevitably succumbing to the sinister influences of besetting weaknesses. With no formal preaching and without a touch of Pharisaism, he works out the essential power of Evil, which, with its malignant patience and unwearying perseverance, gains ground with each casual yielding to temptation, till the once wellmeaning man may actually become a fiend, or at least wear the reflection of the fiend’s image. But we have said enough to show our opinion of the book, which should be read as a finished study in the art of fantastic literature.

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key, and consequently appealed to more vulgar circles. But, for ourselves, we should many times sooner have the credit of Dr. Jekyll, which appeals irresistibly to the most cultivated minds, and must be appreciated by the most competent critics. Naturally, we compare it with the sombre masterpieces of Poe, and we may say at once that Mr. Stevenson has gone far deeper. Poe embroidered richly in the gloomy grandeur of his imagination upon themes that were but too material, and not very novel—on the sinister destiny overshadowing a doomed family, on a living and breathing man kept prisoner in a coffin or vault, on the wild whirling of a human waif in the boiling eddies of the Maelstrom—while Mr. Stevenson evolves the ideas of his story from the world that is unseen, enveloping everything in weird mystery, till at last it pleases him to give us the password. We are not going to tell his strange story, though we might well do so, and only excite the curiosity of our readers. We shall only say that we are shown the shrewdest of lawyers hopelessly puzzled by the inexplicable conduct of a familiar friend. All the antecedents of a life of virtue and honour seem to be belied by the discreditable intimacy that has been formed with one of the most callous and atrocious of criminals. A crime committed under the eyes of a witness goes unavenged, though the notorious criminal has been identified, for he disappears as absolutely as if the earth had swallowed him. He reappears in due time where we should least expect to see him, and for some miserable days he leads a charmed life, while he excites the superstitious terrors of all about him. Indeed, the strongest nerves are shaken by stress of sinister circumstances, as well they may be, for the worthy Dr. Jekyll—the benevolent physician— has likewise vanished amid events that are enveloped in impalpable mysteries; nor can any one surmise what has become of him. So with overwrought feelings and conflicting anticipations we are brought to the end, where all is accounted for, more or less credibly.

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STEVENSON Spencer Tracy as Dr. Jekyll in the 1941 film adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

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beings: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde.) A character out of prose fiction, Jekyll-Hyde seems nonetheless autogenetic in the way that vampires and werewolves and (more benignly) fairies seem autogenetic: surely he has always existed in the collective imagination, or, like Jack the Ripper, in actual history? (As “Dracula” is both the specific creation of the novelist Bram Stoker and a nightmare figure out of middle European history.) It is ironic that, in being so effaced, Robert Louis Stevenson has become immortalized by way of his private fantasy—which came to him, by his own testimony, unbidden, in a dream.

In the following essay, Oates discusses The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and some of its literary precedents and descendents within the framework of Victorian morality.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) will strike contemporary readers as a characteristically Victorian moral parable, not nearly so sensational (nor so piously lurid) as Stoker’s Dracula; in the tradition, perhaps, of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which a horrific tale is conscientiously subordinated to the author’s didactic intention. Though melodramatic in conception it is not melodramatic in execution since virtually all its scenes are narrated and summarized after the fact. There is no ironic ambiguity, no Wildean subtlety, in the doomed Dr. Jekyll’s confession: he presents himself to the reader as a congenital “double dealer” who has nonetheless “an almost morbid sense of shame” and who, in typically Victorian middle-class fashion, must act to dissociate “himself” (i.e., his reputation as a highly regarded physician) from his baser instincts. He can no longer bear to suppress them and it is impossible to eradicate them. His discovery that “Man is not truly one, but two” is seen to be a scientific fact, not a cause for despair. (And, in time, it may be revealed that man is “a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens”—which is to say that the ego contains multitudes: multiple personalities inhabit us all. It cannot be incidental that Robert Louis Stevenson was himself a man enamoured of consciously playing roles and assuming personae: his friend Arthur Symons said of him that he was “never really himself except when he was in some fantastic disguise.”)

Like such mythopoetic figures as Frankenstein, Dracula, and, even, Alice (“in Wonderland”), Dr.Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde has become, in the century following the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novella, what might be called an autonomous creation. That is, people who have never read the novella—people who do not in fact “read” at all—know by way of popular culture who Jekyll-Hyde is. (Though they are apt to speak of him, not altogether accurately, as two disparate

Thus Dr. Jekyll’s uncivilized self, to which he gives the symbolic name Hyde, is at once the consequence of a scientific experiment (as the creation of Frankenstein’s monster was a scientific experiment) and a shameless indulgence of appetites that cannot be assimilated into the propriety of everyday Victorian life. There is a sense in which Hyde, for all his monstrosity, is but an addiction like alcohol, nicotine, drugs: “The moment I choose,” Dr. Jekyll says, “I can be rid of

JOYCE CAROL OATES (ESSAY DATE 1990) SOURCE: Oates, Joyce Carol. “Foreword.” In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, pp. ix-xviii. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

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deformity “without any nameable malformation.” But when Jekyll looks in the mirror he is conscious of no repugnance, “rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human.” When Jekyll returns to himself after having been Hyde he is plunged into wonder rather than remorse at his “vicarious depravity.” The creature summoned out of his soul and sent forth to do his pleasure is a being “inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centered on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone.” Yet Hyde is safely other—“It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty.”

Dr. Jekyll’s initial experience, however, approaches ecstasy as if he were, indeed, discovering the Kingdom of God that lies within. The magic drug causes nausea and a grinding in the bones and a “horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death.” Then:

Oscar Wilde’s equally didactic but far more suggestive and poetic The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) makes the disturbing point that Dorian Gray, the unblemished paragon of evil, “is the type of which the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found.” (Just as Wilde’s Lord Henry defends insincerity “as a method by which we can multiply our personalities.”) By contrast Jekyll’s Hyde is a very nearly Bosch-like creature, proclaiming his wickedness to the naked eye as if, in Utterson’s words, he is a “troglodyte . . . the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent.” One is reminded of nineteenth-century theories of criminology advanced by C. S. Lombroso and Henry Maudsley, among others, who argued that outward physical defects and deformities are the visible signs of inward and invisible faults: the criminal is a type that can be easily identified by experts. Dr. Jekyll is the more reprehensible in his infatuation with Hyde in that, as a well-trained physician, he should have recognized at once the telltale symptoms of mental and moral degeneracy in his alter ego’s very face.

I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted in me like wine.

Unlike Frankenstein’s monster, who is nearly twice the size of an average man, Jekyll’s monster is dwarfed: “less robust and less developed” than the good self since Jekyll’s rigorouly suppressed life has been the consequence of unrelenting “effort, virtue and control.” (Stevenson’s anatomy of the human psyche is as grim as Freud’s—virtually all a “good” man’s waking energies are required in beating back and denying the “badness” in him!) That Hyde’s frenzied pleasures are even in part specifically sexual is never confirmed, given the Victorian cast of the narrative itself, but, to extrapolate from an incident recounted by an eyewitness, one is led to suspect they are: Hyde is observed running down a ten-year-old girl in the street and calmly trampling over her body. Much is made subsequently of the girl’s “screaming”; and of the fact that money is paid to her family as recompense for her violation. Viewed from without Hyde is detestable in the abstract: “I never saw a man I so disliked,” Jekyll’s friend Enfield says, “and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere. . . .” Another witness testifies to his mysteriously intangible

By degrees, like any addict, Jekyll surrenders his autonomy. His ego ceases being “I” and splits into two distinct and eventually warring selves, which share memory as they share a common body. Only after Hyde commits murder does Jekyll make the effort to regain control; but by this time, of course, it is too late. What had been “Jekyll”— that precarious cuticle of a self, that field of tensions in perpetual opposition to desire—has irrevocably split. It is significant that the narrator of Jekyll’s confession speaks of both Jekyll and Hyde as if from the outside. And with a passionate eloquence otherwise absent from Stevenson’s prose: The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it

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him.” Hyde must be hidden not simply because he is wicked but because Dr. Jekyll is a willfully good man—an example to others, like the muchadmired lawyer Mr. Utterson who is “lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow [improbably?] lovable.” Had the Victorian ideal been less hypocritically ideal or had Dr. Jekyll been content with a less perfect public reputation his tragedy would not have occurred. (As Wilde’s Basil Hallward says in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “We in our madness have separated the two [body and soul] and have invented a realism that is vulgar, and an ideality that is void.” The key term here is surely “madness.”)

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rian parable is unique in that the protagonist initiates his tragedy of doubleness out of a fully lucid sensibility—one might say a scientific sensibility. Dr. Jekyll knows what he is doing, and why he is doing it, though he cannot, of course, know how it will turn out. What is unquestioned throughout the narrative, by either Jekyll or his circle of friends, is mankind’s fallen nature: sin is original, and irremediable. For Hyde, though hidden, will not remain so. And when Jekyll finally destroys him he must destroy Jekyll too.

was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.

“Think of it,” Jekyll had gloated at the start, “—I did not even exist!” And the purely metaphorical becomes literally true. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, though stimulated by a dream, is not without its literary antecedents: among them Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), in which, paradoxically, the “evil” self is the narrator and the “good” self, or conscience, the double; and Charles Dickens’s uncompleted The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), in which the Choirmaster Jack Jasper, an opium addict, oscillates between “good” and “evil” impulses in his personality with an anguish so convincingly calibrated as to suggest that, had Dickens lived to complete the novel, it would have been one of his masterpieces—and would have made The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde redundant. Cautionary tales of malevolent, often diabolical doubles abound in folklore and oral tradition, and in Plato’s Symposium it was whimsically suggested that each human being has a double to whom he was once physically attached—a bond of Eros that constituted in fact a third, and higher, sex in which male and female were conjoined. The visionary starkness of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde anticipates that of Freud in such late melancholy meditations as Civilization and Its Discontents (1929-30): there is a split in man’s psyche between ego and instinct, between civilization and “nature,” and the split can never be healed. Freud saw ethics as a reluctant concession of the individual to the group, veneer of a sort overlaid upon an unregenerate primordial self. The various stratagems of culture—including, not incidentally, the “sublimation” of raw aggression by way of art and science—are ultimately powerless to contain the discontent, which must erupt at certain periodic times, on a collective scale, as war. Stevenson’s quintessentially Victo-

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MATTHEW C. BRENNAN (ESSAY DATE 1997) SOURCE: Brennan, Matthew C. “Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” In The Gothic Psyche: Disintegration and Growth in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, pp. 97-112. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1997. In the following essay, Brennan surveys critical reaction to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and offers a psychological and cultural approach to the novella.

Published in 1886—a decade before Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams—Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has long been read as a stunning example of the dual nature of the human personality. Frequently Stevenson’s tale gets grouped with the literature of the double, which includes late-Victorian, earlymodern works such as Joseph Conrad’s “Secret Sharer” (1910) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) as well as earlier Gothic fiction—James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1845). Stevenson himself wrote that he spent years searching for a story that could embody his “strong sense of man’s double being.”1 A few commentators, such as Jeremy Hawthorn and Morton Prince, have narrowly viewed the physical splitting of Henry Jekyll into Edward Hyde as a literal case of multiple personality. But this interpretation stresses not the universality of the story but rather—given the rarity of such a mental disorder—the incredible unlikelihood that one of your friendly neighbors just might be Jack the Ripper. A more fitting and imaginative psychological view is Carl Jung’s. He identifies Jekyll’s transformation as a case of “dissociation,” a neurotic splitting in the psyche that threatened many repressed Victorians and that results from an unresolved projection of the shadow, a term Jung uses for unconscious elements of the personality that are either unpleasant or undeveloped.2 For while Stevenson could not have been fully aware of the implica-

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Significantly, like other novelists in the Gothic tradition who paid close attention to the workings of their unconscious and used this intuitive knowledge to construct their plots, Stevenson drew heavily on his dream life. Not surprisingly, then, many of his attitudes toward his own “double being” anticipate Jungian ideas about the unconscious. In the essay “A Chapter on Dreams” (Across the Plains, 1892), Stevenson speaks of his “double life” as a college student, when he had dreams not only “more vivid” “than any printed book,” but a “dream life” that “he had no means of proving to be false.” Indeed, he goes so far as to maintain that his “Brownies”— who populate and personify his unconscious— “do one-half” of his creative work while he sleeps. In fact, since his “conscience ego” [sic] is “bemired up to the ears in actuality,” he may be “no storyteller at all.” If that is true, Stevenson concludes, “the whole of my published fiction” is “the singlehanded product of some Brownie, . . . some unseen collaborator.” The prime example of Stevenson’s literary appropriation of dreams is of course Dr. Jekyll. Just as Horace Walpole and Mary Shelley found inspiration for their Gothic novels in their own nightmares and reveries, so too did Stevenson finally find his story of humanity’s dual nature in his own unconscious. After two days of racking his brains for a plot, he dreamed the essence of his novel, his so-called “Gothic gnome”: first, “the scene at the window” when Richard Enfield and Gabriel Utterson pass by Jekyll’s house and speak with him through an open window until they glimpse the start of a transformation; and next, “a scene afterwards split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime” (the murder of Sir Danvers Carew), takes “the powder” and undergoes “the change in the presence of his pursuers” (who in the novel are reduced to Dr. Hastie Lanyon, the sole witness of Jekyll’s transformation).3 Given the importance Stevenson places on dreams, the unconscious, and “man’s double being,” Jung’s psychology proves a useful lens

FROM THE AUTHOR STEVENSON ON HIS DEDICATION IN DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

Dearest Katharine, Here, on a very little book and accompanied with your lame verses, I have put your name. Our kindness is now getting well on in years; it must be nearly of age; and it gets more valuable to me with every time I see you. It is not possible to express any sentiment, and it is not necessary to try at least between us. You know very well that I love you dearly, and that I always will. I only wish the verses were better, but at least you like the story; and it is sent to you by the one that loves you—Jekyll and not Hyde. R.L.S. SOURCE: Stevenson, Robert Louis. An excerpt from a letter to Katharine de Mattos: 1 January 1886. In Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Ernest Mehew, p. 297. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1886.

through which to interpret the novel. Because Jung’s theory of individuation and dream analysis outlines a process of psychic growth, it illuminates how the Gothic psyche becomes decentered and ultimately self-disintegrates. As in Dr. Jekyll, the Gothic generally shows the importance of recognizing and integrating the unknown inner selves of the psyche; specifically, it dramatizes the psychological damage that results when the conscious personality denies its shadow, just as Jekyll denies his dark side, Hyde. The cautionary tale of Dr. Jekyll, then, clearly demonstrates the reader’s need to assimilate the shadow into consciousness, and not only through its disastrous conclusion, in which Stevenson’s hero destroys himself—and his doubled shadow—by rejecting it as other. The novel also manifests the need in other ways: through Jekyll’s discovery of man’s dual nature; through Jekyll’s subsequent repression and deterioration and Hyde’s simultaneous growth; and finally, through Hastie Lanyon’s and Gabriel Utterson’s contrasting responses to Jekyll’s Hyde. Like Walton in Frankenstein, Utterson elicits the identification of the Gothic reader, who attends like Utterson to the cautionary tales of Jekyll

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tions for modern psychology that his novel uncannily reveals, like Jung he clearly understood that the transformation of the scientist into a dwarfish, repulsive shadow is really metaphorical. It is metaphorical of the relationship between the unconscious and conscious sides of the psyche; accordingly, it depicts what happens to the psyche when it fails to achieve balance or—to use Jung’s term—individuation and instead risks the open mental boundaries and self-fragmentation of schizophrenia.

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and Lanyon and learns of the urgent need to understand what nightmares teach about “man’s double being.”

Jekyll’s “Double Being” Despite his eventual psychic disintegration, Henry Jekyll begins life auspiciously both professionally and personally; moreover, by scientifically pursuing the nature of his own double consciousness, he seems to entwine these often opposed sides of personality in a way that might have led to individuation, much as did Jung’s own exploration of the unconscious, both his patients’ and his own. Like Victor Frankenstein—a scientist whose work and character resemble Henry’s—Dr. Jekyll was blessed by both nature and nurture: “I was born,” he writes in his “Full Statement of the Case,” in the 1800s “to a large fortune, endowed besides with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future” (69). Like Victor’s, Henry’s ambition, training, and personal habits coincide to produce a major scientific discovery that extends the boundaries of human knowledge: whereas Frankenstein uncovers the origins of generation, thus bridging the boundary of life and death, Jekyll discovers the unconscious. Personally, Jekyll commits himself to duplicity, hiding his desires for pleasure—what he innocuously calls an “impatient gaiety” (69)—while adopting a persona crafted to advance him professionally, a head held high and “a more than commonly grave countenance” (69). These traits—arrogant ambition, moral righteousness, and awareness of his socially unacceptable desires— couple with his interest in transcendental medicine to help him find what no other scientist had seen: “that man is not truly one, but truly two”; furthermore, Jekyll recognizes that “of the two natures that contended in the field of [his] consciousness,” he “could rightly be said to be either” one—the reputable, accomplished scientist or the profane, sensual primitive—“only because,” he concludes, “I was radically both” (70). Jekyll’s ability to perceive and admit his duplicity, his public persona and private shadow, makes him unusually self-aware for a Victorian. He believes he “was in no sense a hypocrite” (70), and certainly before his experiment got out of hand he could be clearly distinguished from the typically repressed yet dutiful gentleman. Take, for instance, Enfield—“the well-known man about town” (6). When he encounters Hyde while walk-

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ing home at 3:00 A.M., he loathes him “at first sight,” comparing him to Satan. He reacts so negatively to Hyde partly because he has apparently just spent the night in taverns and brothels—a common, unacknowledged pastime of proper gentlemen, such as John Fowles’s Charles Smithson in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, who, though engaged to Ernestina Freeman, passes a wild night first getting drunk at his men’s club and then picking up a prostitute. Consequently, to keep such carousing hidden in its place, the typical Victorian home served not only as a temple of domestic virtues, as Walter Houghton observes, but also, Irving Saposnik notes, as a screen “from the all-seeing eye of Mrs. Grundy.” Caught away from home, the morally indignant Enfield covers up the exposure of his recent adventures by collaring Hyde after he tramples a little girl (8). And though Victorians like Enfield shrank from admitting their own duality, they faced duality daily in their city: one mid-century minister speaks of London as “at once the emporium of crime and the palladium of Christianity. . . . It is here that [virtue and vice] join issue in the most deadly proximity.”4 Jekyll, then, proves extraordinarily courageous in facing his shadow. Like Jung, who explains in Memories, Dreams, Reflections that his reading of Faust awakened in him “the problem of opposites, of good and evil, of mind and matter, of light and darkness,” Jekyll’s experiments in transcendental medicine and reflections on his own dual nature evoke awareness of what Jung describes as “the dark side of his being, his sinister shadow,” and his “own inner contradictions.” “For most people,” Joseph L. Henderson explains, “the dark or negative side of the personality remains unconscious,”5 and to recognize it, Jung emphasizes in Aion, requires “considerable moral effort.”6 Unlike Jekyll, Enfield and Lanyon—two representative male Victorians—cannot bear to face their shadows, which they project onto Hyde. But facing the shadow is the first crucial step toward psychic integration. In Jungian psychology, the first stage of the individuation process involves the experience of the shadow, whose sex usually matches that of the ego personality. The shadow is either symbolized by an inward figure, as in a Gothic dream like Stevenson’s, or projected onto an actual figure met in the phenomenal world (Psychology and Religion, C.W. 11:75-79). Much as Mary Shelley represents the relations between Victor and his monster, Stevenson depicts Jekyll’s experience with Hyde as both an inward image and an

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As Jekyll’s shadow, Hyde represents more than just a buried capacity for evil; he manifests various weaknesses that Jekyll needs to recognize and correct as well as some positive qualities he has let atrophy. During an early transformation, Jekyll peers into a mirror—a common symbol of identity—and sees the smaller, younger, darker side of himself; though Hyde differs from Jekyll in appearance, when beholding the shadow Jekyll does not lose his identity. Rather, he deepens it, acknowledging that the “ugly idol in the glass” also lays claim to his psyche: “This, too,” Jekyll confesses, “was myself” (73). Though Jekyll labels Hyde “pure evil,” he recognizes that all humans “are commingled out of good and evil” (74), just as Jung writes that there is no doubt that humanity is “on the whole less good than” it “imagines” itself “or wants to be” (C.W. 11:76). However, at first, Hyde’s worst sins amount merely to what Jekyll had been repressing: the desire for “gaiety.” Jekyll recounts how while young he indulged “a certain gaiety of disposition,” then later “concealed [his] pleasures” (69). Hyde initially indulges in “pleasures” that are simply “undignified” (76), perhaps less blamable than Enfield’s unnamed nocturnal peccadilloes. In any case, this unleashed desire for pleasure compensates for “the dryness” and “self-denying toils” of the scientist’s “life of study” (75, 82), and Hyde’s self-centered intentions balance Jekyll’s reputation as a self-sacrificing do-gooder (10). Besides these negative aspects, Hyde, like Frankenstein’s monster, also contains positive qualities—either undeveloped or lost—that Jekyll

needs to assimilate to balance his personality. For one thing, when transformed as Hyde, Jekyll overcomes the “renunciation” and “restrictions of natural life” (82) demanded by his profession. He feels “natural” and “human” as Hyde (73), not only “younger, lighter” and “happier in body” (72) but also “livelier” in “spirit” (73). Hyde reconnects Jekyll to his primitive, sensual instincts and thus elicits eyewitness comparisons to “apes” (27, 88) and “a monkey” (52)—images of humanity’s all but forgotten primordial roots that circulating ideas of Darwinian atavism surely brought to Stevenson’s attention. As Jung puts it in Psychology and Religion, “We carry our past with us,” namely “the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions.” So if the shadow is inferior, it is not “obviously evil,” for it includes primitive, childish traits that can “vitalize” an overly rational, conscious personality (C.W. 11:76-78).7 Accordingly, Jekyll needs to integrate Hyde into consciousness because what he represents compensates for Jekyll’s overdeveloped scientific and moral persona. Jekyll grounds this side of himself on logos, which Jung describes as the male principle, comprising discrimination, cognition, detachment, and knowledge (C.W. 9.ii:14, 16; 13:41). Conversely, Jekyll’s personality excludes eros, the feminine principle that encompasses human connectedness and relatedness. This imbalance inflates his ego and creates his vulnerability to divided consciousness, for while the noninflated ego retains the potential to align itself with the Self, the inflated ego appropriates the Self. According to Edward F. Edinger, inflation of the ego becomes apparent when someone “is transcending proper human limits.” Clearly Jekyll’s transcendental medicine, with its “high views,” “exacting . . . aspirations” (69), and boundarybreaking experiments that no scientist can duplicate, feeds his inflation, just as Frankenstein’s scientific ambitions to cross the boundary of life and death reveal his godlike inflation. Other symptoms of inflation that fit Jekyll are “too much arrogance,” too much “altruism,” and—especially in the guise of Hyde—too much selfishness.8 Hyde, then, presents Jekyll with a chance to adjust his attitude toward the parts of his psyche that he has been neglecting: his senses, his instincts, and his natural desires. Several critics have argued that what Jekyll represses and then lets out through Hyde is the desire for pleasure, sex in particular. Stevenson, however, insisted that “Hyde was not . . . a mere voluptuary” and that even if he were, “there is no harm in a voluptuary.” Moreover, “the harm was

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outward projection. On the one hand, Hyde is a “familiar” Jekyll “called out of [his] own soul” (76), “a brute that slept within” his nightmarish unconscious (86). On the other hand, he is a projection (74, 78) whose external existence as a real person is verified legally in Jekyll’s will and socially by numerous people—the bank and the police as well as Jekyll’s servants and even his friends and acquaintances such as Enfield, Lanyon, and Utterson. As either projection or dream image, Hyde embodies Jekyll’s shadow—unpleasant, inferior traits, undeveloped or stunted functions, and contents of the personal unconscious that Jekyll has hidden and repressed; Hyde is the alter ego Jekyll had submerged in the unconscious while advancing his public career. However, in actively recognizing and retrieving his shadow from decades of repression, Jekyll stands on the threshold of overcoming his inferiority by assimilating Hyde into consciousness and thereby centering his imbalanced Self.

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in Jekyll”—not Hyde—and it was “because he was a hypocrite—not because he was fond of women.” The almost complete absence of women in the novel does suggest that Jekyll has repressed his sexuality, even if Stevenson never indicates it.9 More important, though, the lack of women in the novel underscores Jekyll’s underdeveloped eros. While he manages to achieve consciousness of his shadow problem, he never so much as glimpses his deeper psychological problem—an undeveloped anima. In this way, Henry is like the Gothic protagonist Victor Frankenstein, who also distorts his rational, scientific faculties to the obsessive point of almost completely withdrawing from society and, as a result, allows his unresolved shadow problem with the Monster to deepen into an anima complex involving his dead mother, Caroline, the mother-substitute Justine, and his “more than sister”/fiancée, Elizabeth. Barbara Hannah remarks on “the absence of any important feminine figures” in Dr. Jekyll, but perhaps she goes too far in asserting that the only anima figure is “Hyde’s purely negative landlady.”1 0 In fact, three females appear in Stevenson’s narrative, and each signals Jekyll’s detachment from the feminine principle. The little girl that Hyde tramples is running to get a doctor when their paths abruptly and violently intersect (8), a suggestion that Jekyll’ s anima is not only unripe but also in dire need of nurturing and healing. Later we learn of the old woman who lives in Hyde’s Soho apartment building; her distaste for Hyde as well as her advanced age and infertility imply that Jekyll’s anima is hopelessly barren (2930). Though seemingly contradictory, both these images of the anima convey infertility. The most revealing anima figure, however, is the maid who witnesses Hyde’s murder of Sir Danvers Carew. Before it happens, Stevenson describes her as romantically gazing out her window at the moon, a common symbol of the feminine and, through its circular shape, a sign of the wholeness of the Self. She notes the gentleness of the old man, whose stature as member of Parliament and inherent civility link him with the Wise Old Man archetype. When Hyde destroys him and the maid loses consciousness, it is as if Hyde were destroying Jekyll’s last chance to consciously connect with his anima and to center his Self (26-27). So while Jekyll’s intellectual detachment entails avoidance of sex, his lack of sex is really a symptom of a greater deficiency—an undeveloped eros, an anima undifferentiated in the unconscious. In reacting to Hyde’s uncontrollable, murderous violence, Jekyll goes into seclusion. Thus Jekyll is

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as far away as could be from the Sacred Marriage, which symbolizes the integration of logos and eros and constitutes individuation of the Self.1 1 It is no surprise that during Jekyll’s last days sequestered in the lab, the butler says he hears “it weeping,” “weeping like a woman or a lost soul” (54, my emphasis). In the end of his Gothic nightmare, Jekyll not only loses the chance to eventually expand his identity to include the shadow and anima (the feminine or soul-image he loses); he even loses identity altogether, which becomes undifferentiated from the “it” (Id) of oceanic unconsciousness.

Jekyll’s Self-Destructive Repression of Hyde But before a man can face and attempt to absorb the anima, he must successfully assimilate the shadow, which Jekyll fails to do. To be sure, Jekyll bravely delves into his unconscious, acknowledging his dark side as an element of his dual identity. Jekyll’s problem is that he fails to incorporate his shadow, and instead—after his initial delight in renewing long-repressed pleasures and instincts—he rejects Hyde as other. As Jung points out—to cite Anthony Storr—the acts of bringing “the repressed tendencies” into conscious awareness and of “confessing the less desirable aspects of personality which the shadow portrays [do] not rid us of them.”1 2 Indeed, rather than trying to integrate his shadow, Jekyll tries to get rid of it. First he turns his scientific efforts toward separating the dual elements of his psyche (71), and then, when Hyde turns from being merely merry to monstrous, he tries to repress him. And though initially Jekyll seems successful, he really only worsens his psychosis, intensifying the imbalance of his Gothic psyche. Despite realizing that his “two natures” contend in the same “field” of “consciousness,” Jekyll finds this consciousness an “agonised womb” and so wants to dissociate “these polar twins.” He decides to house each in a “separate” identity (7071). Accordingly, he furnishes Hyde with his own separate residence in Soho. Until the murder of Carew, Jekyll’s separation seems to work, as he counters his dry life in the lab with Hyde’s selfish pleasures, drawing vicarious amusement from them. Through his dual identities, Jekyll brags, he “could plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability” and by drinking his potion could “doff at once the body of the noted professor,” springing “headlong” as Hyde “into the sea of liberty” (75). This comment of Jekyll’s describes his psychological state when Utterson finds him

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However, by separating his identity as Hyde from his identity as Jekyll, the scientist represses Hyde. In turn, this repression creates a growing psychic imbalance and makes Hyde monstrous. The less dignified Hyde’s pleasures become, the more Jekyll divides himself from Hyde. Before the murder, Utterson tries to persuade Jekyll, his client as well as his friend, to confide in him about Hyde, but Jekyll insists that it is a “private matter” and refuses to speak of him (25). “Let it sleep,” he commands Utterson, as if explicitly urging that they repress all thoughts of Hyde, burying him in the unconscious. After the murder, Jekyll rejects Hyde altogether: he tells Utterson that he is “done with him” and that “I cannot say I care what becomes of Hyde” (33). So divided from Hyde does Jekyll grow that Jekyll “stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde” and judged “Hyde alone” as “guilty” (76). Hence, having failed to assimilate the shadow, Jekyll begins to resemble Jung’s “highly moral people, unaware of their other side, who develop particularly hellish moods” (Psychology and Religion, C.W. 11:76). Moreover, by clinging to his moral standing as “Dr. Jekyll,” Jekyll refuses to accept Hyde as part of their shared consciousness, a repression that in turn makes Hyde a murderous monster. As Jung explains in The Practice of Psychotherapy, the psyche becomes divided and produces “monsters” when consciousness, like Jekyll’s, refuses to accept the unconscious. Although “the unconscious is not a demoniacal monster,” the shadow “becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong,” as Jekyll’s surely is. Furthermore, Jung adds, “to the degree we repress” the shadow, “its danger increases” (C.W. 16:152). After the murder, Hyde’s danger to the terrorstricken Jekyll continuously increases. At this point, Jekyll loses confidence in himself, as he puts it to Utterson (34), and also loses his balance (79, 83) and control of his “original and better self” (79). In effect, his weakening ego begins to collapse into the unconscious. Lanyon diagnoses Jekyll as suffering from “a cerebral disease” (64), and indeed, as if growing psychotic, he loses the ability to distinguish between waking and sleeping—a characteristic common to both schizophrenics and chronic nightmare sufferers whose mental boundaries are thin, open, and permeable. For instance, Jekyll comes “home to [his] own house” “partly in a dream,” and when he then slumbers, he is wrung by “nightmares” (86). Moreover, if he goes to sleep as Jekyll, “it was

always as Hyde that [he] awakened” (86-87). Other manifestations of the Gothic experience of open boundaries include the fog in Soho that makes Hyde’s neighborhood resemble “some city in a nightmare” (28-29) and Jekyll’s constant shifting between first and third pronouns to refer to Hyde after the murder (81-85). These images of open boundaries signify that, as Hyde, Jekyll experiences the liminal. In Victor Turner’s formulation, the liminal can be creative and regenerative if followed by a stage of reintegration with normal society or, psychologically, with normal consciousness—as it is for Walton in Frankenstein. The liminal liberates “human capacities” from social “constraints.” However, it also involves danger and disorder and may be the scene of breakdown and destruction. Clearly, for Jekyll, the liminal results in no rebounding or re-membering, only in Gothic disintegration, for he is unable to respond positively to the liminal’s duality.1 3 Progressively, then, Hyde the shadow grows bigger the longer he is repressed, and as Jekyll the ego weakens, Hyde’s powers strengthen (87). Hyde even assumes the power to transform physically into Jekyll without warning and without pharmaceutical stimulus. This physical autonomy parallels how Jekyll’s unconscious dominates his psyche and precipitates his breakdown. Because Jekyll’s ego essentially coincides with his persona, as Jung explains in Psychological Types, “it can have no conscious relation to the unconscious processes,” for in fact “it is these processes”; moreover, Jung points out, “anyone who is himself his outward role will infallibly succumb to the inner processes,” a situation Jung calls enantiodromia, which literally means “running backwards” and refers to “the emergence of the unconscious opposite” (C.W. 6:470, 426). Even before the murder, Jekyll realizes, “That part of me which I had the power of projecting, had lately been much exercised and nourished; it had seemed to me of late as though the body of Edward Hyde had grown in stature . . . and I began to spy a danger that, if this were much prolonged, the balance of my nature might be permanently overthrown” (7879). Indeed, at the close of this passage, Jekyll intuits that it is already too late, that his ego is sinking into the uroboric unconscious: “All things therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse” (79). He becomes “a creature eaten up” and is “solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self” (87). Finally, on the novel’s last page, Jekyll’s expectation is met, as he

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“quite at ease” after one of the “pleasant dinners” (23) the doctor gives just before the murder.

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ends anticipating the permanent metamorphosis from his form into Hyde’s, thereby completing his Gothic disintegration and his ego’s collapse into the unconscious.

Lanyon’s Disintegration and Utterson’s Growth Like Henry Jekyll, the Scottish doctor Hastie Lanyon—his fellow scientist and estranged friend—experiences a complete psychic, as well as physical, disintegration when faced with the shadow, Mr. Hyde. As Saposnik notes, “Lanyon is afraid to admit vital truths about himself,” and when he encounters their symbolic representation in the form of Hyde, “he cannot struggle with their emergence.” Saposnik brands Lanyon a “coward,” perhaps because, unlike Jekyll, Lanyon cannot even acknowledge the shadow; and Masao Miyoshi, equally harsh with Lanyon, attacks him and the rest of Stevenson’s men as “joyless.”1 4 But I think these critics overstate the flaws in Lanyon’s character. If we can trust the omniscient narrator, Lanyon indeed possesses a “geniality” that rests “on genuine feeling” (14). Moreover, considering their strained relations, Lanyon’s response to Jekyll’s urgent cry for help is not less than generous when, without demanding an explanation, he retrieves a drawer of chemicals from Jekyll’s lab, then waits for the “unnamed man” to appear on his doorstep at midnight. And even if his decision to witness Hyde’s desperate drinking of the potion smacks of what Hyde calls greedy curiosity (67), to his credit Lanyon has humanely fulfilled Jekyll’s opaque request. Rather, then, Lanyon’s real flaw is that, like Jekyll, he has repressed part of his personality and developed a one-sided attachment to what is rational, empirical, and conventional. As a result, Lanyon is vulnerable to the sudden unexpected encounter with his shadow, which he has so rigidly repressed and rejected that his Gothic psyche divides, thus making the shadow an ego-consuming monstrosity. While Lanyon has enjoyed considerable public success as a doctor, he has ignored and left undeveloped other sides of his imbalanced psyche. Like Jekyll, Lanyon is professionally accomplished: Utterson refers to “his crowding patients” and not only locates Lanyon’s office in “that citadel of medicine” but precedes Lanyon’s name with the epithet “great” (14). His success stems not from ingenious interdisciplinary experimentation that advances knowledge but from a logical, “narrow” adherence to what Jekyll labels “material views” (67). In Jekyll’s opinion, Lanyon is an “ignorant” and “hide-bound pedant” (24); he is a kind of logi-

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cal positivist, like Stoker’s Dr. John Seward, who accepts as truth only whatever can be proven empirically, only whatever is sensible and reasonable. Hence, just as Seward rejects Dr. Van Helsing’s use of folklore, superstition, and ritual to diagnose and treat Lucy Westenra’s “mental condition,” Lanyon rejects Jekyll’s research in transcendental medicine as “unscientific balderdash” (15). Having overdeveloped his logos— whose principles include cognition and knowledge—Lanyon remains ignorant of his own buried capacities to appreciate the mystical and the intuitive. A lifelong bachelor like Brontë’s Lockwood, he also stays blind to the workings of his anima, and this blighted potential contributes to his inability to reconnect with his estranged friend Henry Jekyll. But, as I said of Jekyll, first the shadow must be faced and assimilated. Thus Stevenson symbolizes Lanyon’s intolerant view of Jekyll’s research, which is mystical and transcendental, in two ways: through the projection of Lanyon’s unconscious prejudices and weaknesses onto Hyde, the product of Jekyll’s experiment; and through Lanyon’s disgust upon seeing Hyde. As Colin Manlove puts it, what Lanyon is “violently responding to is” the Hyde in himself.1 5 Lanyon’s inability to deal with his unconscious—and its unpleasant, long-hidden contents—manifests itself both in his repeated repression of Jekyll/Hyde and in the lethal Gothic terror Hyde instills in him. Lanyon can bear to think of Jekyll neither in his conversation nor in his written narrative. When Utterson visits Lanyon after Jekyll has permanently shut himself up in the upstairs lab, Lanyon twice objects to the mention of his former friend. First he tells Utterson, “I wish to see or hear no more of Dr. Jekyll” since he is “quite done with that person” (40)—a telling echo of what Jekyll has previously told Utterson about Hyde (33). Next, more passionately and unreasonably, Lanyon insists, “If you cannot keep clear of [the] accursed topic [of Jekyll], then in God’s name, go, for I cannot bear it” (40). Even in his written narrative—which he can control as he cannot control the dialogue with Utterson— Lanyon again twice strains to repress traces of Jekyll/Hyde: he “cannot bring,” he says, his “mind to set on paper” what Jekyll told him, for “even in memory,” he “cannot . . . dwell on it without a start of horror” (68). As Jung writes, “to the degree we repress” the shadow “its danger increases”; accordingly, the more Lanyon represses Hyde and what he represents as a complement to Lanyon’s conscious, logocentric, scientific point of view, the sicker his soul—which means psyche—

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Unlike his scientific friends Lanyon and Jekyll, Gabriel Utterson grows psychologically from the crisis with Edward Hyde, as Walton does from his encounter with Frankenstein and the Monster. Some critics attack Utterson as dishonest and hypocritical, joyless and repressed, and even regressively Oedipal and subversive toward his friends.1 6 However, Utterson alone among the novel’s characters is able to deepen his selfknowledge and—with obvious limits—use it to help others. It is Utterson’s ignorance of Hyde— symbolically a part of his own unconscious—that first drives him on his quest to unmask Hyde and to save Henry Jekyll from Hyde’s domination. After learning from Enfield of Hyde’s savage stomping of the little girl and of his questionable use of Dr. Jekyll to acquit his liability for it, Utterson, like Stevenson, dreams of Hyde. This presence of Hyde as an image in Utterson’s unconscious clearly indicates his role as shadow to Utterson’s persona. As with Jekyll and Lanyon, the encounter with Hyde serves to provoke a selfexamination in Utterson. But not only does Utterson dream of Hyde, he also remembers the dream and acts on it, thus initiating a process of assimilation that can lead to greater psychic awareness and wholeness. In the Gothic narrative, then, Utterson operates as a go-between with the reader, like Walton in Frankenstein and Lockwood in Wuthering Heights. Though Utterson is the centered consciousness of Stevenson’s third-person narration and not (like Walton) a narrator himself, he nonetheless responds positively to the archetypal images of Jekyll’s and Lanyon’s cautionary tales; that is, he strives to draw them into consciousness, where they can strengthen his psyche. Like a Gothic reader and a Jungian analyst, Utter-

son attends to Jekyll’s and Lanyon’s stories and perceives in them what Jung calls “the substratum of” his “own nature.” Following his dream—an unconscious call to broaden his consciousness—Utterson attempts to understand the dream and decides to satisfy his curiosity to see Hyde, decides to “lighten the mystery” and to find “a reason” (16). He resolves to be “Mr. Seek” to compensate for “Mr. Hyde.” Consequently, he stands watch waiting for Hyde once again to enter the side entrance to Jekyll’s lab, as Enfield saw him do. When Utterson finally catches him, Utterson reacts as do all the others— the “sawbones” doctor, Enfield, Lanyon: he immediately recoils with disgust and identifies Hyde with Satan (18-20), thus projecting his shadow onto him. But unlike the others, Utterson does not repress Hyde to escape his nameless sense of this “foul soul” (20); instead, he passes a sleepless night of self-examination. His encounter with Hyde causes him to exhume from his unconscious the ghosts of his old sins, which humble him. Facing his own repressed shortcomings, Utterson withdraws his projected shadow and realizes that even Hyde must “hide” black secrets. In other words, Utterson knows everyone harbors a dark side, a realization like Jekyll’s that all humans have dual natures. Moreover, Utterson understands that only when the dark side is exposed can one’s vulnerability to it be outgrown. This intuitive epiphany leads Utterson to prod Jekyll into spending less time “indoors,” a place that becomes synonymous with Jekyll’s unhealthy solipsistic withdrawal into his unconscious self, Edward Hyde. It is as if Utterson were prodding Jekyll to acknowledge Hyde rather than repress him. Because this Gothic tale ends abruptly with the discovery of Jekyll and Hyde’s death, it remains indeterminate whether Utterson would have progressed toward fuller psychic integrity. From a Jungian point of view, one problem with prognosticating Utterson’s psychic fate is that he does not tell his “own wholly personal story,” and as Jung maintains in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the patient’s story is what is “crucial” to therapy. Moreover, there is no place in the novel where Utterson appears prepared for the second stage of individuation, which when successful results in the assimilation of anima images. In fact, if Jekyll appears remote from the realm of feminine influence, Utterson the avuncular bachelor is cut off from it completely. Still, unlike Jekyll, he maintains a desire to connect with others; most dramatically, when Poole, Jekyll’s butler, is leading him to the lab to witness Jekyll’s final disintegra-

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becomes. Ultimately, Lanyon betrays the signs of psychic disintegration. Like the mind of a sufferer of nightmares or schizophrenia, his Gothic mind is “submerged in terror” (68). Having witnessed the melting and altering of Hyde’s physical boundaries (67-68), Lanyon loses his own psychic integrity, his dissolving mental boundaries mirroring the open, permeable relation of Hyde to Jekyll once Jekyll loses control of his “better self.” The haunting images of Jekyll’s Gothic destruction even ruin Lanyon’s sleep: the “deadliest terror sits by [him] at all hours of day and night,” blurring the line between the conscious and the unconscious, a boundary that stays intact in healthy people. Consequently, he realizes he “must die” (68), and like Jekyll, he does, the ego nightmarishly swallowed into the unconscious.

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tion, Utterson wishes “to see and touch his fellowcreatures” (46). It seems reasonable to conjecture that Utterson’s attempts to balance the inner and outer worlds ensure his survival and sanity, even if they do not guarantee the psychic equilibrium ultimately earned by survivors of Dracula’s Gothic nightmare—namely, Mina and Jonathan Harker. Still, several aspects of Utterson’s personality point toward his readiness to begin the process of individuation. Besides his dream, he twice exhibits acute intuition. One instance accompanies the desire to connect with fellow creatures while approaching Jekyll’s lab: “Struggle as he might,” Stevenson reports, “there was borne in upon [Utterson’s] mind a crushing anticipation of calamity” (46). Significantly, this intuition of Jekyll’s suicidal destruction parallels Utterson’s first meeting with Hyde. During his stakeout, Utterson hears footsteps, and “with a strong prevision of success” he withdraws “into the entry of the court,” where seconds later, as he uncannily knew he would, he faces Mr. Hyde (17-18). This example indicates how alert Utterson is to the images of the unconscious and how well equipped he is to avoid the kind of psychic collapse suffered by Jekyll and Lanyon. In addition to his openness to these promptings of the unconscious, Utterson seems well equipped for an encounter with the shadow by the natural tendencies of his personality. Stevenson stresses Utterson’s “tolerance for others” and his readiness “to help” rather than judge them (5). Moreover, as Edwin Eigner and Barbara Hannah have remarked, the first doppelgänger we meet in the narrative is not that of Jekyll and Hyde but of Utterson and the “the well-known man about town,” his distant relative Richard Enfield.1 7 Though to others they appear to have nothing in common, so strong a bond unites these opposites that they consider their time together “the chief jewel of each week” (6). Fittingly, Utterson is with his social opposite Enfield when he last sees Jekyll and urges him to come outside before Utterson glimpses the start of a transformation. Indeed, repeatedly Utterson has tried to steer his friend from his regressive retreat into Hyde’s control, though of course not fully realizing the true nature of Jekyll and Hyde’s archetypal relation. Utterson’s willingness to deal with Hyde—as Jekyll’s shadow and by extension his own—climaxes with his courageous decision to break down the door to the lab and enter this space symbolic of the monstrous unconscious (“The Last Night”). Here his ability to face the shadow and expose it correlates with Jung’s state-

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ment that it takes “considerable moral effort” to assimilate the shadow into the conscious personality. So if Jekyll and Lanyon fail to make the necessary moral effort and are thus destroyed, Utterson at the least has faced the shadow squarely, lightening its darkness by assimilating the bits of understanding cast upon it by his own experience and the experiences of Lanyon and Jekyll as recounted in their Gothic narratives. Though Henry Jekyll faces his shadow, Edward Hyde, and so discovers the psyche’s dual identities, he mistakenly attempts to maintain their separation. Consequently, instead of tempering the moral, analytic side of his conscious personality with the natural desires of the shadow, Jekyll stiffens the one identity while utterly rejecting the other. By repressing what Hyde represents, Jekyll not only strays from the path to individuation but worse makes Hyde into a murderous monster. After Hyde breaks all bounds and murders Sir Danvers Carew, Jekyll tells Utterson, “I have had a lesson” (33). Tragically, however, Jekyll either does not learn from it or, what is more likely, never understands it in the first place. Nevertheless, the lesson of Jekyll’s cautionary tale is not lost on Stevenson’s Gothic reader. Barbara Hannah interprets Jekyll’s failure to consciously integrate the shadow figure as expressing Stevenson’s own psychological failure: “It was probably not possible at [the time of writing Dr. Jekyll] for Stevenson to realize . . . that this was essentially his own problem.” If he had realized his “mistake,” Hannah continues, he would have made a “serious attempt to find a solution” in the novel. But in conflating the character’s psyche with the author’s, Hannah overlooks the possibility that Stevenson intended not simply to write “a successful thriller” but instead to warn readers of the Gothic fate of ignoring “the war in the members.”1 8 In fact, in his essay “Lay Morals,” Stevenson sounds like Jung in asserting the need to balance the various parts of the psyche—the only possible solution to Jekyll’s Gothic problem. Stevenson states, “[The soul] demands that we should not live alternately with our opposing tendencies in continued see-saw of passion and disgust, but seek some path on which the tendencies shall no longer oppose, but serve each other to common end. . . . The soul demands unity of purpose, not the dismemberment of man” (2:179). While Stevenson plots the psychic dismemberment of man through Jekyll and Lanyon, he provides the solution Hannah calls for through Utterson, who learns—as the two scientists do

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Notes 1. See Albert J. Guerard, “Concepts of the Double,” 8-9; and Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature, 93-94; Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains, 227. 2. See Morton Prince, Psychotherapy and Multiple Personality, 197, 201; and Jeremy Hawthorn, Multiple Personality and the Disintegration of Literary Character, 62-63. Also see C. F. Keppler, The Literature of the Second Self, 8-9. Hawthorn stresses that a person’s multiple personalities not only display “contradictory behavior patterns” but also have “different and mutually exclusive memories,” 2. Significantly, Stevenson’s Jekyll underscores that his “two natures had memory in common,” 10:79. This and the following references in the text to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and to Stevenson’s other works, unless otherwise noted, are from The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. For Jung’s comment, see Man and His Symbols, 7. Other brief links of Jung to Dr. Jekyll include those by Mark M. Hennelly Jr., “Stevenson’s ‘Silent Symbols’ of the ‘Fatal Cross Roads’ in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” 10; Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, 98; Harold Schechter, The New Gods, 38; Clifton Snider, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made On, 15. In her often insightful study Striving towards Wholeness, Barbara Hannah devotes an entire chapter to interpreting Stevenson’s life and works from a Jungian viewpoint. However, as a practicing psychoanalyst, Hannah is more interested in speculating on ways his story reveals the state of his psyche than in close textual analysis. 3. Stevenson, “A Chapter on Dreams,” in Across the Plains, 211, 225-28; he uses the phrase “Gothic gnome” in a letter to W. H. Low, Works, 30:278. 4. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 300-325; Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 18301870, 343; Irving Saposnik, Robert Louis Stevenson, 96, 90. 5. Carl G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 235; Joseph L. Henderson, “Ancient Myths and Modern Man,” 118-20. 6. Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, 9.ii:8. Except where noted otherwise, all quotations of Jung’s writings are from this source. Further citations appear parenthetically as C.W. and are followed by volume and page numbers. 7. See also C.W. 9.i:284-85; C.W. 9.ii:266-67. See Douglas Thorpe, “Calvin, Darwin, and the Double”; and Charles Blinderman, “Vampurella.” 8. Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype, 14-15. 9. Stevenson quoted by George S. Hellman, The True Stevenson, 129. See William Veeder’s “Children of the Night,” 139-48; Stephen Heath, “Psychopathia Sexualis.”

12. Anthony Storr, The Essential Jung, 87. 13. On the relations of mental boundaries to schizophrenia and bad dreams, see Ernest Hartmann, The Nightmare. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 41, 44, 46, 84. 14. Saposnik, 93, 92; Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self, 297. 15. Colin Manlove, “‘Closer Than an Eye,’” 94. 16. See Daniel V. Fraustino, “The Not So Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” 207-8; Miyoshi, 297; William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire, 92; Veeder, 109. 17. Edwin Eigner, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romantic Tradition, 145; Hannah, 52-54. 18. Hannah, 51; letter to John Addington Symonds, Works 30:292.

Works Consulted Blinderman, Charles. “Vampurella: Darwin and Count Dracula.” Massachusetts Review 21 (1980): 411-28. Day, William Patrick. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Edinger, Edward F. Ego and Archetype. 1972. Reprinted, Baltimore: Penguin, 1973. Eigner, Edwin. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romantic Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1969. Fraustino, Daniel V. “The Not So Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 5 (1984): 205-9. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Edited and translated by James Strachey. New York: Avon, 1965. Guerard, Albert J. “Concepts of the Double.” In Stories of the Double, edited by Albert J. Guerard, 1-14. Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1967. Hannah, Barbara. Striving towards Wholeness. 2d ed. Boston: Sigo Press, 1988. Hartmann, Ernest. The Nightmare: The Psychology and Biology of Terrifying Dreams. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Hawthorn, Jeremy. Multiple Personality and the Disintegration of Literary Character. New York: St. Martin’s, 1983. Heath, Stephen. “Psychopathia Sexualis: Stevenson’s Strange Case.” Critical Inquiry 28 (1986): 93-108. Hellman, George S. The True Stevenson: A Study in Clarification. Boston: Little, Brown, 1925. Henderson, Joseph L. “Ancient Myths and Modern Man.” In Man and His Symbols, edited by Carl G. Jung, 95156. 1964. Reprinted, New York: Dell, 1968.

10. Hannah, 55.

Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1957.

11. See C.W. 11:439. As Benjamin G. Lockerd Jr. notes, it is “out of the wholeness of the Sacred Marriage that the highest symbol of the Self can arise.” See The Sacred Marriage, 185.

Jung, Carl G. Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Edited by Sir Herbert Read et al. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Bollingen Series 20, 20 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953-79.

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not—the cautionary lesson of unifying “the thorough and primitive duality” of human consciousness (70).

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———. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Edited by Aniela Jaffé. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. 2d ed. New York: Vintage, 1965.

FURTHER READING

———, ed. Man and His Symbols. 1964. Reprinted, New York: Dell, 1968.

Swearingen, Roger G. The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980, 217 p.

Keppler, C. F. The Literature of the Second Self. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1972. Lockerd, Benjamin G., Jr. The Sacred Marriage: Psychic Integration in “The Faerie Queene.” Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1987. Manlove, Colin. “‘Closer Than an Eye’: The Interconnections of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Studies in Scottish Literature 23 (1988): 97-103. Miyoshi, Masao. The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians. New York: New York University Press, 1969. Neumann, Erich. Depth Psychology and a New Ethic. Translated by Eugene Rolfe. New York: Published for the C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology by G. P. Putnam’s, 1969. ———. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Translated by Ralph Manheim. 2d ed. Bollingen Series 47. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. ———. The Origins and History of Consciousness. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Bollingen Series 42. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954. Prince, Morton. Psychotherapy and Multiple Personality. Edited by Nathan G. Hale Jr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975. Rogers, Robert. A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970. Saposnik, Irving. Robert Louis Stevenson. Boston: Twayne, 1974. Schechter, Harold. The New Gods: Psyche and Symbol in Popular Art. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1980. Snider, Clifton. The Stuff That Dreams Are Made On: A Jungian Interpretation of Literature. Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications, 1991. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Across the Plains. 1892. Reprinted, New York: Scribner’s, 1914. ———. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Vol. 10 of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. South Seas Edition. 32 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1925. ———. The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. South Seas Edition. 32 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1925. Storr, Anthony. Introduction to The Essential Jung, selected by Anthony Storr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Thorpe, Douglas. “Calvin, Darwin, and the Double: The Problem of Divided Nature in Hogg, MacDonald, and Stevenson.” Newsletter of Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada 11, no. 1 (1985): 6-22. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982. Veeder, William. “Children of the Night: Stevenson and Patriarchy.” In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One Hundred Years, edited by William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch, 107-60. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

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Bibliography

Full-length bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

Biographies Bell, Ian. Dreams of Exile: Robert Louis Stevenson, a Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1995, 296 p. Full-length biography of Stevenson. Calder, Jenni. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, 362 p. Biographical study focused on Stevenson’s literary career and influences. McLynn, Frank. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1994, 567 p. Well-regarded and comprehensive biography of Stevenson.

Criticism Block, Ed. “James Sully, Evolutionist Psychology, and Late Victorian Gothic Fiction.” Victorian Studies 25, no. 4 (summer 1982): 443-67. Analyzes Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and short stories “The Merry Men” and “Olalla” with respect to late Victorian evolutionist psychology and its theories regarding psychological aberration. Brantlinger, Patrick and Richard Boyle. “The Education of Edward Hyde: Stevenson’s ‘Gothic Gnome’ and the Mass Readership of Late-Victorian England.” In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One Hundred Years, edited by William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch, pp. 265-82. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Reads The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde “as an unconscious ‘allegory’ about the commercialization of literature and the emergence of a mass consumer society in the late-Victorian period.” Brantlinger, Patrick. “Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880-1914.” In Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 18301914, pp. 227-54. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988. Discusses The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as an “imperial Gothic fantasy,” equating Hyde’s actions with the degenerate behavior of colonials who “go native.” Doane, Janice Devon Hodges. “Demonic Disturbances of Sexual Identity: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr/s Hyde.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 23 (1989): 63-74. Relates the theme of the demonic “other” in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Victorian concerns about shifts in traditional gender roles. Dryden, Linda. “‘City of Dreadful Night’: Stevenson’s Gothic London.” In The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells, pp. 74-108. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

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Egan, Joseph J. “The Relationship of Theme and Art in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 10 (1967): 28-32. Suggests that the artistic design and structure of Stevenson’s story supports its central theme “that Dr. Jekyll himself is both good and evil.” Eigner, Edwin M. Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966, 258 p. Finds Stevenson’s fiction “closely related to . . . the nineteenth century prose romance.” Eigner defines that tradition, as well as Stevenson’s place within it, through comparisons with other works. Hennelly, Jr., Mark M. “Stevenson’s ‘Silent Symbols’ of the ‘Fatal Cross Roads’ in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Gothic 1, no. 1 (June 1979): 10-16. Studies mythologized and Jungian symbols of the crossroads and the wasteland in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Herdman, John. “The Double in Decline.” In The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, pp. 129-31. London: Macmillan, 1990. Probes Stevenson’s use of the doppelgänger motif in “Markheim.” Jolly, Roslyn. “South Sea Gothic: Pierre Loti and Robert Louis Stevenson.” English Literature in Transition, 18801920 47, no. 1 (2004): 28-49. Surveys Gothic elements derived from the juxtaposition of Polynesian supernaturalism and western rationalist materialism depicted in Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá” and Loti’s The Marriage of Loti. Kempton, Kenneth Payton. “Plausibility.” In The Short Story, pp. 172-88. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Identifies the principal theme of Stevenson’s “Markheim” as the “conquest of a man by his conscience” and studies the narrative elements of the short story. Lawler, Donald. “Reframing Jekyll and Hyde: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Strange Case of Gothic Fiction.” In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One Hundred Years, edited by William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch, pp. 247-61. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Describes The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as an early transitional work in the tradition of Gothic science fiction. MacAndrew, Elizabeth. “The Victorian Hall of Mirrors.” In The Gothic Tradition in Fiction, pp. 151-329. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Views Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as exemplary of the late nineteenth-century integration of Gothic effects into social novels. Maixner, Paul. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, 532 p. Collects significant early reviews and commentary on Stevenson’s principal works. Massie, Irving. “The Third Self: Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, ‘Lokis.’” In The Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis, pp. 98-114. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Argues that the action of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde derives from the unity rather than duality of the central character, who in tampering with his own unified nature, incorporating both good and evil, allowed only evil to remain. McAlpin, Edwin A. “Sin and Consequences.” In Old and New Books as Life Teachers, pp. 36-49. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, and Co., 1928. Asserts that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde demonstrates that indulgence in sin will destroy the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. Menikoff, Barry. “Introduction: Fable, Fiction, and Modernism.” In Robert Louis Stevenson: Tales from the Prince of Storytellers, by Robert Louis Stevenson, pp. 29-35. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Characterizes “Markheim” as an allegorical representation of “the struggle of good and evil for the heart of man.” Meyers, Jeffrey. Introduction to The Body Snatcher and Other Stories, by Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Jeffrey Meyers, pp. vii-xviii. New York: New American Library, 1988. Surveys the themes, styles, and plots of Stevenson’s short stories. Miyoshi, Masao. “Masks in the Mirror: The Eighteen Nineties.” In The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians, pp. 289-340. New York: New York University Press, 1969. Includes discussion of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and “Markheim” in examining the double or secret self in Victorian literature. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” In Lectures on Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers, pp. 179-204. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988. Analyzes the style and artistic intent of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, dismissing popular estimations of the novel as a mystery story while concentrating on its evocation of psychological terror. Orel, Harold. “Robert Louis Stevenson: Many Problems, Some Successes.” In The Victorian Short Story: Development and Triumph of a Literary Genre, pp. 115-37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Examines “Markheim,” “Olalla,” and “Thrawn Janet” as representing some of Stevenson’s most successful horror stories. Parsons, Coleman O. “Stevenson’s Use of Witchcraft in ‘Thrawn Janet.’” Studies in Philology 43, no. 3 (July 1946): 551-71. Appraises Stevenson’s familiarity with and invention of witchcraft lore as illustrated in his story “Thrawn Janet.” Penzoldt, Peter. “The Ghost Story with a Moral—Dickens and Stevenson.” In The Supernatural in Fiction, pp. 92117. New York: Humanities Press, 1965. Asserts that Stevenson and Charles Dickens were the only short story writers to create horror tales with moral messages. Punter, David. “Gothic and Decadence.” In The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, pp. 239-67. London: Longmans, 1980.

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Studies the sources and expression of gothicism in Stevenson’s works, particularly in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

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Considers The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde “one of the most potent of modern literary myths” to arise from the “decadent Gothic” literature of the 1890s.

work within the Gothic literary tradition, comparing it to other Gothic works, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Saposnik, Irving S. Robert Louis Stevenson. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1974, 164 p. Critical introduction to Stevenson that includes thematic and structural analysis of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the author’s short fiction. Swinnerton, Frank. R. L. Stevenson: A Critical Study. New York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1915, 215 p. One of the most important and frequently discussed works on Stevenson in the twentieth century. As the first major attack on Stevenson, it has had a significant impact on his reputation, and from the time of its publication, fewer critics have defined Stevenson as a major writer. Swinnerton avoided discussing Stevenson’s personality and attempted to evaluate his work using objective critical methods. Tymms, Ralph. “The Double in Post-Romantic Literature.” In Doubles in Literary Psychology, pp. 72-118. Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1949. Elucidates the use of the doppelgänger, or double, in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Veeder, William, and Gordon Hirsch, eds. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One Hundred Years. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, 312 p. Collection of essays with varying approaches to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that offer analyses of the novella within biographical, cultural, and historical frameworks. Many of the essays examine the

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OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Stevenson’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 24; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 3; Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vols. 1, 2, 4, 13; British Writers, Vol. 5; British Writers: The Classics, Vol. 1; British Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 1; Children’s Literature Review, Vols. 10, 11; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1890-1914; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 18, 57, 141, 156, 174; Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, Vol. 13; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Junior DISCovering Authors; Literature and Its Times, Vols. 1, 3; Literature Resource Center; Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, Eds. 1, 2; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 5, 14, 63; Novels for Students, Vols. 11, 20; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 11, 51; Something about the Author, Vol. 100; Supernatural Fiction Writers; Twayne’s English Authors; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 4; World Literature Criticism; Writers for Children; Writers for Young Adults; and Yesterday’s Authors of Books for Children, Vol. 2.

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BRAM STOKER (1847 - 1912)

(Full name Abraham Stoker) Irish novelist, short story writer, and essayist.

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toker is best known as the author of Dracula (1897), one of the most famous horror stories of all time, and a work frequently cited as a culminating example of the late-Victorian Gothic novel. Stoker also wrote adventure novels and romances, several other works of horror, and numerous pieces of short fiction. These works, however, have been overshadowed by Stoker’s most popular novel and have attracted relatively little critical attention. For most, Stoker is regarded as a one-book author, his sole memorable contribution being the creation of the Transylvanian count whose name has become synonymous with vampirism.

his studies. He graduated with honors in mathematics in 1870 and followed his father into the Irish civil service, where he worked for ten years. During this time Stoker also was an unpaid drama critic for the Dublin Mail, contributing glowing reviews, more unabashed praise than criticism, of Henry Irving’s theatrical performances. The two men became friends and, in 1879, Stoker left his job to become Irving’s manager. He also discharged various managerial, secretarial, and even directorial functions at the Lyceum Theatre. Despite his extensive duties, Stoker wrote a number of novels, including Dracula. Following Irving’s death in 1905, Stoker was associated with the literary staff of the London Telegraph. In his final years, Stoker was afflicted with gout and Bright’s disease. Some biographers also believe he contracted syphilis about the time he was writing Dracula, and that the advanced stages of the disease led to his death in 1912.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Born on November 8, 1847, in Dublin, Stoker was stricken with illness as a child that left him bedridden for the first seven years of his life. During this period, his mother reputedly told him stories of her own childhood during the cholera plague in the Irish town of Sligo, recounting instances of live interment and corpse burnings. At Trinity College, Stoker made up for his early invalidism by excelling in athletics as well as in

MAJOR WORKS Stoker composed Dracula as an epistolary novel comprised of journal entries, letters, newspaper clippings, a ship’s log, and phonograph recordings. The story begins with the journey of a young English solicitor, Jonathan Harker, sent to Transylvania to counsel a wealthy client, Count Dracula. During his two-month stay at Dracula’s castle, Harker becomes disconcerted by Dracula’s

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odd appearance, eccentricities, and predatory behavior. After some investigation, he discovers that Dracula sleeps in a coffin in a crypt beneath the castle during the day and spends his nights stealing babies from the nearby town. Harker manages to escape the castle and return to England where he is reunited with his fiancée Mina Murray. Strange events in London, including the arrival of a Russian schooner containing fifty boxes of earth, and the mysterious death of Mina’s acquaintance Lucy Westenra, suggest that Dracula has followed Harker back to England. Harker engages the help of Lucy’s former doctor, Van Helsing, when she reemerges as a vampire. Together with several assistants the men locate the undead Lucy and destroy her. When it becomes clear that Mina is the Count’s next victim, Harker, Van Helsing, and the others extend their search for Dracula himself. Discovering that he has fled London, they track him down and kill him. As Dracula’s body disintegrates, Mina is saved. As is Dracula, Stoker’s remaining novels and works of short fiction are primarily characterized by their macabre nature and focus on such themes as death, male rivalry, ambivalence toward women, and the morality of good and evil. Among them, “Dracula’s Guest,” originally intended as a prefatory chapter to Dracula, is one of Stoker’s best-known stories. The tale opens with Jonathan Harker traveling to Dracula’s castle, only to be stranded alone in the countryside when his frightened driver refuses to complete the trip. He takes refuge from a violent storm in a mausoleum in a nearby cemetery. As he rests, a beautiful female apparition rises from the tomb and approaches him. Suddenly, he is thrown to the ground and later wakes to find himself warmed and protected by a werewolf. In another story, “The Squaw,” an American visiting Nuremberg drops a pebble from the top of a castle, killing a kitten. Its vengeful mother stalks the man, eventually causing his death. Of Stoker’s other supernatural novels, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) is generally considered his best effort after Dracula. The work concerns an ambitious Egyptologist who attempts to reanimate the mummified remains of an ancient Egyptian queen. During the course of the novel the scientist, Trelawney, discovers that this mummy has been exerting a mysterious influence over his daughter Margaret, from which he eventually manages to free her. Probably Stoker’s second most popular work of fiction, his late novel entitled The Lair of the White Worm (1911) is generally perceived by scholars as a lurid and somewhat

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incoherent pastiche of grotesque horror. Its story concentrates on the sinister figure of Lady Arabella March, whom the novel’s protagonists eventually learn can transform herself into a repulsive worm of monstrous proportions. Although not well regarded by critics, the novel is sometimes discussed in terms of its bizarre, sexualized imagery and as a troubling indicator of Stoker’s mental decline shortly before his death.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Most Victorian readers interpreted Dracula as a straightforward horror novel. Some early reviewers noted the “unnecessary number of hideous incidents” which could “shock and disgust” readers. One critic even advised keeping the novel away from children and nervous adults. Later commentators began to take a more scholarly approach to the novel, exploring the theme of repressed sexuality within the story. Critics have asserted that the transformation of Dracula’s female victims, Lucy and Mina, from chaste to sexually aggressive should be considered a commentary on attitudes toward female sexuality in Victorian society. Homoerotic elements in the relationship between Dracula and Harker have also been analyzed. Moreover, Dracula’s drinking of blood in the novel has been regarded as a metaphor for sexual intercourse, and the stakes that kill Lucy and three other vampire women have been discussed as phallic symbols. Among contemporary critical approaches to Dracula, Clive Leatherdale has traced the origins of Stoker’s Transylvanian count from the stories of eastern European folklore and history, and has examined the novelist’s ambivalent and at times paradoxical rendering of the vampire as both victimizer and victim. Valerie Clemens (see Further Reading) has considered Dracula within the contexts of late nineteenth-century England, exploring Stoker’s representation of rapid changes in Victorian science, technology, and culture in the work. Jerrold E. Hogle has suggested that Stoker’s novel both exaggerates and intensifies the English Gothic literary conventions laid down by Horace Walpole in his supernatural romance The Castle of Otranto, arguing that Dracula offers a bourgeois, capitalist “counterfeit” of the social and symbolic structures originally depicted in the Gothic novel through its use of narrative simulacra. Joseph Valente has studied gender construction and social marginality in Dracula, particularly highlighting the idealized feminine and maternal virtues associated with Mina and the work’s allegorized cultural and

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The Man (novel) 1905

Though Stoker’s other novels were favorably reviewed when they appeared, most are now considered dated by their stereotyped characters and romanticized Gothic plots; and except by aficionados of supernatural fiction they are rarely read today. Even the earliest reviews frequently decried the stiff characterization and tendency to melodrama which flaw Stoker’s writing. Critics have universally praised, however, Stoker’s beautifully precise place descriptions. Stoker’s short stories, while sharing the faults of his novels, have fared better with modern readers. Meanwhile, Dracula has garnered much critical and popular attention since the time of its publication and through the years has spawned countless stories and novels by other authors, as well as numerous theatrical and cinematic adaptations. Indeed, Dracula has never gone out of print since its first publication. Many critics regard the novel as the best-known and most enduring Gothic vampire story ever published. Whether Stoker evoked a universal fear, or as some modern critics would have it, gave form to a universal fantasy, he created a powerful and lasting image that has become an indelible part of popular culture.

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PRINCIPAL WORKS The Duties of Clerks of Petty Session in Ireland (handbook) 1879 Under the Sunset (short stories) 1881 A Glimpse of America (essays) 1886 The Snake’s Pass (novel) 1890 The Watter’s Mou’ (novel) 1894 Dracula (novel) 1897 The Mystery of the Sea: A Novel (novel) 1902 The Jewel of Seven Stars (novel) 1903

Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (biography) 1906 The Lady of the Shroud (novel) 1909 Famous Imposters (essays) 1910 The Lair of the White Worm (novel) 1911 *Dracula’s Guest, and Other Weird Stories (short stories) 1914 The Bram Stoker Bedside Companion (short stories and novels) 1973 This collection contains the short stories “Dracula’s Guest” and “The Squaw.”

PRIMARY SOURCES BRAM STOKER (STORY DATE 1914) SOURCE: Stoker, Bram. “Dracula’s Guest.” In Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, selected by Marvin Kaye, pp. 3-13. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1985. The following short story, written in the 1890s, comprises an intended, but deleted, prefatory chapter to Dracula. It was first published in 1914 in Dracula’s Guest, and Other Weird Stories.

When we started for our drive the sun was shining brightly on Munich, and the air was full of the joyousness of early summer. Just as we were about to depart, Herr Delbrück (the maître d’hôtel of the Quatre Saisons, where I was staying) came down, bareheaded, to the carriage and, after wishing me a pleasant drive, said to the coachman, still holding his hand on the handle of the carriage door: “Remember you are back by nightfall. The sky looks bright but there is a shiver in the north wind that says there may be a sudden storm. But I am sure you will not be late.” Here he smiled, and added, “for you know what night it is.” Johann answered with an emphatic, “Ja, mein Herr,” and, touching his hat, drove off quickly. When we had cleared the town, I said, after signalling to him to stop: “Tell me, Johann, what is to-night?” He crossed himself, as he answered laconically: “Walpurgis nacht.” Then he took out his watch, a great, old-fashioned German silver thing as big as a turnip, and looked at it, with his eyebrows gathered together and a little impatient shrug of his shoulders. I realised that this was his way of respectfully protesting against the unneces-

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political contexts. Other critics have frequently evaluated Dracula from a Freudian psychosexual standpoint, and the novel has additionally been interpreted from folkloric, political, feminist, and religious points of view. Still other commentators have identified themes of parricide, infanticide, and gender reversal in the novel. In recent years, the diverse literary origins of Dracula have also been identified, with Varney the Vampyre; or, The Feast of Blood, John William Polidori’s The Vampyre, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla,” and Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla” studied among its Gothic forerunners.

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sary delay, and sank back in the carriage, merely motioning him to proceed. He started off rapidly, as if to make up for lost time. Every now and then the horses seemed to throw up their heads and sniffed the air suspiciously. On such occasions I often looked round in alarm. The road was pretty bleak, for we were traversing a sort of high, windswept plateau. As we drove, I saw a road that looked but little used, and which seemed to dip through a little, winding valley. It looked so inviting that, even at the risk of offending him, I called Johann to stop—and when he had pulled up, I told him I would like to drive down that road. He made all sorts of excuses, and frequently crossed himself as he spoke. This somewhat piqued my curiosity, so I asked him various questions. He answered fencingly, and repeatedly looked at his watch in protest. Finally I said:

but the horses got very restless, and it took Johann all his time to quiet them. He was pale, and said: “It sounds like a wolf—but yet there are no wolves here now.”

“Well, Johann, I want to go down this road. I shall not ask you to come unless you like; but tell me why you do not like to go, that is all I ask.” For answer he seemed to throw himself off the box, so quickly did he reach the ground. Then he stretched out his hands appealingly to me, and implored me not to go. There was just enough of English mixed with the German for me to understand the drift of his talk. He seemed always just about to tell me something—the very idea of which evidently frightened him; but each time he pulled himself up, saying, as he crossed himself: “Walpurgis nacht!”

“The storm of snow, he comes before long time.” Then he looked at his watch again, and, straightway holding his reins firmly—for the horses were still pawing the ground restlessly and shaking their heads—he climbed to his box as though the time had come for proceeding on our journey.

I tried to argue with him, but it was difficult to argue with a man when I did not know his language. The advantage certainly rested with him, for although he began to speak in English, of a very crude and broken kind, he always got excited and broke into his native tongue—and every time he did so, he looked at his watch. Then the horses became restless and sniffed the air. At this he grew very pale, and, looking around in a frightened way, he suddenly jumped forward, took them by the bridles and led them on some twenty feet. I followed, and asked why he had done this. For answer he crossed himself, pointed to the spot we had left and drew his carriage in the direction of the other road, indicating a cross, and said, first in German, then in English: “Buried him—him what killed themselves.” I remembered the old custom of burying suicides at cross-roads: “Ah! I see, a suicide. How interesting!” But for the life of me I could not make out why the horses were frightened. Whilst we were talking, we heard a sort of sound between a yelp and a bark. It was far away;

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“No?” I said, questioning him; “isn’t it long since the wolves were so near the city?” “Long, long,” he answered, “in the spring and summer; but with the snow the wolves have been here not so long.” Whilst he was petting the horses and trying to quiet them, dark clouds drifted rapidly across the sky. The sunshine passed away, and a breath of cold wind seemed to drift past us. It was only a breath, however, and more in the nature of a warning than a fact, for the sun came out brightly again. Johann looked under his lifted hand at the horizon and said:

I felt a little obstinate and did not at once get into the carriage. “Tell me,” I said, “about this place where the road leads,” and I pointed down. Again he crossed himself and mumbled a prayer, before he answered: “It is unholy.” “What is unholy?” I enquired. “The village.” “Then there is a village?” “No, no. No one lives there hundreds of years.” My curiosity was piqued: “But you said there was a village.” “There was.” “Where is it now?” Whereupon he burst out into a long story in German and English, so mixed up that I could not quite understand exactly what he said, but roughly I gathered that long ago, hundreds of years, men had died there and been buried in their graves; and sounds were heard under the clay, and when the graves were opened, men and women were found rosy with life, and their mouths red with blood. And so, in haste to save their lives (aye, and their souls!—and here he crossed himself) those who were left fled away to other places, where the living lived, and the dead were dead and not—not something. He was evidently

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“Walpurgis nacht!” and pointed to the carriage for me to get in. All my English blood rose at this, and, standing back, I said: “You are afraid, Johann—you are afraid. Go home; I shall return alone; the walk will do me good.” The carriage door was open. I took from the seat my oak walking-stick—which I always carry on my holiday excursions—and closed the door, pointing back to Munich, and said, “Go home, Johann—Walpurgis nacht doesn’t concern Englishmen.” The horses were now more restive than ever, and Johann was trying to hold them in, while excitedly imploring me not to do anything so foolish. I pitied the poor fellow, he was so deeply in earnest; but all the same I could not help laughing. His English was quite gone now. In his anxiety he had forgotten that his only means of making me understand was to talk my language, so he jabbered away in his native German. It began to be a little tedious. After giving the direction, “Home!” I turned to go down the cross-road into the valley. With a despairing gesture, Johann turned his horses towards Munich. I leaned on my stick and looked after him. He went slowly along the road for a while: then there came over the crest of the hill a man tall and thin. I could see so much in the distance. When he drew near the horses, they began to jump and kick about, then to scream with terror. Johann could not hold them in; they bolted down the road, running away madly. I watched them out of sight, then looked for the stranger, but I found that he, too, was gone. With a light heart I turned down the side road through the deepening valley to which Johann had objected. There was not the slightest reason, that I could see, for his objection; and I daresay I tramped for a couple of hours without thinking of time or distance, and certainly without seeing a person or a house. So far as the place was concerned, it was desolation itself. But I did not notice this particularly till, on turning a bend in the road, I came upon a scattered fringe of wood; then I

recognised that I had been impressed unconsciously by the desolation of the region through which I had passed. I sat down to rest myself, and began to look around. It struck me that it was considerably colder than it had been at the commencement of my walk—a sort of sighing sound seemed to be around me, with, now and then, high overhead, a sort of muffled roar. Looking upwards I noticed that great thick clouds were drifting rapidly across the sky from North to South at a great height. There were signs of coming storm in some lofty stratum of the air. I was a little chilly, and, thinking that it was the sitting still after the exercise of walking, I resumed my journey. The ground I passed over was now much more picturesque. There were no striking objects that the eye might single out; but in all there was a charm of beauty. I took little heed of time and it was only when the deepening twilight forced itself upon me that I began to think of how I should find my way home. The brightness of the day had gone. The air was cold, and the drifting of clouds high overhead was more marked. They were accompanied by a sort of far-away rushing sound, through which seemed to come at intervals that mysterious cry which the driver had said came from a wolf. For a while I hesitated. I had said I would see the deserted village, so on I went, and presently came on a wide stretch of open country, shut in by hills all around. Their sides were covered with trees which spread down to the plain, dotting, in clumps, the gentler slopes and hollows which showed here and there. I followed with my eye the winding of the road, and saw that it curved close to one of the densest of these clumps and was lost behind it. As I looked there came a cold shiver in the air, and the snow began to fall. I thought of the miles and miles of bleak country I had passed, and then hurried on to seek the shelter of the wood in front. Darker and darker grew the sky, and faster and heavier fell the snow, till the earth before and around me was a glistening white carpet the further edge of which was lost in misty vagueness. The road was here but crude, and when on the level its boundaries were not so marked, as when it passed through the cuttings; and in a little while I found that I must have strayed from it, for I missed underfoot the hard surface, and my feet sank deeper in the grass and moss. Then the wind grew stronger and blew with ever increasing force, till I was fain to run before it. The air became icycold, and in spite of my exercise I began to suffer. The snow was now falling so thickly and whirling

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afraid to speak the last words. As he proceeded with his narration, he grew more and more excited. It seemed as if his imagination had got hold of him, and he ended in a perfect paroxysm of fear—white-faced, perspiring, trembling and looking round him, as if expecting that some dreadful presence would manifest itself there in the bright sunshine on the open plain. Finally, in an agony of desperation, he cried:

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around me in such rapid eddies that I could hardly keep my eyes open. Every now and then the heavens were torn asunder by vivid lightning, and in the flashes I could see ahead of me a great mass of trees, chiefly yew and cypress all heavily coated with snow.

such a place. I walked around it, and read, over the Doric door, in German—

I was soon amongst the shelter of the trees, and there, in comparative silence, I could hear the rush of the wind high overhead. Presently the blackness of the storm had become merged in the darkness of the night. By-and-by the storm seemed to be passing away: it now only came in fierce puffs or blasts. At such moments the weird sound of the wolf appeared to be echoed by many similar sounds around me.

On the top of the tomb, seemingly driven through the solid marble—for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone—was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the back I saw, graven in great Russian letters:

Now and again, through the black mass of drifting cloud, came a straggling ray of moonlight, which lit up the expanse, and showed me that I was at the edge of a dense mass of cypress and yew trees. As the snow had ceased to fall, I walked out from the shelter and began to investigate more closely. It appeared to me that, amongst so many old foundations as I had passed, there might be still standing a house in which, though in ruins, I could find some sort of shelter for a while. As I skirted the edge of the copse, I found that a low wall encircled it, and following this I presently found an opening. Here the cypresses formed an alley leading up to a square mass of some kind of building. Just as I caught sight of this, however, the drifting clouds obscured the moon, and I passed up the path in darkness. The wind must have grown colder, for I felt myself shiver as I walked; but there was hope of shelter, and I groped my way blindly on. I stopped, for there was a sudden stillness. The storm had passed; and, perhaps in sympathy with nature’s silence, my heart seemed to cease to beat. But this was only momentarily; for suddenly the moonlight broke through the clouds, showing me that I was in a graveyard, and that the square object before me was a great massive tomb of marble, as white as the snow that lay on and all around it. With the moonlight there came a fierce sigh of the storm, which appeared to resume its course with a long, low howl, as of many dogs or wolves. I was awed and shocked, and felt the cold perceptibly grow upon me till it seemed to grip me by the heart. Then while the flood of moonlight still fell on the marble tomb, the storm gave further evidence of renewing, as though it was returning on its track. Impelled by some sort of fascination, I approached the sepulchre to see what it was, and why such a thing stood alone in

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COUNTESS DOLINGEN OF GRATZ IN STYRIA SOUGHT AND FOUND DEATH. 1801.

“The dead travel fast.”

There was something so weird and uncanny about the whole thing that it gave me a turn and made me feel quite faint. I began to wish, for the first time, that I had taken Johann’s advice. Here a thought struck me, which came under almost mysterious circumstances and with a terrible shock. This was Walpurgis Night! Walpurgis Night, when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad—when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was alone— unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me! It took all my philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my courage, not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright. And now a perfect tornado burst upon me. The ground shook as though thousands of horses thundered across it; and this time the storm bore on its icy wings, not snow, but great hailstones which drove with such violence that they might have come from the thongs of Balearic slingers— hailstones that beat down leaf and branch and made the shelter of the cypresses of no more avail than though their stems were standing-corn. At the first I had rushed to the nearest tree; but I was soon fain to leave it and seek the only spot that seemed to afford refuge, the deep Doric doorway of the marble tomb. There, crouching against the massive bronze-door, I gained a certain amount of protection from the beating of the hail-stones, for now they only drove against me as they ricochetted from the ground and the side of the marble. As I leaned against the door, it moved slightly and opened inwards. The shelter of even a tomb was welcome in that pitiless tempest, and I was about to enter it when there came a flash of

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Gradually there came a sort of vague beginning of consciousness; then a sense of weariness that was dreadful. For a time I remembered nothing; but slowly my senses returned. My feet seemed positively racked with pain, yet I could not move them. They seemed to be numbed. There was an icy feeling at the back of my neck and all down my spine, and my ears, like my feet, were dead, yet in torment; but there was in my breast a sense of warmth which was, by comparison, delicious. It was as a nightmare—a physical nightmare, if one may use such an expression; for some heavy weight on my chest made it difficult for me to breathe. This period of semi-lethargy seemed to remain a long time, and as it faded away I must have slept or swooned. Then came a sort of loathing, like the first stage of sea-sickness, and a wild desire to be free from something—I knew not what. A vast stillness enveloped me, as though all the world were asleep or dead—only broken by the low panting as of some animal close to me. I felt a warm rasping at my throat, then came a consciousness of the awful truth, which chilled me to the heart and sent the blood surging up through my brain. Some great animal was lying on me and now lick-

ing my throat. I feared to stir, for some instinct of prudence bade me lie still; but the brute seemed to realize that there was now some change in me, for it raised its head. Through my eyelashes I saw above me the two great flaming eyes of a gigantic wolf. Its sharp white teeth gleamed in the gaping red mouth, and I could feel its hot breath fierce and acrid upon me. For another spell of time I remembered no more. Then I became conscious of a low growl, followed by a yelp, renewed again and again. Then, seemingly very far away, I heard a “Holloa! holloa!” as of many voices calling in unison. Cautiously I raised my head and looked in the direction whence the sound came; but the cemetery blocked my view. The wolf still continued to yelp in a strange way, and a red glare began to move round the grove of cypresses, as though following the sound. As the voices drew closer, the wolf yelped faster and louder. I feared to make either sound or motion. Nearer came the red glow, over the white pall which stretched into the darkness around me. Then all at once from beyond the trees there came at a trot a troop of horsemen bearing torches. The wolf rose from my breast and made for the cemetery. I saw one of the horsemen (soldiers by their caps and their long military cloaks) raise his carbine and take aim. A companion knocked up his arm, and I heard the ball whizz over my head. He had evidently taken my body for that of the wolf. Another sighted the animal as it slunk away, and a shot followed. Then, at a gallop, the troop rode forward—some towards me, others following the wolf as it disappeared amongst the snow-clad cypresses. As they drew nearer I tried to move, but was powerless, although I could see and hear all that went on around me. Two or three of the soldiers jumped from their horses and knelt beside me. One of them raised my head, and placed his hand over my heart. “Good news, comrades!” he cried. “His heart still beats!” Then some brandy was poured down my throat; it put vigour into me, and I was able to open my eyes fully and look around. Lights and shadows were moving among the trees, and I heard men call to one another. They drew together, uttering frightened exclamations; and the lights flashed as the others came pouring out of the cemetery pell-mell, like men possessed. When the further ones came close to us, those who were around me asked them eagerly: “Well, have you found him?”

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forked-lightning that lit up the whole expanse of the heavens. In the instant, as I am a living man, I saw, as my eyes were turned into the darkness of the tomb, a beautiful woman, with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier. As the thunder broke overhead, I was grasped as by the hand of a giant and hurled out into the storm. The whole thing was so sudden that, before I could realize the shock, moral as well as physical, I found the hailstones beating me down. At the same time I had a strange, dominating feeling that I was not alone. I looked towards the tomb. Just then there came another blinding flash, which seemed to strike the iron stake that surmounted the tomb and to pour through to the earth, blasting and crumbling the marble, as in a burst of flame. The dead woman rose for a moment of agony, while she was lapped in the flame, and her bitter scream of pain was drowned in the thundercrash. The last thing I heard was this mingling of dreadful sound, as again I was seized in the giant-grasp and dragged away, while the hailstones beat on me, and the air around seemed reverberant with the howling of wolves. The last sight that I remembered was a vague, white, moving mass, as if all the graves around me had sent out the phantoms of their sheeted-dead, and that they were closing in on me through the white cloudiness of the driving hail.

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The reply rang out hurriedly: “No! no! Come away quick—quick! This is no place to stay, and on this of all nights!” “What was it?” was the question, asked in all manner of keys. The answer came variously and all indefinitely as though the men were moved by some common impulse to speak, yet were restrained by some common fear from giving their thoughts. “It—it—indeed!” gibbered one, whose wits had plainly given out for the moment. “A wolf—and yet not a wolf!” another put in shudderingly. “No use trying for him without the sacred bullet,” a third remarked in a more ordinary manner. “Serve us right for coming out on this night! Truly we have earned our thousand marks!” were the ejaculations of a fourth. “There was blood on the broken marble,” another said after a pause—“the lightning never brought that there. And for him—is he safe? Look at his throat! See, comrades, the wolf has been lying on him and keeping his blood warm.” The officer looked at my throat and replied: “He is all right; the skin is not pierced. What does it all mean? We should never have found him but for the yelping of the wolf.” “What became of it?” asked the man who was holding up my head, and who seemed the least panic-stricken of the party, for his hands were steady and without tremor. On his sleeve was the chevron of a petty officer. “It went to its home,” answered the man, whose long face was pallid, and who actually shook with terror as he glanced around him fearfully. “There are graves enough there in which it may lie. Come, comrades—come quickly! Let us leave this cursed spot.” The officer raised me to a sitting posture, as he uttered a word of command; then several men placed me upon a horse. He sprang to the saddle behind me, took me in his arms, gave the word to advance; and, turning our faces away from the cypresses, we rode away in swift, military order. As yet my tongue refused its office, and I was perforce silent. I must have fallen asleep; for the next thing I remembered was finding myself standing up, supported by a soldier on each side of me. It was almost broad daylight, and to the north a red streak of sunlight was reflected, like a path of blood, over the waste of snow. The officer

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was telling the men to say nothing of what they had seen, except that they found an English stranger, guarded by a large dog. “Dog! that was no dog,” cut in the man who had exhibited such fear. “I think I know a wolf when I see one.” The young officer answered calmly: “I said a dog.” “Dog!” reiterated the other ironically. It was evident that his courage was rising with the sun; and, pointing to me, he said, “Look at his throat. Is that the work of a dog, master?” Instinctively I raised my hand to my throat, and as I touched it I cried out in pain. The men crowded round to look, some stooping down from their saddles; and again there came the calm voice of the young officer: “A dog, as I said. If aught else were said we should only be laughed at.” I was then mounted behind a trooper, and we rode on into the suburbs of Munich. Here we came across a stray carriage, into which I was lifted, and it was driven off to the Quatre Saisons—the young officer accompanying me, whilst a trooper followed with his horse, and the others rode off to their barracks. When we arrived, Herr Delbrück rushed so quickly down the steps to meet me, that it was apparent he had been watching within. Taking me by both hands he solicitously led me in. The officer saluted me and was turning to withdraw, when I recognized his purpose, and insisted that he should come to my rooms. Over a glass of wine I warmly thanked him and his brave comrades for saving me. He replied simply that he was more than glad, and that Herr Delbrück had at the first taken steps to make all the searching party pleased; at which ambiguous utterance the maître d’hotel smiled, while the officer pleaded duty and withdrew. “But Herr Delbrück,” I enquired, “how and why was it that the soldiers searched for me?” He shrugged his shoulders, as if in depreciation of his own deed, as he replied: “I was so fortunate as to obtain leave from the commander of the regiment in which I served, to ask for volunteers.” “But how did you know I was lost?” I asked. “The driver came hither with the remains of his carriage, which had been upset when the horses ran away.”

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“Oh, no!” he answered; “but even before the coachman arrived, I had this telegram from the Boyar whose guest you are,” and he took from his pocket a telegram which he handed to me, and I read: BISTRITZ. “Be careful of my guest—his safety is most precious to me. Should aught happen to him, or if he be missed, spare nothing to find him and ensure his safety. He is English and therefore adventurous. There are often dangers from snow and wolves and night. Lose not a moment if you suspect harm to him. I answer your zeal with my fortune.—Dracula.”

As I held the telegram in my hand, the room seemed to whirl around me; and, if the attentive maître d’hotel had not caught me, I think I should have fallen. There was something so strange in all this, something so weird and impossible to imagine, that there grew on me a sense of my being in some way the sport of opposite forces—the mere vague idea of which seemed in a way to paralyse me. I was certainly under some form of mysterious protection. From a distant country had come, in the very nick of time, a message that took me out of the danger of the snow-sleep and the jaws of the wolf.

TITLE COMMENTARY Dracula THE ATHENAEUM (REVIEW DATE 26 JUNE 1897) SOURCE: A review of Dracula, by Bram Stoker. The Athenaeum, no. 3635 (26 June 1897): 235. In the following review, the critic faults Stoker’s sensationalism in Dracula while acknowledging his effective—if inconsistent—rendering of terror and mystery.

Stories and novels appear just now in plenty stamped with a more or less genuine air of belief in the visibility of supernatural agency. The strengthening of a bygone faith in the fantastic and magical view of things in lieu of the purely material is a feature of the hour, a reaction— artificial, perhaps, rather than natural—against late tendencies in thought. Mr. Stoker is the purveyor of so many strange wares that Dracula reads like a determined effort to go, as were, “one

better” than others in the same field. How far the author is himself a believer in the phenomena described is not for the reviewer to say. He can but attempt to gauge how far the general faith in witches, warlocks, and vampires—supposing it to exist in any general and appreciable measure—is likely to be stimulated by this story. The vampire idea is very ancient indeed, and there are in nature, no doubt, mysterious powers to account for the vague belief in such beings. Mr. Stoker’s way of presenting his matter, and still more the matter itself, are of too direct and uncompromising a kind. They lack the essential note of awful remoteness and at the same time subtle affinity that separates while it links our humanity with unknown beings and possibilities hovering on the confines of the known world. Dracula is highly sensational, but it is wanting in the constructive art as well as in the higher literary sense. It reads at times like a mere series of grotesquely incredible events; but there are better moments that show more power, though even these are never productive of the tremor such subjects evoke under the hand of a master. An immense amount of energy, a certain degree of imaginative faculty, and many ingenious and gruesome details are there. At times Mr. Stoker almost succeeds in creating the sense of possibility in impossibility; at others he merely commands an array of crude statements of incredible actions. The early part goes best, for it promises to unfold the roots of mystery and fear lying deep in human nature; but the want of skill and fancy grows more and more conspicuous. The people who band themselves together to run the vampire to earth have no real individuality or being. The German man of science is particularly poor, and indulges, like a German, in much weak sentiment. Still Mr. Stoker has got together a number of “horrid details,” and his object, assuming it to be ghastliness, is fairly well fulfilled. Isolated scenes and touches are probably quite uncanny enough to please those for whom they are designed.

THE SPECTATOR (REVIEW DATE 31 JULY 1897) SOURCE: “Recent Novels.” The Spectator (31 July 1897): 150-51. In the following review, the critic asserts that the strength of Dracula lies in Stoker’s vivid imagination.

Mr. Bram Stoker gives us the impression—we may be doing him an injustice—of having deliberately laid himself out in Dracula to eclipse all previous efforts in the domain of the horrible,—to

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“But surely you would not send a search-party of soldiers merely on this account?”

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“go one better” than Wilkie Collins (whose method of narration he has closely followed), Sheridan Le Fanu, and all the other professors of the flesh-creeping school. Count Dracula, who gives his name to the book, is a Transylvanian noble who purchases an estate in England, and in connection with the transfer of the property Jonathan Harker, a young solicitor, visits him in his ancestral castle. Jonathan Harker has a terrible time of it, for the Count—who is a vampire of immense age, cunning, and experience—keeps him as a prisoner for several weeks, and when the poor young man escapes from the gruesome charnelhouse of his host, he nearly dies of brain-fever in a hospital at Buda-Pesth. The scene then shifts to England, where the Count arrives by sea in the shape of a dog-fiend, after destroying the entire crew, and resumes operations in various uncanny manifestations, selecting as his chief victim Miss Lucy Westenra, the fiancée of the Honourable Arthur Holmwood, heir-presumptive to Lord Godalming. The story then resolves itself into the history of the battle between Lucy’s protectors, including two rejected suitors—an American and a “mad” doctor—and a wonderfully clever specialist from Amsterdam, against her unearthly persecutor. The clue is furnished by Jonathan Harker, whose betrothed, Mina Murray, is a bosom friend of Lucy’s, and the fight is long and protracted. Lucy succumbs, and, worse still, is temporarily converted into a vampire. How she is released from this unpleasant position and restored to a peaceful post-mortem existence, how Mina is next assailed by the Count, how he is driven from England, and finally exterminated by the efforts of the league—for all these, and a great many more thrilling details, we must refer our readers to the pages of Mr. Stoker’s clever but cadaverous romance. Its strength lies in the invention of incident, for the sentimental element is decidedly mawkish. Mr. Stoker has shown considerable ability in the use that he has made of all the available traditions of vampirology, but we think his story would have been all the more effective if he had chosen an earlier period. The up-to-dateness of the book—the phonograph diaries, typewriters, and so on—hardly fits in with the mediaval methods which ultimately secure the victory for Count Dracula’s foes.

THE TIMES, LONDON (REVIEW DATE 23 AUGUST 1897) SOURCE: “Recent Novels.” The Times, London, no. 35289 (23 August 1897): 6. In the following review, the critic relates the plot of Dracula, asserts that it offers highly dramatic reading,

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and adds: “We would not, however, recommend it to nervous persons for evening reading.”

Dracula cannot be described as a domestic novel, nor its annals as those of a quiet life. The circumstances described are from the first peculiar. A young solicitor sent for on business by a client in Transylvania goes through some unusual experiences. He finds himself shut up in a half ruined castle with a host who is only seen at night and three beautiful females who have the misfortune to be vampires. Their intentions, which can hardly be described as honourable, are to suck his blood, in order to sustain their own vitality. Count Dracula (the host) is also a vampire, but has grown tired of his compatriots, however young and beautiful, and has a great desire for what may literally be called fresh blood. He has therefore sent for the solicitor that through his means he may be introduced to London society. Without understanding the Count’s views, Mr. Harker has good reason for having suspicions of his client. Wolves come at his command, and also fogs; he is also too clever by half at climbing. There is a splendid prospect from the castle terrace, which Mr. Harker would have enjoyed but for his conviction that he would never leave the place alive:— In the soft moonlight the distant hills became melted, and the shadows in the valleys and gorges of velvety blackness. The mere beauty seemed to cheer me; there was peace and comfort in every breath I drew. As I leaned from the window my eye was caught by something moving a storey below me, and somewhat to my left, where I imagined, from the lie of the rooms, that the windows of the Count’s own room would look out. The window at which I stood was tall and deep, stone-mullioned, and, though weatherworn, was still complete, but it was evidently many a day since the casement had been there. I drew back behind the stonework and looked carefully out. What I saw was the Count’s head coming out from the window. I did not see the face, but I knew the man by the neck and the movement of his back and arms. In any case, I could not mistake the hands, which I had had so many opportunities of studying. I was at first interested and somewhat amused, for it is wonderful how small a matter will int-rest and amuse a man when he is a prisoner. But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down, with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings.

These scenes and situations, striking as they are, become commonplace compared with Count Dracula’s goings on in London. As Falstaff was not only witty himself but the cause of wit in other people, so a vampire, it seems, compels

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JERROLD E. HOGLE (ESSAY DATE 1998) SOURCE: Hogle, Jerrold E. “Stoker’s Counterfeit Gothic: Dracula and Theatricality at the Dawn of Simulation.” In Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis, and the Gothic, edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith, pp. 205-24. New York: Macmillan—St. Martin’s, 1998. In the following essay, Hogle illustrates how “Stoker builds on and intensifies the mixed ‘counterfeit’ foundations of Gothic fiction” in Dracula.

Bram Stoker is now widely celebrated as a major contributor to Gothic fiction—and even to Gothic theatre and film—but the exact nature of his contribution needs to be better understood. I want to show here that Stoker draws us forcefully back to the most basic foundations of ‘Gothic’ fiction and theatre, especially in Dracula, while simultaneously offering a ‘zone of horror’ that vividly harbours a host of anxieties basic to AngloEuropean, white middle-class culture at both the fin de siècle of Stoker’s time and our own turn of the century. For me it forms no mere coincidence that 1897, the ‘birth-year’ of Dracula, was the 100th anniversary of the death-year of Horace Walpole, the first writer to subtitle a novel ‘A Gothic Story’. Stoker intensifies the most fundamental and lasting tendencies in the Walpolean Gothic, and does so, I would contend, nowhere more so than in Dracula. Even his alterations of the Gothic tradition, the ones most revealing of his own culture at his own historical moment, are arresting fulfilments of the principal ‘technologies’ (the modes of symbolisation) that emerge in the Gothic from the writings of Walpole through those of Radcliffe, Lewis, Polidori and Charlotte Brontë, to Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR MONTAGUE SUMMERS ON THE ENDURING NATURE OF DRACULA

If we review Dracula from a purely literary point of approach it must be acknowledged that there is much careless writing and many pages could have been compressed and something revised with considerable profit. It is hardly possible to feel any great interest in the characters, they are labels rather than individuals. As I have said, there are passages of graphic beauty, passages of graphic horror, but these again almost entirely occur within the first sixty pages. There are some capital incidents, for example the method by which Lord Godalming and his friend obtain admittance to No. 347 Piccadilly. Nor does this by any means stand alone. However, when we have—quite fairly, I hope—thus criticized Dracula, the fact remains that it is a book of unwonted interest and fascination. Accordingly we are bound to acknowledge that the reason for the immense popularity of this romance—the reason why, in spite of obvious faults it is read and reread—lies in the choice of subject and for this the author deserves all praise. SOURCE: Summers, Montague. “The Vampire in Literature.” In The Vampire: His Kith and Kin. 1928. Reprint edition, pp. 271-340. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1960.

To some extent, we already know how fully these links can be made. Because of work on the Gothic from the Freudian Marxism of Leslie Fiedler (1966), David Punter (1980) and Franco Moretti (1988) up through the recent feminist and cultural studies of Nina Auerbach, Anne Williams, Maggie Kilgour and Judith Halberstam (all 1995) among others, we have come to understand how the rising middle class since the eighteenth century ‘displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell’ by specifically employing the Gothic mode in fiction, theatre, architecture and other forms.1 We now realise that quandaries about class conflicts and economic changes, uneasiness over shifting fam-

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those it has bitten (two little marks on the throat are its token, usually taken by the faculty for the scratches of a brooch) to become after death vampires also. Nothing can keep them away but garlic, which is, perhaps, why that comestible is so popular in certain countries. One may imagine, therefore, how the thing spread in London after the Count’s arrival. The only chance of stopping it was to kill the Count before any of his victims died, and this was a difficult job, for, though several centuries old, he was very young and strong, and could become a dog or a bat at pleasure. However, it is undertaken by four resolute and highly-principled persons, and how it is managed forms the subject of the story, of which nobody can complain that it is deficient in dramatic situations. We would not, however, recommend it to nervous persons for evening reading.

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ily arrangements and sexual boundaries, and versions of the ‘other’ which establish racial and cultural distinctions when traditional economic divisions are being challenged, are projected (or retrojected) together into frightening ‘Gothic’ spectres and monsters, from Walpole’s ancestral effigy-ghost to the vampire-aristocrat from Transylvania. These both contain the socially ‘unmentionable’, yet bring it forth to be seen in some of its horror, albeit displaced and disguised in a fashion that is both alluring and repulsive. In particular, much as Halberstam asserts, Stoker’s Count performs the longest-lasting function of Gothic ghosts/monsters/‘others’. He/it ‘aggregates’ the kinds of men or women, races, class-types and social or sexual behaviours that are regarded as most ‘foreign and perverse’ by the Anglo-European middle class; and he/it conflates these into one figure designed to be set against ‘a hegemonic ideal’, to define that reigning ideological construct, in fact, by being its negation and its dark unconscious.2 Dracula enacts this Gothic ‘ghosting’ so thoroughly, and aggregates so wide a range of culturally defined ‘perversities’ in the process, that he/it becomes, not just a Gothic ‘other’, but ‘foreignness’ incarnate and ‘otherness itself’.3 As some of the best readings of Dracula have shown, the vampire, being a corpse (an ‘it’) as well as an animate humanoid (apparently a ‘he’), can embody a range of potentially oxymoronic significations. Thus Dracula condenses the invasion of life by death and vice versa, as well as a range of racial, cultural, sexual/heterosexual and gender tensions. Stoker’s ‘creature’ is a mixture of so many culturally fashioned contraries that (s)he/it threatens the socio-economic distinctions of its author’s culture with complete dissolution, a vampiric death that could suck the life from them in a perverse intercourse between numerous realms, all supposedly separate. No wonder some recent analysts of Dracula choose to see this kind of ‘monster’ as a version of what Julia Kristeva has called ‘the abject’, or of the process of ‘abjection’.4 Like Kristeva’s ‘abject’, the vampire is an utterly betwixt-and-between anomaly which includes its ‘other’ as a part of itself: it is living/dead, maternal/paternal, human/ animal. Such a condition echoes the most primal, and thus the most abject-ed, state in Powers of Horror: the moment of birth where the emerging infant is half-inside and half-outside the mother, partly dead and partly alive (arguably, ‘un-dead’), in a liminal ‘either/or’ of which we retain dim somatic memories.5 During the growth of the

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‘civilised’ individual, this state and others like it must be ‘thrown off’ or ‘thrown under’ a different and more socially coherent realm, so that a seemingly independent body and subject can, with cultural support, emerge, though always with a pre-conscious longing and loathing for the ‘root’ heterogeneity so basic to it. The Gothic monster, such as Dracula, is a ‘throwing’ of this ‘abject’ into a supposedly alien figure which seems to take it all far away from ‘us’ into ‘strange’ class, racial, geographical, historical and largely non-human conditions. At the same time, this ‘other’ brings us face to face, and haunts us with what we in the Anglo-European West would most dissociate from ourselves, though it is at the deepest foundations of ourselves: the heterogeneous, even multigendered, physical, familial, racial, cultural and symbolic conditions into which and out of which we are actually born. Like Walpole’s portrait-ghost, which is dead and alive, a painting and a person, Stoker’s Dracula is an ‘other’ which contains and sequesters many later cultural anomalies, combining and scapegoating the anxieties they arouse in his day and ours, extending the symbolic method of abjecting many heterogeneities which Walpole first suggested within his ‘Gothic Story’.6 But there are ways, it appears, in which Dracula does not seem to repeat the Gothic tradition at all. Jennifer Wicke has argued how much Stoker’s book is produced out of the Western technologies of communication in the late 1890s. Its presentation of the tale through coded journal entries, letters, transcriptions of recordings, telegrams and newspaper articles or advertisements, while somewhat reflective of the ‘Gothic’ penchant for documents within documents, is far more dependent on near twentieth-century uses of shorthand, typewriting, phonograph records, photography, the telegraph and the mass-market circulation of journalism, all of which help to produce ‘the mechanical replication of culture’ in Stoker’s time and ours.7 One threat now embodied in the vampire-aristocrat, Wicke points out, since he/it is already a hollowed-out, living-dead version of a late medieval warlord, is its/his resemblance to the forms of mass culture which now depict it and try to contain it, and which it employs itself in its quest for blood. Both the vampire and the newest mechanical modes of reproduction and reception transform human beings into the merest husks or signs of their supposed selves in a process that increasingly generates ‘evacuated social languages’—mere signifiers—as representations of people.8 For Lucy Westenra, who is both transmogrified by Dracula

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This connection of the ‘other’ to increased mass-market simulation and hence to another ‘unconscious’ level in the culture, however, is also fundamentally Gothic. As E. J. Clery has demonstrated, the ‘supernatural in The Castle of Otranto figures . . . a conflict between two versions of economic “personality”’: landed property and the private family.1 0 The Gothic, or really the early capitalist imitation of much older ‘Gothic’ structures, is haunted from its beginnings by what we also find in Count Dracula: the heterogeneity of incompatible tendencies in the Western middleclass self pulled backwards and forwards in conflicting economic and social directions, one of which turns the self into a marketable representation, the self as picture or sign, able to gain wide circulation like a coin or a middle-class novel. For Stoker thus to emphasise the modes of symbolic production in a more recent capitalist world where every represented being becomes alienated into the exchangeable figurations of itself is therefore for him to drive once more down to the Gothic’s most basic underpinnings, its harkening back towards antiquated social orders within the advance of its symbols towards the ‘free market’ circulation and consumption of uprooted signifiers. As I have argued elsewhere, the Walpolean ‘Gothic’ is constituted from the start by fakery in its use of fragmented and evacuated figures from the past—the ‘counterfeit’ nature of the picture or effigy that appears at the very heart of what haunts most ‘Gothic Stories’ in explicitly figural animations of the already dead.1 1 The Gothic allows the at least partly middle-class reader and

author to feel the attraction of the lost and once ‘magical’ powers in the now emptied icons of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Yet, further, it permits the marketing of these symbols as false antiquities which give their new consumers the power to recirculate—and thus profit from—them without being strictly bound to their old meanings and contexts of social order. The moving signs of the distant past (such as Walpole’s portrait-ghost or Count Dracula), however, are not simply counterfeits, but ghosts of counterfeits in the eighteenth-century Gothic and its progeny. Jean Baudrillard has helped us to view the Renaissance to which the Walpolean Gothic looks back as a time when signs—words, gestures, behaviours, modes of dress, ways of spending money, the rhetorical and theatrical presentations of the self— were generally conceived of as already counterfeit. Such signs were ‘counterfeit’ because they were both recollections of supposedly ‘natural’ links of birth and status to their signifiers in medieval times and highly mobile figures that could be moved from person to person as the rising beneficiaries of post-medieval urban mercantilism gained the capacity to wear clothes, spend money, use words and otherwise display relocated and fabricated marks of rank which were not ‘naturally’ theirs as they might have had to be in the ‘Dark Ages’.1 2 The Renaissance fake, with all its nostalgia for ‘bound meaning’ (Baudrillard’s phrase), gives way in The Castle of Otranto to a simulacrum of it, available for ‘freer’ circulation aimed at social, political or economic effect, especially since the most hidden sin of Manfred’s grandfather (the fakery behind the portrait) turns out to be his counterfeiting of a will which transferred Otranto from its founding aristocratic owners to his less upperclass, more entrepreneurial family. By taking that ghost of the counterfeit(er) and recasting it further, with some intervening Gothic (and other) influences, into a vampire-aristocrat who tries to master and is mastered by many simulacra of the mass market, Bram Stoker attains his great stature as a Gothic novelist in the way he extends the chief symbolic indicators of the cultural conflicts, aspirations and anxieties that lie at the highly unsettled foundations of Gothic novels and plays. Dracula, like most ‘Gothic Stories’ from Walpole on, is a highly theatrical novel. Indeed, it combines aspects of the numerous French and English vampire melodramas staged from the 1820s onwards with Stoker’s own sense of vampire theatre, the mass market and even of Henry Irving, the demanding egotist whom many consider

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and ‘vamped’ by the fictional press accounts of her activity, this is to be turned into a figure of continual consumption so much so that consuming, especially all-consuming, women seem more and more alike as the novel goes on. In that condition even a woman’s potential ‘unruliness of speech’ is ‘technologised’ into wording, and thus into behaviour, that suits the ‘print-language of hegemony’ (the sanctioned discourses about women), whether a woman resists it (in the way Lucy attempts) or mostly submits to it (as Mina does).9 The vampire, meanwhile, the more he/it learns the forms of modern British mass culture so as both to invade and circulate in England effectively, comes to embody the very mechanical and linguistic means of English imperialism over other cultures, its symbolic sucking of their lifeblood, the same means that Dracula’s British observers use on him/it supposedly to subdue his/ its/her foreign otherness.

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as one of the models for the constantly roleplaying Count Dracula.1 3 In the rest of this essay, I shall argue generally that Stoker builds on and intensifies the mixed ‘counterfeit’ foundations of Gothic fiction by working through, and being driven by, what Baudrillard has revealed as the half-hidden assumptions about signs in the West that come out of and displace the sense of the sign as counterfeit. Dracula, as it reproduces the Walpolean ghost of the counterfeit, plays out and points to two progressions: first, the turn from the assumptions that animate the counterfeit to those of the ‘simulacrum’, the industrial age sense of the sign as a ‘copy’ struck off from a mechanically produced mould (itself a ghost of the counterfeit); and, later, the shift from that schema to the even more modern sign as primarily a ‘simulation’ referring to other simulations, more and more a ‘hyperreality’ (for Baudrillard a ‘code’) without single moulds for originals, even at its moments of nostalgia for older forms of supposedly direct reference from sign to person or object.1 4 What has always been ‘ghosted’ in the Gothic has been the terror of the historical passage into a bourgeois promoted, yet mechanised, order of signproduction and reproduction. In this order the longing for older sureties of reference, however ideological they really were, is conscripted into capitalistic exchanges of signs for signs and the consequent effort to represent a now more privatised ‘inner’ self in outward figures that are reproduced mechanically and circulated by their mechanisms through and beyond ‘private’ spaces.1 5 Stoker’s Dracula deals both indirectly and directly with this historical passage, its tensions and its anxieties, by contrasting them as quandaries at the heart of the Gothic. The chilling possibilities of Baudrillard’s ‘digital and programmatic sign’ is faced incipiently by the Gothic ghost of the counterfeit as early as Walpole and is confronted far more directly in Stoker’s vision of the vampiric simulacrum of the ghost of the counterfeit in a world of everincreasing simulation.1 6 This process appears in Dracula when Stoker has Mina set the stage into which Dracula enters when he/it first arrives on British shores. The scene is the resort town of Whitby, and Mina’s Radcliffean journal-description of it keeps finding itself forced to admit the entirely simulated ‘nature’ in how the scene is viewed and rendered by its viewer: A great viaduct runs across, with high piers, through which the view seems somehow further away

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than it really is. . . . The houses of the old town . . . are all red-roofed, and seem piled up one over the other anyhow, like the pictures we see of Nuremberg. Right over the town is the ruin of Whitby Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes, and which is the scene of part of ‘Marmion,’ where the girl was built up in the wall. It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful and romantic bits; there is a legend that a white lady is seen in one of the windows. Between it and the town there is another church, the parish one, round which is a big graveyard, all full of tombstones. . . . I shall come and sit here very often myself and work. Indeed, I am writing now, with my book on my knee, and listening to the talk of three old men who are sitting beside me.1 7

There could hardly be a more quintessentially ‘Gothic’ setting, the continual presentation of each portion of the scene being followed at once by indicators of its artificial existence in its framing by a painter’s or tourist’s representation, or in its having been written in a book. If a part of the scene is not framed within other parts by the reproduction of it, it is textualised by the allusions, literary or legendary, that it already seems to carry with it. The whole landscape then becomes most explicitly a text when the handwriting of it is mentioned directly and the act of writing is complicated by the further intertextual references provided by the old men telling stories about the place. All this is ‘Gothic’ counterfeiting presented as such within a series of layers that recounterfeit it again and again. The once medieval and ruined Gothic abbey is recontextualised by more current (and marketable) reframings of it; these reframings themselves are reframed by tourist points of view; and these latter perspectives are coloured and reoriented by the texts of authors, legends or older folk. Ultimately, too, all these layers gain their places in this series of simulations by being admittedly written down yet again—and in ‘shorthand’ (p. 53), which has to be transcribed into what we now read, a document of rewriting included among many ‘papers’ and ‘records . . . given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them’ (p. xxxviii). Mina explicitly fashions all such transcriptions according to ‘what I see lady journalists do’ under a very prescribed code for ‘interviewing and writing descriptions’ (p. 54). Even more to the point, the ‘objects’ being simulated at this juncture turn out to be mostly counterfeits of counterfeiting within themselves, particularly the tombstones in the graveyard. One of the old men whom Mina hears talking in the cemetery is the seemingly oracular Mr Swales, an apparently marginal character who, according to

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All the surfaces of Whitby seen in this light become potentially opaque misrepresentations and signifiers of hollowed-out and uncertain pasts which can be reconstructed only with allusions to verbalised knowledge, much of it little more reliable than the tourist-oriented legend of the White Lady in the abbey. To be sure, Swales later tries to recant his claim that ‘The whole thing be only lies’ (p. 65) when he seeks to restore the conventional religious text of hope beyond the grave to soften his premonition that ‘soon the Angel of Death will sound his trumpet for me’ (p. 74). But what he gets in answer to his proleptic final reference is an extremely false Angel of Death by Christian standards. Swales dies of a broken neck at the hands of the too-white Dracula, who leaves the old sage frozen with ‘a look of fear and horror on his face’ (p. 87). He has seen ‘Death with his dying eyes’ (p. 87), though his grimace is also a reaction to the falsity of another lie: Dracula’s simulation and negation of what the Angel of Death is supposed to be and do. Swales exposes the simulated nature of virtually all perceived ‘reality’. The very origins, as well as English settings, of Dracula stem partly from simulations of earlier Gothic fictions, combined with accounts such as Emily Gerard’s ‘Transylvanian Superstitions’, the contents of which are superimposed upon British locations that were already filled with simulacra of a counterfeited past.1 9 Dracula, consequently, as he enters this stage (which is such a palimpsest of signs), is, among other things, an anamorphosis towards multiple simulations of what was already a simulacrum of the Gothic ghost of the counterfeit. The Lord Ruthven-style vampire-aristocrat had become a ‘stock villain’ in the novels and theatres of England, France and Germany well before Stoker’s Count.2 0 As early as the 1830s, it was established as an industrial age ‘mould’ which for decades

was copied with only minimal variation. This now hackneyed simulacrum of the Polidorian counterfeit, a subject of satire by the 1870s and 1880s, is turned by Stoker into an almost endless and groundless set of simulations from the moment Dracula first appears to Jonathan Harker ‘like a statue’ all in black (p. 15).2 1 The opening of such a Gothic simulacrum to a past and future of simulation permeates this scene and much that surrounds it. Here Dracula harkens back to the second major ghost of a counterfeit in The Castle of Otranto, the ‘black marble’ effigy on the tomb of the castle’s founder, which suddenly becomes enlarged, fragmented and hauntingly mobile.2 2 Harker even goes on to renounce the very literary lineage behind Walpole’s ghosts of mere figures when Dracula’s departure at ‘cock crow’ makes the young lawyer view him as ‘like the ghost of Hamlet’s father’ just after the Count has lamented that ‘the glories of the great races [of past warrior-princes] are now as a tale that is told’ in the more modern world (pp. 29-30). Only a little later, Harker discovers that this ghost of a ghost of a counterfeit and selfconfessed and self-textualised remnant of old-style aristocrats can assume virtually any other visage at will, including Jonathan’s own (pp. 44, 48). This is a multiplicity far beyond that of any previous figure in the Ruthven tradition. As Harker himself records in shorthand ‘all that has happened’, so he finds himself bringing the stock vampirearistocrat ‘up-to-date with a vengeance’ (p. 36). Moreover, at the conclusion of the novel, the Count is found in his coffin looking ‘just like a waxen image’, and thus arguably like a Walpolean statue converted to a simulated live body in a wax museum of Stoker’s own day (p. 376). Once the traditional penetration of the vampire is achieved, ‘the whole body crumble[s] to dust’ in an instant, not only because Dracula has been dead for centuries and his sins lead from dust to dust in Christian terms, but also because the ‘ground’ of all his/its simulations is no more than this nonexistence all along, an ageold and now recreated ‘dissolution’ (p. 377). Stoker’s Dracula in any embodiment, even in his most native and settled state, is never more than a synthetic image of other images, while any ‘essence’ sought behind the forms his body takes turns out to be no more than an absence or a constant passing away. All of this comes from an interplay of texts that Stoker read, rather than from any first-hand knowledge of Transylvania. There is no ‘essential Dracula’ in Stoker’s work beyond a combination of second hand simulacra or stories. Stoker’s Dracula at any

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William Veeder, ‘indicts the hollowness of the patriarchal structures’ of knowledge in the novel. Early in the narrative, for example, he reveals to Mina ‘that the graves of the sailors in Whitby Churchyard are all empty, and thus that the tombstones’ [inscribed] pieties are all hollow rhetoric’.1 8 Even the stones that actually encrypt physical bodies are quite often simulacra of fakery by Swales’ account, as in the case of the 1873 grave of ‘George Canon’, where the ‘tomb’ is inscribed as ‘erected by his sorrowing mother to her dearly beloved son’, even though this ‘mother was a hell-cat that hated’ her son and ‘he committed suicide in order that she mightn’t get an insurance she put on his life’ (pp. 66-7).

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level is always already a recollection of previous deaths in the process of changing from one form to another, since it has never come from anything other than an interaction of forms of the dead. When Dracula takes already Gothic ghosts of counterfeits, and even their hackneyed simulacra, and turns them into simulations nearly always in the process of turning into or away from others, it is not simply because Stoker incorporates his awareness of the newest sign-making technologies into them, even if Wicke is right to notice him doing so. It is also because his refigurations of the Gothic ghost and the vampire-aristocrat all draw forth the increasingly visible tendency in postRenaissance ‘Gothic’ counterfeits and simulacra to become sheer figures of other figures, one of the sources of a modern way of life based so entirely on simulations. Stoker does not just employ forms of mass communication, though they do provide his text with an ironically unreal ‘realism’, an illusion of journalistic truth very much of his time; he also shows how such newer simulations and recast Gothic monsters have finally become forms of one another as they all suck some of the life out of the objects of their attentions. The reason for this convergence of symbolic modes is what both underlies and is made possible by the shift from the industrial simulacrum to modern simulation: the growing tendency in Western middleclass life to define the ‘inner self’ through the ‘others’ of artificially reproduced forms, many of which are emptied-out recastings of past figures (such as the Walpolean ghost or the conventional vampire-aristocrat when Stoker first encounters it). Dracula him/itself in Stoker’s novel supremely incarnates this inevitably doomed quest. From the start, the vampire is grasping at the ‘other’ of English signifiers and accoutrements such as Bradshaw’s Guide and ‘Kodak views’ of a Gothic house in London, all to keep incessantly renewing his/ its anomalous, yet largely empty existence (pp. 22-3). As a result, he/it can be constructed as the ‘other’ into which Stoker’s other characters can ‘throw over’ the anguished creation of the self in the pursuit of ever-circulating commodity-signifiers—a pursuit which they fear to acknowledge, but on the basis of which they strive to ‘become’. It is one thing to say that Dracula’s ‘otherness’ from it/himself—seeking and feeding on simulation after simulation to keep the Count the anomaly that he/it is—can be made a symbolic repository for that same tendency in his/its observers and readers. It is quite another to understand how such a Gothic ‘abjection’ of this monster’s and his audience’s relation to signs can

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also become the means by which Stoker, his other characters, and his readers ‘throw off’ many more contradictory conditions basic to themselves: the often repressed but very real crossings of the cultural boundaries established between species, races, ethnicities, classes, sexes, sexualities, stages of evolution, forms of expression, life and death, or even our own body as opposed to the body of the mother. How and why, in the figure of Dracula, can a forcing of the Gothic ghost of the counterfeit into a near-explosion of simulations of simulacra be so effective as an ‘abject’ site for so many varied, primordial yet ‘thrown down’ possibilities of being? What, indeed, are the effects of an abjection of all of these into a both horrifying and alluring Gothic performer of nearly endless simulations and no one foundation? Exactly how are this abjection and the reader’s responses to it bound up with the theatricality that Stoker clearly brings to Dracula—the very Gothic theatricality of the spectre/actor as ‘a figure in a picture’—and with the myriad technological and increasingly public forms of narration in which he finally frames his sometimes stagy scenes? One answer lies in Stoker’s rendition of Irving’s philosophy of theatrical acting in Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. Granted, in line with his famous endorsement of semi-‘realistic’ over declamatory acting, Irving (as Stoker quotes him) advocates a performance that is ‘a truthful picture’ based on ‘a definite conception of what [the actor] wants to convey’, rooted in a truth that is ‘supreme and eternal’ and yet is grasped individually in ‘the working of the mind . . . before the tongue gives it words’.2 3 But this ‘working’ generally begins for Stoker’s Irving in an actor’s knowledge of existing simulacra, a ‘study in recognisable material types and differentiated individual instances of the same type’ (Vol. 2, p. 7). Behaviours adaptable for theatre are ‘recognisable’ mainly because there is one ‘material’ figure of each kind, as in printer’s type, which many copies can repeat with some variations across particular ‘instances’ in an era of mechanical reproduction. Then, too, in this ‘combining [of] things already created’, the Irving-Stoker actor is really engaged in an ‘accumulation of . . . effects’ (supposedly Irving’s words), which Stoker translates as a continual ‘clothing of the player’s own identity with the attributes of another’, layer upon layer, under the assumption that the ‘player’s identity’ is itself ‘of [a] plastic nature’, a malleable, synthetic formation already inclined towards continual reformation (Vol. 2, pp. 8-10). Platonic and organic metaphors for the basis of acting, while certainly

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The more theatre in the 1890s turns out to be based on the simulation of simulacra, as is certainly the case in Stoker’s vision of Henry Irving as well as Dracula, the more it resembles the simulacra of the Gothic ghost of the counterfeit. While this is partly because Stoker thinks quite ‘Gothically’ by this time in consequence of extensive reading and some writing in that mode, it is also because he faces a ‘Gothicising’ of theatre in the way he believes he must represent drama and its greatest actor for the middle and upper classes during this period. Stoker and his view of Irving keep being pulled into a rhetoric, very much within their pretensions to ‘realism’; one which states that ‘all art has the aim or object of seeming and not of being’ (Vol. 2, p. 17) in the sense that all performances, including Stoker’s in his biography of Irving, are the Walpolesque animations of ‘phantasmal images’ projected by mere ciphers and fleshed out by an ‘accumulation’ of simulacrum ‘effects’. Now we are beginning to see at least partial answers to some of our remaining questions. Finde-siècle theatricality, simulation and recast Gothic all become aspects of each other in and around Dracula because all three are especially pointed enactments of the Western progression in human self-projection from the use of the sign as counterfeit to the simulation of simulacra of counterfeits of the past. Moreover, we have now arrived at evidence for how Stoker’s life is bound up with such a Gothic interaction of modes at the time he wrote Dracula. What else but a rhetoric of simulation

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recalled and attempted in this redaction of a dead celebrity’s philosophy, are constantly pulled towards figures of simulacrum-repetition whose overtones oscillate between the mechanical replication of standardised forms and the sheer transmigration and translation of images without their having to be manufactured one by one from moulds. For Irving, Stoker concludes, the transition from words on the page to a staged enactment of them is determined most by the ‘phantasmal image which is conveyed [to the actor] from the words of the poet’ (Vol. 2, p. 24), words that are themselves phantasmal. The actor, then, achieves an effective ‘figure in a picture’ only if he or she, in a layering of simulacrum effects, can materially reproduce an immaterial but visualisable spectre prompted by different visible spectres of past writing. At his time and in the words he writes, theatricality for Stoker is irretrievably inhabited by the simulation of simulacra of older ghostly counterfeitings.

Title page of the 1927 edition of Dracula’s Guest.

about acting could Bram Stoker use? He was, after all, the factotum of Irving, in charge of the advertising, promotion, theatre-refurbishing, inviting of reviewers, portrait-commissioning, finance and even ghost-writing of correspondence. This the ‘business’ of simulating the simulations in the theatre, out of which Irving’s public image and drawing-power were to a great extent built.2 4 Stoker’s ghostly descriptions of theatricality, even when he tries to resist the simulation in them, are driven by the economics of widely circulating figures of figures underpinning and marketing the theatre and its top ‘actor-managers’. As his narration of Irving’s career proceeds, Stoker reveals that the money-raising and advertisements that supposedly furthered the Lyceum acting had become the prime movers of which the acting was now the effect: ‘the more [Irving] had to spend [on production and its consequences] the harder he had to work to earn the wherewithal to do it’ (Vol. 2, p. 313). Money rendered as a representation of, or entitlement to, theatre had become the exchangeable simulacrum which drove the theatre to pursue every available form of capital as a goal in itself. Stoker and Irving, in the former’s increas-

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ingly Gothic account, became frantic seekers after properties, tours and financial backers, to the point of finally signing contracts that later came back to haunt them (Vol. 2, pp. 315-20). Dracula, as we have noted, though more obsessed with blood than money supply, is a deeply complicated extension of this craving. That is partly because this ever-unsatisfied, economically-driven, always newly simulated and thus frightening state of being is inseparable for Stoker from the condition of theatre, acting and the business of both in London at the end of the nineteenth century. The greater terror in these ways of viewing the self by 1897, however, is the possibility that they and their increasingly groundless foundations may really be governing middle-class life outside the theatre. In other words, those living a middleclass existence are consciously or preconsciously driven to cast it symbolically away from themselves into what seems ‘only’ fictional, theatrical or ‘other.’ Stoker’s awareness of these intertwined tendencies is quite apparent in the short nonfiction biographies he offers in Famous Impostors (1910). In this volume a series of fake constructions of identity down through history is presented as beginning no earlier than the late Middle Ages or the dawn of the Renaissance, the exact time-frame most simulated by ‘Gothic’ fictions later, and the era in which the sense of signs as largely ‘counterfeit’ arises.2 5 During that period the imposture of the book’s first case, that of Perkin Warbeck, a false pretender to royal succession, comes about, not as in John Ford’s play or Mary Shelley’s novel about him, but primarily because his ‘family was of the better middle class’ in the ‘manufacturing and commercial’ ‘Low Countries [of] the fifteenth century’. Upon such a stage ‘growing youths [came] in touch at many points with commerce, industry and war’, fields of activity in which origins could be disguised and from which others might thus cast a ‘susceptible’ youth into the ‘part’ of a Plantagenet heir.2 6 Somewhat earlier in late medieval times, too, the legend of the ‘Wandering Jew’, a precursor figure for Dracula, had its source for Stoker in the ‘gossip of an Armenian lacquey’ conveyed to a ‘serving brother of the monastery’ of the Middle Eastern Bishop who later published the story as fact (p. 10). The Wandering Jew was and remains an impostor in the sense of being no more than a ‘marvellous [Eastern] story’ (p. 111) from the start. Yet the legend grew, a much recounterfeited counterfeit, from the thirteenth though to the sixteenth centuries by Stoker’s account, because these ‘were the ages of Jew-baiting in the king-

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doms of the West’ (p. 113) when many evil qualities were attributed to Jews as scapegoats, of whom the Wanderer was an exaggerated composite conflating ‘many old beliefs and fables’. Imposture for Stoker is usually a veiling of questionable middle-class affiliations or longings behind the appropriated features and symbols of other classes or a layering of fables on top of fables, with no more than stories at the base. Into the latter fears and prejudices are projected by the observers who employ and recast these convenient ‘others’. These processes as Stoker sees them, however bogus, are increasingly the means since the thirteenth century by which ‘selves’ and their ‘others’ have been fashioned by a great many bourgeois Europeans in both historical circumstances and in the crafting of fictions. All these different forms of imposture operate in and are cast upon Stoker’s Dracula, who anamorphoses into an immense variety of simulations precisely as he/it continues to enact middle-class selfconstruction and exists as a site for what is ‘thrown off’ in that process to produce an illusion of coherent identity. Indeed, as Stoker says in revealing the legend of the Wandering Jew as groundless, ‘It is the tendency’ of such ‘beliefs to group or nucleate themselves as though there were a conscious and intentional effort at selfprotection’ (p. 111), even when no single person or group makes the effort on their own. For Stoker there is a force in counterfeiting ideologies and collations of symbols that layers simulacra over earlier fabrications, thereby protecting the root imposture (the basic anomaly of a false truth) so that the ‘baiting’ (or othering) that is repeatedly directed at the often-recast construction is never seen for the falsehood and imposture that it is too. At this point we can more clearly say why Gothic ghosts of counterfeiting, theatrical ‘figures in a picture’, are unusually effective places for abjections of ‘thrown off’ and anomalous conditions, particularly when they acquire as many simulations as Stoker’s Dracula does and when these simulations harbour as many othered states of transition as Dracula is able to incarnate and mask. Such figures joining with and ‘nucleating’ others are driven by that very mechanism to cover and thus to ‘protect’ such multiple ‘foundations’ even as they work also to reveal them, albeit minimally, within that production of disguise after disguise. This layered concealment is even more active in Dracula’s continual mutation of him/itself in many different visages and locations, since all these ‘experiments’ (p. 302), as Van Helsing calls them, are designed to prevent detection

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To be sure, this symbolic abjection throughout the Gothic becomes the object of relatively orthodox religious, scientific and paternalistic containment. Stoker is justly (in)famous for presenting the technological searching out, the academic verbalisation and the ritualistic (and phallic) staking of vampires, aggressive women and old-style aristocrats by the Anglo-American/Continental alliance instructed and led by Van Helsing. But, as with the ‘causes’ for abjecting simulations recounted above, the effects that Stoker produces with his counterfeit Gothic are never ones of simple castigation and repression. His achievement in Dracula is a supremely Gothic one for yet another reason: he uses the Gothic novel’s endemic oscillation between theatricality and narrative to intensify its ideological hesitation between the conservative preservation of public social orders and the transgressive attraction in returns of the repressed. In Stoker’s book, for

example, the much discussed feeding of Mina from Dracula’s breast is presented twice, almost in succession. First there is its simulation in the diary of Dr Seward, His face was turned from us, but the instant we saw we all recognised the Count—in every way, even to the scar on his forehead. With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. (p. 282)

And then there is Mina’s own half-dreamy recollection (interpolated later in Seward’s journal) of this ‘nursing’ form of intercourse which also resembles fellatio: ‘You have aided in thwarting me; now you shall come to my call. When my brain says “Come!” to you, you shall cross land or sea to do my bidding; and to that end this!’ With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the—Oh, my God, my God! what have I done?’ (p. 288)

Although these simulations of Mina’s simulacrum narrative say much about the multiple interpretations of anything prompted by the different perspectives in Dracula, they also epitomise and strengthen the interaction of conflicting techniques and attitudes in the counterfeit Gothic. Seward’s own account is both scientifically exact (and therefore rationally removed to some degree) and extremely theatrical, describing the precise arrangement of the figures in the scene as though the Doctor’s words were a set of directions for theatrical ‘blocking’. Mina’s version is more the work of the narrative stenographer, the ‘lady journalist’, who sequentially recounts the words spoken and the actions performed—until the final shift when her description gives way to selfdramatising confession and abject religious repentance. In both cases, dispassionate narrative is pulled towards the theatricalising of the self and others, and distance is then only half-restored by the dramatised repulsion of a horror which cannot hide its own erotic interest in the spurting, even eating, of seminal fluids. If Seward’s version tilts towards the descriptive dispassion of a stage manager, Mina’s offers the immediate, almost pornographic involvement of the actress, yet only as she goes on to make a confession to the male transcriber of her words. Meanwhile, the repetition of the scene simultaneously increases its

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of the actual ‘weaknesses’ that he/it harbours in being so floating a signifier of perpetual dissolution. This cloaking of layering by layering itself is what allows Gothic simulations of simulacra to perform processes of abjection, to ‘throw down’ or ‘throw under’ features of themselves within the spectral veils upon veils out of which they are formed. They are thus especially apt locations into which their spectators and audience can ‘throw off’ the anomalies in themselves and their basic recollections, already complexes of dim memories and vague understandings recast in forms not their own. This personal incoherence, which includes the insecurities and ideological conflicts endemic to the European middle classes, can find few more suitable repositories for itself than a ghostly Gothic palimpsest. The manner of this figure’s layered construction is similar to how the bourgeois sense of self has developed historically and individually, yet the same figure is able to conceal that development behind supposedly antiquated and alien surfaces. Indeed, the more distorting simulations there are, as in Dracula’s case, the better the monster is for incarnating both cultural and human multiplicity and for covering it over as ‘stranger than strange’ at the same time. Finding anomalies at their own roots, the middle classes generate a greater and greater need to produce the self through multiple simulations they cannot control. Hence, they need a multilevelled Dracula as an ‘abject’ both to take all those horrors into a ‘darkness visible’, and to make all of them seem alien and nearly invisible in many simulations of simulacra of Gothic ghosts of the counterfeit.

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sensuous attraction and sado-masochistic horror on the one hand, and encourages greater judgemental distance from the ‘act’ on the other, even as the act is more and more physically described. Then, too, since each simulation of the scene is similar, but not exactly the same, and both views come coloured by emotions and cultural scripts, there is no single ‘more original version’, no ‘primal’ scene outside all perceivers, not even a master simulacrum at the base of these multiple renditions. Bram Stoker in Dracula has forcefully carried the Gothic ghost of the counterfeit to its more modern extension in the haunting explosion of simulations, including media simulations, with no single source. After all, this metamorphic progression of ideologies is one in which the very middle-class author, his world of the theatre, the development of the Gothic, and the economy of England were all very much caught by 1897. At the same time, though, Stoker’s exaggeration of long-standing Gothic tendencies intensifies and complicates the Gothic’s placement (and pulling) of the reader between hegemonic social dominations felt as both necessary and confining, and the disguised visualisation of what hegemony abjects or ‘throws off’, felt as both desirable and horrifically repellent. Stoker’s Dracula makes his many simulations of numerous abjected anomalies both objects of virulent, even excessively patriarchal repression and riveting allurements for desire, especially as desire moves from simulation to simulation much more than the public ideology of the bourgeois self generally allows. Even before Stoker advocated the censorship of sexually explicit language in a 1908 article and died in 1912 of what has since been revealed as a syphilis contracted through extramarital sex, his greatest Gothic novel narratively and dramatically placed both author and reader between the force of suppression, the denial of endless simulation in the face of it, and the half-tempting, half-horrifying force of constant self-transformation—the option half-secretly held out to middle-class longing by the movement across simulations on which desire now depends for self-definition.2 7 To some degree, the Gothic has always been about this conflicted position, for characters and readers, partly because the Walpolean Gothic ghost of the counterfeit looks both backward to ‘grounded’ absolutes and forward to the sheer exchange of signifying commodities. Stoker, most vividly in Dracula, brings that oscillation between the possible foundations of bourgeois identity to the edge of the twentieth century—and then into it in his later works. He

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does so first by extending the capacity of the Gothic fake for harbouring and concealing abjections and then by using it to make us both see and not see so many of the basic anomalies that we strive to deny, yet deeply desire, in our always theatrical quest for selfhood in a world of simulations.

Notes 1. David Punter, The Literature of Terror (1980), 2 vols (London: Longman, 1996) Vol. 2, p. 198. 2. Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1995) pp. 88, 101 and 89. 3. Ibid., pp. 105 and 88. 4. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 18; J.E. Hogle, ‘The Struggle for a Dichotomy: Abjection. in Jekyll and his Interpreters’, in W. Veeder and G. Hirsch, eds, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) pp. 161-207; Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) pp. 66-79 and 124-34. 5. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 10. 6. Kathleen L. Spencer, ‘Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis’, ELH, LIX (1992) 179-225, at pp. 209-14. 7. Jennifer Wicke, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media’, ELH, LIX (1992) 467-93, at p. 476. 8. Ibid., pp. 472 and 478. 9. Ibid., p. 488. 10. E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) p. 77. 11. Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘The Ghost of the Counterfeit in the Genesis of the Gothic’, in Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage, eds, Gothick Origins and Innovations (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994) pp. 23-33; and ‘Frankenstein as NeoGothic: From the Ghost of the Counterfeit to the Monster of Abjection’, in Tilottama Rajan and Julia Wright, eds, Reforming Genre in British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 12. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Structural Law of Value and the Order of Simulacra’, trans. Charles Levin, in John Fekete, ed., The Structural Allegory: Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) pp. 54-73 and 61-2. 13. See Roxana Stuart, Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19thCentury Stage (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994) pp. 190-3. 14. Baudrillard, ‘The Structural Law of Value . . .’, pp. 6273. 15. Andrea Henderson, ‘“An Embarrassing Subject”: Use Value and Exchange Value in Early Gothic Characterisation’, in M.A. Favret and N. J. Watson, eds, At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994) pp. 225-45.

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17. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maud Ellmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 62-3, italics mine. All subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in the text.

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18. William Veeder, ‘Foreword’, to M. Carter, ed., Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988) pp. ix-xviii and xii.

AN EXCERPT FROM AN EARLY REVIEW OF DRACULA

19. C. Leatherdale, The Origins of Dracula (London: William Kimber, 1987) pp. 237-9. 20. Stuart, Stage Blood, p. 106. 21. Such satires included Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore (1887). Ibid., pp. 164-78. 22. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, ed. W.S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) pp. 18-19. 23. Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 2 vols (London: William Heinemann, 1906) Vol. 2, pp. 11-15. Subsequent references are to this edition, and appear in the text. 24. See Phyllis Roth, Bram Stoker (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982) pp. 6-16. 25. Baudrillard, ‘The Structural Law of Value . . .’, pp. 61-2. 26. Bram Stoker, Famous Impostors (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1910) pp. 6-7. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear in the text. 27. Daniel Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker (London: Michael Joseph, 1975) pp. 207-15 and 233-5.

CLIVE LEATHERDALE (ESSAY DATE 2001) SOURCE: Leatherdale, Clive. “The Making of the Count.” In Dracula: The Novel and the Legend: A Study of Bram Stoker’s Gothic Masterpiece. 1985. Third edition, pp. 105-17. Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, United Kingdom: Desert Island Books, 2001. In the following essay, from a chapter of a third edition of a book first published in 1985, Leatherdale considers Stoker’s characterization of Count Dracula, noting Stoker’s sources in history, folklore, and aristocratic society. [Dracula’s] face was a strong—a very strong— aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor. Jonathan Harker’s Journal, Dracula 2:51-52.

Since Wilkie Collins left us we have had no tale of mystery so liberal in matter and so closely woven. But with the intricate plot, and the methods of the narrative, the resemblance to stories of the author of The Woman in White ceases; for the audacity and the horror of Dracula are Mr. Stoker’s own. A summary of the book would shock and disgust; but we must own that, though here and there in the course of the tale we hurried over things with repulsion, we read nearly the whole with rapt attention. It is something of a triumph for the writer that neither the improbability, nor the unnecessary number of hideous incidents recounted of the manvampire, are long foremost in the reader’s mind, but that the interest of the danger, of the complications, of the pursuit of the villain, of human skill and courage pitted against inhuman wrong and superhuman strength, rises always to the top. Keep Dracula out of the way of nervous children, certainly; but a grown reader, unless he be of unserviceably delicate stuff, will both shudder and enjoy. SOURCE: “Novel Notes: Dracula.” The Bookman 12, no. 71 (August 1897): 129.

Before attention turns to some of the deeper themes of Stoker’s most famous novel, it will be helpful to look more closely at the characters he created and the purposes they fulfil—beginning with Count Dracula himself. Stoker spared no effort to present his demonic vampire as dramatically as possible. Other, mortal, figures, he leaves under-sketched, relying on the reader’s imagination to fill in the flesh on the bones he provides, but Dracula is painted with enormous attention to detail. After the first four chapters he is ‘offstage’ for most of the rest of the novel,1 yet not for a moment is the reader allowed to forget the Count’s awesome presence. Visually, aside from his facial features (described above), Dracula is clean-shaven save for

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16. Baudrillard, ‘The Structural Law of Value . . .’, p. 65.

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a long white moustache, and dressed without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He is a tall, old man. He could not have been uncommonly tall, however, for Dracula makes off wearing Harker’s clothes—which presumably fit satisfactorily—and Harker, himself, when later described by others invites no comment as to his size. Moreover, the accepted notion of Dracula’s ever-present black cloak would seem to be an invention of the cinema. Only once is such a garment mentioned (3:75) and the more usual description ‘clad in black from head to foot’ (2:48) would hardly be appropriate to a single item of clothing. Much has been made of the only surviving description of Vlad the Impaler: He was not very tall but very stocky and strong with a cold and terrible appearance, a strong and aquiline nose, swollen nostrils, a thin and reddish face, in which the very long eye lashes framed large wide-open green eyes; the bushy black eye brows made them appear threatening. His face and chin were shaven, but for a moustache. The swollen temples increased the bulk of his head. A bull’s neck connected his head [to the body] from which black curly locks hung on his wide shouldered person.2

There is little enough here by way of similarity—other than standard physiognomic indicators of nature’s villains—even if one overlooks the improbability of Stoker ever having heard of Vlad the Impaler. Even if he had, it is beyond the bounds of plausibility to suggest that Stoker somehow stumbled upon this description. As a fictional character, Count Dracula is an alloy: he combines in his persona certain qualities taken from Irving and perhaps others of his acquaintance; the tradition of the literary vampire descended from Lord Ruthven and Sir Francis Varney; the great myths of Romantic literature from which Stoker liberally borrowed; the wealth of Continental folklore to plant the novel firmly back in its roots; as well as an original flourish by Stoker to turn his Count into a master magician—as we shall see. Let’s consider these components in turn, beginning with real-life inputs into the Count. Henry Irving is the most obvious. Consider this description of the great actor: ‘a tall, spare man . . . a peculiarly striking face, long grey hair thrown carelessly back behind the ears, clean shaven features remarkable for their delicate refinement, united with the suggestion of virile force [and] rather aquiline nose’.3 Against this, Stoker also noted Irving’s ‘fine’ hands and

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‘sweetness’ of face,4 inappropriate surely for the embodiment of evil. Belford’s biography of Stoker carries Irving’s significance to implausible lengths, but that significance can be measured in different ways—Irving’s supposed physical likeness to the Count, his psychological domination of Stoker, and his magnetic stage presence. Irving was well used to playing Mephistopheles and his kind, as forcefully as any actor ever had. Many have speculated that Stoker intended Dracula to enjoy success on the stage as well as on the page, with Irving in the title role. Certainly, the novel is awash with theatrical detail, and is easy to adapt so that characters might enter stage right and exit stage left. But Irving could never have been envisaged as the Count, for the simple reason that Dracula has such a tiny part, being virtually written out of the script after the first act (in Transylvania). Irving’s ego would never have tolerated that! Other critics have suggested Franz Liszt and Walt Whitman as likely models, based on little more than that in old age they both had long white hair. Henry Morton Stanley, the explorer, has been linked on account of his looking ‘more like a dead man than a living one’, according to Stoker, who then describes Dracula’s icy hand as ‘more like the hand of a dead than a living man’.5 Richard Burton and Lord Tennyson both earned mention in Stoker’s Reminiscences for their pointed canine teeth. Being a literary vampire, Dracula conforms to the requirement of belonging to the ranks of nobility. He boasts of having a distinguished lineage, possessing in his veins the blood of Attila the Hun. In some respects, Dracula’s behaviour is what one might expect of the conventional literary aristocrat. He exudes charm of manner; he is contemptuous of the common man; and he speaks several languages—German excellently, and more impressive English than the Dutch professor, Van Helsing. At intervals, Stoker puts in little touches, which increase Dracula’s sense of refinement. The Count is seen wearing white kid gloves and a straw hat, and he carries a brush for his clothes and a brush and comb for his hair. But on other levels he does not act like a nobleman at all. He lacks the typical aristocrat’s high standard of living and conspicuous over-indulgence. He does not eat or drink to excess, nor does he pursue women (as normally understood). His lifestyle does not revolve around fashionable clothes, the theatre, or hunting; he does not hold receptions or build stately homes. He actually chooses to live in a Gothic ruin. Not even his violent pastimes

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By way of character, Dracula conveys more than a vague presence of malice. Stoker endows him with a personality, of sorts. He has a mannerism of tugging his moustache during animated discourses on his family history—the only subject touched on in the book capable of making him pleasantly excitable (3:66). He exhibits a full range of powerful emotions: hate, passion, anger, disdain, baffled malignity, vanity. He is mentally bright, is fearless, remorseless, and cunning—not averse to executing a strategic retreat in the face of disadvantageous odds, as the handbooks on guerrilla warfare dictate. Stoker displays his ignorance of Vlad the Impaler when describing Dracula’s pre-vampire life, for when speaking of his own past the Count naturally does not see himself as a merciless psychopath, but as a stern, principled statesman. And Van Helsing concedes: ‘he was in life a most wonderful man. Soldier, statesman, and alchemist . . .’ (23:413-14). In this, of course, Dracula resembles Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, whose portrayal by Irving left such a deep impression on Stoker. Overall, legal-minded Harker is so impressed by his host’s great foresight and intellectual prowess that he utters the book’s most memorable understatement: Dracula, if he had chosen, ‘would have made a formidable solicitor’ (3:71). This intelligence and urbanity, while allowing Dracula to be firmly located within the tradition of the literary vampire, only partly accounts for his all-pervading menace. He also partakes of the characteristics of the folkoric vampire. Stoker is keen to highlight the animalistic quality of his master-vampire, taking full advantage of the folkloric connection between vampires and werewolves. Besides having pointed ears and protruding canine teeth, Dracula possesses coarse, broad hands with squat fingers—as werewolves are described. His palms, too, are hairy and the nails cut to a sharp point. His eyes glow red. The stench which clings to his places of rest, and which produces a feeling of nausea to those in proximity, is the stench of excrement, of all the ills of mortality, of death, of arrested decay—augmented, when his thirst has been slaked, by the sicklysweet, acrid smell of blood. Even his persona is animalistic: anti-rational, childlike, instinctive.

His vitality is shown as feral, and his cunning is that of an animal that resorts to swift physical action to counter any errors of judgment. Dracula enjoys the gymnastic abilities of reptiles, animals, and birds. He can climb faceforemost down a castle wall, gripping the vertical surface with toes and fingers—though he does not fear death should he fall, for he is immune to the natural laws of mortality. These wall-descending activities are described as lizard-like (3:75). Later, Dracula’s agility is expressed as ‘panther-like’; he has a ‘snarl’ on his face; and he shows ‘lion-like disdain’ (23:418-19). His empathy with the animal world is demonstrated by his control over lower forms of life: rats, bats and wolves. Dracula is obedient to the vampire specifications of European folklore. Being undead, his flesh is icy to the touch; he casts no reflection in the mirror, and when standing in front of flames does not obstruct a view of them. He is unable to impose his presence on a victim at the time of first contact, unless his prey shows complicity in some form. This is evident in Harker’s stepping over the threshold at Castle Dracula (2:48), and in the Count’s later visits to Lucy and Renfield (21:383). Dracula possesses enormous physical strength and speed of movement; his eyes can induce hypnotic effects; and with selective victims he is capable of psychic transfer. Dracula can direct the elements around him, such as creating a puff of wind. He can see in the dark and vaporise himself at will. He is able to change into a dog, wolf, or bat; he can dematerialise to be transported as mist; and he can take shape from phosphorescent specks riding on moonbeams—whose whirring motions weaken powers of resistance. He is restricted by the presence of running water, being unable to cross it except at the slack or flood of the tide, unless with manual assistance. He sleeps and wakes with the precision of clockwork—dawn and dusk being calculated to the second. While sleeping, Dracula appears to be dead, eyes open with no pulse or respiratory motion. All the while he is ‘conscious’ of activity around him, although searching hands cannot ‘wake’ him (4:100). Crucially, although Dracula can theoretically be kept at bay by garlic and other pagan safeguards (though in practice these uniformly fail), he is essentially a vampire of the Christian mould. In other words he is a representative/client/ manifestation of the devil (in London he aptly assumes the alias ‘Count de Ville’ (20:375). He must therefore be shown to be vulnerable to Christian

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are undertaken purely for pleasure.6 Most unusual of all, for a thriving aristocrat, is the absence of servants. Dracula is not averse to performing all the necessary menial tasks—driving the calèche, preparing meals, and even making beds—to prevent Harker, his guest, from deducing that he employs no domestic staff.

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icons and imagery. The crucifix—arch-symbol of the Christian faith—makes him recoil and cower, and the application of holy wafer sterilises his places of rest.7 But Stoker did not wish to restrict his vampireking within the parameters prescribed by folklore. Dracula would have to be special, both in his attributes and in his manner of becoming a vampire. Several of Dracula’s qualities differentiate him from more common varieties of his ilk, for example Stoker’s insistence that Dracula can sleep only in consecrated earth: ‘in soil barren of holy memories [he] cannot rest’ (18:338). This requirement would seem to possess neither folkloric nor historic antecedent.8 According to Orthodox superstition, the undead, if excommunicated, were unable to rest in hallowed soil. So what were Stoker’s motives? Maybe he intended Dracula’s ‘sacrilege’ to heighten the reader’s sense of outrage. Stoker’s innovation makes the Count’s lairs harder to locate, for he is ‘sleeping’ deceitfully among God’s true dead. Another example of Dracula’s uniqueness is his immunity to the rays of the sun. The vampire of superstition is the quintessential apparition of night; it being believed that sunlight could pass through, or harm, sensitive tissue. Dracula, however, cannot be destroyed by direct sunlight as film versions would have us believe. That would make him too vulnerable. Once he is strong and vigorous from the consumption of fresh blood, he is permitted in the novel to wander the streets of London quite naturally. Dracula’s only handicap is that his vampire powers become neutralised during daylight, when he reverts, to all intents, to being a mere mortal. He must therefore take care that at the moment of sunrise he is in the place and form that he wishes to be for the coming day. Otherwise he must await the precise moment of noon or sunset to effect the desired transference (22:401). Most important, Stoker could not allow his arch-fiend to have become a vampire by any of the standard procedures of folklore, for all imply falling victim in some manner. Count Dracula can be a victim of nobody and nothing. If he is a vampire, it must have been through his choice and his power. He was neither bitten whilst alive by another undead, nor was he sentenced to a vampiric punishment for any of the appropriate transgressions. In his human life, Count Dracula was an alchemist and magician. He had studied the secrets of the black arts and other aspects of devilry when enrolled as a student at the Scholomance (18:337; 23:414)—a mythical academy situ-

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ated high in the Carpathian Mountains, overlooking the town of Sibiu (known in Saxon as Hermannstadt).9 The patron of the academy is the devil himself, who instructs on the dark secrets of nature: thunder and lightning, the language of animals, magical spells. Those who studied natural phenomena were assumed to be capable of mastering them. Legend has it that the Scholomance would admit students ten at a time. Upon acquisition of the devilish insight, nine would return to their everyday lives, leaving the tenth to be taken up by the devil as group payment. He would be mounted on an ismejeu (dragon—a merging of Dracula’s devil/dragon associations) and recruited as the devil’s aide-de-camp.1 0 Needless to say, Dracula was the tenth student, whose arcane wisdom is demonstrated by Stoker early in the novel. The Count inspects mysterious blue flames flickering in the forest, which, according to folklore, conceal treasure and gold. Stoker does not permit Dracula’s transition from man to vampire to be left to the reader’s imagination. Such were the resources of Dracula’s brain that, together with the magical powers gleaned from the Scholomance, his mental faculties survived physical death (23:414). But they did not survive intact. He paid the price of having much of his memory destroyed, and has to engage in the re-learning process almost in the manner of an infant. Van Helsing, the guru of Dracula’s adversaries, is an exponent of the scientific method of ‘experimentation’. He appreciates the Count’s emerging mental powers because he, Van Helsing, also employs scientific method, reaching out to acquire knowledge slowly but surely, one step at a time. Van Helsing’s fears are twofold: that Dracula has acquired immortality through forging a special, yet undisclosed relationship with the devil; and that he has centuries ahead of him to sharpen his cunning and his intellect. Dracula undergoes a dramatic shift in power during the course of the novel. At the outset he appears as a cautious old man, not yet sure of the powers at his command. Despite his longevity, he is in the position of a fledgling bird about to leave the nest and fly for the first time. He has not yet employed the full range of vampire powers which are about to be unleashed. Count Dracula is physically dead. But if he is, as it were, living in death, then it might be asked whether he is more dead than alive, or more alive than dead. If he is really dead, then why does he never speak of life beyond the grave, or communicate its wonders or its terrors? The only time Dracula reflects on his past is when recalling his

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To reinforce Dracula’s grasp of black magic, Stoker invests the Count’s native Transylvania with suitably mysterious rocks and waters. It might easily be a lost world inhabited by dinosaurs, for it is a land full of strangeness of the geologic and chemical world. There are deep caverns and fissures that reach none know whither. There have been volcanoes, some of whose openings still send out waters of strange properties, and gases that kill or make to [sic] vivify. Doubtless there is something magnetic or electric in some of these combinations of occult forces which work for physical life in strange way [sic]. (24:436)1 1

These gases are discovered at first hand by Van Helsing when he sniffs sulphurous fumes inside the chapel of Castle Dracula (27:499). Stoker’s Transylvania, in other words is not only a land beyond the forest, it is also a land beyond scientific understanding—a netherworld—where the known laws of nature are suspended. It is a fitting haunt for an agent of diabolism. Awareness of Dracula’s vampire origins leads to the next, vital, question—his motives. He is no zombie-like automaton driven solely by a blind lust for blood. The relationship between Dracula and blood is much more subtle. For one thing, its consumption actually alters his appearance. Absorption of blood changes him from an old, into a younger, stronger man with dark, not white, hair. In just three days between ‘meals’ his hair reverts to showing white streaks (11:216).

not his blood supply. Still more illuminating is Dracula’s trivial interest in Jonathan Harker, who serves as his estate agent and English language tutor, not his provider of nourishment. When Harker cuts himself shaving, Dracula only momentarily loses control of himself. This suggests that the sight of blood induces in him a love-hate ambivalence, not dissimilar to the reactions stimulated in the alcoholic by the prospect of liquor. Dracula’s strategic, as opposed to his biological, interest in blood is to ensnare female victims. These, in turn, will ensnare their menfolk, so that his vampire empire enlarges evermore through incestuous expansion. Here, Stoker, acknowledges the folkloric requirement that vampires always seek their nearest and dearest: ‘The holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks’ (22:408). Dracula is aware of how he can turn this to advantage: ‘Your girls that you all love are mine already: and through them you and others shall yet be mine—my creatures, to do my bidding, and to be my jackals when I want to feed’ (23:421). In no instance does he destroy the lives of his victims for pleasure, but always in order to make use of them. As bloodlessness is not lifethreatening to Dracula, his search must stem from a deeper, psychological drive. Dracula tells an unsuspecting Harker of his ambitions: ‘I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is’ (2:55).

Dracula is not out to bite the neck of every victim who comes his way. He does not patrol nightly in search of liquid nourishment. Rather, his is the addiction of the junkie or the alcoholic. Dracula will not die if no blood is available, any more than will the alcoholic if deprived of spirits. In each case just one substance supplies vigour, energy. It is not that Dracula likes drinking blood. He needs blood—not for life (with which he is blessed/cursed) but for power. It functions as a stimulant.

This confession is revealing. In the Europe of the 1890s Dracula has become outdated.1 3 Transylvania is depicted as a peasant land in decline, unfitting as the continued habitat for a proud descendant of Attila. Admittedly, it is Dracula’s blood-sucking over the centuries which is partly responsible for the enfeeblement of his native land, for its depleted population flout his authority by immunising themselves with garlic and crosses. He feels cheated and deprived. No longer can he wage war against invading Turks: instead he is reduced to hunting defenceless children. In the meantime, Britain has become the hub of Western industrialism. By switching his arena and his methods of operation, Dracula sees new opportunities to be exploited.

The only exception is when his taking of blood is tactical. Dracula’s blood-banks are always female.1 2 His szgany (gypsy) henchmen, who do his earthly bidding, do not go in fear of his teeth. Renfield, similarly, becomes a servant of Dracula,

His objective is therefore to establish a contemporary vampire empire in Britain. In this he will be aided by British laws and customs. The rational West will not suspect him. Its contempt for Eastern superstitions will leave him free; its

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martial exploits during his pre-vampire existence. He has nothing to say about the four hundred years since he signed up with the devil. It would appear that his only aspect that is dead is his body, for his mind has never travelled beyond the experiences of this earth.

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democratic customs will enable him to flourish undetected; and its legal principle of presumption of innocence will work to his devious advantage. Jails cannot hold vampires. British society will unconsciously provide both his sheath and his armour, and ‘the doubting of wise men would be his greatest strength’ (24:438). Notwithstanding, Dracula’s motives contain a more personal element. When narrowly escaping ambush in London he reveals his burning grievance: ‘My revenge has just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side’ (23:421). Revenge? Revenge for what? Stoker seems to be harking back to the pages of Wilkinson, which stated that ‘Dracula’ was driven back to Wallachia and defeated by the Turks. If by the 1890s Count Dracula can no longer take revenge against the Turks, a fifteenth century superpower, he could at least direct it against the modern superpower. Britain must pay for the crimes of the Ottomans, perhaps by coming to symbolise the ingratitude and treachery of Christian Europe—though when the time comes for the Count to vent his anger the identity of his enemies is suitably vague (21:396). This desire for revenge, however, is not totally persuasive. Like the Wandering Jew, Dracula is doomed to wander the earth for eternity unless his heart be pierced. The Count is bored. It is sport he craves. He toys with his adversaries, taunting them, almost defying them to pit their puny wits against him. Despite this range of motives, it is not Stoker’s aim to elicit sympathy for Dracula, or reveal him a victim as much as a victimiser. Stoker portrays him as incarnate evil, without any redeeming features, someone deserving not the least vestige of sympathy. Presumably, Stoker’s intention was that the reader breathes a sigh of relief when Dracula meets his doom. But can we be so sure? Clearly his pursuers think they have destroyed Dracula, and continue to think so several years afterwards. But have they? This is how Mina describes that climactic moment: As I looked, the eyes [of Dracula] saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph. But, on the instant, came the sweep and the flash of Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw it sheer through the throat; whilst at the same moment Mr Morris’s bowie knife plunged in the heart . . . the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight . . . in that moment of dissolution there was in the face a look of peace such as I never could have imagined might have rested there. (27:509)

410

This might seem conclusive enough, until it is recalled that Van Helsing had earlier given precise instructions on how to be rid of the vampire. Folklore, too, insists on ritualistic observation of prescribed rites. These are not followed in the case of Dracula, who is despatched as if he were human, with cold steel. No wooden stake is used; his head is not detached from the body; and no corpse remains to be properly treated or devoured by flames. Initially it seems that Dracula’s look of ‘triumph’ is premature, but could it be the attackers’ sense of satisfaction that is misplaced? Stoker had already informed his readers that vampires have the power of dematerialisation and can transform themselves into specks of dust. Conceivably, then, the Count dematerialised just in time. Realising his narrow escape he prefers to lay low, until such time as Stoker resurrects him in a sequel. Alternatively, Stoker might have felt uncomfortable at the homoerotic notion of Dracula being phallically ‘staked’ by men and—following the example of the female vampires—writhing and screeching in his orgasmic death-throes. This could have been avoided if Mina . . . had staked Dracula. But while retaining the heterosexual pattern, it would still have left Stoker the problem of depicting the male orgasm. Jonathan Harker . . . would also be denied his cherished revenge, and whatever Mina’s other qualities the idea of her hammering a three-foot stake into Dracula would have stretched credibility. It would also, of course, have wrecked the sexual focus on the stakephallus. One imagines that Stoker thought long and hard about who would destroy Dracula, and how, but never quite came up with a satisfactory answer.

Notes 1. The Count, in fact, has only two speaking parts once he arrives in England. Stoker’s final decision to have Dracula ‘on view’ as little as possible appears, from his notes, to have been reached in a late draft. Earlier drafts show Dracula onstage more frequently. 2. Nicholas Modrussa, in Radu Florescu and Raymond T McNally, Dracula: A Biography, p.50. 3. Newspaper report from New York Tribune, November 1883, reprinted in Austin Brereton, The Life of Henry Irving, Vol 2, p.14. 4. Reminiscences, 1:234 and 1:88. For a detailed examination of all the inputs into Count Dracula see Elizabeth Miller, Dracula: Sense & Nonsense, Chapter 1. 5. Reminiscences, 1:370; Belford, p.238. 6. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, pp.90-91.

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8. Leonard Wolf, A Dream of Dracula, p.264. 9. Most of Stoker’s information on the Scholomance came from Emily Gerard’s ‘Transylvanian Superstitions’. 10. Gerard, op. cit. 11. Here again, Stoker may have consulted the works of Emily Gerard, The Land Beyond the Forest and The Waters of Hercules. 12. A possible exception is Dracula’s ‘attacks’ on the crew of the Demeter. Whether he merely kills them, or kills them for their blood, or they throw themselves overboard in terror, is not made clear. 13. See Thomas P Walsh, ‘Dracula: Logos and Myth’, p.230.

Robert E Dowse and David Palmer, “‘Dracula”: the Book of Blood’, The Listener, 7 March 1963. James Drummond, ‘Bram Stoker’s Cruden Bay’, Scots Magazine, April 1976. ———, ‘Dracula’s Castle’, The Scotsman, 26 June 1976. ———, ‘The Mistletoe and the Oak’, Scots Magazine, October 1977. ———, ‘The Scottish Play’, The Scottish Review, 23 August 1981. Paul Dukes, ‘Dracula: Fact, Legend and Fiction’, History Today 32, July 1982. Ernest Fontana, ‘Lombroso’s Criminal Man and Stoker’s Dracula’, Victorian Newsletter, 66, 1984. Christopher Frayling, ‘Vampyres’, London Magazine, 14:2, June-July 1974. Carrol L Fry, ‘Fictional Conventions and Sexuality in Dracula’, Victorian Newsletter 42, 1972.

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7. Stoker’s working notes show that Dracula was meant to register fear only when presented with relics older than himself.

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Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici.

Rev Albert Réville DD, The Devil: His Origin, Greatness and Decadence, Williams and Norgate (London, 1871).

Andrew F Crosse, Round About the Carpathians, Blackwood (London, 1878).

F C and J Rivington, The Theory of Dreams, (2 Vols), 62 St Paul’s Churchyard (London, 1808).

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Robert H Scott MA FRS, Secretary of the Meterological Office, Fishery Barometer Manual, HMSO (London, 1887). William Wilkinson, Late British Consul Resident at Bukorest, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia: with various Political Observations Relating to Them, Longman, Hurst (London 1820).

JOSEPH VALENTE (ESSAY DATE 2002) SOURCE: Valente, Joseph. “Beyond Blood: Defeating the Inner Vampire.” In Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood, pp. 121-43. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. In the following essay, Valente demonstrates how Stoker uses characters to comment on and illuminate political and cultural experiences from an Irish perspective in Dracula.

If Seward errs, and errs fatally, in ascribing Renfield’s first startling transformation entirely to the civilizing female influence of Mina Harker, it is nonetheless true that the inmate and the helpmate possess a special bond in which the Victorian construction of her gender importantly factors. Just as Renfield would continue to enjoy unimpeachable membership in the general society of Little England were it not for his perceived disability—his intermittent mania and zoophagy—so ‘Mina would continue to enjoy unqualified membership in the inner councils of Little England were it not for her perceived disability—her feminine delicacy or weakness. The personal rapport the two display stems in fact from their shared status as wards of Little England, figures of a certain social marginality, condescension, and confinement. Stoker dramatizes this parallel by way of tendentious narrative counterpoint. First, Seward abruptly curtails Mina’s interview with Renfield—ignoring the hints that his patient telegraphs concerning her imminent peril—in order to “meet Van Helsing at the station” (D 207), where the two immediately conspire to exclude Mina from all future deliberations. In successive scenes, then, Renfield is effectively silenced on the subject of Dracula, and Mina is relegated to silence on the subject of Dracula. All of this might be written off as mere coincidence had Stoker not elected to reinscribe the contiguity immediately in reverse order. Van Helsing and Seward convene a war room meeting at the end of which Mina is debarred, for the duration, from further access to the tactical plans of her intimates (“‘you no more must question’”; 214). She is then told, like a child, “‘to go to bed’” (214), where she records the entire incident in her

diary. Even as she makes the entry, the men embark for their group interrogation of Renfield, on which occasion Seward will finally reject his appeal for relief and, once again, turn a deaf ear to his inklings of impending disaster for all. In simultaneous scenes, then, Renfield is locked away with his dangerous knowledge and Mina is imprisoned in her dangerous ignorance. And, what is more, as we learn from Mina’s diary and Dracula’s subsequent pronouncements, even as the men pursue their interrogation of Renfield, Dracula makes his first in a series of visits to a sleeping Mina to have her “veins appease [his] thirst” (251): I remember hearing . . . a lot of queer sounds, like praying on a very tumultuous scale, from Mr. Renfield’s room, which is somewhere under this. And then there was silence over everything. . . . Not a thing seemed to be stirring, but all to be grim and fixed as death or fate; so that a thin streak of white mist, that crept with almost imperceptible slowness across the grass towards the house, seemed to have a sentience and a vitality of its own. . . . The mist was spreading, and was now close up to the house, so that I could see it lying thick against the wall, as though it were stealing up to the windows. The poor man was more loud than ever, and though I could not distinguish a word he said, I could in some way recognize in his tones some passionate entreaty on his part. Then there was the sound of a struggle, and I knew that the attendants were dealing with him. I was so frightened that I crept into bed. . . . I was not then a bit sleepy . . . but I must have fallen asleep. . . . The mist grew thicker and thicker. . . . The last conscious effort which imagination made was to show me a livid white face bending over me out of the mist. (226-28)

The upshot, then, of the men’s disposition of their respective wards is that both find themselves abandoned to Dracula’s abuse, and the climactic effects of this practice are likewise rendered emphatically in adjacent and complementary scenes. Hearing that an “accident” has befallen Renfield, the two physicians rush to his side, only to find him badly mutilated by the vampiric assault. As he languishes toward death, Renfield reveals that he has indeed seen Mina’s “sweet face again” (207), with the disastrous consequences he had dimly bruited: “When Mrs. Harker came in to see me this afternoon she wasn’t the same; it was like tea after the teapot had been watered. . . . It made me mad to know that he had been taking the life out of her” (245). Although the gravely ill Renfield reports fighting with his master on Mina’s behalf—“‘I didn’t mean for him to take any more of her life’” (246)—the doctors abruptly forsake him, in clear violation of their Hippocratic

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F K Robinson, A Whitby Glossary, 1876.

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oath, and barge off to the Harkers’ bedroom, where they discover a matching spectacle of vampiric depredation. This is yet another instance of the narrative syntax secreting implications at variance with and more telling than the narrative point of view controlled by the individual protagonists would seem to admit. Renfield and Mina are paired as inlets for the great spectral stranger because both, notwithstanding the wide differences in their present stations, have been alienated to some degree from their community and consigned to a shadowy corner of their world. It is within the terms of this social correlation, furthermore, that those wide differences acquire a special symbolic and thematic significance. Renfield occupies a particularly abject and pathological social margin, which was attracting increasingly intense concern as the nineteenth century drew to a close: a species of masculine breakdown involving a cluster of nervous disorders classified and treated medically, but identified with a kind of moral incontinence.1 In the case of Renfield, vampiric inhabitation serves as a Gothic trope of this emasculating malaise, indexing its subversion of both individual integrity and, given the male’s presumptive social leadership, the collective sovereignty of the modern ethnos or nation. As discussed earlier, the prevailing code of “muscular” manliness took austere self-reliance and rigid self-containment as its defining norm, and so made the voluptuous self-surrender figured in vampiric seduction both a powerful temptation, as Harker and Van Helsing illustrate, and a synonym of male ruin. Thus constituted in an allergic relation to otherness, the gender ideal of Victorian masculinity tends not only to encourage but also to encode the sort of defensive xenophobic racial mentality that Dracula both arouses and espouses. Renfield clearly accepts, even as he defaults upon, this masculine standard. He acts out his vampiric inhabitation, his failure of boundary maintenance, by orally incorporating an evolutionary chain of other creatures, in an attempt to enlarge his own vital capacity. In other words, his express allegiance to Dracula centers on an identification with his hypermasculine mastery, which Renfield tries to assert on his own behalf. By the same token, when he ultimately endeavors to break with Dracula, he struggles to couch his appeals and admonitions to Seward in the idiom of bourgeois manliness, of which his chivalric protectiveness toward Mina is perhaps the most assured exhibition. For that very reason, however, his communication with the men of Little England

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does more to reinforce than to alter the existing social dynamic. He desperately wishes to demonstrate how akin to them he is, down to justifying their tribalistic code of values, which unfortunately mandates his own exclusion. His warnings can only confirm the vampire warriors in a mentality that (through the self-reflexive logic of the Gothic fantasy) is at the root of the villainy they confront. Mina, by contrast, occupies a minoritized and yet idealized social margin, that of properly feminine fragility, dependency, non-self-sufficiency, heteronomy in sum, which came to attract increasingly intense cultural investments with the fin de siècle emergence of its antitype, the New Woman. Insofar as the traditional “womanly woman,” which Mina consents to play at this juncture, exists primarily to be protected and thus to confer legitimacy and purpose upon an anxious British patriarchy, the infiltration of Mina’s body and spirit by Dracula signifies utter catastrophe, the evisceration not just of her essential role within the hegemonic cultural script but of her essential role in underwriting the script itself. But insofar as that essential role is predicated upon women’s socially mandated heteronomy, vampiric inhabitation is uncannily continuous with her interpellation to the enshrined “feminine” virtues of unselfishness, submissiveness, otherdirectedness. Indeed, the long-established, intuitively obvious identification of vampiric bloodsucking with maternal breast-suckling speaks precisely to this continuity.2 For beyond the physical acts themselves, this identification, however parodic, points to a close psychosocial analogy between the doppelgänger transaction of vampirism and the dyadic pre-Oedipal engrossment of mother and child, each of which involves a mode of connectivity that tends to confound or dissolve the borders of selfhood so prized by patriarchal liberalism. Since the maternal care and nurture crystallized in the act of nursing was deemed to be at once the highest and the most natural office of a woman, the gold standard of her womanliness, any supposed compromise of her ego boundaries would register less as a default on the phallic law of assured self-ownership than as compliance with a conflicting imperative promoted by that very same law as its necessary supplement: a sentimental adhesiveness or connectivity that ensures species survival in both its animal and social dimensions. More than an alternative ethics, this conventionally “feminine” supplement represents an ethics of alterity—an openness toward, respon-

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Helen Chandler as Mina Seward, and Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula, in Tod Browning’s 1931 film adaptation of Dracula.

siveness to, solicitude for, and self-sacrificing identification with others—that crucially informed the Victorian sense of the family home, women’s domestic preserve, as a “haven in a heartless world.” Constituted in a kind of rudimentary and limited xenophilia, normative femininity could serve Stoker as a model of the ethnic ideal of domestic colonialism that he wished to advance. We should not be surprised, therefore, to find him relying strongly upon this gender typology—not, as has often been assumed, to confine his women within traditional stereotypes (Mina’s masculine intellect, after all, is repeatedly noted)—but rather to vindicate the ethical disposition traditionally associated with womanliness in general and maternity specifically.3 Working from this conceptual base, Stoker develops and contextualizes Mina’s vampiric inhabitation so that it can signify beyond parodic catastrophe to redemptive possibility, with Mina in the role of transformative agent. To showcase the alembic potential of Mina’s seemingly conventional ethos, Stoker revisits the dream logic of metalepsis with a (gendered) difference. As the phantasmatic racial/racist other,

Dracula personifies and elicits the violent abrogation of social connectivity already implicit in the blood consciousness of Little England; and, as a result, the men’s tactics against the Count tend to facilitate his campaign of incorporation and recruitment. However, as a phantasmatic transfusion of blood identity, at once compulsory and desirable, the vampiric exchange itself, divorced from its telos of conversion, both objectifies and intensifies the sense of radical social communion already implicit in Mina Harker’s extraordinarily maternal-being-in-the-world; and, as a result, her repeated vampings ultimately redound to the detriment and even the destruction of Dracula and his campaign. Stoker underlines the significance of this process/project divide in the respective fates assigned his differently minded female protagonists. Lucy Westenra, who exhibited no particular maternal bent in life, is fully converted to nosferatu. In this condition, she reappears as an archetype of the evil mother: she waylays little children, feeds upon instead of feeding them, and then casts them callously aside. Mina Harker, by contrast,

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remains suspended within the dynamics of vampiric transfusion, neither incorporated in nor disentangled from Dracula. And in this condition, she extends to new breadths and depths an already capacious maternal sympathy, which moves her to comfort most of the other characters in their hour of need. It is worthy of notice, moreover, that Mina’s long record of motherly service bears a close and unbroken affiliation with vampirism from the start. Her first maternal display has her wandering into the night to retrieve the sleepwalking Lucy Westenra, her erstwhile student and charge, from the suicide seat to which Dracula has lured her for his nightly repast. In an arresting proleptic reversal of Lucy’s performance as the “Bloofer Lady,” Mina leads her friend home, like a lost child, taking special care to protect both “her health” and her “reputation” (88-89). Her second such display occurs in a Budapest hospital, where she begins her marriage by “attend[ing] to her husband” (101) as he suffers the effects of his doppelgänger encounter with Dracula. Almost a month later, she reports, “Jonathan wants looking after still. . . . Even now he sometimes starts out of his sleep in a sudden way and awakes all trembling until I can coax him back to his usual placidity” (141). For Mina, it would seem, the vampire is a wishfulfilling nightmare, compelling her to satisfy her penchant for profound fellow feeling, which tends to seize upon each occasion of emotional attachment as a site of maternal care and concern. The third conspicuous exercise of Mina’s prompt motherly instinct involves comforting Arthur Holmwood in his “hysterical” grief over the ruination of his fiancée by Dracula. A full citation of this well-known episode is in order: He grew quite hysterical, and raising his open hands, beat his palms together in a perfect agony of grief. . . . I felt an infinite pity for him, and opened my arms unthinkingly. With a sob he layed his head on my shoulder, and cried like a wearied child, whilst he shook with emotion. We women have something of the mother in us that makes us rise above smaller matters when the mother-spirit is invoked; I felt this big, sorrowing man’s head resting on me, as though it were that of the baby that some day may lie on my bosom, and I stroked his hair as though he were my own child. I never thought at the time how strange it all was. (203)

This passage has been rightly deemed crucial for making explicit the centrality of the maternal ideal to Mina’s self-image, to the evolving social economy of Little England, and, by extension, to

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Stoker’s sexual politics. But it is equally crucial for our purposes because in the same stroke it unfolds a visual and conceptual rhyme between the mother-child dyad and the vampiric couple. Mina’s reflexive accommodation of Arthur’s importunate hunger for comfort (“opened my arms unthinkingly”) recalls the unconscious gesture of permission or consent that is necessary for the vampire to press his suit. The bodily attitude of the pair, Arthur poised on her “shoulder,” his face presumably turned toward her neck, evokes a classic vampire tableau, while Mina’s simile displacing the action from her shoulder to her “bosom” nudges the reader to draw the bloodsucking/ breast-suckling parallel. Finally, Mina’s sense of being called outside of herself by the invocation of the “mother-spirit” extends the analogy to vampirism from one of physical posture and activity to one of spectral visitation and inhabitation. With all of this in mind, her reflection, “I never thought at the time how strange it all was,” unwittingly references the scene’s uncanny resemblance to and reversal of the parody of motherhood in vampirism. A still stranger and more decisive reversal is in the offing. During the above interlude, a subtle turnabout of roles transpires. As the pressure of the man-child/vampire’s demand for consolation subsides, the mother/host comes to be possessed of as well as by the active and spectral power, here troped as “mother-spirit.” It is as if in not being held to the masculine law of disciplined selfenclosure, Mina is not only able to enjoy, in an intimate eroticized manner, responding to the solicitation of fellow feeling, but also able to draw abnormal emotional strength from being drawn upon in this way. As opposed to building herself up through acts of incorporation, the masculinized, colonial form of aggrandizement favored by Renfield and his master, she secures enhancement through an outpouring and divestment of the self, a strategy that requires her to remain within the moment, as it were, of interdependency and exchange. With Arthur finally becalmed, she evinces an immediate willingness to renew her maternal efforts on behalf of his comrade-inmourning, Quincy Morris, whose inferred urgency of grief elicits from her an offer, a proposition, that is not simply bold and unexpected, but, for her time and class, forward to the point of impropriety: He bore his own troubles so bravely that my heart bled for him . . . so I said to him:—

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So hard upon her tête-à-tête with Arthur, so comprehensive in the avowed scope of its desire, Mina’s gesture unmistakably evokes and inverts the motif of vampiric recruitment. She seeks out recipients for her “heart” blood instead of donors, dressing, in each case, the collateral wounds left by Dracula. In the very next scene she makes her critical visit to Renfield, taking her campaign of maternal consolation directly to the vampire’s minions. One more strand of this narrative warp needs to be traced, for it simultaneously marks and points beyond the last remaining limit to Mina’s motherly largesse of spirit. Immediately prior to her encounter with Arthur, Mina ponders the fate of Dracula himself, now that her menfolk are so doggedly in pursuit: “I suppose one ought to pity anything so hunted as is the Count. That is just it: this Thing is not human—not even beast. To read Seward’s account of poor Lucy’s death, and what followed, is enough to dry up the springs of pity in one’s heart” (202). Mina’s rationale for denying Dracula her compassion (literally, “feeling-with”) is in true Little England fashion inextricably racial and moral: his ontological foreignness—neither man nor beast—naturalizes a moral debasement that absolves her of an otherwise painful but necessary exercise of the sympathetic imagination. Still, Mina’s evident discomfort in not reaching the highest standard of magnanimity that she can envisage might well account for her subsequent zeal to afford solace to virtually everyone else. More importantly, this moment of doubt leaves in her mind—and the reader’s—the intuition of a regulative ethico-political ideal of caritas, comprising a finally unconstrained willingness to acknowledge one’s imbrication with others through a generous emotional investment in them. It thereby lays the ground for a truly decisive turning point in the novel, when Mina fully assumes this seemingly impossible empathetic mandate. After being vamped, Mina calls God’s pity on herself, adducing a life of virtue as grounds for his consideration—“‘What have I done to deserve such a fate, I who have tried to walk in meekness and righteousness all my days’” (252). But as with Job, to whom her biblically phrased sentiments allude, Mina’s bitter fate enables her to reach new

heights of meekness and righteousness, to extend her call for mercy to the great Reprobate who brought her to this pass. “I want you to bear something in mind through all this dreadful time. I know that you must fight—that you must destroy even as you destroyed the false Lucy so that the true Lucy might live hereafter; but it is not a work of hate. The poor soul who has wrought this misery is the saddest case of all. Just think what will be his joy when he too is destroyed in his worser part that his better part may have spiritual immortality. You must be pitiful to him too, though it may not hold your hands from his destruction.” (268-69)

While her compassion cannot be allowed to preempt the spectacle of “destruction” compulsory to the genre, it does augur a change in its symbolic significance. Thus, when her husband reverts to form, ventilating his undiminished “hate” of Dracula in contemplation of his “spiritual immortality” in “burning hell” (269), Mina repeats her demand that he reconsider his asperity, reminding him of their own blood tie to the vampire tribe: “‘Oh hush! oh hush! in the name of the good God. Don’t say such things . . . or you will crush me with fear and horror. Just think, my dear—I have been thinking all this long, long day of it—that . . . perhaps . . . some day . . . I too may need such pity; and that some other like you—and with equal cause for anger—may deny it to me!’” (269). The “pity” Mina summons (in both senses) might be more accurately termed compassion, the same feeling-with that she expressly withheld earlier. While her grievance against Dracula has surely grown more serious in the interim, it has also germinated a certain identification with him. She overtly predicates her charitable sentiments toward her tormentor, those she would inculcate in her loved ones, on her coerced family resemblance to the vampire. We cannot utterly cast Dracula off, she declares in effect, because I am now of his party as well, so much so that I can envision my loving husband as “some other” who justifiably abhors me. In presuming that her change of blood automatically spells a spiritual deterioration, Mina’s method of reasoning remains faithful to the established Little England creed that moral properties reside in blood makeup, be it race (Harker’s slovenly Orientals), class (Van Helsing’s feckless servants), or the most common anthropological transcription of race, “species” (Dracula as hibernicized “brute”). But Mina’s transitional state of being, between the living and the undead—plainly a temporal metaphor of “mixed” blood—defies

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“I wish I could comfort all who suffer from the heart. Will you let me be your friend, will you come to me for comfort if you need it?” (204)

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any easy or absolute correlation between ethnic status and ethical stature. What is more, this transitional state affords Mina access to a privileged moral and political vantage in its own right: her multiple identifications allow her a more prismatic understanding and thus a finer strain of empathy than has been attained heretofore in the novel. Mina alone has a glimmer of the irrevocable linkage between the knight-errants of Little England and the nightstalkers of Transylvania, and this awareness, while a suspicious, identificatory effect of her enthrallment to Dracula,4 paradoxically proves the means of individual, group, and even national deliverance from him. The representational strategy underlying Mina’s carefully circumscribed transcendence of the Little England mindset is vintage Stoker, a testament to his parvenu facility for sly, self-insulating criticism of the community whose approval he continued to demand on his own, Irish-inflected terms. Instead of directly challenging the racial essentialism that tended to cramp his own social prospects, Stoker makes it the epicenter of an internecine conflict, and he adapts, in the person of Mina, a broadly Christian rhetoric to celebrate the Utopian possibilities of ethnic hybridization. On both counts, he closely follows the script he first wrote for “The Dualitists.” Just as the various counterpart relationships between Little England and the vampire kingdom rehearse the schismatic form of duality displayed by Harry Merford and Tommy Santon, so Mina’s acceptance of the vampiric other in herself and her intimates transposes, in a distant but still recognizable key, the symbiotic duality of the Bubb twins. Moreover, just as the symbiotic blessedness of the Bubb twins is embellished with Irish resonances, which index the aptitude for social connectivity buried deep within the often divisive metrocolonial condition, so the enhancement and refinement of Mina’s compassion unfolds under Irish colors. As noted earlier, Mina’s birth surname encrypts a deeply hybrid Irish heritage—at once native and settler, Anglo and Celt, Catholic and Protestant—which her infiltration by a similarly hybrid, hibernicized vampire can be seen to have activated, augmenting her inherited potential for entertaining alterity. As Stoker knew, the Irish prided themselves on a communitarian Weltanschauung that distinguished them from the more atomized individualism dear to John Bull, and the English did not dispute them on this point, doubtless feeling that such other-directedness consorted well with the “essentially feminine” character of the Celtic race.5

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The metaphor clinching this ethno-national association is precisely that of maternity. With her allegorically weighted name and her metropolitan marriage, Mina invokes a long, storied line of female personae of Ireland and personae of a feminized Ireland—the Shan Von Vacht, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Hibernia, the Speirbhean or Sky Woman, and Erin, among others. As the Blessed Virgin Mary became the dominant personification of the national ideal, reflecting the increased political power of Catholic Irish-Ireland during the Victorian era, the entire array of female icons came to be consolidated under the figure of Mother Ireland, who provides a perfect allegorical “fit” for Mina’s role in the novel. Insofar as Mina’s ethics of profound connectivity, imaged in and intensified by her vampiric inhabitation, represents a distinctively feminine and maternal supplement to phallic self-containment, it articulates a cultural ideal with special pertinence to Ireland, one that coheres with that country’s national symbolism and positively transvalues the half-embraced stereotype of its people as emotional, impulsive, sentimental, “essentially feminine.” It is surely no accident that Mina has already been cast in the role of the Blessed Mother by the Catholic Van Helsing, nor that he does so in the process of announcing her fateful exclusion from the conferences of Little England: “‘You must be our star and our hope, and we shall act all the more free that you are not in the danger, such as we are’” (214). These words endow Mina with the iconic attributes of “Mary, Star of the Sea,” the merciful patron of voyagers, and they usher her off to bed where she will shortly be forced to “mother” that seaborn “Irish” voyager so in need of her “pity,” Count Dracula.6 Ironically, however, the very elements coding Mina’s ethics of alterity “Irish”—the intimate yet iconic experience of motherhood coupled with the sectarian yet universalizing discourse of Christianity—speak to interpersonal relations so fundamental and so sweeping that they automatically extend the pertinence of her sentiments beyond the metrocolonial problematic to all manner of social intercourse. Mina’s “sweeter counsels” of sympathy for the vampire do prevail over Jonathan’s hatred, reducing the men to tears and effectively turning her personal insight into a collective decision.7 She not only reconciles herself to the racialized taint of the vampiric contagion; she also convinces the men to accept her on these terms, which is to say, to accommodate a virulent strain of otherness at the heart of their community. At this moment, a

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In the scene just before the “sweeter counsels” of Mina prevail, the men have their climactic London confrontation with Dracula, which provides perhaps the most egregious instance of their collective, unconsciously motivated ineptitude, Despite cornering Dracula in a classic ambush, with numbers on their side, with ample time for their strategic ace, Morris, to devise the perfect “plan of action,” and despite possessing the concerted will to advance “with a single impulse,” they nevertheless wind up empty-handed (266). As Dracula eludes their grasp, the experienced reader of thrillers is left, or rather asked, to wonder exactly what advantages, if not these, would finally permit this platoon of heroes to corral their diabolic counterpart. In the scene immediately after the “sweeter counsels” of Mina prevail, the answer surfaces; Mina herself hits upon what proves to be the single dispositive means for hunting the vampire, as it were, to ground. Divining that her blood-suckling of Dracula has laid down an intimate, subliminal line of psychic contact with him, she tells Van Helsing, “‘I want you to hypnotize me!’” (271), on the supposition that, being a channel for the vampire’s mental impressions, she can serve as a homing device for his movements. With its play on the doppelgänger motif, this pre-Vulcan mindmeld is an ingenious plot contrivance typical of the Gothic adventure genre, which the last third of the novel, a protracted chase scene, otherwise plays out rather perfunctorily. But the stratagem also—and this is the chief part of its ingenuity— perfectly encapsulates Mina’s transformative

significance in the novel, her incubation of a badly needed ethics/politics of connectivity. Taken by itself, the men’s violent confrontational tactics play into the vampire’s hands insofar as he is but the phantasmal emanation of their own antisocial tendencies, their commitment to a metrocolonial ideology of domination and absorption. Their agonistic approach to Dracula only ratifies the depth of their identification. Mina’s tactic of subterranean communication reverses this self-reflexive curve. Her secret sharing with the vampire, which registers a certain degree of identification, paradoxically breaks with, stands against, and finally defeats the egoistic agenda and racist ideology he advances. As the active expression of radical selfabsorption and aggrandizement, both individual (egoism) and collective (tribalism), the vampiric act seeks to impose unilateral mastery at a most intimate point of social intercourse, the exchange of bodily fluids, turning the participants into possessor and possessed, respectively. The mindmeld is, from Dracula’s perspective, an extension of this violent erotic economy. He is the one who originally enjoins the psychic commerce as a device for monitoring and manipulating his newest “helpmeet” (252). Mina herself is under no illusions on this score: “‘he may have used my knowledge for his ends’” (297). But in selfconsciously embracing the interior alterity that the mindmeld entails, she effectively restores the reciprocal character of interpersonal exchange and thereby escapes being controlled by the vampire, which is to say by the ideology of expansive selfenclosure. As Little England enters upon the “great hour” of its offensive into Transylvania, it is given to Van Helsing to translate this ethico-political allegory into the lexicon of Gothic narrative. Confirming that Dracula “‘has so used [Mina’s] mind’” for his own purposes, Van Helsing describes how and why he will be hoisted on his own petard—in a kind of mirror image of the vampire fighters’ earlier contretemps. Dracula’s selfish “child-brain” never foresaw that the mindmeld could bind him into a bilateral social relationship, one in which his authority and his desires were not final. He believes he can dispose of Mina as he will, but precisely because she has put herself at his disposal, suspending the collective fixation with mastery, he cannot do so after all. “He think, too, that as he cut himself off from knowing your mind, there can be no knowledge of him to you; there is where he fail! That terrible

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conversion narrative suddenly irrupts within the conquest narrative of Dracula, and the implications of this modal shift for the novel’s political fantasy are decisive, touching upon its central selfreflexive conceit. As we have seen, in violently dissociating themselves from Dracula qua racial other, the men of Little England only testify to their unconscious projection of Dracula qua specter of racism, and this fantasy dynamic takes narrative form in the symptomatic persistence with which their schemes to subdue the vampire seem rather to abet him. It thus stands to reason, as a matter of symbolic logic, that in suspending this unconscious complicity, Mina’s acceptance of racialized otherness in herself and her persuasion of her menfolk to do likewise would mitigate or even reverse the self-defeating trajectory of Little England’s campaign against vampirism. That is exactly what happens, as Stoker accentuates through a painstaking juxtaposition of events.

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baptism of blood which he give you makes you free to go to him in spirit, as you have yet done in your times of freedom. . . . And this power to good of you and others, you have won from your suffering at his hands. This is all the more precious that he know it not, and to guard himself have even cut himself off from his knowledge of our where. We, however, are not all selfish.” (297)

Like his doppelgänger, however, Van Helsing “only saw so far” (297). Assuming that he and his crew “are not all selfish,” he overlooks how far their much celebrated norm of manhood, with its emphasis on assured self-possession, selfcontainment, and self-mastery, is constituted in an allergic relation to otherness, and so carries the seeds of a certain kind of “selfish”-ness within it. The power that Mina has “won” from her maternal “suffering” is the power to persuade her colleagues to relieve their anxious manliness with the unqualified compassion and otherdirectedness necessary to defeat the egoistic force of Dracula, that is, to effect a conversion that counters in spirit the “blood” conversion of vampirism. As a corollary to this conversion, the men once again allow Mina to be an active participant in the campaign rather than its mascot, abandoning the effort to aggrandize their collective male ego by reducing her to a passive and helpless type of the feminine. With this narrative turn, it should be noted, Stoker bids to effect his own conversion in the racial and gender currencies of Irishness. He tropes the gender ambivalence of his Anglo-Celtic heritage into an alternative value structure. The hysterical heroism/heroic hysteria that has marked much of the vampire hunt begins to give way at this point to another “feminine” style of heroism, which entails confronting and conquering one’s innermost xenophobia. Van Helsing concludes his account of Mina’s psychic telepathy by exhorting the others to “‘follow’” Dracula “‘even if we peril ourselves that we become like him’” (297). With its play on the meaning of the word follow, the last proviso has typically been taken to express Stoker’s concern about the corrupting effects on otherwise highminded British liberals of a violent struggle against a lawless colonial resistance.8 Our analysis, to this point, however, frames Van Helsing’s remarks as a belated and still subliminal recognition of the family resemblance that has always subsisted between the members of Little England and their vampiric double. The occasion of his words is significant in this regard, since his recognition is not just induced by but is virtually emergent in

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his understanding of how the mindmeld operates. Moreover, in acknowledging, first, the possibility of their collective kinship to what has seemed an unspeakably alien figure and, second, the consequent need for the group to guard against its own vampiric aggressions, Van Helsing’s address participates in the subtle but seismic shift facilitated by Mina in the symbolic stakes of the vampire hunt. Even as the action reported in the journal entries flattens into a conventional conquest adventure in an exotic locale, the introduction of the conversion narrative has leavened the symbolic register in which the action transpires. Instead of an intrusive spectral signifier of some outward racial caste (the Irish) or condition (degeneracy), a focus appropriate to more conventional imperialist romance, the vampire becomes a literalized or embodied signifier of an inward racial attitude. * * * One problem facing Stoker was how to map this inward turn, with its localized psychic terrain, onto the broader geopolitical landscape allegorized in the novel. His ingenious stratagem was to coordinate the successes enjoyed by the Little Englanders in their crusade with their increasing willingness to “turn Irish” in their means and manner of pursuing it. That is to say, in one of the more sweeping Gothic symmetries in the novel, Stoker counterbalances the colonial mimicry of Dracula, his strategic simulation of English metropolitan ways of being, with the reverse mimicry of the Little England crew, its adoption of presumptively Irish methods of combating him. And just as, owing to the impacted political conditions of “the union,” the Irish Dracula poses or passes as what he in some sense already is (a Briton), so the members of Little England come to embrace—on duress at first and gradually by design—an otherness proper to or at least indissociable from their “true” ethno-national selves. From the outset of the novel, some of the most potent defensive measures undertaken against the vampire derive from the liturgical rites of the Roman Catholic church, which in the Britain of Stoker’s day were far less prominently associated with the historic sectarian enemies, France and Spain, than with the restive Irish people-nation.9 The first such instance sees Jonathan Harker outwardly expressing his discomfort at the receipt of a crucifix that, “as an English churchman, I have been taught to regard . . . as in some measure idolatrous” (13). During the mirror scene, however, he comes to regard the crucifix as his salvation from the advances of Dracula (31).

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One of the more prominent aspects of Irish Catholicism eschewed in Anglican culture was marialotry, a zealous, some would say excessive devotion to the Blessed Virgin, which left a deep imprint, in turn, upon nationalist symbology of Irish-Ireland. As noted above, with the growingly Catholic leadership of both the Home Rule and Republican movements, Mary was often conflated with the ancient goddesses Hibernia, Erin, and Cathleen as figures of “the sovereignty,” hortatory symbols of an independent Ireland whose honor and dignity her sons were enlisted to avenge. So when Van Helsing proclaims the hypermaternal Mina “‘our star and our hope’” in “‘danger,’” exalting her as an avatar of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, he implicitly organizes her champions in a symbolic economy that unmistakably recalls contemporary Irish Catholic Fenianism. After Mina’s surprising plea on behalf of Dracula and her ensuing entry into telepathy with him, events that catalyze the group’s more conscious accommodation of otherness, Van Helsing progresses from mirroring the iconography of advanced Irish nationalism to echoing its philosophy. His quoted comment that Mina has “won” power over Dracula “‘from [her] suffering at his hands’” articulates the cardinal principle underlying the Fenian-identified ethos of blood sacrifice and anticipates Terence MacSwiney’s celebrated formula: victory comes to those who endure suffering rather than those who inflict it.1 0 Blood

sacrifice is, of course, a policy of the dispossessed. It aims to make a virtue out of necessitousness, if you will, out of an absence of resources beyond the fully committed bodies of those involved. The avowal of this ethos by Little England, Van Helsing’s express belief that Mina’s suffering of a “blood sacrifice” may itself prove the key to victory, amounts to a marked structural identification with the disempowered yet dangerous element of Irish patriotism that Dracula has often been taken to allegorize. A certain topical allusion, highly provocative for Stoker’s contemporary audience, not only underlines this cross-ethnic/cross-class identification but also calls attention to the selfconsciousness with which Little England assumes it. In his journal, Seward calls the vampire fighters’ entire strategy of pursuing Dracula into Transylvania their “Plan of Campaign” (ED 383), and since he uses the uppercase letters that turn this colloquial expression into a proper name, he can only be read as affiliating their effort with the Plan of Campaign, a scheme undertaken between 1886 and 1890 for the Irish tenantry to secure the right of collective bargaining through systematic rent strikes and boycotting.1 1 At the primary level, Seward’s use of the term as a corporate selfdescription identifies the struggle of the Little Englanders against Dracula with a moral force resistance movement undertaken by their ethnic and class antipodes. There is, as usual in Dracula, a vertiginous exactitude to this arrangement. The change in Little England’s moral and political objective, allegorically considered, from defeating the vampire without (the racial other) to defeating the vampire within (the racialist predisposition) forms a precise corrective reversal of the form of projection demanded of the metrocolonial subject, the displacement of the otherness within onto some external threat. Hence, the change in moral and political objective is not merely accentuated or even supplemented, but literally realized and to a degree explained by the transmutation of metropolitan Anglo mandarins into barbarous Irish aliens. But the gesture enacted in Seward’s journal entry carries still greater evidentiary force and political resonance. In the Plan of Campaign, Seward hits on more than an event in Irish history with which Little England might identify, he hits on a conspicuous site in the history of liberal England’s identification with the Irish tenantry during the so-called Union of Hearts, which covered roughly the same period. What made the Plan of Campaign such a salient political move-

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In the second instance, Van Helsing seals the grave of the undead Lucy with the Eucharist, for which he claims a papal dispensation. Van Helsing does speak elsewhere of the need to rely upon superstitious traditions in the war on vampirism, but being a Catholic, he certainly does not regard the Sacrament in this light. Nor are the occult uses of the Eucharist greeted with more than momentary shock by his Protestant cohorts, who shortly find themselves escorting the Host and holding their own crucifixes aloft in an effort to drive Dracula from the body of Mina (247). In this validation of beliefs and observances typically associated with the backward, “idolatrous” peasantry of Ireland, there is an understated inversion of the single most pivotal event in Anglo/Irish history. Instead of a Protestant Dutchman, William III, being called across the water to save England from the perils of Catholicism and, by the time of the Boyne, from its Irish exponents, Stoker gives us a Catholic Dutchman called across the water to save England, and William’s namesake, with the sacred objects of Catholicism and, by extension, the sectarian markers of Irishness.

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ment was less its direct effects on landlord-lessee relations, which were negligible, than its indirect effects on the way certain more advanced, progressive constituencies of English liberalism came, in despite of the party leadership, to view the plight of the Irish, that is, its capacity to mobilize in historical fact the sort of sympathetic imagination that Mina Harker mobilizes in Gothic fiction. Initiated by Stoker’s cousin John Dillon, among others, the plan of Campaign was designed to bait the largely Ascendancy landlords into staging ruthless evictions that would hopefully be witnessed by English visitors invited to Ireland for that purpose.1 2 One such prominent visitor was a Liberal party member of Parliament from Cornwall, Charles Conybeare, who wound up assisting, even joining the resistance efforts of evicted tenants in Donegal and was for his trouble arrested, convicted, and jailed on the charge of criminal conspiracy. Since the “clinching evidence” turned on Conybeare giving “three cheers for the Plan of Campaign,” one might reasonably infer that he was punished for the crime of identifying with the disaffected Irish by being treated as one.1 3 Another Liberal party politico, George Lansbury, was motivated to organize a Radical club delegation to the Plan of Campaign by a preexisting Irish identification, which has a special pertinence for Dracula. Having moved as a boy to the Whitechapel neighborhood of the East End—the haunt of Dracula in London and the ground of certain of his racial affiliations—Lansbury lived, in his words, “among what may be described as a mixed population—Irish and Jews and foreigners, of all nationalities.”1 4 Here Ireland became the center of a radiating countercultural web of subaltern loyalties and adherences spun right in the heart of the metropole: The Irish boys at our school were all ‘Fenians’; consequently, when the wall of Clerkenwell Prison was blown down and three Irish martyrs executed in Manchester because a police officer was accidentally killed, very great excitement prevailed in our classes and playground. The teachers tried to make us understand how wicked the Irishmen had been on both occasions, but my Irish friends would have none of it, and when a few months later T. D. Sullivan’s song God Save Ireland came out, we boys were shouting it at the tops of our voices every playtime.1 5

The last sentence adumbrates a developing solidarity between elements of the English and Irish communities in England, a bond that proved crucial to the Home Rule policies of Stoker’s politi-

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cal favorites and found still more strenuous expression in the Plan of Campaign that they opposed. By having the English Seward place the final, ultimately successful push against Dracula under the sign of the Plan of Campaign, Stoker looks to rivet text and context, history and fantasy, literary and geopolitics from both ends. On one side, through the association of the Plan, and more specifically English participation in the Plan, with the happy resolution of a hibernicized nightmare of blood, Stoker offers his support, characteristically encrypted, for those advanced Liberals who seized the occasion to fashion links with the moral force Irish independence movement, fulfilling the political posture implicit in “The Voice of England.” On the other side, insofar as these elements sought a resolution to the Irish crisis in a selfconscious revision of England’s ethnic attitudes, Seward’s replication of this gesture further attests to the self-reflexive turn the vampire hunt has taken. The construction of the novel’s denouement, the pursuit and execution of Dracula, illustrates the last point compellingly. When the vampire fighters arrive at Galatz, looking for the box containing the Count, they are directed to the office of Immanuel Hildesheim, whose presence elicits an outburst of anti-Semitic vitriol from Jonathan Harker (D 302). In keeping with the dream logic of the novel, this racist fulmination magically conjures forth an objective correlative with direct bearing upon Little England’s quest: the man to whom Hildesheim directs them, Petrof Shinsky, immediately turns up dead, the victim of a murder with apparent racial overtones (“‘This is the work of a Slovak,’” the women cry; 303). To avoid being caught up in a Balkan “whirlpool” of racial animosity and outrage, Harker must flee the scene with his cohorts, forsaking any immediate prospect of locating his wife’s tormentor. The men’s response to this setback, phantasmatically effected by their own lingering racism, is to begin “taking Mina again into [their] confidence” (303). Given her telepathic function, this decision is particularly significant because it serves to close the circuit, to complete the connection, between the society of Little England and their vampiric other. At this point, the men finally agree to finish the process of admitting alterity in their midst, to assume the “hazardous” “chance” of racial selfexposure (303). This attitude proves as conducive to their ultimate goal as their blood anxiety has been counterproductive.

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To render this lesson still more forcibly, while keeping the attendant social critique as muted as possible, Stoker contrives to make the final narrative destination, the killing of Dracula, purposively anti- and ante-climactic at the same time. The end of Dracula is anti-climactic because there is no prolonged or gripping death struggle. Dracula seemingly dies at a touch and disappears in the same motion. As Mina records it, “It was like a miracle; but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight” (325). Noting that the collective “butchery” promised by Van Helsing fails to meet expectations, Auerbach and Skal opine that “Dracula’s supposed death is riddled with ambiguity” (325). On the contrary, a definite message can be gleaned from the manner in which Dracula’s death defies expectations. The body of the vampire does not in the end offer even the minimal resistance necessarily exerted by an independently objectified being. Unsustainable, even as dust, he bears the insubstantiality of a mirage, an internally generated phantom. Mina’s phraseology seems chosen to insinuate the imaginary status of Dracula. He vanishes “in the drawing of a breath” because he is a function of breath, metaphorically considered, an emanation of the soul. In this light, the fate of Quincy Morris may be seen as the terminal and summary instance of the mirroring of vampire and vampire fighters. Received in the very act of slaying Dracula, Morris’s death wound serves as a ritual token of Dracula’s symbolic value for the members of Little England: it signifies that their effective extermination of the vampire and what he represents can only transpire through the eradication of a blameworthy part of their collective self. That the sacrificial embodiment of this part is an Anglo-American, the ethno-national group inheriting world-

imperial domination from the British, suggests that a more broadly colonialist supremacism is at last emerging as the guilty attribute. This brings us to the ante-climactic aspect of Dracula’s demise. While the reader might infer that Mina’s allimportant scar—the mark of her pollution by and subjection to the hibernicized monster—disappears on the instant of Dracula’s passing, the spectacle of its disappearance is explicitly paired instead with the end of Morris. Dracula has been gone for some time—indeed, his gypsy allies have since departed—when Morris in his death throes bears witness to the regenerated purity of Mina’s visage: “‘Look! Look! . . . See! The snow is not more stainless than her forehead! The curse has passed away!’” (326). Timing, as we know by now, is everything in the symbolic economy of Dracula. The timing here, the coincidence of Mina’s cleansing not with the vampire’s destruction but with its subjective correlative, indicates that “the curse” consists less in the taint of blood immixture than in the estimation of such immixture as taint. In other words, Mina carries the stigmata of her Irish hybridity until the moment, symbolically enacted in Morris’s death, when the social stigma of that hybridity dissipates. Jonathan Harker’s closing “Note,” seven years on, confirms as much on several levels—fact, import, and ethos—all of which converge in the person of the Harkers’ first-born child, who signals the renewal of Little England on other terms. The fact, first of all, that “the boy’s birthday is on the same day as that on which Quincy Morris died” (326) positions him as the redemptive effect of Morris’s “gallant” performance as ritual scapegoat in the destruction of the evil doppelgänger. Mina herself draws some such inference in her “secret belief that some of [Morris’s] spirit has passed into [her son],” in what amounts to a clear reversal of the vampiric “curse” whose passing is heralded by Morris’s death (326). As opposed to Dracula’s outright appropriation of the spirit through the lethal ingestion of another’s blood, Morris has achieved a partial transmission of spirit through the shedding of his own blood. The yoking of the Christian ideal with the politics of hybridity, initiated by Mina, is thus sustained through the coda of the novel. The import of Morris’s death is memorialized in the naming of the Harker child. His parents give him a “bundle of names” intended to link the “little band of men together” (326). By this act, he becomes not just the symbolic heir of Little England as a whole but a living emblem of that radical connectivity which proved the ethical cor-

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With her “man’s brain” and “woman’s heart,” her mixed blood and iconic purity, her undead and yet unvanquished spirit, Mina is not only a hybrid figure but also, through sheer force of overdetermination, a symbolic figure of hybridity; and it is she, tellingly, who puts Little England back on the trail lost in connection with her husband’s anti-Semitic lapse. Her determination of the proper route to follow, the river course, merely transposes onto the terrain of action adventure her earlier directions as to the proper ethicopolitical course to follow. Once again, the narrative and symbolic syntax prompts the discovery that the waterway to finding and defeating Dracula flows inward.

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relative of the Little Englanders’ triumph, their means of destroying the vampire in themselves. Quincy, the name the boy is called, becomes by extension the master signifier of that connectivity, upon which the first Quincy’s death put the seal. In a certain sense, even Dracula himself finds a place in the xenophilic community that young Harker embodies. As a number of critics have noted, Mina’s dark tryst with Dracula means that the blood of the vampire now flows in the veins of her golden child. Some have seen this genetic residuum as an ironic portent of ongoing or recrudescent racial menace, “an element of horror . . . left over, uncontained,” in the words of Daniel Pick.1 6 Others see this result as ironic evidence that, as Stephen D. Arata puts it, “the position of vampire and victim have been reversed. Now it is Dracula whose blood is appropriated and transformed to nourish a failing race. . . . The English race invigorates itself by appropriating those racial qualities needed to reverse its own decline.”1 7 The former position sees the nightmare of Dracula continuing for British imperialism; the latter sees the nightmare of British imperialism continuing, with Stoker’s license. Before we accept this Hobson’s choice, however, it is well to remember that insofar as both the vampire and Mina Murray Harker are coded Irish in the novel, and undecidably Anglo/Celtic-Irish in either case, this final admixture of blood need not be construed as bearing any significance, as making any objective difference in a racial or ethnic sense. And this ultimate in-difference is by no means an accident of allegory. To the contrary, Stoker has characteristically reappropriated a well-worn Gothic convention, here the secret ineradicability of vampiric infection, to index what is unconventional about his novel: that it is not finally about blood distinction but blood consciousness. The dominant, seemingly opposed readings of the coda have joined in mistaking the novel’s critical object for its ideological objective, a tribute to Stoker’s dense, socially motivated cryptology. The characters themselves, however, do point the way beyond this error by the end of Dracula. Arata claims that Harker “unwittingly calls attention” in the closing note to the presence of Dracula’s blood in his son and heir.1 8 But since Harker clearly neither forgets nor suppresses the incident of his wife’s vamping—“Seven years ago we all went through the flames” (326)—his unwittingness can be seen to arise from a comparative unconcern or lack of anxiety about the index of “blood.” Indeed, Harker’s ease of mind on this

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score is the political burden of the novel’s happy ending. It is precisely in relinquishing the mania or obsession with blood that the men of Little England have freed themselves from the enthrallment with vampirism, which is but the Gothic literalization of that mania. To accept the influx of Dracula’s blood, his racial otherness, is to escape the influence of Dracula’s vampirism, his racist obsession with blood as the vehicle of identity. The vampire fighters have, in Harker’s words, gone “through the flames,” the Christian symbol of purgation, and it is they who have been purified, not of Dracula’s blood, which they only encountered in the process, but of their own liability to blood “hate.” In Lacanian terms, the men of Little England have graduated from the Imaginary register, which is defined by an antagonistic struggle for an always elusory selfidentity, here presumed to reside in blood; and they have graduated to the Symbolic register, wherein identity is understood to be the aftereffect of a social relationality inscribed in the signifier, here an aptly polyeponymous name capable of linking a group of people together. Projected onto the geopolitical scale, this shift from an Imaginary of blood to a Symbolic of social articulation or interlinkage represents a theoretical model of the shift that Stoker desired and his political hero Gladstone made a Liberal policy goal: from emulous rivalry among the various parties to the Irish Question to coexistence within a multinational state embracing Home Rule for its several constituencies. Quincy Harker, finally, is the culmination of Mina’s role as universal mother, on which basis she has served as the principal exponent of the ethos of radical social connectivity celebrated in the novel. Accordingly, the child provides an occasion for punctuating the narrative with a reaffirmation of Mina’s preeminence, not just as an iconic presence but as a transformative agency. The task falls to the official spokesman and authority figure of the group, Van Helsing, who holds young Harker, rather like a symbolic prop, upon his knee: “‘This boy will some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her sweetness and loving care; later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake’” (327). As he has done before, Van Helsing manages to cast Mina simultaneously as a hyperfeminine ideal, here troped in terms of maternal “sweetness and loving care,” and as a gloriously androgynous bearer of masculine virtue, here troped along martial rather than the usual intellectual lines. While the men “did dare so much

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Notes 1. Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 141-80. 2. For a discussion of this traditional identification, see Joan Copjec, Read My Desire (Boston: MIT Press, 1994), 128-29. 3. As in contemporary slasher films, the heroine (Mina) actually exceeds stereotyped gender expectations in ways that the female victims (Lucy and her mother) do not. See Carol J. Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” Representations 20 (Spring 1987): 187-228. 4. Wolf takes her “whole argument” to be “dictated from afar by Dracula.” See ED 367 n. 17. 5. See Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), 34-51. 6. In Stoker’s time, there was a Roman Catholic church called Mary, Star of the Sea, off Leahy’s Terrace in suburban Dublin. See Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 384. 7. The phrase sweeter counsels recalls another prominent appellation of Mary, “Our Mother of Good Counsel.” 8. Moses, “The Irish Vampire,” 87. 9. For a detailed anatomy of the role of religion in Dracula, see Moses, “The Irish Vampire,” 89-96. 10. Tom Garvin, Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 157. 11. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine, 188-94. In every other edition of Dracula, the Plan of Campaign is capitalized, so the Norton’s lowercase rendering is surely an error. 12. Liz Curtis, The Cause of Ireland, 152. 13. Ibid., 152-53. 14. Ibid., 153.

15. Ibid., 153-54.

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for her sake,” Mina does not occupy the traditional feminine pedestal of treasured object, but proves “brave and gallant” in her own right, a positive force in the struggle against vampirism. One effect of this unconventional gender combination is to suggest that Mina’s surpassing courage consists in her maternalism itself, in her willingness to acknowledge her imbrication with even the most threatening forms of otherness and to predicate her ethical posture on that radical connectivity. It is in following Mina’s heroic lead, in letting go the racialist impetus of their manly ideal, that the men of Little England become the heroes that they are too readily presumed to be all along. And it is by following this lead that the “hard men” of young Harker’s generation might have resolved the Irish Question on the principles of domestic cosmopolitanism, first advocated in Stoker’s Address, twenty-five years before Dracula, instead of resolving the Irish Question twenty-five years after Dracula, on principles of tribal bloodletting worthy of the vampire at his worst.

16. Pick, “‘Terrors of the Night,’” 77. 17. Arata, Fictions of Loss, 129. 18. Ibid.

Abbreviations D

Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Nina Auerbach and David Skal, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1997).

ED

Bram Stoker, The Essential Dracula: The Definitive Annotated Edition of Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel, ed. Leonard Wolf (New York: Penguin, 1993).

NPH

Bram Stoker, “The Necessity for Political Honesty,” auditor’s Address to the Trinity College Historical Society, first meeting, twenty-eighth session, November 13, 1872.

FURTHER READING Criticism Clemens, Valerie. “Dracula: The Reptilian Brain at the Fin de Siècle.” In Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow: A Critical Anthology, edited by Elizabeth Miller, pp. 205-18. Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, United Kingdom: Desert Island, 1998. Examines Dracula in light of turn-of-the-century concerns over rapid social, technological, and cultural change. Craft, Christopher. “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Representations, no. 8 (autumn 1984): 107-33. Probes the ambivalent representation of same-sex eroticism in Dracula. Fry, Carol L. “Fictional Conventions and Sexuality in Dracula.” Victorian Newsletter, no. 42 (fall 1972): 20-22. Briefly identifies the classically Gothic melodramatic plot of the rake’s pursuit and seduction of a virgin as rendered in Dracula. Ingelbien, Raphael. “Gothic Genealogies: Dracula, Bowen’s Court, and Anglo-Irish Psychology.” ELH 70, no. 4 (winter 2003): 1089-1105. Considers Dracula as “an allegory of Ireland’s social, political, and cultural upheavals at the end of the nineteenth century.” Jackson, Rosemary. “Gothic Tales and Novels.” In Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, pp. 95-122. London: Methuen, 1981. Studies Dracula as “a culmination of nineteenth-century English Gothic,” particularly considering the symbolic qualities of the vampire myth employed by Stoker in the novel. Lewis, Pericles. “Dracula and the Epistemology of the Victorian Gothic Novel.” In Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow: A Critical Anthology, edited by Elizabeth Miller, pp. 71-81. Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, England: Desert Island, 1998. Examines the ways in which Dracula prefigures postmodern critical notions of the “unreliability of individual perception.”

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Nayder, Lillian. “Virgin Territory and the Iron Virgin: Engendering the Empire in Bram Stoker’s ‘The Squaw.’” In Maternal Instincts: Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875-1925, edited by Claudia Nelson and Ann Sumner Holmes, pp. 75-97. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Highlights thematic concerns with gender and empire in Stoker’s story “The Squaw.” Pedlar, Valerie. “Dracula: A Fin-de-Siècle Fantasy.” In The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Identities, edited by Dennis Walder, pp. 196-216. London: Open University Press, 2001. Analyzes Dracula in the contexts of nineteenth-century myth and fantasy writing, the conventions of Gothic literature, vampire folklore, and Freudian psychoanalysis. Roth, Phyllis. Bram Stoker. Boston: Twayne, 1982, 167 p. Concise critical introduction to Stoker and his works that includes a psychoanalytical interpretation of Dracula, a biographical summary, and an extensive bibliography. Schaffrath, Stephan. “Order-versus-Chaos Dichotomy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Extrapolation 43, no. 1 (spring 2002): 98-112. Elucidates the symbolic conflict between order and chaos depicted in Dracula. Senf, Carol A. Introduction to The Critical Introduction to Bram Stoker, edited by Carol A. Senf, pp. 1-41. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Surveys the defining characteristics of Stoker’s fiction.

Regards “Dracula’s Guest” as “one of the best werewolf stories ever written.” Valente, Joseph. “‘Double Born’: Bram Stoker and the Metrocolonial Gothic.” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 3 (fall 2000): 632-45. Concentrates on topical references to Anglo-Irish relations and the psycho-symbolic use of the doppelgänger motif in Stoker’s story “The Dualitists; or the Death Doom of the Double Born.” Varnado, S. L. “The Daemonic in Dracula.” In Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction, pp. 95-114. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1987. Views Dracula as a dramatization of the “cosmic struggle between the opposing forces of darkness and light, of the sacred and the profane.” Weissman, Judith. “Women and Vampires: Dracula as a Victorian Novel.” Midwest Quarterly 18, no. 4 (July 1977): 392-405. Interprets Dracula as a novel of “sexual terror.” Weissman interprets the female vampire as a symbol of “the sexually straightforward and insatiable woman” who is threatening to the sexually insecure man. Williams, Anne. “Why Are Vampires Afraid of Garlic?: Dracula.” In Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic, pp. 121-34. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Examines the significance of the tools—“the rosary, a branch of the flowering wild rose, and the Host, as well as ត [g]arlic, the crucifix, and the stake”—used by vampire hunter Van Helsing.

Stade, George. Introduction to Dracula, by Bram Stoker, pp. v-xiv. New York: Bantam Books, 1981.

Wolf, Leonard. The Essential Dracula. New York: Plume, 1993, 484 p.

Recapitulates the modern critical tendency to interpret the “prevailing emotion” of Dracula as “a screaming horror of female sexuality.”

Places Dracula within the literary and historical contexts of Gothic fiction.

Stewart, Garrett. “‘Count Me In’: Dracula, Hypnotic Participation, and the Late-Victorian Gothic of Reading.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 5, no. 1 (1994): 1-18. Theoretical discussion of Dracula as the aesthetic terminus of the late-Victorian Gothic romance. Temple, Philip. “The Origins of Dracula.” Times Literary Supplement (4 November 1983): 1216. Observes several possible anecdotal and geographical sources for Dracula. Tilley, Elizabeth. “Stoker, Paris and the Crisis of Identity.” Literature and History 10, no. 2 (autumn 2001): 26-41. Investigates the Paris setting of Stoker’s short story “The Burial of the Rats” and its relation to garbage, sanitation, and middle-class identity. Twitchell, James B. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Wolfman.” In Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror, pp. 215-16. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

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OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Stoker’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 23; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 3; Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 5; British Writers, Vol. 3; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1890-1914; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 105, 150; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 36, 70, 178, 304; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Novels for Students, Vol. 18; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 62; Something about the Author, Vol. 29; Supernatural Fiction Writers; Twayne’s English Authors; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vols. 8, 144; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 4; and World Literature Criticism.

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HORACE WALPOLE (1717 - 1797)

English novelist, biographer, memoirist, historian, essayist, playwright, and letter writer.

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ne of the most flamboyant personalities in eighteenth-century English letters, Walpole is often considered the outstanding chronicler and correspondent of his era. According to biographer W. S. Lewis (see Further Reading), “Walpole is the man who brought the art of letterwriting to the highest point it reached in our language.” The Letters, which date from 1732 to 1797 and number in the thousands, are noted for their remarkable content as well as their distinctive style. While the detailed description they provide of English politics and society in Walpole’s time is unsurpassed, they also possess stylistic charm and wit which make them highly entertaining prose. In addition to this achievement, Walpole is widely recognized as one of England’s first art historians, an influential revivalist of Gothic architecture, and the author of The Castle of Otranto (1764), a work which pioneered the introduction of supernaturalism and mystery into the romance and is thus regarded as the first Gothic novel.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Walpole was born into a family of old Norfolk stock which could be traced back to the last king

of the Britons. His immediate family came into wealth during his father’s political career. Sir Robert Walpole, who held many influential posts including secretary of war and treasurer of the navy, served during the reign of George II as England’s first prime minister and became the first Earl of Orford. Because Horace was considerably younger and both physically and temperamentally different from the other children of Sir Robert and Catherine Shorter Walpole—and because his parents had a notoriously strained marriage— there was considerable speculation over Horace’s paternity. He, however, was unaffected by the gossip and remained fervently loyal to both of his parents until their deaths. Conditions in the Walpole home enhanced Horace’s tendencies toward impetuosity and self-indulgence. Lady Walpole, a reputedly vain and capricious woman, compulsively pampered her youngest son, and the atmosphere of the Walpole home can perhaps best be summed up by the family motto: “Fan qua sentiat” (“Say what you think”). From 1727 to 1734 Walpole attended Eton, which proved a much more stable environment than his family’s estate. Here he became close friends with Thomas Ashton, Richard West, and Thomas Gray. Referring to themselves as the Quadruple Alliance, the four schoolmates prided themselves on their intellectual precocity and delved into Latin classics as well as French and English literature, which they read, translated, and parodied. Along with Gray,

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Walpole entered Cambridge, but he did not take a degree; in 1739 he left school to make the Grand Tour of the Continent with Gray as a traveling companion. They toured for two years but eventually quarreled and returned to England separately. Much of the strain on their friendship stemmed from the class differences between them: while Gray was a scrivener’s son, Walpole was the prime minister’s, which admitted him to elite social circles and enabled him to spend without consideration of cost. While on the Continent he was elected to Parliament, and he served in that body intermittently until 1768. His terms were characterized by brief, fervent bouts of enthusiasm amidst an overriding sense of apathy. Despite his occasional passion over a particular issue, he was generally more interested in the drama of the political scene than actual policymaking. Although Walpole classified himself as a “settled Whig”—that is, one opposed to the bulk of power residing in any single branch of government or class of society—he once described his political objective as being “at the liberty of pleasing myself without being tied to a party.” In 1747, the year in which he published Aedes Walpolianae, a catalog of Sir Robert’s art collection and the first book on a private art collection in England, Walpole moved into a former coachman’s cottage near Twickenham. He named this residence Strawberry Hill and began remodeling it in 1753, a project which grew in extravagance year by year. The original Strawberry Hill was a fairly modest dwelling; Walpole turned it into a latemedieval castle designed in the Gothic style. The architectural “committee” responsible for the castle’s appearance consisted of Walpole and two of his friends, John Chute and Richard Bentley. Their primary goal was to create a structure that reflected the beauty of older English architecture, but which also captured a viewer’s imagination and sense of make-believe. The result was a museum-like tribute to Gothic detail as well as to Walpole’s unbridled determination to make his fantastic conception a reality. The completed Strawberry Hill exhibited lavish examples of Gothic ornamentation, including stained-glass windows, balustrades, loggias, and hidden stairways. Unfortunately, since neither Walpole nor his associates were experienced engineers, many parts of Strawberry Hill were structurally unsound. For example, during Walpole’s lifetime alone the battlements had to be replaced three times. Although Strawberry Hill became the object of ridicule in some quarters because of its outlandish appearance, it inspired an architectural fad, as

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many members of the upper class began to add Gothic touches to their homes. Walpole also established a private press at Strawberry Hill in 1757 which operated for thirty-two years and is still recognized for publishing one of the most impressive lists of titles of any private press in England, including Walpole’s works and the poems of Thomas Gray. The estate ultimately became an elaborate showcase for Walpole’s extensive collections of armor, coins, books, art, and bric-a-brac, which were viewed by ticket-holding visitors. In 1842 the contents of Strawberry Hill were sold in a widely publicized auction which lasted over a month; Strawberry Hill itself now serves as a training college for teachers. In spite of changes made in the house and gardens, much of its original splendor remains and contemporary visitors may still perceive the fanciful, if eccentric, imagination responsible for its design and creation. In 1765 Walpole made the first of four extended trips to Paris, where he was received by the pinnacle of French society. Members of the French upper class were widely known for their scathing wit and expertise at verbal assault: thus, Walpole, who was despised by many of his fellow Britons for these very qualities, became the toast of Parisian society. While in Paris, he was bedridden with a severe case of gout—to which he finally succumbed at age eighty—and was visited by an illustrious parade of well-wishers. Walpole was befriended by Madame du Deffand, the grand dame of French society, who was twenty years his senior and with whom he corresponded until her death in 1780. Deffand fell in love with Walpole, who had never shown any romantic interest in women, and expressed her emotions in letters to him. Although Deffand’s letters to Walpole survived, he requested that his be destroyed after his death. Biographers and critics consider this an unfortunate loss and speculate that this correspondence would have shed light on Walpole’s generous and compassionate nature, a dimension of his personality which has received little attention. Throughout his life Walpole was always devoted, sometimes irrationally, to a select group of friends, and this was especially true during his later years. Particularly close to him near the end of his life were the Berry sisters, Agnes and Mary, daughters of one of his Strawberry Hill neighbors. After Walpole’s death it was rumored that he had wanted to marry Mary, so charmed was he by her intelligence and wit. However, biographers conclude that this was most unlikely considering his stalwartly negative stance on marriage and their age differences—Walpole was seventy and Miss

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MAJOR WORKS The only fictional work for which Walpole is widely known is his novel The Castle of Otranto. Although considered a seriously flawed work, The Castle of Otranto is credited with introducing a number of important innovations that influenced the development of the Gothic novel, which enjoyed a great vogue during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. According to Walpole, The Castle of Otranto was inspired by a dream in which he was in a castle and a gigantic armorclad hand appeared to him at the top of a staircase. After two months of continuous, almost fevered, writing, Walpole completed the story, but published it anonymously under the pretense that it was an Italian manuscript written during the Last Crusade and translated by one William Marshal. Some early reviewers accepted it as a medieval text and praised it as possessing surprisingly “modern” qualities. Other commentators were not convinced or amused by this claim: the novel was generally faulted as being preposterously unbelievable and insulting to its readers. However, the negative critical reception of The Castle of Otranto did not prevent it from becoming extremely popular, which encouraged Walpole to reveal his authorship in the second edition. In his preface he defined the work as “an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern.” The former, he explained, relied upon imagination and improbability, with the result frequently being grossly incredible: the latter attempted to copy nature, but often lacked imagination. He concluded that these elements must be adequately balanced in order to create a plausible, yet interesting, narrative. Walpole was largely successful in accomplishing his objective. An admirer of legends of the Middle Ages, he incorporated their fairy-tale elements and chivalric code into a storyline which featured characters who were contemporary in speech and thought. His use of a Gothic castle and its array of machinery (trap doors, vaults, dungeons, rattling chains, etc.) was original not only in its inclusion but in its offhanded presentation. In The Castle of Otranto, statues bleed, apparitions stalk the castle, and

ancestral portraits sigh, but all are accepted as natural occurrences by the characters. In addition to this technique, Walpole manipulated the forces of nature to accentuate the sense of ominousness. For example, a gust of wind extinguishes the heroine’s candle at a critical moment and moonlight magnifies and plays tricks on the characters’ perception of objects. Another important element of The Castle of Otranto is the introduction of what eventually became stock characters in Gothic literature: the handsome hero, the virginal heroine, sinister monks, and the nobleman in peasant’s garb. Walpole’s lesser-known fictional works include The Mysterious Mother (1768), a drama in blank verse, and Hieroglyphic Tales (1785). The theme of The Mysterious Mother—incest—was so controversial that Walpole printed the work himself and distributed it only to selected friends. Although it has received relatively little critical comment, the drama has come to be recognized as an important forerunner of Gothic drama. Of The Mysterious Mother Bertrand Evans (see Further Reading) wrote: “Elements of setting, character, machinery, and technique, combined for a single purpose, make The Mysterious Mother the first play in the Gothic tradition.” The Hieroglyphic Tales are considered Walpole’s most peculiar fictional effort. By his own admission the Tales were “written extempore and without any plan.” In these early examples of automatic writing, Walpole completely defied fictional conventions of his day as well as prevailing moral taste to create works rife with incest, scatology, and unwitting cannibalism, and populated by concubines, dead children, and such fantastic elements as giant hummingbirds and carts made of giant pistachio shells. The effect is one of delirium and surrealism with—some critics claim—a detectable undercurrent of Walpole’s obsessions and psychological disturbances.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Critics generally consider Walpole’s letters the masterwork for which he is most deservedly known to posterity. The primary purpose of the letters was to entertain Walpole’s readers: their secondary purpose was to inform. Therefore the letters are marked by a highly distinctive style— witty, colorful, and vividly descriptive—but they are not always factually accurate. A harsh critic of dry and uninteresting writing by his contemporaries, Walpole sought to avoid similar weaknesses in his own prose and concentrated on developing seemingly artless but riveting narratives which

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Berry was in her early twenties. Nevertheless, the Berry sisters lived at Little Strawberry Hill, a cottage on Walpole’s estate, for many years and Mary became literary executrix of his papers upon his death in 1797, editing his works under her father’s name in accordance with the prejudices of the age.

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came alive through carefully selected and embellished detail. While most critics agree that Walpole’s vivid imagination and strongly-held opinions make the letters less than objective portrayals of his era, a significant number have harshly attacked what they consider exaggeration or distortion in his correspondence. In the twentieth century, critics reevaluated Walpole’s work and began to defend the significance of his letters as one of the most trustworthy and indispensable sources available for a thorough depiction of society, politics, and manners in eighteenthcentury England. General critical assessment maintains that, in spite of its important contributions to the Gothic tradition, The Castle of Otranto’s shortcomings are too serious to overlook. The novel suffers from a convoluted and confusing plot, insufficient character development, and stilted dialogue, all of which discourage and virtually prohibit reader involvement. One prevalent criticism is that the work is too rapidly paced, with the Gothic devices occurring in such quick succession that little of the sense of mystery Walpole wished to create is present. Nevertheless, these defects have not obscured The Castle of Otranto’s influence upon novelists who have received more recognition than Walpole. Both Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe, prominent Gothic novelists, as well as Sir Walter Scott, acknowledged their indebtedness to Walpole’s work, with Reeve (see Further Reading) calling her acclaimed novel The Old English Baron “the literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto” and Scott praising The Castle of Otranto as “not only . . . the original and model of a peculiar species of composition, attempted and successfully executed by a man of great genius, but . . . one of the standard works of our lighter literature.”

A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, with Lists of Their Works. 2 vols. (biography) 1758 A Dialogue between Two Great Ladies (satire) 1760 Anecdotes of Painting in England, with Some Account of the Principal Artists, and Incidental Notes on Other Arts. 4 vols. (art history) 1762-71 The Opposition to the Late Minister Vindicated from the Aspersions of a Pamphlet Entitled “Considerations on the Present Dangerous Crisis” (essay) 1763 The Castle of Otranto: A Story (novel) 1764 Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (essay) 1768 The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (play) 1768 A Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole, Youngest Son of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, at Strawberry-Hill, near Twickenham (catalog) 1774 Hieroglyphic Tales (short stories) 1785 Memoires of the Last Ten Years of the Reign of George the Second. 2 vols. (memoirs) 1822 Memoirs of the Reign of George the Third. 4 vols. (memoirs) 1845 Last Journals, from 1771 to 1783. 2 vols. (journals) 1859 Letters of Horace Walpole. 19 vols. (letters) 1903-25 Horace Walpole’s “Fugitive Verses” (poetry) 1931 The Yale Edition of Walpole’s Correspondence. 48 vols. (letters) 1937-83 Memoirs and Portraits (memoirs) 1963 Selected Letters (letters) 1973

PRIMARY SOURCES PRINCIPAL WORKS The Beauties: An Epistle to Mr. Eckardt, the Painter (poetry) 1746 Aedes Walpolianae; or, A Description of the Collection of Pictures at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, the Seat of the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford (catalog) 1747 A Letter to the Whigs, Occasioned by the “Letter to the Tories” (essay) 1747 A Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at London, to His Friend Lien Chi at Peking (satire) 1757

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HORACE WALPOLE (ESSAY DATE 1764) SOURCE: Walpole, Horace. “Translator’s Preface.” In Castle of Otranto, A Story, pp. iii-ix. Dublin, Ireland: J. Hoey, J. Exshaw, P. Wilson, S. Cotter, W. Sleater, J. Potts, S. Watson, J. Hoey, junior, J. Williams, and J. Sheppard, 1764. In the following “Translator’s Preface” to The Castle of Otranto Walpole offers a fictional account of the “discovery” of the manuscript, presented as a medieval document.

The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter,

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This solution of the author’s motives is however offered as a mere conjecture. Whatever his views were, or whatever effects the execution of them might have, his work can only be laid before the public at present as a matter of entertainment. Even as such, some apology for it is necessary. Miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events, are exploded now even from romances. That was not the case when our author wrote; much less when the story itself is supposed to have happened. Belief in every kind of prodigy was so established in those dark ages, that an author would not be faithful to the manners of the times, who should omit all mention of them. He is not bound to believe them himself, but he must represent his actors as believing them. If this air of the miraculous is excused, the reader will find nothing else unworthy of his perusal. Allow the possibility of the facts, and all the actors comport themselves as persons would do in their situation. There is no bombast no

similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Every thing tends directly to the catastrophe. Never is the reader’s attention relaxed. The rules of the drama are almost observed throughout the conduct of the piece. The characters are well drawn, and still better maintained. Terror, the author’s principal engine, prevents the story from ever languishing; and it is so often contrasted by pity, that the mind is kept up in a constant vicissitude of interesting passions. Some persons may perhaps think the characters of the domestics too little serious for the general cast of the story; but besides their opposition to the principal personages, the art of the author is very observable in his conduct of the subalterns. They discover many passages essential to the story, which could not be well brought to light but by their naivete and simplicity: In particular, the womanish terror and foibles of Bianca, in the last chapter, conduce essentially towards advancing the catastrophe. It is natural for a translator to be prejudiced in favour of his adopted work. More impartial readers may not be so much struck with the beauties of this piece as I was. Yet I am not blind to my author’s defects. I could wish he had grounded his plan on a more useful moral than this; that the sins of fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation. I doubt whether, in his time, any more than at present, ambition curbed its appetite of dominion from the dread of so remote a punishment. And yet this moral is weakened by that less direct insinuation, that even such anathema may be diverted by devotion to St. Nicholas. Here the interest of the Monk plainly gets the better of the judgment of the Author. However, with all its faults, I have no doubt but the English reader will be pleased with a sight of this performance. The piety that reigns throughout, the lessons of virtue that are inculcated, and the rigid purity of the sentiments, exempt this work from the censure to which romances are but too liable. Should it meet with the success I hope for, I may be encouraged to re-print the original Italian, though it will tend to depreciate my own labour. Our language falls far short of the charms of the Italian, both for variety and harmony. The latter is peculiarly excellent for simple narrative. It is difficult in English to relate without falling too low or rising too high; a fault obviously occasioned by the little care taken to speak pure language in common conversation. Every Italian or Frenchman of any rank piques himself on speaking his own tongue correctly and with choice. I cannot flatter myself with having done justice to

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in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear. The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity; but the language and conduct have nothing that savours of barbarism. The stile is the purest Italian. If the story was written near the time when it is supposed to have happened, it must have been between 1095, the æra of the first crusade, and 1243, the date of the last, or not long afterwards. There is no other circumstance in the work, that can lead us to guess at the period in which the scene is laid: The names of the actors are evidently fictitious, and probably disguised on purpose: Yet the Spanish names of the domestics seem to indicate that this work was not composed, until the establishment of the Arragonian Kings in Naples had made Spanish appellations familiar in that country. The beauty of the diction, and the zeal of the author [moderated, however, by singular judgment] concur to make me think that the date of the composition was little antecedent to that of the impression. Letters were then in their most flourishing state in Italy, and contributed to dispel the empire of superstition, at that time so forcibly attacked by the reformers. It is not unlikely that an artful priest might endeavour to turn their own arms on the innovators; and might avail himself of his abilities as an author to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions. If this was his view, he has certainly acted with signal address. Such a work as the following would enslave a hundred vulgar minds beyond half the books of controversy that have been written from the days of Luther to the present hour.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR FREDERICK S. FRANK ON THE MYSTERIOUS MOTHER

Unlike the first Gothic novel, the first Gothic drama consigns its characters permanently to the outer darkness. The Mysterious Mother is not only the darkest work that Walpole himself ever wrote, it is probably the darkest tragedy written on incest or any other subject of sexual transgression in the entire eighteenth century. In later forms of the high Gothic, the soul often dies before the body dies and evil supplants good. Surely, this tragic fact is what moved the publisher of the 1798 edition of the play to celebrate Walpole’s achievement in these terms: “Of the present tragedy we may boldly pronounce, that for nervous, simple, and pathetic language, each appropriated to the several persons of the drama; for striking incidents; for address in conducting the plot; and for consistency of character uniformly preserved through the whole piece; it is equal, if not superior, to any play of the present century” (Mysterious Mother, Advertisement from the Publishers, 174).

TITLE COMMENTARY The Castle of Otranto THE CRITICAL REVIEW (REVIEW DATE JANUARY 1765) SOURCE: A review of The Castle of Otranto: A Story, by Horace Walpole. The Critical Review 19 (January 1765): 50-1. In the following excerpt from a negative review of The Castle of Otranto, the critic expresses disapproval of the gross absurdity of the supernatural elements and suggests that the anonymously-published novel is the work of a modern, not medieval, author.

The ingenious translator of this very curious performance [The Castle of Otranto] informs that it was found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England; that it was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529; and that the style is of the purest Italian; he also conjectures, that if the story was written near the time when it is supposed to have happened, it must have been between 1095, the era of the first crusade, and 1243, the date of the last, or not long afterwards. . . .

SOURCE: Frank, Frederick S. Introduction to The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story and The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy, by Horace Walpole, edited by Frederick S. Frank, pp. 11-34. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2003.

my author in this respect: His stile is as elegant, as his conduct of the passions is masterly. It is pity that he did not apply his talents to what they were evidently proper for, the theatre. I will detain the reader no longer, but to make one short remark. Though the machinery is invention, and the names of the actors imaginary, I cannot but believe, that the ground-work of the story is founded on truth. The scene is undoubtedly laid in some real castle. The author seems frequently, without design, to describe particular parts. The chamber, says he, on the right-hand; the door on the left-hand; the distance from the chapel to Conrad’s apartment: These and other passages are

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strong presumptions that the author had some certain building in his eye. Curious persons, who have leisure to employ in such researches, may possibly discover in the Italian writers the foundation on which our author has built. If a catastrophe, at all resembling that which he describes, is believed to have given rise to this work, it will contribute to interest the reader, and will make the castle of Otranto a still more moving story.

Such is the character of this work given us by its judicious translator; but whether he speaks seriously or ironically, we neither know nor care. The publication of any work, at this time, in England composed of such rotten materials, is a phenomenon we cannot account for. That our readers may form some idea of the absurdity of its contents, we are to inform them that Manfred, prince of Otranto, had only one son, a youth about fifteen years of age, who on the day appointed for his marriage was ‘dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers.’ This helmet, it seems, resembled

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The above wonder is amongst the least of the wonderful things in this story. A picture comes out of its panel, and stalks through the room, to dissuade Manfred from marrying the princess who had been betrothed to his son. It even utters deep sighs and heaves its breasts. We cannot help thinking that this circumstance is some presumption that the castle of Otranto is a modern fabric; for we doubt much whether pictures were fixed in panels before the year 1243. We shall not affront our readers understanding so much as to describe the other monstrosities of this story; but, excepting those absurdities, the characters are well marked, and the narrative is kept up with surprising spirit and propriety.

JOHN LANGHORNE (REVIEW DATE FEBRUARY 1765) SOURCE: Langhorne, John. A review of The Castle of Otranto, a Story, by Horace Walpole. The Monthly Review 32 (February 1765): 97-9. In the following excerpt from a laudatory review of The Castle of Otranto, Langhorne applauds the vivid writing and dramatic power of the novel. This review, written when the work was supposed to be the work of a medieval author, contrasts sharply with a scathing review written by Langhorne for the same periodical three months later when the identity of the author was revealed.

Those who can digest the absurdities of Gothic fiction, and bear with the machinery of ghosts and goblins, may hope, at least, for considerable entertainment from [The Castle of Otranto] . . . : for it is written with no common pen; the language is accurate and elegant; the characters are highly finished; and the disquisitions into human manners, passions, and pursuits, indicate the keenest penetration, and the most perfect knowledge of mankind. . . . The principal defect of this performance does not remain unnoticed. That unchristian doctrine of visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, is certainly, under our present system, not only a very useless, but a very insupportable moral, and yet it is almost the only one deducible from this story. . . . However, as a work of genius, evincing great dramatic powers, and exhibiting fine views of nature, The Castle of Otranto may be read with pleasure. To give the reader an

ABOUT THE AUTHOR SIR WALTER SCOTT OFFERS HIGH PRAISE FOR WALPOLE AND THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO

The Castle of Otranto is remarkable, not only for the wild interest of the story, but as the first modern attempt to found a tale of amusing fiction upon the basis of the ancient romances of chivalry. . . . This romance has been justly considered not only as the original and model of a peculiar species of composition, attempted and successfully executed by a man of great genius, but as one of the standard works of our lighter literature. . . . The style of The Castle of Otranto is pure and correct English of the earlier and more classical standard. . . . Description, for its own sake, is scarcely once attempted in The Castle of Otranto; and if authors would consider how very much this restriction tends to realise narrative, they might be tempted to abridge, at least, the showy and wordy exuberance of a style fitter for poetry than prose. It is for the dialogue that Walpole reserves his strength; and it is remarkable how, while conducting his mortal agents with all the art of a modern dramatist, he adheres to the sustained tone of chivalry which marks the period of the action. This is not attained by patching his narrative or dialogue with glossarial terms, or antique phraseology, but by taking care to exclude all that can awaken modern associations. In the one case, his romance would have resembled a modern dress, preposterously decorated with antique ornaments; in its present shape, he has retained the form of the ancient armour, but not its rust and cobwebs. SOURCE: Scott, Sir Walter. “Walpole.” In Lives of the Novelists. 1811. Reprint edition, pp. 17796. London: Oxford University Press, 1906.

analysis of the story, would be to introduce him to a company of skeletons; to refer him to the book will be to recommend him to an assemblage of beautiful pictures.

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that upon a statue of Alfonso the Good, one of the former princes of Otranto, whose dominions Manfred usurped; and therefore the helmet, or the resemblance of it, by way of poetical justice, dashed out his son’s brains.

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PERCY LUBBOCK (ESSAY DATE 26 MAY 1923) SOURCE: Lubbock, Percy. A review of The Castle of Otranto: A Story, by Horace Walpole. The Nation and The Athenaeum 33, no. 8 (26 May 1923): 267-68. In the following excerpt from a review of The Castle of Otranto, Lubbock concludes that the novel is of no interest to the general reader, its plot and characterization being too trivial, unsubstantial, and tedious. Lubbock asserts that this work is of interest only because of its historical importance and is correctly relegated to the classroom as an example of early Gothic fiction or the eighteenth-century Romantic revival.

It is certainly hard on [Walpole], the trick that a later age has played with his Gothic romance [The Castle of Otranto]. Gray said it made the dons at Cambridge afraid to go to bed in the dark, Scott found a “wild interest” in it, Macaulay spoke of its unflagging excitement; and the end has been, not merely that it excites and frightens nobody, not only that it lies unread, but worse— that it is relegated to the very place of all others which is least congenial to Horace Walpole. It is handed over to the schools, to the critical handbooks, to the literary lecture-rooms; in these The Castle of Otranto lives on vigorously, but this is its only life. It is never mentioned, never thought of anywhere else; but as soon as the lecturer reaches the “romantic revival” of the eighteenth century we know what to expect—punctually the epoch opens with Horace Walpole’s tale of terror. He invented, we always understand, a “new form” in fiction, and his invention was symptomatic of the great new turn of thought that was changing the world of Pope into the world of Coleridge; and so The Castle of Otranto, ceasing to be terrible, remains historic, and doubtless it will continue to open the age of romance as long as there are handbooks and lectures on English literature in which to do so. Such is the company into which the fastidious author appears to have fallen irredeemably. As a collector and a wit and a letter writer, he may enjoy a society more to his mind; but as a romancer, no—as a romancer he belongs exclusively to the frumpish inelegance of the schools. He would rather be forgotten outright. . . . Can we do anything, even now, to retrieve his situation? . . . [Read] the story straight through— and say whether you find the story attractive in any way on its unsupported merit. It may be that the answer is surprising, if the experiment is made for the first time. Taken on its own merit, the story has an interest, neither wild indeed nor unflagging, but an interest as a piece of writing carefully

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studied and mannered, a neat exercise in an artificial tone. There is no crudity and no violence in its accent; it seems to be describing the adventures of a well-bred and courtly company in a rococo stage-pastoral, a world which at times will gracefully unbend to the humours and extravagances of its domestic servants. It is a pleasing and familiar effect, classical in its disciplined taste. It may be a shock to discover, on listening more closely, that these distinguished people are enduring agonies, experiencing portents, plunging into disasters such as “words cannot paint”—the author, staggered by the succession of enormities, can find no other phrase. But their style is not seriously ruffled by their tortures; they are still classical in their sufferings, and with a noble resignation they meet their doom, models of antique deportment in their despair and their extinction. It is not exciting, it is not terrifying, it is rather dull; but it has all the proprieties of an urbane tradition. And is this, then, the spirit-shaking fiction that inaugurated a new method of romance? After all, The Castle of Otranto must remain what it has been for so long, the text of the lecturer; for its respectable manners, though well maintained, are not so striking as to restore it to the casual liberal reader. Its interest as a tale is a very thin matter compared with its interest as a document; but this latter is heightened, perhaps, by the attempt to read it as a tale. For the startling novelty of its method, that to which it owes its prominence in the history of taste, unexpectedly disappears if it is not specially sought; unless you are purposely looking for it to point a moral, the Gothic rudeness and grimness of the Castle is easily missed. The dismal horrors that were once so medieval have turned to the baroque in their decorative exuberance; not a hollow groan, not a clanking chain, not a hair-raising shriek in the story, but is now the very echo of an age that comfortably toyed with marvels, persuading itself to a pleasing shudder. The revival of romance?— . . . it carries us back to the days when the imagination of man was so bright, so clear, so complacent, that it had actually, for its own relief, to create a little pretence-obscurity and mystery in one of its polished corners. We have changed all this so thoroughly—such vapours of the pit now curl and swirl in our haunted minds—that we may claim to have discovered, at last and again, the recesses of the grotesque and the mysterious, the places where the antic sits and grins. Perhaps it is we who are inaugurating a Gothic revival; at least

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In May 1765 the same critic in the Monthly Review wrote:

As for Horace Walpole, the moral he may point in the schools, or part of it, is the very long way a very little matter will go when it is really new. It was really a new idea to use the supernatural once more in fiction as a means of making your flesh creep; and Horace used the supernatural so inexpertly that we now hardly notice it is there; but in its day it frightened dons from their rest and struck even Scott with its gruesome power. Horace handled his marvels precisely as Mr. Anstey and Mr. Wells handle theirs; only he asked of them exactly the opposite effect. To bring the supernatural into your story without precaution, to tumble it forth into life that is unprepared and unattuned—this is the way to use it for burlesque and satire; taken for granted, blandly precipitated into normal life, the effect of a miracle is richly comic. Horace Walpole thought that it might become tragic and solemn by no other arts; and he was right: it could become both for a time, since the idea was a new revival. And so a gigantic helmet dropped from heaven into a castle-yard, a picture groaned, a statue shed blood from its nose; and for the space of a generation and more these prodigies met the demand of their author, crept upon his readers with delicious thrills. Enough, The Castle of Otranto had its turn, and more than its turn, in the genial world; let it remain henceforward in the handbooks, for ever heralding an historic movement.

While we considered [The Castle of Otranto a translation] we could readily excuse its preposterous phenomena, and consider them as sacrifices to a gross and unenlightened age. But when, as in this edition, [it] is declared to be a modern performance, that indulgence we offered to the foibles of a supposed antiquity, we can by no means extend to the singularity of a false tale in a cultivated period of learning. It is, indeed, more than strange that an Author, of a refined and polished genius, should be an advocate for reestablishing the barbarous superstitions of Gothic devilism!

EMMA CLERY (ESSAY DATE 1994) SOURCE: Clery, Emma. “Against Gothic.” In Gothick Origins and Innovations, edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage, pp. 34-43. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. In the following essay, Clery explores the significance of the change in critical perception of The Castle of Otranto from positive to negative following the disclosure of the novel’s true authorship, noting particularly the potentially subversive nature of the work.

In February 1765 a critic in the Monthly Review said of The Castle of Otranto: Those who can digest the absurdities of Gothic fiction, and bear with the machinery of ghosts and goblins, may hope, at least, for considerable entertainment from the performance before us: for it is written with no common pen; the language is accurate and elegant, the characters are highly finished; and the disquisitions into human manners, passions and pursuits, indicate the keenest penetration, the most perfect knowledge of mankind.1

And he went on to complain about the author’s attempt to defend in his preface ‘all the trash of Shakespeare . . . what that great genius evidently threw out as a necessary sacrifice to that idol the caecum vulgas, the ignorant masses he would adopt in the worship of the true God of Poetry’.2 What we have here is one of the great doubletakes in the history of book-reviewing. Three months divide the two judgements. The incitement was the appearance in the interim of a second edition with a new preface and the initials H. W. Otranto stood revealed as a modern scandal rather than an ancient curiosity, a sinister hoax rather than a naive genuine article. Most interesting for present purposes is the reminder that the founding text of the tradition of gothic fiction as we see it was a double text for the first audience. What does it mean, that a work is today installed in all its unitary and canonical splendour at the head of a literary genus, when the same work, as a historical event, provoked such a profound doubleness, disjunction, or even disfunction, incoherence, in response? How are we to understand this initial hiccup in Otranto’s reception? How much importance should we attach to it? From the perspective of the present that seeks to establish the essential coherence of a gothic aesthetic it must register as mere surface noise. At the most basic level, a critical discourse that employs ‘Gothic’ as a useful genre classification, presupposes ‘Gothic’ as the ‘already read’, the already known. It cannot imagine, or has no interest in imagining, a position from which a modern fiction employing the marvellous, like Otranto, figures as a disruption of norms and expectations. By disruption, I don’t mean the tired ‘gothic versus neo-classicism’ formula. This still posits a ‘Gothic’ in place as a retrospective unity. I’m talking about a horizon within which ‘Gothic’ does not exit as given

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we have plenty to shudder at that was never dreamed of at Strawberry Hill.

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entity, stable and reassuringly objective. Where, instead, Walpole’s experiment of updating superstition for modern consumption can be glimpsed only differentially, interpreted only in so far as it affirms or negates what existed before. A literary work addresses itself to what Hans Robert Jauss calls the horizon of expectation of the reader. It ‘predisposes its audience to a very specific kind of reception by announcements, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics, or implicit allusions.’3 From its first pages it arouses expectations which can then be confirmed intact, disorientated, reorientated or fulfilled ironically in the course of the reading.4 What is stressed in this version of literary history is dialogism, the constitutive role of the historical reader in establishing the work’s meaning. The meaning of a text is not immanent and fixed, but spun out through the process of interaction. Such a perspective grants real hermeneutic value to the double-take of the critic from the Monthly Review and allows that he was, in effect, judging two entirely different works. One, a curious relic by ‘Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of Otranto’ translated by a certain ‘William Marshall, Gent.’; the other, identical in almost every respect to the first, the work not only of a living author, but one who has inherited one of the best-known names in the country.

attached, contemporary parallel, Ossian); translation (mediation with the past, contextualising preface quoted at length in reviews); verisimilitude (with reference to the representation of character); prohibited: modern use of the marvellous; famous author (MP and son of Prime Minister); ‘trash of Shakespeare’ (appealing to the vulgar). The opposition could be construed in the following way. An antiquity which is firmly situated as a product of the past by the apparatus of translation but at the same time is rather like a modern novel of manners is commendable. A modern fiction that exploits the marvellous and is written by a man with political connections to appeal to the basest instincts of the audience is prohibited.

The question that next presents itself, is why the first of these works should be allowed and the second disallowed. Again, projections of a preconstituted ‘gothicism’ which confounds critical orthodoxies, can only obscure by their essentialism. There is a logic that joins together the reviewer’s two disjunct verdicts and it can be at least partially reconstructed from the terms used in the articles. A systematicity, a discourse, subtends the move from enthusiastic appreciation to sour grapes. The preface to The Order of Things, where Foucault introduced his theory of discourse, famously cites a Chinese encyclopedia as discussed by Borges, with its alien and fabulous taxonomy of animals, including among the classifications, ‘belonging to the Emperor’, ‘frenzied,’ ‘embalmed’, ‘innumerable’, and ‘having just broken the water pitcher’. I won’t pretend that I can uncover anything as arresting in the Monthly Review, but one of the procedures of discursive discipline described by Foucault, the principle of exclusion, is especially relevant here. The articles bring together a number of, for us, mysteriously disconnected elements under two categories of fiction, the commendable and the prohibited. They could be arranged in two columns like this: commendable: antique object (even with ‘gothic absurdities’

Lack of space forbids subtlety, so I will say straight away that I see the first preface as an invocation of the discourse of material and social improvement used by the reviewer. The twist is, that when Walpole eventually comes clean about the authorship, this preface will be revealed as a parody in advance of the terms in which the reviewer will reject the work. The second twist is, that its account of the work’s origins in the dark ages will turn into an allegory of the present. Let me show how this happens with a few specific references to the text:

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Now, rather than continuing to discuss the reviews in isolation, I want to turn to Walpole’s two prefaces, and try to show how the binary system I’ve sketched draws its coherence as a discourse from a dialogic exchange with the prefaces. The discourse is summoned into voice by the familiar signals of the first preface, only to be undermined by the second. I should mention that in the second edition of Otranto, only the second preface was printed, therefore assuming a knowledge of the first, but from the third edition in 1755 onwards they were printed together, as they are today.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear. The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity; but the language and conduct have nothing that savours of barbarism. The style is the purest Italian. If the story was written near the time when it is supposed to have happened, it must have been between 1095; the æra of the first crusade, and 1243, the date of the last, or not long afterwards. There is no other circumstance in the work that can lead us to guess at the period in which the scene is laid: the names of the actors are evidently fictitious, and probably disguised on purpose: yet

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The solution of the author’s motive is however offered as a mere conjecture. Whatever his views were, or whatever effects the execution of them might have, his work can only be laid before the public at present as a matter of entertainment. Even as such, some apology for it is necessary. Miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events, are exploded now even from romances. That was not the case when our author wrote, much less when the story itself is supposed to have happened. Belief in every kind of prodigy was so established in those dark ages, that an author would not be faithful to the manners of the times who should omit all mention of them. He is not bound to believe them himself but he must represent his actors as believing them.

turn their own arms on the innovators; and might avail himself of his abilities as an author to confirm the populace in their errors and superstitions.’ Onuphrio Muralto, it will emerge, is Horace Walpole; and it is precisely as an ‘artful priest’, a propagator of the ‘barbarous superstitions of gothic devilry’ that he will be condemned. Like the priest, he is hijacking the primary instrument of reform, the press, and reintroducing fabulous lies by means of the widely-circulated form of popular fiction. Here the discourse of socio-historical improvement intersects with debate on the power of fiction and the proper methods of directing it to useful and moral ends. The critics, straight-faced and earnest, will reverse against Walpole his teasing assertion in the preface that, ‘Miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events, are exploded now even from romances’. As the Monthly Review puts it, the ‘singularity of a false tale’ is incompatible with ‘a cultivated period of learning’. Or the Critical Review: ‘The publication of any work, at this time, in England, composed of such rotten materials, is a phenomenon we cannot account for’. However, with the transposition of the discourse of improvement into the fiction controversy, ‘superstition’, the other-to-besubjugated, is subsumed by a much nearer anxiety, the threat of unregulated consumerism.

‘Letters were then in their most flourishing state in Italy, and contributed to dispel the empire of superstition . . .’. The trope of the spread of learning driving out superstition is, of course, a ubiquitous feature of the language of enlightenment. With technological determinism á la Marshall McLuhan, it places the printing press at the centre of world historical progress. The present, witnessing an unprecedented dissemination of print and rapid expansion of the reading public, represented the glorious conclusion of this progress. The trope was, in fact, habitually applied to modern times and, in Britain, most often joined to elaborate panegyrics of English liberty and English institutions, and to denunciations of those institutions raised on superstition, notably the Catholic Church and the despotic forms of government found abroad. Walpole, with what will appear in retrospect a transparent irony, projects the contemporary struggle between light and darkness into a murky Italian past.

Like superstition, hedonistic consumption is a manifestation of the passions without the guidance of reason. In the view of the discourse of improvement, which is sometimes called the discourse of civic humanism, the economic passions, which include the love of luxury and are the basis of national prosperity, need to be reigned in and coordinated for the public good under the rational direction of wise governors. This view was scandalously challenged by Bernard Mandeville who argued in The Fable of the Bees that the private vices of greed and luxury would translate into the public benefits of a healthy national economy and strength abroad without the need for moral or political intervention, a position not far from the laissez-faire and ‘invisible hand’ of Adam Smith. I want to suggest that Walpole’s prefaces represent a similar scandal, disguised in the first instance and later confirmed by the second edition. And naturally the scandal would be magnified by the fact that the author was himself in a position of political power (as it was, 30 years later, in the case of ‘Monk’ Lewis).

The potential irony then intensifies. ‘It is not unlikely that an artful priest [ie Onuphrio Muralto, the author of this work] might endeavour to

Mimicking the shocked tones of the civic humanist, he observes in preface number one: ‘Such a work as the following would enslave a

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the Spanish names of the domestics seem to indicate that this work was not composed until the establishment of the Arragonian kings in Naples had made Spanish appellations familiar in that country. The beauty of the diction, and the zeal of the author [moderated however by singular judgment] concur to make me think that the date of the composition was little antecedent to that of the impression. Letters were then in their most flourishing state in Italy, and contributed to dispel the empire of superstition, at that time so forcibly attacked by the reformers. It is not unlikely that an artful priest might endeavour to turn their own arms on the innovators; and might avail himself of his abilities as an author to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions. If this was his view, he has certainly acted with signal address. Such a work as the following would enslave a hundred vulgar minds beyond half the books of controversy that have been written from the days of Luther to the present hour.

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hundred vulgar minds beyond half the books of controversy that have been written from the days of Luther to the present hour’. ‘To the present hour’ exactly—for the statement lexically hooks into a literary critical discourse that speaks of the reading public’s ‘enslavement’ by authors of fiction who calculatingly manipulate the passions, and Walpole obliquely confesses himself guilty, of just this crime. Neither are the remarks about ‘entertainment’ or ‘faithful to the manners of the times’ as innocent as they seem. A work of the distant past may be presented as pure entertainment, since it can contain no useful moral for the enlightened present; but this is far from being the case with a modern work of fiction, which must justify and redeem its fall from truth to illusion with a clear moral function. Walpole will go on to refuse a moral function outright in the second preface, and already in the first he obligingly draws attention to this heterodoxy, pointing out, in the role of translator, the ‘author’s defect’ in not finding a more useful moral than that ‘the sins of the fathers are visited on their children to the third or fourth generations’ (a moral, though, not without interest). In the same fashion, the detached stance of the antiquarian who simply offers the public a record of ‘things as they were’ disguises the amoral modern author, happy to cater to the regressive public taste for the marvellous, because he accepts, without judgement, ‘things as they are’. If we move on now to the second preface, we can see the way this position of economic amoralism is articulated in aesthetic terms: PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION The favourable manner in which this little piece has been received by the public, calls upon the author to explain the grounds on which he composed it. But before he opens those motives, it is fit that he should ask pardon of his readers for having offered his work to them under the borrowed personage of a translator. As diffidence of his own abilities, and the novelty of the attempt, were his sole inducements to assume that disguise, he flatters himself that he shall appear excusable. He resigned his performance to the impartial judgment of the public; determined to let it perish in obscurity, if disapproved; nor meaning to avow such a trifle, unless better judges should pronounce that he might own it without a blush. It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have been damned up, by a strict adherence to common life. But if in the latter species,

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Nature has cramped imagination, she did but take her revenge, having been totally excluded from old romances. The actions, sentiments, conversations, of the heroes and heroines of ancient days were as unnatural as the machines employed to put them in motion. The author of the following pages thought it possible to reconcile the two kinds. Desirous of leaving the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention, and thence of creating more interesting situations, he wished to conduct the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability; in short to make them think, speak and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do in extraordinary positions. He had observed, that in all inspired writings, the personages under the dispensation of miracles, and witnesses to the most stupendous phenomena, never lose sight of their human character: whereas in the productions of romantic story, an improbable event never fails to be attended by the most absurd dialogue. The actors seem to lose their senses the moment the laws of nature have lost their tone. As the public have applauded the attempt, the author must not say he was entirely unequal to the task he had undertaken; yet if the new route he has struck out shall have paved a road for men of brighter talents, he shall own with pleasure and modesty, that he was sensible the plan was capable of receiving greater embellishments than his imagination or conduct of the passions could bestow upon it.

In a very well known passage, the author speaks of a ‘new route’ in fiction, and of a ‘blend of the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern’. The idea of a blend is based on the perceived deficiencies of these two existing types. Modern fictions are overly mimetic, cramped by their imitation of nature. Ancient fictions are too wildly improbable, in particular their delineation of character is too unnatural, Walpole seems to be suggesting, to allow a modern reader a proper point of identification. Both the proposal to salvage the extravagances of the past, and the criticism of an aesthetic of nature that really amounted to an ethic, are controversial. But how do they engage with the social and economic issues just mentioned? First, I should say, by context. The preface quickly launches into a digression of three or four pages addressed to Voltaire, (establishing that Shakespeare is Walpole’s model and defending the presence of comedy in the tragedies from the criticisms of the Frenchman). Walpole’s rehabilitation of genre hybridism in Shakespeare parallels Elizabeth Montagu’s contemporary, influential rehabilitation of the preternatural in Shakespeare. In both these instances, the exemplary function of literature is discounted. Walpole and Montagu

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This lengthy aside of Walpole’s on drama illuminates the libertarian language used in the passage quoted. The powers of fancy in fiction have been dammed up and cramped, in his view, by the same prescriptions, the same critical strictures, aimed at Shakespeare. The subordination of fiction to moral instrumentality is refused. In place of this function ‘boundless realms of invention’ are evoked, prompting ideas of the infinite vistas of commercial expansion. The absolute value of freedom is novelty, ‘creating more interesting situations’; suggesting the central place of the fashion system in that most commercially up-andcoming literary form, the novel. Walpole spotted a gap in the market. He decided to try to reconcile the ‘powers of fancy’ with ‘the rules of probability’. The success of the first edition has vindicated his venture, and encouraged him to reveal his authorship and point the way for ‘men of brighter talents’ to build on his entrepreneurial foundations. But this vision of liberty is not without its tensions. The remark that ‘the great resources of fancy have been damned up by a strict adherence to common life’, removes the notion of moral instrumentality at the same time as it metaphorically introduces an idea of economic instrumentality by representing fancy as a property, a form of mineral wealth. More immediately, the author’s deferential address to ‘the public’ masks a more complex relation involving both antagonism and dependency. On the one hand, there is the memory of the claim that ‘such a work as the following would enslave a hundred vulgar minds’, relocated in present fears concerning the addictive, pathological pleasures of fiction, and the extraordinary powers wielded by the novelist over the sensibilities of his or her readers. On the other hand, there is the reverse possibility, raised by the simple observation ‘the public have applauded

the attempt’, that fiction, having asserted its autonomy from moral ends, its social uselessness, may become in turn a slave to the whims of the audience, or the law of supply and demand, reinstrumentalised by the operations of the market, (reformed) as a commodity. This possibility is raised more provocatively in the final sentence of the preface: ‘Such as [Otranto] is, the public have honoured it sufficiently, whatever rank their suffrages allot to it.’ An elaborate way of saying, ‘this is a bestseller, so stuff the critics’. A hierarchical, judgemental conception of taste is superseded by ‘kitchen taste’ relating to a ‘culinary’ or entertainment art, based on a gustatory model, subjectivist and nonevaluative, as in ‘each to his own taste’. The word ‘rank’ does double service here: not only indicating the indifference of the author to critical hierarchy, but also playfully mauling the cherished correlation of social rank and the proper exercise of taste. The rather forced use of ‘suffrages’ may, too, be an attempt to crank up the level of critical reaction one degree closer to hysteria, its radical political connotations overlaying the radical prospect of a ‘republic of consumption’. The two prefaces of The Castle of Otranto raise the spectre of a thoroughgoing transformation in the relation between literary fiction and society; not in order to analyze or resolve the difficulties involved in such a transformation, certainly; more, if I can change the metaphor, to wave it like a red flag in the face of the opposition. But we find there not only a proposal for a new kind of reading matter, but the outlines of a new mode of fiction reading, one which still largely determines our expectations today. The reading I offer is, I think, incompatible with the assumptions of genre criticism. That said, I wouldn’t question the interpretative value of the term ‘gothic’ when applied to works of the 19th and 20th century, when self-consciousness in the writing of fantastic or supernatural fictions has reached a level such that ‘gothic’ becomes determinate as the name for a species of writing. But it seems to me that when applied to earlier works, ‘gothic’ can only serve to widen the cause of ontology, the search for essences. I wonder if we wouldn’t be better off examining some of the categories in which contemporary commentators actually placed the works—the ‘terrorist system of novel-writing’ for instance, or most often, ‘modern romance’, a term which for the 18th century was instilled with the fascination of paradox.

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ignore the objection that drama which included gross improbabilities like ghosts and fairies, or promiscuously mixed comedy and tragedy, threatened to lapse from the role of instruction and elevation to mere unredeemed entertainment, from didacticism to aimless affectivity. Conversely, when Walpole and Montagu’s revaluations are resisted and condemned, it is rationalised as resistance to a groundling’s-eye-view of the drama, the passive, uncritical, sensuous pleasure of the spectacle. Not incidentally, Walpole’s argument is framed in terms of rank, as the right of the fictionalised domestic servant to laugh, ‘however grave, important, or even melancholy, the sensations of princes or heroes may be’.

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What I hope I’ve shown is that The Castle of Otranto interprets its own project in material terms, most specifically with reference to class hierarchy and the development of a consumer society. It’s my belief that the works written and published prior to the canonization of gothic have a lot to tell us about the social causes and consequences of that aesthetic conversion.

Notes 1. Monthly Review (Feb. 1765), pp. 97-99. 2. Ibid, (May 1765), p. 394. 3. Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 23. 4. Ibid, p. 23.

MICHAEL GAMER (ESSAY DATE 2001) SOURCE: Gamer, Michael. Introduction to The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole, pp. xiii-xxxv. London: Penguin, 2001. In the following essay, Gamer discusses how The Castle of Otranto has been received by critics from the eighteenth century through the twenty-first century, and explores Walpole’s vision as evidenced in the novel.

Frontispiece of Horace Walpole’s A Description of Strawberry Hill, in which Walpole delineates his Gothic castle.

1. Reception

In the first edition, The Castle of Otranto is subtitled, ‘A Story’. On the title page of the second edition this has been changed to ‘A Gothic Story’. For the reader of today, this supplement has no resonance. As a consequence of overuse or misuse, the term has no elasticity. It is merely what we expect to see. The main point I want to establish in the paper is that in its historical moment this word is absolutely full, taut, with meaning; invested, in fact, with all the significance I’ve allotted to the interaction between author and critic and the interplay between one preface and the other. ‘Gothic’ in this place is no ordinary sign—as an adjective, as a representation, it would be properly applied to the first edition of Otranto—it would be used as the reviewer uses it, to delimit the work of a past era. Instead, ‘gothic’ is introduced precisely in the place where it shouldn’t be, where it doesn’t fit, rupturing coherence, severing a modern fiction from its function as an index of enlightenment, an anti-sign, a negativity, semantically dislocated but ominous with a futurity that figures as regression. The future of autonomous fiction that cannot escape the condition of a commodity.

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Since its first publication in 1764, The Castle of Otranto has rarely, if ever, been out of print, and over 130 editions precede this one.1 Few books of fiction have surpassed its sustained popularity in the history of literary publishing; even fewer can claim so central an influence on the history of the novel or on late eighteenthcentury prose romance. Appearing a quarter of a century before Gothic fiction became a popular literary form, Walpole’s story is startling for the way in which it assembles, almost prophetically, an array of generic devices recognizable to any reader familiar with Frankenstein (1818), Northanger Abbey (1818), Wuthering Heights (1847) or Dracula (1897). The fatal prophecy against Manfred’s house, the supernatural visitations attending it, and the Draconian attempts of Manfred to combat both found their way into countless late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fictions, including those of Anna Letitia Barbauld, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, W. H. Ireland, Charlotte Dacre and Charles Robert Maturin. In addition, the book’s breathless pace and mysterious opening, packed with unexplainable happenings and sinister portents, anticipate later detective and sensation fiction. Most influential and evocative of all, of course, has been the icon

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Yet in its immediate reception and in the many appraisals that have followed, critical responses to The Castle of Otranto and to its author have been consistently mixed, characterized by a recognizable blend of pleasure and bewilderment, admiration and discomfort. Early nineteenth-century anthologies of the British novel, for example, included Walpole’s romance almost without exception; yet when Anna Letitia Barbauld chose in 1810 to include it in her monumental series The British Novelists, she began by pointing uneasily to its popularity with younger readers and by expressing reservations about its cultural value. Walpole’s ‘slight performance’, as she called it, may have been ‘one of the first of the modern productions founded on appearances of terror’ and may have shown ‘a livelier play of fancy’ than most of its successors, but these virtues did not entirely excuse the supernatural fiction that it apparently had inspired: ‘it is calculated to make a great impression on those who relish the fictions of the Arabian Tales, and similar performances . . . Since this author’s time, from the perusal of Mrs Radcliffe’s productions and some of the German tales, we may be said to have “supped full with horrors”.’2 A year later, another essay on Walpole and The Castle of Otranto appeared, this time published in an Edinburgh edition of the novel edited by Walter Scott.3 Like Barbauld, Scott expressed reservations about the source of Otranto’s popularity and its frequent recourse to the supernatural before moving on to more enthusiastic praise; but there the similarities between the two essays ended. No longer (as in Barbauld’s description) a slight, spirited work written by a dilettante in eight days, The Castle of Otranto in Scott’s treatment constituted a daring synthesis of historical realism and unfettered imaginative liberty. Scott, therefore, presents Walpole as at once an eccentric dreamer, an insightful antiquarian, and a gifted

ABOUT THE AUTHOR H. P. LOVECRAFT ON WALPOLE’S INFLUENCE ON THE GOTHIC

Fond of mediaeval romance and mystery as a dilettante’s diversion, and with a quaintly imitated Gothic castle as his abode at Strawberry Hill, Walpole in 1764 published the Castle of Otranto; a tale of the supernatural which, though thoroughly unconvincing and mediocre in itself, was destined to exert an almost unparalleled influence on the literature of the weird. . . . Such is the tale; flat, stilted, and altogether devoid of the true cosmic horror which makes real literature. Yet such was the thirst of the age for those touches of strangeness and spectral antiquity which it reflects, that it was seriously received by the soundest readers and raised in spite of its intrinsic ineptness to a pedestal of lofty importance in literary history. What it did above all else was to create a novel type of scene, puppetcharacters, and incidents; which, handled to better advantage by writers more naturally adapted to weird creation, stimulated the growth of an imitative Gothic school which in turn inspired the real weavers of cosmic terror—the line of actual artists beginning with Poe. This novel dramatic paraphernalia consisted first of all of the Gothic castle, with its awesome antiquity, vast distances and ramblings, deserted or ruined wings, damp corridors, unwholesome hidden catacombs, and galaxy of ghosts and appalling legends, as a nucleus of suspense and daemoniac fright. . . . All this paraphernalia reappears with amusing sameness, yet sometimes with tremendous effect, throughout the history of the Gothic novel; and is by no means extinct even today, though subtler technique now forces it to assume a less naive and obvious form. An harmonious milieu for a new school had been found, and the writing world was not slow to grasp the opportunity. SOURCE: Lovecraft, H. P. “The Early Gothic Novel.” In Supernatural Horror in Literature. 1945. Reprint edition, with a new introduction by E. F. Bleiler, pp. 23-9. New York: Dover, 1973.

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of the castle, transformed in Walpole’s handling from a locus of safety into a place of sexual transgression and supernatural visitation, of secret passageways and political intrigue. With its adjacent monastery, it is a place that harbours guilty secrets and unlawful desires, a fortress not for keeping people out but for keeping them in. Modern readers, therefore, will find in Walpole’s Gothic structures the prototypes not only for other Gothic fictions like The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), but also for twentieth-century films as popular and disparate as Nosferatu (1922), Rebecca (1940), Alien (1979) and The Name of the Rose (1986).

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and imaginative historian. Tapping ‘that secret and reserved feeling of love for the marvelous and supernatural, which occupies a hidden corner in almost every one’s bosom’,4 Walpole’s antiquarian knowledge, Scott argued, had allowed him the coup of introducing apparitions seamlessly into a carefully historicized setting: The association of which we have spoken [that of overcoming rational disbelief in the supernatural] is of a nature peculiarly delicate, and subject to be broken and disarranged. It is, for instance, almost impossible to build such a modern Gothic structure as shall impress us with the feelings we have endeavoured to describe. It may be grand, or it may be gloomy; it may excite magnificent or melancholy ideas; but it must fail in bringing forth the sensation of supernatural awe, connected with halls that have echoed to the sounds of remote generations, and have been pressed by the footsteps of those who have long since passed away. Yet Horace Walpole has attained in composition, what, as an architect, he must have felt beyond the power of his art. The remote and superstitious period in which his scene is laid, the art with which he has furnished forth its Gothic decorations, the sustained, and, in general, dignified tone of feudal manners, prepare us gradually for the favourable reception of prodigies, which, though they could not really have happened at any period, were consistent with the belief of all mankind at that time in which the action is placed.5

Coming from a writer traditionally credited with inventing the historical novel—whose estate Abbotsford was modelled, in many ways, on Walpole’s own Strawberry Hill—Scott’s tribute probably should not surprise us. That Scott should agree with Barbauld (herself an early theorist and practitioner of supernatural fiction6 ) in so many particulars while differing so markedly on Otranto’s cultural significance, however, is at once unexpected and yet typical of the book’s varied critical reception. It remains one of the few works of fiction to draw strong praise and censure from so many authors of note, boasting famous dismissals by William Hazlitt and Thomas Babington Macaulay and encomiums from writers as different from one another as Lord Byron and Ann Yearsley.7 Scott’s celebration may be the one more often quoted in scholarly essays and editions, but twenty-first-century readers will find themselves surprised by the justness of Barbauld’s observations, particularly her fascination with the volume’s slightness and theatricality and her representation of it as ‘the sportive effusion of a man of genius, who throws the reins loose upon the neck of his imagination’.8 If readers have found difficulty finding stable footing when reading Walpole’s romance, their uneasiness has stemmed at

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least in part from its unsettling combination of careful historicism and imaginative outrageousness, of solemnity and burlesque. In addition to these difficulties of irony and tone, The Castle of Otranto’s first reviewers were forced to cope with the ruse of its initial publication. Anxious over the book’s reception, Walpole had disguised its first edition by publishing it under the pseudonym of ‘William Marshall, Gent.’ and by having Thomas Lownds print and sell the work rather than doing so at his own press at Strawberry Hill. Walpole then added a bogus Preface that still reads as one of the work’s triumphs, burlesquing scholarly tone and gleefully attending to minute details of the forgery. Writing in the persona of Marshall, Walpole declares Otranto to be an English translation of a sixteenth-century text printed in Naples in 1529 and written by one ‘ONUPHRIO MURALTO, Canon of the Church of St. NICHOLAS at OTRANTO’ (see p. 1). He then proceeds to give this genealogy an extra twist, surmising Onuphrio Muralto to have taken as the source of his narrative a tale originally written during the Crusades. Walpole’s Preface even provides an account of the work’s probable religious and political origins, speculating it to be a document of the Italian Counter-Reformation: ‘It is not unlikely that an artful priest . . . might avail himself of his abilities as an author to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions’ (see p. 5). The sum is a fabrication whose complex historicism is typical of Walpole’s sense of humour, since to pull off the forgery in convincing fashion he must impersonate an eighteenth-century Catholic English country gentleman translating a militant sixteenth-century Neapolitan priest appropriating (for religious and political ends) a thirteenthcentury local history. With this elaborate frame and a few additional observations on its dramatic excellence and the difficulties of translating Italian into English, The Castle of Otranto appeared in masquerade on Christmas Eve of 1764. The immediate response was not auspicious. Perhaps suspicious of the book’s holiday publication date, the Critical Review reacted defensively. It flatly condemned the book’s subject matter and, after displaying its own command of antiquarian knowledge, cavalierly refused to judge its authenticity: ‘whether he speaks seriously or ironically, we neither know nor care. The publication of any work, at this time, in England composed of such rotten materials, is a phœnomenon we cannot account for’.9 The Monthly Review chose a more charitable course, recommending the book as a

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While we considered it as [a translation from an ancient writer], we could readily excuse its preposterous phœnomena, and consider them as sacrifices to a gross and unenlightened age.—But when, as in this edition, the Castle of Otranto is declared to be a modern performance, that indulgence we afforded to the foibles of a supposed antiquity, we can by no means extend to the singularity of a false taste in a cultivated period of learning. It is, indeed, more than strange, that an Author, of a refined and polished genius, should be an advocate for re-establishing the barbarous superstitions of Gothic devilism!1 1

No doubt the Monthly’s irritation stemmed from a dislike of being made to look foolish. Still, its response is worth examining for what it yields about the literary culture into which Walpole published his romance. Strikingly, none of the immediate responses to The Castle of Otranto allowed for the possibility that a cultivated mind could enjoy reading, let alone be capable of writing, such a book. In the above quotation, the Monthly Review’s objections arise out of assumptions about its role as a respectable and enlightened literary journal. The reviewer, John Langhorne, appears especially keen to separate his own ‘period of cultivated learning’ from past ages, and especially from Otranto’s culture of chivalry and its ‘barbarous superstitions of Gothic devilism’. What is interesting here is the way in which imagining this kind of gulf between superstitious past and enlightened present brings with it other assumptions about readerly pleasure. From the Monthly’s relative position of enlightenment, it is unwilling on some fundamental level to believe that rational readers or writers can take pleasure in supernatural representations. Its first review, therefore, had instead presented The Castle of Otranto as a historical curiosity, and within this framework had invited readers to discern a recognizable human nature transcending history and overcoming the most egregious superstition. Put another way, the Monthly Review’s stance of finding pleasure in Otranto’s ‘fine views of nature’ while being repulsed by its barbarism allowed for the accompanying belief that noble, laudable aspects of human nature could transcend the centuries while other, less desirable aspects could not. The Monthly’s applause in its first review had arisen, then, from the narrative of historical

progress it had been able to impose on Walpole’s book. In doing so, it wielded a story that recurs in critical writing frequently during the second half of the eighteenth century, shaping debates about the function of the supernatural not only in fiction but also on the stage.1 2 We find it operating even in the responses of Walpole’s own circle of friends—as with George ‘Gilly’ Williams, who felt Otranto’s archaic setting and subject matter to be so patently absurd and innately uninteresting that ‘no boarding-school Miss of thirteen could get half through without yawning’.1 3 We see it also in the accounts of more flexible and sympathetic readers like William Mason, who could not fathom the idea that the book was a modern production. Writing to Walpole immediately after the publication of the book’s second edition, Mason confessed that, ‘When a friend of mine to whom I had recommended The Castle of Otranto returned it me with some doubts of its originality, I laughed him to scorn, and wondered he could be so absurd as to think that anybody nowadays had imagination enough to invent such a story.’1 4 In the face of such statements, we can begin to grasp how completely the assumptions of readers like Mason could be challenged by the revelation that The Castle of Otranto was not an ancient text but a ‘Gothic story’ (the subtitle Walpole affixed to Otranto’s second edition) by a modern author. To understand the particular nerves that Walpole’s book struck we need to consider the social position of its inventor and his relation to this historically specific question of ‘imagination’, since Walpole brought both to bear on his attempts to transform how his contemporaries read prose fiction and understood its function.

2. The ‘Master of Otranto’ With the appearance of its second edition, The Castle of Otranto ceased to be written by a zealous priest from bygone times. Its author became instead a living, mature man of forty-seven years of age, a Member of Parliament of nearly twentyfive years’ standing, and the son of a celebrated Prime Minister. Part of The Castle of Otranto’s contemporary reception, then, has always been tied to Walpole’s notoriety as a public figure, since readers and reviewers alike were forced to ask what it meant for a man of such eminence to write such a book. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, Horace Walpole had grown up during the height of Robert Walpole’s power. As Walpole’s biographers have suggested, his social position no doubt helped to render his time at Eton free of the usual bullying and brutality associated with the school

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historical curiosity and as ‘a work of genius, evincing great dramatic powers, and exhibiting fine views of nature’.1 0 When Walpole’s second edition showed the work to be a modern production with pretensions to literary innovation, however, the Monthly was forced to recant its judgement:

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in the eighteenth century, and made his Grand Tour a heady, exuberant and formative experience.1 5 While travelling in Italy in 1740 with his childhood friend Thomas Gray, Walpole mixed with its best society, befriending diplomats like Horace Mann and taking great pleasure in purchasing works of art for his father’s extensive collection at his country estate Houghton in Norwich. Elected to Parliament while abroad, Walpole arrived back in England in September of 1741 expecting to take his seat in the House of Commons and his place among London’s élite. His first speech six months after his arrival, however, could hardly have accorded less with his expectations. In that time, Robert Walpole’s government had fallen after over two decades in power. Consequently, Walpole’s first address was in defence of his father who, in the wake of his resignation, faced multiple allegations of corruption. With this reversal of fortune, Horace Walpole’s involvement in parliamentary matters over the next decades was intermittent and behind the scenes. Rather than acting as a direct participant in affairs of state, he moved between the role of periodic strategist and pamphleteer and that of perpetual observer and chronicler. Steadfastly loyal to his father’s memory, his first book was a catalogue of the paintings Robert Walpole had collected and housed at Houghton, entitled Aedes Walpolianae, written in 1743 and printed privately in 1747. Walpole’s later Memoirs, begun in 1751 and fortyone years in the writing, constitutes a textual version of this lifelong work of defending the family’s political legacy.1 6 Over the next years Walpole wrote primarily as a gentleman author and elegant essayist, publishing when it suited him and taking pleasure in helping to publish the works of his friends. Three of his early poems—‘Epistle to Thomas Ashton from Florence’, ‘The Beauties’ and an Epilogue to Tamerlane—appeared in 1748 in the first volumes of James Dodsley’s Collection of Poems, which also featured Gray’s first published work. After this joint appearance, Walpole spent considerable energy over the next decade persuading Gray to publish more poetry and overseeing its production and reception. The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard appeared in 1751 to great applause; Designs by Mr. R. Bentley, for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray (featuring elaborate rococo illustrations by Walpole’s friend Richard Bentley) appeared two years later. It is no accident that when Walpole opened the Strawberry Hill Press in 1757, he chose Odes by Mr. Gray (1757) as its first published work.

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In spite of this sustained interest in writing and publishing poetry, however, Walpole emerged in the 1740s and 1750s primarily as a prose writer—one capable of moving between savage parody, graceful elegance and pointed observation. His first essays, written for magazines such as the Museum and the World, were determinedly frivolous and deliberately at odds with the moral essays of Samuel Johnson and with the serious tone of periodicals like the Gentleman’s Magazine. The ‘Advertisement to the History of Good Breeding’ and ‘On the Relative Simplicity of Gothic Manners to Our Own’, for example, indulged in parody and burlesque. Others, like the ‘Scheme for Raising a large Sum of Money by Message Cards and Notes’, were at once more outrageous and more intellectual, and showed Walpole developing ideas that would prove central to the literary and aesthetic projects that culminated in The Castle of Otranto: The notion I have of a Museum is an Hospital for every Thing that is singular; whether the Thing have acquired Singularity, from having escaped the Rage of Time; from any natural Oddness in itself; or from being so insignificant that nobody ever thought it worth their while to produce any more of the same Sort. Intrinsic Value has little or no Property in the merit of curiosities . . . If the Learned World could be so happy as to discover a Roman’s old Shoe (provided the Literati were agreed it were a Shoe, and not a leathern Casque, a drinking Vessel, a balloting Box, or an empress’s Head Attire), such Shoe would immediately have the Entrée into any collection in Europe.1 7

This notion of singularity and uniqueness informs most of Walpole’s writing and publishing in these years. The Strawberry Hill Press, moreover, provided him with a means of bypassing the usual channels of book printing and bookselling when he chose to do so. Abjuring both profit and politics when choosing manuscripts for publication, the press quickly acquired a reputation for publishing books fundamentally different from those available elsewhere. In his own compositions Walpole appears often to have been driven by a similar desire for innovation even when writing anonymous partisan tracts for other presses. His successful political satire, A Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at London, to His Friend Lien Chi at Peking (N. Middleton, 1757), anticipated later works like Robert Southey’s Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), while his Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors (Strawberry Hill Press, 1758) was one of the first books of its kind. It was for his groundbreaking Anecdotes of Painting (Strawberry Hill, 1762), however, that Walpole

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One of the difficulties readers have faced when attempting to come to grips with Walpole’s writings and reputation has stemmed from his diversity of interests and this fondness of ‘Singularity’. For nineteenth-century historian and essayist Thomas Babington Macaulay, Walpole’s eccentricity and determination to be considered a gentleman author who wrote with ease on many subjects smacked of affectation and effeminacy. ‘[None] but an unhealthy and disorganized mind,’ he argued, ‘could have produced such literary luxuries.’1 9 Likely the most influential assessment of Walpole ever written, Macaulay’s account derives its persuasiveness from its ability to present Walpole’s work and life as projections of a single set of affectations that, while assembled and put on like masks, nevertheless comprise Walpole’s character.2 0 Whether by reading Walpole’s correspondence, wandering through Strawberry Hill, or perusing the volumes published by its press, one nevertheless imbibes the same aesthetic experience: The motto which he prefixed to this Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors, might have been inscribed with perfect propriety over the door of every room in his house, and on the titlepage of every one of his books. ‘Dove diavolo, Messer Ludovico, avete pigliate tante coglionere?’ [‘Where the devil, Sir Ludovico, did you collect so many imbecilities?’] In his villa, every compartment is a museum; every piece of furniture is a curiosity; there is something strange in the form of a shovel; there is a long story belonging to the bell-rope. We wander among a profusion of rarities, of trifling intrinsic value, but so quaint in fashion, or connected with such remarkable names and events that they may well detain our attention for a moment. A moment is enough.2 1

Deriving much of its rancour from his own sense of professionalism, Macaulay’s distaste arises out of a belief not just that Walpole’s interests are ‘unhealthy’, but that they also constitute an affront to artistic seriousness and therefore a deni-

gration of appropriate authorship. Yet what Macaulay dismissed pejoratively as a ‘profusion of rarities’ in Walpole’s life and works has been reappraised by twentieth-century literary historians as a body of innovative writing of unparalleled range, one typical of the generation of Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale Piozzi and surpassing even that of Oliver Goldsmith. Between 1747 and his death in 1797, Walpole wrote and published several poems, a historical romance, a tragedy, a comic afterpiece, a book of art history, a bibliographic study, a memoir, a diary, a description of his own house, several catalogues of paintings, political pamphlets, fables and fairy tales. After his death his executors published what remains an authoritative political history of late eighteenth-century Britain and perhaps the most famous body of correspondence ever written.2 2 Even in the face of this voluminous output, it is fair to say that Walpole was equally famous in his lifetime for his achievements as a collector and architect. At the time of his death his collection of miniature and print portraits was arguably the best ever assembled in Britain. His villa Strawberry Hill, moreover, was without question the most famous house of its kind. Like The Castle of Otranto, which, though often called the first Gothic novel, was in many ways anticipated by the poetry of William Collins and novels like Tobias Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) and Thomas Leland’s Longsword (1762), Strawberry Hill was more influential than entirely original. While not the first attempt to appropriate Gothic architecture into a domestic setting, it effectively revived Gothic as a popular architectural style.2 3 In 1748 Walpole had purchased the original Chopp’dStraw Hall and its five acres in Twickenham because of its nearness to London and its attractive location on the banks of the Thames. He did not start remodelling until 1751, and for that purpose commandeered the help of friends John Chute (who transformed much of the exterior) and Richard Bentley (who brought to Walpole’s interiors the same extravagant flair with which he had illustrated Gray’s poems). Calling themselves ‘The Committee’, the three transformed the house, quadrupling its original size in a little over a decade and adding battlements, turrets, cloisters, stained glass, fireplaces and other fixtures to give it the effect of a medieval castle. Their work, moreover, was decidedly unlike Robert Walpole’s Palladian estate at Houghton, largely because Strawberry Hill’s small size and irregular design dictated different choices of architectural style and materials. Where Houghton achieved its effects

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became best known before the success of The Castle of Otranto. At once a treasure-trove of information and a sustained assessment of English painting, the book shows Walpole moving at ease between the minutiae of historical research and engaging, arresting writing. W. S. Lewis puts the matter succinctly: ‘It was an instant success. Gibbon spoke of his “minute curiosity and acuteness.” Strangers wrote to him with gratitude and volunteered additions and corrections for the next edition. It was no wonder that this work was so popular: it was new, informative, and entertaining . . . [and] laid the foundations for an historical study of the Fine Arts in England.’1 8

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through stone, grand rooms and columns, Strawberry Hill used theatrical devices like trompe-l’oeil painting and materials like plaster and papier mâché. Writing to Horace Mann in 1750, Walpole explained that ‘[t]he Grecian is only proper for magnificent and public buildings. Columns and all their beautiful ornaments look ridiculous when crowded into a closet or a cheesecake house. The variety is little, and admits no charming irregularities.’2 4 By the end of its second stage of building in 1763, Strawberry Hill had already become a celebrated attraction, further gaining in reputation as the century closed. A telling measure of its popularity occurs in The Ambulator: or, A Pocket Companion in a Tour Round London (1800), which devotes five pages to Strawberry Hill while allocating only two to the British Museum.2 5 While the steadily increasing stream of visitors to his villa forced Walpole later in his life to print rules for admission, he also openly encouraged the attention that the house conferred on him by twice printing a description of it and its contents.2 6 This transformation of house into textual form was hardly accidental. As early as 1765 Walpole began to encourage friends and readers to associate Strawberry Hill with the setting of The Castle of Otranto by playfully referring to the villa as ‘Otranto’ and himself as ‘The Master of Otranto’.2 7 More importantly, he repeatedly associated the house with Otranto’s composition: Your partiality to me and Strawberry have I hope inclined you to excuse the wildness of the story. You will even have found some traits to put you in mind of this place. When you read of the picture quitting its panel, did not you recollect the portrait of Lord Falkland all in white in my gallery? Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of my romance? I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it—add that I was very glad to think of anything rather than politics—In short I was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had drunk my tea, about six o’clock, till half an hour after one in the morning, when my hand and fingers were so weary, that I could not hold the pen to finish the sentence, but left Matilda and Isabella talking, in the middle of a paragraph.2 8

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The dream, pointedly, is ‘a very natural dream’ within the surroundings of Strawberry Hill, one that opposes Gothic story, Gothic villa and Gothic dream to their ‘modern’ and ‘rational’ counterparts. In this sense, Walpole’s account of his romance’s origin constructs a fairly elaborate analogy, one in which the same differences that distinguish Strawberry Hill from other eighteenthcentury houses also distinguish The Castle of Otranto from other contemporary fiction. House and text stand, here and elsewhere, as analogous expressions of the same singular urge, serving as both excuse for, and vindication of, one another. It is within the surroundings of Strawberry Hill and this notion of complementarity that we should understand The Castle of Otranto’s choice of aesthetics and its narrative strategies, particularly its fondness for dreamlike setting and theatrical effect.

3. ‘Two Kinds of Romance’ However much it might have begun as a random exercise in composition, The Castle of Otranto exhibits in its opening pages the purposiveness of a manifesto. Walpole’s narrative of the book originating in a dream, suggestive as it has been to explorations of consciousness in Gothic fiction,2 9 is more than counterbalanced by the critical accounts he provided in the book’s second Preface and in his own correspondence. The story’s opening lines, furthermore, with their strong allegiance to fairy tales, signal a departure from established forms of eighteenth-century fiction, while the miraculous events frequently invoke and subvert literary conventions in ways that smack of anti-romances like Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752). Here, however, the conventions that are being subverted are not those of romance (as with Lennox) but those of formal realism. Walpole may open, for example, with an unwilling bride left at the altar, but he does not devote his ensuing pages (as one might expect in a novel) to providing that bride’s ‘history’ or to describing the chain of individual motivations and contingent events that brought about the occurrence. Instead, he provides a supernatural spectacle—the groom Conrad ‘dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being’ (p. 18)—that obliterates the possibility of rational explanation and raises more questions than it answers. We see similar strategies at work as well in the book’s almost allegorical handling of character. Even in the case of his most fully

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If the ruse of Walpole’s first Preface governed how The Castle of Otranto’s first edition was received, the critical discourse with which he opens the Preface to the second edition has proven equally influential with modern readers. Part of its persuasiveness is more than understandable; Walpole’s description of the book, as ‘an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern’ (see p. 9), does capture its innovative combination of supernaturalism and psychological realism, of chivalric romance and modern novel. His Epigraph, moreover, tellingly revises Horace’s Ars Poetica to express Otranto’s aesthetic ends. While the original Horace translates roughly into ‘Idle fancies shall be shaped like a sick man’s dream so that neither foot nor head can be assigned to a single shape,’ Walpole’s rewriting of the Latin changes the meaning of the final words to ‘nevertheless head and foot are assigned to a single shape’.3 0 What Walpole’s critical statements do not adequately capture are the ways his text consistently transgresses the conventions of both fictional traditions rather than compromising between them—an assertion suggested elsewhere by Walpole in a letter to Madame du Deffand: Let the critics have their say: I shall not be vexed: it was not written for this age, which wants nothing but cold reason. I own to you, and you will think me madder than ever, that of all my works it is the only one in which I pleased myself: I let my imagination run: my visions and my passions kindled me. I wrote it in defiance of rules, critics, and philosophies: and it seems to me all the better for that.3 1

Stated in the terms of his second preface, Walpole’s ‘defiance’ arises from his belief that the critical ‘rules’ separating ancient and modern romance are more artificial than any fiction that could result from their indiscriminate mixing. In the place of such strictures he offers the counter-

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developed character, Manfred, Walpole spends considerably more time describing Manfred’s strategic decisions than the internal processes that produce them. The Castle of Otranto’s supernatural agents, moreover, contribute to this strategy, actively thwarting the very kinds of characterization that form a staple of the fiction of Defoe and Richardson and even of the social satires of Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox and Tobias Smollett. All of Manfred’s plotting and re-plotting, his gifts for calculating probabilities and responding to contingencies, fail because he is presented with a fixed narrative and fate that no amount of character, no attention to detail, and no amount of strategizing can avert.

Illustration from The Castle of Otranto, c. 1790.

argument that his generic mixture of the supernatural and the mundane, of broad comedy and classical tragedy, is both appropriate and natural because it functions as a formal expression of medieval consciousness and culture. A modern critic, E. J. Clery, describes the various historicisms at work here nicely: ‘Rationally speaking, ghosts and goblins are not true, but when they appear in the literary artifacts of past ages, they are true to history, accurate representations of an obsolete system of belief: a stance we might call exemplary historicism.’3 2 Walpole puts this matter of the nature of history more ironically, provocatively insisting within The Castle of Otranto’s historicized setting, ‘My rule was nature’ (p. 10). Writing within the literary culture of the 1760s, Walpole’s confident celebration of The Castle of Otranto’s ‘nature’ owes a considerable debt to Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), a text that helped to revive the status of medieval ‘Gothic’ literature and architecture in the second half of the eighteenth century. Published only two years before Walpole’s romance, Hurd’s study had argued for the fundamental similarity of Homeric epic and ‘Gothic’ metrical romance. From this ‘remarkable

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correspondency’, Hurd had proceeded to make a striking defence of the formal logic of the Gothic: When an architect examines a Gothic structure by Grecian rules, he finds nothing but deformity. But the Gothic architecture has its own rules, by which when it comes to be examined, it is seen to have its merit, as well as the Grecian . . . The same observation holds of the two sorts of poetry. Judge of the Faery Queen by the classic models, and you are shocked by its disorder: consider it with an eye to its Gothic original, and you find it regular. The unity and simplicity of the former are more complete: but the latter has that sort of unity and simplicity, which results from its nature. The Faery Queen, then, as a Gothic poem, derives its METHOD, as well as the other characters of its composition, from the established modes and ideas of chivalry.3 3

Walpole’s appropriation of key ideas in Hurd’s Letters has understandably been important to modern assessments3 4 of The Castle of Otranto, providing a sense of its intellectual underpinnings and anticipated readership. As the attacks on Voltaire in its second Preface suggest, Walpole was more than willing to repackage Hurd’s arguments in the language of anti-French sentiment and in the logic of cultural nationalism. Given Macaulay’s later condemnation of Walpole as ‘the most Frenchified English writer of the eighteenth century’,3 5 his recourse to national chauvinism here strongly suggests a desire to mitigate reader and reviewer censure that might have otherwise resulted from the initial ruse of its first edition. The criticisms of Voltaire, after all, could just as easily have been directed against his own countrymen David Garrick and Nahum Tate, whose popular stage versions of Shakespeare had frequently purged scenes perceived to be at odds with the overall tone of the play in question. Apart from this decision to represent his romance as homage to the natural genius of the national Bard, other political currents run through The Castle of Otranto as well. Walpole’s account of the book’s composition as a kind of therapy against a particularly bad year in Parliament has been well documented,3 6 as have been the correspondences between Manfred’s tyranny and aspects of Walpole’s own life, particularly George III’s treatment of Walpole’s cousin Henry Seymour Conway. Other commentators have called attention to the almost Oedipal family violence that pervades the text, finding in Manfred’s political downfall a kind of political exorcism by Walpole of his father.3 7 It is when we remind ourselves of Walpole’s fondness for masquerade and ventriloquism, however, that we begin to sense the extent of Walpole’s deep play in The Castle of Otranto

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with issues of defiance and transgression, whether literary or political. For if the character of Manfred raises questions concerning the nature of Walpole’s identification with the psychology of power, then Walpole’s impersonation of the translator ‘William Marshall, Gent.’ presents us with an equally striking piece of political theatre. Walpole’s politics throughout his life were resolutely Whig, in part out of loyalty to his father and in part because of his innate suspicion of power and those who held it. Yet within the fiction of The Castle of Otranto’s first edition, Marshall is unquestionably Tory and likely an old Jacobite supporter of the Stuart monarchy. Standing at the head of ‘an ancient catholic family in the north of England’ (p. 5), Marshall discovers, translates and publishes a tract of the Italian CounterReformation. The story, furthermore, dramatizes the restoration of a wrongfully ousted ruler and the downfall of a usurping house after three generations in power, one in which Manfred’s position as the grandson of the usurper Ricardo corresponds nicely to George III’s position as the grandson of the first Hanoverian king of Great Britain. Given the horror Walpole expressed in his correspondence during the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, his reasons for choosing a figure like Marshall are difficult to ascertain. Unlike the ‘artiful priest’ he supposedly translates, Marshall functions in Walpole’s representation as neither a figure of allegory nor an object of ridicule, and falls equally far from embodying Jacobite parody or from functioning as a fictional means of acting out fantasies of political defiance. He does, however, form part of Walpole’s sense of aesthetic subversion and knowing impropriety—what Macaulay criticized as perversion and what recent commentators have characterized as an obsession with surface, performance and counterfeiting.3 8 For Susan Sontag, Strawberry Hill (and Gothic fiction more generally) embodies the essence of ‘camp’ because each displays a nostalgic affection for its source materials and a self-conscious ‘love of the exaggerated, the “off”’.3 9 Such ‘off’ moments in The Castle of Otranto have been noted by even its earliest readers. They occur in the book’s superfluous details (as when Bianca notes that no one has slept in the chamber below them ‘since the great astrologer that was your brother’s tutor drowned himself’ (p. 38)), in its habit of setting conventions against one another (as when the chivalry-mad Theodore unchivalrously pledges himself both to Matilda and to Isabella because he cannot tell the two heroines apart), and in its crucial scenes (as when the statue of Alphonso the

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It is this sense of inherent irony and selfconscious artifice—that one is somehow not meeting with characters and things but rather with performances of characters and representations of things—that has so often produced the revulsion of critics like Macaulay and the excitement of writers like Sontag. Addressing Walpole’s habit of infusing his text with allusions to Shakespeare and other works, Robert Mack finally attaches the word ‘parody’ to Walpole’s text—but not ‘parody’ in its usual sense: Otranto is parody not in the sense that it seeks to deride or to mock the characteristics and language of Shakespearean drama, but parody rather in the more etymologically precise sense of the word. It is a literal para-odos, a complementary ‘song’ to be heard not in place of, but alongside the original. It asks its readers to carry their knowledge of the

entire corpus of Shakespeare’s drama to the work so that those very readers can themselves fill in the narrative gaps in the volume with the resonance of a shared theatrical tradition.4 3

The same can be said for the position of theatre and performance in The Castle of Otranto as well. While Walpole’s first reviewers sensed that they were reading an eighteenth-century forgery and not a medieval romance, because of small historical errors in the text, twenty-first-century readers will discover Otranto’s eighteenth-century origins in the sentimental and overblown acting styles of its character-performers. The blushes, sighs and fainting spells of Walpole’s heroines, and the dark brow and moody stalking of Manfred, are as much a part of the theatre of Garrick as is the spectacle in which Manfred’s servant reports the death of Conrad: The servant, who had not staid long enough to have crossed the court to Conrad’s apartment, came running back breathless, in a frantic manner, his eyes staring, and foaming at the mouth. He said nothing, but pointed to the court. The company were struck with terror and amazement. The princess Hippolita, without knowing what was the matter, but anxious for her son, swooned away. (p. 18)

This focus on sentiment and emotional gesture—on representing the expression of emotional conflict rather than on describing its internal processes—provides us with another way of understanding the self-consciousness of Walpole’s narrative style and characterization. That an inveterate theatre-goer and author of an acclaimed tragedy (The Mysterious Mother) and a successful comic afterpiece (Nature Will Prevail) should construct character theatrically rather than novelistically should not surprise us. Similar observations can be made about Otranto’s narrative structure. Its five chapters and general fidelity to the classical unities of the drama make it resemble a five-act tragedy far more than an eighteenthcentury romance. Certainly Walpole cultivated the association; in his first Preface to Otranto he noted playfully: ‘It is a pity that he did not apply his talents to what they were evidently proper for, the theatre’ (p. 7). Responding to Walpole’s cue, we may wish to attend to the seemingly endless ghosts, counterfeits and masks in The Castle of Otranto by investigating the degree to which they are informed by a logic of performance and by the cultural history of Georgian theatre and opera. For Charles Beecher Hogan and Anne Williams, such a suggestion opens up a number of fruitful

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Good ludicrously bleeds from its nose). Such occasions most often show Walpole gesturing to literary conventions yet refusing to wield (or oppose) them with propriety. Responding to these unstable moments in the text, readers as far-ranging as Clara Reeve, Walter Scott and William Hazlitt all noted that Walpole’s ghosts often undermined the very effects they were supposed to produce. They appeared too often, or else were too large, too substantial, too corporeal. Hazlitt’s distaste is especially telling. Calling Walpole’s supernatural ‘the pasteboard machinery of a pantomime’, he characterizes it as too obtrusive and too artificial to produce authentic terror in its reader. Lacking appropriate sublimity and seriousness, Walpole’s ghosts ‘are a matter-of-fact impossibility; a fixture, and no longer a phantom’.4 0 Such formulations nicely anticipate the critical assessments of Robert Miles and Jerrold Hogle, who, while differing from one another in the questions they ask of Walpole’s texts, none the less isolate Walpole’s selfconsciousness about questions of authenticity as emblematic of Gothic writing more generally.4 1 For Miles, Walpole’s romance is not only about uncovering correct genealogies; it also thematizes such questions of lineage by putting forward a false account of its own origins and then insisting on its veracity. Hogle finds a similar practice of counterfeiting—and a similar nostalgia about literary and class origins—in Walpole’s ghosts, which parade as medieval Italian spirits while gesturing with every action to Shakespeare. Hogle’s term, ‘the Ghost of the Counterfeit’, recalls not only Macaulay’s disgust for Walpole’s ‘masks within masks’ but also Sontag’s notion that The Castle of Otranto presents us not with ghosts but rather with ‘ghosts’—what Hazlitt calls ‘chimeras . . . begot upon shadows and dim likenesses’.4 2

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possibilities for understanding how and why Walpole’s book has troubled its readers for so long. Locating the aesthetics of The Castle of Otranto in opera seria, Williams reimagines Strawberry Hill and the romance it inspired as essentially theatrical: ‘For Walpole, Gothic is always just that, performances, its structures always full of imitation, disguise, and travesti.’4 4 Looking to late eighteenth-century dramas of spectacle and the invention of melodrama in the early nineteenth century, Hogan’s assessment is equally sweeping and suggestive. ‘The grandfather of the Gothic novel,’ he concludes, ‘was also the grandfather of the Gothic play.’4 5 We might wish to reverse this pronouncement, however, when we consider The Castle of Otranto’s sustained popularity and influence. Commentators on Walpole and the Gothic have often been puzzled by the seemingly inexplicable gap between the publication of Otranto (1764) and the later popularity of Gothic fiction and drama in the 1780s and 1790s, wondering why such an explosively popular genre should have taken nearly twenty years to gain its hold on British imaginations. Examining its publication history a final time, we see only one significant span of years (1767-81) in which no printing of The Castle of Otranto occurred—perhaps the only time the book might ever have been out of print. This single dry spell was ended by the stage success of Robert Jephson’s The Count of Narbonne (1781), an adaptation of The Castle of Otranto to which Walpole contributed many hours of his time hoping for its success. He was not disappointed. Performed twenty-one times during its initial run, The Count of Narbonne was the hit of the 1781-2 theatrical season and held the stage for the next two decades. With Jephson’s success, a fresh edition of The Castle of Otranto was called for in 1782, and thereafter the book experienced a similar, sustained popularity: it received fourteen printings in English between 1782 and 1800; spawned numerous imitations; and acquired its status as a foundational work of Gothic fiction. Certainly the Gothic novel gave rise to the Gothic play, but the suggestion here is that Jephson’s adaptation invited readers to do more than merely take up Walpole’s romance again and read it alongside its theatrical representation. The sustained popularity of both points to a symbiosis between Gothic text and Gothic drama—one that anticipates the Gothic’s later returns in film and digital media, and that is present since the first Gothic ‘revival’ of the genre Jephson and Walpole helped to construct.

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Notes 1. See A. T. Hazen, A Bibliography of Horace Walpole (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), pp. 52-67; and W. S. Lewis, Introduction to Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. W. S. Lewis (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. vii-viii. 2. See [Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘Horace Walpole’, The British Novelists, ed. A. L. Barbauld, 50 vols. (London: F. C. & J. Rivington et al., 1810), Vol. 22, pp. i-iii.] By ‘German tales’ Barbauld refers not only to German works popular in Britain in the 1790s, like K. F. Kahlert’s The Necromancer, or a Tale of the Black Forest (1794) and Gottfried August Bürger’s oft-translated poem Lenore (1774), but also to English celebrations of German supernaturalism like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1805). 3. See [Walter Scott, Introduction to The Castle of Otranto (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne, 1811), pp. iii-xxxvi. Extract.] Scott later reprinted the essay for Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library, ed. and intro. Walter Scott, 10 vols. (London: Hurst, Robinson & Co., 1821-4). 4. See [Walter Scott, Introduction] p. xvii. 5. Ibid., pp. xx-xxi. 6. Barbauld’s Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (London: J. Johnson, 1773), written with her brother John Aiken, contains a theoretical essay on suspense (‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’) and a supernatural short story (‘Sir Bertrand, a Fragment’). 7. See Appendix: Early Responses to The Castle of Otranto [, in The Castle of Otranto, with an introduction by Michael Gauer, New York: Penguin Books, 2001.] 8. See [Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘Horace Walpole’] p. i. 9. See [Review of The Castle of Otranto, Critical Review 19 (January 1765), pp. 50-51. Extract.] p. 51. 10. See [Review of The Castle of Otranto, Monthly Review 32 (February 1765), pp. 97-9. Extract.] p. 99. 11. See [Review of The Castle of Otranto (2nd edition), Monthly Review 32 (May 1765), p. 394.] p. 394. 12. See especially Robert P. Reno, ‘James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest and Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre: Challenges of the Supernatural Ghost on the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage’, Eighteenth-Century Life 9 (1984), pp. 95-106; and Further Reading, Clery. 13. See Further Reading, Lewis, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (hereinafter referred to as Correspondence), Vol. 30, p. 177. 14. Ibid., Vol. 28, p. 5. 15. See Further Reading, Kallich, Ketton-Cremer, and Mowl. 16. By Walpole’s injunction, the manuscripts of the Memoirs were not published until nearly three decades after his death. 17. Museum 2 (1746), pp. 46-7. 18. See Further Reading, Lewis, Horace Walpole: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1960, p. 155. 19. See [Thomas Babington Macaulay, Review of Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann, Edinburgh Review 58 (October 1833), pp. 227-58. Extract.] p. 227.

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21. Ibid., p. 239. 22. See Further Reading, Ketton-Cremer and Lewis (Correspondence). 23. As a revived architectural style, Gothic was first popularized by the engravings that appeared in Thomas and Batty Langley’s Gothic Architecture, Improved, which was first published in 1741 under the title of Ancient Architecture. Walpole criticized the Langleys’ attempts to graft Gothic decorations on to classical forms. Other early attempts, like those of Lord Brooke at Warwick Castle, failed in Walpole’s mind for similar reasons, while Saunderson Miller’s work at Wroxton simply collapsed.

38. See Further Reading, Hogan, Hogle, Sedgwick and Williams. 39. See Further Reading, Sontag, p. 108. 40. See [William Hazlitt, Lectures on the Comic Writers (1819), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1930-33), Vol. 6, p. 127. Extract.] 41. See Further Reading, Miles and Hogle. 42. See [William Hazlitt, Lectures] 43. Robert Mack, Introduction to Walpole, The Castle of Otranto and Hieroglyphic Tales (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), p. xx. 44. See Further Reading, Williams, p. 115. 45. See Further Reading, Hogan, p. 237.

24. Walpole to Horace Mann, 25 February 1750 (Correspondence, Vol. 20, p. 127).

Further Reading

25. See The Ambulator: or, A Pocket Companion in a Tour Round London (London: J. Scatcherd, 1800), pp. 14-15, 198-202.

Books and Articles:

26. See Walpole, Journal of the Printing-Office at Strawberry Hill, ed. Paget Toynbee (London: Constable & Houghton Mifflin, 1923). Under 1784 the entry reads ‘printed a page of rules for admission to see my House’, but does not indicate how many copies were printed. See also Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole (Twickenham: Strawberry Hill, 1774; 2nd edition, 1784). 27. See Walpole to William Cole, 9 March 1765 (Correspondence, Vol. 1, p. 88); Walpole to Horace Mann, 18 November 1771 (ibid., Vol. 23, pp. 349-51); and Walpole to Mme du Deffand, 27 January 1775 (ibid., Vol. 6, p. 145). Angry over Walpole’s refusal to believe his forgeries genuine, Thomas Chatterton later wrote a long diatribe against the ‘Baron of Otranto’, which formed the basis of the later controversy over Walpole’s role in Chatterton’s death (ibid., Vol. 15, pp. xvi-xvii). 28. Walpole to William Cole, 9 March 1765 (Correspondence, Vol. 1, p. 88). See also Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, p. iv. 29. See Further Reading, Guest, Harfst, Kiely and Punter. 30. This was first noted in W. S. Lewis, Introduction to The Castle of Otranto, pp. 12-13. 31. Walpole to Mme du Deffand, 13 March 1767. This translation quoted from Stephen Gwynn, The Life of Horace Walpole (London: Thorton Butterworth, 1932), p. 191. 32. See Further Reading, Clery, p. 54. 33. Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, ed. Edith J. Morley (London: Henry Frowde, 1911), pp. 94, 118-19. 34. See Further Reading, Clery, Guest and Kiely. 35. See [Thomas Babington Macaulay, Review] p. 233. 36. See Further Reading, Fothergill, Ketton-Cremer and Samson. 37. See Further Reading, Harfst and Haggerty.

Clery, E. J., The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). This material history of Gothic and supernatural fiction devotes two chapters to Walpole and Otranto: Ch. 3, ‘The Advantages of History’, places Walpole’s hoax with the first edition in the context of popular antiquarianism in the 1760s and the various historicisms it practised; Ch. 4, ‘Back to the Future’, reads Otranto within contemporary re-imaginings (Richard Hurd, James Stuart and Adam Smith) of chivalry and feudalism as ‘a distinctive stage in historical evolution with a prevailing mode of subsistence giving rise to characteristic social, intellectual and political structures’ (p. 68). Fothergill, Brian, The Strawberry Hill Set: Horace Walpole and His Circle (London: Faber & Faber, 1983). A biographical account of Walpole, focusing on his many friendships. Guest, Harriet, ‘The Wanton Muse: Politics and Gender in Gothic Theory after 1760’, Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780-1832, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 118-39. This article focuses on early theories of Gothic; on their ambivalent gendering and how they define a ‘territory of . . . pleasure in terms that do not readily yield their political affiliation’ (p. 119). These early theories provided a marked contrast to those affiliated with Gothic texts in the 1790s. Haggerty, George E., ‘Literature and Homosexuality in the Late Eighteenth Century: Walpole, Beckford and Lewis’, Studies in the Novel 18 (1986), pp. 341-52. Explores the relation between Gothic fiction and the homosexuality of three of its primary eighteenthcentury male practitioners. Harfst, Betsy Perteit, Horace Walpole and the Unconscious: An Experiment in Freudian Analysis (New York: Arno, 1980). This published dissertation ‘attempts to expose the unconscious repressions which could have been responsible for the erratic behavior of Horace Walpole . . . and to determine the relationship between these repressions and his romantic works’ (p. i). Hogan, Charles Beecher, ‘The “Theatre of Geo. 3”’, Horace Walpole: Writer, Politician, and Connoisseur, ed. Warren Hunting Smith (New Haven and London: Yale Univer-

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20. Ibid., esp. p. 227: ‘His features were covered by mask within mask. When the outer disguise of obvious affectation was removed, you were still as far as ever from seeing the real man.’

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sity Press, 1967), pp. 227-40. This article establishes Walpole’s interest in both reading plays and attending the theatre as a foundation for reading The Castle of Otranto, ultimately arguing that ‘[t]he grandfather of the Gothic novel was also the grandfather of the Gothic play . . . Far more than The Mysterious Mother or Nature Will Prevail its form is dramatic; so is its theme; so are its characters’ (p. 237). Hogle, Jerrold, ‘The Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Genesis of the Gothic’, Gothick Origins and Innovations, ed. Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 23-33. This playful essay interprets Walpole’s (and Gothic fiction’s) obsession with forgeries and counterfeited signs through the work of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, focusing particularly on their contention that with the advent of mercantile and capitalist culture one sees a widening gulf between sign and signifier. Kallich, Martin, Horace Walpole (New York: Twayne, 1971). This study of Walpole’s literary historical importance gives primacy to his published writings rather than to his letters. Ketton-Cremer, R. W., Horace Walpole: A Biography, 3rd edition (London: Methuen, 1964). First published in 1940, this remains the most recent standard biography of Walpole. Kiely, Robert, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). This book devotes its opening chapter to The Castle of Otranto, stressing the book’s relation to epic and eighteenth-century politics, and its interest in Catholicism and the irrational. Lewis, W. S., Horace Walpole: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1960 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961). Five readable and cogent introductory lectures on Walpole’s ‘Family’, ‘Friends’, ‘Politics’, ‘Strawberry Hill’ and ‘Works’. Lewis, W. S., ed., The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1937-83). The monumental edition of Horace Walpole’s correspondence. Miles, Robert, Gothic Writing, 1750-1820: A Genealogy (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Defining Gothic as a heterogeneous aesthetic crossing the genres, this book devotes a chapter to Walpole’s (and the Gothic’s) self-reflexive fixation upon questions of lineage and descent. Mowl, Timothy, Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider (London: John Murray, 1996). This most recent biography of Walpole takes issue with earlier treatments of Walpole’s homosexuality by W. S. Lewis, R. W. Ketton-Cremer and others; it is most persuasive in its treatment of Walpole’s Grand Tour and his relationship with Lord Lincoln. Punter, David, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day: Volume 1: The Gothic Tradition (London and New York: Longman, 1980; 2nd edition, 1996). A foundational study of the Gothic from both Freudian and Marxist approaches, treating its persistent themes, its relation to other contemporary aesthetic movements, and its various transformations and their contexts. Samson, John, ‘Politics Gothicized: The Conway Incident and The Castle of Otranto’, Eighteenth-Century Life 10

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(1986), pp. 145-58. Countering the widespread assumption that Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto as an escape from politics, this essay argues that ‘the book evinces a startling infusion of the characters, events, and ideas in Walpole’s political life in 1764’ (p. 145). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 2nd edition (New York: Methuen, 1986). This book provides an account of the relation between Gothic conventions and the ways in which its practitioners wield language and structure narrative. Sontag, Susan, ‘Notes on Camp’, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1966). Also printed in A Susan Sontag Reader, intro. Elizabeth Hardwick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 105-19. Williams, Anne, ‘Monstrous Pleasures: Horace Walpole, Opera, and the Conception of Gothic’, Gothic Studies 2 (April 2000), pp. 104-18. This article explores Walpole’s fondness for opera and grounds The Castle of Otranto and the Gothic in operatic travesty, theatricality and subject matter.

FURTHER READING Biographies Lewis, Wilmarth Sheldon. Horace Walpole: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. 1960. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Vol. 9. Bollingen Series 35, Pantheon Books, 1961. 215 p. Authoritative biography by a foremost Walpole scholar. Mowl, Timothy. Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider. London: John Murray, 1996, 274 p. Full-length biography of Walpole.

Criticism Beers, Henry A. “The Gothic Revival.” In A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century. 1899. Reprint edition, pp. 221-64. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1916. Finds it impossible to take The Castle of Otranto seriously as a work of literature and difficult to understand the respect accorded to the work. Birkhead, Edith. “The Beginnings of Gothic Romance.” In The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance. 1921. Reprint edition, pp. 16-37. New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1963. Chapter from what is widely regarded as a key early analysis of Gothic literature. Contends that The Castle of Otranto was not a serious contribution to literature, but supports the now commonly accepted belief that the novel was the inspiration for later works of Gothic romance. Bleiler, E. F. “Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto.” In Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, The Vampyre, edited by E. F. Bleiler, pp. vii-xviii. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966. Provides details of Walpole’s biography that pertain to The Castle of Otranto and surveys public and critical reaction to The Castle of Otranto since the time of its first publication. Clark, Kenneth. “Ruins and Rococo: Strawberry Hill.” In The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, third edition, 1962. Reprint edition, pp. 46-65. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974.

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Conger, Syndy McMillen. “Faith and Doubt in The Castle of Otranto.” Gothic 1 (1979): 51-9. Restates René Descartes’ assertion that “radical doubt, left to itself, can come full circle to become primitive faith,” and maintains that “[f]rom its first exemplar, The Castle of Otranto, the Gothic novel has been a fascinating combination of radical doubt and primitive articles of faith like animism, ancestor worship, and belief in ghosts, giants, or devils.” Davenport-Hines, Richard Treadwell. “The Dead Have Exhausted Their Power of Deceiving.” In Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin, pp. 11550. New York: North Point Press, 1998. Provides contextual information surrounding Walpole’s composition of The Castle of Otranto, including Walpole’s political writings and the construction of his Gothic “castle,” Strawberry Hill. Evans, Bertrand. “The First Gothic Plays.” Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley, pp. 31-48. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947. Provides a detailed discussion of the themes and techniques of The Mysterious Mother. Frank, Marcie. “Horace Walpole’s Family Romances.” Modern Philology 100, no. 3 (February 2003): 417-35. Maintains that “[i]n both Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, incest blocks inheritance, a narrative combination that points not to an intrafamilial or intrapsychic conflict, but rather to a sociopolitical context, which I read as a clash between aristocratic and bourgeois models of the family.” Haggerty, George E. “Fact and Fancy in the Gothic Novel.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 39, no. 4 (March 1985): 37991. Discusses Walpole’s innovations in blending “opposing modes of literary expression”—fact and fancy—in The Castle of Otranto and how this legacy affected later works in the Gothic tradition. Asserts that “[b]y introducing into the novel material that emerges so specifically from private fantasy . . . Walpole brought into focus both the seeming limitations of the novel form as it emerged in the eighteenth century and the terms under which those limitations were to be overcome.” Kahn, Madeleine. “‘A By-Stander Often Sees More of the Game Than Those That Play’: Ann Yearsley Reads The Castle of Otranto.” Bucknell Review 42, no. 1 (1998): 5978. Examines poet Ann Yearsley’s assessment of The Castle of Otranto as expressed in her poem “To the Honourable H____e W_____e, on Reading ‘The Castle of Otranto.’ December, 1784.” Kiely, Robert. “The Castle of Otranto: Horace Walpole.” In The Romantic Novel in England, pp. 27-42. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. Examines The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother in detail as characteristic works exhibiting the strengths and weaknesses of Gothic fiction. Asserts that

Gothic and Romantic fiction evolved because of the inability of Neoclassical literature to explore the complexities of human nature. McKinney, David. “‘The Castle of My Ancestors’: Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill.” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 13 (1990): 199-214. Probes the reasons Walpole “chose the Gothic style for his house” and included “stage-set designs as an attempt to create the atmosphere of a medieval castle,” thereby “determining [his] vision for Strawberry Hill.” Mehrotra, K. K. Horace Walpole and the English Novel: A Study of the Influence of The Castle of Otranto, 1764-1820. 1934. Reprint edition. New York: Russell & Russell, 1970, 197 p. Discusses eighteenth-century conceptions of the novel and of the moral purpose of fiction, and demonstrates the ways in which The Castle of Otranto violated those rules. Morrissey, Lee. “‘To Invent in Art and Folly’: Postmodernism and Walpole’s Castle of Otranto.” Bucknell Review 41, no. 2 (1998): 86-99. Argues that “Gothic follies, and The Castle of Otranto, dispense with conventional proportions, on the one hand, and show that Enlightened people, on the other, are subject to a ‘milling confusion’ that prevents them from seeing the truth.” Mudrick, Marvin. “Chamber of Horrors.” In Books Are Not Life but Then What Is?, pp. 303-09. London: Oxford University Press, 1979. Argues that The Castle of Otranto merits consideration not only as the inspiration for later works in the Gothic tradition, but for what it reveals about the nightmares and subconscious fears of Walpole’s age. Reeve, Clara. “Preface to the Second Edition.” The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story. 1778. Reprint edition, edited by James Trainer, pp. 3-6. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Preface to Reeve’s novel in which she discusses the influence of The Castle of Otranto on her work, and the flaws in Walpole’s novel that she hopes to avoid in hers. Varma, Devendra P. “The First Gothic Tale: Its Potentialities.” In The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences, pp. 42-73. London: Arthur Barker, 1957. Provides one of the most extensive discussions of the literary influences upon Walpole’s work and Walpole’s influence on other writers. Also examines in detail the structure of The Castle of Otranto and Walpole’s presentation of his characters.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Walpole’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: British Writers, Vol. 3; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 39, 104, 213; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, Vols. 2, 49; Literature Resource Center; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 1; and Twayne’s English Authors.

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Discusses Walpole’s creation of Strawberry Hill as the preeminent example of the Gothic fashion. He finds Walpole’s sham castle not merely a local absurdity, but the culmination of the aesthetic taste of his period.

EDITH WHARTON (1862 - 1937)

(Full name Edith Newbold Jones Wharton) American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and autobiographer.

Seed,” and “Bewitched,” works that were gathered and printed in her late volume of ghost tales.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

harton is best known as a novelist of manners whose fiction detailed the cruel excesses of aristocratic society in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her carefully crafted, psychologically complex novels, novellas, and short stories reflect concern for the status of women in society as well as for the moral decay she observed underlying the outward propriety of the upper classes. While her subject matter, tone, and style have often been compared with those of her friend and mentor Henry James, Wharton has achieved critical recognition as an original chronicler of the conflict between the inner self and social convention. Aside from her numerous tales of the supernatural, collected as Ghosts in 1937, Wharton’s writings generally eschew overt Gothic machinery, while many nevertheless evoke the pervasive and elemental sense of foreboding and psychological terror typically associated with the genre. Among her most well-known works, the tragic novella Ethan Frome (1911) features an ominous mood of preternatural dread that underscores the self-destructiveness and alienation of its main character. Noted stories that demonstrate Wharton’s fascination with the supernatural include “The Eyes,” “Pomegranate

Born into a wealthy New York family, Wharton was privately educated by governesses and tutors both at home and abroad. At an early age she displayed a marked interest in writing and literature, a pursuit her socially ambitious mother attempted to discourage. Nevertheless, Wharton finished her first novella at the age of fourteen and published a collection of verse two years later. From the perspective of an upper-class initiate, she observed the shift of power and wealth from the hands of New York’s established gentry to the nouveau riche of the Industrial Revolution. Wharton considered the newly wealthy to be cultural philistines and drew upon their lives to create many of her best-remembered fictional characters and situations. In 1885 she married Edward Wharton. Becoming dissatisfied with society life and disillusioned with marriage, however, Wharton sought fulfillment in writing. Many of her stories and poems originally appeared in Scribner’s Magazine, and both her first short story collection, The Greater Inclination (1899), and her novel The House of Mirth (1905) were well received by critics and readers. Suffering from ill health and forced to contend with her husband’s growing mental

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instability, Wharton was granted a divorce in 1912. Soon after, she established residence in France. During World War I, Wharton organized relief efforts in France. With her financial support, an ambulance unit, a workroom for female garment workers, and a sanatorium for women and children with tuberculosis were established there. The French recognized her philanthropy by awarding her the Cross of the Legion of Honor, and she was made Chevalier of the Order of Leopold in Belgium for her work on the behalf of Belgian orphans. In the United States, her energetic fund-raising activities were aided by “Edith Wharton” committees in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and Providence during the war. While her war novella The Marne (1918), generated little positive critical interest, Wharton became the first female recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence (1920) in 1921. In 1927, Wharton was nominated to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. During the final years of her life, Wharton continued to write short stories and novels, many of which reflect her growing disillusionment with postwar America and the Jazz Age. Several of her finest short stories featuring supernatural themes were also published during this time, these and other of her noted works of Gothic fiction were collected at the end of her life, while her final novel, The Buccaneers (1938), remained unfinished at her death in St. Brice-sous-Foret in 1937.

MAJOR WORKS Wharton’s most celebrated works of fiction include the novels The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, as well as her novella Ethan Frome. Of these, her longer novels are thought to be especially effective at piercing the veil of moral respectability that sometimes masked a lack of integrity among the rich. In The House of Mirth an intelligent and lovely girl must lose her status as a member of the leisure class if she is to avoid moral ruin. Lily Bart rebels against the standards of her social group enough to smoke, gamble, and be seen in public with married men; however, her sense of decency keeps her from marrying a wealthy but vulgar suitor merely to secure her fortune. Her other opportunity consists of a young lawyer who makes fun of the “high society” his modest but adequate means entitle him to observe. When the first proposes, she turns him down; when the second proposes, it is too late—he finds the distraught Lily dead of an overdose of sleeping pills. Written after World War I, The Age

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of Innocence, another novel about Old New York society, again showcases passionate characters hemmed in by their desire to keep their membership in a dispassionate social group. Newland Archer is engaged to marry an acceptable and attractive girl, but falls in love with Ellen Olenska, a European divorcee. Olenska had married a Polish Count, a villain from whom she escaped with the eager aid of his secretary. Equally passionate but seeking to reestablish her honor in New York society (which is not sure she is acceptable), Olenska encourages Archer to keep his commitment. To make it easier for him, she returns to Europe. A third work of social criticism, Ethan Frome is also notable for its enveloping atmosphere of decay and gloom, and reflects several of the Gothic themes that Wharton explored more fully in her short stories. Set in the aptly-named village of Starkfield in the hill country of rural New England, Ethan Frome portrays a world that offers no satisfactory escape from a loveless marriage. Wharton shows how the title character suffers when he is caught between two women—his wife, Zeena, on whom he depends for economic survival, and his true love, a younger relative of his wife’s who has come to their farm. Near the conclusion of the novella, Ethan and his beloved realize that there is no escape from their predicament. When their attempt at suicide fails, they become invalids in the hands of Zeena. Wharton gave full play to the literary allure of supernatural horror in her short stories, which included numerous ghost stories, as well as several works featuring Gothic tropes displaced into the milieu of the psychological and the domestic. One of her earliest works of short fiction, “The Fullness of Life” (1893) is an afterlife fantasy. In it, the spirit of a deceased wife finds herself attracted to another spirit she perceives to be her soul mate. After much deliberation, however, she decides to wait instead for the death of her husband so that they may be rejoined. With “The Moving Finger” Wharton moved more fully into the genre of the macabre. In the story, a man decides to have a painting of his dead wife altered so that the two may age together. He perceives this as her wish, but as time proceeds the painting seems to mysteriously change on its own, signaling the wife’s realization of her husband’s impending death. In “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” the ghost of a former maid continues to serve her mistress. Seeking to protect the woman, an invalid, from an encroaching danger, the dead maid’s spirit rings her bell, but to no avail. Wharton’s supernatural stories written after her relocation to France are thought

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Particularly in her later stories, Wharton employed the supernatural to project various aspects of the human psyche ranging from fear and guilt to joy and longing. In “Bewitched” a married man becomes infatuated with the spirit of a dead girl, a witch whom his wife believes has entranced him with black magic. “Miss Mary Pask” features a more jubilant tone than is typical of Wharton’s ghosts stories, describing its narrator’s meeting with an old friend whom he only belatedly realizes has already died. With “A Bottle of Perrier” Wharton produced a tale of psychological terror influenced by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and centered on a murderous relationship between master and servant. “Mr. Jones” is perhaps Wharton’s most Jamesian piece. It tells of a house dominated by the spirit of a former caretaker whose rule was so formidable that it continues to control the dwelling and those living in it. The protagonist of “After Holbein,” Anson Warley, is confronted with the specter of death and the realization that his dilettantish life has been wasted. Among Wharton’s most well-received stories, “Pomegranate Seed” evokes the mythological tale of Persephone in recounting the story of a spirit that continues to send letters to her living

husband while terrifying her perceived rival, the man’s second wife and the story’s narrator, Charlotte Ashby.

CRITICAL RECEPTION During her lifetime many of Wharton’s works of fiction were lauded with high critical and popular esteem. The House of Mirth became a best seller in 1905 and provoked much discussion in the United States, where it was hailed as one of the best novels ever produced by an American author. The Age of Innocence was likewise highly acclaimed as one of Wharton’s finest works, and earned her a Pulitzer Prize in 1921. Despite these successes, Wharton’s fiction was for most of the twentieth century dismissed as the work of an outdated novelist of manners whose settings, style, and slow-moving pace belonged to the nineteenth century. By the end of the twentieth century, however, feminist scholars, genre critics, and mainstream audiences began to regard Wharton’s writings with a much higher degree of distinction and appreciation, rehabilitating her reputation and suggesting the significance of her place in literary history between the moral and psychological fiction of the late nineteenth century and the iconoclastic realism of the early twentieth-century’s Lost Generation. Wharton’s ghost stories, in particular, have been linked to new insights into the overall thematic concerns of her work. In the 1937 preface to her collection Ghosts Wharton wrote: “the ‘moral issue’ question must not be allowed to enter into the estimating of a ghost story. It must depend for its effect solely on what one might call its thermometrical quality; if it sends a cold shiver down one’s spine, it has done its job and done it well.” While Wharton’s own thoughts on her ghost stories appealed to a relatively straightforward test of audience response, contemporary scholars, without questioning the chilling effectiveness of her ghost tales, have subjected these works to more rigorous critical standards. Several have studied Wharton’s adapted use of Gothic conventions in her ghost stories for the purposes of social critique, focusing on her career-long examination of class divisions in American society during the early decades of the twentieth century in conjunction with her use of psychological terror. A juxtaposition of feminist and Gothic concerns have also appeared frequently in contemporary critical estimations of Wharton’s ghost stories. Of principal interest has been Wharton’s fictional alignment of patriarchal

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to bear affinities with the stories of Henry James, Wharton’s close friend. Both writers remarked on their interpretation of the supernatural as an extension of the subconscious, particularly in its projection of the guilt or fear stimulated by the collapse of human relationships. In “Afterward” a vengeful spirit from the past returns to strip Ned Boyne of the fortune he has made years ago under questionable circumstances. This ghost of a young man Boyne once knew in America appears in England, where the story’s protagonist has retreated with his new-made wealth. Both are never heard from again. In the hallucinatory story “The Eyes” the protagonist Andrew Culwin is haunted by a pair of repulsive, disembodied eyes. Only much later does he realize that the eyes are apparitions from the future, a phantasmal projection of his own wizened conscience as it looks back upon his youthful indiscretions and self-deception. In “The Triumph of Night” the protagonist Faxon becomes plagued by obsessive feelings of guilt after failing to respond to a nightmarish vision in which he sees his friend’s death planned by a greedy uncle. “Kerfol” depicts a ruined French estate haunted by the spirits of dogs, animals murdered by the previous owner in revenge for what he wrongly believed was his wife’s adultery.

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value systems, capitalist-bourgeois repression of women, and the machinations of Gothic fantasy in not only her supernatural fiction, but also in her novels The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.

Twilight Sleep (novel) 1927 The Children (novel) 1928 Hudson River Bracketed (novel) 1929 §Certain People (short stories) 1930 The Gods Arrive (novel) 1932 A Backward Glance (autobiography) 1934 **The World Over (short stories) 1936

PRINCIPAL WORKS “The Fullness of Life” (short story) 1893; published in the journal Scribner’s Magazine The Decoration of Houses [with Ogden Codman, Jr.] (nonfiction) 1897

Ghosts (short stories) 1937; also published as The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton The Buccaneers (unfinished novel) 1938 Collected Short Stories. 2 vols. (short stories) 1967

The Greater Inclination (short stories) 1899

Edith Wharton Abroad: Selected Travel Writings, 1888-1920 (travel essays) 1995

The Touchstone: A Story (novella) 1900; published in England as A Gift from the Grave: A Tale

The Uncollected Critical Writings (criticism) 1997

*Crucial Instances (short stories) 1901

*

The Valley of Decision: A Novel (novel) 1902

†

Sanctuary (novella) 1903 †The Descent of Man, and Other Stories (short stories) 1904 Italian Villas and Their Gardens (essays) 1904

‡ # 㛳

The House of Mirth (novel) 1905

§

Italian Backgrounds (memoirs) 1905

**

The Fruit of the Tree (novel) 1907

This collection includes the short story “The Moving Finger.” This collection includes the short story “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell.” This collection includes the short stories “Afterward” and “The Eyes.” This collection includes the short stories “Kerfol” and “The Triumph of Night.” This collection includes the short stories “Bewitched” and “Miss Mary Pask.” This collection includes the short stories “A Bottle of Perrier,” “After Holbein,” and “Mr. Jones.” This collection includes the short story “Pomegranate Seed.”

Madame de Treymes (novella) 1907 The Hermit and the Wild Woman, and Other Stories (short stories) 1908

PRIMARY SOURCES

‡Tales of Men and Ghosts (short stories) 1910 Ethan Frome (novella) 1911 The Reef: A Novel (novel) 1912 The Custom of the Country (novel) 1913 #Xingu, and Other Stories (short stories and novella) 1916 Summer: A Novel (novel) 1917 The Marne (novella) 1918 French Ways and Their Meaning (essays) 1919 The Age of Innocence (novel) 1920 The Glimpses of the Moon (novel) 1922 A Son at the Front (novel) 1923 Old New York (novellas) 1924 The Mother’s Recompense (novel) 1925 The Writing of Fiction (criticism) 1925 㛳Here and Beyond (short stories) 1926

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GENERAL COMMENTARY MARGARET P. MURRAY (ESSAY DATE AUGUST 1989) SOURCE: Murray, Margaret P. “The Gothic Arsenal of Edith Wharton.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 10, nos. 3-4 (August 1989): 315-21. In the following essay, Murray illustrates how Wharton uses horror in the Gothic tradition to highlight women’s experiences, particularly with regard to power and identity.

Throughout Edith Wharton’s life, we find several recurring themes related to her own emotional problems were not resolved in her novels. One of these themes is her ambivalence towards her femininity. However, she was an adept student of literature as well as a gifted author, and her strong literary background allied with her talents as writer enabled her eventually to put to rest, one by one, her own ghosts, through a careful manipulation of a genre familiar to her as a scholar: The Gothic. Nothing could have suited Edith Wharton, the writer’s, deepest needs and fears more than the Gothic story. Only this genre and its Edwardian evocation of atmosphere and style would answer the needs of Edith Wharton, the Lady. Many Gothic critics, such as Jack Sullivan, contend that a ghost story should not be reduced to a simple Freudian case reading (6), which can become little more than an act of vandalism perpetrated on a work of art. A Freudian study strips it of its atmosphere, which is probably the single most important characteristic of the tale of terror. Wharton would agree with this theory. She

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Thus Wharton takes a Gothic story out of the realm of “how and why.” Any attempt to establish psychological cause and effect can tear the thin, extoplasmic tissue which chills. In the best tales of terror the explanation is totally irrelevant; the damage is already done; the reader is cold. However, we can’t overlook what Freud tells us regarding storytelling in general: A happy person never fantasies (sic), only an unsatisfied one. The motive forces of fantasies are unsatisfied wishes and every single fantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality. (qutd. in Punter 409)

Freud’s theory gives us a deeper insight into Wharton’s creative drive. Her personal and social dissatisfaction, demonstrated through her themes, is well-documented. A quick perusal of the history of the Gothic tale explains why the most logical vehicle for her “correction of unsatisfying reality” became the Gothic tale. In a Gothic tale, we are presented with motifs and images designed to terrify. Why they terrify can be explained by the Jungian theory of universal archetypes and the collective unconscious. Jung maintains that there are certain primordial images “universally present in the preconscious makeup of the human psyche” (69). This preconsciousness can be seen as a “preracial memory,” exemplified in various mythical prototypes which are and have been extant throughout the history of mankind. Whether Wharton read Jung or not is irrelevant. When she tells us in the preface, “it is in the warm darkness of the pre-natal fluid far below our conscious reason that the faculty dwells with which we apprehend the ghosts. . . .” (1), we are able to see her instinctive appreciation of the tools which build the Gothic tale. Gothic tales may be divided into two categories: the tale of terror and the tale of horror. Varma says of the former: “the Gothic spirit makes humble obeisance before the great Unknown. . . .” and thus a tension is kindled between the human and the divine (16). From this tension comes terror and in terror, there is a dark beauty. The reader is in the presence of something greater than himself, which is awesome and beautiful: but the ambiguity of the mechanism which evokes the presence raises fear or terror.

In horror, the mechanism is no longer ambiguous. There is no divine tension. Varma continues: “The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against the corpse” (130). Wharton is able to use Terror most adeptly but in “Pomegranate Seed” she completely masters the subgenre of horror. Wharton’s works in the Gothic spanned her career. The first, “The Dutchess at Prayer,” was written in 1900 during the Edwardian Gothic renaissance when the literature of alienation, paranoia, and nightmare came to be called the literature of power. Part of that power lies in its ability to move the soul by evoking the “unteachable” and the “unknowable” (Sullivan 10). The Edwardian ghost story was also characterized by stylictic sophistication. “Eschewing Gothic hyperbole, the best stories have elegant surfaces that gradually imply or reveal something not so elegant; the chills are evoked with care and control” (Sullivan 8). Here, as H. P. Lovecraft states, “‘atmosphere is the all important thing’” (qutd. in Sullivan 8). What we are given is a genre tailor-made for an author so careful and controlling she edits her own biographical material and writes her own epitaph. A striking parallel exists between her examination of the displaced wife in The Fruit of the Tree and her later use of this theme in “Pomegranate Seed.” Justine Brent, the second wife in The Fruit of the Tree, is supplanted by the dead Bessie Amherst. But the Bessie who supersedes her is not the woman who was, but the figment of the guiltstricken imagination of their mutual husband, John Amherst. Justine cannot fight a ghost, particularly the ghost of a creature who never existed. Justine becomes just one more powerless, hopeless woman. When Wharton reworks the theme twentythree years later, she has arrayed her Gothic weaponry. Moving the plot reversal into the realm of the supernatural, she is able to assert her mastery over the societal restrictions that reduce women to mere shadow dancers on the fringe of a male-defined world. If women must remain in the shadows, then let the shadows come alive. In “Pomegranate Seed” exactly this happens: for it is in this tale of the nether world that Wharton unveiled her omnipotent woman. In her preface Wharton tells us it is easier for her to imagine ghosts “wistfully haunting a mean

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tells us in the preface to her ghost stories that a ghostly tale “must depend for its effect solely on what one might call its thermometrical quality: if it sends a shiver down one’s spine, it has done its job and done it well” (4).

WHARTON

house in a dull street than the battlemented castle with its boring stage properties” (3), and such is the house of Ken and Charlotte Ashby. Osbert Sitwell felt “ghosts went out when electricity came in”; (qutd. in Preface 3). Wharton strongly disagreed, and to make her point, there are more electric lights in “Pomegranate Seed” than this reader cares to count. What she did believe is that the reader must meet her “halfway among the primeval shadows” (Preface 2). It is through “the states of mind inherited from an earlier phase of race-culture” (Wharton, WF [The Writing of Fiction], 38), that we respond to the universal archetype in Gothic fiction. Wharton tells us “the creative mind thrives best on a reduced diet,” (qutd in Wolff 25), and “Pomegranate Seed” is certainly that. There are no Gothic mechanisms or motifs. “Pomegranate Seed” demands an alert reader because Wharton plunges right into the pit in the first paragraph. In The Writing of Fiction, she tells us, “every phrase should be a signpost” (37). The Ashby home had been a “sanctuary” from the “soulless roar” (200). Now it is not. Charlotte must deal with the soulless in her own home, which has become no haven, but an antechamber of the abyss. And since a mortal has no power over ghosts, we see the hopelessness of the situation right away. In this simple evocation of the atmosphere of the doomed, we are immediately faced with a horror which “contracts and freezes the soul” (MacAndrew 125). Margaret McDowill notes that “neither Ken nor Charlotte is equal to the spiritual demands imposed upon them by extraordinary circumstances” (139), but this is not the point. If redemption were possible through a battle of good and evil” “Pomegranate Seed” would be a tale of terror. Instead, it is a tale of horror, indicated by the “signposts” which identify the Ashby home as an entranceway to the underworld. The second signpost comes when Charlotte realises the malevolence of the grey letters as soon as she sees one. In the Gothic lexicon, “grey is the most subtle of symbolic adjectives. It is the color of . . . fear” (Downey 89). Charlotte identifies it as “peculiar,” and it always arrives after dark (201). Whenever Ken receives the letters he is “emptied of life” (202) and they take him “far away” (203) from her. Thus, as Wharton outlines in The Writing of Fiction, “the preliminary horror [is] posited” (39). Afterward, the only other symptoms of distress are a few more letters (nine in total). But

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Wharton keeps to her credo regarding the tale of horror, by “harping on the same string—the same nerve . . .” (39), which she tells us in the same place, does the trick. And she is right. Wharton has turned on all the lights, left no shadows and given us a tale of contemporary horror. She is in the realm of “literature of power” in that she is “evoking the unknowable and unteachable” (Sullivan 10). Through her prose style she involves the reader on an atavistic level. Through our preracial consciousness, we know that something unspeakable is going on here. She has also, in this tale, answered the critics who think her prose doesn’t stand the test of time. A young mother comes home, thumbs through her children’s homework, and realizes in the course of her day something is wrong in her marital paradise. She plans a second honeymoon for her husband and herself, anticipating the advice of the contemporary marriage counselor. Problems ensue; she telephones mother. She hops in a taxicab, goes to mother’s house, places a few more phone calls, trying to solve the problems, to no avail. Mother and she hop back into a cab, go home and call the police, “as if . . . it could do any good” (230). All these modern solutions are to no avail because her antagonist is impervious to the light of scientific development. Her anatagonist may be met only in the “pre-natal fluid.” Her ghost, as McDowell points out, has “an archetypal dimension reaching beyond the purely abnormal to the universal” (135). The third signpost comes when Charlotte, who is totally cognizant of the problem, tries to explicate the “unteachable”: “on the other side of the door something I can’t explain, can’t relate. . . . Something as old as the world, as mysterious as life.” (205). Her nemesis is unseen, but there is no doubt there is a ghost. Penzoldt, in his study of the supernatural in fiction notes “invisibility is an important quality of the gods of all known religions” (46). This theomorphic trait “is more terrifying than any other, especially if it asserts its presence through all the other senses” (47). To make sure we haven’t missed these signs, Wharton follows up with her own omnipresent “premonition of something inexplicable, intolerable, to be faced . . . when she opened the door . . .” (203). Charlotte knows that “her husband [is] being dragged away from her into some mysterious bondage . . .” (217). He has “the clutch of a man who felt himself slipping over a precipice,” and he looks at her “as if salvation lay in [her] face . . .”

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Elizabeth MacAndrew provides invaluable information on the roles of women in the Gothic tale. Women, she tells us, are not split in half, as a male Doppelgänger is, in Gothic fiction. Whether she takes the form of seductress or gentle inspiration, she is in touch with the earth: In its positive form, the female spirit ties the male to the earth, keeping him in touch with it. . . . In its malignant aspect, . . . it tempts, seduces, lures men to inevtiable destruction, and draws its power from the same tie with the earth. (179)

Whether the woman is good or bad is therefore irrelevant. What is pertinent is, she is strong. Charlotte is the inspirational tie, but what good is that when she ties Kenneth to Mother Earth? Mother Earth is Elsie. This imagery explains R. W. B. Lewis’s suggestion that Elsie “has assumed the role of Pluto and has summoned her spouse to . . . cohabit with her in the land of the dead” (Introduction xvi). In Lewis’s reading she is the consort of Pluto, which identifies Elsie as the Magna Mater, Kore/Demeter. This image broaches the first archetypal aspect of Elsie, whose other incarnation is the femina alba. Aniela Jaffe, through her work in Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious explains there is a persistent transcultural image of “a lady in white,” the femina alba, who is a harbinger of doom and who, in her radiant appearance is identified as the goddess Aphrodite. We must remember: All archetypal contents are two-fold and ambiguous. In the unconscious the opposites are not yet separated: an unconscious content becomes conscious only through discrimination of its latent opposites. When the two sides stand face to face they can be comprehended and the conscious mind can grasp them. (90)

Jaffe quotes Karl Kerenyi, a mythologist: Aphrodite is not only the goddess of love, in secret she is the queen of the underworld or of death. . . . In Greek southern Italy there are superb works of art which show how Persephone . . . can appear in the guise of Aphrodite. (90)

Jaffe demonstrates the universality of this archetype by citing the image of Frigg (or Freya) in the Germanic pantheon. She is literally, “the

Beloved” of the sky-god who receives the souls of the dead. As the goddess of death she is called Hel, and in this incarnation, she is horrific. More significant was Erda (or Hertha). “This earth mother was divided into the shining radiant Freya for she encompassed both: light and darkness, life and death” (91) It is in the persons of “Aphrodite-Persephone, Freya-Hel, [that] the goddess of love and the goddess of death are opposite aspects of the one primordial mother” (90). Jung himself notes, “these mythologies express the ultimate concerns of the psyche” (xxx). There is, textually, proof of the convergent natures of Charlotte and Elsie. Persephone ate only a few pomegranate seeds. Her meager meal was enough to keep her locked in the netherworld for the length of the growing season. The twelve months become the twelve years of Ken and Elsie’s mariiage. The seeds are transformed into letters, the impotent recipient of which is ken. But Elsie does not call him back for the short time of the growing season in the myth. There are nine she has strayed into the territory of her mirror image, Charlotte. As the dual natures converge, Charlotte, unconsciously, defends her own preconscious image when she berates Ken for being “too unstable” to bear the burden of a great love. She challenges his fidelity not on the grounds that he has emotionally deserted her, but that he has “already forgotten Elsie twice within a year” (212). Charlotte’s nascent duality is further evidenced when she tells Ken time is “only a word” (213). To an immortal this is true; to a mere human being, time is a measure of mortality. Charlotte knows this to be true, because almost immediately, she characterizes herself as “unhuman” (213). Justine Brent’s hellish dream world has become the prehistoric realm of the Magna Mater. In this nether world Ken becomes an insignificant pawn in the battle, not of sister against sister, but of an ancient, primordial world versus the electrified, motorized, industrialized world. The power of the femina alba will not be denied. The authorial voice has elicited no sympathy for Ken. The emotional focus is entirely on Charlotte, who plans vacations, speaks to servants, visits mother, schemes, pleads; she acts and interacts. Ken only reacts—to letters and to Charlotte. John Amherst’s egocentric vision is trampled by Wharton’s illumination of life in the prenatal bath. Ken is the symbolic bagatelle awarded to the conquering power.

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(218). But it is too late. He has already kissed the letter: he has accepted Elsie’s summons from the underworld. (This act of a lover’s obeisance to a death image can be further clarified by looking at the role of women in the love-death archetype.)

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Through the language of the unconscious, Wharton was able to address the dichotomy between herself as an accomplished woman and her fictional powerless women. Such a focus enabled her to stop distancing herself from her own womanhood. In slaying the ghost of her ambivalence regarding her own gender, she was able to create an omnipotent woman: CharlotteElsie, who is Aphrodite-Persephone. Wharton evoked an atmosphere of horror which traces its lineage to the Edwardian Gothics, who were much admired by her. Yet, for all “Pomegranate Seed”’s Edwardian style, she never lets the reader forget that the setting is most contemporary. She did not use a single Gothic mechanism, but never leaves the Gothic genre. Even though she makes a point of mentioning “skyscrapers, advertisements, telephones, [radios], airplanes, movies, motors and all the rest of the twentieth century” (205), she never lets the reader forget the timeless nature of fear.

Works Cited Downey, June E.: Creative Imagination: Studies in the Psychology of Literature. New York: Hartcourt, Brace& Co., 1929 Jaffe Aniela: Apparitions: An Archetypal Approach to Death Dreams and Ghosts. Irving, Texas: Spring Publications, 1979. Jung C. G.: Psyche and Symbol. Ed. Violet S. deLaszlo, Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1958. Lewis, R. W. B.: “Introduction,” The Selected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, by Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968. vii-xxvii. MacAndrew, Elizabeth: The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. McDowell, Margaret B.: “Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories.” Criticism XII (Spring 1970): 133-52. Penzoldt, Peter: The Supernatural in Fiction. New York: Humanities Press, 1965. Punter, David: The Literature of Terror. London and New York: Longman, 1980. Sullivan, Jack: Elegant Nightmares. Athens, Ohio: Ohio Univ. Press, 1978. Varma, Devendra P.: The Gothic Flame. London: Arthur Baker Ltd., 1957. Wharton Edith: The Fruit of the Tree. New York: Scribner’s 1907. ———: The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985. ———: “Pomegranate Seed.” Ghost Stories 199-230. ———: “Preface.” Ghost Stories 1-4. ———: The Writing of Fiction. New York: Octagon Books Inc., 1966. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin: A Feast of Words. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

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MONIKA ELBERT (ESSAY DATE MARCH 1995) SOURCE: Elbert, Monika. “The Transcendental Economy of Wharton’s Gothic Mansions.” American Transcendental Quarterly 9, no. 1 (March 1995): 51-67. In the following essay, Elbert asserts that in her Gothic, domestic ghost stories, Wharton—like the Transcendentalists—offers an alternative to the perceived greed, corruption, and compulsion inherent in a capitalist society. Ghosts, to make themselves manifest, require two conditions abhorrent to the modern mind: silence and continuity. —Edith Wharton, Preface to The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton1 “Outside there,” she thought, “skyscrapers, advertisements, telephones, wireless, airplanes, movies, motors, and all the rest of the twentieth century; and on the other side of the door something I can’t explain, can’t relate to them. Something as old as the world, as mysterious as life. . . .” —Charlotte Ashby in Wharton’s “The Pomegranate Seed” 205

In her ghost stories Edith Wharton is really not diverging significantly from the social critique of her other stories or novels.2 However, instead of depicting mansions peopled with social climbers, Wharton creates mansions haunted by ghosts who stand in the way of social climbers. In fact, her depiction of a class structure in disarray and of the individual’s alienation from an overwhelming business ethic is as pronounced in her Gothic tales as in her novels of Old New York. However, there is a slight twist: the ghosts outside, in the shape of bad business partners, mismatched lovers, unfaithful friends, and abused and disgruntled servants, are not half as terrifying as the ghosts within, a quandary which Charlotte Ashby faces and attempts to articulate (in the epigraph above), as she leaves the bustle of the city to discover the territory within. Ultimately, Wharton allows spiritual concerns to triumph over economic circumstances and suggests that there is a world elsewhere: in the process, she reaffirms the vision of the American Transcendentalists. Here is a Realism tinged with the idealism of the American Renaissance writers. Behind the Gothic quandary is Wharton’s ambivalence towards French and Old New York aristocracy: she is as obsessed with her confusion about her allegiance to European or New England origins as her Transcendental predecessors. On the one hand, she loathes the old order and wants the structures torn down; on the other, she is terrified of disorder and chaos: “[Wharton] was simultaneously appalled by the shams of her class

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Wharton, in her Gothic stories, shows the corruption of the old aristocracy and the compulsiveness of the nouveaux riches; in so doing, she subverts and undermines the economic foundations of Western capitalism, as much as Thoreau did in escaping from the world of work to his Walden sanctuary. One finds the same dilemmas of a capitalistic economy in many of Wharton’s ghost stories, most notably in “A Bottle of Perrier,” “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” “The Looking Glass,” and “All Souls’,” i.e., the tensions between the leisure class and the servant class, and the leisure class’ increasing atrophy of the will, their alienation from nature and the countryside, as well as the discrepancy between rational and imaginative vision. Many of the pacts made between master/ mistress and servant in Wharton’s gothic fiction center on duplicitous appearances and economic necessity: thus, for example, in “The Looking Glass,” Cora tells a lie to the bedridden Mrs. Clingsland to make her final days less oppressive: in fact, she concocts a dead lover’s letters in order to pacify one of those “discouraged . . . grand people” in one of those “grand houses” (232). The servant-nurse ostensibly wanted to keep the greedy, fraudulent clairvoyants away from Mrs. Clingsland, who wanted to resurrect her youthful good looks and lover; i.e., the servant wanted to protect her from a bad business deal, but by having a dying man concoct the letters for her, Cora feels guilty—the servant who has transgressed her boundaries—and also vindicated: “For it was true

ABOUT THE AUTHOR ANNETTE ZILVERSMIT ON WHARTON’S “POMEGRANATE SEED”

Near the end of her life, Wharton, like [Henry] James, wrote two of her best and most revealing stories of psychological terror, “Pomegranate Seed” (1931) and “All Souls’” (1937). In “The Jolly Corner” James finally exposes the true source of his isolation in the specter of the fingerless and maimed alter-ego his protagonist encounters. So Wharton, nearing her seventies, called up her most potent fears, the phantoms, not of men or society, but of other women, seemingly more attractive and deserving than herself or her heroines. These other women, like the rivals in many of her novels, seem so formidable as to be in touch with other-worldly powers that enhance them and allow them to defeat and destroy the seemingly helpless protagonists. The final brilliance of these last tales is that long before the external spectres are confirmed, the inner aberrations of the heroines are felt. The final presence of the supernatural only confirms the entrapment of these women in their own long-denied fears. . . . The strange and seemingly irrelevant title Wharton gives this story, “Pomegranate Seed,” offers clues to perhaps the deeper identity of the letter-writing phantom who haunts Wharton’s heroine. By alluding to one of the early subspecies of the supernatural tale, the Greek myth of Persephone, Wharton concedes that the fears of her heroines are rooted in the mesh of Western civilization even as Wharton’s modern retelling yields new meaning. SOURCE: Zilversmit, Annette. “Pomegranate Seed.” College Literature 14, no. 3 (1987): 296-305.

I’d risked my soul, and that was something she couldn’t pay for; but then maybe I’d saved hers, in getting her away from those foul people, so the whole business was more of a puzzle to me than ever” (148). Ironically, feeling guilty for lying and for selling her soul, Cora manages to wheedle one hundred dollars out of Mrs. Clingsland to have

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and contemptuous of classes beneath her” (Conn 173); moreover, being so conservative, she felt that “disruption anywhere in the system threatens the disintegration of the entire culture. . . . Since anarchy represented for Wharton the worst of all possible outcomes—certainly worse than death— restraint always declared itself a better strategy than reform” (174). Not surprisingly, the inception of the Gothic novel corresponded with the burgeoning of industrialization and class fluctuations, and, similarly, Wharton’s writing of Gothic stories corresponded with a growing consumer culture and mass technology: “The ideology of the gothic novel is the legitimization of burgeoning capitalist power, a dark fairy-tale assurance that the propertied, after surviving their troubles, could maintain their ascendancy in terms of political and economic powers” (Bernstein 161). Beneath the terror of Wharton’s Gothic mode is her own ambivalence towards the servants in her life and towards the issue of class and culture in general.3

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masses read for the repose of the dead letterwriting man’s soul, and she feels some comfort in that the priest had been “a sort of accomplice too, though he never knew it” (250). Here, as in most of Wharton’s Gothic tales, the spirit is weighed against money, and strangely enough, the terms are often interchangeable, though the servant’s province is more often than not more allied with the soil (the country) and the soul, even if s/he doesn’t wield much power in the marketplace world. Thus, the protagonists in “Afterward” and in “The Triumph of Night” suffer because of a bad business transaction (deception or selfdeception on their part), and the protagonist in “All Souls’” is weighed down by her possessiveness and by her dependence on modern luxuries. Implicit in Wharton’s attack is the sentiment behind Thoreau’s admonition in the “Economy” section of Walden that humankind needs to simplify and get back to basic necessities to find meaning in life. Though the vision of ghosts allows the Wharton protagonists to escape (temporarily) the rampant materialism surrounding them, inhabiting the Gothic edifices leads to stasis, a clinging to the past, and finally to illness, if not to death, if the inhabitants cannot imagine another cultural construct. The visions of the past are not organic, but solipsistic; the masters use their servants to bridge the gap between past and present, body and spirit, but the servants do not eradicate the past, nor can they connect the master to a primeval, agrarian past, but rather, they serve as a constant reminder of the present. Thus, in “A Bottle of Perrier” the master Almodham attempts to recapture the past by pursuing his archaeological interests in the desert, but the servant murders him; similarly, Sara Clayburn in “All Souls’” attempts to find shelter in her old “Colonial” house, but her servants possess her mind, and she is left without any social or mental stability. In the latter case, the “coven” of servants, like Cora in “The Looking Glass,” offered the potential of viewing anew, though ostensibly, the servants appear to be the medium to some irretrievable past for the wealthy mansion-owner. In some ways, though, Wharton is more of a Romantic than the Realist James, more Emersonian than Jamesian, in suggesting that enlightenment might come from the silence within, when one is removed figuratively, in one’s psychic home or mansion, or literally, from society, but the fears and neuroses which characterize her protagonists cannot be overcome through a simple sojourn in the country. Indeed, the business mentality of

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contemporary New York weighs heavily upon Wharton, and she looks for meaning to counteract the loudness of American technological civilization, in the mythology of the European past—in the many abandoned villages and haunted castles of her ghost stories. In other words, she turns aesthetic in her tastes and longings. Considering that the Gothic was a European art form (on both the literary and architectural levels), it is not surprising that Wharton should feel at home with it, since she is ambivalent about all that is European. She resembles the Transcendentalists, especially Emerson, in both affirming and denying her allegiance to an aristocratic European past, while trying to establish her American identity. She manifests the anxiety of influence, as surely as Emerson does in “The American Scholar.” The only other critic to consider Wharton’s Transcendental affinities, Toby Widdicombe, does a close reading of Wharton’s “The Angel at the Grave” as a “problematic memorial to Transcendentalism” (47). He asserts that “If Wharton is considered the doyenne of realism, then the story, with its focus on the philosophical problems inherent in Transcendentalism, overturns expectations” (47). One of those problems, evident in the story, is the Transcendental belief that one needed to create something new, while reappraising the genius of the past (55). Certainly, Wharton was also caught in this bind, as I mention earlier in describing her allegiance to the “old” and “new” European and American culture. At times Wharton is downright elitist about her mythologized European past, especially aesthetically speaking, when she advises writers not to “disown” the past, not to waste the “inherited wealth of experience” (154); she praises Proust, for example, for his ability to combine originality with respect for the past and reads his strength as “the strength of tradition” (Writing of Fiction 154). She attacks young contemporary writers for their “lack of general culture” and of “original vision” as they “attach undue importance to trifling innovations” (154). Wharton did not think much about contemporary American writers; in fact, in a letter to Comte Arthur de Vogue, who wanted to be introduced into cultural circles in America, she regrets that she cannot recommend any authors’ names to him, even though she has “several men of science” to recommend: “but the new America is so little literary that I do not know to whom I should direct you” (October 1919). She sees the world of intellect divided between the scientist and the writer, with the scientist (Emerson’s ver-

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Moreover, Wharton is nostalgic about her own personal European past, as she reminisces fondly about her childhood in A Backward Glance. Suffering a financial setback after the Civil War, the father let “his town and country houses for six years to some of the profiteers of the day,” and, ironically, the family goes “to Europe to economize” (44). This is actually the reverse situation of the rich American couple who go ghost-hunting in an old Tudor mansion in Wharton’s ghost story, “Afterward”: . . . [the mansion’s] remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot water pipes, and other vulgar necessities—were exactly those pleading in its favor for two romantic Americans perversely in search of the economic drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition, with unusual architectural felicities. (48)

In her own life, Wharton’s family was forced to move to Europe for six years, and from this crucial period of her life, she gathered sustenance from the traditions of the past. Happy misfortune, which gave me for the rest of my life, that background of beauty and oldestablished order! I did not know how deeply I had felt the nobility and harmony of the great European cities till our steamer was docked at New York. (44)

Wharton juxtaposes the eyesore of New York (“the shameless squalor of the purlieus of the New York docks”) with “the glories of Rome and the architectural majesty of Paris” (44). It is this sense of being lost in America which allies her with fellow expatriates, James and T. S. Eliot. Towards the end of her life, though, she realizes that one urban center is like another, as she describes a veritable modern Wasteland: Paris is simply awful—a kind of continuous earthquake of motor busses, trams, lorries, taxis, & other howling & swooping & colliding engines, with hundreds of U.S. citizens rushing about in them & tumbling out of them at one’s door—&, through it all, the same people placidly telephoning one to come to tea. (To Bernard Berenson, 23 May 1920)

To escape the commotion and the American tourists (who seem synonymous with noise) in Paris, Wharton escapes to the natural landscape of her country getaway: “The country—the banlieue

even—is divine, & my humble potager gushes with nightingales” (23 May 1920). It is no wonder that with this malaise of modern culture weighing upon her, Wharton finally spends the last years of her life not in a sprawling urban center like Paris but in a country villa, Pavillon Colombe, outside Paris. In many ways, she lives her last years as her protagonist in “All Souls’” (Mrs. Clayburn) does: isolated and outside the realm of modern communication. When Wharton hears about the death of a family friend, she writes to Dr. Beverly Robinson about the gap in communications: The news of Anna’s death comes as a great shock to me, for I had not heard of her illness. Since I have given up Paris, & live entirely in the country, I sometimes miss a letter or newspaper containing news of friends at home, and thus remain for weeks in ignorance of what has happened to them. (21 January 1921)

This self-imposed isolation causes all news from the outside to seem garbled, fantastic, and fragmented; thus, as the ghosts without are held in check, the ghosts within loom large for the aging Wharton. Wharton invites both the protagonist and the reader to explore the power of the imagination in order to validate one’s private space in the face of overwhelming odds. The wireless, telegraphs, telephones, movies, the constant static, “white noise,” of everyday life prevent the protagonist from encountering the “silence and continuity” of oneself alone (stripped of the accouterments of modern culture).4 One is reminded here as elsewhere in Wharton’s Gothic tales of Thoreau’s need to shut himself off from news, telegrams, and trains in an effort to ward off the debilitating effects of civilization and to “live deliberately.” To Wharton, too, modern channels of communication cut off one’s life-line to an inner self: on a trip to New York, after settling down in France, she comments about the crippling effects of her sojourn, paralyzing, that is, in terms of her selfexpression: The fact is, my wonderful New York fortnight reduced me to absolute inarticulateness—of tongue and pen. . . . moreover, I had acquired [in New York] a proficiency in telephoning and telegraphing which seemed to have done away with my ability to express myself in any less lapidary style. (Letter to Corinne Robinson, 2 March 1914)

In her Gothic fiction, Wharton forces the skeptic and the non-introspective reader to believe

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sion of the Materialist) faring remarkably better. She writes to John Jay Chapman that he and she are the “only valid survivors” of “a milieu litteraire” (8 October 1919).

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and to move within the realm of the unconscious: she asks us to suspend belief or disbelief momentarily and seduces us into the realm of ghosts, to a higher understanding of self. She invites us to move from the “soulless” roar of the city to the “soulful” existence within the home one creates (e.g., “Pomegranate Seed”), even if that requires some painful psychic experiences—or an encounter with a ghost. Essentially, Wharton asks the reader to return to some primitive, psychological state: she explains that “No one with a spark of imagination ever objected to a good ghost story as ‘improbable’. . . . Most of us retain the more or less shadowy memory of ancestral terrors, and airy tongues that syllable men’s names” (The Writing of Fiction 38-39). The belief in ghosts, according to Wharton, has its origin in “states of mind inherited from an earlier phase of race-culture” (Writing 38). In telling her life’s story, Wharton discusses how her reading of ghost stories was crucial to the development of her imagination. In her autobiographical sketch “Life and I,” Wharton recounts the story of her childhood encounter with death and the underworld: she “fell ill of typhoid fever, and lay for weeks at the point of death” (1079). In her later Gothic stories, one can find traces of this moment of fear she experienced as a child, when the two worlds of body and spirit—of the physician’s diagnosis and scientific advice and of the magic of children’s fairy tales—seemed to collide. She was in Germany, in the Black Forest, a natural setting for ghosts, at the time, and two little playmates lent her a book of ghost stories which terrified her: “To an unimaginative child the tale would no doubt have been harmless; but it was a ‘robber story,’ and with my intense Celtic sense of the supernatural, tales of robbers and ghosts were perilous reading” (1079). This particular story brought on a relapse of the fever (perhaps the fever intensified the reaction), and for many years after, she lived in “a world haunted by formless horrors” (1080). This nameless horror lasted for eight years, until she was seventeen or so, and even as a woman of twenty-seven, she “could not sleep in the room with a book containing a ghoststory” (1080) and found herself burning books of this kind. The fear of something “on the other side of the door” which the protagonist Charlotte Ashby articulates (“Pomegranate Seed” 205) is similar to Wharton’s threshold experience with death and her initiation into terror—“something as old as the world, as mysterious as life.” This fear, since it was wrought at a time of sickness, could have been

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her awakening to mortality, or to the secrets of her unconscious, as she was left alone for many hours. The stimulus of the ghost story exacerbated this apprehension, this recognition of life beyond the body. Indeed, it was after this experience that she could no longer sleep at night because her “terror”—“some dark undefinable menace”—was “forever dogging [her] steps,” and when she took walks with her nursemaid, she would return terrified at the thought that something was pursuing her, “I could feel it behind me, upon me; and if there was any delay in the opening of the door I was seized by a choking agony of terror” (1080). This symbol of the opening and closing door— bridging the external life to one’s unconscious— becomes prominent in Wharton’s ghost stories. The collision of two realms—spiritual and material—was ultimately liberating for Wharton and her characters because it sparked her creative potential; Wharton reveled in the chaos and unbounded freedom of the moment of collision. One of the reasons Wharton so admired Nietzsche was his abandonment of rules, his predilection for the unbounded, the chaotic: “He has no system, and not much logic, but wonderful flashes of insight, and power of breaking through conventions that is most exhilarating” (To Sara Norton, 7 July 1908). Wharton praises Nietzsche for his “get[ting] back to a wholesome basis of naked instinct.” According to R. W. B. Lewis, Wharton greatly admired Emerson for his influence on Nietzsche: “Nietzsche, she said, was Emerson’s chefd’oeuvre” (236). In the letter praising Nietzsche, Wharton laments the split between body and soul which Christianity has created, “There are times when I hate what Christianity has left in our blood—or rather, one might say, taken out of it—by its cursed assumption of the split between body and soul.” Interestingly enough, this is the same kind of distress felt by Emerson in “The Transcendentalist,” where he describes the separation of body and spirit in his discussion of the Materialist and Idealist, and by Thoreau in his chapter of Walden, “Higher Laws,” where he feels compelled to devour a woodchuck raw: “I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both” (257). Wharton attempts to go beyond the eternal binary opposition of body-soul, and this is what makes her both Transcendentalist and modern. Thus, in her ghost stories, she shows the dangerous consequences of bifurcating the world of spirit and matter, and one can make the case that Whar-

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For Wharton the stasis of life—in Old New York—could be overcome by other-worldliness. An overly intrusive business world or a scientifically determined milieu necessitates a ghost. One of the prerequisites for the appearance of a ghost in Edith Wharton’s world (of the ghost stories) is a deep sense of ennui emanating from a routine business life, which is often intertwined with a disintegrating married life. Often such characters try to re-establish their history by purchasing an old haunted house, but the ghosts they meet are their own bugaboos, taken from the depths of their unconscious. Thus, for example, in “Afterward” Mary and Ned Boyne attempt to escape their American past and the drudgery of work: Mary Boyne had been “exiled” from New York when her husband’s engineering business forced them to move to the “soul-deadening ugliness of a Middle Western town” (50); finally, after much hard work, her husband enjoys a “prodigious windfall” of a particular mine which puts them “in possession of life and the leisure to taste it”

(50). With their newly acquired American fortune, they seek an old secluded house in Europe (in old England), but they tell the real estate agent that it must be haunted. Ironically, while the husband writes his long-planned book on the “Economic Basis of Culture,” his deceased business partner from the past, whom Boyne has deceived and ruined, comes back to haunt him and finally to destroy him: the New World ghost returns to the Old World to have his vengeance. Meanwhile, the wife, who waits patiently, years even, for the return of her husband, whom the ghost has taken hostage, finds herself “domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions of life” (71). All her visions of painting and gardening disappear as she becomes the harshest critic of culture, by dropping out of the work world and social life altogether: “She watched the routine of daily life with the incurious eye of a savage on whom the meaningless processes of civilization make but the faintest impression” (71). This watching and being watched are crucial factors in Wharton’s Gothic, and the visual motif may be read in several ways. On the most obvious level, the protagonists feel haunted by something which they cannot fathom: in “Kerfol” and in “A Bottle of Perrier,” for example, the characters feel eyes gazing at them from behind the window as they traverse the courtyards. Of course, the most nightmarish vision of being watched occurs as a result of technology—as Wharton would show in such stories as “All Souls’.” Moreover, Wharton shows, even in her non-Gothic fiction, as in the aptly titled “Atrophy,” that the disjunction between seeing and being, between public and private, added much to twentieth-century anxiety, ironically through such illusory images provided by the media (film, newspaper, and literature): You took up the morning paper, and you read of girl bandits, movie star divorces, “hold-ups” at balls, murder and suicide and elopement, and a general welter of disjointed disconnected impulses and appetites; then you turned your eyes onto your own daily life, and found yourself as cribbed and cabined, as beset by vigilant family eyes, observant friends, all sorts of embodied standards, as any white muslin novel heroines of the sixties! (“Atrophy” 501)

In such a world, there is nowhere to escape public and private scrutiny, even though the wish to be invisible is there. On another level, the gaze of the eyes does not so much represent the gaze of the other as it does the protagonists’ own moral conflict, their own guilt for putting personal business interests

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ton creates pagan ghosts rather than Christian ghosts to initiate the reader into her own conflicts between the spiritual and material realms. Though the context may be ostensibly Christian, as in “All Souls’,” the ghosts are, psychologically seen, the passions which have been repressed in the individual psyche; they are not aroused by the Christian remembrance of the dead, but in the ritualistic evocation by a coven of witches who feel close to the earth. Indeed, All Souls’ is the evening upon which the veil between life and death is the thinnest, when the realms between body and spirit are not totally distinct, and Wharton is provocative in allowing Sara’s transformation to occur on this very evening. Bereft of the luxuries of modern communication (the material), Sara is forced to contend with her own voice, or spirit, by herself. Ghosts most often manifest themselves in Wharton’s Gothic when a character experiences a psychological crisis in development—whether that be an inappropriate marriage (involving class differences or emotional incompatibilility, e.g., “Kerfol,” in which the eternal bachelor-narrator recreates the drama of an unhappy marriage), a mid-life crisis (e.g., “Pomegranate Seed”), an encounter with illness (“The Lady’s Maid’s Bell”), with aging (“The Looking Glass”), or with death (“All Souls’”), or the adolescent search for one’s profession (“The Triumph of Night”). Wharton’s repeated use of the Persephone myth in her ghost stories shows her coming to terms with her childhood terror of mythical descent into the underworld, into the unconscious.5

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above those of their friends; thus, in “The Triumph of Night,” George Faxon, recuperating from his nervous breakdown, reads of his friend’s death and feels utter remorse: the friend’s obituary “stared up at him as if with Rainer’s dying eyes” (128). In “The Eyes” the protagonist Culwin seeks his soul in the eyes of others, for he is haunted by his own soul—as reflected in his eyes; in the darkness of night, he has visions of eyes that “hung there and drew me. I had the vertige de l’abime, and the red lids were the edge of my abyss” (37). To his horror, he finds the eyes are his. Nonetheless, as a good post-Darwinian character, he tries to deny these “hallucinations” through the power of science, explaining them away by attributing the “illusion” to the flicker in the fireplace or the reflection of the mirror. Moreover, he suggests that his ghosts would have disappeared with “a pair of spectacles” (31). He feels that he is “afflicted by an optical or a digestive delusion” (31) but decides not to go to a doctor because he wanted to pursue the eyes’ “interesting double life” (31). Always beneath the scientific vision of Wharton’s non-believing Gothic protagonists is a wish for another realm beyond the physical/empirical; in fact, she follows an American tradition that is not simply Gothic, in making claims for a double vision which encompasses binary oppositions and destroys traditional categories of thinking. Thoreau and Emerson, with their Transcendental beliefs, explore similar spiritual realms and similar out-of-body experiences. Thoreau, for example, speaks of a “certain doubleness” which makes him as “remote” from himself as from another: “However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it” (Walden 180). Similarly, Emerson discusses the nature of his dreams in terms of ghostly apparitions and marvels at the easy reconciliation between subjectivity and objectivity in these dreamscapes: Their [the dreams’] double consciousness, their sub- & ob- jectiveness is the wonder. I call the phantoms that rise the creation of my fancy but they act like volunteers & counteract my inclination. They make me feel that every act, every thought, every cause, is bipolar & in the act is contained the counteract. If I strike, I am struck. If I chase, I am pursued. . . . (Jrnl., 20 April 1838)

However, in his essay, “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson, in his attack upon the marketplace, shows the discrepancies between the materialist’s and idealist’s views and the contradictions which

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surface through this double vision: “The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show very little relation to each other; never meet and measure each other” (254). Moreover, Emerson feels that behind every material fact are levels of some higher spiritual meaning or meanings: “. . . the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or shall I say the quadruple or the centuple or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact” (“The Poet” 260). Like her predecessors Emerson and Thoreau, Wharton is deeply concerned with the binary oppositions resulting from the rampant materialism of American culture. Indeed, Wharton prefers the “ghost-feeler,” “the person sensible of invisible currents of being in certain places and at certain hours” over the rational “ghost-seer” who relies upon his senses for truth (“Preface” 1). Though she believes that “deep within us . . . the ghost instinct lurks” (2), she feels that science and technology are robbing us of this instinct; she chastises those who need scientific or rational data to “believe” in ghosts. For her, “To ‘believe’ . . . is a conscious act of the intellect,” but superior to this realm is the unconscious: “it is in the warm darkness of the prenatal fluid far below our conscious reason that the faculty dwells with which we apprehend the ghosts we may not be endowed with the gift of seeing” (“Preface” 1). Many of Wharton’s ghost stories revolve around ocular deception in the marketplace: a belief in the physical realm with one’s earthly eyes or an obsession with one’s professional (but superficial) identity, but finally, the deceived party is made to see the ugly reality of his business ethics through his encounter with the supernatural. Thus, for example, in “The Eyes,” every time the protagonist, Culwin, cheats or deceives another character (often by being non-committal), he is haunted by dreams of eyes: “What turned me sick was their expression of vicious security. I don’t know how else to describe the fact that they seemed to belong to a man who had done a lot of harm in his life, but had always kept just inside the danger lines” (34, emphasis mine). Though he initially attempts to explain the phenomenon by applying “scientific principles,” he ultimately is undone by them, for they are his own eyes. There is often a relationship between the narrator telling the story and the ghost story he tells. For example, the dilettante-author Culwin in “The Eyes” makes his ghost public and finally realizes his mistake.

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The most horrific of Wharton’s ghost stories, “All Souls’,” suggests that it is not so much ghosts as modern civilization which terrifies man. It is the most modern of men or women who become most victimized by the apparitions; thus, while the servants, the people who live on the land and are close to early traditions, can live in the world of ghosts, the newcomer, the idle rich man or the marketplace success, is most uprooted. As in the other servant-master Wharton ghost stories, two tensions emerge. There is a disjunction between the new business mentality and an old domestic, agrarian ideal, and there is the attendant rift between social classes, between servant and master (with the dynamics often upset, so that the servant is more master of the situation than the master, who is portrayed as paralyzed or diseased and whose intellectual powers atrophy as he loses touch with his hands and body). The narrator of “All Souls’” (significantly, the title suggests the universality of the soul’s link with the supernatural), the cousin of Sara Clayburn, the woman who encounters the ghost, insists that ghosts didn’t go out when “electric lights came in” (252). She also suggests that it is people like Sara who are most susceptible to ghosts, simply because they suffer from a lapse of the imagination, as they rely heavily on the false light of technology and logic: “it’s generally not the highstrung and imaginative who see ghosts, but the calm matter-of-fact people who don’t believe in them, and are sure they wouldn’t mind if they

did see one? Well, that was the case with Sara Clayburn and her house . . .” (252). In fact, the narrator’s obsession with explaining her haunted cousin’s fate may emanate in part from her own “matter-of-fact” rational self, which puts her at the same risk as her “modern” cousin. The cousinnarrator clearly expresses that of all the relatives she is “more likely than anybody else to be able to get at the facts, as far as they can be called facts, and as anybody can get at them” (252). Ostensibly, the cousin-narrator and Sara suffer (initially— before Sara’s breakdown) from the same practical, level-headed outlook on life. However, the narrator makes the point that one need not retrace one’s steps back to England to discover a ghost; in fact, she sounds a great deal like Hawthorne pleading the case that New England would offer as much material for his romances as Old England. However, once again, the turn of the screw is that the real ghost story, the real terror, belongs to the modern New Englander. Wharton’s narrator explains the misconception as she evokes a parody of the traditional ghost story: “As between turreted castles patrolled by headless victims with clanking chains, and the comfortable suburban house with a refrigerator and central heating where you feel, as soon as you’re in it, that there’s something wrong, give me the latter for sending a chill down the spine!” (252). The real horror then is the wasteland of urban sprawl and suburban uniformity; the frustration comes from not being able to break the continuity of meaningless gestures and conventions. As Sara Clayburn’s surname suggests, the class to which Sara belongs is rather rigid and unyielding; however, the steadfastness that traditionally belongs to the land-owning class is slipping away, and ironically, it is the servant/working class who are in control in this setting. After her husband’s death, Sara Clayburn continues to inhabit her husband’s Connecticut Colonial estate, which has housed three generations of Clayburns. Though the Clayburns have been considered a “good influence” on the countryside, it is also obvious that they have exploited the land and perhaps usurped power: “There was a lot of land about it, and Jim Clayburn, like his fathers before him, farmed it, not without profit, and played a considerable and respected part in state politics” (254). It is obvious that one does not need European history to reclaim the sins of the fathers—that New England history does just as well. Though the Clayburn estate was built in circa 1780, it “was open, airy, high-ceilinged, with electricity, central heating,

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He has discouraged an artist disciple (Gilbert) of his from a life of the imagination. By telling him that he cannot write, he relegates him to a tedious life on Wall Street: “He vegetated in an office, I believe, and finally got a clerkship in a consulate, and married drearily in China. I saw him once in Hong Kong, years afterward. He was fat and hadn’t shaved. I was told he drank” (45). Similarly, in “The Triumph of Night,” George Faxon, out of a job and on his way to a secretarial job in the country, could have saved his alter-ego Frank Rainer from the manipulations of his Wall Street uncle, but instead, he ignores the signs of the ghost lurking over the mercenary uncle’s figure. Faxon suffers a nervous breakdown and is forced to retreat into solitude, away from the work-world. His doctor diagnoses the problem as “overwork” and advises him “to be quiet for a year. Just loaf and look at the landscape” (126).6 Faxon ultimately realizes that if he had not fled the ghost, he “might have broken the spell of iniquity, the powers of darkness might not have prevailed” (127).

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and all the modern appliances” (252), and the past and present clash in Sara’s All-Souls’ night breakdown. The Clayburns, indeed, seem excessively civilized, in the most corrupt sense of possessing the most modern accouterments and in subjugating the wills of the townspeople and servants. It is rather ironic, then, when Sara suffers from a fall and finds herself totally dependent on the servants, who abandon her for an evening (and who, according to the rational narrator, go off on an All Souls’ witch’s vigil, at the prompting of a ghost). Left to her own devices, Sara becomes a bundle of nerves as she is cut off from civilization, as surely as the house’s electricity and telephone lines are cut for the night. She awakens to a house of “Silence. A deep nocturnal silence in that day-lit house” (258) and is terrified by the equally silent snow outside: “It [snow] was still falling, with a business-like regularity, muffling the outer world in layers on layers of thick white velvet and intensifying the silence within. A noiseless world . . .” (259). She is temporarily crippled from her fall, so she crawls to the kitchen for sustenance, and, literally groping in the dark, she finds something much more terrifying than the female ghost she encountered earlier in the morning. If, at first, the terrifying silence of being alone is disturbing, the encounter with the bodiless voice is maddening: the silence is broken by “a man’s voice, low and emphatic, and which she had never heard before” (264). Her earlier fears emanated from the too white landscape, with its “business-like” monotony, and the white noise of silence: “Her previous terrors had been speculative, conjectural, a ghostly emanation of the surrounding silence” (264), but now she is struck to the core by this strange unintelligible voice. It is none other than the blasting of the radio: the voice of the “invisible stranger” is “passionately earnest, almost threatening” and is incomprehensible to her (he was speaking “a language unknown to her” (264). Significantly, she loses consciousness, not at the sight of a ghost, but at the sight of the monster of the twentieth century—the deadening radio: “in the middle of the perfectly scoured table stood a portable wireless, and the voice she heard came out of it” (264). (It is the same feeling of contempt that Thoreau describes in the “Economy” section of Walden towards the telegraph, the railroad, and the transatlantic cable.) The horror of it is that the electrical current is ostensibly cut, but still there is noise and no silent realm to which to retreat. In the end, Wharton’s ghost stories suggest that there is a higher realm of knowing than what

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the practical world of business teaches us. In the post-Darwinian, post-Freudian milieu of Wharton’s settings, all reality becomes suspect, and there is no particular way to interpret the phenomenon of ghosts. In the preface to her ghost stories, Wharton chides the type of ghost-seeker emerging in England, the type of person who wants to “validate” or “authenticate” the appearance of a particular ghost in a particular mansion. That pseudo-empiricist is uninteresting to her. For her, “the warm darkness of the prenatal fluid” (“Preface” 1) is associated with the ghost-seeing power or intuitive faculty, but this “ghost instinct” is “being gradually atrophied by those two worldwide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema” (2). Ultimately, Wharton seems to suggest that the pre-Darwinian ghost is still significant, that some other mode of perceiving reality is deep within each individual and is linked to some distant universal past. Or in Emersonian terminology, one could say that Wharton looks back to a Transcendentalist ethos. To Emerson, the reality of the Materialists is based on “experience,” while that of the Idealists is founded on “consciousness”; the former group “think from the data of the senses,” whereas the latter “perceive that the senses are not final, and say, ‘The senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell’” (“The Transcendentalist” 239). While the Materialist is weighed down by the “external world,” the Transcendentalist, much like Wharton’s ghostfeeler, “believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration . . .” (243). In this context, one should recall the words of a doubter, the bachelor-narrator of “Kerfol,” who, with his fortune, can afford to buy a solitary and romantic but dilapidated old house in Brittany, especially since the owners are “dead broke, and it’s going for a song” (80). He begins to be absorbed by the atmosphere of the place, “Certainly no house had ever more completely and finally broken with the present. . . . I wanted only to sit there and be penetrated by the weight of its silence” (81). Overcome “by the pressure of the invisible,” he experiences the collision of past and present values, of material and spiritual realms, and begins to see anew as he recreates and relives the history of the former inhabitants: “I was beginning to want to know more; not to see more—I was by now so sure it was not a question of seeing—but to feel more: feel all the place had to communicate” (81-82). Once again, Wharton has been able to convert yet another skeptical

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Notes 1. Wharton, Ghost Stories, 3. Further references to Wharton’s ghost stories are to this edition, unless otherwise indicated. “A Bottle of Perrier” is cited from the Lewis collection of short stories. The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (Scribner’s, 1973) is somewhat different from the original Appleton-Century edition of Wharton’s Ghosts (1937). Among other changes in the reprint are the inclusion of “An Autobiographical Postscript” from “Life and I” and the substitution of “The Looking-Glass” for “A Bottle of Perrier” (McDowell 313). 2. Cf. Judith Fryer; though she does not speak about the ghost story at great length, she does mention that the ghost stories as well as the major novels share an underlying dichotomy: Wharton explored “the issues of social order and the wildness of individual abandon . . .” (199). See also Margaret McDowell, who examines Wharton’s later ghost stories in an effort to understand Wharton’s relationship with the past and to explore Wharton’s concern with “the intimate connection of body with spirit” (293), especially as it relates to aging and death. 3. For a discussion of Wharton’s complex relationship with her servants, see Erlich, who discusses one of Wharton’s most intimate (and earliest) relationships— with her nanny: “Wharton regarded her nanny as a benevolent goddess who wrapped her in a cocoon of safety, but even good care proffered by a nursemaid is a commodity purchased by parents who renounce this role for themselves” (7). Cf. also Carol Singley, who analyzes Wharton’s Gothic story “A Bottle of Perrier” in terms of “the interrelations of sexuality, class, race, and power as functions of both the female and male gothic” (272); significantly, Singley chooses a Wharton Gothic story dominated by males to show that Wharton “. . . not only critiques patriarchal power and the damaging sexual relations it spawns, but she offers a fleeting glimpse of what these new, revisionary relations may be” (272-273). 4. For a discussion of the use of the letter, the cable, and the telegraph as a structural and dramatic device in Wharton’s novels, see Jean Frantz Blackall’s informative essay; she focuses on the telegram as emphatic and representative of the “authoritative voice, or the intrusive presence of its sender” (164). 5. For readings of the Persephone myth in Wharton, see Candace Waid, who analyzes mother-daughter relationships using the myth of Persephone as well as the position of the woman writer (195-203). See also Josephine Donovan for a discussion of the DemeterPersephone myth in terms of the mother-daughter dynamics in Wharton’s fiction (43-83), and see also Erlich (42-25). 6. This fear of the “rest cure” might be a manifestation of Wharton’s own fears of inertia, since, as a young woman, Wharton was sent to Philadelphia for S. Weir Mitchell’s famous “rest treatment” (Lewis 82-84). Like Faxon, too, she felt that she was constantly under

surveillance during the treatment; in Lewis’s words, she felt that “ghostly presences were peering in on her morning and night” (84).

Works Cited Bernstein, Stephen. “Form and Ideology in the Gothic Novel.” Essays in Literature 18 (Fall, 1991): 151-165. Blackall, Jean Frantz. “The Intrusive Voice: Telegrams in The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.” Women’s Studies 20 (Dec. 1991): 163-168. Conn, Peter. The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Donovan, Josephine. After the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989. Emerson, R. W. Emerson in His Journals. Ed. Joel Porte. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1982. ———. “The Transcendentalist” and “The Poet.” Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays. Ed. Larzer Ziff. New York: Penguin, 1982: 239-258, 259-284. Erlich, Gloria C. The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Fryer, Judith. Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. McDowell, Margaret B. “Edith Wharton’s Ghost Tales Reconsidered.” Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. Eds. Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit. New York: Garland, 1992. 291-314. Singley, Carol. J. “Gothic Borrowings and Innovations in Edith Wharton’s ‘A Bottle of Perrier.’” Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. Eds. Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit. New York: Garland, 1992. 271-290. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and “Civil Disobedience.” New York: Penguin, 1983. Waid, Candace. Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of Chapel Hill Press, 1991. Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. New York: Scribner’s, 1933. ———. “A Bottle of Perrier” and “Atrophy.” The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. Vol. II. Ed. R. W. B. Lewis. New York: Scribner’s, 1968. 511-531, 501-510. ———. “Life and I.” Novellas and Other Writings. Ed. Cynthia Griffin Wolff. New York: The Library of America, 1990. 1071-1096. ———. The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribner’s, 1973. ———. The Letters of Edith Wharton. Eds. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis. New York: Collier, 1988. ———. The Writing of Fiction. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925. Widdicombe, Toby. “Wharton’s ‘The Angel at the Grave’ and the Glories of Transcendentalism: Deciduous or Evergreen?” American Transcendental Quarterly 6:1 (1992): 47-57.

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protagonist (and simultaneously, the reader) from “ghost-seer” to “ghost-feeler.”

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KATHY A. FEDORKO (ESSAY DATE 1995) SOURCE: Fedorko, Kathy A. “The Gothic Text: Life and Art.” In Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton, pp. 1-21. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. In the following essay, Fedorko maintains that “the Gothic in her fiction allows Wharton both to mirror and to revise issues that inform her life as well as the genre.”

Wharton’s conflicting and conflicted views of women and men and feminine and masculine reflect a complicated interweaving of family and social environment, historical time, and individual psychology. These conditions and the gender tension they foster in turn provide the impetus for Wharton to use and recast Gothic conventions and narratives in her fiction as a way to dramatize psychic conflict. Indeed, as a dreamlike interaction among parts of the self, the Gothic in her fiction allows Wharton both to mirror and to revise issues that inform her life as well as the genre: an ambivalent terror of/attraction to the supernatural and the threatening; a fascination with incest; a fearful ambivalence about marriage, about breaking out of social restraints, about being “different”; and an attraction to houses as signs of self and to the “abyss” as a state of being beyond the rational. Wharton’s handling of these issues distinctly evolves throughout her career. In the process, Wharton progressively imagines a fe/male self, moving from gender-bound women and men in the Gothic-marked fiction written early in her career to characters in the later fiction who struggle toward or even attain a degree of gender mutuality.

Family and Society Wharton’s autobiographies—the published version, A Backward Glance (1934) and the unpublished version, “Life and I”1 —and her autobiographically colored nonfiction French Ways and Their Meaning and The Writing of Fiction document the personal and professional struggles that drew Wharton to a Gothic perspective. “Life and I” also vividly dramatizes that perspective, for in it Wharton remembers her child self as a Gothic heroine—trapped in suffocating interiors, suppressed by patriarchal restraints embodied by her mother, isolated by her writing and tortured by her acute sensibilities, but at the same time pleasurably, even erotically, charged by those sensibilities. As a passionate, secret lover of words and literature, Wharton felt herself to be the isolated, emotionally orphaned heroine, alone in her “other side,” a supernatural world where

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the flow and energy of words brought ecstatic release while producing inordinate guilt because she was so “different” (“Life” 23, 36). This intermingling of eroticism and fear, pleasure and pain, is the quintessential Gothic psychology. “Life and I” demonstrates Wharton’s uneasiness with the patriarchal value system that tells women they are worthwhile only if they are attractive, especially to men, and that they risk being excluded if they are intelligent or strong willed or in any other way “unfeminine.”2 “To look pretty” is one of the “deepest-seated instincts of my nature,” Wharton writes there. Her clarification of this instinct identifies her as both gazed-at (female) art piece and (male) artist: “I say ‘to look pretty’ instead of ‘to be admired,’ because I really believe it has always been an aesthetic desire, rather than a form of vanity. I always saw the visible world as a series of pictures, more or less harmoniously composed, & the wish to make the picture prettier was, as nearly as I can define it, the form my feminine instinct of pleasing took” (“Life” 1-2). Wharton’s earliest memory, with which she begins A Backward Glance, is of being dressed beautifully while walking with her father and realizing for the first time the value of being a “subject for adornment” (2). Yet at the same time, in “Life and I,” she confesses humiliation about being laughed at by her brothers for her red hair and the “supposed abnormal size” of her hands and feet; she was, she felt, “the least good-looking of the family” and therefore intensely conscious of her “physical short comings” (37). Though pronouncing at a young age that when she grew up she wanted to be “the best dressed woman in New York” like her mother, Wharton felt herself no match and no daughter for the elegant Lucretia Jones (BG 20). While she recalls her “tall splendid father” as “always so kind,” with strong arms that “held one so safely,” and her childhood nurse Doyley as “the warm cocoon” in which she “lived safe and sheltered,” she remembers that her mother’s abounding interest in flounced dresses and ermine scarves was accompanied by her indolence and capriciousness, that her mother stressed politeness and reserve rather than nurturing (20, 26). This model of old New York womanhood upheld the patriarchy with her “shoulds” and “musts,” her withering judgmental demeanor, and her physical reserve, an outcome, perhaps, of her own “internalized oppression” that she encouraged in her daughter (Wehr 18). Sandra Gilbert describes Wharton’s situation in her comment that “the more fully the

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Even speaking was a hazardous business for the precocious, acutely sensitive young Edith, because, in Wharton’s view, her mother scorned verbal imperfection and risk taking. Over sixty years later the daughter writes, “I still wince under my mother’s ironic smile when I said that some visitor had stayed ‘quite a while,’ and her dry: ‘Where did you pick that up?’” (BG 49). The anger is palpable in the memory that “my parents—or at least my mother—laughed at me for using ‘long words,’ & for caring for dress (in which heaven knows she set me the example!); & under this perpetual cross-fire of criticism I became a painfully shy self-conscious child” (“Life” 37). And a shy adult. For throughout A Backward Glance runs the theme of her “incorrigible shyness” that she blames time and again for missed opportunities of intimacy. The mute girl is mirrored in the passive female Gothic character, holding her tongue, afraid to question, unable to defend herself.3 It is worth remembering that “the image of the repressive mother is the daughter’s creation” and that Wharton’s autobiographies should not be assumed to be factual documents (Fryer 359-60 n.4).4 Although there are hints in A Backward Glance about Lucretia’s difficult childhood, we have no “backward glance” from Lucretia to counter her daughter’s perspective and to help us understand her own childhood pain and losses. Still, however skewed Wharton’s memories of her mother, her perception was that she was rejected by a cold mother who criticized and restrained more than she accepted and nurtured. From her Wharton learns the intense self-criticism, the selfhating voice, that women internalize from patriarchal judgment of them as inadequate. Wharton’s reiteration in “Life and I” that she “frankly despised” little girls clearly seems to include herself (12). This “self-hater” turns up in her Gothic short stories as the female victim who colludes in her own destruction and as the villainous male who oppresses the passive woman (Wehr 20).5 As a child Wharton is beset by “the most excruciating moral tortures” instilled by her internalized mother (“Life” 2). She illustrates this point with an anecdote about telling a little boy in her dance class that their dance teacher’s

mother looks like an old goat. When she admits to the teacher that she made the remark, she gains a scolding and the tormented sense that her own mother would have thought her “naughty” not to have known how to do the “right” thing (“Life” 7). Noting that she had two “inscrutable beings” to please, God and her mother, and that her mother was the most inscrutable of the two, Wharton confesses that “this vexed problem of truth-telling, & the impossibility of reconciling ‘Gods’ standard of truthfulness with the conventional obligation to be ‘polite’ & not hurt anyone’s feelings” plunged her into a “darkness of horror” (6-7). Wharton’s intense moral anxiety resembles the impetus for traditional Gothic fantasy of the eighteenth century, springing as it did from uneasiness about “problems of personal moral responsibility and judgement, questions of restrictive convention, and a troubled awareness of irrational impulses which threatened to subvert orthodox notions of social and moral propriety” (Howells 7). Wharton’s girlhood, as she perceives it, thus is haunted by a late nineteenth-century version of the “grim realities” of eighteenthcentury womanhood that inspired Ann Radcliffe’s and Fanny Burney’s Gothic, “the restraints on her freedom, all the way to actual imprisonment; the mysterious, unexplained social rituals; the terrible need always to appear, as well as always to be, virtuous; and, over all, the terrible danger of slippage from the respectable to the unrespectable class of womanhood” (Moers 206-207). Bourgeois men were actors in the eighteenthcentury world, and women were passive possessions whose good behavior was often the deciding factor in their material well-being. Female respectability involved passive obedience to male authority, since women were seen as “inescapably Other” (Day 95). Societal emphasis on reason and repression of feeling, the “male” sphere, made that which was repressed, the “female” sphere, all the more threatening and thereby in need of destruction or imprisonment. The rebellious Gothic probed fears, spoke the unspeakable, meddled in the taboo, like rape, sex among the clergy, and, especially, incest. Social institutions like the church and the family, symbolized by the ruined church or castle, were considered claustrophobic and hypocritical because they suppressed and denied part of human experience. Initially Wharton’s “devastating passion” for “making up” stories as a child was a way of finding release from a threatening, confining, judgmental world into a supernatural one (“Life” 11).

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mother represents culture, the more inexorably she tells the daughter that she cannot have a mother because she has been signed with and assigned to the Law of the Father,” the law that means “culture is by definition both patriarchal and phallocentric” (“Life’s” 358).

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The sound and sight of words produced “sensuous rapture,” regardless of her inability to understand them (10). She writes in “Life and I” that words “sang to me so bewitchingly that they almost lured me from the wholesome noonday air of childhood into some strange supernatural region, where the normal pleasures of my age seemed as insipid as the fruits of the earth to Persephone after she had eaten of the pomegranate seed” (10). Wharton might well be describing immersion in le sémiotique, Julia Kristeva’s term for a pre-Oedipal, preverbal, sensual state associated with the maternal voice and bodily rhythms. The sensuousness of language thus provides the young Wharton with a haunted maternal bower, a “secret garden.”6 Even when Wharton learns the meanings of words, it isn’t intellectual discourse but rather the language of erotic secrecy and mystery, of supernatural otherworldliness that pervades her descriptions of immersion in books. She feels a “secret ecstasy of communion” with the books in her father’s library: Coleridge; Goethe’s Faust and Wilhelm Meister; The Duchess of Malfi; The White Devil; the “Song of Solomon”; Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra, no small dose of the romantic, the erotic, the Gothic (BG 69). These “enraptured sessions” with poetry, philosophy, religion, and drama become part of her “secret retreat” within her where she “wished no one to intrude” (70). “Words and cadences haunted it like song-birds in a magic wood,” nurturing the way her mother did not (70). Her father’s library becomes analogous to “my strange inner world,” conflating the symbolic and spiritual, the paternal and maternal (72). In Wharton’s Gothic, startling, disorienting, and often erotic discoveries take place in libraries, as intellectual knowledge is expanded by intuitive, uncanny awareness.7 Wharton’s dilemma as female child and woman is that intellectual knowledge and activities endow male-identified power at the same time that they estrange her from her female self as it has been defined by her society and her mother. Discovering Sir William Hamilton’s History of Philosophy in her brother’s room gives the young Wharton the hope that “now I should never be that helpless blundering thing, a mere ‘little girl,’ again!” (“Life” 32-33). But her intense intelligence and engagement with language also increase her sense of abnormality. As she confesses, “it humiliated me to be so ‘different’” (36). The social ramifications of difference were clear. According to an 1882 story in the Newport Daily News the engagement between Edith Jones and Harry

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Stevens, when she was nineteen, was broken because of “an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride” (Lewis, Biography 45). Her own writing intensified Wharton’s gender conflict. This public, and thereby unfeminine, act was met with silent disapproval: “My literary success puzzled and embarrassed my old friends far more than it impressed them, and in my own family it created a kind of constraint which increased with the years. None of my relations ever spoke to me of my books, either to praise or blame—they simply ignored them; and among the immense tribe of my New York cousins, though it included many with whom I was on terms of affectionate intimacy, the subject was avoided as though it were a kind of family disgrace, which might be condoned but could not be forgotten” (BG 14344). In having her own writing avoided as though it were a “family disgrace,” Wharton faced the quintessential woman writer’s dilemma. Writing is a fearful, “naughty” thing to do, for it involves honesty of feeling, assertiveness, and noticing and talking of things not polite to acknowledge. Like sex, it is fraught with guilt, this uncontrolled, unladylike, other-worldly act. Hélène Cixous, in urging women to “write her self,” shows that Wharton’s dilemma is still a current one for women: “Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn’t been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a welladjusted normal woman has a . . . divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick?” (“The Laugh” 876).8 The denial by silence of Wharton’s writing by her extended family and their dread of creativity is not unlike the denial of intense and sometimes supernatural experiences by characters in her Gothic stories. Their attempted suppression of disorienting awareness is undermined when the reader joins Wharton in an act of voyeurism and recognition as the story plays itself out.9 Her family relationships and experiences were not Wharton’s only impetus for using Gothic conventions and narratives in her fiction as a way to tell the disallowed story of female sexuality and power. Her Victorian/Post-Victorian Anglo-Saxon society, with its penchant for ignoring what it

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One of the main aspects of life to which Wharton refers in the phrase “things as they are” is sexuality. The French, she observes, are criticized by Anglo-Saxons for talking and writing freely about sexuality, as if to do so were “inconsistent with . . . purity and morality.” Wharton notes approvingly that the French just take sex for granted “as part of the great parti-coloured business of life” (60, ellipsis mine). Wharton felt that Anglo-Saxon literature had been no better than the society at acknowledging female sexuality in particular. In The Writing of Fiction she argues that English novelists create women whose passion is banked by prudery. Scott, for instance, “became conventional and hypocritical when he touched on love and women,” substituting “sentimentality for passion” and reducing his heroines to “‘Keepsake’ insipidities” (5). Thackeray, Dickens, Brontë, and Eliot were also affected by the “benumbing” restraints of their time (63). Wharton’s own portrayal of passionate women in her novels was hindered not only because, as Elizabeth Ammons argues, she felt the American woman she wrote about “was far from being . . . a whole human being” but also because her society, her background, and the very form of realism resisted such portrayal (3, ellipsis mine). In A Backward Glance, Wharton recounts that early in her career she had a reader protest, “have you never known a respectable woman? If you have, in the name of decency write about her!” (126) Those were the days, she remembers, when an editor stipulated that no “unlawful attachment” should appear in her projected novel and when her friend Charles Eliot Norton warned that “no great work of the imagination has ever been based on illicit passion” (126-27). But decades later the situation remained unchanged. The Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, and Collier’s wouldn’t publish Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive because of the “illicit liaison” in them, and the editor of Delineator, which finally did publish them, commented that “the situation, that of a man and woman unmarried and living together, is a little startling for magazine publication” (Lewis, Biography 502).

Wharton’s anger about the problem of portraying sexuality in literature surfaced most heatedly when she chided younger novelists for not realizing that portraying whole people, complete with passions, had been difficult for their predecessors. In a 1931 letter to Sinclair Lewis she rebukes him for the depreciatory comments he had made about Howells in his Nobel acceptance address; Wharton points out that Howells had to contend with a country “reeking with sentimentality and shuddering with prudery” (Dupree 265). She returns to the matter in A Backward Glance, commenting bitterly that “the poor novelists who were my contemporaries . . . had to fight hard for the right to turn the wooden dolls about which they were expected to make believe into struggling suffering human beings. . . . The amusing thing about this turn of the wheel is that we who fought the good fight are now jeered at as the prigs and prudes who barred the way to complete expression” (127, ellipsis mine). Contemporary critical discussion of realism has shown that the difficulty of portraying passions in realistic fiction that Wharton pinpointed (and a reason why she relied on a Gothic subtext to show passion constrained) is a problem inherent in the form. The dilemma is the very strength of realistic fiction, Leo Bersani has argued; its recreation of social structures militates against a full portrayal of the forces that would deny their validity. “The technical premises of realistic fiction—the commitment to intelligible, ‘full’ characters, to historical verisimilitude, to the revealing gesture or episode, to a closed temporal frame— already dooms any adventure in the stimulating improbabilities, of behavior which resists being ‘placed’ and interpreted in a general psychological or formal structure” (67). Because it keeps characters coherent, “the containment of desire is a triumph for social stability” (73). Feminist criticism has enlarged the conversation about how this “containment of desire” in deference to “social stability” is a culturally created gender issue, a containment of the “natural” feminine/maternal by the “symbolic” masculine/ paternal. Often “submerged meanings” appear in women’s writing as surreal or uncanny eruptions in and interruptions of the text (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 72). Grace Poole’s intrusion into Jane’s story in Jane Eyre is one of the most discussed examples. A novel such as Villette, as well, which seemingly doesn’t recognize the Romantic or Gothic, nonetheless can be said to possess a “buried letter of Romanticism” and “the phantom of feminism” conveying “the discourse

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considered inappropriate human experience, was an impetus as well. In French Ways and Their Meaning, Wharton describes maturity in a society as the ability to face primal terrors. “Intellectual honesty, the courage to look at things as they are,” she writes, “is the first test of mental maturity. Till a society ceases to be afraid of the truth in the domain of ideas it is in leading-strings, morally and mentally” (58-59).

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of the Other, as the novel’s unconscious . . . struggles for articulation within the confines of midnineteenth-century realism” (Jacobus, “Buried Letter” 42, 59; ellipsis mine). Brontë’s texts have been called examples of “new” Gothic in that intense feeling and extrarational experience are not only contained in “marvelous circumstance” but interpenetrate the “ordinary world” and thereby enlarge the sense of reality in the novels, especially the reality of women (Heilman 123, 121). Traditional Gothic male villains are deconstructed when “dark magnetic energy” characterizes female protagonists (127). Such a view privileges the realist form with which Wharton was comfortable in her novels but into which, like Brontë, she interwove a Gothic text to accommodate the gender tension central to her life as a writer.

The Abyss Wharton’s sense of being an outsider, the “separated one,” as a precocious child and a woman writer, uncomfortable with the maleidentified power of writing and the intellect while at the same time lured by the nourishing femaleidentified “rich world of dreams” and the sound and sight of words, helps explain her use of mystical/supernatural rather than “realistic” language to describe her creative process, the goddess’s descent into the soul, as she puts it (Wilt 19; “Life” 12; BG 198). The moment of creation is akin to the mysterious moment just before sleep when “one falls over the edge of consciousness” (BG 198). Similarly, the storytelling process “takes place in some secret region on the sheer edge of consciousness” where characters haunt the brain and names spectrally appear without characters (205). The creative act is “like the mystic’s union with the Unknowable” (121) or “that mysterious fourth-dimensional world which is the artist’s inmost sanctuary (WF 119).”1 0 Wharton’s language of creativity—the “unknown depths,” the “sheer edge of consciousness,” the mysterious and the spectral—is the language of her Gothic as well. Characters anxiously facing the dark abyss of preternatural knowledge or entering a mysterious life removed from society in the Gothic stories and the Gothicmarked novels replicate Wharton’s creative process of entering the “unknown depths.” Wharton’s Gothic thus enacts the writing process as a plunge into awareness beyond the realistic, where the unexpurgated “real” story is told, the “unla-

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beled, disallowed, disavowed” of which her patriarchal mother and society would not approve (Stein 126). The omnipresent Gothic abyss traditionally threatens damnation, a fall into “the demonic underworld” that leads to “the rejection of human identity and the embracing of the monstrous” (MacAndrew 49; Day 7). Rather than this chaotic loss of humanity, the abyss as Wharton uses it is a plunge into a realm that threatens loss of the controlled self at the same time that it promises new understanding. And what realm could be more frightening and yet more alluring for this unmothered daughter of the patriarchy than the feminine/maternal darkness, with its overwhelming intimacy and primal power? Wharton acknowledges the occult power of the maternal when she places the faculty for apprehending ghosts in “the warm darkness of the pre-natal fluid far below our conscious reason” (G vii). Her Gothic portrayals of inner journeys into threatening knowledge take characters into maternal places: houses, cabins, caves. Within the place within the mind of the character, an abyss opens, threatening annihilation at the same time that it promises self-awareness if s/he can acknowledge the experience.1 1 Facing the abyss is crucial to Wharton’s Gothic, for the willingness of characters to face the maternal darkness indicates their willingness to understand the inner life, the loss of the known self that has opened before them. Arrogant intellectual men in her Gothic fiction are usually those least willing to acknowledge what they have seen in the abyss and most apt to ignore or deny their experience with the darkness. Wharton seems to be mirroring her sense of the limitations of her own rationality, of the patriarchal symbolic, her sense that, emphasized at the expense of respect for the maternal erotic darkness, such logocentrism becomes tyrannical and repressive.1 2 Since the characters, especially in the stories, are themselves too timid to fully assimilate what they have experienced, Wharton depends on the reader to decipher their lost knowledge. Thus the woman’s story is heard despite the attempts of the male narrator or other (usually male) character to deny or suppress it. Contemporary feminist criticism of the Gothic argues that what draws a woman in particular to the “forbidden center” of the Gothic mystery is not threatened incest within the Oedipal plot, a reading that privileges the male reader, but rather “the spectral presence of a dead-undead mother,

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Sexual maturity, the secret knowledge and power of the mother, is both feared and desired. “Bad” women the heroine confronts in the Gothic text are the “monstrous” other parts of herself, and the parts of the mother, that she cannot accept—her passions, her ambitions, her energy (Stein 123ff.). The Gothic gives “visual form to the fear of self,” the dark, knowing mother/self who might appear in the fiction as a mad woman or a freak or a sexual monster and therefore beyond the pale of respectable society (Moers 163). Wharton gives such “visual form to the fear of self” when Lily Bart has her disturbing vision of herself in the mirror early in The House of Mirth and in the mirror of her thoughts after Trenor’s attempted rape. Wharton’s own fear of her sexual self is reflected in the exaggerated mirroring of Lily’s vaguely erotic activities by the omnivorously sexual Bertha Dorset. Wharton’s use of the abyss in her Gothic fiction as a character’s disorienting confrontation with primal human emotion or experience recalls Jung’s theory of individuation, “the process by which a person becomes a psychological ‘individual,’ that is, a separate, indivisible unity or ‘whole,’” by assimilating knowledge from the unconscious as part of consciousness (9[1]:275). This process has been called an adaptation to inner reality as well as outer, to what one is “meant to be”; one recognizes the next step in what one is meant to be by looking for what attracts and frightens at the same time (Whitmont 48-49, 62). The “rebirth journey,” as individuation has been called, brings to consciousness “the lost values of the psyche, which lie so largely in the realm of Eros, and by this means the human being becomes more complete” (Harding 245). The goal of the journey is an assimilation of gender selves, inner and outer worlds, consciousness with unconsciousness.1 4 Jung conforms with most androcentric Western theory in his association of consciousness with the masculine and unconsciousness with the feminine. “Psychologically the self is a union of conscious (masculine) and unconscious (feminine). It stands for the psychic totality” (9[2]:268). These realms accrue, however, the sexist associations of reasonable, reasoning masculine

consciousness as opposed to feared, fearful feminine unconsciousness. In Jung’s theory the male hero’s plunge into the abyss of the unconscious involves confronting his “shadow,” the hated, repressed side of the personality and thereafter the “anima,” the archetypal image of the female in a man’s unconsciousness, an awesome, organic power associated with the Terrible Mother or with a dual mother, part destructive, part creative (Wehr 59-67, 112-13). The ultimate encounter is thus with an Other that must be overcome to be assimilated. Feminist archetypal critics have revised Jungian theory to make it more compatible with women’s experiences as women themselves have written about them. The shadow a woman confronts often carries with it the gynophobia of the social world that fuses with the animus (the archetypal image of the male in a woman’s unconscious) into “a masculine character who loathes the woman as much as she loathes herself” (Pratt, “Spinning” 104). Annis Pratt cautions that for women the rebirth journey entails psychological risk that is as likely to lead to madness as to renewal (Archetypal 142). But women may also overcome this self-destructiveness and assimilate a mother/self that engenders a sense of female power and erotic independence by accepting rather than fearing the life forces of sexuality, birth, and death. Thus “the woman’s encounter with a feminine figure at the depths of her psyche . . . is more a fusion than an agon; the woman encounters a being similar to herself which empowers even as it exiles her from the social community,” since she then becomes a woman unreconciled to a patriarchal world (Pratt, “Spinning” 106, ellipsis mine). In imagining this feminine archetype encountered in the inner world, women writers often draw on female-identified mythology: Demeter/Persephone, Celtic Grail legends, Ishtar/Tammuz rebirth legends, and witches and other wise women (Pratt, Archetypal 170). This is Wharton’s practice in her Gothic-marked fiction. While male reading of the Gothic places the “maternal blackness” beneath the ruined castle, “the crumbling shell of paternal authority,” as imprisoning womb/tomb, feminist reading is more apt to identify the castle or other enclosure as the mother, “mother as nurturer, as sexual being, as body, as harboring a secret, as an indifferent hardness” (Fiedler 112; Holland and Sherman 289). The mother, especially for the woman reader, threatens nothingness, overwhelmingness, nonseparation (Holland and Sherman 283). The female Gothic character’s entrapment in or explo-

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archaic and all-encompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront” (Kahane, “Gothic Mirror” 336).1 3 The “ubiquitous Gothic precipice on the edge of the maternal blackness” thus draws female characters to a confrontation with the mysteries of identity (340).

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ration of a Gothic house is thus an extension of her relationship to the maternal body she shares (Kahane, “Gothic Mirror” 338).1 5

fearful—those emotions and conditions that, like the regression to the maternal, threaten to overwhelm one.1 6

Kristeva’s theory of the abject provides another way to read the abyss in Wharton’s Gothic. Though Kristeva emphasizes the abject as a reiteration of separation from the maternal, her discussion of the self-awareness gained in the process of struggling against and being pulled into the abject sheds light on the response of Wharton’s Gothic characters. Lying just on the edge of meaninglessness and nonexistence, the abject represents “our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language” (13). “The phantasmatic mother,” constitutes, in the history of each person, “the abyss that must be established as an autonomous (and not encroaching) place, and distinct object, meaning a signifiable one,” so that the person might “learn to speak” (100). In spite of this “placing,” one does not “cease separating” from the abject; it retains the power to recreate the act of attempting to break away from the maternal entity punctuated by the pull back from it (13).

Wharton dramatizes the power of the uncontrollable and overwhelming in her autobiographical account of recuperating, when she was nine years old, from a near-fatal bout of typhoid and of being given a book to read: “To an unimaginative child the tale would no doubt have been harmless; but it was a ‘robber-story,’ & with my intense Celtic sense of the super-natural, tales of robbers & ghosts were perilous reading. This one brought on a serious relapse, & again my life was in danger” (“Life” 17).

Reexperiencing the act of separation from the mother forces the limits of one’s psychic world and the limits of self-knowledge. “The abject shatters the wall of repression and its judgments. It takes the ego back to its source on the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has broken away. . . . Abjection is a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego). It is an alchemy that transforms death drive into a start of life, of new significance” (15, ellipsis mine).

Thereafter, until she was a “young lady,” she lived in “chronic fear” of an unexplained terror, “like some dark undefinable menace, forever dogging my steps” (17). Most terrifying was returning from daily walks outside with nurse, governess, or father and, while waiting for the door to her home to be opened, feeling the menace behind her, on top of her, and being “seized by a choking agony of terror” until she could escape inside (18). The memory suggests an overwhelming need to reconnect with the sheltering maternal body/house across the threshold. But the intensity of the “undefinable menace” that sends her to the mother also suggests an anxious fear of separation intensified by never having felt solidly connected in the first place. In Wharton’s Gothic fiction, terror of the outside unknown is transmuted into terror of the internal unknown, within the house/ mother rather than outside of it. Facing that terror is a courageous means of claiming and transforming it.

Such a definition of the abject as a rebirth into new understanding through the pull of the maternal abyss helps explain why Wharton’s characters are both terrified of and attracted to extrarational experiences. Wharton’s Gothic emphasizes the maternal abyss as “repellent and repelled” to those most frightened by it, yet Wharton also emphasizes that it is also a state of being that one must assimilate within oneself rather than reject or pull away from (6). In dramatizing primal experiences in her Gothic fiction—of ghosts, madness, and sexual threat—Wharton is courting disorder. She is pressing the limits of rationality and having her characters risk temporary egolessness for the sake of greater awareness, particularly of the feminine. She is speaking about those things considered unspeakable by her family and society—the erotic, the antisocial, the grotesque, the energetic, the

Wharton states, in “Life and I,” that until the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, she “could not sleep in the room with a book containing a ghost-story” (19). Using the progressive tense of recent occurrence, she admits, “I have frequently had to burn books of this kind, because it frightened me to know that they were down-stairs in the library!” (19). Such a sensational reaction to the threat posed by the supernatural—such books almost killed me and I subsequently burned them—reveals how much Wharton feared the uncontrollable and how much power she granted fiction as a means of recreating the terror of uncontrollable forces. Julia Briggs’s idea that “by recounting nightmares, giving them speakable shapes and patterns” in “stories of the terrific unknown,” we hope to “control them and come to terms with them” might well account for both

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In recasting the “abyss” as a restorative, regenerative place for those courageous enough to face it, Wharton reconceives its destructive power. Her several nervous breakdowns and her bouts of “occult and unget-at-able nausea” and overwhelming fatigue during the period when she was most conflicted about her identity as writer/wife/ socialite/intellectual/homemaker made her familiar with the risks of the journey into the self (Wolff 52). Wharton’s experience with the Weir Mitchell Rest Cure for her nervous collapse was more salutary than the experiences of Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Virginia Woolf, since she was encouraged to write during her time of separation from the outside world (Lewis, Biography 84). Nonetheless her imposed infantalization, during which she was barred from visitors yet felt “ghostly presences . . . peering in on her morning and night,” reappears as a dominant theme in many of her Gothic stories (84). Walter Berry’s comment in his letter of November 9, 1898, that he is “delighted to hear” that Wharton had “loosened the first stone in your cell toward an escape” suggests that Wharton saw herself as a prisoner during her “cure” (Beinecke). Her visit with her dear friend Henry James during his period of despair in 1910 is another encounter with the abyss. She observes that his eyes are those of a man who “has looked on the Medusa,” and as she sits beside him, she looks “into the black depths over which he is hanging— the superimposed ‘abysses’ of all his fiction” (Lewis and Lewis, Letters 202). Most notable for Wharton is that James is no longer in control of his emotions: “I, who have always seen him so serene, so completely the master of his wonderful emotional instrument . . . , I could hardly believe it was the same James who cried out to me his fear, his despair, his craving for the ‘cessation of consciousness,’ & all his unspeakable loneliness & need of comfort, & inability to be comforted!” (202, ellipsis mine). Wharton later comments how “haunted” she has been by James’s condition (203). The tension between complete mastery over one’s emotions and being incapacitated by them is part of the gender-identified duality that Wharton dramatizes in her Gothic fiction. Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence is perhaps her most successful example of a character who exemplifies balance between the extremes, though it comes at the cost of “leaving home” for good. Because she has faced the

Medusa and the darkness of the abyss, Ellen possesses a maturity of mind and spirit that Newland Archer admires, even marvels at. He himself skirts the edge and the Medusa’s gaze, thereby sacrificing the “flower of life” (AI 350). Confronting the Medusa, without the deflecting mirror in which Perseus sought refuge, is one of Wharton’s favorite ways of describing the act of facing powerful femaleness directly, unflinchingly. Yet the drama and tension of traditional female Gothic is in good part dependent on the concealment of female knowledge, the mysteries of birth, death, and sexuality, within the threatening maternal space of dungeon, castle, or haunted room. One female reader of the form, Leona Sherman, describes recreating in the Gothic a figurative confrontational dance with her mother about the essence of femaleness: “I know she knows but she won’t tell me. I know I know, but I doubt because she won’t tell me. She says one thing, but I see another on her face. I feel we can’t really talk about what we know, because she would be calling her whole past life into question and endangering her present. She thinks the concealment necessary for my survival, and finally, she loves me and wants to protect me above all. The mysteries are the issues of sex and birth and death and, too, the necessity of concealing them” (Holland and Sherman 287). Wharton describes in “Life and I” just such an evasive encounter with her mother about sexuality. I quote this much quoted passage in its entirety because Wharton’s dramatic, even melodramatic, rendering of her request for information about the secret of sexuality so uncannily mirrors Sherman’s description of a woman reading/ recreating a Gothic story: . . . a few days before my marriage, I was seized with such a dread of the whole dark mystery, that I summoned up courage to appeal to my mother, & begged her, with a heart beating to suffocation, to tell me “what being married was like.” Her handsome face at once took on the look of icy disapproval which I most dreaded. “I never heard such a ridiculous question!” she said impatiently; & I felt at once how vulgar she thought me. But in the extremity of my need I persisted. “I’m afraid, Mamma—I want to know what will happen to me!” The coldness of her expression deepened to disgust. She was silent for a dreadful moment; then she said with an effort: “You’ve seen enough pictures & statues in your life. Haven’t you noticed that men are—made differently from women?” “Yes,” I faltered blankly. “Well, then—?”

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Wharton’s autobiographical “confession” and her Gothic fiction that draws one into the “terrific unknown” (11).

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5. As Pablo Freire writes, “The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically. Yet, although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized” (32).

I was silent, from sheer inability to follow, & she brought out sharply: “Then for heaven’s sake don’t ask me any more silly questions. You can’t be as stupid as you pretend!” The dreadful moment was over, & the only result was that I had been convicted of stupidity for not knowing what I had been expressly forbidden to ask about, or even think of! [“Life” 34-35]

Wharton recreates herself here as the traditional Gothic heroine probing the dreadproducing mother/castle for answers about “the whole dark mystery” of sexuality, but she leaves both uninformed and humiliated because she is so uninformed. Perhaps because Wharton didn’t believe, as Sherman posits, that the mother/Gothic denies the knowledge to the questing daughter because she “loves me and wants to protect me above all,” in her own Gothic fiction Wharton turns the “Gothic denial” of “the whole dark mystery” of sexuality, birth, and death figured by the woman/ mother on its head (Holland and Sherman 292, 287). By denying access to the mother and thereby to femaleness, both women and men wield patriarchal power, power defied by characters such as Charity Royall in Summer and Lady Jane Lynke in “Mr. Jones.” More often, a character shrinks from rather than claims this powerful knowledge, and the reader is left with an awareness of the sacrifice that the character has made because of her or his timidity.

Notes 1. Cynthia Griffin Wolff posits that “Life and I” was written in 1920 or 1922 (417, n.3). 2. Wolff discusses the tension in Wharton between doing and being, between creating art and becoming a beautiful art object. See especially 40-43. 3. According to Wolff, Wharton’s experiences taught her that “strong emotions of any kind were innately dangerous” (38). For the young Wharton nothing was worse than to be mute. “To be ‘mute’ . . . is to be vulnerable to pain,” and words offered “the promise of an escape from loneliness and helplessness” (25-26, ellipsis mine). I argue that in the Gothic stories dangerous emotion is projected onto the dangerous man, preying upon the mute woman, whose imprisonment is partly a result of self-censorship. Although she doesn’t mention the Gothic, Wolff discounts most of Wharton’s ghost stories as inferior fiction. 4. Wolff also notes that the inclination “to fall into the formula of nasty mother and clever daughter” ignores the complexity of the relationship between Lucretia and Edith Jones (32). Erlich posits that Wharton’s image of her mother may well have been “a projection of the child’s need for punishment rather than an accurate description,” but she acknowledges that whatever the “historical truth,” Wharton’s “internalized mother” was a “persecutory figure” (25, 26).

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6. Several critics have noted that Wharton’s use of “secret garden” in connection with her writing probably refers to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 children’s classic of the same name. What is important for my purposes are the similarities The Secret Garden bears both to Wharton’s childhood and to her Gothic. At the beginning of the novel, two emotionally abandoned children, Mary and Colin, are angry, pale, and lonely, living together in what Mary calls a “queer house,” where “everything is a kind of secret. Rooms are locked up and gardens are locked up” (159). Both think the other is a ghost when they first meet, both live in their own world of stories and dreams. Together they enter the secret, neglected garden, care for it, and are rejuvenated by the activity. This plot resembles Wharton’s Gothic heroes/heroines entering the spirit of the mother in a mysterious enclosure and being shaken and changed by the encounter. 7. Erlich calls Frederick Jones’s library Wharton’s “emotional center” (32). She notes that Wharton even makes the connection in “Life and I” between the library and her self or body and that books and libraries are thereafter “libidinized” (34, 154). Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney discuss Wharton’s anxiety about reading, in her father’s library, books forbidden by her mother. They quote Paula Berggeren as even suggesting that in disobeying her mother Wharton is figuratively gazing on her “father’s nakedness” in the library (185). 8. Gilbert and Gubar also identify the “anxiety of authorship” that a woman writer experiences because of “her culturally conditioned timidity about selfdramatization, her dread of the patriarchal authority of art, her anxiety about the impropriety of female invention” (Madwoman 50). Singley and Sweeney discuss how Wharton expresses her anxiety about reading and writing in the narrative of “Pomegranate Seed.” My sense of Wharton’s gender discomfort in relation to writing differs slightly but significantly from both of these useful studies. I believe Wharton felt anxious about writing not only because she was a woman but because speech and writing do have the potential to be aggressive, harmful acts regardless of which gender engages in them. Lucretia Jones’s power to wound with words was an early model for her daughter of this potential. Thus although the culturally constructed anxiety Wharton felt about writing influenced her projective creation of menacing intellectual men in her Gothic fiction, she is also responding to her discomfort with destructive verbal power. 9. Howells refers to readers of the Gothic as “literary voyeurs” (15-16), and Wolstenholme extensively discusses this quality of the Gothic experience. 10. Fryer discusses the haunted quality of Wharton’s creative process (158-59). 11. Wolff talks about Wharton’s realization that good art develops from the artist’s courage to plunge into the primal depths and confront “his most secret self” (9). Wolff stresses Wharton’s need to outgrow and reject her relationship with her mother, however, while I see

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12. A key characteristic of ghost stories by American women, according to Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, is that they not only expand “reason” to include the supernatural but more often replace reason with sympathy as the key interpretive faculty (13). 13. Fleenor notes that “this confrontation can be seen in a literary context as the confrontation of the female author with the problem of being an author, not the father of her work but the mother of it” (16). 14. Jung’s tendency to ignore socially derived, sexist assumptions in the construction of his archetypes, which I discuss earlier, also colors his theory of individuation; this emphasizes the importance of feminist archetypal criticism of women’s rebirth journeys as portrayed in their writing. 15. Kahane points out that the maternal body carries such “archaic fantasies of power and vulnerability” because society encourages it with its cultural divisions (“Gothic Mirror” 350). 16. Tzvetan Todorov discusses the fantastic as a means of combating social and internal censorship. The function of the supernatural in particular “is to exempt the text from the action of the law, and thereby to transgress that law” (159).

Abbreviations AI

The Age of Innocence

BG

A Backward Glance

Biographies Benstock, Shari. No Gifts From Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994, 546 p. Biography of Wharton. Coolidge, Olivia. Edith Wharton, 1862-1937. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964, 221 p. Biography of Wharton. Dwight, Eleanor. Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life. New York: Abrams, 1994, 296 p. Biography of Wharton. Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1975, 592 p. Definitive biography of Wharton. McDowell, Margaret B. Edith Wharton. Boston: Twayne, 1976, 158 p. Provides a biographical and critical overview of Wharton’s life and career. Singley, Carol J., editor. A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, 302 p. Offers a biographical and critical examination of Wharton. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977, 453 p. Offers a biographical and critical analysis of Wharton’s career.

CI

Crucial Instances

CP

Certain People

Criticism

CSS

Collected Short Stories

DM

The Descent of Man and Other Stories

Banta, Martha. “The Ghostly Gothic of Wharton’s Everyday World.” American Literary Realism 27, no. 1 (fall 1994): 1-10.

EF

Ethan Frome

G

Ghosts

GA

The Gods Arrive

HB

Here and Beyond

HM

The House of Mirth

HRB

Hudson River Bracketed

HW

The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories

“Life”

“Life and I”

S

Summer

WF

The Writing of Fiction

X

Xingu and Other Stories

FURTHER READING Bibliographies Garrison, Stephen. Edith Wharton: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990, 514 p. Provides a descriptive bibliography. Lauer, Kristin O. and Margaret P. Murray. Edith Wharton: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Pub., 1990, 528 p. Offers an annotated bibliography.

Probes Wharton’s fiction as it responds to modern society through “ethnographic surrealism,” a form of cultural study focused on the discovery of primitive knowledge and particularly evident in her Gothic short story “Afterward” and novella Ethan Frome. Beer, Janet, and Avril Horner. “‘This Isn’t Exactly a Ghost Story’: Edith Wharton and Parodic Gothic.” Journal of American Studies 37, no. 2 (August 2003): 269-83. Argues “that some of Wharton’s ghost stories contain a further dimension, beyond allusion, where they shift into a parodic and humorous strain that enables her to engage self-reflexively with the Gothic tradition.” Dyman, Jenni. Lurking Feminism: The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: Peter Lang, 1996, 199 p. Book-length study of Wharton’s short Gothic fiction that concentrates on the incipient feminist awareness demonstrated in these works. Elbert, Monika M. “T. S. Eliot and Wharton’s Modernist Gothic.” Edith Wharton Review 11, no. 1 (spring 1994): 19-25. Argues that in her short story “A Bottle of Perrier” Wharton emulates the mytho-historical and rationalist modernism of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land. ———. “Wharton’s Hybridization of Hawthorne’s ‘Brand’ of Gothic: Gender Crossings in ‘Ethan Brand’ and

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Wharton attempting to assimilate and recreate her maternal relationship and using the Gothic abyss as a locus of this interaction.

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‘Bewitched.’” American Transcendental Quarterly 17, no. 4 (December 2003): 221-41. Compares the use of Gothic conventions associated with male desire in Wharton’s short story “Bewitched” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand.” Kaye, Richard A. “‘Unearthly Visitants’: Wharton Ghost Tales, Gothic Form and the Literature of Homosexual Panic.” Edith Wharton Review 11, no. 1 (spring 1994): 10-18. Studies male homosexuality depicted as a supernatural threat in five stories by Wharton: “A Bottle of Perrier,” “The Triumph of Night,” “The Eyes,” “Afterward,” and “Pomegranate Seed.” Singley, Carol J. “Gothic Borrowings and Innovations in Edith Wharton’s ‘A Bottle of Perrier.’” In Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, edited by Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit, pp. 271-90. New York: Garland, 1992. Argues that in her short stories Wharton “follows a tradition of Ghost Fiction by British and American women writers . . . which deals in varying ways with the missing or longed-for mother.”

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OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Wharton’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: American Writers; American Writers: The Classics, Vol. 2; American Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 1; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 25; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 3; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 1865-1917; Contemporary Authors, Vol. 132; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 4, 9, 12, 78, 189; Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, Vol. 13; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Exploring Short Stories; Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion; Literature and Its Times, Vols. 2, 3; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Major 21st-Century Writers; Modern American Women Writers; Novels for Students, Vols. 5, 11, 15, 20; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 6, 7; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 6, 84; Supernatural Fiction Writers; Twayne’s United States Authors; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vols. 3, 9, 27, 53, 129, 149; 20th Century Romance and Historical Writers; and World Literature Criticism.

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OSCAR WILDE (1854 - 1900)

(Full name Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde; has also written under the pseudonyms Sebastian Melmoth and C. 3. 3.) Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, critic, poet, and short story writer.

narcissistic protagonist. Other writings by Wilde noted for their use of Gothic elements include two satirical short stories, “The Canterville Ghost” (1887) and “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” and the biblically-inspired drama Salomé (1893).

W

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

ilde is one of the foremost figures of late nineteenth-century literary Decadence, a movement whose members espoused the doctrine of “art for art’s sake” by seeking to subordinate moral, political, and social concerns in art to matters of aesthetic value. This credo of aestheticism, however, indicates only one facet of a man notorious for resisting any public institution—artistic, social, political, or moral—that attempted to subjugate individual will and imagination. In contrast to the cult of nature purported by the Romantic poets, Wilde posed a cult of art in his critical essays and reviews; to socialism’s cult of the masses, he proposed a cult of the individual; and in opposition to what he saw as the middleclass façade of false respectability, he encouraged a struggle to realize one’s true nature. Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), is typically considered one of the defining literary works of the Decadent movement. Exhibiting the author’s fascination with human perversity, the novel also features numerous Gothic themes and techniques as it details in elaborate, ornamental prose the moral degeneration of its morbidly

Wilde was born in Dublin, where he received his early education. As a student at Dublin’s Trinity College and later at Oxford University in London, he was influenced by the writings of Walter Pater, who, in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), urged indulgence of the senses, a search for sustained intensity of experience, and stylistic perfectionism in art. Wilde adopted such aestheticism as a way of life, cultivating an extravagant persona that was burlesqued in the popular press and music-hall entertainments, copied by other youthful iconoclasts, and indulged by the avant-garde literary and artistic circles of London wherein Wilde was renowned for intelligence, wit, and charm. Wilde published his first volume, Poems, in 1881. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, the daughter of a wealthy Dublin family, and thereafter promoted himself and his ideas with successful lecture tours of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. In the late 1880s Wilde and his family settled in London, and he continued to crusade for aestheticism as a book reviewer and as the editor of the periodical

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Woman’s World. “The Canterville Ghost,” the first of Wilde’s short stories to appear in print, was published in Court and Society in February 1887. In addition to this work, three subsequent short stories written by Wilde appeared in various London magazines that same year and were later collected as Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories (1891). His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was published during a period of great creativity and productivity for Wilde that extended from 1888 to 1895. Most of his highly regarded critical essays, collected in Intentions (1891), also appeared during this time. Shortly after the publication of this collection, Wilde attained the greatest critical and popular success of his lifetime with the plays Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Meanwhile, during the 1890s, Wilde met and became infatuated with Lord Alfred Douglas, son of the Marquess of Queensbury. His relationship with Douglas, the Marquess’s violent disapproval of this relationship, and his own ill-advised legal action against the Marquess scandalized London. The Importance of Being Earnest was in production at the time of Wilde’s 1895 trial on charges of “gross indecency between male persons.” His conviction and subsequent imprisonment led to ignominy for Wilde and obscurity for his works. He continued to write during his two years in prison, producing the poems in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and Other Poems (1898) and the essay De Profundis (1905). Upon his release, however, Wilde was generally either derided or ignored by literary and social circles. At the time of his death in 1900 the scandal associated with Wilde led most commentators to discuss him diffidently, if at all. While critical response no longer focuses so persistently on questions of morality, Wilde’s life and personality still incite fascination. Biographical studies and biographically oriented criticism continue to dominate Wilde scholarship.

MAJOR WORKS A writer far from exclusively concerned with the supernatural, Wilde nevertheless made several experiments with Gothic subjects during his relatively brief professional literary career. Wilde’s first collection of prose, The Happy Prince, and Other Tales (1888), displays his early penchant for ornamentation and stylistic grace in his writings and largely predates his Gothic concerns. Often described as fantastic due to their exotic characters and setting, these stories feature characters who

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take responsibility for their own actions, are conscious of the suffering of those around them, and are capable of generosity and forgiveness as well as selfishness and cruelty. Containing both social and literary satire, the works collected in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories parody what he considered American naïveté, the cultural and social snobbery associated with the British aristocracy, as well as many of the contrivances of Gothic fiction. Among these pieces, “The Canterville Ghost” is a story about an American family who rents a haunted castle in England but steadfastly refuses to believe in the increasingly indignant ghost who inhabits it. Often dismissed as simplistic and melodramatic, this story nonetheless evinces Wilde’s fascination with the supernatural and the dark side of human nature. Wilde further explored these themes in “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.” In this story, Lord Arthur, who is soon to be married, meets a palm reader who predicts that he will commit murder. Because Arthur believes in predestination, he feels obliged to fulfill the prophecy before allowing himself to marry. Like the family in “The Canterville Ghost,” Arthur is unable to acknowledge or accept the existence of evil in himself and others. At the end of the story, after killing the palm reader by throwing him in the Thames, he heaves a “deep sigh of relief” before happily marrying his fiancée. The title figure of Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, in evident fulfillment of his impulsive wish to remain young while a painted portrait of himself grows old in his place, retains his youthful attractiveness while signs of age and debauchery appear in the painting. Detailing a period of eighteen years in Dorian’s life after the completion of his portrait by the painter Basil Hallward, The Picture of Dorian Gray chronicles the young aristocrat’s involvement in the unspecified “ruin” of a number of individuals, his revels in rare, beautiful, and costly objects, his experimentation with drugs and alcohol, and finally his descent to murder. During this time his portrait, hidden from view in Dorian’s attic, mysteriously ages and becomes repulsive, reflecting the effects of Dorian’s excesses, while Dorian himself remains young and attractive. His ultimate attempt to destroy the painting results in his own death; the portrait then resumes its original appearance, and the hideous corpse found lying before it is only with difficulty identified as that of Dorian Gray. A thematic departure for Wilde, the one-act drama Salomé joins a biblical subject with Decadent themes. Retelling the story of the prophet John the Baptist’s death due to the passion of a Judean

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CRITICAL RECEPTION Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray created a sensation on its first appearance, when it was widely interpreted as advocating the immoral behavior of its protagonist. The subject of extensive analysis in ensuing years, the novel has been assessed as a moral fable, a Gothic horror tale, a catalog of Decadent concerns owing much to Joris-Karl Huysmann’s A rebours (1884; Against the Grain), a study of Victorian art movements, and a fictional dramatization of Paterian ideas about art and morality. While a number of critics have read the novel purely as a morality tale on the hazards of indulgence and self-absorption, others accept Wilde’s viewpoint that the suffering and belated wisdom of the protagonist are incidental to the work’s artistic form. Conceding a departure from his own literary principles, Wilde freely admitted that the book does indeed contain a moral, which he summarized as: “All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.” Critics interested in the Gothic elements of the novel have frequently studied these in conjunction with the work’s aesthetic and ethical concerns. Lewis J. Poteet has explored the affinities between The Picture of Dorian Gray and its Gothic precursor, Charles R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, a work he argues constructs both the structural and thematic patterns of Wilde’s novel. According to Poteet, both works share such features as the depiction of a “radical bifurcation of nature and art” illustrated in the seductive and corruptive effects of social knowledge, a distinctive doubling of characters, and a shared use of supernatural horror to convey a theme of moral retribution. Kenneth Womack has interpreted the novel as a lateVictorian study in Gothic subversion. Highlighting the essential moral hollowness of Dorian Gray, who in his debauched, hedonistic, and narcissistic behavior sacrifices his spiritual being to empty aesthetic pleasures, Womack suggests that the novel principally employs its supernatural device

of Dorian’s aging portrait for the purposes of social critique centered on the figure of the aesthete. Donald Lawler has also examined the juxtaposition of Gothic and aesthetic elements in The Picture of Dorian Gray. In Lawler’s estimation, Wilde’s writings frequently appropriate a Gothic sensibility as a means of exploring the outer limits of human behavior, and that Wilde, in effect, endeavored to “gothicize” art and aesthetics in his novel and other works. Lawler has additionally explored Wilde’s drama Salomé as “a gothically inverted worship of death” concentrated on the figure of the enraptured princess and symbolized in the sexualized imagery associated with her call for the head of John the Baptist. Overall, despite such modern assessments, Wilde is not usually considered a Gothic writer, but rather one whose unique blend of Decadent aesthetic concerns, literary supernaturalism, and interest in human perversity lends itself well to Gothic interpretation. While the critical reception of Wilde’s writings remains complicated, in part because his works have had to compete for attention with his sensational life, the Gothic vein remains a viable and robust critical approach to one of the more fascinating and diverse literary figures of the late nineteenth-century period.

PRINCIPAL WORKS Poems (poetry) 1881 The Happy Prince, and Other Tales (short stories) 1888 The Picture of Dorian Gray (novel) 1890; first published in the journal Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine; revised edition, 1891 A House of Pomegranates (short stories) 1891 Intentions (essays) 1891 *Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories (short stories) 1891 Lady Windermere’s Fan (play) 1892 Salomé (play) 1893 A Woman of No Importance (play) 1893 An Ideal Husband (play) 1895 The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and Other Poems [as C.3.3.] (poetry) 1898 †De Profundis (letter) 1905

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princess, Salomé has been categorized as an eroticized Gothic tragedy that explores themes of unrequited love and forbidden desire. Wilde’s stylized and urbane social dramas of the 1890s, including An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) are finely crafted comedies of manners sparkling with wit and abounding with quotable epigrams. Generally devoid of Gothic concerns, these dramas are usually considered Wilde’s crowning literary achievements.

WILDE

Collected Works. 14 vols. (poetry, essays, short stories, novel, plays, and criticism) 1908

“I believe you have a mystery in your life, Gerald,” I exclaimed; “tell me about it.”

The Letters of Oscar Wilde (letters) 1962

“Let us go for a drive,” he answered, “it is too crowded here. No, not a yellow carriage, any other colour—there, that dark green one will do”; and in a few moments we were trotting down the boulevard in the direction of the Madeleine.

*

†

This volume includes the short stories “The Canterville Ghost,” “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” and “The Sphinx without a Secret.” This work was not published in its entirety until 1949.

“Where shall we go to?” I said. “Oh, anywhere you like!” he answered—“to the restaurant in the Bois; we will dine there, and you shall tell me all about yourself.”

PRIMARY SOURCES OSCAR WILDE (STORY DATE MAY 1887) SOURCE: Wilde, Oscar. “The Sphinx without a Secret.” In 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories, edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg, pp. 438-44. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993. The following story was originally published under the title “Lady Alroy” in Saunder’s Irish Daily News in May, 1887. Wilde changed the title to “The Sphinx without a Secret” when the story was collected and published in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories in 1891.

One afternoon I was sitting outside the Café de la Paix, watching the splendour and shabbiness of Parisian life, and wondering over my vermouth at the strange panorama of pride and poverty that was passing before me, when I heard someone call my name. I turned round, and saw Lord Murchison. We had not met since we had been at college together, nearly ten years before, so I was delighted to come across him again, and we shook hands warmly. At Oxford we had been great friends. I had liked him immensely, he was so handsome, so high-spirited, and so honourable. We used to say of him that he would be the best of fellows, if he did not always speak the truth, but I think we really admired him all the more for his frankness. I found him a good deal changed. He looked anxious and puzzled, and seemed to be in doubt about something. I felt it could not be modern scepticism, for Murchison was the stoutest of Tories, and believed in the Pentateuch as firmly as he believed in the House of Peers; so I concluded that it was a woman, and asked him if he was married yet. “I don’t understand women well enough,” he answered. “My dear Gerald,” I said, “women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.” “I cannot love where I cannot trust,” he replied.

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“I want to hear about you first,” I said. “Tell me your mystery.” He took from his pocket a little silver-clasped morocco case, and handed it to me. I opened it. Inside there was the photograph of a woman. She was tall and slight, and strangely picturesque with her large vague eyes and loosened hair. She looked like a clairvoyante, and was wrapped in rich furs. “What do you think of that face?” he said; “is it truthful?” I examined it carefully. It seemed to me the face of someone who had a secret, but whether that secret was good or evil I could not say. Its beauty was a beauty moulded out of many mysteries—the beauty, in fact, which is psychological, not plastic—and the faint smile that just played across the lips was far too subtle to be really sweet. “Well,” he cried impatiently, “what do you say?” “She is the Gioconda in sables,” I answered. “Let me know all about her.” “Not now,” he said; “after dinner,” and began to talk of other things. When the waiter brought us our coffee and cigarettes I reminded Gerald of his promise. He rose from his seat, walked two or three times up and down the room, and, sinking into an armchair, told me the following story:— “One evening,” he said, “I was walking down Bond Street about five o’clock. There was a terrific crush of carriages, and the traffic was almost stopped. Close to the pavement was standing a little yellow brougham, which, for some reason or other, attracted my attention. As I passed by there looked out from it the face I showed you this afternoon. It fascinated me immediately. All that night I kept thinking of it, and all the next day. I wandered up and down that wretched Row, peering into every carriage, and waiting for the yellow

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“The next day I arrived at Park Lane punctual to the moment, but was told by the butler that Lady Alroy had just gone out. I went down to the club quite unhappy and very much puzzled, and after long consideration wrote her a letter, asking if I might be allowed to try my chance some other afternoon. I had no answer for several days, but at last I got a little note saying she would be at home on Sunday at four and with this extraordinary postscript: ‘Please do not write to me here again; I will explain when I see you.’ On Sunday she received me, and was perfectly charming; but when I was going away she begged of me, if I ever had occasion to write to her again, to address my letter to ‘Mrs. Knox, care of Whittaker’s Library, Green Street.’ ‘There are reasons,’ she said, ‘why I cannot receive letters in my own house.’ “All through the season I saw a great deal of her, and the atmosphere of mystery never left her. Sometimes I thought that she was in the power of some man, but she looked so unapproachable that

I could not believe it. It was really very difficult for me to come to any conclusion, for she was like one of those strange crystals that one sees in museums, which are at one moment clear, and at another clouded. At last I determined to ask her to be my wife: I was sick and tired of the incessant secrecy that she imposed on all my visits, and on the few letters I sent her. I wrote to her at the library to ask her if she could see me the following Monday at six. She answered yes, and I was in the seventh heaven of delight. I was infatuated with her: in spite of the mystery, I thought then—in consequence of it, I see now. No; it was the woman herself I loved. The mystery troubled me, maddened me. Why did chance put me in its track?” “You discovered it, then?” I cried. “I fear so,” he answered. “You can judge for yourself.” “When Monday came round I went to lunch with my uncle, and about four o’clock found myself in the Marylebone Road. My uncle, you know, lives in Regent’s Park. I wanted to get to Piccadilly, and took a short cut through a lot of shabby little streets. Suddenly I saw in front of me Lady Alroy, deeply veiled and walking very fast. On coming to the last house in the street, she went up the steps, took out a latch-key, and let herself in. ‘Here is the mystery,’ I said to myself; and I hurried on and examined the house. It seemed a sort of place for letting lodgings. On the doorstep lay her handkerchief, which she had dropped. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. Then I began to consider what I should do. I came to the conclusion that I had no right to spy on her, and I drove to the club. At six I called to see her. She was lying on a sofa, in a tea-gown of silver tissue looped up by some strange moonstones that she always wore. She was looking quite lovely. ‘I am so glad to see you,’ she said; ‘I have not been out all day.’ I stared at her in amazement, and pulling the handkerchief out of my pocket, handed it to her. ‘You dropped this in Cumnor Street this afternoon, Lady Alroy,’ I said very calmly. She looked at me in terror, but made no attempt to take the handkerchief. ‘What were you doing there?’ I asked. ‘What right have you to question me?’ she answered. ‘The right of a man who loves you,’ I replied; ‘I came here to ask you to be my wife.’ She hid her face in her hands, and burst into floods of tears. ‘You must tell me,’ I continued. She stood up, and, looking me straight in the face, said, ‘Lord Murchison, there is nothing to tell you.’ . . . ‘You went to meet someone,’

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brougham; but I could not find ma belle inconnue, and at last I began to think she was merely a dream. About a week afterwards I was dining with Madame de Rastail. Dinner was for eight o’clock; but at half past eight we were still waiting in the drawing-room. Finally the servant threw open the door, and announced Lady Alroy. It was the woman I had been looking for. She came in very slowly, looking like a moonbeam in grey lace, and, to my intense delight, I was asked to take her into dinner. After we had sat down, I remarked quite innocently, ‘I think I caught sight of you in Bond Street some time ago, Lady Alroy.’ She grew very pale, and said to me in a low voice, ‘Pray do not talk so loud; you may be overheard.’ I felt miserable at having made such a bad beginning, and plunged recklessly into the subject of the French plays. She spoke very little, always in the same low musical voice, and seemed as if she was afraid of someone listening. I fell passionately, stupidly in love, and the indefinable atmosphere of mystery that surrounded her excited my most ardent curiosity. When she was going away, which she did very soon after dinner, I asked her if I might call and see her. She hesitated for a moment, glanced round to see if anyone was near us, and then said, ‘Yes; to-morrow at a quarter to five.’ I begged Madame de Rastail to tell me about her; but all that I could learn was that she was a widow with a beautiful house in Park Lane, and as some scientific bore began a dissertation on widows, as exemplifying the survival of the matrimonially fittest, I left and went home.

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I cried; ‘this is your mystery.’ She grew dreadfully white, and said, ‘I went to meet no one.’ . . . ‘Can’t you tell the truth?’ I exclaimed. ‘I have told it,’ she replied. I was mad, frantic; I don’t know what I said, but I said terrible things to her. Finally I rushed out of the house. She wrote me a letter the next day; I sent it back unopened, and started for Norway with Alan Colville. After a month I came back, and the first thing I saw in the Morning Post was the death of Lady Alroy. She had caught a chill at the Opera, and had died in five days of congestion of the lungs. I shut myself up and saw no one. I had loved her so much, I had loved her so madly. Good God! how I had loved that woman!”

He took out the morocco case, opened it, and looked at the photograph. “I wonder?” he said at last.

“You went to the street, to the house in it?” I said.

In your issue of today you state that my brief letter published in your columns is the “best reply” I can make to your article upon Dorian Gray. This is not so. I do not propose to fully discuss the matter here, but I feel bound to say that your article contains the most unjustifiable attack that has been made upon any man of letters for many years. The writer of it, who is quite incapable of concealing his personal malice, and so in some measure destroys the effect he wishes to produce, seems not to have the slightest idea of the temper in which a work of art should be approached. To say that such a book as mine should be “chucked into the fire” is silly. That is what one does with newspapers.

“Yes,” he answered. “One day I went to Cumnor Street. I could not help it; I was tortured with doubt. I knocked at the door, and a respectable-looking woman opened it to me. I asked her if she had any rooms to let. ‘Well, sir,’ she replied, ‘the drawing-rooms are supposed to be let; but I have not seen the lady for three months, and as rent is owing on them, you can have them.’ . . . ‘Is this the lady?’ I said, showing the photograph. ‘That’s her, sure enough,’ she exclaimed; ‘and when is she coming back, sir?’ . . . ‘The lady is dead,’ I replied. ‘Oh, sir, I hope not!’ said the woman; ‘she was my best lodger. She paid me three guineas a week merely to sit in my drawing-room now and then.’ . . . ‘She met someone here?’ I said; but the woman assured me that it was not so, that she always came alone, and saw no one. ‘What on earth did she do here?’ I cried. ‘She simply sat in the drawing-room, sir, reading books, and sometimes had tea,’ the woman answered. I did not know what to say, so I gave her a sovereign and went away. Now, what do you think it all meant? You don’t believe the woman was telling the truth?” “I do.” “Then why did Lady Alroy go there?” “My dear Gerald,” I answered, “Lady Alroy was simply a woman with a mania for mystery. She took these rooms for the pleasure of going there with her veil down, and imagining she was a heroine. She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.” “Do you really think so?” “I am sure of it,” I replied.

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OSCAR WILDE (LETTER DATE 26 JUNE 1890) SOURCE: Wilde, Oscar. “To the Editor of the St. James’s Gazette.” In The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, edited by Richard Ellmann, pp. 238-41. New York: Random House, 1969. In the following letter, published in the St. James’s Gazette two days after that newspaper published a vicious attack (“A Study in Puppydom,” June 24, 1890) on The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde responds to the critic’s derisive evaluation of his work and defends his novel.

Of the value of pseudo-ethical criticism in dealing with artistic work I have spoken already. But as your writer has ventured into the perilous grounds of literary criticism I ask you to allow me, in fairness not merely to myself but to all men to whom literature is a fine art, to say a few words about his critical method. He begins by assailing me with much ridiculous virulence because the chief personages in my story are “puppies.” They are puppies. Does he think that literature went to the dogs when Thackeray wrote about puppydom? I think that puppies are extremely interesting from an artistic as well as from a psychological point of view. They seem to me to be certainly far more interesting than prigs; and I am of opinion that Lord Henry Wotton is an excellent corrective of the tedious ideal shadowed forth in the semi-theological novels of our age. He then makes vague and fearful insinuations about my grammar and my erudition. Now, as regards grammar, I hold that, in prose at any rate, correctness should always be subordinate to

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As regards erudition, it is always difficult, even for the most modest of us, to remember that other people do not know quite as much as one does oneself. I myself frankly admit I cannot imagine how a casual reference to Suetonius and Petronius Arbiter can be construed into evidence of a desire to impress an unoffending and ill-educated public by an assumption of superior knowledge. I should fancy that the most ordinary of scholars is perfectly well acquainted with the Lives of the Caesars and with the Satyricon. The Lives of the Caesars, at any rate, forms part of the curriculum at Oxford for those who take the Honour School of Literæ Humaniores; and as for the Satyricon, it is popular even among passmen, though I suppose they are obliged to read it in translations. The writer of the article then suggests that I, in common with that great and noble artist Count Tolstoi, take pleasure in a subject because it is dangerous. About such a suggestion there is this to be said. Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace, type, are artistically uninteresting. Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination. Your critic, if I must give him so honourable a title, states that the people in my story have no counterpart in life; that they are, to use his vigorous if somewhat vulgar phrase, “mere catchpenny revelations of the nonexistent.” Quite so. If they existed they would not be worth writing about. The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle. There are no such people. If there were I would not write about them. Life by its realism is always spoiling the subject-matter of art. The supreme pleasure in literature is to realise the non-existent. And finally, let me say this. You have reproduced, in a journalistic form, the comedy of Much Ado about Nothing, and have, of course, spoilt it in your reproduction. The poor public, hearing, from an authority so high as your own, that this is a wicked book that should be coerced and suppressed by a Tory Government, will, no doubt, rush to it and read it. But, alas! they will find that it is a story with a moral. And the moral is this:

All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment. The painter, Basil Hallward, worshipping physical beauty far too much, as most painters do, dies by the hand of one in whose soul he has created a monstrous and absurd vanity. Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere sensation and pleasure, tries to kill conscience, and at that moment kills himself. Lord Henry Wotton seeks to be merely the spectator of life. He finds that those who reject the battle are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it. Yes; there is a terrible moral in Dorian Gray—a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but which will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

GENERAL COMMENTARY DONALD LAWLER (ESSAY DATE 1994) SOURCE: Lawler, Donald. “The Gothic Wilde.” In Rediscovering Oscar Wilde, edited by C. George Sandulescu, pp. 249-68. Gerrards Cross, England: Smythe, 1994. In the following essay, Lawler examines The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salomé, and The Sphinx, asserting that these three works share “a gothicized aestheticism whose obsessive beauty-worship expresses itself in a symptomatic fixation with art’s decorative character—and . . . a reliance on the Gothic as expressing, determining, and resolving the artistic requirements of each work.”

As the 1880s were ending and the Aesthetic Movement modulating into the Decadence, Oscar Wilde was concluding a series of essays, later to be collected as Intentions, that contributed a radical aesthetic to this movement of which he had become the unacknowledged leader. Having made a case for aestheticizing Victorian manners and mores in ‘The Decay of Lying’, Wilde began turning the tables on art in ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, by offering a fictional resolution to the problem of Shakespeare’s sonnets, showing that faith alone brings art to life, whereas empirical demands for proof cause faith to become deceitful, seeking foolish correlatives of itself in forgery. Wilde’s gothic transactions with aestheticism that were to follow in the early 1890s, invite critical inquiry that addresses both their revisionary and gothic character. This paper brings into focus Wilde’s uses of the gothic1 in three major works, in three different structural genres: Dorian Gray, a novel; Salome, a one-act play; and a long poem, The Sphinx. From a critical perspective, they form an odd sort of trilogy, connected by shared inter-

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artistic effect and musical cadence; and any peculiarities of syntax that may occur in Dorian Gray are deliberately intended, and are introduced to show the value of the artistic theory in question. Your writer gives no instance of any such peculiarity. This I regret, because I do not think that any such instances occur.

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ests, common themes, and treatments—especially a gothicized aestheticism whose obsessive beautyworship expresses itself in a symptomatic fixation with art’s decorative character—and sharing a reliance on the gothic as expressing, determining, and resolving the artistic requirements of each work.2 Wilde appropriated gothic resources of expression, effect, even genre-framing for exploring the limits and contradictions of his own arguments for aestheticizing life. In this series of works the once ‘Great Aesthete’ explores the destructive effects of art, especially in the familiar romantic idealization of beauty as well as in a synaesthesia of art for life, an advanced form of Romantic idealism’s disillusion with worldly commerce. I propose to begin as did Wilde with Dorian Gray in which he first explored and reshaped the expressive resources of the gothic for telling the story of Dorian Gray.3 In so doing, Wilde displayed his exceptional powers of inventive synthesis, theatrical intuition, and stylistic ingenuity to their best advantage. The gothic informs every important aspect of the novel to the extent that references will be limited to a few representative instances of the novel’s more innovative and influential gothic features.4 Wilde’s contribution to exploring new worlds of gothic influence and revelation was to gothicize art in Dorian Gray. More precisely it was the romantic aesthetic worship of art and beauty that he gothicized, locating it at the juncture between the two great forces of the revised, 1891 novel: the archetypal moral allegory of the wages of sin complemented by an aesthetic allegory that interrogates two, art-related delusions. The first is Basil’s artistic error of painting a confessional portrait that proclaimed his own love for his subject. The second is Lord Henry’s aesthetic doctrine that living may be refined into an artform. Dorian’s supplement to that axiom is the delusion that Henry’s aesthetic vision is achievable with a wish-fulfilled perpetual youth stolen from Basil’s portrait and by aestheticizing life through art, leading to a spiritualization of the senses. The encryption of the gothic begins with Basil Hallward’s romanticized portrait that awakens a narcissism in Dorian, who sees himself through the eyes of the artist’s ‘idolatry’. Basil’s admission to Henry that he had erred artistically by putting too much of himself into the painting includes his aesthetic apologia exposing a more ambitious motive of the artist for his subject than an invita-

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tion to vanity. Dorian has ‘suggested to me a new manner in art,’ and Basil then adds, ‘I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me before’ (14). That statement departs from Romantic idealism to foreshadow the gothic world.5 Unlike previous gothic stories, the invention of the gothic world in this one is a cooperative venture in three stages, dispersed over the first three chapters. Basil provides the occasion in a life-size, realistic portrait of his ideal Dorian. Henry adds the catalytic temptation in his philosophy of pleasure declaimed as Dorian poses on Basil’s platform, while the painter adds the final touches to the picture. These remaining brush strokes are critical because they are a record of Dorian’s expression as he recognizes in his repressed appetites ways to a knowledge of good and evil with the power of transforming his life. Basil paints on, ‘conscious only that a look had come into the lad’s face that he had never seen before’ (20), as Dorian experiences a conversion to Henry’s philosophy of self-realization through affirmation and pursuit of appetites: ‘The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it’ (21). Dorian is easily caught in the network of Henry’s epigrams—‘Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.’ The novel makes no claims about Dorian being smart, but he had a perfect profile, which after all both Henry and the author preferred to mere intelligence in their favorites. Thus, Basil’s portrait of an ideal Dorian becomes a recording of Dorian’s fall from innocence and grace. These are the strange combinations and conjunctions of influences reflected in the portrait that were to have such a profound and lasting influence on Gray. Henry’s temptation speech established the basis for Dorian’s legitimizing his appetites by redefining them as questing for experience and therefore as a kind of knowledge rather than as matters for denial, repression, and shame. In gothic terms, Gray’s wish to exchange lives with the portrait is his expression of the classic desire of the gothic protagonist/antagonist to re-create himself, this time by bartering his soul for a life in art, appropriating the appearances of the artist’s icon, while his soul animates the picture that will then begin to age. The painting’s reflecting the true condition of Gray’s soul is the price of his admission to the gothic world. Dorian Gray never does understand the rules of the world he hoped to live in, but they are obviously not what he expected. In the gothic world, they never are. The interactive magical picture is not merely the focus of the gothic world in the

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the avenging but luckless James Vane to the various arts in which Gray seeks both consolation and escape. Gray’s fascination with the painting quickly becomes a morbid obsession, and as other gothic herovillains, he becomes the enthralled captive of the gothic world he has created, ending in hysteria and near-madness.

Dorian’s new opinions of art, mostly appropriations from Lord Henry, nonetheless diverge from his mentor’s even as early as the Sibyl Vane affair. Dorian’s rejection of Sibyl is the direct result of her abandonment of a life or more accurately a love in art for the real thing, once she had experienced it. Her declaration as a contemporary Lady of Shalott strikes at the heart of Dorian’s aesthetic idealism. With the loss of Sibyl’s influence and his gradual estrangement from Basil, Gray indulges his appetites, believing his sins justified by his quest for self-understanding and self-fulfillment. These may have been precepts of Henry’s philosophy of the Dandy; but once acted upon, understanding becomes self-loathing. Dorian also enacts and therefore transforms Henry’s doctrine of aestheticizing life, only Dorian really attempts it as an extended exercise in redesigning his instinctive behaviour, sense impressions, and even the structure of both brain and mind through art.7 This is the main purpose of the notorious eleventh chapter, of its central location, of its literal cataloguing of the exotica of art, and of its position immediately preceding Basil’s murder. Chapter eleven presents two contradictory views of Dorian’s extended experiments in selfreconstruction. First, it implies that Gray artificially controls and refines his responses. Second, it shows that Gray’s method for applying art to life and recreating himself is a delusion. He is, rather, a collector and a dilettantish one at that. His only artistic creation, most ironically, is his gothic revision of Basil’s portrait, which Gray achieves through his misbehaviour, contextualized in the diary of his life as updated daily in the picture (120).

The phrase ‘Gothic art’ is used by Wilde but once and in Chapter eleven of the novel, prefaced by Dorian’s conviction that ‘life itself was the first, the greatest of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation’ (100) and contextualized by Dorian’s increasingly hallucinated mental state (102). In the story of Gray’s failure to aestheticize the life of a dandy, Wilde represents art as having been transformed into the talisman of gothic thinking in which the moods and atmospheres created by art recreate, reinforce, and sustain the nightmare originating in the picture. Once Dorian’s imagination has been gothicized, he cannot free himself from it. Instead of promoting the ideal of Dorian’s ‘new scheme of life’, elaborated in Chapter eleven, ‘that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization’ (101), gothicized imagination subverts Gray’s agenda for aestheticizing life and spiritualizing the senses into parodies as foul as the picture of Basil’s original icon of beauty and inspiration had become.9

Even Gray’s delusions of a life in art are permanently gothicized after he reveals the condition of his soul to Basil in the gothic portrait and then murders him. Gray who once had lived to savour and raise every new experience to the level of a sonnet, a fugue, or a watercolour could think of nothing thereafter but escape from guilt and of course his emblematic conscience, even if that meant abandoning art and dandyism for ugliness, violence, and crime.8 Gray is hounded by an impressive variety of secularized, contemporary Wildean furies in addition to the portrait: from

* * * After finishing Dorian Gray, Wilde turned his attention to other projects: another essay, perhaps a reparational homage to Ruskin in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ and the first of his derivations of the French well-made play that became Lady Windermere’s Fan. His work on that social comedy was soon interrupted by Salome, a topic that Wilde had been considering for more than a year. In addition to obvious and well-recognized French influences and Wilde’s decision to write out of his system a sexual tragedy before completing a more polite sexual and social comedy, it appears that he was also interested in exploring further potentials of gothicized art for three related interests represented but not foregrounded in the novel: sexual passion (unfulfilled, repressed, and perverse), the supernatural (especially the scriptural and prophetic), and the tragic.1 0 The controversies surrounding the play must have exasperated even the showman in Wilde since its performance was limited to the original French version in Paris during Wilde’s lifetime.1 1 Nevertheless, Salome, without doubt, was in-

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novel: it is the gothic world and with its invention Wilde gothicizes art and the beauty-worship of aestheticism, just as Mary Shelley gothicized science and the mad scientist in Frankenstein.6 The consequences of Dorian’s wish that gothicizes art resonate throughout every remaining action of the novel. Nothing is left untouched by it.

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tended by Wilde to be shocking and controversial, and in that he could not have been disappointed. In the play, Wilde extends the influence of gothicized art to scripture, dramatizing freely from the narratives of Matthew (14:1-12) and Mark (6:1429). Wilde wants his scriptural materials to exercise influences in the play roughly analogous to myth or legend in Greek tragedy, within the context of a gothic mode modulated by the rich economy of symbolist drama. Together they develop the mood and tonal unity of the drama, transforming the biblical account of Salome and the death of John the Baptist from an erotically charged imbroglio of mismatched desire into a gothically inverted worship of death. Herod’s recoil at Salome’s necrophilic foreplay with the head of the Baptist as the stage empties and darkens may be the most subtly complex dramatic action Wilde invented, and its power, drawing upon the convergence of the play’s gothic elements, is superbly theatrical.1 2 The decorative and descriptive symbolism Wilde uses repeatedly in the play forecasts an approaching gothic storm of sexual emotion and reaction. The repetitive technique may have been inspired by Maeterlinck, but it also derives surely from the uses of aesthetic and decorative effects in Dorian Gray.1 3 In Salome, subtle dramatic variations and inversions of dialogue, scenery, lighting, acting as dramatic equivalents of balladic refrains (according to Wilde), promote premonitions of the gothic. It is not necessary to recognize these as patterns repeated from the novel, partly because foreknowledge of events leading to Salome’s dance and its outcome for the Baptist bears a parodic similarity to dramatic irony—the gothic is a parodic form—producing resonances for the audience with every word and action of the characters. The argument from unrequited or denied sexual passion involves the major players of the drama in a complex dance of transformations, leading to the deaths of all but the original guilty parties, Herod and Herodias, whose incestuous marriage occasioned the arrest of the Baptist for preaching against Herodias’s adultery. The overlapping romantic entanglements among characters produce several perverse and inverse passions that build toward Salome’s awakened lust for the prophet. It is her sudden, irresistible passion that Wilde requires of his biblical Juliet, whose virginal innocence is attested by the other characters in that stylized dialogue Wilde uses to frame the symbolist associations he unpacks from some of his earlier stories.1 4 Wilde required Salome’s passion to flame out of an early indifference to the

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attentions that her budding sexuality wins for her. Even Herod’s leering admiration that awakens a sense of her own sexual power does not affect her beyond making her more wary. Rather than appearing intimidated by Herod’s amorous interest, Salome realizes that a weakness of character expressing itself in voyeurism gives her a degree of power over him that she will soon exploit. Would Salome and Herodias have discussed Herod’s Inclination? Salome remains coyly indifferent to the attentions of Narraboth, the young Syrian captain of the guard; but then she is a princess, and Wilde never has her forget it. Her detachment matches that of Dorian Gray at the beginning of the novel, a quality the author apparently found attractive and perhaps personally challenging. And yet she responds immediately to the sound of Iokanaan’s chthonic voice, a monotone that intimidates Herod if not Herodias, who suffers no illusions that the Baptist speaks with any supernatural authority. The appearance of the Baptist evokes Salome’s libido, moving her to adopt the language and manner of an aggressive courtship of the prophet. Young and impetuous, Salome grows more perverse with each rebuffed advance. Acceleration of Salome’s enthralled passion for the prophet can be measured by the Baptist’s features that her passion fetishizes: the black hair, the white body, and finally the red lips. Salome’s contradictory passion and denial statements express youthful petulance and confusion at failing to arouse even Iokanaan’s human interest in her let alone an erotic response. Her passion focuses at last upon the lips of the prophet as the symbol of his power and prophetic office. 1 5 Thereafter, Salome is obsessed with kissing the mouth of the Baptist. His contemptuous rejection of her as unworthy of notice seems to motivate her the more, as it warps her judgment. Salome’s immortal dance is the central action of the play, her art gothicized by a purpose we foreknow to be death, but which turns out to be something even worse. Salome dances for the head of the Baptist, a man she loves so madly that she will take his life in order to possess him. That desire beckons the gothic entry into the drama, an arrival more anticipated than experienced.1 6 The dance is a powerful scene in any venue, and yet it is all but unwritten in the play. The unveiling of the scorned woman dancing her temptation before the enthralled desire of Herod is left, like the sins of Dorian Gray, to the reader’s (and the dancer’s) powers of invention. Salome’s dance becomes the first measure of her moral insanity— once a category of psychology understood by

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There are three powerful scenes yet to follow in which the gothic character of the play defines itself. In another of Wilde’s bargaining scenes, Herod’s haggling over the promised reward neatly reverses the power roles of the King and his stepdaughter. In her monotonal responses, interrupted by Herod’s prolix, Pilate-like attempts at saving both face and conscience, Salome assumes the imperative style of the Baptist, thereby parodying it. The final scene begins with the head of Iokanaan brought to Salome on a charger, in payment of Herod’s debt and the double revenge of two scorned women, Herodias and her daughter. Having altered the scriptures thus far for dramatic effect, Wilde places his personal imprint on the Salome legend in the conclusion, producing an unusual climax for a gothic plot. Salome’s dramatic apostrophe to the severed head and missing body of the Baptist is indeed worthy of a prose Browning. Salome’s perverse eroticism, outdoes even Swinburne in the gothic power of its interrogation of the Baptist’s prophetic and implicitly Christian asceticism by Salome’s Dionysian carnality. In a sense, Salome’s monologue was prefaced by her awakened libido at the sight of the Baptist, who represents power, supernatural authority, her own lost innocence and frustrated desire. More than one reader has remarked on the parallelism between Salome and Iokanaan, and that sense of shared identity emphasizes Wilde’s gothic representation of the revulsion of the flesh at what is described in Dorian Gray as ‘this monstrous soul-life’. Iokanaan had spiritualized his senses by denying and demonizing them and the world to which they belong. Salome apparently wins her monologistic debate with the Baptist but at the price of becoming enough like him to suggest the transposition of Dorian and his picture. The play ends with two more strong dramatic moments. First we hear the voice of Salome sounding like the disembodied voice of the Baptist in her Maenad-like, triumphant peroration: ‘They say that love hath a bitter taste. [. . .] But what of that? What of that? I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan.’ Only in possessing the head of the

Baptist does Salome think to possess his lips of power and prophecy, both metaphors of the man. Herod’s disgusted, and fearful reflex is one of those moments of ironic and even cynical reversal that Wilde loved to construct in his prose poems: ‘Kill that woman!’. The genius in that reflexive instant lies in the way Wilde forces dramatic recognition of both the appropriateness of the sentence and concurrently its impulsive, arbitrary, and hypocritical wrongness. The play closes with Salome crushed to death but thereby released by Herod from a state of Dionysian sexual frenzy that has disgusted the Tetrarch (although apparently not Herodias, whose last words are ‘I approve of what my daughter has done’) and is supposed to appall the audience as well. The conclusion like that of other gothic plots remains ambiguous, inviting revisionary, even contradictory interpretations. Nor should we mistake the play’s and the gothic’s heteroglossal preferences, if I may appropriate Bakhtin’s ingenious and fashionable term.1 7 * * * The Sphinx, Wilde’s long unfinished poem, had its beginnings in Paris, according to Ellmann, in 1874 (36, 90-91), inspired by Poe, Swinburne, and Browning. The idea was put aside but taken up again at Oxford in 1878, after Wilde had finished ‘Ravenna’, when it would have suited his purpose of establishing himself as a young poet of promise to follow the Newdigate Prize poem with another from a similar perspective: a set piece featuring youthful, Byronic reflections on a vaguely classical subject graced by curious historical and learned ornamentation. Though ambitious enough for fame, a youngish Wilde perhaps sensing unrealized potentials put it back in the trunk. He may have had another go at it in the early eighties while back in Paris but with no better result. Finally, some time in the early nineties, probably following the publication of the original Salome, Wilde completed the poem, in Paris, of course. I suggest that Wilde returned for this last time to his unfinished sphinx because he saw how it could be revived and completed by applying a gothic aesthetic that had produced such sensational effects in both Dorian Gray and Salome. The gothic provided the means for realizing the unfulfilled potentials of the various drafts, and this revised, final version of The Sphinx was published at last in an ornate edition designed by Charles Ricketts in 1894, at least a year after it was completed.

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Victorians. Moreau’s image of Salome dances also before our mind’s eye, a visual double and another painted allusion, as Wilde’s image performs her own version of this most intentional of dances. And yet, if this be the obligatory scene of the play, it is neither the climax nor the quintessentially gothic scene that biblical history teaches us to expect, a point that confirms Wilde’s theatrical instincts.

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Although Wilde’s Sphinx is more Greek than Egyptian in form, both mythic traditions are mingled together freely in the poem. Hermaphroditic, the sphinx symbolizes a pagan ideal of uniting a primitive animism with animal worship, an early representation of mystery religion, and a forerunner of the great mystery religion, Christianity, bridging the historic evolution of mind and soul. Wilde connects the mythological sphinx— perhaps for contemporary and later readers a relic of an incredible age of monsters out of the fossil rocks, somehow symbolized by the early generations of Greek and Egyptian gods, swarming with monstrous mutations—to the Old and New Testaments in which the land of Egypt, a refuge for Joseph and Israel only to become a slave state, later serves as a haven for the holy family fleeing the tyranny of another Herod. Wilde’s sphinx dwells in a private Victorian collection of antiquities, a curiosity, a silent messenger of Greco-Egyptian myth and the chaos that informed it, surrounded by the upholstery of late Victorian imperial England. It is a displacement that inspired Victorian and later stories of supernatural terror and whose gothic potentials are obvious. The location is also a metaphor for the aestheticized history of the sphinx, a fantastic biography of mythic and legendary rumours, appropriately chaotic and contradictory, whose primary effect is the gothicized, nightmare-like state of an overly stimulated imagination, such as we encounter in Dorian Gray and Salome. Indeed, our interlocutor’s late descriptions of the sphinx have the distinct flavour of Wilde’s gothicized art.1 8 The characteristic heaping up of aesthetic ornamentation also serves purposes similar to the gothicized art of Dorian Gray. Different forces creating the gothic world of each work, however, do indeed produce related but different effects. Dorian’s intentional wish creates his gothic world of art, but it is the speaker’s enthralled, perverse sexual fantasies that lead him into the sphinx’s circle of desire and devolution. The speaker’s long, monologic interview with the sphinx, the many questions put to the mute statuette whose mythic voice has not been heard in twenty centuries, seem to break an enchantment of silent isolation and bring the symbol back to a kind of life, at least in the gothicized imagination of the speaker.1 9 The sphinx yet has power, it seems, of speaking as a gothic artifact through the imagination of the questioner. In this respect, Wilde’s sphinx appears to be a significant departure from Rossetti’s reflections on the great bull that Layard had excavated from Nineveh and brought

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as the spoils of science to the British Museum. Wilde wants the sphinx to be a relic of an altogether different sort of history, not natural but mythic and pre-human. The Sphinx offers a gothic archaeology of a human soul rather than of a city, and the secret of the sphinx’s savage antiquity lies in the imagination of the speaker as a primitive retention of pre-conscious mind. The life of the sphinx is stored in the imagination of the speaker rather than at a national gallery or in his private collection. The statuette speaks to those who understand its unconscious iconography.2 0 The interrogation of the sphinx produces a fantastic psychoanalysis of the god’s ancient promiscuous life. The probing questions and increasingly morbid emphasis on the sphinx’s mythic indiscretions gradually reveal to the reader the erotic fantasies of the speaker in the guise of an inquiry into the perverse sexual preference of sphinxes in which passion is linked with cruelty and even murder, both aspects of erotic passion in Dorian Gray and Salome, and both traditionally energizing forces of the gothic. However, grotesquely, the sphinx symbolizes for the speaker a demi-god at liberty to indulge in its impulses and appetites freely and without guilt, as matters of preference and involving nothing of moral restraints or absolute prohibitions, both of which, when viewed by Wilde’s contemporary anthropology, were considered decayed remnants of tribal taboos. The speaker’s renunciation of the sphinx as false in a complex echoing of Keats raises questions about our speaker’s stability, similar to those about Gray. First, the rejection is also a selfindictement of one whose imagination has been gothicized by the sphinx’s seductive silence, ancient at the crossroads of historic and cosmic time yet revenant in its power to energize our speaker’s imaginative avatar. The sphinx seems therefore relevant historically as gothicized imagination: not merely its symbol but its reification, realized in the monstrous archetype from which the speaker cannot completely escape. Yeats’s famous concluding lines to ‘The Second Coming’ may have a special relevance, perhaps even special reference to Wilde’s revenant sphinx: ‘what rough beast, its hour come round at last . . .’ We also have license to recall Herod’s reflexive dismissal of Salome’s necrophilia.2 1 Wilde’s connection of the sphinx with Christianity may not be as gratuitous as Ellmann suggests. Developing from Dorian Gray and Salome, it anticipates Wilde’s later meditations on the aesthetic Christ as an artist of religion. Each

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* * * Wilde’s uses of the gothic mode in three major works helped produce two masterpieces and transformed an unfinished work into a dramatic monologue of the conflicted presentations of carnal passion and spiritual enervation. Wilde’s first deployment of the gothic mode seems to have arisen from the inspiration for Dorian Gray to deconstruct Wilde’s own aesthetic philosophy of life as represented in his stories and essays of the late eighties and early nineties. To a significant extent, the foundations of Dorian Gray, Salome, and The Sphinx as decadent masterpieces seem dependent upon Wilde’s decision to use the gothic as the most effective means for resolving artistically the competing claims of the

aesthetic, sexual, tragic, and supernatural aspects of works representing portions of his own inner life. Since the works were to be realized through sequences of effects, like the phasmatropic projection of Victorian picture cards set into a synchronized motion, Wilde required a form that emphasized powerful engagement of reader reaction through his manipulation of imagery, symbols, legendary or mythic structures and secondary or imagined emotions. Traditionally, appeals of this kind have been especially suited to the gothic because the genre offered models for expressing those hidden, complex relationships among the sexual, psychological, and supernatural declensions of mind encoded in the exotic and decorative powers of art. Wilde’s use of the gothic was a brief, brilliant episode in an experimental phase of his career during which he assayed and reshaped conventions of the major structural genres en route to his greatest success as a comedic dramatist. Wilde was not to return to the gothic. Perhaps after prison and social martyrdom, reflected so powerfully in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, neither the gothic nor the tragic were available options to his art because he had experienced both real tragedy and the fulfillment of his own imagination of disaster. As Lord Henry once put it: ‘the only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact’ (64).

Notes 1. Given the persistence of a critical superstition that the gothic novel died in the 1820’s, I am obliged to declare such reports have been grossly exaggerated and to affirm its survival despite critical interment: ‘it had a limited run (nearly everyone dates it from Otranto in 1764 to either Melmoth in 1820 or Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner in 1824)’ (Geary 2). Day’s definition of gothic literature identifies characters’ experience of an enthralled state of fear and desire as the distinctive power of the genre, and it will serve our needs in this essay. Although emphasizing the fate of characters in gothic plots, this approach is a variant of reader-response in the Aristotelian tradition. The primary cause of the characters’ enthralled condition is a kind of hubris: the desire for something contrary to nature, often associated with the supernatural or forbidden sex. In his Preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, H. Walpole explained that his new type of romance had been invented to energize the fiction of his age by representing two powerful, instinctive forces omitted from contemporary novels: the will to believe in a supernatural (and the fear of it at the same time, most often expressed as dread of the demonic) and the desire for a sexual freedom proscribed by social mores and religion. The gothic internalized the conflict of these forces through the power of romance or fantastic narrative to engage readers’ primary emo-

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symbol—the sphinx statuette and crucifix— exercises power over the speaker’s imagination in this poem, although the crucifix is rather a latecomer. Yet each symbol betrays albeit differently the humanism that was at this point in Wilde’s life central to his speculative thinking. The primitive animistic power of the sphinx in its chaotic mixture of animal and human pre-consciousness becomes historically parallel to the irrational, that is to say, the historically unfulfilled archetype of the crucified god whose humanity and divinity appear locked in unresolvable antithesis. In the poem if the sphinx is too savage to lift the narrator above the primitive avatar of human imagination, the crucifix is too complex a symbol of the human in the divine and the divine potential of the human to be realizable. Claims by both symbols offer the speaker little to choose but a cold conscience, itself the remnant of tribal guilt. At the centre of the circle of fear and desire are the contradictory symbols: the woman/animal and the man/god, each representing a now gothicized myth, one ancient and bestial the other historical and divine through which, Wilde’s interlocutor implies, human imagination has been tangled in problematic contradictions. Arousing himself from his gothic reveries, our speaker, still a student in his ‘students cell’, finds himself obliged to choose between the loathsome mystery of the sullen sphinx whose power to ‘wake in me each bestial sense’ and the powerless crucified God who ‘weeps for every soul that dies, and weeps for every soul in vain’. Can there be escape from this nightmare if the sphinx must be renounced by a dying or poisoned soul? The waking world appears to offer only despair in place of guilt, suggesting that the difference between two worlds linked by imagination is insufficient to relieve the burden of a gothic life of desire that eventually kills the soul.

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tions of awe, fear, wonder, and desire. Walpole also established alliances with the tragic and the didactic, traits that have remained affiliated with the gothic ever since. The transmission of the gothic to the present has produced too many distinct sub-types even to mention let alone discuss, but these discrete species range from gothic science fiction (Frankenstein to Jurassic Park) to gothic fantasy (Varney the Vampire to Twin Peaks) and include domesticated gothics like The Picture of Dorian Gray, and exotics like Salome, and The Sphinx. 2. The premise of this approach of Dorian Gray, Salome, and The Sphinx is that they are each in the gothic mode, meaning that they commonly share an experimental use of the gothic in conjunction with other well-documented formal elements of plotting and style. Wilde’s use of the gothic has been noted, albeit in passing, by many scholars (Buckler, CharlesworthGelpi, Cohen, Ellmann, Hyde, Kohl, Nassaar, Régnier, San Juan) but not formally addressed. It seems to me that many features of Wilde’s three works that have perplexed critics as ‘strange’ (a favoured term) and even ineffable are more readily understandable as expressive of the gothic. 3. References in my text are to the revised, 1891 version of the novel. However, in the original, Lippincott’s version (1890), gothic sensationalism amplified the effect of the moral allegory, of Dorian’s growing depravity and eventual indirect suicide. Although it was not Wilde’s intent, his original use of the gothic contributed to a widespread misinterpretation of that finale as the despairing but repentant act of a justified sinner: a misreading Wilde himself realized his text supported. The revised version, although it does not close out moral allegory, reinforces the relationship between art and the gothic world of nightmare and anxiety. 4. Wilde selected the gothic because he needed a literary mode that would promote the best features of a complex narrative that included a fantastic premise with supernatural resonances (the soul-bargaining and the magical picture), a complex allegory (moral, aesthetic, historical, autobiographical), and multivalent sexual passions while producing a more tragic than pathetic or sentimental impression. Wilde developed his gothic fantastic treatment of the living painting to emphasize his ingenious scheme of gothicising art and everything associated with art in the novel, but especially the decorative uses of art. The result of these and the other conjunctions within the context of a gothic narrative was to produce a style of discourse, design, and symbolic emphasis that was immediately identified as the distinctive idiom of British Decadence. The key to this idiom, I believe, is Wilde’s gothic treatment of art and its many associations, but especially as an intensely decorative and ornamental mode. 5. ‘To recreate life’ is the gothic signature of such overreachers as Drs Frankenstein and Jekyll. It does not matter to the gothic that Basil intended no more than recreating life aesthetically. The tragic pattern is already established for Dorian to complete, proving Basil’s error fatal not only for the painter but also, eventually, for Sibyl Vane and Dorian. 6. Wilde gothicizes art in the novel and in the other texts we examine only for the duration of the plot and not in some ontologic sense. Nevertheless, Wil-

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de’s vision of the gothic potential of art does take its place permanently in the repertory of the gothic. Just as Frankenstein defines the condition of gothic science, so does Dorian Gray establish a gothicized art that is retained as a resource in the genre. 7. It is probable that Wilde derived Dorian’s method of attempting to spiritualize the senses from contemporary thinkers like G. H. Lewes and Wilhelm Wundt. We find traces in references to Henry’s quasi-scientific studies of individual and group behaviour, the importance of hereditary influences on Dorian equated with personal influences (Henry, Basil, and Sibyl) and the influences of art. These reflect theories of Lewes and Wundt on parallel psychic and physical causation that informed their debate with Huxley and the Darwinists over a purely materialist model for development and influence of human consciousness. The key notion for Lewes was ‘psychic causality’, an idea that first Henry and then Dorian mis-appropriate as a formula for reconstructing an aestheticized self, built up by repeated exposures to artistic effects that would produce acquired dispositions. Unfortunately for Gray’s scheme of becoming the artist of his own life, since art had been gothicized in the painting by his own wish, everything aestheticized becomes thereby gothicized as well. 8. See Dorian Gray 143: to Dorian the image of the closed circle of hallucinated desire and fear is an apt representation of his gothicized mind. At this point art enthrals rather than enchants because the linkage of art with evil, of dandyism and aestheticism with the gothic world has become a self-replicating pattern. 9. A few representative examples will do: the morning after Basil’s murder Gray awakens peacefully in his sunlit bedroom, then but ‘gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent, bloodstained feet into his brain’ (125). The bloodstains foreshadow the changes in the picture. Later, when Gray seeks escape from consciousness in London’s opium dens, ‘the moon hung low in the sky like a yellow skull’ (142). This moment comes just before he encounters his nemesis, James Vane. It may be worth an aside to note that Wilde’s idea for costuming Salome was to dress the entire cast in yellow. 10. Themes of perverse sexual passion, supernaturalism of one sort or another, and tragic deaths have been associated with the gothic novel since The Castle of Otranto and were also linked in some of Wilde’s poetry and later stories like ‘Mr W. H.’ and those in A House of Pomegranates. 11. The text I use is the English language translation, originally botched so badly by Alfred Douglas that Wilde finally did a complete revision, after having rejected Aubrey Beardsley’s offer to make a new translation of his own. In a somewhat more radical if eccentric way, the play’s transmission history forms the rough equivalent of mediated narratives in gothic stories. Refusal to approve a license for the English version while the play was in rehearsal caused a great controversy over censorship, and drew from Wilde a threat to renounce his English citizenship and defect to France where he would be free from interference. Had he done so rather than heed George Archer’s counsel not to leave under fire, he would have left an intellectual hero, at least in Europe, and literary and

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12. It should be noted that Salome performed is far more effective than Salome read, although admittedly the experiences differ. For instance the theatrical effect of the repetitious, stylized dialogue, punctuated by the symbolist imagery encountered in the speech of every character but Herodias and Iokanaan can be mesmerizing in the theatre, especially as the erotically and gothically derived tensions build toward a culturally foretold climax. Indeed, no small portion of the play’s success is the result of Wilde’s genius for playing his characters against his audience’s expectations derived from both scriptural authority and other artistic representations. 13. Wilde’s gothic invasion of the world of art from the novel to the play included the power to gothicize the imaginations of those who invoke emotionally charged decorative effects or seem obsessed by them: allusiveness is an attribute of genres. This helps to account for the otherwise gratuitous foreboding shared by the choric characters with the principals. Hence anything that a gothicized art may incorporate either directly or by association becomes a rumour of some aspect of the gothic world. The power of gothicized art, as we have already seen, haunts the imagination of the characters and, thereby, affects the reader’s imagination. By using the power of a gothic aesthetic, Wilde had at his disposal for drama a proved and effective way for exercising an audience’s response and for energizing their imaginations without need of explanations. Gothic appeals to readers’ secondary fears and desires, for example, are experienced as reflexes of imagination, needing no conceptual recognition. 14. Those parodic prose-poems with biblical subjects were given in Wilde’s aestheticized, archaic idiom. The moon that serves symbolic duty in poems, stories, and the novel, rises to the level of influence in Salome and serves also as a thematic barometer, changing from white to red to black. There is the symbolism associated with Salome’s little white feet—possibly imported from ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ because of their sexual fetishism there—that fascinate the Syrian captain and even his gay admirer, the ‘Page of Herodias’. Flower and bird symbols abound in ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, and a bird out of The Happy Prince and Other Tales may have precursed the white doves associated with the early, virginal Salome before the moon turns red. 15. Iokanaan hardly engages Salome in dialogic exchange; and he does not have a pleasant word to say to or about anyone. He offers only a few words about the Christ who is to follow but who remains distantly off stage. The Baptist appears as the last Old Testament prophet. Salome, however, finds him irresistible, perhaps, because he denies himself to her, or perhaps for no reason at all beyond an inexplicable attraction. It is the sort of tragic fatality about which Basil speaks in the novel. If the fisherman (of ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’) could fall in love with a woman’s feet because the mermaid had none and Dorian be enchanted by Henry’s voice, it would not be uncharac-

teristic in Wilde for Salome to be smitten by Iokanaan’s voice, hair, skin, and at last mouth. Religion is not so much gothicized in Salome as marginalized. However, scripture in its translated discourse, to the extent that it is aestheticized in the play, does reveal a parodic, gothic potential for Wilde as it did in the prose poems. Matthew and Mark are, after all, revised by Wilde for a gothic, dramatic purpose. 16. Here is another instance of Wilde’s innovative use of gothic conventions or practice. 17. Perhaps the literary and dramatic conclusions need to be critically separated for the moment. As the performance ends, the audience is supposed to agree with Herod’s outrage at Salome’s necrophilia and blasphemy but be shocked at his arbitrary order to kill Salome—at least this may be assumed about the majority of Wilde’s contemporary audiences. Readers who dramatize the text internally enjoy the burden of electing to reread the conclusion where they will find not only signs of authorial sympathy for the admittedly mad Salome but traces of another working myth—that of Cupid and Psyche—behind the Dionysian construction that is foregrounded. There is, then, more than one irony to Herod’s command. Salome has ended her monologue: ‘If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me, and the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. Love only one should consider.’ What a lesson for him! Perhaps what Salome thought she was getting in Iokanaan was a god to equal her passion rather than a desiccated prophet. Herod’s response is to deplore Salome’s ‘crime against an unknown God’. It is a statement with more reflexive than direct meanings. In the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Cupid was the unknown god. Historically, another Herod was to pass another death sentence, this time on the very unknown god this Herod condoles. And, of course, the ‘unknown God’ alludes to St Paul’s famous ‘Areopagus Sermon’ in Athens (Acts 17:22-31) that led to the conversion of many. 18. Wilde reintroduces from Dorian Gray the drawing room of a collector of ancient and fabled curiosities, especially ones that would have been associated with anthropological study of primitive customs, religious rituals, and sexual rites that James G. Frazer had just analyzed in The Golden Bough. The Roots of Religion and Folklore (1890). Wilde’s interlocutor may remind us of Gray in both his youth and debauched imagination, but there seems something of the amateur anthropologist in him also, more like the Victorian gentlemanscientist of Robert Browning’s ‘A Tocatta of Galuppi’s’, perhaps, than Wilde’s decadent brat. Once again Wilde imports a work of art to be wished into a kind of hallucinated, gothic life that then reflects the true condition of the protagonist’s guilty soul. In the 1944 MGM film adaptation of Dorian Gray, not only does the sphinx appear in Basil’s studio, in the painting, and in Dorian’s study but also the poem is quoted several times as a basis for representing the statuette as one of the gods of Egypt with the power of granting Dorian Gray’s wish for endless youth and for exercising an ancient evil influence over the lad in what was a rather creative reversal of the historical declension of influences in the texts.

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cultural history would have been changed. It is tempting to speculate how different Wilde’s life could have been. As it was, Wilde stayed, and a similar motive later kept Wilde from taking his chance to leave England for France after the collapse of the first trial.

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19. The sphinx has long since turned to stone and has no longer a voice of her own. Her previously reputed conversations with humans having been riddling invitations to death make us wonder whether this her silence is now another form of riddle.

Wilde, Oscar. Complete Works, London, Collins, 1969.

20. In Dorian Gray, this very argument for the survival of imagination and conscience as transformed remnants of the emotional and irrational life of primitive cultures is one phase of the theme of gothicized influence. The idea fascinated Wilde, perhaps because he was one who had learned to search for and recognize influences that had shaped his own life, especially we may suppose, his sexual life. This interest may have originated with Pater and later been reinforced by the growing influences of post-Darwinist psychology and the newer cultural and primitive anthropology. The theme appears in stories like ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’, ‘Mr. W. H.’, and Intentions before it became gothicized in Dorian Gray, Salome, and The Sphinx.

Worth, K. Oscar Wilde, New York, Grove Press, 1983.

21. Wilde’s reversal of the argument of Salome in the poem is worth noting. Instead of the female princess who is the victim of the gothic world created by her sick desire for Iokanaan, the speaker’s morbid and carnal curiosity elaborated through his double-edged confessional interview, exercises in him appetites so feral that no human of Wilde’s class could have entertained them without shame, even in a conditional state.

References Behrendt, P. F. Oscar Wilde. Eros and Aesthetics, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1991. Buckler, W. ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray. An Essay in Aesthetic Exploration’, Victorians Institute Journal 18 (1990), 135174. Charlesworth-Gelpi, B. Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1965. Cohen, P. K. The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde, Cranbury, New Jersey and London, Associated University Press, 1978. Day, W. P. In the Circles of Fear and Desire, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987. Ellmann, R. Golden Codgers, New York, Oxford University Press, 1973. ———. Oscar Wilde, New York, Knopf, 1988. Gagnier, R. Idylls of the Marketplace, Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 1986. Geary, R. F. The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction, Lewiston, New York, Mellon University Press, 1992. Hyde, H. Oscar Wilde, New York, Ferrar, 1975. Kohl, N. Oscar Wilde. The Works of a Conformist Rebel, trans. D. H. Wilson, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1989. Nassaar, C. S. Into the Demon Universe. A Literary Exploration of Oscar Wilde, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974. San Juan, Jr., E. The Art of Oscar Wilde, Princeton University Press, 1967. Walpole, H. ‘Preface’, The Castle of Otranto. Ed. W. S. Lewis, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969.

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———. Letters, Ed. R. Hart-Davis, London, Hart-Davis, 1962. ———. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ed. D. Lawler, New York, Norton, 1987.

TITLE COMMENTARY The Picture of Dorian Gray ST. JAMES GAZETTE (REVIEW DATE 24 JUNE 1890) SOURCE: “A Study in Puppydom.” In A Norton Critical Edition: Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Donald L. Lawler, pp. 67-71. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988. In the following essay, first published in the St. James’s Gazette on June 24, 1890, the critic derides The Picture of Dorian Gray as poorly written, derivative, immature, and immoral.

Time was (it was in the ’70’s) when we talked about Mr Oscar Wilde; time came (it came in the ’80’s) when he tried to write poetry and, more adventurous, we tried to read it; time is when we had forgotten him, or only remember him as the late editor of The Woman’s World—a part for which he was singularly unfitted, if we are to judge him by the work which he has been allowed to publish in Lippincott’s Magazine and which Messrs Ward, Lock & Co. have not been ashamed to circulate in Great Britain. Not being curious in ordure, and not wishing to offend the nostrils of decent persons, we do not propose to analyse The Picture of Dorian Gray: that would be to advertise the developments of an esoteric prurience. Whether the Treasury or the Vigilance Society will think it worth while to prosecute Mr Oscar Wilde or Messrs Ward, Lock & Co., we do not know; but on the whole we hope they will not. The puzzle is that a young man of decent parts, who enjoyed (when he was at Oxford) the opportunity of associating with gentlemen, should put his name (such as it is) to so stupid and vulgar a piece of work. Let nobody read it in the hope of finding witty paradox or racy wickedness. The writer airs his cheap research among the garbage of the French Décadents like any drivelling pedant, and he bores you unmercifully with his prosy rigmaroles about the beauty of the Body and the corruption of the Soul. The grammar is better than Ouida’s; the erudition equal; but in every other

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Let us take one peep at the young men in Mr Oscar Wilde’s story. Puppy No. 1 is the painter of the picture of Dorian Gray; Puppy No. 2 is the critic (a courtesy lord, skilled in all the knowledge of the Egyptians and aweary of all the sins and pleasures of London); Puppy No. 3 is the original, cultivated by Puppy No. 1 with a “romantic friendship.” The Puppies fall a-talking: Puppy No. 1 about his Art, Puppy No. 2 about his sins and pleasures and the pleasures of sin, and Puppy No. 3 about himself—always about himself, and generally about his face, which is “brainless and beautiful.” The Puppies appear to fill up the intervals of talk by plucking daisies and playing with them, and sometimes by drinking “something with strawberry in it.” The youngest Puppy is told that he is charming; but he mustn’t sit in the sun for fear of spoiling his complexion. When he is rebuked for being a naughty, wilful boy, he makes a pretty moue—this man of twenty! This is how he is addressed by the Blasé Puppy at their first meeting: “Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. . . . When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you. . . . Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dulleyed. You will suffer horribly.”

Why, bless our souls! haven’t we read something of this kind somewhere in the classics? Yes, of course we have! But in what recondite author? Ah—yes—no—yes, it was in Horace! What an advantage it is to have received a classical education! And how it will astonish the Yankees! But we must not forget our Puppies, who have probably occupied their time in lapping “something with strawberry in it.” Puppy No. 1 (the Art Puppy) has been telling Puppy No. 3 (the Doll Puppy) how much he admires him. What is the answer? “I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know now that when one loses one’s good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. . . . I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what

ABOUT THE AUTHOR JULIAN HAWTHORNE ON THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

Mr Oscar Wilde, the apostle of beauty, has in the July number of Lippincott’s Magazine a novel or romance (it partakes of the qualities of both), which everybody will want to read. It is a story strange in conception, strong in interest, and fitted with a tragic and ghastly climax. Like many stories of its class, it is open to more than one interpretation; and there are, doubtless, critics who will deny that it has any meaning at all. It is, at all events, a salutary departure from the ordinary English novel, with the hero and heroine of different social stations, the predatory black sheep, the curate, the settlements, and Society. Mr Wilde, as we all know, is a gentleman of an original and audacious turn of mind, and the commonplace is scarcely possible to him. Besides, his advocacy of novel ideas in life, art, dress, and demeanour had led us to expect surprising things from him; and in this literary age it is agreed that a man may best show the best there is in him by writing a book. Those who read Mr Wilde’s story in the hope of finding in it some compact and final statement of his theories of life and manners will be satisfied in some respects, and dissatisfied in others; but not many will deny that the book is a remarkable one, and would attract attention even had it appeared without the author’s name on the title page. SOURCE: Hawthorne, Julian. “The Romance of the Impossible.” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (September 1890): 79-80.

I must lose? . . . Oh, if it was only the other way! If the picture could only change, and I could be always what I am now!” No sooner said than done! The picture does change: the original doesn’t. Here’s a situation for you! Théophile Gautier could have made it romantic, entrancing, beautiful. Mr Stevenson could have made it convincing, humorous, pathetic. Mr Anstey could have made it screamingly funny. It has been reserved for Mr Oscar Wilde to make it

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respect we prefer the talented lady who broke off with “pious aposiopesis” when she touched upon “the horrors which are described in the pages of Suetonius and Livy”—not to mention the yet worse infamies believed by many scholars to be accurately portrayed in the lost works of Plutarch, Venus, and Nicodemus, especially Nicodemus.

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dull and nasty. The promising youth plunges into every kind of mean depravity, and ends in being “cut” by fast women and vicious men. He finishes with murder: the New Voluptuousness always leads up to blood-shedding—that is part of the cant. The gore and gashes wherein Mr Rider Haggard takes a chaste delight are the natural diet for a cultivated palate which is tired of mere licentiousness. And every wickedness or filthiness committed by Dorian Gray is faithfully registered upon his face in the picture; but his living features are undisturbed and unmarred by his inward vileness. This is the story which Mr Oscar Wilde has tried to tell; a very lame story it is, and very lamely it is told. Why has he told it? There are two explanations; and, so far as we can see, not more than two. Not to give pleasure to his readers: the thing is too clumsy, too tedious, and—alas! that we should say it—too stupid. Perhaps it was to shock his readers, in order that they might cry Fie! upon him and talk about him, much as Mr Grant Allen recently tried in The Universal Review to arouse, by a licentious theory of the sexual relations, an attention which is refused to his popular chatter about other men’s science. Are we then to suppose that Mr Oscar Wilde has yielded to the craving for a notoriety which he once earned by talking fiddle-faddle about other men’s art, and sees his only chance of recalling it by making himself obvious at the cost of being obnoxious, and by attracting the notice which the olfactory sense cannot refuse to the presence of certain self-asserting organisms? That is an uncharitable hypothesis, and we would gladly abandon it. It may be suggested (but is it more charitable?) that he derives pleasure from treating a subject merely because it is disgusting. The phenomenon is not unknown in recent literature; and it takes two forms, in appearance widely separate—in fact, two branches from the same root, a root which draws its life from malodorous putrefaction. One development is found in the Puritan prurience which produced Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata” and Mr Stead’s famous outbursts. That is odious enough and mischievous enough, and it is rightly execrated, because it is tainted with an hypocrisy not the less culpable because charitable persons may believe it to be unconscious. But is it more odious or more mischievous than the “frank Paganism” (that is the word, is it not?) which delights in dirtiness and confesses its delight? Still they are both chips from the same block—“The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” and The Picture of Dorian Gray—and both of them ought to be chucked into the fire.

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Not so much because they are dangerous and corrupt (they are corrupt but not dangerous) as because they are incurably silly, written by simpleton poseurs (whether they call themselves Puritan or Pagan) who know nothing about the life which they affect to have explored, and because they are mere catchpenny relevations of the non-existent, which, if they reveal anything at all, are revelations only of the singularly unpleasant minds from which they emerge.

LEWIS J. POTEET (ESSAY DATE SUMMER 1971) SOURCE: Poteet, Lewis J. “Dorian Gray and the Gothic Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies 17, no. 2 (summer 1971): 239-48. In the following essay, Poteet surveys possible connections between The Picture of Dorian Gray and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, maintaining that “Wilde in fact may be said to have written a version of Gothic novel, giving the form contemporary dimensions.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s only novel, was written and published during the same burst of creative energy that produced the essays collected in Intentions (1891).1 Yet it has rarely been studied in connection with them or with any native English novelistic tradition; it has usually been treated as a curious, anomalous artifact of aestheticism, deriving more from the French than from anything else. In fact, Graham Hough is typical in treating the novel as a bad imitation of K.-J. Huysmans’ A Rebours. He bases this judgment on the identity of the unnamed “yellow book” which Dorian Gray reads in Chapter X and whose influence on his life is detailed in Chapter XI, and he says rather ungenerously that the “yellow book,” which he identifies with A Rebours, “probably remains anonymous because Wilde owed too much to it and was not overanxious to advertise his sources.”2 The most recent full-length study of Wilde’s work, too, calls Huysmans’ novel the “main inspiration” of Dorian Gray.3 These attributions of influence have been made again and again despite Wilde’s clearly caustic deprecation of Huysmans in a letter to Robert Ross (Letters, p. 520).4 He does, to be sure, mention Huysmans in answer to a question about the “yellow book”: “The book in Dorian Gray is one of the many books I have never written, but it is partly suggested by Huysmans’s A Rebours. . . . It is a fantastic variation on Huysmans’s over-realistic study of the artistic temperament in our inartistic age” (Letters, p. 313). But he has been taken to mean that his own novel is

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Wilde may indeed have owed Huysmans more than he acknowledged, but a close look at both books uncovers important differences. A Rebours is, as Wilde says in the description of the “yellow book” in Dorian Gray, “a novel without a plot”; Dorian Gray is definitely a novel with a plot, beginning with Dorian’s temptation and his rash vow, moving through his progressive loss of “natural” innocence and his artificialization of his life to his crime, the murder of Basil Hallward, and his own death. A Rebours is an intensely psychological study of a single protagonist, seen through his own eyes; Wilde divides the reader’s attention among three main characters and a “living” portrait. The protagonist of A Rebours is not criminal; Dorian is. He does not even inspire unsavory rumors, as Dorian does, for society is irrelevant to the exploration of his personal aesthetic. In fact, the direct influences of A Rebours on Dorian Gray are pretty much limited to Chapters X and XI, in which Dorian encounters the “yellow book” and imitates the protagonist by collecting sensations—musical, artistic, gemological, religious. But even this is only one of several exercises in Dorian’s progressive initiation into aestheticism: it has its appropriate place, I suggest, in a larger scheme. Behind the larger scheme of the book lies a native, English Romantic literary tradition, that of the Gothic novel, the form which a recent scholar calls “the serious romance” and which he says the novels of Godwin, Ann Radcliffe, Charles Maturin, Mary Shelley, Dickens, the Brontës, and R. L. Stevenson best represent.5 Instead of making generalizations about the Gothic novel in general, we may most usefully inquire into the relationship of Wilde’s novel to it by looking closely at the Gothic novel that was most likely to be on his mind when he wrote Dorian Gray. Charles R. Maturin, one of the Gothic novelists most successful and prolific in the Romantic period, was an ancestor of Wilde; in fact, Wilde mentions his novel Melmoth the Wanderer and acknowledges the family relationship with some pride—Maturin was his grand-uncle (Letters, p. 520). Wilde may have helped his friends Robert Ross and More Adey to write an “anonymous biographical introduction

to a new edition of the novel in 1892” (Letters, p. 555n), about a year after Dorian Gray was published. And Melmoth the Wanderer does provide many of the larger patterns with which Wilde shapes his novel, so that Wilde in fact may be said to have written a version of Gothic novel, giving the form contemporary dimensions. From Melmoth and other Gothic novels and legends which provided material for them (the Faust legend, for example), Wilde takes the overall movement from rash vow (the bargain with the devil) to condemnation. Melmoth’s pact with the devil is for vaguely specified ends, giving him the power of a magician over the world of spirits and demons and the power to move about the earth freely, not limited to place or time as are ordinary men. Thus, in the most explicit statement about his bargain, he cries out before his condemnation to hell, “no one has ever exchanged destinies with Melmoth the Wanderer. I have traversed the world in the search, and no one, to gain the world, would lose his own soul” (III, 327), Dorian makes a pact, the implications of which are tied in with Wilde’s aesthetic theory, as we shall see; he is increasingly the subject of gossip and rumor because, like Melmoth, he moves about secretly and is associated with debauchery and disaster (Melmoth II, 180ff, 275). Wilde takes from Maturin’s novel Dorian’s eternal youth—Melmoth, though “then . . . considerably advanced in life, to the astonishment of his family, . . . did not betray the slightest trace of being a year older than when they last beheld him” (I, 35-36). He also follows Maturin by making Dorian suddenly age at the moment of his damnation, just as, after Melmoth’s dream of damnation, “now the lines of extreme age were visible in every feature. His hairs were as white as snow, his mouth had fallen in, the muscles of his face were relaxed and withered—he was the very image of decrepit debility” (III, 328-332). From Melmoth and other Gothic novels, Wilde accepts the radical bifurcation of nature and art; he puts to original uses the Gothic novelist’s conventional plot pattern in which an innocent child of nature is corrupted by the artificialities of society. In Melmoth, the child of nature is Immalee: “Her drapery consisted only of flowers, whose rich colours and fantastic grouping harmonized well with the peacock’s feathers twined among them, and altogether composed a feathery fan of wild drapery, which in truth, beseemed an ‘island goddess’” (II, 187-188). After her “seduction” into the cruel arts of society and a knowledge of the inconsistency and cruelty of man to man in

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the “fantastic variation”; what he says is that it is the “yellow book” which Lord Harry sends Dorian. In another letter, answering the same question, he writes, “The book that poisoned, or made perfect, Dorian Gray does not exist; it is a fancy of mine merely” (Letters, p. 352) as if to counter the mistaken, if commonplace, association with Huysmans.

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society, Immalee finds nature no longer friendly but threatening (II, 210-221, 249-256). On her “nuptial” trip with her tempter and demon-lover, she finds nature hostile: I feel as if I were traversing some unknown region. Are these indeed the winds of heaven that sigh around me? Are these trees of nature’s growth, that nod at me like sceptres? How hollow and dismal is the sound of the blast!—it chills me though the night is sultry!—and those trees, they cast their shadows over my soul! (III, 57)

This vision of nature inverted, of a sort of antinature, would not have been distasteful to the author of “The Decay of Lying,” but of course Wilde’s attitude to nature and art is not precisely that of Maturin. The point is that Wilde keeps the concepts in opposition and connotatively loaded as the Gothic novelist had, particularly as he describes Dorian’s progress from child of nature in the first chapter to disillusioned aesthete at the end. At the beginning, he is described with profuse nature imagery: The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amid the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. . . . Dorian “looks as if he was made of ivory and roseleaves. . . . He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at.” (II, 1, 3-4)

Dorian’s vow preserves his beauty but commits him to the superiority of art over nature, and he cultivates the artificial. He finds nature increasingly neither beautiful nor ugly, but dull and without meaning. Ultimately, his natural beauty gone, he lies dead, identifiable only by his rings (II, 272). The Gothic novel is also almost certainly an influence on the passage, in Chapter XIV, in which Wilde describes how Dorian gets rid of the body of the murdered Hallward. The torture devices, the dark caverns, the mysterious diabolical machines of the Inquisition which are suggested in Melmoth are adapted as Dorian forces Campbell, a young scientist whom he has compromised in some unexplained way, to bring his “heavy chest, and the irons, and the other things that he required for his dreadful work” (II, 209) of dissolving the body. But most important, Wilde would have been able to find the suggestion in Melmoth of the portrait device. The young narrator of that novel first encounters the Wanderer in a portrait:

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John’s eyes were in a moment, and as if by magic, rivetted on a portrait that hung on the wall, and appeared, even to his untaught eye, far superior to the tribe of family pictures that are left to moulder on the walls of a family mansion. It represented a man of middle age. There was nothing remarkable in the costume, or in the countenance, but the eyes, John felt, were such as one feels they wish they had never seen, and feels they can never forget. (I, 20)

As in Dorian Gray, the portrait of old Melmoth is given mysterious and terrifying associations. The young narrator thinks he sees “the eyes of the portrait, on which his own was fixed, move” (I, 23). He discovers that his uncle asked in his will that the portrait be destroyed, as if by that act the obscure curse of the Wanderer might be driven off (I, 26-27). When young Melmoth tries to destroy it, obeying the will, he finds hints that it may have a life of its own: He seized it;—his hand shook at first, but the mouldering canvas appeared to assist him in the effort. He tore it from the frame with a cry half terrific, half triumphant,—it fell at his feet, and he shuddered as it fell. He expected to hear some fearful sounds, some unimaginable breathings of prophetic horror, follow this act of sacrilege, for such he felt it, to tear the portrait of his ancestor from its native walls. He paused and listened;— there was “no voice, nor any that answered;”— but as the wrinkled and torn canvas fell to the floor, its undulations gave the portrait the appearance of smiling. Melmoth felt horror indescribable at this transient and imaginary resuscitation of the figure. (I, 93-94)

It is not only in Melmoth, of course, that this concentration on a portrait is to be found; Eino Railo has traced the history of the portrait motif through Gothic literature from Walpole to Wilde, with particular attention to works by Poe and Rossetti.6 But in Maturin’s attribution of a sort of life to the portrait, which to destroy is in some way fearful to the living, we have the most direct suggestion of Wilde’s symbol in a book he knew well. Wilde certainly puts the portrait to more significant use than Maturin. He makes it a structural, unifying element in his novel, and he spins out of it whole levels of meaning never attained in Melmoth. Most studies of Dorian Gray have recognized the portrait’s function as Dorian’s “double,” the figure which embodies the subconscious, darker, evil side of his nature. This psychological allegorizing, the “doppelgänger motif,” has been shown to be a basic technique of the novelistic romance.7 In studying it, Eino Railo calls this “parting of good and evil as though into two

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The artist transfers to the canvas, as by magic, the entire personality of his sitter, thus creating the latter’s double. . . . The portrait represents the evil half of his being. . . . In this manner Wilde brings to light an idea that had probably always lain behind the portrait-theme—that the picture constituted in some mysterious way the sitter’s double, living a parallel life and reflecting his personality. . . . What the author is actually arguing is simply that a vicious life leaves its own marks.1 0

While this scheme may point up Wilde’s place in a tradition, it oversimplifies the psychology of the artist in Dorian Gray. The essays in Intentions, particularly the two parts of “The Critic as Artist,” describe the creative personality not in terms of conscious and subconscious but as in process of multiple realizations of the possibilities of the self. In one of his fanciful descriptions of the book, Wilde suggests, similarly, that the different characters may represent not just two but several versions of one person: “that strange coloured book of mine . . . contains much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps” (Letters, p. 352). Wilde was not so much drawn, I suggest, to the “doubling” of certain characters in the Gothic novel as to the far more central technique of focusing on a strong-willed central protagonist whose goals are not narrowly defined. What stands out, after all, about Melmoth and Ambrosio (hero of The Monk, 1794) and even Manfred (The Castle of Otranto, probably the first Gothic novel) is both their self-absorbed, narcissistic egomania and the fluidity of their aims. They seek

variously to possess the souls of innocent victims and the bodies of women (Melmoth, Ambrosio, and Manfred) or exclusive and perpetual control over a kingdom through a dynastic triumph (Manfred), or power over dark powers (Melmoth and Vathek); but the exact object of their ambitions is never as important as the exercise of the will itself. What better fictional model could Wilde have had for the artist- and critic-figure of the Intentions? His self is described as a creative, dynamic one, not a simple character with fixed attributes. He is active and forceful; his art is the product of his conscious will; but he uses the will not to “express” a static personality, good or evil, but rather as an agent to flux: The soul that dwells within us is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and individual, created for our service and entering into us for our joy. It is . . . sick with many maladies, and has memories of curious sins. (IV, 180) He will realise himself in many forms, and by a thousand different ways, and will ever be curious of new sensations and fresh points of view. Through constant change, and through constant change alone, he will find his true unity. . . . What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities. (IV, 197)

It is perhaps not quite accidental that Wilde’s character of the artist is derived from sources contemporary with the Gothic novel—specifically, Keats, whose letters Wilde loved to quote, and whose definition, in one of the best-known of them, of his own poetical “character” distinguishes it from the Wordsworthian in that it “is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing—It has no character.”1 1 It is my contention, then, that with the portrait-motif as with the other structural elements derived from the Gothic novel, Wilde expresses and tests the theory of art and the artist of the Intentions. This dimension in the novel is suggested by Richard Ellmann when he writes, “Dorian sells his soul not to the devil but, in the ambiguous form of his portrait, to art.”1 2 It is not merely “art” in the abstract, though; it is specifically to the theory of art expounded in the Intentions that Dorian makes his rash vow: “If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything!” (II, 31). Dorian’s dilemma is embodied in the paradox repeated throughout the dialogues, a paradox derived ultimately from Keats’ Odes—man, mortal and mutable, creates works of art which are immortal. Dorian tries by

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separate entities in the same individual and [the idea of] veritable doubles” an “extremely vital theme of terror in romantic literature.”8 In Melmoth, for example, Moncada, a character in one of the internal narratives, finds himself inescapably involved with a parricide, who acts as a catalyst to his own unrealized darker potentialities—“I dreaded him as a demon, yet I invoked him as a god” (II, 42). A recent analysis of the “double” which goes beyond mere identification explains it as originating in a “verbal distinction . . . between personality and character, the former as in some way the conscious product of the latter.” In the nineteenth century, this critic says, writers began to treat the self as “binary or double-decked” and naturally tended to “anthropomorphize each part.”9 According to this analysis, Wilde’s use of the portrait, however more sophisticated than in Melmoth, is still relatively simple:

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an extraordinary exercise of the will to resolve the paradox, to become a work of art. He is tempted into this venture by a sort of “devil,” the aesthetic critic Lord Henry, who preaches a version of the dialogues’ main tenet, the artistic possibilities of multiple realizations of the self: “I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy” (II, 21-27). Dorian’s vow and his subsequent exploration of art, music, travel, and the whole range of sensation, not excluding opium, sex (Lord Henry’s conquest of Dorian, and Dorian’s of Campbell, are described with many hints of the seduction of a younger by an older man), and finally murder, are thus to be taken as the story of an artist in the framework laid down by “The Critic as Artist”: In his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having, as it were, caught their color and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with a . . . curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardor of temperament. (II, 159)1 3

He is an artist in life, not only in paint or in words, for he tries to give his life the beautiful changeableness of the artist and artist-critic of Wilde’s dialogues. Dorian Gray is, then, both artist and work of art; in fact, in Wilde’s version of romantic, the two are one. As artist, Dorian seeks to apply aesthetic criteria in a pure form to all of life, even—in the Sybil Vane affair—to love, loving the actress only so long as her art is perfect and spurning her when, touched by real love, she loses her sense of form. As work of art, Dorian illustrates the Wildean notion of the independence of the work of art from conditions of creation and the artist’s preconceptions, for initially Basil Hallward and Lord Henry “create” Dorian. Basil Hallward creates the emblem of his beauty—the portrait— which precipitates his narcissistic recognition of his own beauty and his rash vow; Lord Henry “creates” his personality by tempting him with a vision of the artistic possibilities of confident and aggressive self-development. But Dorian goes far beyond Lord Henry’s instruction, for he really acts, while Lord Henry merely speculates on the possibilities. And Dorian bewilders Basil, who is basically Victorian in his morality, with a complete

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amorality. Dorian in effect takes over the creation of the work of art from Basil, for he is himself the work of art in the new scheme, and his artistic experiments in living make him more and more different from whatever the “real” Dorian Gray, who sat for Basil’s portrait, may have been. In a sense, he also undertakes a repainting of the portrait, for his experiences modify the expression on the canvas, making it more and more old, cruel, and brutal. But these changes in the canvas—often explained as the conventional “voice of conscience” in Dorian—actually reflect the life of Dorian filtered through the judgment of Basil, the Victorian moralist, to whom Dorian’s search for sensation is a wallowing in sin. After all, Basil used “realism . . . of method,” painting Dorian “in his own dress and in his own time” (II, 138). It is typical Wildean puckishness that at one level the entire portrait device is an elaborate joke at the expense of representational painting. Dorian’s rash bargain, then, is ambiguous in the same way as the bargain made by the protagonist of the Gothic novel. Melmoth’s deal with the devil elevates him above normal men; he dares more, he achieves more, than they do. He tests the bounds of the spiritual universe. He sees the world of men from a special perspective, outside time, and can compare generations and societies as most men cannot. He is a martyr to this special knowledge. He is damned, for the price of his greater knowledge and experience is his soul. Similarly, Dorian dares to live by an aesthetic more purely aesthetical than most men are willing to attempt. His rejection of the moral evaluation of behavior is complete. Wilde is, like most late Victorians, skeptical of metaphysical systems; and for his version of Gothic novel, even the pretended belief in the world of demons which characterizes the works of Walpole, Beckford, and Maturin is impossible. But he can substitute a contemporary version. The aesthetic dandy, cynical, amoral, and defiant of conventional morality, keenly interested in the contemporary French writers of “little yellow books” who so shocked the Victorian middle class, was a perfect “demon” to flaunt before the respectable late-century reading public. And from Wilde’s point of view, the only spiritual world with any meaning is the aesthetic one. It is thus appropriate for Dorian’s vow to be in the service of art. But Wilde is at once both honest about the possibilities of such a pure aestheticism and true to the Gothic tradition of the moralistic ending. He gives the moralists their spokesman in Basil Hallward and his terrifying portrait; he acknowl-

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The Gothic novel, itself a fin-de-siècle genre of the eighteenth century, cast off the conventional eighteenth-century homage to realism, credibility, and responsibility to an aesthetic of taste, reaching beyond accepted novelistic approaches to life and character to explore with brilliant if erratic flashes a psychological universe. Horror in the Gothic novel is almost never genuine; its effects are overstated in a calculated way; characters are rarely believable or consistent. It is not hard to see why the Gothic novel appealed to Oscar Wilde. In it he found implicit and explicit attitudes toward a realistic, moralistic Establishment aesthetic similar to the one he faced. It gave him a form through which he could test his own anti-Victorian aesthetic in a protagonist whose very woodenness is a function of his being partly allegorical and whose damnation is as inescapable as it is irrelevant to the “truth” of his theories. For the “truth” of Dorian Gray is to be found, like the “truth” of Melmoth the Wanderer, in the resonances and tensions of the work, rather than in any fidelity to the ordinary life of the society from which its author came.

Notes 1. All parenthetical references in the text to Oscar Wilde’s works are to the edition by Robert Ross (New York: Bigelow, Brown, & Co., 1909); to the letters, to the edition by Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Rupert HartDavis Ltd., 1962); to Melmoth the Wanderer, to the edition Wilde probably helped edit (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1892). 2. Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (London: Methuen & Co., 1961), p. 195. 3. Epifanio San Juan, Jr., The Art of Oscar Wilde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 53.

4. Wilde writes, “En Route is sheer journalism. It never makes one hear a note of the music it describes. . . . The style is . . . worthless, slipshod, flaccid.” 5. Edwin Eigner, Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 5-6. 6. Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism (London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1927), pp. 304-307. I am indebted to Edouard Roditi’s Oscar Wilde (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions Books, 1947), for pointing out the possibility of the influence of Maturin on Wilde. He also suggests a number of analogues in other nineteenth-century uses of the portrait motif (pp. 113-118). 7. Eigner, pp. 21-22. 8. Railo, pp. 186-188. 9. Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1948), pp. 72-73. 10. Railo, p. 307. 11. John Keats, Letters (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 227-228. 12. Richard Ellmann, “Romantic Pantomime in Oscar Wilde,” Partisan Review, (Fall, 1963), 353. 13. On possible sources for the concept of murder as a fine art, see De Quincey’s “On Murder, Considered as one of the Fine Arts,” Collected Works, XIII (London: A. & C. Black, 1897), 9, and Wilde’s own “Pen, Pencil, and Poison” (IV, 61 ff).

KENNETH WOMACK (ESSAY DATE 2000) SOURCE: Womack, Kenneth. “‘Withered, Wrinkled, and Loathsome of Visage’: Reading the Ethics of the Soul and the Late-Victorian Gothic in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” In Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, pp. 168-81. New York: Palgrave, 2000. In the following essay, Womack argues that “[a]n ethical reading of” The Picture of Dorian Gray “reveals the ways in which the novelist exploits the fantastic elements inherent in the Victorian Gothic as a means for fulfilling his decidedly moral aims.”

As a literary phenomenon, the Victorian gothic manifests itself in fin-de-siècle literature both as a subversive supernatural force and as a mechanism for social critique. Envisioning the world as a dark and spiritually turbulent tableau, the fictions of the late-Victorian gothic often depict the city of London as a corrupt urban landscape characterized by a brooding populace and by its horror-filled streets of terror. In The Three Impostors (1895), for instance, Arthur Machen offers a desolate, hyper-eroticized portrait of London and its invasion by a chemically altered degenerate race of pagan beings. In one of the more chilling portrayals of London’s citizenry,

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edges the likelihood that Dorian is excessively individualistic (“You worshiped yourself too much”—III, 190); and he recognizes the sterility of the absolute affirmation of art, as the dead Dorian can only be identified by his rings (II, 272). Above all, Dorian’s ultimate self-hatred as he accepts the moralists’ view of his life and his consequent attack on the portrait (which turns out to be suicide)—all this is not so much a denial of the aesthetic as it is both an acknowledgment that in its pure form it is not ready for the world, or the world for it, and also an experiencing of the decadent’s final thrill—le frisson nouveau—death. Dorian Gray, like Melmoth, seems insincerely moralistic at the end; both were conceived, however, as tests, experiments in the juxtaposition of opposites, to be ended only by a doom made necessary precisely by the irreconcilability of the opposing forces.

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Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1896) narrates the Devil’s progress through the city’s ethically bankrupt environs as he searches for someone— indeed, anyone—with the moral strength to resist his temptations. He does not succeed. At the conclusion of The Sorrows of Satan, the Devil ascends the steps of Parliament, walking arm-inarm with its acquiescent ministers. The characters in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) encounter a similarly troubled London cityscape. In the novel, a desperate and lonely Robert Holt wanders the city in search of lodging only to confront the supernatural insect, metaphor for London’s spiritual vacancy in the form of a giant beetle. Finally, in The Lodger (1923), Marie Belloc Lowndes depicts the mean streets of 1880s London in her fictional account of Jack the Ripper’s murderous exploits in the city’s notorious East End. The novel’s chilling atmosphere of suspense, fear and horror—as with other works in the genre—underscores the manner in which the Victorian gothic provides a critique of the moral and spiritual value systems of London and its forlorn inhabitants. Each volume also narrates—in one form or another, human, insect or otherwise—the corruption of the soul. In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Oscar Wilde likewise investigates the ethics of the soul through his own well-known portrait of aesthetic narcissism and fin-de-siècle decadence. Yet in the novel’s Preface, Wilde writes that ‘no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist’, he coyly adds, ‘is an unpardonable mannerism of style’ (1991, 69). During the novel’s initial serialization, the popular press severely rebuked The Picture of Dorian Gray for its ostensible lack of moral import. A reviewer in the 30 June 1890 edition of the Daily Chronicle described the novel as ‘unclean’ and a ‘poisonous book’ with ‘odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction’. In a 5 July 1890 notice in the Scots Observer, yet another reviewer complained about the novel’s ‘false’ morality, ‘for it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health, and sanity’ (cited in Beckson 1998, 271). Wilde swiftly replied to the growing horde of critics, arguing, rather ironically, that The Picture of Dorian Gray was in fact too moral: ‘All excess, as well as all renunciation’, Wilde soberly concluded, ‘brings its own punishment’ (cited in Ellmann 321). While the novelist’s contradictory stances regarding his narrative’s ethical properties seem purposefully beguiling, few critics deny the moral fable that functions at the core of The Picture of Dorian

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Gray. Although Colin McGinn, for example, evaluates the novel in terms of its humanist agenda in Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (1997), he neglects, as with other Wilde critics, to consider the role of the Victorian gothic as the mechanism via which Wilde achieves his moral aims regarding the soul and its function as the repository for humanity’s notions of goodness and evil—the essential qualities that define our perceptions about the interpersonal fabric of the self.1 An ethical reading of Wilde’s novel reveals the ways in which the novelist exploits the fantastic elements inherent in the Victorian gothic as a means for fulfilling his decidedly moral aims in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ethical criticism, with its reliance upon contemporary moral philosophy, affords readers with a paradigm for considering the contradictory emotions and problematic moral stances that often mask literary characters. Ethical criticism also provides its practitioners with the capacity for positing socially relevant interpretations by celebrating the Aristotelian qualities of living well and flourishing. As Martha C. Nussbaum reminds us in The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, the ethical study of literary works offers a powerful means for interpreting the ideological and interpersonal clashes that define the human experience. The ethical investigation of literature, she writes, ‘lays open to view the complexity, the indeterminacy, the sheer difficulty of actual human deliberation’. Such humanistic criticism, she adds, demonstrates ‘the vulnerability of human lives to fortune, the mutability of our circumstances and our passions, the existence of conflicts among our commitments’ (1986, 1314). By focusing our attention upon the narrative experiences of literary characters, ethical criticism provides a powerful mechanism for investigating the interconnections between the reading experience and the life of the reader. An ethical reading of Wilde’s novel— concerned, as it is, with the soul and our perceptions regarding the nature of goodness—demands that we devote particular attention to these issues and their relevance to such a reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray. In her important volume of moral philosophy, The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch elaborates upon the concept of goodness and the ways in which our personal configurations of it govern human perceptions regarding the relationship between the self and the world. Murdoch’s paradigm for understanding goodness functions upon the equally abstract notions of free will and moral choice. ‘Good is indefinable’,

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Because such ontological concepts remain so vitally contingent upon personal rather than communal perceptions of morality, Murdoch suggests that their comprehension lies in the mysterious fabric of the self. ‘The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion’, she observes, and ‘goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness’ (93). In Murdoch’s philosophy, goodness manifests itself during the healthy pursuit of self-awareness and selfknowledge. The soul, as the product of such an intrapersonal quest, functions as the repository for goodness and evil, as well as the essential material that comprises the self. Moral philosophers often conceive of the soul as a vast entity that consists of our innate emotional senses and desires. In Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Nussbaum elaborates upon the concept of the soul, which she sees as ‘shaped and structured by the needs and interests of an imperfect and limited being. Its characterization of what truth and value are is distorted by the pressure of bodily need, emotional turmoil, and the other constraining and limiting features of our bodily humanity’ (1990, 248). The soul operates as a conflation of sorts between bodily desires and individual value systems, and the harmony between these two elements produces a kind of moral beauty. Robert E. Norton describes the soul’s

capacity for moral beauty as ‘both the motivation and manifestation of virtue’ (1995, 48) and associates ‘moral purity and goodness with a kind of beauty of soul’ (1995, 96). As the essence of a given individual’s humanity, then, the soul consists of spiritual and emotional components that define the sensual and virtuous qualities of our selves. ‘To choose a style’, Nussbaum writes in Love’s Knowledge, ‘is to tell a story about the soul’. For Wilde, the literary style of The Picture of Dorian Gray manifests itself in his appropriation of the Victorian gothic as his novel’s narrative means. ‘Form and style are not incidental features’, Nussbaum argues. ‘A view of life is told. The telling itself—the selection of genre, formal structures, sentences, vocabulary, of the whole manner of addressing the reader’s sense of life—all of this expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what matters and what does not, of what learning and communicating are, of life’s relations and connections’ (1990, 259, 5). In this manner, the Victorian gothic’s supernatural elements make possible Wilde’s narration of Basil Hallward’s artistic rendering of Dorian Gray, the painting of whom functions as the basis for the ethical debate that undergirds much of the novel: should we, as human beings, pursue our id-driven desires for sensual gratification and external beauty for the price of a hideous soul? Wilde employs the paradoxical Lord Henry Wotton as the voice of The Picture of Dorian Gray’s moral deliberations and Dorian’s soul as the object of Lord Henry’s intellectual whimsy. In addition to calling into question the ethics of the aristocracy in his novel, Wilde avails himself of the Victorian gothic as a means for engendering a philosophical discourse on good and evil, as well as on the mysterious properties of the human soul.3 An ethical reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray not only allows us to speculate about Wilde’s moral aims in his depiction of Dorian’s increasingly repulsive soul, but also to interrogate the Victorian gothic as an ethical construct in itself. As with the novel itself—which John Stokes describes as being from ‘that bottomless pile of Gothic stories’ (1996, 37)—the character of Dorian Gray combines elements of aesthetic decadence with the Victorian gothic. As he roams through the ‘dim roar’ of the novel’s desolate London setting, Dorian vacillates between states of pronounced ennui and musical euphoria (Wilde 1991, 71). As Basil completes the portrait, for instance, the eternally posing Dorian complains of boredom: ‘You never open your lips while you

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Murdoch writes, ‘because judgments of value depend upon the will and choice of the individual’ (1985, 3). Postulating any meaning for goodness, then, requires individuals to render personal observations about the nature of this precarious expression and its role in their life decisions. Although Murdoch concedes that goodness essentially finds its origins in ‘the nature of concepts very central to morality such as justice, truthfulness, or humility’, she correctly maintains, nevertheless, that only individual codes of morality can determine personal representations of goodness (89). ‘Good is an empty space into which human choice may move’ (97), she asserts, and ‘the strange emptiness which often occurs at the moment of choosing’ underscores the degree of autonomy inherent in the act of making moral decisions (35). Individuals may also measure their personal conceptions of goodness in terms of its foul counterpart, evil, which Murdoch defines generally as ‘cynicism, cruelty, indifference to suffering’ (98). Again, though, as with good, evil finds its definition in the personal ethos constructed by individuals during their life experiences in the human community.2

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are painting’, he tells the artist, ‘and it is horribly dull standing on a platform and trying to look pleasant’ (1991, 83). Conversely, Wilde punctuates Dorian’s most intense life experiences, particular his aesthetic ones, with musical images. Talking to Dorian, Wilde writes, ‘was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow . . . with all the music of passion and youth’ (1991, 99). Dorian’s beauty informs every aspect of his persona, from his external appearance to his capacity for inspiring confidence in every person he encounters: ‘Yes, he was certainly handsome’, Wilde writes, ‘with his finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world’ (1991, 83). As an exquisite combination of youthful good looks and a pleasant outward demeanor, Dorian enjoys the worship of nearly everyone he meets, especially Basil and Lord Henry. While Dorian ultimately subscribes to Lord Henry’s ontology of new Hedonism, Basil proffers the moral philosophy that the young aesthete clearly—given the novel’s tragic conclusion— should have accepted. Devoted both to his craft as well as to his subject, Basil espouses a theory of moral beauty simply too realistic for Dorian to imbibe, stricken, as he is, with his ostensibly fleeting good looks. In sharp contrast with the fin-desiècle decadence that surrounds him, Basil’s philosophy of the soul argues for a healthy balance between our inner and outer selves, between our spiritual centres and the external images that we present to the world. ‘The harmony of the soul and the body’, Basil cautions, ‘we in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, and ideality that is void’ (1991, 79). In his portrait of Dorian, Basil clearly attempts to strike a balance between these two vital elements, so much so that he initially refuses to exhibit his latest creation and unleash it upon an aesthetically absorbed late-Victorian society. Basil fears, correctly, that the painting will consume ‘my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself’ (1991, 75). Perhaps even more troubling, the artist confesses that Dorian’s ‘personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style’ (1991, 78). This allencompassing sense of artistic style, a kind of decadence in itself, frightens the painter even more, for he perceives the unsettling wave of

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aestheticism that characterizes fin-de-siècle London, particularly evidenced by Lord Henry’s mindset.4 Unlike Basil, who champions a theory of moral beauty founded upon a balance between body and soul, Lord Henry advocates the separation between these two forms of experience. Lord Henry, in the words of Amanda Witt, ‘cultivates the attitude of observing his own life, rather than actually living it’ (1991, 91). At times a caricature of the disinterested upper class, Lord Henry subscribes to a range of effected homilies and aphorisms. In one instance, he proudly proclaims that ‘there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about’. The philosophy of new Hedonism that he delineates in the novel—and which Dorian, to his detriment, literally and figuratively absorbs—can only function by separating fully the spiritual from the corporeal self.5 ‘Beauty, real beauty’, Lord Henry remarks, ‘ends where an intellectual expression begins’ (1991, 72), adding that ‘Beauty is a form of Genius—is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation’ (1991, 88). Lord Henry’s decadent philosophy challenges its subscribers to elevate their desires for aesthetic experience and fulfillment over interpersonal consequences, to achieve a total separation between their ethical obligations to their community and their needs for self-indulgence: ‘I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream’, Lord Henry observes, then ‘I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediævalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal’ (1991, 85). Lord Henry’s late-Victorian philosophy of new Hedonism also proposes a striking counterpoint to notions of goodness as espoused by such contemporary moral philosophers as Murdoch, Nussbaum, McGinn and others. In Murdoch’s ethical paradigm, the concept of goodness relates to a given individual’s capacity for perceiving the ‘unself’, or that person living within us who attempts to approach the world with a ‘virtuous consciousness’. Such a lifestyle possesses the possibility of producing a beautiful soul. In Lord Henry’s philosophy, however, what matters is ‘one’s own life’, as opposed to the lives of the others with whom we live in community. New Hedonism, at least in Lord Henry’s postulation, urges its adherents to pursue pleasure at any cost.

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Delivered with the confidence and verbal precision of his station, Lord Henry’s aesthetic philosophy proves too enticing for the naïve and impressionable Dorian to ignore and serves as the catalyst for the Faustian bargain that he strikes in the novel. ‘A new Hedonism’, Lord Henry tells the young aesthete, ‘that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do. The world belongs to you for a season’ (1991, 88). Yet Dorian, inspired by Lord Henry’s philosophy, dares to possess the world for more than a mere season. While staring at his portrait, ‘the sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation. He had never felt it before’ (1991, 90). Fearing the day when time finally robs him of his youthful good looks, Dorian initially vows to kill himself when he grows old. For Dorian—with Lord Henry’s theory of beauty still ringing in his ears—living in anything other than a state of exalted beauty seems simply unfathomable: There would be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and colourless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed. The scarlet would pass away from his lips, and the gold steal from his hair. The life that was to make his soul would mar his body. He would become dreadful, hideous, and uncouth. (1991, 90)

Dorian soon finds himself unable to distinguish between himself and the picture, describing it as ‘part of myself’ and the ‘real Dorian’ (1991, 93-4). Unbeknownst to himself at the time, Dorian enters into a supernatural bargain of sorts

when he wishes he could change places with the picture: ‘If it were only the only the other way!’ he pleads. ‘If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that— for that—I would give everything!’ (1991, 90). The ethics of his Faustian transaction and of his absorption of Lord Henry’s philosophy only become known to Dorian after his brief association with Sybil Vane, an aspiring young workingclass actress from London’s East End. Night after night, Dorian watches as she performs in various Shakespearean plays, taking on a myriad of fictional identities while remaining, in Dorian’s envious words, ‘more than an individual’ (1991, 115), a beautiful soul in her own right. Unconcerned with her lower-class origins, Dorian falls in love with the youthful actress: ‘Sybil is the only thing I care about’, he tells Lord Henry. ‘What is it to me where she came from? From her head to her little feet, she is absolutely and entirely divine. Every night of my life I go to see her act, and every night she is more marvelous’ (1991, 114). In short, Dorian admires Sybil for her ability to create genuine, beautiful souls upon the stage. He reveres her capacity for taking fictional characters and imbuing them with the physical and spiritual aspects of real life that Dorian, whose external beauty depends on stasis for its endurance, simply cannot grasp. Yet Dorian’s love for Sybil collapses after she gives a lifeless performance in Romeo and Juliet. After the play, Sybil appears ‘transfigured with joy’ because her incipient relationship with Dorian had freed her ‘soul from prison’. Before encountering Dorian, the only reality that she knew existed on the stage; after meeting Dorian, however, ‘suddenly it dawned on my soul what it all meant’, she explains, vowing to give up the theatre and its artificiality (1991, 140-1). Dorian subsequently chastises Sybil for her change of heart, for her implicit denial of Lord Henry’s philosophy. After he leaves a distraught Sybil in her dressing room, Dorian strolls alone among London’s desolate gothic streets: ‘He remembered wandering through dimly-lit streets, past gaunt blackshadowed archways and evil-looking houses’, Wilde writes. ‘Women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after him. Drunkards had reeled by, cursing, and chattering to themselves like monstrous apes. He had seen grotesque children huddled under doorsteps, and heard shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts’ (1991, 143). When he returns home after experiencing his dark night of the aesthetic soul, Dorian perceives a change in Basil’s portrait of him, ‘a touch

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‘Individualism’, Lord Henry argues, ‘has really the higher aim’ than endeavouring to share in the ethical codes of one’s society (1991, 134). The philosophy of new Hedonism also eschews morality in favour of pleasurable experience. Although some experiences initially may be spiritually distressing or ethically unsatisfying, Lord Henry contends that their iteration should produce nothing but pleasure once the individual has inured his or her conscience to the soul-purging qualities of such experiences, no matter how sinful they may prove to be. ‘Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it [experience] as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid’, Lord Henry remarks. ‘But there was no motive power in experience’, he adds. ‘All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy’ (1991, 118).

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of cruelty in the mouth’ that had not existed there previously (1991, 144). Suddenly remembering his wish for eternal youth and its spiritual consequences, Dorian decides to return to Sybil in order to forestall the spiritual demolition of his soul. As he bathes in the warm glow of his romantic feelings for the young actress, Dorian repeats her name over and over again to the music of singing birds. ‘I want to be good’, he later tells Lord Henry. ‘I can’t bear the idea of my soul being hideous’ (1991, 149). After he learns of Sybil’s suicide, however, Dorian chooses to devote himself entirely to a lifestyle of hedonism in the tradition of Lord Henry’s philosophy. Having already tasted the pleasures of decadence, Dorian resolves to avail himself of sin with the knowledge that he can do so without being challenged by a guilty conscience: ‘Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins—he was to have all these things’, Wilde writes. ‘The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame’ (1991, 157). In this fashion, the picture becomes Dorian’s ethical doppelgänger, his wilful sacrifice for a decadent lifestyle and the means via which he will preserve his youth. Dorian embarks upon his life of debauchery with the aid of a book given to him by Lord Henry. Essentially a handbook for decadent living, the volume—a yellow, paper-covered French novel—influences Dorian’s progress toward total spiritual and ethical ruin. 6 ‘The whole book seemed to him’, Wilde writes, ‘to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it’ (1991, 174). With his new Hedonist education at the hands of Lord Henry complete, Dorian engages in a protracted life of crime and corrosive sensuality in gothic London. At the age of 25, Dorian’s aristocratic social standing begins to erode when an exclusive West End club threatens to blackball him. In addition to consorting with thieves and coiners, Dorian brawls with foreign sailors in the Whitechapel area. Suddenly the subject of numerous rumours and upper-class gossip, Dorian becomes associated with scandals involving the suicide of a ‘wretched boy in the Guards’ (1991, 193); the disappearance of Sir Henry Ashton, who fled England in disgrace; and the diminished reputations of the young Duke of Perth and the son of Lord Kent. ‘Women who had wildly adored him, and for his sake had braved all social censure and set convention at defiance’, Wilde writes, ‘were seen to grow pallid with shame or horror if Dorian Gray entered the room’ (1991, 186-7).

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In addition to his chosen life of crime and social iniquity, Dorian feeds his exaggerated licentious desires during his search for new arenas of sensual fulfillment. In one instance, he considers joining the Roman Catholic communion, not for spiritual reasons, but rather, because the ‘Roman ritual had always a great attraction for him’ (1991, 178). Dorian also becomes an avid collector of beautiful objects and searches for yet other venues for assuaging his aesthetic needs. At one juncture in the novel, Dorian devotes himself entirely to the study of music, constructing an elaborate room with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of olive-green lacquer in which to serenade himself with the pleasing strains of Schubert, Chopin and Beethoven. As a collector of sensual objects, Dorian accumulates perfumes from the Far East, painted gourds from Mexico, rare and expensive jewelry, tapestries and embroideries once housed in the palaces of Northern Europe, and various ecclesiastical vestments. Dorian assembles his orgy of material possessions to provide himself with a ‘means of forgetfulness’, Wilde writes, with ‘modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne’ (1991, 185). Hidden in the attic above his palatial London home lies the picture, which grows even more ghastly as Dorian’s evil exploits continue to mount. At 38, Dorian soothes his fears in opium dens in remote London, where ‘the heavy odour of opium met him’, Wilde writes. ‘He heaved a deep breath, and his nostrils quivered with pleasure’ (1991, 224). All the while, Dorian earns glowing praise for his decadent lifestyle and his lack of meaningful social or artistic endeavour from Lord Henry, his hedonist master and tutor.7 ‘You are the type of what the age is looking for, and what it is afraid it has found’, Lord Henry tells him. ‘I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets’ (1991, 248). Dorian’s life of debauchery begins to collapse, however, with the confluence of his murder of Basil and his dogged pursuit by James Vane, Sybil’s vengeful brother. Dorian kills Basil after the artist insists that the aesthete show him the picture of Dorian’s rotting soul. Basil reacts in horror as he glimpses the portrait of Dorian’s foul inner life being slowly corroded by ‘the leprosies of sin’ (1991, 199). After he stabs the artist to death for condemning his evil lifestyle, Dorian stares disinterestedly at Basil’s lifeless body as a woman on the

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After the Duchess’s brother accidentally kills James during a shooting-party the next day, Dorian experiences a ‘cataleptic impression’—a cognitive, philosophical phenomenon that, according to Nussbaum in Love’s Knowledge, ‘has the power, just through its own felt quality, to drag us to assent, to convince us that things could not be otherwise. It is defined as a mark or impress upon the soul’ (1990, 265). Relieved to have survived James’s efforts at revenge, Dorian resolves to devote himself to goodness. ‘I wish I could love’, he tells Lord Henry. ‘But I seem to have lost the passion and forgotten the desire. I am too much concentrated on myself’ (1991, 238). Despite Lord Henry’s considerable protests, Dorian demonstrates his intentions to adopt an ethical lifestyle by opting not to destroy the innocence of Hetty Morton, a girl in the village near the Duchess’s estate. Shocked by his sudden change of heart, Dorian ‘determined to leave her as flower-like as I had found her’ (1991, 243). As Dorian symbolically rises from the piano—the producer of the sensual music that served as the soundtrack for his evil life—he confesses to Lord Henry that ‘I am going to be good’ and that ‘I am a little changed already’ (1991, 249). Yet when he later checks the picture for evidence of his ethical renewal, he discovers ‘no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite’, Wilde writes. ‘The thing was still loathsome—more loathsome, if possible, than before’ (1991, 252). Rather than being the product of a genuine shift in moral attitude, Dorian’s aspirations toward

goodness result from his own vanity, as well as from his apprehension regarding the potential loss of the self that he adores above all others in his community. In this manner, the novel’s faux cataleptic impression confronts readers—and perhaps Dorian himself—with an unusual ethical construct, the anti-epiphany. Stultified by his own hypocrisy and his ‘mask of goodness’, Dorian chooses to destroy his decaying soul: He ‘would kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free’, Wilde writes. Dorian ‘would kill this monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace’ (1991, 253). Taking up the knife that he used to murder Basil, Dorian stabs at the picture. After servants hear an agonized cry and a ‘crash’, they enter the attic and discover a splendid portrait of their master in all ‘his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor’, Wilde writes, ‘was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage’ (1991, 254). By attempting to eradicate the picture that serves as a record of his unethical life, Dorian succeeds in destroying himself. While the novel’s deus ex machina conclusion, a virtual cliché of gothic fiction in general, suggests a number of narrative possibilities,8 Dorian’s supernatural demise nevertheless results directly from his Faustian bargain and the ethically vacuous existence that he deliberately pursues. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian’s adherence to Lord Henry’s hedonist philosophy clearly manifests itself in his spiritual and physical destruction. Dorian’s soul expires, William Buckler astutely observes, because of the ‘inevitable consequence, not of aestheticism, but of an ugly, self-deceiving, all-devouring vanity that leads the protagonist to heartless cruelty, murder, blackmail, and suicide’ (1991, 140). Wilde employs the Victorian gothic as the express means through which he characterizes the corrosion and ultimate demise of Dorian’s soul. Because Wilde relies on the supernatural and the grotesque as means for narrating Dorian’s spiritual digression in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Victorian gothic clearly operates as an ethical construct in Wilde’s novel. Ethical criticism, with its interest in exploring the trials and tribulations of human experience and their intersections with the act of reading, simply affords us with a mechanism for recognizing a given writer’s humanistic agenda. In The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind, Cora Diamond argues that through ethical criticism ‘we can come to be aware of what makes for deeper understanding and an enriching of our

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street sings in a hoarse voice. By murdering Basil, Dorian attempts to rid himself once and for all of the artist’s irritating moral influence. As Stephen Arata observes in Fictions of Loss in the Victorian fin de siècle, ‘The contrast between the lovely Dorian and the hideous portrait can be taken to stand for the difference between Henry’s ethic and Basil’s’ (1996, 64). In this instance, Henry’s hedonistic philosophy wins out yet again. Dorian finally begins to re-evaluate his decadent existence after experiencing James’s stubborn effort to exact revenge for the untimely death of his sister. After spotting him in a London opium den, James follows Dorian to a social occasion at the home of the Duchess of Monmouth. James startles Dorian into a ‘death-like swoon’ after pressing his face against the window of the conservatory. ‘The consciousness of being hunted, snared, tracked down, had begun to dominate him’, Wilde writes (1991, 233-4), and Dorian conceals himself in the Duchess’s house.

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own thought and experience; we can come to have a sense of what is alive, and what is shallow, sentimental, cheap’. The ethical critique of literature reminds us, moreover, that ‘it is our actions, our choices, which give a particular shape to the life we lead; to be able to lead whatever the good life for a human being is is to be able to make such choices well’ (Diamond 1991, 303, 373). In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde avails himself of the Victorian Gothic in a stunning depiction of what transpires when human beings make ineffectual choices and sacrifice their own senses of moral beauty by elevating the aesthetic pleasures of the body over the spiritual needs of the soul.

Notes 1. In ‘Ethics and Aesthetics in The Picture of Dorian Gray,’ Michael Patrick Gillespie offers yet another ethical critique of Wilde’s novel, although, as with McGinn, he fails to consider the role of the Victorian gothic as the engine of the novelist’s moral debate regarding the sanctity of the human soul, opting instead to read the novel in terms of the ethical nature of its aesthetic elements: ‘Through the actions of its characters’, Gillespie writes, The Picture of Dorian Gray’s ‘discourse establishes within us a sense of the wide-ranging aesthetic force that ethics exerts upon a work of art. Furthermore, Wilde’s novel gives us the opportunity to enhance the mix of our aesthetic and ethical views by extending our sense of the possibilities for interpretation beyond those delineated by our immediate hermeneutic system’ (1994, 153-4). 2. For a useful definition of ‘ethics’ and discussion of its emergence as a viable reading paradigm during the past decade, see Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s chapter on ‘Ethics’ in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin’s Critical Terms for Literary Study (2nd edn, 1995). ‘Understanding the plot of a narrative’, Harpham writes, ‘we enter into ethics. Ethics will always be at the flashpoint of conflicts and struggles’, he continues, ‘because such encounters never run smooth’ (1995, 404). As Wayne C. Booth observes in The Company We Keep: an Ethics of Fiction, ‘the word “ethical” may mistakenly suggest a project concentrating on quite limited moral standards: of honesty, perhaps, or of decency or tolerance’. In Booth’s postulation of an ethical criticism, however, ‘ethical’ refers to ‘the entire range of effects on the “character” or “person” or “self”. “Moral” judgments are only a small part of it’ (1988, 8). 3. In Fictions of Loss in the Victorian fin de siècle, Stephen Arata rejects the notion that Wilde appropriates an ethical rhetoric in The Picture of Dorian Gray, contending that ‘here as elsewhere Wilde rejects humanistic notions of the organic and autonomous individual’ (1996, 61). Yet a comparison of Wilde’s divergent characterizations of the competing ethics of Lord Henry and Basil suggests otherwise. Wilde clearly derides Lord Henry’s ambiguous philosophy of new Hedonism through its expositor’s pompous and malformed discourse, while arguing in favour of Basil’s theory of moral beauty through the devastation, and ultimately the death of, Dorian’s soul.

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4. In this instance, Basil clearly fears the rise of aestheticism because he senses the erosion of the ethical and cultural value systems of his community, a process that William Greenslade describes as ‘degeneration’ in Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880-1940. ‘Such fears at the fin de siècle were at work shaping institutional practices—medical, psychiatric, political—and their assumptions’, Greenslade writes. ‘Degeneration facilitated discourses of sometimes crude differentiation: between the normal and the abnormal, the healthy and morbid, the “fit” and “unfit”, the civilized and the primitive. Degeneration’, he adds, ‘was, in part, an enabling strategy by which the conventional and respectable classes could justify and articulate their hostility to the deviant, the diseased, and the subversive’ (1994, 2). Despite his espousal of a new Hedonism, Lord Henry also registers anxiety about the lower classes and the disenfranchised in The Picture of Dorian Gray. As an anti-Hedonist, Basil ironically demonstrates little affinity for the practices of degeneration and proves to be remarkably tolerant of the lower classes, particularly evinced by his enthusiastic approval of Dorian’s relationship with Sybil. 5. In Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity, Gillespie reminds us of the illogic inherent in Lord Henry’s philosophy, an anti-ethical system with little concern for consistency or reason. ‘As the novel progresses’, Gillespie writes, ‘one finds that each of these points of view contributes to a more detailed illumination of the discourse and in doing so blunts inclinations to privilege any one of these perspectives over the others. New Hedonism in fact defines itself only through the symbiotic support of multiple systems of values, and any effort to view it in isolation would prove reductive’ (1994, 61). 6. In Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellmann speculates about the book’s identity. At his trial, Wilde conceded that the mystery book was Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884), although it also has thematic similarities to Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). According to Ellmann, in the first draft of The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde entitled the book Le Secret de Raoul, by Catulle Sarrazin. ‘This author’, Ellmann writes, ‘was a blend of Catulle Mendès, whom he had known for some years, and Gabriel Sarrazin, whom he met in September 1888, and the name of ‘Raoul’ came from Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus’ (1988, 316). 7. In Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles, and Imitations, John Stokes notes the interesting similarities in the interpersonal dynamics of the relationships between Lord Henry and Dorian and between Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, the novelist’s youthful lover and aesthetic protégé (1996, 11). 8. For a thorough analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray’s sudden and mysterious conclusion, see McGinn’s Ethics, Evil, and Fiction. ‘What Wilde has done is to condense the general theme of his book into this final scene’, McGinn argues, ‘giving it literal expression, so that Dorian’s odd ambiguous status, suspended between life and art, is represented’ (1997, 135).

Bibliography Arata, Stephen. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian fin de siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Beckson, Karl. The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia. New York: AMS, 1998.

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Corelli, Marie. The Sorrows of Satan, or the Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire: a Romance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Diamond, Cora. The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. Cambridge: MIT, 1991. Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Vintage, 1988. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. ‘Ethics and Aesthetics in The Picture of Dorian Gray’. Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. Ed. C. George Sandulescu. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994. 137-55. Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. ‘Ethics’. Critical Terms for Literary Study. Eds Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 387-405. Lowndes, Marie Belloc. The Lodger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Machen, Arthur. The Three Impostors. New York: Knopf, 1930. Marsh, Richard. The Beetle. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976. McGinn, Colin. Ethics, Evil, and Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. 1970. London: Ark, 1985. Norton, Robert E. The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Stokes, John. Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles, and Imitations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Wilde, Oscar. Plays, Prose Writings, and Poems. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1991.

FURTHER READING Biography Laver, James. Oscar Wilde. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1954. 32 p. Succinct biography of Wilde. Includes a bibliography.

Criticism Backus, Margot Gayle. “Homophobia and the Imperial Demon Lover: Gothic Narrativity in Irish Representations of the Great War.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 21, no. 4 (March-June 1994): 45-63. Explores the underlying motifs of demonized homosexuality and “the Gothic reunion of the self with some incomprehensible, unspeakable thing from which it has been divided” in The Picture of Dorian Gray and several other contemporaneous works of Anglo-Irish fiction.

Charlesworth, Barbara. “Oscar Wilde.” In Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature, pp. 53-80. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965. Biographical reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Clark, Bruce B. “A Burnt Child Loves the Fire: Oscar Wilde’s Search for Ultimate Meanings in Life.” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 4, no. 3 (1981): 225-47. Calls The Picture of Dorian Gray the most important of Wilde’s works in explicating his thoughts on reality and literary meaning. Clausson, Nils. “‘Culture and Corruption’: Paterian SelfDevelopment versus Gothic Degeneration in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Papers on Language and Literature 39, no. 4 (fall 2003): 339-64. Argues that in The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde endeavored to merge a Gothic plot of decadence and degeneration with themes of self-development and (homo)sexual liberation inspired by the writings of Walter Pater. Cohen, Philip K. “The Crucible: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Intentions.” In The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde, pp. 105-55. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978. Suggests that in The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde fully explored the potential tragedy that was circumvented in his satiric short story “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” maintaining that in the essays of Intentions Wilde sought to establish a middle ground between the repression and hypocrisy portrayed in the story and the hedonistic abandon depicted in the novel. Dickson, Donald R. “‘In a Mirror That Mirrors the Soul’: Masks and Mirrors in Dorian Gray.” English Literature in Transition: 1880-1920 26, no. 1 (1983): 5-15. Considers “the notion of mirror images that reflect masks of characters” with regard to the subtle aesthetic design of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dryden, Linda. “Oscar Wilde: Gothic Ironies and Terrible Dualities.” In The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells, edited by Laurence Davies, pp. 110-45. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Analyzes The Picture of Dorian Gray within the genre traditions of Gothic horror and literary Decadence, particularly highlighting affinities between Wilde’s novel and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ericksen, Donald H. “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” In Oscar Wilde, pp. 96-117. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977. Discusses the sources, plot, critical reception, characterization, imagery, language, and setting of Wilde’s novel. Gomel, Elana. “Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the (Un)Death of the Author.” Narrative 12, no. 1 (January 2004): 74-92. Interprets The Picture of Dorian Gray as it traces parallels between the narrative themes of fin de siècle Gothic fantasy and postmodern theory concerning authorship, identity, and textuality. Jullian, Philippe. “Dorian Gray.” In Oscar Wilde, translated by Violet Wyndham, pp. 213-23. London: Constable, 1969.

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Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: an Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

WILDE

Enumerates some of the diverse literary and social influences on The Picture of Dorian Gray and summarizes the effect of the novel’s publication on Wilde’s career and personal reputation.

Zeender, Marie-Noëlle. “John Melmoth and Dorian Gray: The Two-Faced Mirror.” In Rediscovering Oscar Wilde, edited by C. George Sandulescu, pp. 432-40. Gerrards Cross, England: Smythe, 1994.

Kohl, Norbert. “Culture and Corruption: The Picture of Dorian Gray.” In Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel, translated by David Henry Wilson, pp. 138-75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Compares the themes, characterizations, and centralizing motif of the two-faced mirror in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.

Attempts to account for the “continued interest in and varied reception of Dorian Gray” through an examination of the novel’s origins, structures, setting, themes, and characterizations. Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde’s Parable of the Fall.” In Contraries: Essays, pp. 3-16. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Contends that “Wilde’s novel must be seen as a highly serious meditation upon the moral role of the artist,” regarding its theme as “the Fall—the Fall of innocence and its consequences, the corruption of ‘natural’ life by a sudden irrevocable consciousness (symbolized by Dorian’s infatuation with himself).” Pappas, John J. “The Flower and the Beast: A Study of Oscar Wilde’s Antithetical Attitudes toward Nature and Man in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” English Literature in Transition 15, no. 1. (1972): 37-48. Examines The Picture of Dorian Gray for expressions of antipathy toward nature as well as toward the place of humans in the natural world. Riquelme, John Paul. “Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Gothic: Walter Pater, Dark Enlightenment, and The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 3 (fall 2000): 609-31. Investigates The Picture of Dorian Gray as a novel that blends various literary sensibilities, tropes, and structuring principles, including Gothic doubling, Paterian aestheticism, mythic allusion, and the technique of chiaroscuro.

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Ziolkowski, Theodore. “Image as Motif: The Haunted Portrait.” In Disenchanted Images: Literary Iconology, pp. 78-148. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977. Includes commentary on The Picture of Dorian Gray in a chapter devoted to supernatural occurrences involving portraits in fiction.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE: Additional coverage of Wilde’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 49; Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 15; British Writers, Vol. 5; British Writers: The Classics, Vols. 1, 2; British Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 2; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1890-1914; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 104, 119; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, 112; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 10, 19, 34, 57, 141, 156, 190; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Dramatists, Most-studied Authors, and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Drama Criticism, Vol. 17; Drama for Students, Vols. 4, 8, 9; Exploring Short Stories; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Novels for Students, Vol. 20; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers; Short Stories for Students, Vol. 7; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 11, 77; Something About the Author, Vol. 24; Supernatural Fiction Writers; Twayne’s English Authors; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vols. 1, 8, 23, 41; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 4; World Literature Criticism; and Writers for Children.

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A Abaellino (Zschokke) 1: 499–500 Abartis, Caesarea 2: 115–20 The Abbess (Ireland) 3: 199 The Abbot (Scott) 3: 307, 310 Abbotsford 1: 502, 503, 504 “Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht” (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 395–96 Abercrombie, Dr. 1: 333–35 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner) 2: 293–94, (sidebar) 304 Beardsley, Aubrey and 2: 299

Faustian legend 2: 302 sexuality 2: 303 Abyss (motif) 3: 480–83 “Act 1” (Boaden) 1: 394–98 “Adam Bell” (Hogg) 2: 422 Addison, Agnes 1: 486–90 Addison, Augustan 1: 41, 44–45 “An Address to the Muses” (Baillie) 2: 67 “Address to the Reader” (Reeve) 1: 113–15 “Addresses to the Night” (Baillie) 2: 56 Adelgitha; or The Fruits of a Single Error (Lewis) 3: 44–45 Adventure fiction 3: 359 “An Adventure of Hardress Fitzgerald” (Le Fanu) 3: 7 “The Adventure of My Aunt” (Irving) 2: 452 “The Adventure of the German Student” (Irving) 2: 442–46 as ambiguous gothic 2: 452–53 burlesque 2: 454 parody 2: 458–59 psychological gothicism of 2: 450–51 sexual innuendo 2: 456–58 The Adventure of the Popkins Family” (Irving) 2: 452 The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (Smollet) 1: 1–2, 5 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 3: 158 “Advertisement” (Brown) 2: 155–56

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

“Advertisement to the History of Good Breeding” (Walpole) 3: 446 Aedes Walpolianae (Walpole) 3: 430, 446 Aestheticism 1: 107–8 in eighteenth-century Europe 1: 48–57 Wharton, Edith 3: 468–69 Wilde, Oscar 3: 487, 489, 493– 99, 511–16 African American experience 1: 108, 118–27, 180–92; 3: 146–48 After Dark (Collins) 2: 220 “After Holbein” (Wharton) 3: 459 “The Aftermath of Gothic Fiction” (Lovecraft) 1: 260–64 “Afterward” (Wharton) 3: 459, 468, 469, 471 “Afterword: Reflections on the Grotesque” (Oates) (sidebar) 3: 179 “Against Gothic” (Clery) 3: 437–42 “Against Nature” (Oates) 3: 182 Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (Brownmiller) 1: 216 Agapida, Fray Antonio. See Irving, Washington The Age of Innocence (Wharton) 3: 458, 459–60, 483 “Age of Lead” (Atwood) 2: 11 Aikin, John 1: 2, 4–7, (sidebar) 7, 46 Ainsworth, William Harrison (sidebar) 1: 94, 95

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SUBJECT INDEX

The Subject Index includes the authors and titles that appear in the Author Index and the Title Index as well as the names of other authors and figures that are discussed in the Gothic Literature set. The Subject Index also lists literary terms and topics covered in the criticism. The index provides page numbers or page ranges where subjects are discussed and is fully cross referenced. Page references to significant discussions of authors, titles, or subjects appear in boldface; page references to illustrations appear in italic.

SUBJECT INDEX

AL AARAAF, TAMERLANE, AND MINOR POEMS

Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (Poe) 3: 187 “Alastor” (Shelley, P.) 1: 24 The Albigenses (Maturin) 3: 74, 79–81, 84 Alcott, Louisa May Angel in the House 1: 203–4 compared to Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 175 social violence 1: 197–206 Alcuin (Brown) 2: 153–54, 159 The Alhambra (Irving) 2: 442 Alias Grace (Atwood) 2: 2–3 “Alice Doane’s Appeal” (Hawthorne) 2: 371 “Alkmene” (Dinesen) 2: 276 “‘All She Said Was “Yes”’” (Jackson) 1: 277 “All Souls” (Wharton) 3: 467, 468, 469, 471, 473–74 Allegory 1: 69–73 Allston, Washington (sidebar) 1: 522, 523, 524 Alnwick 1: 494–96 “The Altar of the Dead” (James) 2: 466–67 The Ambassadors (James) 2: 462 Ambiguous Gothic Irving, Washington 2: 453–55 The Island of Dr Moreau 1: 164 Mysteries of Winterthurn 3: 176 psychoanalysis 2: 412–17 “Der Sandmann” 2: 412 “Ambitious Nature of Man” (Godwin) 2: 324–27 The American (James) 2: 462, 472 American Appetites (Oates) 3: 165 American culture 3: 168–77 “American Female Gothic” (Showalter) 1: 210–20 American Gothic (painting) 1: 73, 73–74 American Gothic tradition 1: 57–74 Brown, Charles Brockden 2: 156–62 compared to medieval literature 2: 298–99 cultural identity in 1: 121–27 vs. European Gothic tradition 1: 57–65; 2: 156–58 Faulkner, Wiliam 2: 298–305 fear 1: 65 feminist literary theory 1: 210–19 founding authors 1: 2; 2: 158 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 1: 212–15 grotesques 2: 300–301 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 368–77 historiography of 1: 68–69 iconography of 2: 301 Irving, Washington 2: 443, 446–51, 451–55 King, Stephen 2: 494–99

538

Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 168–84 Otherness in 1: 67–74 painting and 1: 518–25 patterns 2: 301–3 psychological horror 2: 299 Rice, Anne 3: 279–85 Salem witch trials 1: 62–65 Southern Gothic 2: 300–306 theological debate in 3: 277–78 women writers 1: 210–19 See also Gothic movement American International Pictures 1: 429 “American Literature—Dr. Channing” (Hazlitt) (sidebar) 2: 163 American Mineralogical Society 2: 165 American Psycho (Ellis) 1: 36–38 American realism, Gross Clinic (painting) 1: 519 American Review and Literary Journal 2: 162–64 The American Scene (James) 2: 472 “An Analysis of The Monk and Its German Sources” (Conger) 2: 349–54 Ancient literature 1: 16 Andrézel, Pierre. See Dinesen, Isak Andriano, Joseph 2: 411–19 Anecdotes of Painting (Walpole) 3: 446–47 “The Angel at the Grave” (Wharton) 3: 468 Angel in the House 1: 131, 203–4 The Angelic Avengers (Dinesen) 2: 258, 263 The Animals in That Country (Atwood) 2: 2 Animism 3: 243–44 “Ann Radcliffe” (Scott) (sidebar) 3: 238 Anne of Geierstein (Scott) 3: 311, 312, 315 “Anne Rice: Raising Holy Hell, Harlequin Style” (Ingebretsen) 3: 277–86 Antebellum period 1: 180–92, 520 Anti-Catholicism. See Catholicism The Antiquary (Scott) 1: 96–97; 3: 299, 314 Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome (Collins) 2: 201–2, 206–10 Anxiety. See Fear “An Apology for The Monk” (A Friend to Genius) 3: 48–51 Appel, Alfred 2: 300–301 The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories (du Maurier) 2: 279 “L’Apres-midi-d’un faune” (Faulkner) 2: 293 Apuleius 1: 20–21 Arbus, Diane 1: 215 Archetypes Gothic fiction 3: 464–65

King, Stephen 2: 485 “Pomegranate See d” 3: 464–66 Prometheus 3: 338–42 “Der Sandman” 2: 413–14 Architecture 1: 40–41, 52, 475–76, 486–506; 2: 252–55 Alnwick renovation 1: 494–96 American 1: 497–505 castles 1: 492–94 Cottingham, L. N. (sidebar) 1: 497 European history 1: 490–96; 3: 142–43 gargoyles 1: 482 Gilmor, Robert III 1: 502–5 Glen Ellen 1: 504 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 2: 344–49 Gothic revival 1: 477–78, 486– 89, 497–505 in Gothic Wood 1: 73–74 grotesques 1: 483 houses 3: 143–44 imagination in 1: 483–84 inclusion of the ugly 1: 483 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry 1: 498–99 as metaphor 1: 69–70, 72; 2: 242–45, 301, 344–48 as motif 3: 315–16 naturalism and 1: 482–83 nineteenth-century attitude toward 1: 487–88 in Northanger Abbey 2: 41–45 origins 1: 480 physical restrictions 1: 481–82 relationship to literature 1: 480–86, 497–505 religious buildings 1: 510–11, 511–13 repetition 1: 484–85 Romantic attitude toward 1: 486–87, 488 Scott, Sir Walter 3: 315–16 spiritual world and 1: 482 Strawberry Hill 1: 58, 502–3; 3: 430, 442, 447–48 as sublime 1: 55–56 supernatural and 1: 481, 484; 3: 315 Wadsworth, Daniel 1: 499 written histories 1: 497–98 Aristocracy Decadent Aristocrat 3: 189 “The Fall of the House of Usher” 3: 221 family curse and 1: 294–96 vampires 1: 344, 350 Wharton, Edith 3: 448, 466–68 Armadale (Collins, Wilkie) 1: 88 Armageddon in films 1: 430 Art 1: 506–26 Christianity and 1: 507

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

THE BETROTHED

B Bachman, Richard. See King, Stephen Backsheider, Paula 1: 410 A Backward Glance (Wharton) 3: 469, 476–80 Bag of Bones (King) 2: 482 Bailey, Thomas Aldrich 1: 504–5 Baillie, Joanna 2: 49, 49–77 compared to Wollstonecraft, Mary 2: 63 on human nature 2: 51–54, 56–57 madness as theme 1: 340–41 obituary (sidebar) 2: 55 principal works 2: 50–51 on utopia 2: 63–65 witchcraft 2: 69–73 Baillie, John 1: 56 Bailyn, Bernard 1: 121–22 Baldick, Chris 3: 84–91, 219–20 “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (Wilde) 1: 34 The Ballad of Reading Gaol,and Other Poems (Wilde) 3: 488, 499 Balzac, Honoré de 3: 100–103 Banshees (musical group) 1: 470–71 Baptiste, Jean 1: 291–92 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia (Aikin) 1: 2, 4–7, (sidebar) 7, 46; 3: 24–25, 443 “The Barber of Duncow” (Hogg) 2: 422 Barker, Clive 1: 287–90, (sidebar) 411 Barker, Martin 2: 184 Barkham, John 2: 282–83 Barnaby Rudge (Dickens) 2: 252 Barnes, Djuna 2: 188 “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville) 3: 108 compared to “The Fall of the House of Usher” 3: 122–23 Gothic language 3: 124 landscape motif 3: 123–24 modernity of 3: 122–24 Basil (Baillie) 2: 50, 54 Basil: A Story of Modern Life (Collins) 2: 205, 214 Basilique de Saint-Denis 1: 479 “The Battle of Evermore” (song) 1: 463 Baudelaire, Charles 3: 99–100 Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda 1: 480–86 “The Beach of Falesá” (Stevenson) 3: 360–61 Beardsley, Aubrey 2: 299 “The Beast in the Jungle” (James) 2: 466–70, 471 Beating fantasy 3: 329, 330 Beattie, James 1: 50, 51, 220 “The Beauties” (Walpole) 3: 446

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (Oates) 3: 165 Beckett, Samuel 1: 31, 38–39 Beckford, William 2: 79, 79–102 Fonthill Abbey 2: 85–86 Henley, Samuel and 2: 87–88 homosexuality 2: 87, 98 Oriental tales 1: 260–61; 2: 88–89 principal works 2: 81 self-identity 2: 95–101 “Becoming an Author in 1848: History and the Gothic in the Early Works of Wilkie Collins” (Heller, Tamar) 2: 205–10 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (sidebar) 1: 377 “Bela Lugosi’s Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Either: Goth and the Glorification of Suffering in Rock Music” (Hannaham) 1: 468–73 Belinda (Edgeworth) 1: 207 Bell, Currer. See Bronte¨, Charlotte Bell, Ellis. See Bronte¨, Emily The Bell Jar (Plath) 1: 215–16 Bell, Michael Davitt 2: 451–56 “The Bell Tower” (Melville) 3: 108, 110–11, (sidebar) 111, 113 La Belle Dame sans Merci (Keats) 1: 19 Bellefleur (Oates) 3: 163–65, 177, 179 American culture 3: 172–74, 178 American Gothic tradition 3: 172–74 castle as Gothic convention 3: 172 sexuality 3: 173 Beloved (Morrison) 3: 136 Atwood, Margaret on 3: 149 Echo mythology 3: 140 excerpt (sidebar) 3: 151 ”Foreword” 3: 137–38 ghosts 3: 138 house in 3: 144–47 as slave narrative 3: 146–47 trauma in 3: 150–60 Belshazzar’s Feast (painting) 1: 524 Benedict, Williston R. 2: 429–32 “Benito Cereno” (Melville) 3: 108, 113, 119–22 “Berenice” (Poe) 3: 189, 203–4 Bergman, Ingrid 2: 468 “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 399 Berkman, Sylvia 2: 283–84 Berry, Mary 3: 430–31 Bertram; or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (Maturin) 1: 337–38, 407–8, 499, 500; 3: 74, 84 Bessborough, Lady 2: 85–86 The Betrothed (Scott) 3: 311, 314

539

SUBJECT INDEX

Middle Ages attitude toward 1: 507–12 religious influence on 1: 512–13 sculpture 1: 475–76, 511–17 “The Art of Fiction” (James) 2: 467 The Art of the Novel (James) 2: 473 Arthur Mervyn (Brown) 2: 154, 159–62, 168 “Artist of the Beautiful” (Hawthorne) 2: 381 Arvin, Newton 3: 111–19, 118 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) 2: 293–95, 304 Askew, Alice and Claude 1: 362, 365 “Aspects of the Supernatural in the Shorter Fiction of James Hogg” (Mack) 2: 425–28 The Assassins (Oates) 3: 164 “The Assassins” (Shelley, P.) 1: 9–12 The Assignation (Oates) 3: 179–80 Astoria; or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains (Irving) 2: 442–43 “At Home All Was Blood and Feathers: The Werewolf in the Kitchen—Angela Carter and Horror” (Wisker) 2: 182–90 “At the Tourist Centre in Boston” (Atwood) 2: 9 The Athenaeum (periodical) 3: 393 “Atrophy” (Wharton) 3: 471 “Atwood Gothic” (Mandel) 2: 5–10 Atwood, Margaret 2: 1, 1–24 on Beloved 3: 149 portrayal of women 2: 189 principal works 2: 3–4 “Atwoodian Gothic: From Lady Oracle to The Robber Bride” (Howells) 2: 10–17 Auerbach, Nina 1: 203–4, 361–76; 3: 20 Austen, Jane 1: 74–76, 80–81, 221–22; 2: 25, 25–47, 236 Atwood, Margaret and 2: 3 principal works 2: 27 Radcliffe, Ann and 2: 36–40 Austen-Leigh, R. A. 2: 32 Austen-Leigh, William 2: 32 “Austen’s Sense and Radcliffe’s Sensibility” (Conger) 2: 35–40 “The Author in the Novel: Creating Beckford in Vathek” (Gill) 2: 95–101 “Automata” (Hoffmann). See “Die Automate” (Hoffmann) “Die Automate” (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 395 “Aylmer Vance and the Vampire” (Askew) 1: 362, 365 Azemia (Beckford) 2: 80

SUBJECT INDEX

BEUMEIER, BEATE

Beumeier, Beate 2: 194–200 Beutel, Katherine Piller 3: 138–42 “Bewitched” (Wharton) 3: 457, 459 “Beyond Blood: Defeating the Inner Vampire” (Valente) 3: 415–27 “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud) 1: 87 Bhabba, Homi 3: 151–52 Bierce, Ambrose 1: 198, (sidebar) 199 The Big Sleep (Chandler) 1: 36 The Big Sleep (film) (Faulkner) 2: 294 Bildungsroman 2: 246–48 Billy Budd (Melville) 3: 109, 111–12 Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (Beckford) 2: 79 “The Birds” (du Maurier) 2: 280, 283–84 The Bird’s Nest (Jackson) 1: 276 Birkhead, Edith 1: 16–21, (sidebar) 3: 246 “The Birthmark” (Hawthorne) 2: 365, 375 “Black Andie’s Tale of Tod Lapraik” (Stevenson) 3: 360 The Black Book (Morrison) 3: 146 “The Black Cat” (Poe) 3: 188–89, 189, 213 The Black Dwarf (Scott) 3: 307, 315 Black House (King) 2: 482, 487, 491–93 The Black Robe (Collins) 2: 202, 217–26 Black Venus (Carter) 2: 180, 183 Black Water (Oates) 3: 165 “The Blackness of Darkness: E. A. Poe and the Development of the Gothic” (Fiedler) 3: 205–11 Blackstone, William 1: 224–25 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1: 25 review of Die Elixiere des Teufels 2: 391–92 review of Melmoth the Wanderer (sidebar) 3: 98 Blair, Hugh 1: 45 Blair, Robert 1: 53 Blake, William engravings of (sidebar) 1: 487 influence on Faulkner, William 2: 306–12 Prometheus mythology 3: 339 Blatty, W. P. 1: 450 Bleak House (Dickens) 2: 229–30, 237, 242–45 Bleiler, E. F. 1: 351; 2: 85–89, 393–401 The Blind Assassin (Atwood) 2: 2–3, 3

540

The Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne) 2: 364, 371 Blixen, Tania. See Dinesen, Isak Blood Canticle (Rice) 3: 264 Blood Is Not Enough (Datlow) 1: 366–67 A Bloodsmoor Romance (Oates) 3: 163–65, 177 American culture 3: 178 compared to Little Women 3: 175 fetishism 3: 174 heroines 3: 174–75 “Bloodstains” (Oates) 3: 180–81, 182–83 “The Bloody Chamber” (Carter) 2: 182, 187 The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Carter) 2: 180–83, 187–88, 199 Bloom, Harold 3: 337–42 “Blue-Bearded Lover” (Oates) 3: 179–80 Bluebeard’s Egg (Atwood) 2: 11 Blues (music) 1: 369, 464 The Bluest Eye (Morrison) 3: 135–36, 144, 148 Blythe, David Gilmour 1: 524 Boaden, James 1: 394–98, (sidebar) 399, 413–15 “Bodies” (Oates) 3: 183 Bodily Harm (Atwood) 2: 11, 189 The Body Snatcher (film) 1: 400 “The Body-Snatcher” (Stevenson) 3: 360 Boileau, Etienne 1: 515–16 Boileau, Nicolas 1: 41, 44, 148 “The Bold Dragoon” (Irving) 2: 449 Booker Prize 2: 2 The Bookman (periodical) (sidebar) 3: 405 Borges, Jorges Luis 2: 9; 3: 179 Bosch, Hieronymous 3: 53–60 The Bostonians (James) 2: 462 Botting, Fred 1: 21–30, 48–57; 2: 215–17; 3: 348–56 “The Bottle Imp” (Stevenson) 3: 360, 362–64 “A Bottle of Perrier” (Wharton) 3: 459, 467, 468, 471 Boulger, James 3: 92 Bowen, Elizabeth 1: 173–79, (sidebar) 333 Bowen’s Court (Bowen) 1: 173–79 Boz. See Dickens, Charles “Boz’s Gothic Gargoyles” (Hollington) (sidebar) 2: 252 Bracebridge Hall; or, The Humorists: A Medley (Irving) 2: 442, 447, (sidebar) 450 Bradbury, Ray (sidebar) 1: 172 Braddon, May Elizabeth 1: 354 Brantly, Susan C. 2: 269–78

The Bravo of Venice (Lewis) 3: 43–44 Brennan, Matthew C. 3: 372–82 Breve fra Afrika (Dinesen) 2: 258 Brewster, David 1: 334 “The Bridal of Polmood” (Hogg) 2: 437 The Bride of Lammermoor (Scott) 1: 25; 3: 300, 312, 314 The British Critic (periodical) 2: 327 Brockway, James (sidebar) 2: 191 Bromley Contingent 1: 470–71 Bronte¨, Charlotte 2: 103, 103–30 compared to Bronte¨, Emily 2: 104 compared to Wharton, Edith 3: 480 depravity 2: 115 Gothic conventions 2: 108–9, 111–13, 121–27 heroines 2: 107–14 influence of Lewis, Matthew Gregory 2: 122–27 principal works 2: 105 Bronte¨, Emily 1: 262–63, 331; 2: 131, 131–51 compared to Bronte¨, Charlotte 2: 104 influence of Byron, Lord George Gordon 2: 145 principal works 2: 133 Brook Farm 2: 364 Brooke-Rose, Christine 2: 410 Bross, Addison 2: 299 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevski) 1: 315 Brown, Charles Brockden 1: 2; 2: 153, 153–78 American Gothic tradition 2: 156–62 compared to Schiller, Friedrich (sidebar) 2: 171 detective fiction 1: 250–51 Godwin, William and 2: 168, 170–72, (sidebar) 171 principal works 2: 155 protagonists 2: 159–62 Brown, Jane K. 2: 354–62 Brown, Marshall 2: 354–62 The Brownie of Badsbeck (Hogg) 2: 422, 437–38 “The Brownie of the Black Haggs” (Hogg) 2: 422, 428 Brownmiller, Susan 1: 216 Buch Annette (Goethe) 2: 341 “Bulletin” (Jackson) 1: 271–72 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 1: 2, 12–16, 14, (sidebar) 15, 262–63 Burke, Edmund 1: 55, 97, 107–8, 110–13, 149 on French Revolution 3: 350–51

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO: A STORY

C C. 3. 3. See Wilde, Oscar Cabbalism 1: 254–55 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (film) 1: 419 Calder, Jenni 1: 131 Caleb Williams (Godwin) 1: 2, 81, 87; 2: 321–24, 335 compared to Wieland; or, The Transformation 2: 168, 170–71 doubles 3: 369 as early detective fiction 1: 249–50 European Gothic tradition 2: 337–38 as evil 2: 327 Gothic narrative 2: 330–37 influence of French Revolution 1: 78–80 influence on Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 339 motifs 2: 333–34 narrative structure 3: 86 Poe, Edgar Allan on 3: 212 as political commentary 3: 212–13 preface 2: 324 review 2: 327–30 social injustice in 1: 22–23 Calhoon, Kenneth S. 2: 344–49 Calvinism in horror fiction 3: 277 Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 91–96

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 2: 429–31 sublime 3: 91–96 “Calvinism and Gothicism: The Example of Brown’s Wieland” (Gilmore) 2: 170–77 The Calvinist Temper in English Poetry (Boulger) 3: 92 Cambrio-Britons (Boaden) 1: 413–15 Candid Reflections . . . on what is commonly called the Negroe-Cause, by a Planter (Long) 1: 208 Cannibalism 2: 237 “The Canterville Ghost” (Wilde) 3: 487–88 Capitalism, Wharton, Edith 3: 467–75 Capon, William 1: 403 Capote, Truman 1: 66, 70, 2: 304 Captain Bonneville (Irving) 2: 443 “Cardillac the Jeweller” (Hoffmann). See “Das Fräulein von Scuderi” “The Cardinal’s Third Tale” (Dinesen) 2: 267–68 “Carmilla” (Le Fanu) 1: 31, 139, 352–58; 3: 2–5 doubles 1: 382 dreams 1: 329–30 mother-child relationship 1: 382–84 narrative structure 3: 271 power of women 1: 355–58; 3: 18–21 as supernatural horror tale 3: 22–27 vampire-victim relationship 1: 356–57; 3: 19–20 victimization of women 1: 355–58; 3: 17–21 women in nineteenth century 3: 16–21 Carmilla and 12 Other Classic Tales of Mystery (Le Fanu) 3: 3–5 “Carmilla and the Gothic Legacy: Victorian Transformations of Supernatural Horror” (Geary) 3: 21–27 “Carnival” (Dinesen) 2: 264–65 Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales (Dinesen) 2: 258 Carrie (King) 2: 481 Carrion Comfort (Simmons) 1: 366 Carso, Kerry Dean 1: 496–506 Carter, Angela 2: 179, 179–200 fairy tales 2: 185–86 fantasy 2: 183–90, 197–99 fetishism 2: 184–85 gender construction 2: 199 humor 2: 185 literary influences of 2: 188 portrayal of women 2: 183–85

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

principal works 2: 181 psychological horror 2: 183–89 on Rice, Ann (sidebar) 3: 267 sexuality as theme 2: 184–89 Carwin the Biloquist (Brown) 2: 160, 161, 169–70 “The Caryatids: an Unfinished Tale” (Dinesen) 2: 264–65, 269 Casebeer, Edwin F. (sidebar) 2: 492 “The Cask of Amontillado” (Poe) 3: 188, 189, 197–98 Castle (Gothic convention) 1: 251, 284–85 Barker, Clive 1: 287–90 Bellefleur 3: 172 Bleak House 2: 242–45 The Castle of Otranto 1: 402; 2: 301; 3: 196–97 feminist literary theory 1: 211 King, Stephen 1: 284–90 Little Dorrit 2: 252–53 Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale 3: 128–32 Morrison, Toni 3: 136 The Mysteries of Udolpho 1: 226 Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 194–97 Radcliffe, Ann 2: 252 See also Haunted house Castle Dangerous (Scott) 3: 307, 311, 315 The Castle of Andalusia (O’Keeffe) 1: 406–7 The Castle of Otranto: A Story (Walpole) 1: 57–58, 459; 2: 36, 299–300; 3: 449 authorship of 3: 434–35, 437, 444–46 castle as Gothic convention 1: 402; 2: 301; 3: 196–97 “counterfeit” Gothic in 3: 451–52 critical reception of 3: 442–52 doubles in 3: 369 excess as theme 3: 355 family murder 2: 310–11 ghosts 3: 451–52 heroine in 2: 138, 144 influence of Strawberry Hill 1: 503 influence on Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 501 influence on Dracula 3: 395– 404 influence on Pierre; or, The Ambiguities 3: 115 labyrinth in 3: 197 mysterious portrait in 1: 252, 254; 2: 252; 3: 25, 199 as original Gothic literature 1: 1–2, 402; 2: 116; 3: 431 political elements 3: 450 preface 3: 338–40, 432–34, 449 prophecy in 3: 200 review 3: 435, 436–37 Scott, Sir Walter on 3: 432

541

SUBJECT INDEX

as political writer (sidebar) 1: 30 on the sublime 1: 148–50; 3: 91–92 Burlesque 2: 298, 452–54 Burns, Robert 1: 18 Burns, Sarah 1: 518–25 Burwick, Frederick 1: 332–42 “The Bus” (Jackson) 1: 268 “A Bus Along St. Clair: December” (Atwood) 2: 6 Butler, Judith 1: 379, 384 Butler, Marilyn (sidebar) 3: 328 By the North Gate (Oates) 3: 164 Byron, Lord George Gordon 1: 2, 240–43, (sidebar) 241; 3: 342 Clairmont, Claire and 3: 344–46 influence on Bronte¨, Emily 2: 145 lampoon of The Monk 3: 51–52 on Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3: 36, (sidebar) 42 romantic heroes of 1: 24, 253– 54; 2: 299 Shelley, Mary and 3: 344 on Vathek (sidebar) 2: 95

SUBJECT INDEX

CASTLE OF WOLFENBACH; A GERMAN STORY

servants 2: 299–300 subversive nature of 3: 437–42, 448 supernatural 3: 449–51 Castle of Wolfenbach; a German story (Parsons) 1: 2, 7–9, 96 The Castle Spectre (Lewis) 1: 402; 3: 32, 37 German romantic influence 1: 408 ghosts 1: 338 inspiration for 3: 34–36 literary influences on 3: 42 madness 1: 338 as model for Gothic melodrama 3: 41–43 nationalism 1: 412 “To the Reader” 3: 34–36 The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (Radcliffe) 1: 2; 3: 231–32, 239–340 Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors (Walpole) 3: 446 Catharine,or the Bower (Austen) 2: 32–33 Cathedrals. See Religious buildings “Catherine Morland’s Gothic Delusions: A Defense of Northanger Abbey” (Glock) (sidebar) 2: 37 Catholicism Collins, Wilkie 2: 217–26 Martineau, Harriet 2: 218 Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 87– 88, 94–96 misogyny and 2: 221 Rice, Anne 3: 279 Cat’s Eye (Atwood) 2: 2, 11–13 “The Cenci” (Shelley, P.) 1: 24 Chamber’s Cabinet Cyclopedia (Shelley) 3: 320 Chambers, Sir William 1: 405 Chandler, Helen 3: 417 Chandler, Raymond 1: 36 “Chapter 1” (Bronte¨, E.) 2: 133–35 “Chapter 1” (Brown) 2: 156 “Chapter 1” (du Maurier) 2: 281–82 “Chapter 14” (Austen) 2: 27–31 “Charles” (Jackson) 1: 265–66, 269 “Charles Brockden Brown and the Invention of the American Gothic” (Fiedler) 2: 156–62 “Charles Dickens and Mrs. Radcliffe: A Farewell to Wilkie Collins” (Coolidge Jr.) (sidebar) 2: 237 “Charlotte Bronte¨’s Lucy Snowe” (Waring) (sidebar) 2: 121 “Charlotte Bronte¨’s ‘New’ Gothic” (Heilman) 2: 107–14 Charnas, Suzy McKee 1: 368–169

542

Chase (motif) Faulkner, William 2: 301–2 James, Henry 2: 473–74 Shelley, Mary 3: 339 Chekhov, Anton 1: 2 Chesterton, G. K. 3: 366, 368 “A Child is Being Beaten” (Freud) 3: 329 Child, Lydia Marie 1: 187–88 Childbirth 1: 216 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron) 1: 24 Children punishment of 2: 239–40 relationship to mother 1: 377–81 in ’Salem’s Lot 1: 372 “The Children of the Corn” (King) 2: 481 A Child’s Garden of Verses (Stevenson) 3: 359–61 The Chimes (Dickens) 2: 230 de Chirico, Giorgio 1: 147 Chorley, H. F. (sidebar) 2: 137 “Christabel” (Coleridge) 1: 19, 24, (sidebar) 48 Christianity art and 1: 507 The Sphinx 3: 498–99 Wharton, Edith 3: 470–71 Christine (King) 2: 482 castle in 1: 285–86 compared to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 2: 487 family 2: 501 film 2: 488 werewolf myth 2: 486 A Christmas Carol (Dickens) 2: 229–30 A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (Irving) 2: 442 The Circle Game (Atwood) 2: 1–2, 3, 8 Citizen Kane (film) 1: 437 Civilisation and its Discontents (Freud) 1: 90; 3: 372 Clairmont, Claire 3: 344–46 Clara Howard (Brown) 2: 154, 162 Clark, Robert 1: 58 Cleishbotham, Jedediah. See Scott, Sir Walter Cleland, John 1: 50 Clendenning, John 2: 446–51 Clery, E. J. on Baillie, Joanna 2: 54–61 on The Castle of Otranto: A Tale 3: 437–42 value of Gothic fiction in 18th century 1: 220–28 Clover, Carol 3: 284 Cobb, Palmer (sidebar) 2: 412 The Cock and Anchor (Le Fanu) 3: 1, 7–10, 16 Cock Lane ghost 1: 18

The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (Sedgwick) 1: 72; 2: 10 Cole, Thomas 1: 524 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1: 2, 18–19, 24, (sidebar) 48, 236–41 ghosts 1: 337 on The Mysteries of Udolpho 3: 245–46 review of The Monk 3: 46–48 sea stories 1: 251 Collected Stories of William Faulkner (Faulkner) 2: 294, 307–8 Collins, Wilkie 1: 88–89; 2: 201, 201–28,219 anti-Catholicism 2: 218–26 curse narratives 1: 298–300 detective fiction 2: 216 development of writing style 2: 205–10 Dickens, Charles on (sidebar) 2: 223 Eliot, T. S. on (sidebar) 2: 215 Gothic conventions 2: 215–17 principal works 2: 202 sensation fiction 2: 211–15, 218–19, 223–26 Collins, William 1: 18, 53–54 Colman, George 1: 403 Come Along with Me (Jackson) 1: 276 Comedy. See Humor “The Company of Wolves” (Carter) 2: 182, 186, 187 “The Composition of Northanger Abbey” (Emden) 2: 31–35 Confessional novels 3: 211–17 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (DeQuincey) 1: 331 The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (Melville) 3: 108–9 Conger, Syndy McMillen 2: 35–40, 136–46, 349–54 Conrad, Joseph 1: 31–32 Convent stories 2: 223–24 Coolidge, Archibald C. Jr. (sidebar) 2: 237 Cooper, Alice 1: 469–70, 470 Cooper, James Fenimore 1: 2, 58; 3: 206 Corliss, Richard 1: 437–38 Corman, Roger 1: 443–46 Cottingham, L. N. (sidebar) 1: 497 “Councillor Krespel” (Hoffmann). See “The Cremona Violin” Count Basil (Baillie) 2: 50, 63, 65 Count Dracula (character) 1: 166–69, 342–55, 362–63, 424, 3: 417 characterization of 3: 405–10 compared to psychic vampires 1: 365–66

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

DISGUISE

D Dacre, Charlotte 1: 208–10 “The Daemon Lover” (Jackson) 1: 269–70 Dagover, Lil 1: 419 “Daisy” (Oates) 3: 180, 181, 183–84 Daisy Miller (James) 2: 462 The Damnation Game (Barker) 1: 289–90 Danse Macabre (King) 2: 481–82, 483–85, 485–86

“Daphne du Maurier and Gothic Signatures: Rebecca as Vamp(ire)” (Horner and Zlosnik) 2: 284–91 Dark Dreams (Derry) 1: 429–30 The Dark Half (King) 2: 486, 489–90 The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla (King) 2: 482 The Dark Tower VI: The Songs of Susannah (King) 2: 482 The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (King) 2: 482 Datlow, Ellen 1: 366–67 Davenport, Basil (sidebar) 2: 285 Davenport-Hines, Richard Treadwell 1: 490–96 David Copperfield (Dickens) 2: 248 Davis, Alexander Jackson (sidebar) 1: 491, 497, 499–501, 503–4 Day, William Patrick 2: 312–13, 317; 3: 178 “De Grey: A Romance” (James) 2: 462, 463 De Monfort (Baillie, Joanna) 2: 50, 54–56, 58–60 review of (sidebar) 2: 68 social progress of 2: 62–66 De Profundis (Wilde) 3: 488 Deacon Brodie,or the Double Life (Stevenson) 3: 368 “The Dead” (Oates) 3: 179 The Dead Zone (King) 2: 482, 490–91 “Death by Landscape” (Atwood) 2: 11 Decadence movement 3: 487, 489 Decadent Aristocrat (Gothic convention) 3: 189 “The Decay of Lying” (Wilde) 3: 493 “Dedication” (Goethe) 2: 343–44 DeFoe, Daniel 3: 212 Degeneration Machen, Arthur 1: 169–71 Stevenson, Robert Louis 1: 158–60 Stoker, Bram 1: 166–69 Wells, H. G. 1: 162–66 Wilde, Oscar 1: 160–62 Deleuze, Gilles 3: 226–27 “The Deluge at Norderney” (Dinesen) 2: 257–58, 267–68, 272 Delusion and Dream (Freud) 1: 326–27 Demon and Other Tales (Oates) 3: 167–68 Demonic possession 1: 328, 430 “Demons” (Oates) 3: 164 Dennis, John 1: 148–49 DeQuincey, Thomas 1: 331 Derrickson, Teresa 1: 197–207 Derrida, Jacques 1: 154–55; 3: 350 Derry, Charles 1: 429–30

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

A Description of Strawberry Hill (Walpole) 3: 442 Desire (theme) 2: 194–99 Detective fiction 1: 36–37 Caleb Williams 1: 249–50 Collins, Wilkie 2: 216 Edgar Huntly or Memoir of a Sleep-Walker 1: 250–51 The Murders in the Rue Morgue 1: 250–51 Mysteries of Winterthurn 3: 175–77 “Development of a Child” (Klein) 1: 381 Devil 1: 313; 2: 434–36; 3: 198 “The Devil and Anne Rice” (Rice and Gilmore) (sidebar) 3: 278 “The Devil and Tom Walker” (Irving) 2: 442 “The Devil in Manuscript” (Hawthorne), witchcraft 2: 371 “The Devil Sings the Blues: Heavy Metal, Gothic Fiction and ‘Postmodern’ Discourse” (Hinds) 1: 461–68 The Devil’s Elixir (Hoffmann). See Die Elixiere des Teufels Devlin, James E. 2: 456–58 “Diagnosing the ‘Sir Walter Disease’: American Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature” (Carso) 1: 496–506 Diamond, Cora 3: 515–16 Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethe) 2: 344 Dickens, Charles 2: 229, 229–56 cannibalism 2: 237 childhood memories (sidebar) 2: 237 on Collins, Wilkie (sidebar) 2: 223 Eliot, T. S. on (sidebar) 2: 215 Gothic conventions 2: 251–55 humor 2: 234–41 imagery 2: 242–45 principal works 2: 231 “Dickens’ Gloomiest Gothic Castle” (Ronald) 2: 242–45 Dinesen, Isak 2: 257, 257–78 European Gothic tradition 2: 261–68, 271 horror specialist 2: 283–84 imagination 2: 262–63, 268 Kierkegaard, Søren and 2: 272 on “The Monkey” 2: 276 portrayal of women 2: 264–68 principal works 2: 259 supernatural 2: 263 “‘Dirty Mama’: Horror, Vampires, and the Maternal in Late Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fiction” (Michelis) 1: 376–85 Disguise (theatrical device) 1: 406–7

543

SUBJECT INDEX

“counterfeit” Gothicism of 3: 397–404 supernatural 1: 358–59 Count Robert of Paris (Scott) 3: 300, 311 Covent Garden (theater) 1: 389 Cox, Jeffrey 2: 62 Craft, Christopher 3: 284 Crayon, Geoffrey. See Irving, Washington The Crayon Miscellany (Irving) 2: 442 “The Cremona Violin” (Hoffmann) 2: 388 Cresserons, Charles de. See Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan The Cricket on the Hearth (Dickens) 2: 230 The Critic (periodical) (sidebar) 3: 125 “The Critic as Artist” (Wilde) 3: 507 A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (Blair) 1: 45–46 The Critical Review (periodical) 3: 434–35, 444 Critique of Judgement (Kant) 1: 150 Crosman, Robert 2: 308–10 Cross, Wilbur 2: 368 Crowe, Catherine 3: 24 Cry to Heaven (Rice) 3: 263–64 Cujo (King) 2: 491 Cultural identity 1: 121–27, 171–79 Curse narratives Baptiste, Jean 1: 291–92 haunted house 1: 290–300 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1: 292–95 “The Curse of Ancient Egypt” (Carter) (sidebar) 3: 267 The Curse of Frankenstein (film) 1: 428, 446 Curtis, Ian 1: 471–73 Cycle of the Werewolf (King) 2: 482, 486, 487–89

SUBJECT INDEX

DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL

Do with Me What You Will (Oates) 3: 164 “Doge und Dogaressa” (Hoffmann) 2: 398 The Dolliver Romance (Hawthorne) 2: 376 “Dolph Heyliger” (Irving) 2: 449 Dombey and Son (Dickens) 2: 230, 251–52 Domestic fiction 1: 265–69 “Don’t Look Now” (du Maurier) 2: 280 Doppelgänger definition 2: 485 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1: 305; 2: 391–92, 399–400, 414, 431 James, Henry 2: 473–77 A Legend of Montrose 3: 314 in nineteenth-century literature 1: 232–33 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 183–84 Old Mortality 3: 314 Persona (film) 1: 429 The Picture of Dorian Gray 1: 160–62 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 1: 158–60 “Dorian Gray and the Gothic Novel” (Poteet) 3: 504–9 Dostoevski, Fyodor 1: 2, 315–16; 2: 433–34 “The Double as Immortal Self” (Rank) 1: 310–16 “‘Double Born’: Bram Stoker and the Metrocolonial Gothic” (Valente) 1: 33 Double Persephone (Atwood) 2: 1–2, 8 Doubleday, Ellen 2: 289 Doubleday, Neal Frank 2: 368–78 Doubles (literary device) Beckett, Samuel and 1: 38–39 Caleb Williams 3: 369 “Carmilla” 1: 382–84 The Castle of Otranto 3: 369 definition 2: 485–86 Dinesen, Isak 2: 272–73 “The Fat Boy” 2: 236 Foucalt, Michel 3: 350 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 1: 26; 3: 338–42, 350 The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents 3: 369 King, Stephen 2: 485–93 Lacan, Jacques 3: 350 Lives of the Twins 3: 178 Melmoth the Wanderer 1: 27 in modern literature 1: 32–35 Nemesis 3: 178 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 178 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 1: 29 Snake Eyes 3: 178 Soul/Mate 3: 178

544

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3: 368–69, 372, 374–81 as supernatural self 1: 310–16 Twin Peaks (television show) 1: 453–54 Vathek 3: 369 The Woman in White 2: 216 See also Doppelgänger Dougherty, Stephen 3: 218–28 Douglas, Mary 1: 132–33 Douglas, Sir George 2: 432 Douglass, Frederick “Down, Satan!” (Barker) 1: 287–88 Doyle, Arthur Conan 1: 365 Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret (Hawthorne) 2: 376 “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (Hawthorne) 2: 364, 375 “Dr. Jekyll and the Emergence of Mr. Hyde” (Miyoshi) 3: 365–70 Dracula (character). See Count Dracula Dracula (film) 1: 424, (sidebar) 425; 3: 417 Dracula (Stoker) 1: 31, 33–34, 358–59; 3: 385–87 American Psycho and 1: 37 Anglo-Irish identity 1: 171–79 characterization of Count Dracula 1: 342–44; 3: 405–10 characters as Irish allegory 3: 415–27 “counterfeit” Gothic in 3: 397–404 critical reception 3: 386–87 degeneration 1: 166–69 dreams 1: 168, 330 eroticism in 1: 136–38 film adaptations 1: 446–47 influence of The Castle of Otranto 3: 395–404 mythology 1: 166–69 narrative structure 3: 270–71 review 3: 393–95, (sidebar) 405 sensationalism 3: 393 Summers, Montague on (sidebar) 3: 395 victims in 1: 133–36 as Victorian text 1: 128–40 Dracula’s Guest (Stoker) 3: 386–93, 401 Drama 1: 389–91, 401–15 character development 1: 405–6 Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 499–500 disguise in 1: 406–7 Gothic motifs in 1: 401–9 importance of 1: 26–27 influence of German romantic playwrights 1: 407–9 landscape as motif 1: 402–5

Lewis, Matthew Gregory 1: 338, 402, 408, 412; 3: 32, 34– 36, 37, 41–43 Maturin, Charles Robert 1: 337–38, 407–8, 499, 500; 3: 74, 84–85 nationalism 1: 412 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 164 repetition in 1: 407 sociopolitical ideology 1: 410–15 stage design 1: 404–5 vampire plays 1: 348–49 Wilde, Oscar 3: 488, 495–97 See also specific names of plays The Drawing of the Three (King) 2: 486–87 The Dream (Baillie) 2: 58 “The Dreamers” (Dinesen) 2: 258 Dreams Dracula 1: 168, 330 horror films 1: 415–16 Jung, Carl G. 1: 329 Myers, F. W. H 1: 330–31 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 2: 431–32 psychology of 1: 326–32 role in Gothic fiction 1: 329– 32; 2: 253 Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents (Beckford) 2: 79–80, 87, 89, 97–98 Drury Lane theater 1: 389 Druse, Eleanor. See King, Stephen du Maurier, Daphne 2: 115, 118, 279, 279–92 Doubleday, Ellen and 2: 289 horror 2: 283–84 Jung, Carl G. and 2: 289 principal works 2: 280 self-identity 2: 289–90 vamp vs. femme fatale 2: 285–86 Dunbar, William 1: 121–22 “The Dungeon” (Oates) 3: 183, 184 “The Dutchess at Prayer” (Wharton) 3: 463 Duthie, Peter 2: 61–67 Dyer, Richard 2: 188

E Eakins, Thomas 1: 519 “The Early Gothic Novel” (Lovecraft) (sidebar) 3: 443 The East Indian (Lewis) 3: 38 “Echoes” (Dinesen) 2: 258 “Edgar Allan Poe” (Lawrence) (sidebar) 3: 203

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

“THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER”

“Epistle to Thomas Ashton from Florence” (Walpole) 3: 446 The Epistolary Intrigue (Lewis) 3: 37–38 “The Erl-King” (Goethe). See “Der Erlkonig” (Goethe) “The Erl-King. From the German of Goethe. Author of the Sorrows of Werter” (Scott) (sidebar) 2: 350 “The Erl-King’s Daughter” (Scott) 3: 293–94 “Der Erlkonig” (Goethe) (sidebar) 2: 350 Eroticism in Dracula 1: 136–38 homoeroticism 3: 274–75 vampires 3: 274–76 See also Sexuality Essay on Sepulchres (Godwin) 1: 98, 101 An Essay on the Sublime (Baillie) 1: 56 “Ethan Brand” (Hawthorne) 2: 365, 374 Ethan Frome (Wharton) 3: 457–58 Ethics of the Sexual Difference (Irigaray). See Ethique de la difference sexuelle Ethique de la difference sexuelle (Irigaray) 1: 90–91 Ethwald (Baillie) 2: 58 Europe, eighteenth century aestheticism in 1: 48–57 attitude toward architecture 1: 486–87, 488; 3: 142–43 copyright laws 1: 95 function of literary criticism 1: 95–96 as impetus for Gothic movement 1: 1, 30–31 marriage laws 1: 224–26 role of women 2: 63–65 value of Gothic fiction 1: 221– 27; 3: 23–24 “European Disruptions of the Idealized Woman: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and the Marquis de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine” (Wright) 3: 61–70 European Gothic tradition 1: 74–104, 3: 124–25 vs. American Gothic tradition 1: 57–65; 2: 156–58 Caleb Williams 2: 337–38 development of Gothic fiction 1: 260–64 Dinesen, Isak 2: 261–68, 271 Faulkner, William 2: 298–305 feminist literary theory of 1: 86–91 French Revolution and 1: 74–85 German Romanticism 2: 271–72

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 378– 79; 3: 125 influence on Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 188, 194–95 Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 84–91 Melville, Herman 3: 118–22 nationalism in 1: 93–102, 158– 71; 2: 240 Romanticism 1: 249–58 See also Gothic movement The Europeans (James) 2: 462 “The Eve of St. Agnes” (Keats) 1: 19, 24 Evil eye (superstition) 1: 307 Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder (Fielding) 3: 24–25 “Excerpt from a letter dated 3 March 1886” (Symonds) (sidebar) 3: 365 Excess (theme) 3: 352–55, 355 The Exorcist (Blatty) 1: 450 The Exorcist (film) 1: 450–51 “Expedition to Hell” (Hogg) 2: 424–25 Expensive People (Oates) 3: 164, 178 “Extract from a note appended to a letter on December 9, 1838” (Beckford) 2: 83–85 Eyes (motif) 3: 472–73 “The Eyes” (Wharton) 3: 457, 459, 472–73

F A Fable (Faulkner) 2: 294 “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic” (Savoy) 1: 66–74 The Fair Maid of Perth (Scott) 3: 312–13 Fairy tales 2: 13, 185–86 “The Fall of the House of Clennam: Gothic Conventions in Little Dorrit” (Jarrett) 2: 251–55 “The Fall of the House of Usher” (Poe) 1: 71–72; 3: 188–89, 196 aristocracy 3: 221 castle in 3: 194–97 compared to “Bartleby the Scrivener” 3: 122–23 family curse in 2: 221 family murder 2: 311 film adaptation 3: 224 haunted house in 3: 225–26 madness in 3: 204 miscegenation 3: 221–27 slavery 3: 223

545

SUBJECT INDEX

“Edgar Allan Poe” (Lovecraft) (sidebar) 3: 219 Edgar Huntly or Memoir of a Sleep-Walker (Brown) 1: 250–51; 2: 154, 159–60 Edgeworth, Maria 1: 207, (sidebar) 3: 306 The Edible Woman (Atwood) 2: 1, 9 Edinburgh Journal of Science, 1: 334–35 Edinburgh (Scot’s) Magazine, 1: 25 Edmundson, Mark 1: 520 “Edward Randolph’s Portrait” (Hawthorne) 2: 370 Edwards, Jonathan 3: 277–78 The Effusions of Sensibility; or, Letters from Lady Honoria Harrowhart to Miss Sophonisba Simper (Lewis) 3: 37–38 Egan, James 3: 168–78 Ehrengard (Dinesen) 2: 258 “The Eighteenth-Century Psyche: The Mysteries of Udolpho” (Williams) 3: 252–60 Elbert, Monika 3: 466–75 Elder, Marjorie 2: 382–86 Elinor and Marianne (Austen) 2: 25, 33 Eliot, T. S. (sidebar) 2: 215 Die Elixiere des Teufels (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 394, 405 compared to The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 2: 431 doppelgänger 2: 391–92, 400 influence of The Monk 3: 40–41 uncanny 1: 304 Elizabethan literature 1: 17 Ellis, Bret Easton 1: 36–38 Ellis, S. M. (sidebar) 3: 6 Elwin, Malcolm 3: 368 Emden, Cecil S. 2: 31–35 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 3: 468, 470, 472, 474 “Emily’s Demon-Lover: The Gothic Revolution and The Mysteries of Udolpho” (Graham) 3: 249–52 Emma (Austen) 2: 26–27, 32 Emmeline,or, the Orphan of the Castle (Smith) 1: 96 “Endicott and the Red Cross” (Hawthorne) 2: 370 Enfield, William 3: 246–49 The English Review, 2: 85 Enigmatic code 1: 319–20 Enlightenment 1: 48–57, 67 An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (Godwin) 1: 22; 2: 321–23, 330–31, 334; 3: 212

SUBJECT INDEX

“THE FALL RIVER AXE MURDERS”

“The Fall River Axe Murders” (Carter) 2: 182–83 “Fame” (Jackson) 1: 266 Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott (Hogg) 2: 422 Family in horror films 1: 420–22 Jackson, Shirley 1: 265–82 King, Stephen 2: 501–3 Twin Peaks (television show) 1: 455–56 “Family” (Oates) 3: 164 Family curse (Gothic convention) 1: 290–300; 3: 221 The Family Legend (Baillie) 2: 58 Family murder (Gothic convention) 2: 216, 311 “Family Portraits” (Baptiste) 1: 291–92, 292 “Famine Country” (Oates) 3: 181, 183, 184 Famous Imposters (Stoker) 3: 402 Fanshawe: A Tale (Hawthorne) 2: 364, 379 “Fantasia of the Library” (Foucault) 1: 92 Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Hoffmann) 2: 393, 395 Fantasmagoriana (Shelley) 1: 25 Fantastic (genre) definition 1: 128–29 Dinesen, Isak 2: 270–71 Dracula 1: 139 Gebir 1: 257–58 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 168–77, 180 Fantasy (Gothic element) 2: 183–90, 197–99 “The Fat Boy” (Dickens) 2: 235–38 Fatal Revenge; or The Family of Montorio (Maturin) 3: 73–74, 84, 92–93 Faulkner, William 2: 293, 293–320 chase in 2: 301–2 grotesques 2: 301 influence of Beardsley, Aubrey 2: 299 influence of Blake, William 2: 306–12 principal works 2: 295–96 Southern Gothic 2: 297–305 Wandering Jew 2: 302 “Faulkner’s Miss Emily and Blake’s ‘Sick Rose’: ‘Invisible Worm,’ Nachträglichkeit, and Retrospective Gothic 2: 306–12 Faust (character) 2: 156–57, 299 See also specific works “Faust and the Gothic Novel” (Brown, J. and M.) 2: 354–62 Faust: Ein Fragment (Goethe) 2: 342, 349–53 Faust II (Goethe) 2: 342, 354–61

546

Faust: Part I (Goethe). See Faust—Der Tragödi erster Teil Faust—Der Tragödi erster Teil (Goethe) 2: 341–42, 343–44, 354–61 Fear 2: 10 “All Souls” 3: 473–74 architecture as representation 2: 344–48 comedy and, in films 1: 435 of death 1: 400–401 Gothic response to 1: 1–2 vs horror 3: 237–38, 463 King, Stephen 2: 495, 504 in literary history 1: 16–21, 65 The Marble Faun 2: 383–84 nationalism and 1: 93–102 Radcliffe, Ann 2: 336 of Rice, Anne (sidebar) 3: 278 Scott, Sir Walter 3: 309–13 sublime and 1: 110–13, 148–49 See also Horror; Psychological horror; Supernatural The Feast of All Saints (Rice) 3: 263–64 Fedorko, Kathy A. 3: 476–85 Female Gothic 1: 210–19 freaks 1: 215–16 Radcliffe, Ann 3: 252–59 Shelley, Mary 3: 327–33 “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother” (Moers) (sidebar) 3: 338 “Female Sexuality” (Freud) 1: 378 Feminist literary theory 1: 86–91, 108–9 American Gothic tradition 1: 210–19 “Taming a Tartar” 1: 203–6 Wharton, Edith 3: 459–60, 480–82 Femme fatale, 2: 139, 285–86 “Die Fermate” (Hoffmann) 2: 397 Ferriar, John 1: 207 Fetishism 2: 184–85; 3: 174 Fiedler, Leslie 1: 66–67, 212, 520 on American Gothic tradition 2: 298–305 on Brown, Charles Brockden 2: 156–62 on Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 205–11 Fielding, Henry 1: 490; 3: 24–25 Fielding, Penny 1: 38 Films, horror 1: 398–401, 415–52 American International Pictures 1: 429 Armageddon 1: 430 comedy and fear 1: 435 Corman, Roger 1: 443–46 demonic 1: 430 Dracula films 1: 446–47 family portrayal in 1: 420–22 German 1: 429, 430–31, 439 Hammer Films 1: 428–29, 435, 440, 445–47

history of development 1: 425–39 Japanese 1: 428 King, Stephen 1: 398–401 Lang, Fritz 1: 429, 431 monsters 1: 416–17, 427–30, 442 Poe, Edgar Allan 1: 429, 444–45 popularity of 1: 415 psychological thrillers 1: 438 science fiction 1: 427–29 Surrealist movement and 1: 416 television and 1: 431–32 zombie films 1: 443 See also specific names of films Fingal (Macpherson) 1: 97–98 Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (Carter) 2: 180, 183–85, (sidebar) 191 First Impressions (Austen) 2: 25, 32, 33 First Love: A Gothic Tale (Oates) 3: 165 Fisher, Bejamin F. IV 3: 128–32 Five Sermons on the Errors of the Roman Catholic Church (Maturin) 3: 92, 95 Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling (Godwin) (sidebar) 2: 330, 331 Flight (motif). See Chase (motif) Folklore, vampire 1: 344–45, 349, 353 Fontaine, Joan 2: 119 Fonthill Abbey 2: 85–86 Forbes, Esther 1: 62–65 “’A Forced Solitude’: Mary Shelley and the Creation of Frankenstein’s Monster” (Tillotson) 3: 342–48 “Foreword” (Morrison) 3: 137–38 “A Forgotten Creator of Ghosts: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Possible Inspirer of the Brontës” (Kenton) (sidebar) 3: 22 The Fortunes of Nigel (Scott) 3: 298, 311, 313 The Fortunes of Perkin Warbek (Shelley) 3: 320 The Fortunes of Torlough O’Brien (Le Fanu) 3: 7, 10–15 “Foucault in the House of Usher: Some Historical Permutations in Poe’s Gothic” (Dougherty) 3: 218–28 Foucault, Michel 1: 92, 145–46 doubles in 3: 350 family curse in 1: 295–96; 3: 221

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

GENRES

as social philosophy 1: 255 supernatural 3: 336–37 “Frankenstein, or the New Prometheus” (Bloom) 3: 337–42 Fraser, Graham 1: 38–39 “Das Fräulein von Scuderi” (Hoffmann) 2: 398 Fredolfo: A Tragedy (Maturin) 3: 74, 84–85 “Das fremde Kind” (Hoffmann) 2: 397 French authors 1: 2; 3: 97–103 French Revolution 1: 74–85, 410; 3: 350–52 French Ways and Their Meaning (Wharton) 3: 476, 479 Freund, Karl 1: 437 Freud, Sigmund 1: 70–71, 87, 90; 3: 372 beating fantasy 3: 329 demonic possession 1: 328 dream interpretation 1: 326–32 ghost stories 3: 462–63 on humor 2: 18 on hysteria 3: 243 Jung, Carl G. and 1: 329 Nachträglichkeit 2: 310 Oedipal complex 1: 377–79, 380, 384 pre-oedipal 1: 377–79 on “Der Sandmann” 2: 402–3, 408–9, 413 on the sublime 1: 152–53 uncanny 1: 301–10, 454, (sidebar) 2: 308 See also Psychoanalysis Friedkin, William 1: 450–51 A Friend to Genius (critic) 3: 48–51 “The Friends of the Friends” (James) 2: 471, 473 Frisch, Shelley L. 2: 408–11 “From Otranto to Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner’s Gothic Heritage” (Kerr) 2: 297–306 “From the Sublime to the Uncanny: Victorian Gothic and Sensation Fiction” (Milbank) 1: 86–92 The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton) 3: 463 Fugitive Verses (Baillie) 2: 49 “The Fullness of Life” (Wharton) 3: 458 Furnier, Vincent. See Cooper, Alice “Further Confessions” (Oates) 3: 180 Fuseli, Henry 1: 519, 520 Fuss, Diana 1: 72–73

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

G Gamer, Michael 3: 442–54 A Garden of Earthly Delights (Oates) 3: 164 The Garden of Earthly Delights (painting) 3: 56 Gardiner, H. W. 3: 379 Garner, Margaret 3: 146–47 Gaslight (film) 1: 339–40 Geary, Robert F. 3: 21–27 Gebir (Landor) 1: 257–58 Gender identity Klein, Melanie on 1: 379–81 pre-oedipal stage 1: 377–79 vampires 1: 382–84; 3: 275, 281–85 Gender relations Northanger Abbey 1: 221–22 “Taming a Tartar” 1: 199–200 Villette 2: 122–27 Gender roles 3: 476–80 Genres adventure fiction 3: 359 Ambiguous Gothic 2: 412–17, 453–55; 3: 176 Bildungsroman 2: 246–48 comic Gothic 2: 17–23 confessional novels 3: 211–17 convent stories 2: 223–24 curse narratives 1: 290–300 detective fiction 1: 36–37, 249–51; 2: 216; 3: 175–77 domestic fiction 1: 265–69 doppelgänger 1: 158–60, 305; 2: 391–92, 399–400, 414, 431, 473–377, 485 fantastic 1: 128–29; 3: 168–77, 180 female Gothic 1: 210–19; 2: 20, 36; 3: 252–59, 327–33 ghost stories 2: 6–8, 11, 229, 230, 364, 395, 462–64, 466– 71, (sidebar) 471; 3: 181, 459, 461–62, 466–75 historical novels 1: 58–65; 2: 400 horror 1: 261–62; 2: 481–504 Jacobin 1: 78 mystery 2: 249 novel of manners 2: 247–48 Oriental 1: 260–61; 2: 88–89, 96 romances 1: 49–52, 129–33, 220–26, 249–58, 501–2; 2: 115–20, 213–17, 368–77, 380–81; 3: 6–15 satire 3: 283 sea stories 1: 251–52; 3: 205–11 sensation fiction 1: 87–91, 354; 2: 211–15, 218–19, 223– 26, 431, 447; 3: 5–6 slave narratives 1: 183–92; 3: 146–48

547

SUBJECT INDEX

Fountainville Forest,a Play, in Five acts, as Performed at the Theatre-Royal Covent-Garden (Boaden) 1: 394–98, 413 Foxfire (Oates) 3: 165 The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Nussbaum) 3: 510 “Fragment of a Novel” (Byron) 1: 240–43 Frank, Frederick S. 2: 89–95, (sidebar) 3: 434 Frankenstein (film) (sidebar) 1: 416, 432–35, 440–42 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (Shelley) 1: 2, 25–27, 31; 2: 116; 3: 319–21, 343 as autobiography (sidebar) 3: 328, 342–47 birth metaphor (sidebar) 3: 338 British politics in 3: 348–55 compared to Caleb Williams 3: 339 compared to Pet Sematary 2: 500 compared to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3: 371 compared to “The Bell Tower” (sidebar) 3: 111 compared to Wonderland 3: 169–70 doubles in 3: 338–42, 350 dramatization of 1: 26 enigmatic code 1: 319–20 excess in 3: 352–55 female body 3: 330 feminist literary theory of 1: 108 film adaptation of 1: 422–25, 440–42 French Revolution 1: 82–85; 3: 350–52 heroine in 2: 138 as horror classic 1: 261–62 influence of St. Leon 2: 323 influence on Interview with a Vampire 3: 280 influences on 3: 321 loneliness in 3: 342–47 Milton, John in 3: 341 monster 3: 335–36, 339–42, 348–55 morality of 3: 335–36 narrative structure 3: 86 Promethean mythology 3: 338–442 psychoanalysis of 1: 322–24, 331 Scott, Sir Walter on 3: 336–37, (sidebar) 349 Shelley, Percy Bysshe on 3: 335–36

SUBJECT INDEX

“A GENUINE BORDER STORY”

Southern Gothic 2: 297–305; 3: 178 sportive Gothic 2: 447–51, 451–53 television Gothic 1: 452–59 terror-romances 1: 249–58 travel narrative 3: 107–8 urban Gothic 1: 129, 130–33, 139 vampire fiction 3: 266–76 Westerns 3: 205–6 See also Gothic movement “A Genuine Border Story” (Hogg) 2: 427 Getatore (superstition) 1: 308–9 “The Ghost of Edward” (Baillie) 2: 59 “The Ghost of Fadon” (Baillie) 2: 60 Ghost stories Atwood, Margaret 2: 6–8, 11 “Die Automate” 2: 388, 395 Dickens, Charles 2: 229, 230 Freudian analysis 3: 462–63 James, Henry 2: 462–64, 466– 71, (sidebar) 471 “Legends of the ProvinceHouse” 2: 364 “Night-Side” 3: 181 Wharton, Edith 3: 459, 461– 63, 466–75, 482 Wilde, Oscar 3: 488 Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (Le Fanu) 3: 1 The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (Wharton) 3: 466 “The Ghostly Rental” (James) 2: 461, 463, 471–72 Ghosts 1: 18 Beloved 3: 150–60 Cambrio-Britons 1: 413–15 The Castle of Otranto: A Story 3: 451–52 The Castle Spectre 1: 338 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1: 337 hallucinations 1: 333–41 Morrison, Toni 3: 138 Shelley, Mary on 3: 321–24 Wharton, Edith 3: 460–62, 466–75 See also Grotesques; Supernatural Ghosts (Wharton) 3: 457, 459, 460–62 “Ghosts in the Machines: The Haunted Castle in the Works of Stephen King and Clive Barker” (Oakes) 1: 283–90 “The Giant Woman” (Oates) 3: 180 The Giaour (Byron) (sidebar) 2: 95 Gibbs, Kenneth 2: 494–99 Giddens, Anthony 1: 130–31 Gide, André 2: 423

548

Gil Blas (Le Sage) 1: 334 Gill, R. B. 2: 95–101 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 1: 109, 212, (sidebar) 213, 214–15 Gilmor, Robert III 1: 502–5 Gilmore, Michael T. 2: 170–77 Gilmore, Mikal (sidebar) 3: 278 “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (Leiber) 1: 364–65, 367 Girouard, Mark 1: 490 Glen Ellen (house) 1: 504 “Glenallan” (Bulwer-Lyton) 1: 12–16 Glock, Waldo S. (sidebar) 2: 37 Go Down, Moses (Faulkner) 2: 294 Gobineau, Arthur de 3: 222 “Goblin Market” (Rossetti) (sidebar) 1: 143 “The Goblin Who Stole a Sexton” (Dickens) 2: 231–34 Goddu, Teresa A. 1: 180–97, 520 Godwin, William 1: 2, 20, 81, 87; 2: 321, 321–39 canonization of writers 1: 98 compared to Brown, Charles Brockden (sidebar) 2: 171 confessional style of 3: 211–13 on cultural nationalism 1: 99, 101 detective fiction 1: 249–50 on government 3: 350–51 influence of DeFoe, Daniel 3: 212 influence of Richardson, Samuel 3: 212–13 influence of the French Revolution 1: 78–80 influence on Brown, Charles Brockden 2: 168, 170–72 influence on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym 3: 213–17 necromancy 2: 326–27 philosophy of 2: 330–37 Poe, Edgar Allan on (sidebar) 2: 328; 3: 212 “Preface” to Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling (sidebar) 2: 330 principal works 2: 323–24 Shelley, Mary and 3: 319, 339, 345–46 social injustice 1: 22–23 sorcery 2: 325 supernatural 2: 324–27 witchcraft 2: 325–26 Wollstonecraft, Mary and 2: 322 “The Godwinian Confessional Narrative and Psychological Terror in Arthur Gordon Pym” (Markley) 3: 211–18 “Godwin’s Necromancy” (Poe) (sidebar) 2: 328 “Godwin’s Things As They Are” (The Monthly Review) 2: 327–30

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1: 2; 2: 341, 341–62 architecture 2: 344–49 Lewis, Matthew Gregory and 2: 349–53 märchen 2: 396 translation of “Der Erlkonig” (sidebar) 2: 350 uncanny 1: 308 Goethe’s Faust: Part II (Goethe). See Faust II Goethe’s Roman Elegies (Goethe) 2: 341 Goetz of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand (Goethe). See Goetz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand Goetz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (Goethe) 2: 341 “The Gold Bug” (Poe) 3: 206 The Golden Ass (Apuleius) 1: 20–21 The Golden Bowl (James) 2: 462 “The Golden Pot” (Hoffmann). See “Der goldene Topf” “Der goldene Topf” (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 402, 415 interpretations of 2: 393–97 supernatural 2: 412 Golem (film) 1: 434–35 Gondal (imaginary island) 2: 131, 132 Goodness, nature of 3: 510–11 Goodrich, Samuel 2: 364 Gorey, Edward (sidebar) 1: 510 Goth (music) 1: 470–73 Gothic (term) architecture 3: 142 Bronte¨, Charlotte and 2: 104–5 definition 1: 507; 2: 10–11, 113–14 negative connotations of 1: 40–42, 507; 2: 297–98 Oates, Joyce Carol on 3: 178–80 Gothic America (Goddu) 1: 520 “Gothic and Decadence: Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen” (Punter) 1: 158–71 “Gothic and Romance: Retribution and Reconciliation” (Sage) 3: 6–16 “The Gothic Arsenal of Edith Wharton” (Murray) 3: 462–66 “The Gothic Caleb Williams” (Rizzo) 2: 337–38 “Gothic Drama as Nationalistic Catharsis” (Hoeveler) 1: 410–15 “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution” (Paulson) 1: 74–86 “The Gothic Formula of ‘Bartleby’” (Ryan) 3: 122–24

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

A HAUNT OF FEARS

social history of 1: 48–57 television 1: 452–60 Victorian period and 1: 61–62, 86–91 visual arts 1: 475–526 women’s lack of recognition 1: 212 See also American Gothic tradition; European Gothic tradition; Genres; specific topics “Gothic Origins” (Botting) 1: 48–57 “Gothic Plot in Great Expectations” (Loe) 2: 245–51 “Gothic Possibilities in Moby-Dick” (Fisher) 3: 128–32 “Gothic Pyrotechnics” (Brockway) (sidebar) 2: 191 “Gothic Repetitions: Toni Morrison’s Changing Use of Echo” (Beutel) 3: 138–42 Gothic revival American 1: 497–505 architecture 1: 477–78, 486– 89, 497–505 Davis, Alexander Jackson (sidebar) 1: 491 England vs. United States 1: 488–89 “Gothic Spaces, The Political Aspects of Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (Weissberg) 3: 142–50 “The Gothic Spirit” (Ranger) 1: 401–11 “The Gothic Text: Life and Art” (Fedorko) 3: 476–85 “Gothic Transformations: Isak Dinesen and the Gothic” (James, S.) 2: 261–69 “The Gothic Unity of Godwin’s Caleb Williams” (Graham) 2: 330–37 “The Gothic Vathek: The Problem of Genre Resolved” (Frank) 2: 89–95 “The Gothic Wilde” (Lawler) 3: 493–502 Governor General’s Award 2: 1, 3 Graham, Kenneth 2: 330–37; 3: 249–52 Graham’s Magazine, (sidebar) 2: 369 “The Grave” (Blair, R.) 1: 53 Graveyard poetry 1: 52–55 Gray, Thomas 3: 446 “The Great Carbuncle,” 2: 374 Great Expectations (Dickens) 2: 229–30, 247, 252 as Bildungsroman 2: 246–48 cannibalism 2: 237 Gothic plot 2: 248–51 as novel of manners 2: 247–48 punishment of children 2: 239–40

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

The Great God Pan (Machen) 2: 169–70 The Greater Inclination (Wharton) 3: 457 Green, Howard 2: 261 “Green Tea” (Le Fanu) 1: 335–36; 3: 2 Greg, W. R. 2: 120–21 “The Grey Champion” (Hawthorne) 2: 370 Griffin, Susan M. 2: 217–28 Griffith, Clark 3: 202–5 Grimké, Sarah 1: 182 Gross Clinic (painting) 1: 519 Gross, Louis S. 1: 57–66 “The Grotesque and the Gothic” (Appel) 2: 300–301 Grotesques 1: 19 American Gothic tradition 2: 300–301 architecture 1: 483 Carter, Angela 2: 190–94 definition 2: 300 sublime and 2: 300 techno-gothic 2: 68–72 See also Ghosts Guattari, Felix 3: 226–27 Guy Deverell (Le Fanu) 3: 1–2 Guy Domville (James) 2: 462, 466–67, 473 Guy Mannering (Scott) 3: 306–7, 310–14

H Halberstam, Judith 1: 197–99, 205; 2: 234 Hale, Sarah J. 1: 211–12 Halloween (Burns) 1: 18 Hallucinations 1: 333–41 The Hamlet (Faulkner) 2: 294 Hammer Films 1: 428–29, 435, 440, 445–47 The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood) 2: 1–2, 11, 13 Hannah, Barbara 3: 380 Hannaham, James 1: 468–73 The Happy Prince (Wilde) 3: 488 Hardy, Thomas 1: 34–35 The Harlem Book of the Dead (Van Der Zee) 3: 146 Harlequin formula 3: 281–83 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, (sidebar) 2: 55 Hartman, Geoffrey 2: 302 Haslam, John 1: 338–39 Haslam, Richard 3: 91–97 Hassan, Ihab 2: 301, 302 A Haunt of Fears (Barker) 2: 184

549

SUBJECT INDEX

“Gothic Genealogies: Dracula, Bowen’s Court, and Anglo-Irish Psychology” (Ingelbien) 1: 171–80 “The Gothic Imaginary: Goethe in Strasbourg” (Calhoon) 2: 344–49 “Gothic in the Horror Film 1930-1980” (Punter) 1: 439–52 “Gothic Letter on a Hot Night” (Atwood) 2: 8 “Gothic Libraries and National Subjects” (Lynch) 1: 92–102 Gothic literature. See Gothic movement “Gothic Motifs in the Waverly Novels” (Le Tellier) 3: 305–16 Gothic movement abnormal psychology 1: 332–41 aestheticism 1: 48–57, 107–8 African American experience 1: 108, 180–92 American vs. European 1: 57– 65; 2: 156–58 Antebellum period 1: 180–92 art 1: 506–26 cannibalism 2: 237 character types 1: 20; 2: 298– 302, 403–7 compared to modernism 1: 30–39 “counterfeiting” 3: 397–404, 451–52 demonic women in fiction 2: 14–16 drama 1: 26–27, 401–15 evolution of 1: 40–47 Faustian legend 2: 156–57, 299 films 1: 415–52 French authors 1: 2 French Revolution 1: 74–85, 410 Irish authors 1: 38 language of 1: 38–39 libraries in 1: 92–102 as masculine endeavor 1: 523 medieval in 1: 49–51, 61, 511–13 music 1: 461–73 1990s 1: 520 origins 1: 1–2, 30–31; 2: 116, 189 overviews 1: 1–102 performing arts 1: 389–474 poetry of 1: 18–20, 24, 52–55 reader appreciation 1: 4–5 relationship of architecture to literature 1: 480–86, 497–505 romances vs. novels 1: 49–52 Romanticism and 1: 2, 21–29, 42–45; 2: 271, 494; 3: 124, 308–9 Russian authors 1: 2 Scottish writers 1: 2

SUBJECT INDEX

THE HAUNTED CASTLE

The Haunted Castle (Railo) 1: 284 “The Haunted Chamber” (Radcliffe) 3: 233–37 Haunted house (Gothic convention) “The Fall of the House of Usher” 3: 225–26 The House of Seven Gables 1: 292–94 symbolism of family curse 1: 290–300 See also Castle (Gothic convention) “Haunted Houses I and II” (Mighall) 1: 290–301 The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (Dickens) 2: 230 “The Haunted Palace” (Poe) 3: 223–24 Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (Oates) 3: 163–64, 180, 184 The Haunting (film) 1: 281 “A Haunting Back: Harriet Jacobs, African-American Narrative, and the Gothic” (Goddu) 1: 180–97 The Haunting of Hill House (Jackson) (sidebar) 1: 464 film adaptation 1: 281 loneliness in 1: 273–74 supernatural 1: 274–75 To Have and Have Not (film) (Faulkner) 2: 294 Hawkins, Anthony Hope 1: 130 “Hawthorne and the Gothic Romance” (Lundbland) 2: 378–82 Hawthorne, Julian (sidebar) 3: 503 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 363, 363–86 curse narratives 1: 292–95 European Gothic tradition 2: 378–79; 3: 125 Goodrich, Samuel and 2: 364 influence of German Romanticism 2: 379 influence of Maturin, Charles Robert 2: 374 influence of Radcliffe, Ann 2: 376 influence on James, Henry 2: 462–63 mysterious portrait and 2: 370 Poe, Edgar Allan on (sidebar) 2: 369, 379 principal works 2: 365–66 spiritualism 2: 379–80 witchcraft 2: 371–73 “Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun: A Gothic Structure” (Elder) 2: 382–86 “Hawthorne’s Use of Three Gothic Patterns” (Doubleday) 2: 368–78 The Hay Wain (painting) 3: 55

550

Hazlitt, William (sidebar) 2: 163, (sidebar) 3: 298 The Heart of Midlothian (Scott) 3: 292 fear 3: 310 mystery 3: 308 robbers 3: 313 violence 3: 311–12 “Heat” (Oates) 3: 178 Heat: And Other Stories (Oates) 3: 165 Heavy metal music compared to Gothic novel 1: 461–67 Led Zeppelin I 1: 461 Satanism 1: 463–65 sexuality in lyrics 1: 462–63 subversive nature of 1: 466–67 Hedonism 3: 512–15 Heilman, Robert B. 2: 107–14 “The Hellbound Heart” (Barker) 1: 288–89 Heller, Tamar 2: 205–10 Heller, Terry 2: 312–19 Helyer, Ruth 1: 36–37 Henley, Samuel 2: 87–88 Hennelly, Mark M. Jr 3: 51–61 Henriquez (Baillie) 2: 58 “Henry James’ Ghost Stories” (Woolf) (sidebar) 2: 471 Heredity. See Family curse (Gothic convention) A Heritage of Horror (Pirie) 1: 445 Heroes 1: 24; 2: 299 Byronic (sidebar) 1: 241, 253–54 doubles and 1: 313 in drama 1: 405–6 Melville, Herman 3: 116 solitude 1: 253–54 Heroes and Villains (Carter) 2: 180, 188 Heroines A Bloodsmoor Romance 3: 174–75 of Bronte¨, Charlotte 2: 107–14 The Castle of Otranto 2: 138, 144 of Dinesen, Isak 2: 264–68 in drama 1: 405–6 femme fatale 2: 139 Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus 2: 138 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 1: 214–15 The Italian 2: 138, 139 Jane Eyre 2: 115–20, (sidebar) 116 Justine 3: 64, 67–69 Little Dorrit 2: 253 madness 1: 339–41 Melmoth the Wanderer 2: 138– 41, 144 Melville, Herman 3: 115–16 The Monk 2: 138–39; 3: 64–67

“The Monkey” 2: 274–75 The Mysteries of Udolpho 2: 138, 139, 144; 3: 254–59 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 183 Radcliffe, Ann 1: 221–24; 3: 64 in Rebecca 2: 118–19, 285–90 submissiveness 2: 138 Wuthering Heights 1: 138–45 See also Women “Heroines of Nineteenth-Century Fiction” (Howells) (sidebar) 2: 116 Herzog, Werner 1: 430–31 Hibbert, Samuel 1: 334, 336–37, 338 Hieroglyphic Tales (Walpole) 3: 431 The High Bid (James) 2: 462 Hill, Leslie 1: 376 The Hill of Dreams (Machen) 1: 170–71 Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall 1: 461–68 Historical novels 1: 58–65; 2: 400 Historiography 1: 68–69 The History of Caliph Vathek: An Arabian Tale (Beckford). See Vathek History of English Poetry (Wharton) 1: 54 A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (Irving) 2: 441–42 A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Irving) 2: 442–43 Hitchcock, Alfred 1: 435, (sidebar) 436, 437, 447–48 Hoeveler, Diane Long 1: 410–15; 3: 327–35 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1: 2; 2: 387, 387–420 Cobb, Palmer on (sidebar) 2: 412 compared to Shelley, Mary 3: 330 doppelgänger 1: 305; 2: 391–92, 399–400, 414, 431 Gide, André and 2: 423 influence of Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3: 40–41 influence on Hogg, James 2: 431 märchen 2: 395, 397 musical life 2: 387, 398 principal works 2: 388–89 psychological horror 2: 411–17 Scott, Sir Walter on (sidebar) 2: 392, 401, 407 uncanny guest 1: 302–4; 2: 403–11 “Hoffmann’s Uncanny Guest: A Reading of ‘Der Sandmann’” (Prawer) 2: 401–8

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

“INTERRACIAL SEXUAL DESIRE IN CHARLOTTE DACRE’S ZOFLOYA”

in Wuthering Heights 1: 262–63 zombie films 1: 443 See also Fear; Psychological horror; Supernatural “The House” (Jackson) 1: 280 The House and the Brain (Bulwer-Lytton) 1: 262–63 House at Hawk’s End (Nicole) 2: 120 The House by the Churchyard (Le Fanu) 3: 1–2, 5 The House of Mirth (Wharton) 3: 457–358, 459–60, 481 The House of Raby; Or, Our Lady of Darkness (Hooper) 1: 296–98, 300 The House of Seven Gables (Hawthorne) 2: 364–65, 380 family curse 1: 294–95 haunted house 1: 292–94 mysterious portrait 2: 370 witchcraft 2: 373 The House of the Vampire (Viereck) 1: 363 “How Readers Make Meaning” (Crosman) 2: 308–10 Howe, S. G. 1: 296 Howells, Coral Ann 2: 10–17 Howells, William Dean (sidebar) 2: 116, 462 “Howe’s Masquerade” (Hawthorne) 2: 369 Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 1: 125–26 Human nature 2: 51–54, 56–57 Hume, David 2: 95, 99–100 Hume, Marilyn 2: 146–50 Humor Carter, Angela 2: 185 Dickens, Charles 2: 234–41 in early Gothic literature 2: 298 and fear, in films 1: 435 Irving, Washington 2: 451–54 Lady Oracle 2: 17–23 “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” 2: 447–48 The Magic Toyshop 2: 185 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 2: 433–34 Hurd, Richard 1: 42–46, 54–55; 3: 449–50 Hysteria as deception 2: 69–73 feminist literary theory 1: 211 Freud, Sigmund on 3: 243 See also Madness

I “I and My Chimney” (Melville) 3: 114

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

I Lock the Door upon Myself (Oates) 3: 165 “’I Wants to Make Your Flesh Creep’: Notes toward a Reading of the Comic-Gothic in Dickens” (Wolfreys) 2: 234–42 “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber” (King) 2: 481 Identity crisis, “Der Sandmann,” 2: 412–17 Illustrations of madness: exhibiting a singular case of insanity and a no less remarkable difference in medical opinion: developing the nature of the assailment,and the manner of working events; with a description of the tortures experienced by bomb-bursting, lobster-cracking, and lengthening of the brain (Halsam) 1: 338–39 “‘I’m in the Business Too’: Gothic Chivalry, Private Eyes, and Proxy Sex and Violence in Chandler’s The Big Sleep” (Rzepka) 1: 36 Imagery in Bleak House 2: 242–45 Melville, Herman 3: 113–14 music 3: 114 tower 3: 113–14 Imagination 2: 262–63, 268 Imogen (Godwin) 1: 411 The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde) 3: 488 In a Glass Darkly (Le Fanu) 1: 335–36; 3: 2 “In Cold Blood” (Capote) 1: 66 In the Circles of Fear and Desire (Day) 2: 312–13, 317 “In the Region of Ice” (Oates) 3: 183 Incest. See Sexuality, incest Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) 1: 185–92 The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (Carter) 2: 180, 195–99 Ingebretsen, Edward J. 3: 277–86 Ingelbien, Raphael 1: 171–80 Ingemann, Bernhard Severin 2: 272–73 An Inland Voyage (Stevenson) 3: 359 Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers (Abercrombie) 1: 333–34 Insanity. See Madness Intentions (Wilde) 3: 488, 493, 504, 507 Interlunar (Atwood) 2: 11 The Interpretations of Dreams (Freud) 1: 326–28 “Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya” (Mellor) 1: 207–10

551

SUBJECT INDEX

“Hoffmann’s Weird Tales” (Literary World), 2: 392–93 “Hogg” (Saintsbury) (sidebar) 2: 429 Hogg, James 1: 2, 28–29, 80; 2: 421, 421–39 compared to Dostoevski, Fyodor 2: 433–34 influence of Hoffmann, E. T. A. 2: 431 influence on Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 213 poetry 2: 421–23, 427 principal works 2: 423–24 Scott, Sir Walter and 2: 421– 22, 432–33 supernatural 2: 422–23, 425– 28, 431–32 Hogle, Jerrold E. 3: 395–405 Hollington, Michael (sidebar) 2: 252 “The Hollow of the Three Hills” (Hawthorne) 2: 364, 366–68, 371 Holt, Victoria 2: 115, 119–20 “Homely Gothic” (Botting) 2: 215–17 Homosexuality 1: 72–73 Beckford, William 2: 87, 98 in “The Monkey” 2: 273–76 See also Sexuality Hooper, Jane Margaret 1: 296–98, 300 Hope, Anthony. See Hawkins, Anthony Hope “Hop-Frog: Or, the Eight Chained Orang-Outangs” (Poe) 3: 189 Horace 1: 41 “Le Horla” (Maupassant) 1: 314 Horner, Avril 2: 284–91 Horror architecture as representation 2: 344–48 Calvinist motifs in 3: 277 Dinesen, Isak 2: 283–84 drama 1: 390 films, 1930-1980 1: 439–51 films, American 1: 398–401, 415–39 films, German 1: 429, 430–31, 439 films, Japanese 1: 428 Lewis, Matthew Gregory (sidebar) 3: 62 in The Mysteries of Udolpho 1: 225–26 Oates, Joyce Carol on (sidebar) 3: 179 pornography and 2: 187–88; 3: 284 science fiction films 1: 427–29 slavery as 1: 181–92, 520 television 1: 390–91, 431–32 vs. terror 3: 237–38, 463 Wharton, Edith 3: 463–66

SUBJECT INDEX

“THE INTERRUPTED CADENCE”

“The Interrupted Cadence” (Hoffmann). See “Die Fermate” “An Interview with Angela Carter” (Carter and Katsavos) 2: 181–82 Interview with the Vampire (Rice) 1: 369–70; 3: 263–65 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 280 theological debate in 3: 278–85 See also Vampire Chronicles “The Intoxicated” (Jackson) 1: 271, 272 “Introduction: The Art of Haunting” (Burns, S.) 1: 518–25 “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” (Wood) 1: 415–25 Introduction to The Best Tales of Hoffmann (Bleiler) 2: 393–401 Introduction to The Castle of Otranto (Gamer) 3: 442–54 Introduction to The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story and The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (Frank) (sidebar) 3: 434 Introduction to Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (Butler, M.) (sidebar) 3: 328 Introduction to Gothic Art (Martindale) 1: 506–11 Introduction to Gothic Sculpture 1140-1300 (Williamson) 1: 511–18 Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer (Baldick) 3: 84–91 Introduction to Plays on the Passions (Duthie) 2: 61–67 “Introductory” (Birkhead) 1: 16–21 “Introductory Discourse” (Baillie) 2: 51–54, 56–57, 62, (sidebar) 68 Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner) 2: 302 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (film) 1: 442 Iphigenia in Tauris (Goethe). See Iphigenie auf Tauris Iphigenie auf Tauris (Goethe) 2: 341 Ireland, W. H. 3: 199 Irigaray, Luce 1: 90–91 “Irving and the Gothic Tradition” (Clendenning) 2: 446–51 Irving, Henry 3: 400–401 Irving, Washington 1: 262; 2: 379, 441, 441–60 Ambiguous gothic 2: 453–55 American Gothic tradition 2: 443, 446–55 burlesque 2: 452–54 compared to Radcliffe, Ann 2: 453–55

552

compared to Scott, Sir Walter 2: 453 humor 2: 451–52 innovator of sportive Gothic 2: 447–51, 451–53 parody 2: 448–49, 453, 458–59 principal works 2: 443 the sublime 2: 452 use of sexual innuendo 2: 456–58 “Irving’s ‘Adventure of the German Student’” (Devlin) 2: 456–58 “Irving’s German Student” (Lupack) 2: 458–59 “Irving’s Use of the Gothic Mode” (Ringe) (sidebar) 2: 450 Irwin, Joseph James (sidebar) 3: 62 Island Nights’ Entertainments (Stevenson) 3: 360 The Island of Dr Moreau (Wells) 1: 162–66, 163 Island of Lost Souls (film) 1: 441–42 “Isle of the Devils” (Lewis) 1: 208 “The Isle of Voices” (Stevenson) 3: 360 IT (King) 2: 501 The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (Radcliffe) 2: 36; 3: 232, 243 doubles in 3: 369 heroine in 2: 138, 139 women’s education 3: 239–40, 242–44 Italy: With Sketches of Spain and Portugal (Beckford) 2: 80 Ivanhoe (Scott) 3: 308, 310, 312

J Jackson, Shirley 1: 264–82, (sidebar) 464 house theme 1: 280–82 loneliness theme 1: 272–78 marriage reflected in fiction 1: 266 misanthropy theme 1: 278–80 science fiction 1: 271–72 supernatural 1: 264, 267–72, 274–75 Jacobs, Harriet 1: 185–92 Jaffe, Aniela 3: 465 “James Boaden” (Temple) (sidebar) 1: 399 James, Henry 1: 31, 129; 2: 214–15, 461, 461–80 compared to Lewis, Matthew Gregory 2: 446–47 doppelgänger 2: 473–77 ghost stories 2: 462–64, 466– 71, (sidebar) 471

Gothic conventions 2: 470–77 house metaphor 2: 472–77 Howells, William Dean and 2: 462 influence of Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 462–63 principal works 2: 464–65 supernatural 2: 463–64, 470–73 Wharton, Edith and 3: 459, 483 James, M. R. 1: 38 James, Sibyl 2: 261–69 “Jamesian Gothicism: The Haunted Castle of the Mind” (Shelden) 2: 470–78 Jameson, Fredric 1: 146–47, 466–67 Jane Austen and her Art (Lascelles) 2: 32 “Jane Austen’s Gothic Architecture” (Lamont) 2: 41–46 Jane Eyre (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 103–5, 111, (sidebar) 121 Gothic conventions 2: 108–9 heroines (sidebar) 2: 116 masculine tone 2: 114–15 as prototype for modern Gothic 2: 115–20 Jane Eyre (film) 1: 119 Jane Talbot (Brown) 2: 154, 162 “Janice” (Jackson) 1: 269 Jarrett, David 2: 251–55 Jazz (Morrison) 3: 140–41 Jentsch, E. 1: 301–2 The Jewel of Seven Stars (Stoker) 3: 386 Jewsbury, Geraldine (sidebar) 2: 207 “Joanna Baillie and Charlotte Dacre” (Clery) 2: 54–61 Johnson, Diane 1: 217–19 Johnson, Greg 3: 178–85 Johnson, Heather 2: 190–94 Johnson, Samuel 1: 50–51 “The Jolly Corner” (James) 2: 461, 463–64, 466–77 “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu” (Ellis) (sidebar) 3: 6 “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu” (Rolleston) 3: 5–6 Joshi, S. T. 1: 264–83 “A journal entry of October 15, 1821” (Byron) (sidebar) 3: 42 Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (Lewis) 3: 32–33 The Journal of Julius Rodman (Poe) 3: 206 Journal of Natural Philosophy (Nicholson) 1: 336 The Journal of Sir Walter Scott (Scott) 3: 299

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

A LEGEND OF MONTROSE

K Kael, Pauline 1: 437 Kafka, Franz 3: 170 Kant, Ïmmanuel 1: 150–55 Karloff, Boris (sidebar) 1: 416, 434–35; 3: 353 Karpinski, Joanne B. 1: 68 Kater Murr (Hoffmann) 2: 403 Katsavos, Anna 2: 181–82 Keats, John 1: 2, 19, 24, (sidebar) 2: 171 Kemble, John Philip 1: 403 Kenilworth (Scott) 3: 297, 310, 312 Kenton, Edna (sidebar) 3: 22 Kerenyi, Karl 3: 465 “Kerfol” (Wharton) 3: 459, 471, 474 Kerr, Elizabeth M. 2: 297–306 Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 1: 185–86 Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751 (Stevenson) 3: 359–60 Kierkegaard, Søren 2: 272 Kilgour, Maggie 1: 67 “Kilmeny” (Hogg) 2: 423, 427 Kincaid, James 2: 236–37 King, Stephen 2: 481, 481–505 American Gothic tradition 2: 494–99 castle in 1: 284–90 compared to Shelley, Mary 2: 500 compared to Stevenson, Robert Louis 2: 485–87 doubles in 2: 485–93 families, American 2: 501–3 fear 2: 495, 504 on film adaptation of The Shining 1: 219

horror films 1: 398–401 influence of Melville, Herman 2: 494–99 principal works 2: 482–83 quest in (sidebar) 2: 492 serial killers 2: 490–93 supernatural 2: 501–4 vampires 1: 371–73; 3: 270 “The King’s Betrothed” (Hoffmann). See “Die Königsbraut” Kirland Revels (Holt) 2: 119–20 Kiss Me Again, Stranger (du Maurier), review of 2: 282–83 Klein, Melanie 1: 317–25 Lacan, Jacques on 1: 381 on mother 1: 379–81 Oedipal complex 1: 380 Klein Zaches (Hoffmann) 2: 405 Knapp, Steven 1: 144 Knickerbocker, Diedrich. See Irving, Washington Kollin, Susan 1: 36 “Die Königsbraut” (Hoffmann) 2: 400–401 Kotzebue, August von 1: 407–9 Kristeva, Julia 2: 287; 3: 482 Kroker, Arthur 1: 147 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge) 1: 19, (sidebar) 48

L Labyrinth (Gothic convention) 3: 197–98 Lacan, Jacques 1: 317, 381; 3: 350 LaCapra, Dominick 3: 152–55, 158 “The Lady of the House of Love” (Carter) 2: 182, 199 The Lady of the Lake (Scott) 3: 290, 306 Lady Oracle (Atwood) 2: 2, 3, 10 as comic Gothic 2: 17–23 compared to Cat’s Eye 2: 12 excerpt (sidebar) 2: 18 literary conventions in 2: 11–13 Lady Susan (Austen) 2: 33 Lady Windermere’s Fan (Wilde) 3: 488, 495 “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” (Wharton) 3: 458, 467, 471 The Lair of the White Worm (Stoker) 3: 386 Lamb, Mary 1: 100 Lamont, Claire 2: 41–46 “Landing in Luck” (Faulkner) 2: 293 Landor, Walter Savage 1: 257–58 Landscape (motif) “Bartleby the Scrivener” 3: 123–24

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

The Castle of Otranto 1: 402 in drama 1: 402–5 Moby-Dick; or, The Whale 3: 113 Radliffe, Ann 1: 403; 3: 113 Lang, Fritz 1: 429, 431 Langbaum, Robert 2: 262 Langhorne, John 3: 435 Langstaff, Launcelot. See Irving, Washington Lanone, Catherine 3: 97–104 Laplanche, Jean 2: 310–11 Lascelles, Mary 2: 32 Lasher (Rice) 3: 264 The Last Days of Pompeii (Bulwer-Lytton) (sidebar) 1: 15 The Last Man (Shelley) 3: 320 Last Tales (Dinesen) 2: 258 “The Later Years, 1820-1824” (Lougy) 3: 76–84 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry 1: 498–99 “The Laugh” (Wharton) 3: 478 Laurencin, Marie 2: 261 Lawler, Donald 3: 489, 493–502 Lawrence, D. H. (sidebar) 3: 203 Lay of the Last Minstrel (Scott) 1: 487; 3: 290 Lay Sermons (Hogg) 2: 427 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 1: 31, 89–90, 139; 3: 1, 1–29, (sidebar) 6 abnormal psychology in 1: 335–36 development of vampire 1: 353–58 doubles in 1: 382–84 dreams 1: 329–30 historical romances 3: 6–15 influence of (sidebar) 3: 22 influence on Stoker, Bram 1: 358 marriage of 3: 17–18 principal works 3: 3 sensation fiction 1: 354; 3: 5–6 women in 3: 16–17 Le Guin, Ursula K. (sidebar) 1: 291 Le Sage, Alain René 1: 334 Le Tellier, Robert Ignatius 3: 305–16 Leatherdale, Clive 3: 405–15 Led Zeppelin (musical group) 1: 461–62, 463 Led Zeppelin I (music recording) 1: 461, 462 Ledwon, Lenora 1: 452–60 Lee, Sophia 1: 115–18, (sidebar) 119 A Legend of Montrose (Scott) architecture motif 3: 315 doppelgänger 3: 314 fear 3: 310

553

SUBJECT INDEX

The Journals of Eleanor Druse: My Investigation of the Kingdom Hospital Incident (King) 2: 482 The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Atwood) 2: 2, 6, 11 A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (Radcliffe) 3: 232 Joy Division (musical group) 1: 471–73 Jude the Obscure (Hardy) 1: 35 Jung, Carl G. 2: 147, 412 dream interpretation 1: 329 du Maurier, Daphne and 2: 289 Freud, Sigmund and 1: 329 individuation 3: 481 psychological horror 3: 463 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3: 373–74 Justine (Sade) 3: 61–69

SUBJECT INDEX

“THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW”

mystery in 3: 307 violence 3: 312 “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (Irving) 2: 441–43, 447, 447–48, 457 Legends. See Mythology Legends of Angria (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 103 “Legends of the Province-House” (Hawthorne) 2: 364 Leiber, Fritz 1: 364–65 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Goethe) 2: 341 “Leixlip Castle” (Maturin) 3: 75–76 “Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood” (Freud) 1: 152 Lerner, Gerda 3: 17 Leroux, Gaston 1: 2 Lestat (character) 1: 369–70; 3: 269–70, 271–76, 280–83 A Letter from Xo Ho,a Chinese Philosopher at London, to His Friend Lien Chi at Peking (Walpole) 3: 446 Letter to Katharine de Mattos: 1 January 1886 (Stevenson) (sidebar) 3: 373 “A Letter to Richard Woodhouse on September 21, 1819” (Keats) (sidebar) 2: 171 Letter to Sir Walter Scott (Edgeworth) (sidebar) 3: 306 “Letter to Wilkie Collins on September 20, 1862” (Dickens) (sidebar) 2: 223 Letters (correspondence) du Maurier, Daphne 2: 289–90 Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3: 37–38 Walpole, Horace 3: 429, 431–32 See also specific letters Letters from Africa (Dinesen). See Breve fra Afrika (Dinesen) Letters of Horace Walpole (Walpole) 3: 429 The Letters of Oscar Wilde (Wilde) 3: 504–5 Letters on Chivalry and Romance (Hurd) 1: 42–46, 54–55; 3: 449–50 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (Scott) 1: 334, 335, 337, 338 Letters on Natural Magic (Brewster) 1: 334 Lévy, Maurice 3: 193–202 Lewes, George Henry 1: 300 Lewis, Matthew Gregory 1: 2, 48, 76–79, 81, 86–87, 402; 3: 31, 31–71 Byron, Lord George Gordon on 3: 36, (sidebar) 42

554

compared to Bosch, Hieronymous 3: 53–60 compared to James, Henry 2: 446–47 compared to Rice, Anne 3: 279 German romantic influence 1: 408 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von and 2: 349–53 heroines 2: 138–39, 144, 297–98 influence of 3: 40–45 influence on Bronte¨, Charlotte 2: 122–27 influence on Hoffmann, E. T. A. 3: 40–41 letters of 3: 37–38 madness as theme 1: 338; 3: 203 marriage of 3: 36 mastery of horror (sidebar) 3: 62 on The Mysteries of Udolpho 3: 39 nationalism 1: 412 plagiarism 3: 61 principal works 3: 33 racial phobia of 1: 208 Sade, Marquis de and 3: 61–69 Scott, Sir Walter on 3: 36 Shelley, Percy Bysshe and 3: 59–60 wasted talent of 3: 355 Lewis, W. S. 3: 447 Libraries 1: 92–102 Life among the Savages (Jackson) 1: 266–67 Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Laplanche) 2: 310–11 “Life and I” (Wharton) 3: 470, 476–78, 482–84 Life before Man (Atwood) 2: 2 “Ligeia” (Poe) 3: 188, 189 animated tapestry in 3: 200 castle in 3: 194–95 madness in 3: 204 Light in August (Faulkner) 2: 293–94, 302, 304 Lionel Lincoln (Cooper) 1: 58–62 Literary criticism, function of 1: 95–96 Literary Women: The Great Writers (Moers) 1: 210–11 Literary World, 2: 392–93 “The Little Antiquary” (Irving) 2: 452 Little Dorrit (Dickens) 2: 229–30, 251–55 “The Little Photographer” (du Maurier) 2: 284 Little Women (Alcott) 3: 175 Lives of the Necromancers; or, An Account of the Most Eminent Persons in Successive Ages, Who Have Claimed for Themselves, or

to Whom Has Been Imputed by Others, the Exercise of Magical Power (Godwin) 2: 324–27 Lives of the Novelists (Scott) 3: 313 Lives of the Twins (Oates) 3: 165, 178 Livre des Métiers (Boileau) 1: 515–16 Loe, Thomas 2: 245–51 Loneliness (theme) 1: 272–78; 3: 342–47 Long, Edward 1: 208 The Long Story (Beckford). See The Vision Longinus (philosopher) 1: 148–49 “The Looking Glass” (Wharton) 3: 467–68, 471 “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” (Wilde) 3: 487 Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories (Wilde) 3: 488 “The Lottery” (Jackson) 1: 272–73, (sidebar) 464 Lougy, Robert 3: 76–84 Louis (character) 1: 369–70; 3: 268–70, 280–84 as narrator 3: 271 sexuality of 3: 274–75 Love (Carter) 2: 180 Love and Death in the American Novel (Fiedler) 1: 67, 212, 520; 2: 298–303 Lovecraft, H. P. 1: 260–64, 261 on Poe, Edgar Allan (sidebar) 3: 219 supernatural (sidebar) 1: 260 on Walpole, Horace (sidebar) 3: 443 Loved and Lost (Le Fanu) 3: 17 “The Lovely Night” (Jackson) 1: 268–69 “The Lover’s Tale” (Maturin) 3: 77–78, 87, 90 Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Nussbaum) 3: 511 “The Loves of the Lady Purple” (Carter) 2: 183–84, (sidebar) 191 The Loving Spirit (du Maurier) 2: 279 Lubbock, Percy 3: 436–37 “Lucky to Get Away” (Jackson) 1: 266 “Luella Miller” (Wilkins-Freeman) 1: 365 Lugosi, Bela 1: 424, (sidebar) 425; 3: 353, 417 Lukacs, George 1: 58; 2: 209 Lundblad, Jane 2: 378–82 Lupack, Barbara Tepa 2: 458–59 Lynch, David 1: 454–56 Lynch, Deidre 1: 92–102 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 1: 153 “Lyttil Pynkie” (Hogg) 2: 422

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

MEMNOCH THE DEVIL

M

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

Medieval literature compared to American Gothic tradition 2: 298–99 horror as theme 1: 16–17 Meigs, J. Aitken 3: 218–19 “Meister Martin der Küfner und seine Gesellen” (Hoffmann) 2: 398–99 Méliès, George 1: 426 Mellard, James M. 2: 306–12 Mellor, Anne K. 1: 207–10 Melmoth réconcilié (Balzac) 3: 100–103 Melmoth, Sebastian. See Wilde, Oscar Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin) 1: 2, 31, 80, 87; 2: 254; 3: 73–74, 76, 297 as autobiography 3: 77 Calvinism 3: 91–96 compared to The Picture of Dorian Gray 3: 504–9 European Gothic tradition 3: 84–91 evil 1: 462 Gothic conventions in 1: 27–29 heroine in 2: 138–41, 144 influence on Fanshawe: A Tale 2: 379 labyrinth in 3: 197 mysterious portrait 1: 252; 3: 506–7 narrative structure 3: 77–78, 86–87, 98–99 “Preface” (sidebar) 3: 85 psychological horror in 1: 27–28 religion in 3: 79, 87–89 review (sidebar) 3: 98 sadism 3: 199 sequel to 3: 100–103 sublime 3: 91–96 “Melville and the Gothic Novel” (Arvin) 3: 111–19, 118 Melville, Herman 1: 143–44; 3: 107, 107–33 compared to Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 122–23 European Gothic tradition 3: 118–22 Gothic influence on 3: 111–16 imagery 3: 113–14 influence on King, Stephen 2: 494–99 monsters 3: 116 music imagery 3: 114 mysterious portrait convention 3: 114–15 principal works 3: 109–10 “Melville’s Use of the Gothic Tradition” (Shetty) 3: 118–22 Memnoch the Devil (Rice) 3: 264, 273–74 See also Vampire Chronicles

555

SUBJECT INDEX

“The Macabre and the Unexpected” (Barkham) 2: 282–83 MacAndrew, Elizabeth 3: 465 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 3: 447 Machen, Arthur 1: 169–71 Mack, Douglas S. 2: 425–28 Macpherson, James 1: 20, 97–98 MacPherson, Jay (sidebar) 3: 111 Mad Love (film) 1: 437 “Mad Monkton” (Collins) 1: 298–300 “Mademoiselle de Scuderi” (Hoffmann). See “Das Fräulein von Scuderi” Madness Bertram 1: 337–38 The Castle Spectre 1: 338 Gaslight 1: 339–40 as Gothic theme 1: 339–41; 2: 67–68 heroines 1: 339–41 Matthews, James Tilly 1: 338–39 Maupassant, Guy de 1: 314 Orra 1: 340–41 Poe, Edgar Allan 1: 314–15; 3: 202–5 Witchcraft 2: 72–73 “The Yellow Wallpaper” 1: 214–15 See also Hysteria Magic. See Sorcery The Magic Toyshop (Carter) 2: 180, 182, 183–85 Magistrale, Tony 3: 124–28 “Main Street” (Hawthorne) 2: 375 “The Making of a Genre” (Prawer) 1: 425–39 “The Making of the Count” (Leatherdale) 3: 405–15 Malin, Irving 2: 300–302 “The Man of the Crowd” (Poe) 3: 198 Mandel, Eli 2: 5–10 “Manfred” (Byron) 1: 24 Mangan, James Clarence 3: 82, 83 Mansfield Park (Austen) 2: 26–27, 32 Manuel (Maturin) 3: 74, 77, 84 The Marble Faun (Faulkner) 2: 294, 376 The Marble Faun (Hawthorne) 2: 363–65, 371–73, 382–85 Märchen (literary myth) 2: 394–95, 397 Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (Melville) 3: 108 “Markheim” (Stevenson) 3: 360, 368 Markley, A. A. 3: 211–18

Marmion (Scott) 3: 290, 306, 309, 312 The Marne (Wharton) 3: 458 Marriages and Infidelities (Oates) 3: 164, 180 Martindale, Andrew 1: 506–11 Martineau, Harriet 2: 218 “Mary Burnet” (Hogg) 2: 427–28 “Mary Shelley and Gothic Feminism: The Case of ‘The Mortal Immortal’” (Hoeveler) 3: 327–35 Marya (Oates) 3: 164 The Masque of Red Death (film) 1: 444 “The Masque of the Red Death” (Poe) 3: 188–89, 204, 224 The Master Flea (Hoffmann) 2: 397 The Master of Ballantrae (Stevenson) 3: 360 Mathilda (Shelley) 3: 330 “Matthew Gregory Lewis” (Montague) 3: 36–46 Matthews, James Tilly 1: 338–39 “Maturin and the ‘Calvinist Sublime’” (Haslam) 3: 91–97 Maturin, Charles Robert 1: 2, 80, 87, 337–38; 3: 73, 73–105 Catholicism 3: 87–88, 94–96 compared to Don Quixote 3: 82 compared to Wilde, Oscar 3: 504–9 death of 3: 81–82 German romantic influence 1: 407–8 heroines 2: 138–41, 144 influence of Romantic poets 3: 82 influence on Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 499 influence on French authors 3: 97–103 influence on Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 374 labyrinth convention 3: 197 on Melmoth the Wanderer (sidebar) 3: 85 portrayal of women 3: 80 principal works 3: 74 religion and 3: 79, 81 Scott, Sir Walter and 3: 82–83 use of Gothic conventions 1: 27–29 Maupassant, Guy de 1: 314 “Mayfair Witches” series (Rice) 3: 263–65 Maynard, Temple J. (sidebar) 1: 399 “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (Hawthorne) 2: 364 McCullers, Carson 1: 215; 2: 298, 300 McDowill, Margaret 3: 464

SUBJECT INDEX

MEMOIRS OF CARWIN THE BILOQUIST

Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (Brown) 2: 171–72, 176 Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (Brown) 2: 170 Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Es., R. A. (Collins) 2: 201, 205–10 “The Merry Men” (Stevenson) 3: 360 The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (Stevenson) 3: 360 “The Metamorphosis” (Oates) 3: 179 Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (Baillie) 2: 60 “Metzengerstein” (Poe) 3: 189, 199–200 Miall, David S. 3: 238–45 Michelis, Angelica 1: 376–85 “The Midnight Mass” (Collins) 2: 218 Mighall, Robert 1: 290–301 Milbank, Alison 1: 86–92 Miles, Robert 1: 411 The Milesian Chief (Maturin) 1: 27; 3: 73–74, 83, 84, 85 Milton, John 2: 170–76; 3: 339, 341 “The Mines of Falun” (Hoffmann). See “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” “The Minister’s Black Veil” (Hawthorne) 2: 364 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Scott) 3: 290 “The Mirror and the Cameo: Margaret Atwood’s Comic/Gothic Novel, Lady Oracle” (Vincent) 2: 17–24 A Mirror for Witches (Forbes) 1: 62–65 “Mirrored Worlds and the Gothic in Faulkner’s Sanctuary” (Heller, Terry) 2: 205–10 Mirroring (literary convention) 2: 312–18 Misanthropy 1: 278–80 Miscegenation 3: 218–19, 221–27 Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (Aiken, Barbauld) 1: 2, (sidebar) 7 Miscellaneous Plays (Baillie) 2: 50 Mishra, Vijay 1: 143–57 Misogyny 2: 221 “Miss Braddon” (James, H.) 2: 214–15 “Miss Jeromette and the Clergyman” (Collins) 2: 203–4 The Mist (King) 1: 286–87 Mitchell, S. Weir (sidebar) 1: 213, 213–14 Miyoshi, Masao 3: 365–70

556

Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale (Melville) 3: 107–9 Captain Ahab as Gothic villain 3: 126–27 castle in 3: 128–32 compared to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym 3: 206–8 compared to The Shining 2: 494–99 film adaptation 3: 129 landscape motif 3: 113 mysterious portrait in 3: 114 review (sidebar) 3: 125 “The Modern American Horror Movie—Text and Subtext” (King) 1: 398–401 Modern Novel Writing; or, The Elegant Enthusiast (Beckford) 2: 80 Modernism 1: 30–39, 109 Moers, Ellen 1: 210–11, 215, (sidebar) 3: 338 Mogen, David 1: 68 Mona Lisa 1: 32–33 Monasteries. See Religious buildings The Monastery (Scott) 3: 314 The Monk (Lewis) 1: 2, 48, 76–79, 81, 86–87; 3: 32–33, 66 as advocate of virtue 3: 48–51 compared to Justine 3: 61–69 compared to paintings of Bosch, Hieronymous 3: 54–60 compared to Villette 2: 122–27 excess in 3: 355 heroine in 2: 138–39; 3: 64–67 indecency of 3: 46–48 influence of Faust: Ein Fragment 2: 349–53 influence on Die Elixiere des Teufels 3: 40–41 Lord Byron’s lampoon of 3: 51–52 madness as theme 3: 203 as original Gothic literature 2: 116 “The Preface” 3: 34 publishing history 3: 39–40 as sensational fiction 3: 31 sexuality 1: 463 Monk, Samuel H. 1: 148, 152 “The Monkey” (Dinesen) 2: 259–61, 269 doubles in 2: 272–73 Gothic conventions 2: 263–68 heroine in 2: 274–75 homosexuality 2: 273–76 monsters 2: 267 reader response 2: 276–77 “The Monk’s Gothic Bosh and Bosch’s Gothic Monks” (Hennelly) 3: 51–61

“’The Monster Never Dies’: An Analysis of the Gothic Double in Stephen King’s Oeuvre” (Strengell) 2: 485–93 Monsters ambivalence toward 1: 417 as cultural symbols 1: 198–99 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 1: 25–26, 83–85, 255; 3: 335–36, 339–42, 343, 348–55 horror films 1: 416–17, 427– 30, 442 Karloff, Boris 1: 434–35 Melville, Herman 3: 116 “The Monkey” 2: 267 Pet Semetary 2: 486 sexuality of 2: 188 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3: 370–72 in “Taming a Tartar” 1: 199– 207 techno-gothic grotesques 2: 68–72 See also Vampires; Werewolves “Monte Verità” (du Maurier) 2: 284 The Monthly Review (periodical) 2: 327–30; 3: 51, 444–45 The Moonstone (Collins) 2: 201, (sidebar) 207 “‘More Demon than Man’: Melville’s Ahab as Gothic Villain” (Magistrale) 3: 124–28 Moretti, Franco 2: 234 Morrison, Toni 1: 108; 3: 135, 135–61 on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 3: 158 American Africanism 1: 118–27 castle convention 3: 136 Echo mythology 3: 138–41 ghosts 3: 150–60 inspiration for Beloved 3: 137–38 oral tradition 3: 147 portrayal of women 3: 139–41, 147–48 principal works 3: 136 Pulitzer Prize 3: 135 supernatural 3: 138–42, 148–49 Morse, Heyward 2: 468 “The Mortal Immortal: A Tale” (Shelley) 3: 330–33 Mosses from an Old Manse (Hawthorne) 2: 364–65, 379, 381 Mothers Freud, Sigmund on 1: 377–79 Klein, Melanie on 1: 379–81 power of 3: 480–84

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

NIXON, RICHARD

Lewis, Matthew Gregory on 3: 39 as original Gothic literature 2: 116 Psyche mythology 3: 252–56 sublime theme in 3: 313 suspense narrative of 3: 249–52 women’s education 3: 239–43 Mysteries of Winterthurn (Oates) 3: 163–65, 175–78 The Mysterious Mother (Walpole) 3: 431, (sidebar) 434 The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Dickens) 2: 230 Mysticism 1: 254–55 Mythology Carter, Angela 2: 188–89 Dracula 1: 166–69 Echo 3: 138–41 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 338–42 horror films 1: 445–47 märchen 2: 394–95 motherhood (sidebar) 3: 338 Prometheus 3: 338–42 Psyche 3: 252–56 sexuality 2: 188–89 The Sphinx 3: 498 vampire 3: 266–76 Wharton, Edith 3: 465, (sidebar) 467 Mythology of the Secret Societies (Roberts) 1: 79

N Nachträglichkeit (deferred action) 2: 310 Nachtstüke (Hoffmann) 2: 397 “Naked” (Oates) 3: 182 “Napoleon and the Spectre” (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 105–7 “Narrative and Psychology in Gothic Fiction” (Punter) 1: 317–26 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Poe) 1: 118, 251; 3: 204, 207 biographical analysis of 3: 205–11 compared to Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale 3: 206–8 history of critical reception 3: 189–90 influence of Godwin, William 3: 211–17 as Western novel 3: 205–6 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass) 1: 183–85 Nash, Jesse W. 2: 499–504 National Book Award 3: 163–64

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

Nationalism drama 1: 412 European Gothic tradition 1: 93–102, 158–71; 2: 240 Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 83 Native Son (Wright) 1: 180 Naturalism 1: 129–30, 482–83 Naylor, Gloria 3: 142 Necromancy 2: 326–27, (sidebar) 328 Nemesis (Oates) 3: 165, 178 Neoclassicism 1: 50–55 “Never Bet the Devil your Head” (Poe) 3: 198 New American Gothic (Malin) 2: 301–2 “New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History” (Lerner) 3: 17 “New Life for an Old Tradition: Anne Rice and Vampire Literature” (Wood, M.) 3: 266–76 The New Magdalen (Collins, Wilkie) 1: 88 The New Monthly Magazine, 2: 428–29 “New Novels: The Moonstone: A Romance” (Jewsbury) (sidebar) 2: 207 “New Publications, with Critical Remarks: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” (The New Monthly Magazine) 2: 428–29 “A New Year’s Eve Adventure” (Hoffmann). See “Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht” Newgate novels (sidebar) 1: 94 Newton, Judith 3: 17, 21 Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens) 2: 230 Nicholson, Jack 2: 498 Nicholson, William 1: 336 Nicolai, Friedrich 1: 336–37 Nicole, Claudette 2: 115, 120 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1: 147; 3: 470 Night of the Living Dead (film) 1: 442–43 Night Side: Eighteen Tales (Oates) 3: 163–65, 170, 180–84 Night Thoughts (Young) 1: 53 Nightmare (Gothic element) “The Company of Wolves” 2: 187 Gorey, Edward (sidebar) 1: 510 horror films 1: 415–16 Nightmare (painting) 1: 519 Nights at the Circus (Carter) 2: 180, 182, 185–86, 197–99 “Night-Side” (Oates) 3: 181 The Night-Side of Nature (Crowe) 3: 24 Nightwood (Barnes) 2: 188 Nixon, Richard 1: 369

557

SUBJECT INDEX

relationship to children 1: 377–81 Wharton, Edith and 3: 476–77, 483–84 The Mountain Bard: Consisting of Ballads and Songs, Founded on Facts and Legendary Tales (Hogg) 2: 422 Movie-Made America (Sklar) 1: 438 “The Moving Finger” (Wharton) 3: 458 “Mr Adamson of Laverhope” (Hogg) 2: 426–27 “Mr. Jones” (Wharton) 3: 459 “Mrs. Ann Radcliffe: The Craft of Terror” (Varma) (sidebar) 3: 253 “MS. Found in a Bottle” (Poe) 3: 188, 202 Murder in the Dark (Atwood) 2: 10, 11, 17 Murders in the Rue Morgue (film) 1: 418–19 Murders in the Rue Morgue (Poe) 1: 250–51 Murdoch, Iris 3: 510–11 Murnau, F. W. (sidebar) 1: 451 Murphy, Dennis Jasper. See Maturin, Charles Robert Murray, Margaret P. 3: 462–66 Music 1: 391, 461–73 blues 1: 464 Bromley Contingent 1: 470–71 Goth 1: 470–73 heavy metal 1: 461–67 imagery 3: 114 punk 1: 470–73 rock 1: 461–62, 469–73 See also specific names of musical groups, songs and albums My Heart Laid Bare (Oates) 3: 165 “My Life with R. H. Macy” (Jackson) 1: 265 Myers, F. W. H 1: 330–31 Mysteries 2: 249; 3: 306–8 The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe) 1: 2, 80–81, 92–93; 2: 25, 59; 3: 231–33, 255 castle convention in 1: 226 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor on 3: 245–46 compared to Billy Budd 3: 111–12 compared to Twin Peaks 1: 455 Enfield, William on 3: 246–49 “The Haunted Chamber” 3: 233–37 heroine in 1: 221–24; 2: 138, 144; 3: 254–59 horror 1: 225–26 influence on Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 501 influence on Northanger Abbey 2: 34–40

SUBJECT INDEX

“’NO MORE THAN GHOSTS MAKE’”

“’No More Than Ghosts Make’: The Hauntology and Gothic Minimalism of Beckett’s Late Work” (Fraser) 1: 38–39 No Name (Collins, Wilkie) 1: 88 The Nocturnal Minstrel (Sleath) 1: 98 Northanger Abbey (Austen) 1: 74–76, 80–81; 2: 25–31, 236 architecture 2: 41–45 compared to The Blind Assassin 2: 3 gender relations 1: 221–22 Gothic extravagance in (sidebar) 2: 37 influence of The Mysteries of Udolpho 2: 34–40 revision of 2: 31–35 sensibility in 2: 36–40 Northanger Novelists 1: 7 Nosferatu (film) 1: 450, (sidebar) 451 Nostalgia 1: 69 The Notebooks of Henry James (James) 2: 473 Nothing Sacred (Carter) 2: 180 “Novel Notes: Dracula” (The Bookman), (sidebar) 3: 405 Novel of manners, Great Expectations, 2: 247–48 ““The Novel of Suspense’: Mrs. Radcliffe” (Birkhead) (sidebar) 3: 246 Novels. See Genres “Novels of the Season” (Whipple) 2: 114–15, 135–36 “The Nuns of Magwan” (Collins) 2: 218, 219–20 Nussbaum, Martha C. 3: 510–11 “Nussknacker und Mausekönig” (Hoffmann) 2: 396–97 “Nutcracker and the King of Mice” (Hoffmann). See “Nussknacker und Mausekönig” “Nymph of the Fountain” (Beckford) (sidebar) 2: 84

O O. Henry Award 3: 164 Oakes, David A. 1: 283–90 Oates, Joyce Carol 1: 216–17; 3: 163, 163–86 American Gothic tradition 3: 168–84 compared to Alcott, Louisa May 3: 175 doppelgänger 3: 183–84 fantastic 3: 168–77 on Gothic 3: 178–80 heroines 3: 183 on horror (sidebar) 3: 179

558

Kafka, Franz and 3: 170 National Book Award 3: 163–64 O. Henry Award 3: 164 otherness as theme 3: 170, 183 principal works 3: 165–66 Southern Gothic 3: 178 on The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3: 370–72 Observations on Maniacal Disorders (Pargeter) 1: 339 O’Connor, Flannery (sidebar) 1: 68, 69, 215; 2: 304 O’Connor, William Van 3: 118 “October 4, 1957, and an Invitation to Dance” (King) 2: 483–85 Ode on Melancholy (Keats) 1: 19 Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands (Collins, William) 1: 18 “Ode to Fear” (Collins, William) 1: 53–54 Oedipal complex 1: 377–79, 380, 384 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Rich) 1: 216 O’Keeffe, John 1: 406–7 “Olalla” (Stevenson) 3: 368 The Old Curiosity Shop (Dickens) 2: 229–30, 252 The Old English Baron (Reeve) (sidebar) 1: 112, 113–15, 115, 2: 252 Old Mortality (Scott) doppelgänger 3: 314 fear 3: 309–10 violence 3: 312 “An Old Woman’s Tale” (Hawthorne) 2: 364 Oldstyle, Jonathan. See Irving, Washington Oliphant, Margaret 2: 211–14 Oliver Twist (Dickens) 2: 230, 239–40, 248 O’Malley, Patrick 1: 35 The Omen (film) 1: 422 Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (Melville) 3: 108, 114, 119 “On Fable and Romance” (Beattie) 1: 50 “On Frankenstein” (Shelley, P.) 3: 335–36 “On Ghosts” (Shelley) 3: 321–24 “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror, with Sir Bertrand, A Fragment” (Aiken, Barbauld) 1: 4–7, (sidebar) 7, 46 “On the Relative Simplicity of Gothic Manners to Our Own” (Walpole) 3: 446

“On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition” (Scott) (sidebar) 2: 392, (sidebar) 3: 349 “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (Radcliffe) 3: 237–38 “On the Uncanny” (Freud) 1: 70–71, 87 On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (King) 2: 482 “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts” (Jackson) 1: 279 Oral tradition Morrison, Toni 3: 147 supernatural as theme 1: 17–18 Oriental tales 1: 260–61; 2: 88–89, 96 Orlok, Count (character) 1: 450 Ormond (Brown) 2: 153–54, 159–61 Orra (Baillie, Joanna) 1: 340–41; 2: 50, 56, 58, 59–60 Osceola. See Dinesen, Isak Osmyn the Renegade (Maturin) 3: 76 Ossian (Macpherson) 1: 20, 45–46 The Other House (James) 2: 472 “Other Themes” (Railo) 1: 249–60 Otherness (theme) 1: 67–74 in American Gothic paintings 1: 521–25 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 170, 176, 183 “The Others” (Oates) 3: 179–80 “Our Library Table” (Chorley) (sidebar) 2: 137 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens) 2: 229–30, 237 “Our Vampire, Our Leader: Twentieth-Century Undeaths” (Auerbach) 1: 361–76 Out of Africa (Dinesen) 2: 257–58 The Outcry (James) 2: 462 “The Oval Portrait” (Poe) 1: 252–53; 3: 189, 192–95, 199 “Owen Wingrave” (James) 2: 463 “Oxford’s Ghosts: Jude the Obscure and the End of the Gothic” (O’Malley) 1: 35

P Pain 1: 110–13 “The Painter’s Adventure” (Irving) 2: 452 Painting 1: 475–76, 518–25; 3: 53–60, 447 See also specific names of paintings Pandora (character) 3: 271 Paradise Lost (Milton) 2: 170–76; 3: 339, 341

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

POETRY

author’s defense of 3: 492–93 compared to Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 504–9 degeneration 1: 160–62 doubles in 1: 34 Hedonism 3: 512–15 morality 3: 510–16 mysterious portrait convention 1: 253; 3: 488, 494–95, 506–7 review 3: 502–4 supernatural 3: 511–15 themes 1: 162 Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Melville) 1: 143–44; 3: 108–9 music imagery 3: 114 mysterious portrait conventiion 3: 114–15 symbolism in 3: 115 tower imagery 3: 113 Pierson, William 1: 497 The Pilgrims of the Sun (Hogg) 2: 422–23, 427 “Pillar of Salt” (Jackson) 1: 268 The Pirate (Scott) 3: 292, 297, 315 architecture motif 3: 315 buccaneers 3: 313 fear 3: 310 mystery in 3: 300–304, 307 superstition 3: 314 Pirie, David 1: 445 “The Pit and the Pendulum” (Poe) 3: 189, 198–99 Planche, J. R. 1: 348–49 Plath, Sylvia 1: 215–16 Playing in the Dark (Morrison) 1: 108 Plays on the Passions (Baillie). See A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy “A Plea for Sunday Reform” (Collins) 2: 218 “The Pleasure Principle” (Freud) 1: 90 “Poe and Hoffmann” (Cobb) (sidebar) 2: 412 “Poe and the Gothic” (Griffith) 3: 202–5 “Poe and the Gothic Tradition” (Lévy) 3: 193–202 Poe, Edgar Allan 1: 2, 71–72; 2: 311; 3: 187, 187–230 American Africanism and 1: 118 animated tapestry convention 3: 199–200 Blythe, David Gilmour and 1: 524 castle convention 3: 194–97 Cole, Thomas and 1: 524 compared to Melville, Herman 3: 122–23

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

compared to Stevenson, Robert Louis 3: 365 on Cooper, James Fenimore 3: 206 cultural identity in 1: 126–27 decadent aristocrat convention 3: 189 detective fiction 1: 250–51 devil 3: 198 on Godwin, William (sidebar) 2: 328 horror films 1: 429, 444–45 influence of European Gothic tradition 3: 188, 194–95, 202, 211–13 influence of Hogg, James 3: 213 influence of Walpole, Horace 2: 310–11 influence on Gothicism 1: 31 labyrinth convention 3: 197–98 Lawrence, D. H. on (sidebar) 3: 203 Lovecraft, H. P. on (sidebar) 3: 219 madness as theme 1: 314–15; 3: 202–5 on Mosses from an Old Manse 2: 379 mysterious portrait convention 3: 199 mysticism 1: 254–55 Otherness of 1: 523–24 principal works 3: 190 prophecy convention 3: 200 sadism 3: 198–99 transcendence 2: 494–96 on Twice Told Tales (sidebar) 2: 369 Wandering Jew (Gothic convention) 3: 198 Poems (Wilde) 3: 487 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (Bronte¨, C. and Bronte¨, E.) 2: 103, 132 Poems. by Edgar Allan Poe (Poe) 3: 187 Poems: Wherein It Is Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners (Baillie) 2: 49–50, 56 The Poetic Mirror; or, The Living Bards of Britain (Hogg) 2: 422 “Poetics of the Uncanny: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Sandmann’” (Frisch) 2: 408–11 Poetry ballads 1: 258 Graveyard school 1: 52–55 Hogg, James 2: 421–23, 427 Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 187–88, 189 Romanticism and 3: 369

559

SUBJECT INDEX

“The Parasite” (Doyle) 1: 365 Pargeter, William 1: 339 Parisi, Peter 3: 284 Parker, John Henry 1: 477–80 “Parodied to Death: The Postmodern Gothic of American Psycho” (Helyer) 1: 36–37 Parody 2: 448–49, 458–59 Parsons, Mrs. Eliza 1: 2, 7–9 “Part II: Sections I and II, and Part IV: Sections V, VI, VIII, and IX” (Burke) 1: 110–13 Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Hawthorne) 2: 382 The Passion of New Eve (Carter) 2: 180, 190–94 A Passionate Pilgrim (James) 2: 477 Pater, Walter 1: 32–33 “The Pathology of History” (Gross) 1: 57–66 Patriarchy Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome 2: 206–10 The Magic Toyshop 2: 185 Wharton, Edith 3: 476–80 Patterns (literary convention) 2: 301–3, 368–77 Pattison, Robert 1: 463, 464–65 Paulson, Ronald 1: 74–86 “The Pavilion on the Links” (Stevenson) 3: 360 Peabody, Sophia 2: 364 Peck, Gregory 3: 129 Peeping Tom (film) 1: 447–48 Penny dreadful 1: 2 Percy, Thomas 1: 54 Peregrine Pickle (Smollet) 1: 50 The Perfectionist (Oates) 3: 164 Peri Hypsous (Longinus) 1: 148–49 Perkins, Anthony 1: 437 Persona (film) 1: 429 Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (Irving, H.) 3: 400–401 Persuasion (Austen) 2: 25–27, 32, 42 Perversity, sexual 2: 186, 288 Pet Sematary (King) 2: 482, 486, 499–504 Petersen, Karen 2: 261 Peveril of the Peak (Scott) 3: 292, 297, 311, 315 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Burke) 1: 107, 110–13 Physiognomy 1: 107 The Piazza Tales (Melville) 3: 108, 110–11 The Pickwick Papers (Dickens) 2: 229–34, 235, 237 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde) 1: 31, 37–38; 3: 487–89, (sidebar) 503 aestheticism 3: 494–95

SUBJECT INDEX

THE POISONED KISS AND OTHER STORIES FROM THE PORTUGUESE

Scott, Sir Walter 3: 289–90, 293–94 supernatural themes 1: 18–20 Walpole, Horace 3: 446 Wilde, Oscar 3: 487, 488, 497– 99, 499 See also specific titles and authors The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (Oates) 3: 164, 170, 180 Polanski, Roman 1: 449 Polidori, John 1: 243–49, 262, 344–47, 345, (sidebar) 362 Political ideology. See Sociopolitical ideology “The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s” (Clery) 1: 220–28 “Pomegranate See d” (Wharton) 3: 457, 459, 461, 470, 471 female archetypes 3: 464–66 female mythology (sidebar) 3: 467 as ghost story 3: 463–65 Pornography American Psycho 1: 37 horror and 2: 187–88; 3: 284 The Magic Toyshop 2: 184–85 psychological horror and 2: 187–88 The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History 2: 187–88 See also Sexuality The Portable Faulkner (Faulkner) 2: 294 Porte, Joel 3: 277 Portrait, mysterious (Gothic convention) The Castle of Otranto 1: 252; 2: 252, 254; 3: 25, 199 “Family Portraits” 1: 292 The House of Seven Gables 2: 370 Little Dorrit 2: 254 Melmoth the Wanderer 1: 252; 3: 199, 506–7 Melville, Herman 3: 114–15 The Oval Portrait 1: 252–53 The Picture of Dorian Gray 1: 253; 3: 488, 494–95, 506–7 Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 199 Rossetti, Christina 1: 252–53 terror-romanticism and 1: 252–53 The Portrait of a Lady (James) 2: 462, 471–72 The Possessed (Dostoevski) 1: 315 “The Possibility of Evil” (Jackson) 1: 275–76 The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (Dickens). See The Pickwick Papers Postman, Neil 1: 455

560

“Postmodern Gothic: Desire and Reality in Angela Carter’s Writing” (Neumeier) 2: 194–200 “Postmodern Gothic: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary” (Nash) 2: 499–504 Postmodernism Carter, Angela 2: 188 Jameson, Fredric on 1: 466–67 Pet Sematary 2: 500–504 sublime 1: 147–48 Poteet, Lewis J. 3: 504–9 Powell, Michael 1: 447–48 “The Power of Allusion, the Uses of Gothic: Experiments in Form and Genre” (Johnson, G.) 3: 178–85 Power Politics (Atwood) 2: 1, 9 Prawer, S. S. 1: 425–39; 2: 401–8 “The Preceptor as Fiend: Radcliffe’s Psychology of the Gothic” (Miall) 3: 238–45 “Preface” (Godwin) (sidebar) 2: 330 “Preface” (Lewis) 3: 34 “Preface” (Maturin) (sidebar) 3: 85 “Preface” (Wharton) 3: 460–62, 472, 474 “Preface to Wuthering Heights” (Bronte¨, C.) (sidebar) 2: 147 The Prelude (Wordsworth) 1: 21 Prest, Thomas Preckett 1: 349 Price, Vincent 1: 444–45 Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 2: 26–27 The Prince of Angola (Ferriar) 1: 207 The Prisoner of Zenda (Hawkins) 1: 130 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Hogg) 1: 80; 2: 421–23, 427 bad grammar in 2: 428–29 Calvinism 2: 429–31 compared to Die Elixiere des Teufels 2: 431 criticism of 2: 432 Devil as divine 2: 434–36 dreams 2: 431–32 German Romanticism and 2: 432 as greatest Scottish book 2: 432–38 narrative structure 3: 86 publication history 2: 429 Saintsbury, George on (sidebar) 2: 429 Scottish influence in 1: 28–29; 2: 436–37 supernatural 2: 423, 431–32 The Professor (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 103–4, 107, 122 The Progress of Romance (Reeve) 1: 51–52

“Prologue and Act 1, Scene 1” (Siddons) 1: 398 Prophecy (Gothic convention) 3: 200 “The Prophetic Pictures” (Hawthorne) 2: 364, 370 “Providence and the Guitar” (Stevenson) 3: 361 Psycho (film) 1: 437, 447–48 Psychoanalysis 1: 70–71, (sidebar) 2: 308 Ambiguous Gothic 2: 412–17 beating fantasy 3: 329, 330 of Beloved 3: 150–60 The Castle of Otranto 1: 322 dreams 1: 326–29 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 1: 322–24 Klein, Melanie 1: 317–25, 379–81 LaCapra, Dominick 3: 152–55, 158 object-relations psychology 1: 319, 321 “A Rose for Emily” 2: 310–11 symbolism 1: 321–22 See also Freud, Sigmund Psychological horror American Gothic tradition 2: 299 Carter, Angela 2: 183–89 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 2: 411–17 Jung, Carl G. 3: 463 The Marble Faun 2: 383–84 Melmoth the Wanderer 1: 27–29 Mosses from an Old Manse 2: 365 pornography and 2: 187–88 psychological thrillers 1: 438 “Young Goodman Brown” 2: 365 See also Horror Psychology abnormal 1: 332–41 Gil Blas 1: 334 interpretation of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson) 3: 373–81 in Night Side: Eighteen Tales 3: 180–84 supernatural and 1: 232 Pugin, A. W. 1: 487 Pulitzer Prize Morrison, Toni 3: 135 Wharton, Edith 3: 458, 459 Punch (periodical) 2: 218, 226 Punk music 1: 470–73 Punter, David 1: 158–71, 317–26, 439–52; 3: 278 The Purcell Papers (Le Fanu) 3: 1–2, 6–7, 9–10, 12 Purcell, Reverend Francis. See Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan Purinton, Marjean D. 2: 67–76

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

A REVIEW OF DRACULA, BY BRAM STOKER

“Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis” (Spencer) 1: 127–43 “Puss-in-Boots” (Carter) 2: 182 Putzel, Max (sidebar) 2: 304

Q

R “Race and the Gothic Monster: The Xenophobic Impulse of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Taming a Tartar’” (Derrickson) 1: 197–207 “Race, Labor, and the Gothic Western: Dispelling Frontier Myths in Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind” (Kollin) 1: 36 Race relations 1: 108 Alcott, Louisa May 1: 200 in early American literature 1: 118–27 Gobineau, Arthur de 3: 222 interracial desire 1: 207–10 miscegenation 3: 218–28 in The Shadow Knows 1: 218 in “Taming a Tartar” 1: 200– 203, 205–6 in Zofloya 1: 208–10 Radcliffe, Ann 1: 20, 80–81; 3: 231–62 animism 3: 243–44 Austen, Jane and 2: 36–40 Birkhead, Edith on (sidebar) 3: 246 castle in 2: 252 compared to Irving, Washington 2: 453–55 compared to Scott, Sir Walter 3: 310 compared to Walpole, Horace 2: 36 fear 2: 336 female Gothic 3: 252–59 feminist literary theory and 1: 86 founder of Gothic genre 1: 2 Gothic veil 1: 455

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

Rebecca (du Maurier) 2: 118–19, 279–80 “Chapter 1” 2: 281–82 film adaptation 1: 437 heroine as vampire 2: 286–90 melodrama (sidebar) 2: 285 symbolism 2: 284–91 vamp vs. femme fatale 2: 285–86 Rebecca (film) 1: 437 “Recent Novels” (The Spectator), 3: 393–94 “Recent Novels” (The Times, London) 3: 394–95 “Recent Novels: Villette” (Greg) 2: 120–21 “Recent Popular Novels: The Woman in White” (Dublin University Magazine) 2: 211 The Recess; Or, A Tale of Other Times (Lee) 1: 115–18, (sidebar) 119, 126 Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaca Batalha (Beckford) 2: 80 “The Reconstruction of the Gothic Feminine Ideal in Emily Bronte¨’s Wuthering Heights” (Conger) 2: 136–46 “Recovering Nightmares: Nineteenth-Century Gothic” (Thomas, R.) 1: 326–32 Redburn: His First Voyage (Melville) 3: 107, 108, 112, 114, 119 Redgauntlet (Scott) 3: 299, 307, 311 Reeve, Clara 1: 51–52, 80, (sidebar) 112, 113, 113–15; 2: 252 “Reflections of Excess: Frankenstein, the French Revolution, and Monstrosity” (Botting) 3: 348–56 “Reflections on the Grotesque” (Oates) (sidebar) 3: 179 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke) 1: 97; 3: 350–51 The Reivers (Faulkner) 2: 294 “The Relationship of Gothic Art to Gothic Literature” (Bayer-Berenbaum) 1: 480–86 Religious buildings 1: 510–13 “The Renaissance, and Jacobean Gothic” (Parker) 1: 477–80 “The Renegade” (Jackson) 1: 270–71, 277 Repetition (theatrical device) 1: 407 Repulsion (film) 1: 449 The Return of the Vanishing American (Fiedler) 2: 304–5 Reversals (literary device) 1: 23, 26 A review of Dracula, by Bram Stoker (The Athenaeum), 3: 393

561

SUBJECT INDEX

“Queen of May” (Jackson) 1: 266 The Queen of the Damned (Rice) 3: 263–64 See also Vampire Chronicles The Queen’s Wake, 2: 422 Quentin Durward (Scott) 3: 311, 313 Quest (Gothic convention) 2: 473–74, (sidebar) 492

heroines 1: 221; 2: 138, 144; 3: 64 influence on Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 501 influence on Gothic fiction 3: 40 influence on Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 376 influence on Melville, Herman 3: 111–16 influence on Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 194–95, 202 influences on 3: 232 landscape as motif 1: 403, 404; 3: 113 legacy of (sidebar) 3: 253 Lewis, Matthew Gregory on 3: 39 library in 1: 92–93 mysterious portrait 1: 252 obsoleteness of 2: 452 patterns in 2: 301 principal works 3: 233 Scott, Sir Walter on (sidebar) 3: 238 sublime as theme 1: 87; 3: 313 supernatural 1: 332–33 Wollstonecraft, Mary and 3: 239 on women’s education 3: 238–44 Radical Innocence (Hassan) 2: 301, 302 Railo, Eino 1: 249–60, 284 Raising Demons (Jackson) 1: 267–68 The Rambler (Johnson) 1: 50–51 Rambles Beyond Railways (Collins) 2: 218, 219 Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (Shelley) 3: 320 Ranger, Paul 1: 401–11 Rank, Otto 1: 310–16 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (Hawthorne) 2: 365, 375 “Rat Krespel” (Hoffmann) 2: 388, 397 Rathbone, Basil 3: 353 Die Räuber (Schiller) (sidebar) 1: 275 “The Raven” (Poe) 3: 189 “Ravenna” (Wilde) 3: 497 Raven’s Wing (Oates) 3: 179 Rayner (Baillie) 2: 58 “The Readerhood of Man” (Brooks-Rose) 2: 410 “Reading Rooms: M. R. James and the Library of Modernism” (Fielding) 1: 38 “The Real Right Thing” (James) 2: 473 The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Diamond) 3: 515–16

SUBJECT INDEX

A REVIEW OF MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHITE WHALE

A review of Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale (The Critic), (sidebar) 3: 125 A review of Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe (Coleridge) 3: 245–46 Review of The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe (Enfield) 3: 246–49 “Review of New Books: Twice Told Tales” (Graham’s Magazine), (sidebar) 2: 369 A review of The Castle of Otranto: A Story (Langhorn) 3: 435 A review of The Castle of Otranto: A Story (Lubbock) 3: 436 A review of The Castle of Otranto: A Story(The Critical Review), 3: 434–35 “A review of The Monk” (Coleridge) 3: 46–48 A review of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde(The Times), 3: 364–65 Reynolds, David S. 1: 520 Rhode, Eric 1: 437 Rice, Anne 3: 263, 263–87 American Gothic tradition 3: 279–85 author’s fears (sidebar) 3: 278 Catholicism 3: 279 compared to Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3: 279 Harlequin formula and 3: 281–83 principal works 3: 265–66 rewriting vampire mythology 3: 266–76 self-consciousness of (sidebar) 3: 267 vampires of 1: 369–71 Rich, Adrienne 1: 216 Richardson, Samuel 3: 212–13 Richter, David H. 3: 278–79 Rieger, James 1: 346 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge) 1: 19, 251 Der Ring des Polykrates (Schiller) 1: 306–7 The Ring of Polykrates (Schiller). See Der Ring des Polykrates Ringe, Donald A. (sidebar) 2: 450 “Rip Van Winkle” (Irving) 2: 441–43, 449–50, 457 Riquelme, John Paul 1: 30–40 The Rise of Life on Earth (Oates) 3: 165 Rizzo, Betty 2: 337–38 “The Roads Round Pisa” (Dinesen) 2: 269 Rob Roy (Scott) 3: 292, 297, 299–300, 312 The Robber Bride (Atwood) 2: 2, 10, 13, 213–17

562

“The Robber Bridegroom” (Atwood) 2: 11 “Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (Brennan) 3: 372–82 Roberts, Bette 3: 279 Roberts, J. M. 1: 79 Robertson, Fiona 3: 297–305 Rock (music) 1: 469–70 Rock music 1: 469–73 The Rocky Mountains; or, Scenes, Incidents, and Adventures in the Far West (Irving) 2: 442 Roderick Hudson (James) 2: 462 Roettgen Pieta (carving) 1: 484 “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (Hawthorne) 2: 364 Rogers, Samuel 2: 85 Rokeby (Scott) 3: 290, 306 Rolleston, T. W. 3: 5–6 “The Romance Feeling” (Summers) 1: 40–48 “’Romance of a Darksome Type’: Versions of the Fantastic in the Novels of Joyce Carol Oates” (Egan) 3: 168–78 “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (James) 2: 462, 463, 465–66, 471 The Romance of the Forest (Radcliffe) 1: 2; 2: 252; 3: 232, 239–40, 246 “The Romance of the Impossible” (Hawthorne) (sidebar) 3: 503 Romances Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 368– 77, 380–81 Jane Eyre as prototype 2: 115–20 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 3: 6–15 vs. novels 1: 49–52 as reflection of female oppression 1: 220–26 revival of 1: 129–30 The Robber Bride 2: 213–17 Scott, Sir Walter 1: 501–2 sea stories 1: 251–52 terror-romance 1: 249–58 urban Gothic and 1: 130–33 The Woman in White 2: 216 “Romancing the Shadow” (Morrison) 1: 118–27, 520–21 “Romantic Supernaturalism: The Cast Study as Gothic Tale” (Burwick) 1: 332–42 “Romantic Transformations” (Botting) 1: 21–30 Romanticism African American experience 1: 119–27 cabbalism and 1: 254–55 drama 1: 258, 390 European Gothic tradition 1: 249–58; 2: 271–72

German 1: 407–9; 2: 271, 379, 411–12, 432 Gothic heroes in 1: 24 Gothic movement and 1: 2, 21–29, 42–45; 2: 271, 494; 3: 124, 308–9 Gothic revival and 1: 486–89 grotesques 2: 300 Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 82 opposition within movement 1: 255–56 poetry 3: 369 “Romanticism and the Gothic Revival” (Addison) 1: 486–90 Romiero (Baillie) 2: 58 Römishe Elegien (Goethe) 2: 341 Ronald, Ann 2: 242–45 The Rose and the Key (Le Fanu) 1: 89 “A Rose for Emily” (Faulkner) 2: 293–95, 296–97, 306–12 Rose, Jacqueline 1: 380 Ross, Marlon 1: 101 Rossetti, Christina (sidebar) 1: 143, 252–53 Ruskin, John 2: 300 Russian authors 1: 2 Ryan, Steven T. 3: 122–24 Rymer, James Malcolm 1: 349 Rzepka, Charles 1: 36

S “The Sacrifice” (Oates) 3: 180–81, 182, 184 Sade, Marquis de 3: 61–69, 249 The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (Carter) 2: 180, 187–88, 199 Sadism 3: 198–99 Sage, Victor 3: 6–16 Saint-Germain, Count (character) 1: 367–68 Saintsbury, George (sidebar) 2: 429 ’Salem’s Lot (King) 2: 482, 499 family 2: 502 influence of Watergate scandal 1: 371 vampires 1: 371–73; 3: 270 Salmagundi; or, The Whim-whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others (Irving) 2: 441–42 Salomé (Wilde) 3: 487, 489, 495–97 “Salvator Rosa” (Hoffmann). See “Signor Formica” Sampson, George 1: 102 Sanctuary (Faulkner) 2: 293–94, 312–18 Sanders, Scott P. 1: 68

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

SEXUALITY

letter from Edgeworth, Maria (sidebar) 3: 306 on Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3: 36 literary legacy and 1: 92–93, 96–97, 102 Maturin, Charles Robert and, 3: 82–83 mystery and 3: 298–304, 306–8 on Nicolai, Friedrich 1: 336–37 popularity in America 1: 501 principal works 3: 292–93 on Radcliffe, Ann (sidebar) 3: 238 romances 1: 501–2 Romantic attitude toward architecture 1: 487 Southern Gothic 2: 303 supernatural 3: 313–16, (sidebar) 349 translation of Goethe (sidebar) 2: 350 Wavery Novels 3: 289–92, 297–304, 305–16 Scottish writers 1: 2 Sculpture 1: 475–76, 514–17 Sea stories 1: 251–52; 3: 205–11 A Season of Dreams (Appel) 2: 300–301 “Secrecy, Silence, and Anxiety: Gothic Narratology and the Waverly Novels” (Robertson) 3: 297–305 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 1: 72; 2: 10 “A Select Party” (Hawthorne) 2: 373–74 Self-identity of Beckford, William 2: 95–101 doubles as supernatural 1: 310–16 of du Maurier, Daphne 2: 289–90 Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 183 “Der Sandmann” 2: 412–17 Senf, Carol A. 1: 342–61; 3: 16–21 Sensation fiction 1: 87–91 German 2: 431 Irving, Washington 2: 447 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 1: 354; 3: 5–6 The Woman in White 2: 211– 15, 218–19, 223–26 “Sensation Novels” (Oliphant) 2: 211–14 Sense and Sensibility (Austen) 2: 25–27, 32, 33 The Sense of the Past (James) 2: 472 Sensibility 2: 36–40 The Separation (Baillie) 2: 58 Septimius Felton (Hawthorne) 2: 376

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

The Serapion Brethren (Hoffmann). See Die Serapionsbrüder Die Serapionsbrüder (Hoffmann) 2: 392–93, 397–401, 402–3, 405 Serial killers, King, Stephen 2: 490–93 A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy (Baillie) 2: 50–51, 51–60 authorship of 2: 54–55 modern critical reception 2: 65–67 review (sidebar) 2: 68 social progress in 2: 61–65 “Seven Gothic Tales” (Brantly) 2: 269–78 Seven Gothic Tales (Dinesen) 2: 257–61, 269–71, (sidebar) 270 “Seven Gothic Tales: The Divine Swank of Isak Dinesen” (Updike) (sidebar) 2: 270 Several Perceptions (Carter) 2: 180 Sex Pistols (musical group) 1: 470–71 Sexual innuendo 2: 456–58 Sexuality 1: 30 Absalom! Absalom! 2: 303 American South 2: 303 Bellefleur 3: 173 Black House 2: 482 Carter, Angela 2: 184–89 fetishism 2: 184–85; 3: 174 heavy metal lyrics 1: 462–63 incest 2: 310–11; 3: 329–30 interracial 1: 207–10 The Monk 1: 463 monsters 2: 188 mythology and 2: 188–89 perversion 2: 186, 311 pre-oedipal stage 1: 377–79 Rebecca 2: 286–90 “A Rose for Emily” 2: 310–11 The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History 2: 187–88 Salomé 3: 496–97 Sanctuary 2: 315–17 The Shadow Knows 1: 217–18 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 2: 482; 3: 375–76 vampires 1: 350–51, 357, 368, 370 Victorian attitudes 1: 132, 137, 207 in Victorian Gothic 1: 87–91 Wharton, Edith 3: 478–79, 483–84 of Wilde, Oscar 3: 488 See also Eroticism; Homosexuality; Pornography

563

SUBJECT INDEX

“The Sand-man” (Hoffmann). See “Der Sandmann” “Der Sandmann” (Hoffmann) 2: 388–91 as Ambiguous Gothic 2: 412 archetypes 2: 413–14 compared to “The Mortal Immortal: A Tale” 3: 330 Freud, Sigmund on 2: 402–3, 408–9, 413 identity crisis 2: 412–17 narrative structure 2: 401–7 ncanny guest in 1: 302–4; 2: 403–11 reader response 2: 397, 410–11 Sartoris (Faulkner) 2: 294 Satanism 1: 463–65 See also Devil Satire 3: 283 Savage, Jon 1: 471 Savoy, Eric 1: 66–74 Scarborough, Dorothy 1: 36 The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne) 2: 363–65 symbolism 2: 376 witchcraft 2: 372–73 “Scheme for Raising a large Sum of Money by Message Cards and Notes” (Walpole) 3: 446 Schiller, Friedrich von 1: 152, 274, (sidebar) 275 compared to Brown, Charles Brockden (sidebar) 2: 171 influence on Gothic drama 1: 407–9 uncanny 1: 306–7 Scholes, Robert 3: 249 Schopenhauer, Arthur 1: 152–53 Schreck, Max 1: 450 Scott, Sir Walter 1: 2, 262, 335; 3: 289, 289–317 Abbotsford 1: 502 anonymity 3: 290 antiquarianism influence on 1: 25 architecture motif and 3: 315–16 on The Castle of Otranto 3: 432, 443–44 compared to Irving, Washington 2: 453 compared to Radcliffe, Ann 3: 310 on Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 336–37, (sidebar) 349 Gilmor, Robert III and 1: 503 on Gothic ambiguity 2: 453 on hallucinations 1: 334, 338 Hazlitt, William (sidebar) 3: 298 on Hoffmann, E. T. A. (sidebar) 2: 392, 401, 407 Hogg, James and 2: 421–22, 432–33

SUBJECT INDEX

SEXUALITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Sexuality and Its Discontents (Weeks) 1: 138 The Shadow (Gothic convention) 2: 146–50 Shadow Dance (Carter) 2: 180 The Shadow Knows (Johnson) 1: 217–19 “Shadow—A Parable” (Poe) 3: 190–92 Shadows on the Grass (Dinesen) 2: 267 Shakespeare, William, influence of 1: 98 Shelden, Pamela Jacobs 2: 470–78 Shelley, Mary 1: 2, 31, 261–62; 3: 319, 319–35 attitude toward female body 3: 329–33 Byron, Lord George Gordon and 3: 344 chase motif and 3: 339 Clairmont, Claire and 3: 344–46 compared to Hoffmann, E. T. A. 3: 330 compared to King, Stephen 2: 500 education of 3: 345–46 female Gothic 3: 327–33 film adaptation of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 1: 432–33 Frankenstein as autobiography (sidebar) 3: 328 on ghosts 3: 321–24 Godwin, William and 2: 323; 3: 319, 339, 345–46 heroines 2: 138; 3: 327–33 incest 3: 329–30 influence of the French Revolution 1: 82–85 loneliness 3: 342–47 Polidori, John and 3: 344 principal works 3: 321 Shelley, Percy Bysshe and 3: 319–21, (sidebar) 328, 344–46 social philosophy 1: 255 use of Gothic elements, 1: 25 Wollstonecraft, Mary and 3: 319, 328–29, 342 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1: 2, 9–12, (sidebar) 76, 82–83 Clairmont, Claire and 3: 344–46 on Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 335–36 Lewis, Matthew Gregory and 3: 59–60 Polidori, John and 3: 344 Shelley, Mary and 3: 319–21, (sidebar) 328, 344–46 The Shepherd’s Calendar (Hogg) 2: 425–28, 427–28 Shetty, Nalini V. 3: 118–22 Shilling shocker 1: 2

564

The Shining (film) 1: 69, 219, 498 The Shining (King) 2: 482, 494–99 Shirley (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 104, 110–11 “Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror” (Joshi) 1: 264–83 Showalter, Elaine 1: 210–20 A Sicilian Romance (Radcliffe) 1: 2, 398; 2: 254; 3: 232 The Sicilian Romance,or, The Apparition of the Cliffs, An Opera, by Henry Siddons (Siddons) 1: 398, 412, 412–13 “The Sick Rose” (Blake) 2: 306–12 Siddons, Henry 1: 398, 412–13 The Siege of Salerno (Maturin) 3: 76 “The Signalman” (Dickens) 2: 230 “Signor Formica” (Hoffmann) 2: 399–400 Simmons, Dan 1: 366 “Sinister House” (Davenport) (sidebar) 2: 285 Sioux, Siouxsie 1: 470–71 “Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” (Aiken, Barbauld) 1: 2, 5–7, (sidebar) 7, 46–47; 3: 24–25 “Sir Edmund Orme” (James) 2: 463 “Sir Walter Scott” (Hazlitt) (sidebar) 3: 298 The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Irving) 2: 441–42, 447–49, (sidebar) 450 Sketches by Boz (Dickens) 2: 230, (sidebar) 252 Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparations (Hibbert) 1: 334, 336–37, 338 “A Skilled Hand Weaves a Net of Horror” (Berkman) 2: 283–84 Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Halberstam) 1: 197–99 Sklar, Robert 1: 438 Skywalk (Brown) 2: 153 Slave narratives 1: 183–92; 3: 146–48 Slavery American creativity and 1: 520–21 “The Fall of the House of Usher” 3: 223 Garner, Margaret 3: 146–47 as horror 1: 181–92, 520 Sleath, Eleanor 1: 98 A Small Boy and Others (James) 2: 472 Smith, Alexander 2: 225 Smith, Charlotte 1: 96 Smith, Iain Crichton 2: 432–38 Smith, Rosamond. See Oates, Joyce Carol Smollet, Tobias 1: 1–2, 5, 20, 50 Snake Eyes (Oates) 3: 165, 178 Snitow, Ann 3: 281–82

The Snow-Image, and Other Tales (Hawthorne) 2: 365 “The Snowstorm” (Oates) 3: 180, 183 Social criticism 3: 458, 466–75 Social history 1: 48–57; 2: 61–67 Social philosophy 1: 255 “Socialized and Medicalized Hysteria in Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft” (Purinton) 2: 67–76 Sociopolitical ideology in drama 1: 410–15 Soldier’s Pay (Faulkner) 2: 294, 299 Solstice (Oates) 3: 183 Son of Frankenstein (film) 3: 353 Son of the Morning (Oates) 3: 164, 168, 170–72, 177 Song of Solomon (Morrison) 3: 136, 138–39 Sorcery 2: 325 The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe). See Die Leiden des jungen Werthers “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (Wilde) 3: 495 Soul/Mate (Oates) 3: 165, 178 The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner) 2: 294 South, American and Gothic tradition 2: 302–5 South, European and terror-romanticism 1: 256–57 Southam, B. C. 2: 32 Southern Gothic 2: 297–305; 3: 178 The Sovereignty of God (Murdoch) 3: 510–11 Spargo, R. Clifton 3: 150–60 Spark, Muriel 3: 338 The Spectator (periodical) 3: 393–94 “The Spectre Bridegroom” (Irving) 2: 448–49 Spectres. See Ghosts; Grotesques “Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein” (Atwood) 2: 4–5 Spencer, Kathleen L. 1: 127–43 The Sphinx (Wilde) 3: 497–99 “The Sphinx without a Secret” (Wilde) 3: 490–92 Spiritualism 1: 482; 2: 379–80 “The Split Second” (du Maurier) 2: 284 The Spoils of Poynton (James) 2: 472 Sportive Gothic 2: 447–51, 451–53 The Spy (periodical) 2: 422 “The Squaw” (Stoker) 3: 386 St. Irvyne (Shelley, P.) 1: 24 St. James Gazette (periodical) 3: 502–4 St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (Godwin) 2: 321–23

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

TABLETOP OF THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS

“The Stout Gentleman” (Irving) 2: 442 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 1: 182–83, 185–90; 3: 223 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson) 1: 31, 314; 3: 359–61, (sidebar) 365 as autobiography 3: 368 compared to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 371 compared to works of King, Stephen 2: 485–87 critical reception 3: 361, 366 dedication of (sidebar) 3: 373 degeneration 1: 158–60 doubles in 3: 368–69, 372, 374–81 film adaptation 3: 368 Jung, Carl G. 3: 373–81 monster 3: 370–72 review 3: 364–65 sexuality 2: 487; 3: 375–76 Victorian morality and 3: 370–72 The Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson (Elwin) 3: 368 “Strange Stories by a Nervous Gentleman” (Irving) 2: 452, 455 “Strange Stories: Irving’s Gothic” (Bell) 2: 451–56 A Strange Story (Bulwer-Lytton) (sidebar) 1: 15, 263 “Strangers in Town” (Jackson) 1: 277 Strawberry Hill (castle) 1: 58, 502–4; 3: 430, 442, 447–48 Strawberry Hill Press 3: 446 Strengall, Heidi 2: 485–93 “The Strength of Backward-Looking Thoughts” (Davenport-Hines) 1: 490–96 “The Student from Salamanca” (Irving) 2: 442 Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Pater) 1: 32–33 “A Study in Puppydom” (St. James Gazette), 3: 502–4 Sublime 1: 55–56, 87–91, 143–55 architecture as 1: 55–56 vs. beautiful 1: 107–8 Burke, Edmund on 1: 148–50; 3: 91–92 fear and 1: 110–13, 148–49 grotesques and 2: 300 Irving, Washington 2: 452 Kant, Immanuel on 1: 150–55 in Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 91–96 Radcliffe, Ann 1: 87; 3: 313 Suger of St. Denis (sidebar) 1: 478, 506, 508 “Suger of St. Denis” (World Eras), (sidebar) 1: 478 Sula (Morrison) 3: 148

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

Summers, Montague 1: 40–48; 3: 36–46, (sidebar) 395 The Sundial (Jackson) 1: 277–78, 279–81 Sunset Boulevard (film) 1: 437–38 Supernatural 1: 231–33; 2: 10–11 architecture and 1: 481, 484 “Carmilla” 3: 26–27 The Castle of Otranto: A Story 3: 449–51 Count Dracula 1: 342–44, 358 Dinesen, Isak 2: 263 doubles and 1: 310–16 dreams 1: 327 fantastic novels 1: 128–29 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 336–37 Godwin, William on 2: 324–27 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 378 history in Gothic literature 3: 22–27 Hogg, James 2: 422–23, 425– 28, 431–32 Jackson, Shirley 1: 264, 267– 72, 274–75 James, Henry 2: 463–64, 470–73 King, Stephen 2: 501–4 Lovecraft, H. P. (sidebar) 1: 260 Morrison, Toni 3: 138–42, 148–49 oral tradition 1: 17–18 The Picture of Dorian Gray 3: 511–15 poetry 1: 18–20 psychology and 1: 232, 332–41 Scott, Sir Walter 3: 313–16, (sidebar) 349 urban Gothic 1: 139 Wharton, Edith 3: 457, 458– 59, 470–75 See also Fear; Ghosts; Horror; Psychological horror Superstition evil eye 1: 307 getatore 1: 308–9 Scott, Sir Walter 3: 314–16 vampires 1: 345, 348–49 “Superstition” (Hogg) 2: 422, 427 Surfacing (Atwood) 2: 2, 3, 6–8, 11 Surrealist movement 1: 416 Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Atwood) 2: 3, 7 Swithen, John. See King, Stephen Symonds, John Addington (sidebar) 3: 365

T Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins (painting) 3: 54

565

SUBJECT INDEX

St. Ronan’s Well (Scott) 3: 292, 308, 311 “Stairway to Heaven” (song) 1: 464 “Stephen King and the Tradition of American Gothic” (Gibbs) 2: 494–99 “Stephen King’s Canon: The Art of Balance” (Casebeer) (sidebar) 2: 492 Stevenson, Robert Louis 1: 31, 314; 3: 359, 359–84, (sidebar) 373 compared to King, Stephen 2: 485–87 compared to Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 365 degeneration 1: 158–60 principal works 3: 361–62 Stoker, Bram 1: 32–34, 127–40, 358–59, 364; 3: 385, 385–428 characterization of Count Dracula 3: 405–10 “counterfeit” Gothicism 3: 397–404 cultural identity in Dracula 1: 171–79 degeneration 1: 166–69 development of Count Dracula 1: 342–44 dreams 1: 330 influence of Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 1: 358 influence of Walpole, Horace 3: 395–404 Irish allegory in Dracula 3: 415–27 Irving, Henry and 3: 400–401 principal works 3: 387 “Stoker’s Counterfeit Gothic: Dracula and Theatricality at the Dawn of Simulation” (Hogle) 3: 395–405 Stone, Edward 2: 309 Storm and Stress movement 2: 349–53 “Storms” (Hogg) 2: 425–26 “The Story of a Lie” (Stevenson) 3: 361 The Story of a Lie,and Other Tales (Stevenson) 3: 360 “The Story of Prince Alasi and the Princess Firouzkah” (Beckford) 2: 88 “The Story of Prince Barkiarokh” (Beckford) 2: 88 “The Story of Princess Zulkais and the Prince Kalilah” (Beckford) 2: 88 “The Story of the Young Italian” (Irving) 2: 455 “The Story of the Young Robber” (Irving) 2: 447, 448, 452 “A Story Replete with Horror” (Benedict) 2: 429–32

SUBJECT INDEX

“THE TALE OF GUZMAN’S FAMILY”

“The Tale of Guzman’s Family” (Maturin) 3: 77, 87, 90 “The Tale of Stanton” (Maturin) 3: 77–78 The Tale of the Body Thief (Rice) 3: 264 See also Vampire Chronicles “Tale of the Indians” (Maturin) 3: 77–78 “Tale of the Spaniard” (Maturin) 3: 77–78, 93–94 A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) 2: 230 Tales of a Traveller (Irving) 2: 442, 447, 452–53 Tales of the Dead (Shelley) 1: 25 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (Poe) 3: 198–99 Tales of the Wars of Montrose (Hogg) 2: 422 Tales of Wonder (Lewis) 3: 32 The Talisman (King) 2: 482, 487–89 The Talisman (Scott) 3: 307–8, 310, 312, 315 Taltos (Rice) 3: 264 Tam O’Shanter (Burns) 1: 18 Tamerlane, and Other Poems (Poe) 3: 187 “Taming a Tartar” (Alcott) Angel in the House 1: 203–4 feminist literary theory 1: 203–6 gender relations 1: 199–200 monster 1: 199–207 race relations 1: 200–203, 205–6 “The Tapestried Chamber” (Scott) 3: 294–97 Tapestry, animated (Gothic convention) 3: 199–200 Tar Baby (Morrison) 3: 136, 138 Techno-Gothic 2: 68–73 Television 1: 452–60 “The Tell-Tale Heart” (Poe) 3: 188–89, 213 “The Temple” (Oates) 3: 167–68 The Temptation of Saint Anthony (painting) 3: 57 The Tenants of Malory (Le Fanu) 3: 10 Terror. See Fear “Terror Made Relevant: James’s Ghost Stories” (Thorberg) 2: 466–70 Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy) 1: 34–35 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (film) 1: 422–25 “Textualising the Double-Gendered Body: Forms of the Grotesque in The Passion of New Eve” (Johnson) 2: 190–94 them (Oates) 3: 163

566

Theology debate in Gothic tradition 3: 277–78 “Theorizing the (Gothic) Sublime” (Mishra) 1: 143–57 “A Theory of Knowledge” (Oates) 3: 181–82, 184 “They Eat Out” (Atwood) 2: 9 Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (Godwin). See Caleb Williams “The Third Baby’s the Easiest” (Jackson) 1: 265–66 “This is a photograph of Me” (Atwood) 2: 8 Thomas, Ronald R. 1: 326–32 Thompson, G. R. 2: 301 Thorberg, Raymond 2: 466–70 Thoreau, Henry David 3: 468, 469, 472, 474 “Thrawn Janet” (Stevenson) 3: 360 “The Three Graves: A Fragment of a Sexton’s Tale” (Coleridge) 1: 236–41 The Three Imposters (Machen) 1: 170 The Three Perils of Man; or War, Women, and Witchcraft (Hogg) 2: 422 The Three Perils of Woman; or Love, Leasing, and Jealousy (Hogg) 2: 427 “Tibby Hyslop’s Dream” (Hogg) 2: 428 “The Tiger’s Bride” (Carter) 2: 182 Tillotson, Marcia 3: 342–48 The Times, London, review of Dracula, 3: 394–95 “To the Editor of the St. James Gazette” (Wilde) 3: 492–93 “To the Reader” (Lewis) 3: 34–36 “Tobias Martin, Master Cooper and His Men” (Hoffmann). See “Meister Martin der Küfner und seine Gesellen” The Token (Goodrich) 2: 364 Tom Jones (Fielding) 1: 490 The Tomb of Ligeia (film) 1: 444 The Tommyknockers (King) 1: 287 Torquato Tasso (Goethe) 2: 341 A Tour on the Prairies (Irving) 2: 442–43 “Toward a History of Gothic and Modernism: Dark Modernity from Bram Stoker to Samuel Beckett” (Riquelme) 1: 30–40 Tracy, Spencer 3: 368 Transcendence 2: 494–96 “The Transcendental Economy of Wharton’s Gothic Mansions” (Elbert) 3: 466–75 Transcendentalism 3: 468, 470–71, 472, 474 “The Transformation” (Shelley) 3: 324–26

“The Translation” (Oates) 3: 180, 184 “Translation from an Ancient Chaldee MS” (Hogg) 2: 422 “Translator’s Preface” (Walpole) 3: 432–34 “Trauma and the Specters of Enslavement in Morrison’s Beloved” (Spargo) 3: 150–60 Travel narratives 3: 107–8 “The Travelling Companion” (Stevenson) 3: 368 Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (Stevenson) 3: 359 Treasure Island (Stevenson) 3: 359–60 “The Trial for Murder” (Dickens) 2: 230 “Tricks with Mirrors” (Atwood) 2: 6 “The Triumph of Night” (Wharton) 3: 459, 468, 471–73 The Tryal (Baillie) 2: 50, 63, 66 The Turn of the Screw (James, H.) 1: 31; 2: 461–68, 468, 471, 473 Turner, Nat 1: 181–82 “Turtle-God” (Oates) 3: 183 Twain, Mark 1: 125–26; 3: 158 Twice-Told Tales (Hawthorne) 2: 364, (sidebar) 369 Twin Peaks (television show) 1: 453–59, 457 “Twin Peaks and the Television Gothic” (Ledwon) 1: 452–60 “Twins” (Oates) 3: 178 Twister (film) 1: 69 Twitchell, James P. 1: 344, 351 Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (Melville) 3: 108

U “The Ugly-Pretty, Dull-Bright, Weak-Strong Girl in the Gothic Mansion” (Abartis) 2: 115–20 Uncanny 1: 454 Freud, Sigmund 1: 301–9, 454 guest 1: 302–4; 2: 403–11 repetition and 1: 305–6 Schiller, Friedrich von 1: 306–7 television Gothic and 1: 454–56 “The Uncanny” (Freud) 1: 301–10, (sidebar) 2: 308 “’Uncanny Drives’: The Depth Psychology of E. T. A. Hoffmann” (Andriano) 2: 411–19 Uncanny guest (Gothic convention) 1: 302–4; 2: 403–11

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

WALPOLE, HORACE

V Valente, Joseph 1: 33; 3: 415–27 Valperga (Shelley) 3: 320 The Vampire Armand (Rice) 3: 264 “The Vampire as Gothic Villain” (Senf) 1: 342–61 Vampire Chronicles (Rice) 1: 369–70; 3: 262–65 eroticism 3: 274–76 Harlequin formula 3: 283 narrative structure 3: 271–72 as revisionist vampire mythology 3: 266–76 See also specific titles of books Vampire fiction 3: 266–76 “The Vampire in Literature” (Summers) (sidebar) 3: 395 The Vampire Lestat (Rice) 3: 263–64 See also Vampire Chronicles The Vampire; or, the Bride of the Isles (Planche) 1: 348 The Vampire Tapestry (Charnas) 1: 368–169 Vampires 1: 32–33, 233, 342–87, 3: 266–76 as aristocracy 1: 344, 350 “Carmilla” 1: 353–58, 382–84; 3: 19–20 Count Dracula 1: 166–69, 342– 44, 358–59, 362–64, 424, 3: 405–10, 417 drama 1: 348–49 Edwardian 1: 363 eroticism 3: 274–76 folklore 1: 344–45, 349, 353 gender identity 1: 382–84; 3: 275, 281–85 “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” 1: 364–65

Jewish characteristics of 2: 287 King, Stephen 1: 371–73; 3: 270 “The Lady of the House of Love” 2: 188 Lestat 1: 369–70; 3: 269–76, 280–83 literary history of 1: 255 Louis 1: 369–70; 3: 268–70, 271, 274–75, 280–84 Mona Lisa 1: 32–33 1980s movies 1: 372 Nixon, Richard and 1: 369 parasitism 1: 351–52, 356, 365 psychic 1: 362–67 Rebecca 2: 286–90 revisionist mythology 3: 266–76 Rice, Anne 1: 369–71; 3: 262– 76, 280–84 Saint-Germain, Count 1: 367–68 sexuality of 1: 350–51, 357, 368, 370 superstition 1: 345, 348–49 The Vampyre. A Tale 1: 243–29, 344–47 Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (Rymer or Prest) 1: 349–52 women 1: 352–58, 364–67; 3: 19–20 See also Monsters; Rice, Anne; Stoker, Bram The Vampyre. A Tale (Polidori) 1: 243–49, 262, 344–49, (sidebar) 362 Van Der Zee, James 3: 146 Varma, Devendra P. (sidebar) 3: 253, 463 Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (Rymer or Prest) 1: 349, 349–52 Vathek (Beckford) 2: 79–81 author’s personae in 2: 96–101 criticism of 2: 91 doubles in 3: 369 as Gothic tale 2: 89–94 influence on The Giaour (sidebar) 2: 95 inspiration for 2: 83–85 as Oriental tale 1: 260–61; 2: 88–89, 96 review 2: 85, (sidebar) 86 unauthorized translation 2: 81–83, 88 writing of 2: 87–89 Veidt, Conrad 1: 419 “Verging on the Gothic: Melmoth’s Journey to France” (Lanone) 3: 97–104 Vertigo (film) 1: 435

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

Victimization “Carmilla” 1: 355–58 Dracula 1: 133–36 of women 1: 355–58; 2: 185, 188–89; 3: 327–33 Victorian period 1: 61–62, 86–91 Angel in the House 1: 131, 203–4 cultural attitudes 1: 131–33 Dracula and 1: 128–40, 166–69 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and 3: 370–72 Viereck, George Sylvester 1: 363 Villette (Bronte¨, C.) 2: 103–4 compared to The Monk 2: 122–27 Gothic conventions 2: 108, 111–13, 121–27 review 2: 120–21, (sidebar) 121 as reworking of The Professor 2: 122 Vincent, Sybil Korff 2: 17–24 Violence American Psycho 1: 36–38 The Castle of Otranto 2: 310–11 “The Fall of the House of Usher 2: 311 Oates, Joyce Carol on 1: 217 O’Connor, Flannery (sidebar) 2: 168 Scott, Sir Walter 3: 311–11 social 1: 197–206 against women 1: 218–19; 2: 185, 188–89 “A Virtuoso’s Collection” (Hawthorne) 2: 374 The Vision (Beckford) 2: 79 Visual arts 1: 475–526, 480–86 La Volonté de savoir (Foucalt) 1: 295–96 Von Deutscher Baukunst (Goethe) 2: 344 Voyagers to the West (Bailyn) 1: 121–22

W Wadham College Chapel 1: 477–78 Wadsworth, Daniel 1: 499 “Waiting for Shilo” (MacPherson) (sidebar) 3: 111 Walden (Thoreau) 3: 468, 470, 474 Waller, Gregory 3: 269 Walpole, Horace 1: 31, 80; 2: 297, 299–300; 3: 429, 429–55 Berry, Mary and 3: 430–31 compared to Radcliffe, Ann 2: 36 excess as theme 3: 355 Gray, Thomas and 3: 446

567

SUBJECT INDEX

Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh (Le Fanu) 1: 89–90; 3: 1–3, 5, 16–17 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 1: 185–90; 3: 223 The Uncommercial Traveller (Dickens) 2: 238–39 “Der unheimliche Gast” (Hoffmann) 2: 402 Unholy Loves (Oates) 3: 164 Unknown Pleasures (music recording) 1: 472 The Unvanquished (Faulkner) 2: 294 Updike, John (sidebar) 2: 270 Urban Gothic 1: 129, 130–33, 138–40 Urfaust (Goethe) 2: 357 Utopia 2: 63–65

SUBJECT INDEX

WANDERING JEW

heroines 2: 138, 144 influence of Hurd, Richard 3: 449–50 influence on Davis, Alexander Jackson 1: 501 influence on Gothic genre (sidebar) 3: 443 influence on Melville, Herman 3: 115 influence on Poe, Edgar Allan 2: 310–11 influence on Stoker, Bram 3: 395–404 legacy of 1: 57–58 letters of 3: 429, 431–32 literary form of 1: 459 mysterious portrait in 1: 252; 2: 252, 254; 3: 25, 199 originator of Gothic literature 1: 1–2, 402; 2: 116 patterns in 2: 301 poetry of 3: 446 principal works 3: 432 prophecy in 3: 200 psychoanalysis of 1: 322 singularity of 3: 447 Strawberry Hill 1: 58, 502–3; 3: 430, 447–48 Strawberry Hill Press 3: 446 Wandering Jew (Gothic convention) Faulkner, William 2: 302 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 373–74 “The Man of the Crowd” 3: 198 Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 74 “The Mortal Immortal: A Tale” 3: 330 precursor for Count Dracula 3: 402 Warfel, Harry R. 2: 164–70 Waring, Susan M. (sidebar) 2: 121 Washington Square (James) 2: 462 Watching (motif) 3: 471 Watergate scandal 1: 371 Watt, James 1: 411 Waverly Novels 3: 289–92, 297–316 See also specific titles in series Waverly; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (Scott) 1: 2; 3: 289–90, (sidebar) 306 fear, 3: 309, 310 mystery in 3: 306 supernatural 3: 313–14 violence 3: 312 We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Jackson) 1: 278, 280–82 We Were the Mulvaneys (Oates) 3: 165 Weeks, Jeffrey 1: 138 Wein, Toni 2: 121–29 Weir of Hermiston (Stevenson) 3: 360

568

Weissberg, Liliane 3: 142–50 Weld, Theodore 1: 182 “Welldean Hall” (Hogg) 2: 437 Welles, Orson 1: 437; 2: 119 Wells, H. G. 1: 162–66 Werewolves The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories 2: 188 Christine 2: 486 King, Stephen 2: 487–89 See also Monsters Werke (Goethe) 2: 344–48 Wesley, John 1: 17–18 Westerns (novels) 1: 36; 3: 205–6 Whale, James 1: 422–25 Wharton, Edith 3: 457, 457–86 abyss in 3: 480–83 aestheticism 3: 468–69 on American writers 3: 468–69 aristocracy 3: 448, 466–68 autobiographies 3: 476–84 capitalism 3: 467–75 Christianity 3: 470–71 compared to Bronte¨, Charlotte 3: 480 cultural elitism of 3: 468–69 European heritage 3: 468–69 feminist literary theory 3: 459–60 gender roles 3: 476–80 ghost stories 3: 461–75, 482 ghosts 3: 460–62, 466–75 horror 3: 463–66 James, Henry and 3: 459, 483 mythology 3: 465, (sidebar) 467 Nietzsche, Friedrich and 3: 470 patriarchy 3: 476–80 principal works 3: 460 Pulitzer Prize 3: 458, 459 realism 3: 468 relationship with mother 3: 476–77, 483–84 sexuality 3: 478–79, 483–84 social criticism 3: 458 supernatural 3: 457, 458–59, 470–75 Thoreau, Henry David 3: 468, 469 Transcendentalism 3: 468, 474 as woman writer 3: 478, 480 Wharton, Thomas 1: 54 What I Lived For (Oates) 3: 165 “What is Gothic About Absalom, Absalom!” (Putzel) (sidebar) 2: 304 “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (Oates) 1: 216–17; 3: 164, 179 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Stories of Young America (Oates) 3: 164 Whipple, E. P. 2: 114–15, 135–36 A Whisper of Blood (Datlow) 1: 366–67

White Goddess 3: 211 White-Jacket: or, The World in a Man-of-War (Melville) 3: 108, 115 “Who Is Heathcliff? The Shadow Knows” (Hume, M.) 2: 146–50 “Why Is Your Writing So Violent?” (Oates) 1: 217 Wicke, Jennifer 3: 396 Widdicombe, Toby 3: 468 “The Widows” (Oates) 3: 180, 183 Wieland; or, The Transformation (Brown) 2: 153–55, 159–61, 167 compared to Caleb Williams 2: 168, 170–71 influence of Paradise Lost 2: 170–76 introduction to 2: 155–56 Keats, John on (sidebar) 2: 171 as original Gothic literature 2: 116 review 2: 162–64 “Wieland; or, The Transformation” (Warfel) 2: 164–70 The Wild Irish Boy (Maturin) 3: 73, 83, 84, 94 The Wild Palms (Faulkner) 2: 294 Wilde, Oscar 1: 31, 34; 3: 487, 487–518 aestheticism 3: 487, 489, 493– 99, 511–16 compared to Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 504–9 Decadence movement 3: 487 defense of The Picture of Dorian Gray 3: 492–93 degeneration 1: 160–62 ghost stories 3: 488 influence on The House of the Vampire 1: 363 morality of 3: 509–16 principal works 3: 489–90 sexual misconduct charge 3: 488 Wilder, Billy 1: 437–38 Wilderness Tips (Atwood) 2: 11 “Wilkie Collins and Dickens” (Eliot) (sidebar) 2: 215 Wilkins-Freeman, Mary E. 1: 365 “William Beckford and Vathek” (Bleiler) 2: 85–89 “William Wilson” (Poe) 3: 189, 213, 215 Williams, Anne 1: 67, 69; 3: 252–60 Williamson, Paul 1: 511–18 Willing to Die (Le Fanu) 3: 17 Willis, Paul 1: 465 Wilson, J. J. 2: 261 The Wind (Scarborough) 1: 36 The Wings of the Dove (James) 2: 462, 471 Winter’s Tales (Dinesen) 2: 258 Wise Children (Carter) 2: 186 Wisker, Gina 2: 182–90

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

ZSCHOKKE, HEINRICH

power in nineteenth century 1: 356–58; 3: 16–21 pre-oedipal stage 1: 377–79 as puppets 2: 183–85 romance as reflection of oppression 1: 220–26 Sanctuary 2: 317–18 “Taming a Tartar” 1: 203–6 vampires 1: 352–58, 364–67; 3: 19–20 victimization of 1: 355–58; 2: 185, 188–89; 3: 327–33 in Victorian England 1: 131– 33, 203–5; 2: 63–65; 3: 20–21 violence against 1: 218–19; 2: 185, 188–89 White Goddess 2: 303 Willing to Die 3: 17 as writers 3: 478, 480 See also Heroines “Women and Power in ‘Carmilla’” (Senf) 3: 16–21 Women; or Pour et contre (Maturin) 3: 74, 79, 81, 83, 84, 95–96 Women, Power, and Subversion (Newton) 3: 17, 21 Wonderland (Oates) 3: 164–65, 177, 183 American culture 3: 168–70 American Gothic tradition 3: 168–70 compared to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 3: 169–70 as Southern Gothic 3: 178 “Wonderlands” (Oates) 3: 178–79 Wood, Grant 1: 73–74 Wood, Martin J. 3: 266–76 Wood, Robin 1: 415–25 Woodstock (Scott) 3: 311, 315 Woolf, Virginia (sidebar) 2: 471 “The Wool-Gatherer” (Hogg) 2: 422, 438 Wordsworth, William 1: 21 “A Work of Genius: James Hogg’s Justified Sinner” (Smith) 2: 432–38 World Eras, (sidebar) 1: 478 “Worldly Goods” (Jackson) 1: 267 Worringer, Wilhelm 1: 481 “Wrapping Workhouse” (Dickens) 2: 238–39 Wren, Sir Christopher 1: 40–41 Wright, Angela 3: 61–70 Wright, Richard 1: 180 “Writer and Humanitarian” (Irwin) (sidebar) 3: 62 The Writing of Fiction (Wharton) 3: 464, 468, 470, 476, 479–80 Wuthering Heights (Bronte¨, E.) 2: 131–33, 264 “Chapter 1” 2: 133–35 dream interpretation in 1: 331

GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 3

film adaptation 2: 142 Healthcliff as The Shadow 2: 146–50 heroine in 2: 138–45 immorality of 2: 135–36 influence of Gothic on 2: 136– 38, 145 preface (sidebar) 2: 147 review (sidebar) 2: 137 spiritual horror 1: 262–63 Wylder’s Hand (Le Fanu) 1: 89; 3: 1–2 Wyler, William 2: 142

X Xenophobia 1: 93–94

Y Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn 1: 367–68 Yeats, W. B. 1: 31–32 “The Yellow Mask” (Collins) 2: 202, 217–26 “The Yellow Mask, the Black Robe, and the Woman in White: Wilkie Collins, Anti-Catholic Discourse, and the Sensation Novel” (Griffin) 2: 217–28 “The Yellow Wallpaper” (Gilman) 1: 109, 212–15, (sidebar) 213 Yoknapatawpha novels 2: 297–306 You Are Happy (Atwood) 2: 5–6, 8 You Can’t Catch Me (Oates) 3: 165 You Must Remember This (Oates) 3: 164–65 Young, Edward 1: 53 “Young Goodman Brown” (Hawthorne) 2: 363, 365, 372–73, 378

Z Zanoni (Bulwer-Lytton) (sidebar) 1: 15 Zastrozzi (Shelley, P.) 1: 24 Zgorzelski, Andrzej 1: 128 Zlosnik, Sue 2: 284–91 Zofloya (Dacre) 1: 208–10 Zombie (Oates) 3: 165 Zschokke, Heinrich 1: 499–500

569

SUBJECT INDEX

“The Witch of Fife” (Hogg) 2: 423 Witchcraft Godwin, William 2: 325–26 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 371–73 Victorian attitudes 1: 132–33 Witchcraft (Baillie) 2: 50, 58, 69–73 The Witching Hour (Rice) 3: 264 With Shuddering Fall (Oates) 3: 164–65, 178 “‘Withered, Wrinkled, and Loathsome of Visage’: Reading the Ethics of the Soul and the Late-Victorian Gothic in The Picture of Dorian Gray” (Womack) 3: 509–17 Within the Rim and Other Essays, 1914-15 (James) 2: 472 Wolfreys, Julian 2: 234–42 Wollstonecraft, Mary 1: 83, 221, 223 compared to Baillie, Joanna 2: 63 Godwin, William and 2: 322 Radcliffe, Ann and 3: 239 Shelley, Mary and 3: 319, 328– 29, 342 Womack, Kenneth 3: 489, 509–17 Woman and the Demon (Auerbach) 3: 20 The Woman in White (Collins, Wilkie) 1: 88–89; 2: 201–2, 211 Gothic conventions in 2: 215–17 review 2: 211 as sensation fiction 2: 211–15, 218–19, 223–26 A Woman of No Importance (Wilde) 3: 488 Woman’s Record (Hale) 1: 211–12 Women 1: 210–29 American Gothic writers 1: 210–19 artists 2: 261 attraction to Gothic 2: 11, 189 demonic (fictitious) 2: 14–16 education of 3: 238–44 eighteenth-century marriage laws 1: 224–26 female body 3: 329–33 Gothic portrayal of 1: 108–9; 3: 465 Gothic writers, lack of recognition 1: 212 hysteria as deception 2: 69–73 interracial sexual desire 1: 207–10 Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 80 Morrison, Toni 3: 139–41, 147–48 mythology 3: 465